If the Currency Collapses & You Try to Flee Into Gold,There Won't Be Any

Employment Recovery? 1,600 Workers Apply For Just 36 Jobs At An Ice Cream Plant In Maryland

The stock market may be soaring to unprecedented heights, but things just continue to get even tougher for the middle class.  In this economic environment, there is intense competition for virtually all kinds of jobs.  For example, more than 1,600 applications were recently submitted for just 36 jobs at an ice cream plant in Hagerstown, Maryland.  That means that those applying have about a 2 percent chance of being hired.  About 98 percent of the applicants will be turned away.  That is how tough things are in many areas of the country today.  It is now more than five years after the great financial crash of 2008, and the level of employment in the United States is still almost exactly where it was at during the worst moments of the last recession.  And this is just the beginning.  The next major financial crash is rapidly approaching, and once it strikes our employment crisis is going to get much, much worse.

Working at an ice cream plant does not pay very well.  But at least it beats flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wal-Mart.  And in this economy, there is no shortage of desperate workers that are willing to take just about any job that they can find.  The following is how a Breitbart article described the flood of applications that were received for just 36 positions at an ice cream plant owned by Shenandoah Family Farms in Hagerstown, Maryland...

Thanks to persistent unemployment and low availability of low-skill jobs, Shenandoah Family Farms’ ice cream plant in Hagerstown, Maryland has received over 1,600 applicants for a grand total of 36 jobs. Many of those applicants are former workers at the Good Humor plant that was bought by Shenandoah Family Farms. “You’d think that after 20-some-years working someplace at least somebody would think you area a good person, that you’d show up on time every day, and that would be worth something,” Luther Brooks, a 50-year-old former worker at the plant told the Washington Post. “I can’t get nothing. I’ve tried.”

Anyone that believes that the economic crisis is "over" is just being delusional.  It may be "over" for the boys and girls that work on Wall Street, but even their good times are only temporary.

Of course most Americans are not fooled by the propaganda being put out by the mainstream media.  According to a recent CNN poll, 70 percent of all Americans believe that "the economy is generally in poor shape".

And according to another survey, the economy is still the #1 concern for American voters by a good margin and unemployment is still the #2 concern for American voters by a good margin.

In other words, "It's the economy, stupid!"

The American people can see that mid-wage jobs are disappearing and that the middle class is being systematically eviscerated.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent Business Insider article...

A startling number of middle-class jobs may be headed toward extinction.

More than any other job class, mid-level positions have struggled to recover from the recession, and only a quarter of jobs created in the past three years are categorized as mid-wage. There are high-skilled professional jobs that require college degrees and low-skilled service jobs for less educated workers, but the middle is getting squeezed.

As mid-wage jobs disappear, they are being replaced by low wage jobs.  As I mentioned yesterday, one recent study found that about 60 percent of the jobs that have been "created" since the end of the last recession pay $13.83 or less an hour.

And this is just the beginning of the decline of the middle class.  Another great financial crisis is rapidly approaching, and once it arrives things are going to get much worse than they are right now.

A number of very prominent experts believe that this next great financial crisis could begin in 2014.  For example, in a recent article entitled "Top Ten Trends 2014: A Year of Extremes", Gerald Celente warned that "an economic shock wave" could hit the United States by the middle of the year.  Here are some excerpts from that article...

-"In 33 years of forecasting trends, the Trends Research Institute has never seen a new year that will witness severe economic hardship and social unrest on one hand, and deep philosophic enlightenment and personal enrichment on the other. A series of dynamic socioeconomic and transformative geopolitical trend points are aligning in 2014 to ring in the worst and best of times."

-"Such unforeseeable factors aside, we forecast that around March, or by the end of the second quarter of 2014, an economic shock wave will rattle the world equity markets."

-"Nearly half of the requests for emergency assistance to stave off hunger or homelessness comes from people with full-time jobs. As government safety nets are pulled out from under them – as they will continue to be for the foreseeable future – the citizens of Slavelandia will have no recourse but action."

You can read the rest of that article right here.

And according to the Wall Street Journal, United-ICAP chief market technician Walter Zimmerman in convinced that 2014 will mark the beginning of a massive stock market decline.  In fact, he believes that over the next couple of years it could fall by more than 70 percent...

In what may be the bearish call to end all bearish calls, one technician believes 2014 will be the year of “major reversals,” with the Dow Jones Industrial Average expected to start a two-year decline that could eventually take it down more than 70% to below 5000.

If his forecast is correct, it will make what happened in 2008 look like a Sunday picnic...

“Based on our longer-term time cycles the present stock market rally must be considered the bubble to end all bubbles,” Mr. Zimmerman wrote in a note to clients.

He doesn’t believe the Dow Industrials will hit a long-term cycle low until 2016, somewhere in the 5770 to 4650 range. The Dow hasn’t seen those levels, which are 65% to 72% below current prices, since late-1995 to mid-1996.

So what do you think the rest of 2014 will bring?

Credit to Economic Collapse

Driverless Cars are the Future

Big freeze shatters North America temperature records

Temperature records have tumbled across North America, as a big freeze saw all 50 US states hit freezing temperatures.

The most extreme cold, blamed on a weather pattern known as the polar vortex, was said to have affected nearly 190 million people.

In Kentucky, an escaped prisoner turned himself in to get out of the cold.

Some parts of the Midwest coast hit -26C (-14F), as low as the Antarctic coast in winter, and much colder than the inside of a domestic freezer.

Temperature records were shattered in states across the US, including Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

The small town of Hell, Michigan, recorded a wind-chill temperature of -36C (-33F), prompting online jokes about hell freezing over.

Colder than Mars

But it was the town of Embarrass, Minnesota, that experienced the lowest temperature in the nation on Tuesday: -37C (-35F).

Credit to BBC

Say Goodbye to Your Car, House and Your Freedom

Your future home, the micro-apartment.

If Satan has an ally in the halls of government, it would be Agenda 21. Agenda 21 is pure evil as it seeks to destroy all property rights, limit private citizen’s ability to grow their own food and it takes away critical resources from the people such as water. Agenda 21 was created by the enemies of humanity and the friends of Satan.

The Price for Opposing Agenda 21

If your name is Stacy Lynne, you know all too well the evils of Agenda 21. Stacy used to fight against the implementation of Agenda 21 in her town of Fort Collins, Colorado. She was very effective in her fight to preserve her community’s personal liberties. She was so effective, that the Agenda 21 forces stole her son without so much of an allegation of wrongdoing. A judge had to be imported to Fort Collins who worked for IMF and World Bank to exact revenge against Stacy and her child for her anti-Agenda 21 activities. Stacy has not seen her son in 15 months, yet her parental rights have never been legally severed. The Agenda 21 forces of Fort Collins, Colorado, are brutal and inhuman.

Kim Fahey of Antelope Valley, CA., liked living off of the grid. He also enjoyed building his own home. He was so good at living off of the grid, that the officials from LA County sentenced him 543 days in jail for code violations. Yes, that’s right, code violations! His neighbors are being forced off of their land in Antelope Valley by Agenda 21 code enforcement SWAT teams.

The people living in 15 counties in Northern California and Southern Oregon are attempting to withdraw from their respective states and form a new state called theState of Jefferson. These citizens are doing so because they can better deal with the abuse coming from federal agencies such as the EPA if they are not under the control of the California and Oregon state governments.

Farmers and ranchers from the area, who have had their water rights awarded to them by the courts over a 100 years ago, are seeing their water disappear through administrative fiat. Benign activities such as hunting, fishing and other outside recreation have all but disappeared under these policies. As a result, the farmers and ranchers in this area are facing financial ruination.

These three cases merely form a microcosm of the abuses being perpetrated all across this country. Nobody can oppose the unconstitutional Agenda 21 without risking the loss of their child, going to jail or losing their property without compensation.

Thank God It’s Not Me

The lyrics to the once popular song, Thank God I’m a Country Boy, no longer applies. In fact, just the opposite appears to be true. It seems that only the rural residents are at risk. Unfortunately, that too is no longer true. If you own property and don’t live in a core inner city with all the crime and pollution, you are at risk for suffering the same kind of plight as Stacy, Kim and the residents of the wannabe State of Jefferson.

A New Plan

If you have seen the two Hunger Games movies, then you understand that the average citizen must be made to live in stack and pack apartments, that they do not own, while they reside inside of eleven mega-cities totaling six million people each in densely populated living conditions. This is not Hollywood fiction, this is happening right now in America.

This is the picture that the globalists do not want you to see.

The real brains behind the unfolding Agenda 21-inspired mass migration from the suburbs to the inner cities is Mike Kruglig and his new group of community advisers, Building One America. Most of you have never heard of Kruglig or Building One America and there is a good reason for their anonymity. If a majority of the American people ever discovered Kruglig’s true intentions for suburban dwelling Americans, they would chase him down the street and string he and his people up from the nearest light pole.

The secretive agenda of Building One America has been mostly achieved by Obama’s appointment of like-minded community activists to his staff. In fact, Kruglig was one of Obama’s original community organizing mentors from the President’s Chicago Southside days. The word stealth applies because of a damning photo depicting Kruglig and Obama meeting at the Whitehouse in 2011 which appeared on the Building One America website. (The photo is displayed above).  However, this type of publicity would not have been good for the swing voters living in America’s suburbs in the 2012 election. Obama’s people had the video scrubbed as well as the search engine links. However, the Breitbart people retained a copy of the picture. This begs the question, if the Building One America plan is so good for America, then why would the Obama people conceal his affiliation with Kruglig and his group of Agenda 21 social engineers?

Kruglig’s Agenda 21 Building One America group proposes the creation of a regional tax-base sharing revenues in which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and economically depressed concentric zones of inner-ring suburbs. Building One Americaalso seeks to move the poor out of cities by imposing mandatory low-income-housing quotas for middle-class suburban developments.

Kruglig’s group also seeks to export the controversial regional tax-base sharing scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban municipalities. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area regional government is run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats (i.e. Commissars) who are out of control. It is critical to know that removing the election process from this Agenda 21 wealth redistribution endeavor was deliberate for reasons that will become obvious.

The Specifics

Kruglik’s group also favors a variety of policies designed to force people out of their cars and force suburbanites, robbed of their own tax money, to relocate into densely populated stack and pack cities.

Among Kruglick’s strategies to separate people from their cars is the Vehicle Mileage Tax (VMT). Road pricing for the VMT would be implemented to force drivers out their cars. This will impact all drivers except for the Obama inspired exemption of low income drivers.

The VMT is designed to give favored status to certain groups. These groups represent organizations that want to transfer wealth through the heavy hand of administratively controlled regional government by interfering in the housing, transportation and the land use market place.

This tyranny is also being beta tested in the (San Francisco) Bay area in a project entitled One Bay Area Plan. One Bay Area Plan is a 25 year plan which combines housing, transportation, and Agenda 21 land use policies. The public cover story is that the project is designed to save the planet by reducing greenhouse gases.

The generated revenue, estimated at $15 million per day, would be used to fund further Agenda 21 transportation schemes such as buses, trolleys and light rail in which only a few people presently ride.

This plan also calls for Upzoning which would expand the plan to even more areas in the Bay. This would mean even more requirements for high density housing in cities that do not have their “fair share” of low income people. This will result in more 200 square foot apartments being constructed near public transit lines. It should be noted that New York City Mayor, Commissar Bloomberg, is doing something very similar in New York City in which the construction of any new apartment unit over 500 square feet is being forbidden in some neighborhoods.

This Bay Area Agenda 21 plan also contains a concept referred to as the Communities of Concern (i.e. low income and communities of color) would receive funds from these windfall profits that the region would receive. It appears as if Obama is trying to provoke a race war. Additionally, development fees would be eliminated for affordable (i.e. low income) housing developments, while subsidies would be used for favored activities such as the creation of more micro apartments and the construction of low income housing in the suburbs.

Sadly, the politicians who enact this tyrannical lunacy rarely understand the implications and the overall scheme of their bad political works. What these mental giants understand is that ICLEI, courtesy of our central bank, is throwing huge sums of money at various communities to enact these draconian pieces of legislation.

Conclusion

Your name does not have to be Stacy or Kim and you don’t have to live in Northern California or Southern Oregon to be a victim of this insanity. Agenda 21 is occupying America the same as any foreign army would.

As America is facing the real possibility of civil war and/or World War III, we are witnessing the post-occupation plans of our country through Agenda 21. In case the good guys do lose the upcoming struggle, we best resist how far we are going to let these policies become a part of our community fabric. We need to be at city council meetings, passing out fliers and generally calling attention to the authoritarianism which is quickly engulfing our communities.

One final thought for your consideration, do you think there is a possibility that the Agenda 21 SWAT teams which swoop down upon innocent Americans who are deemed to be code violators, that this is actually a portend for what is going to happen to known political dissidents?

Credit to Common Sense Show

Life in the Orwellian Electronic Concentration Camp

10 Ways We're Being Spied on by Big Brother

 

John W. Whitehead
Activist Post

[A security camera] doesn’t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.”—Pratap Chatterjee, journalist

What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect of our lives. No, what has been most disconcerting about the emergence of the American police state is the extent to which the citizenry appears content to passively wait for someone else to solve our nation’s many problems. Unless Americans are prepared to engage in militant nonviolent resistance in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, true reform, if any, will be a long time coming.

Yet as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if we don’t act soon, all that is in need of fixing will soon be unfixable, especially as it relates to the police state that becomes more entrenched with each passing day. By “police state,” I am referring to more than a society overrun by the long arm of the police. I am referring to a society in which all aspects of a person’s life are policed by government agents, one in which all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.

That said, how can anyone be expected to “fix” what is broken unless they first understand the lengths to which the government with its arsenal of technology is going in order to accustom the American people to life in a police state and why being spied on by government agents, both state and federal, as well as their partners in the corporate world, is a problem, even if you’ve done nothing wrong.Indeed, as the trend towards overcriminalization makes clear, it won’t be long before the average law-abiding American is breaking laws she didn’t even know existed during the course of a routine day. The point, of course, is that while you may be oblivious to your so-called law-breaking—whether it was collecting rainwater to water your lawn, lighting a cigarette in the privacy of your home, or gathering with friends in your backyard for a Sunday evening Bible study—the government will know each and every transgression and use them against you.

As noted by the Brookings Institution, “For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.”

As the following will show, the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, is perhaps the most insidious of the police state’s many tentacles, impacting almost every aspect of our lives and making it that much easier for the government to encroach on our most vital freedoms, ranging from free speech, assembly and the press to due process, privacy, and property, by eavesdropping on our communications, tracking our movements and spying on our activities.

Tracking you based on your consumer activities: Fusion centers, federal-state law enforcement partnerships which attempt to aggregate a variety of data on so-called “suspicious persons,” have actually collected reports on people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.” Retailers are getting in on the surveillance game as well. Large corporations such as Target have been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years. In 2015, mega-food corporations will be rolling out high-tech shelving outfitted with cameras in order to track the shopping behavior of customers, as well as information like the age and sex of shoppers.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Sensing a booming industry, private corporations are jumping on the surveillance state bandwagon, negotiating lucrative contracts with police agencies throughout the country in order to create a web of surveillance that encompasses all major urban centers. Companies such as NICE and Bright Planet are selling equipment and services to police departments with the promise of monitoring large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors are attempting to take a bite out of this lucrative market as well. Raytheon has recently developed a software package known as Riot, which promises to predict the future behavior of an individual based upon his social media posts.

Tracking you based on your phone activities: The CIA has been paying AT&T over $10 million per year in order to gain access to data on Americans’ phone calls abroad. This is in addition to telecommunications employees being embedded in government facilities to assist with quick analysis of call records and respond to government requests for customer location data. They receive hundreds of thousands of such requests per year.

 Tracking you based on your computer activities:Federal agents now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can be installed via a number of inconspicuous methods, including USB, or via an email attachment or software update. It can then be used to search through files stored on a hard drive, log keystrokes, or take real time screenshots of whatever a person is looking at on their computer, whether personal files, web pages, or email messages. It can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Tracking you based on your behavior: Thanks to a torrent of federal grants, police departments across the country are able to fund outrageous new surveillance systems that turn the most basic human behaviors into suspicious situations to be studied and analyzed. Police in California, Massachusetts, and New York have all received federal funds to create systems like that operated by the New York Police Department, which “links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists.” Police all across the country are also now engaging in big data mining operations, often with the help of private companies, in order to develop city-wide nets of surveillance. For example, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, now work with IBM in order to “integrate new data and analytics tools into everyday crime fighting.”

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country (only twelve states do not use facial recognition software). For example, in Ohio, 30,000 police officers and court employees are able to access the driver’s license images of people in the state, without any form of oversight to track their views or why they’re accessing them. The FBI is developing a $1 billion program, Next Generation Identification, which involves creating a massive database of mugshots for police all across the country.

Tracking you based on your car: License plate readers, which can identify the owner of any car that comes within its sights, are growing in popularity among police agencies. Affixed to overpasses or cop cars, these devices give police a clear idea of where your car was at a specific date and time, whether the doctor’s office, the bar, the mosque, or at a political rally. State police in Virginia used license plate readers to record every single vehicle that arrived to President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 from Virginia. They also recorded the license plates of attendees at rallies prior to the election, including for then-candidate Obama and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. This data collection came at the request of the U.S. Secret Service. Incredibly, Virginia police stored data on some 8 million license plates, some for up to three years.

Tracking you based on your social media activities: The obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, has astutely observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads, or run sweeps for insurance companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit. Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your metadata: Metadata is an incredibly invasive set of data to have on a person. Indeed, with access to one’s metadata, one can “identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.” The National Security Agency (NSA) has been particularly interested in metadata, compiling information on Americans’ social connections “that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.” Mainway, the main NSA tool used to connect the dots on American social connections, collected 700 million phone records per day in 2011. That number increased by 1.1 billion in August 2011. The NSA is now working on creating “a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.”

Tracking you from the skies: Nothing, and I mean nothing, will escape government eyes, especially when drones take to the skies in 2015. These gadgets, ranging from the colossal to the miniature, will have the capability of seeing through the walls of your home and tracking your every movement.

To put it bluntly, we are living in an electronic concentration camp. Through a series of imperceptible steps, we have willingly allowed ourselves to become enmeshed in a system that knows the most intimate details of our lives, analyzes them, and treats us accordingly. Whether via fear of terrorism, narcissistic pleasure, or lazy materialism, we have slowly handed over our information to all sorts of entities, corporate and governmental, public and private, who are now using that information to cow and control us for their profit. As George Orwell warned, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Thus, we have arrived in Orwell’s world. The question now is: will we take a stand and fight to remain free or will we go gently into the concentration camp?


Credit to Activist Post

Why I am Leaving the Church Growth Movement

Dr. Randy White

Church growth is all the rage. For pastors, the focus is on leadership. For laymen, on “reaching people.” In the church world, church-growth is the standard of success. If a church “reaches people,” and the pastor is a “visionary leader,” then the church will be considered a success. If a church makes it into somebody’s bogus “Fastest Growing Church” list, then the growth frenzy continues with the sheep flocking to check out what innovation has been initiated to reach the masses for Christ.

Personally, I think the Emperor has no clothes.

For at least four reasons, I reject the church-growth and church-health principles taught at almost every pastor’s conference, and expressed in almost every church. Our church will be different, because I reject these principles. Although different will likely mean odd, behind-the-times, and shrinking in size, I go there anyway.

I refuse to believe that a “Christian community” will save anyone

Community is the big word today (along with missional…and if you claim to be a missional community, you are really on the cutting edge). Churches work hard to design community. They do it through small-groups, centered around felt-needs, and gathered in living rooms across the country. These community groups gather for the bigger community in a weekly celebration of magnificence. This weekly celebration has been carefully scripted, from the ridiculously silly and manipulative countdown screen, to the last triumphant note of victory at which the community members are sent out to create a Christian society by building community within their neighborhoods.

These community groups gather for “Bible study,” which is almost always a double misnomer. The only Scripture used will be out-of-context references that came from the latest book by the latest Hollywood-looks celebrity pastor who gathered his thoughts (from the internet?), and allowed a nameless editor to work them into something profitable. The group will neither study the passages, nor the book itself. They will simply read a chapter before they come, spend 45 minutes talking about the parts they liked, share how the chapter made them feel about themselves as well as any insights gained, then go away and tell their friends about their marvelous Bible study.  It reminds me of when my dad told me we were having tube steak for dinner.  I was somewhat disappointed when I found out he just used that lofty sounding name to refer to hot-dogs. Today much of the Bible study in missional-communities is the equivalent of tube steak.

Following “Bible study,” the groups engage in fellowship time, then go on their way as biblically empty as when they arrived. Soon they will gather for a “mission project” in which they repair a home (painting the door red so all the town will know that this is one of the homes repaired by that missional community, and will rise up and call the missional community wonderful). If not a home repair project, it may be picking up trash for the city, or painting a dilapidated school, or providing shoes for shoeless children. The sermon will often be aimed toward raising up an army of Christians who adopt the orphan, visit the imprisoned, and blog for social justice.

Even if I believed that these “missions projects” were as successful as the church websites claim (“we had an awesome God-thing happen at our last gathering”), I don’t think it has any lasting impact. As I see it, the Christian is not so much to engage his society, but to come out from it. The church today is filled with those who are both in the world and of the world, and who are organized to change the world into a kinder, gentler place to be.  The success rate of the mega-church missional-church movement has been an utter failure. Society is more liberal and godless than ever before, with no end to its decline in sight. The mega-missional church will gather in their multi-campus celebrations this weekend and slobber over themselves for their victories, yet our society doesn’t display achieve a single victory. Not one.

Building missional community does nothing more than produce a feel-good complacency to the community members. Although they live, assured they are going to be people of impact, as part of a community, they fail to really make any difference. They fool themselves into thinking the Emperor’s clothes are superb.

Have you noticed that I’ve not mentioned anything about the proclamation of the Word, and the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? That’s because there is not much to mention from the church today. The church today does good works, has good music (in the ears of many), has a really good sound-system, and a pastor who could lead circles around Moses. What it doesn’t have is the backbone to proclaim that our world must reject humanism, social justice, poverty eradication efforts, and other white-washed measures of “expanding the Kingdom of God”—and, must find its only hope in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I reject all manipulation and aim toward persuasion

The second reason I’m leaving the missional-community church-growth movement is because I reject manipulation of all kinds. In fact, more than ever before, it disgusts me. The modern church is so built on manipulation that I’m convinced it could not continue without it.

I recently attended a relatively small Bible-believing, Bible-teaching church as a guest. I was refreshed to see that almost every participant had their Bible—and opened—during the sermon. This told me that the pastor regularly delivers enough verse-by-verse content that looking up one verse on an iPad just wouldn’t suffice. Bibles, for this rare congregation, were a necessity. I was also impressed by the music. It was bad…and that impressed me. It wasn’t polished. There wasn’t a carefully selected Praise Team who passed the “Sunday morning test” of looks and sound, dressed in color-coordinated clothing, closing their eyes and looking to heaven as if they were in an ecstatic moment (I’ve often seen these ecstatic moments turn on and off like a light switch). In fact, the song leader was clearly not a professional, and his tone was often off just a bit. But the people sang with joy. I was impressed with their prayers. They prayed for real and legitimate needs during a Sunday morning service. It would never pass the church-growth test, because it wasn’t seeker-friendly at all with random people from the congregation praying at-will over the needs of the members. As a first-time visitor, I felt out-of-place during that prayer, and I thought that was wonderful. After all, if I was looking for a church, I’d want one that really cared about the hurting people they knew, the flesh-and-blood people who sat in their pews each Sunday.

Most churches (including mine) are not like this. In most churches (not mine), I wonder if they would be able to continue the “worship” if the electricity went out. The service is so dependent on mood-lighting, electric instrumentation, sound amplification, and video enhancement that it would fall flat in a New York minute with no power. In my church, thankfully, if the electricity went out, we would give one another a quick glance and grin, and keep on singing or preaching. If the electricity-dependent “worship” of the modern church lost electricity, we would see quickly how much vast emptiness there is in these churches, and in short-order, the churches would be vastly empty. No show, no crowd. (Incidentally, I’m not a fan of the black-box architecture of the missional-community church. This is a total rejection of centuries of theologically-driven architectural principles of church design that understood a theology of aesthetics.)

Rejecting manipulation, I won’t do a countdown video before the service; it simply enhances the idea of a show that is about to begin. I refuse to only allow the A-team to “perform.” I don’t want soft music playing while I pray (or preach, or give an invitation). I don’t want “smart lights” that set the mood, changeable at the push of a button to fit the tone of the selected song. I don’t want to manipulate my audience into a certain feeling which will evoke a certain action. Doing so is sadly too easy, because our generation (as the Bible predicted) loves the tickling of ears. If you tickle, they will come.

What I do want to provide is persuasion. I want to stand before the congregation with a persuasive argument from Scripture. As a lawyer before the jury, I want to present a water-tight case that will change the thinking of those who have come to hear a Biblical message. I realize that I do this in a day in which feeling trumps thinking, and so my kind of persuasive preaching will often be rejected. Persuasive preaching doesn’t have enough stories, illustrations, and “you can do it” back-slapping grunts.

I refuse to let my congregation be deceived by good feelings

Thirdly, I reject the missional-community church-growth movement because it is deceptive. Participants in these churches feel like they are stalwart conservatives in a Bible-believing, Gospel-proclaiming, Hell-reducing, Kingdom-expanding church. They consistently proclaim, “My preacher really preaches the Bible.” True, their preacher does hold up a Bible and talk about how true and authoritative it is. He even quotes from the Bible fairly consistently (“I know the plans I have for you…I will never leave you nor forsake you…I am come that you might have life more abundantly…(and, of course) bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse”). What these church members do not know is that they have adopted the leftist agenda (socialism) or neo-con agenda (reconstructing a Christian society) which is as empty as it has always been.

I will lose church-growth potential because I won’t allow a good-feeling production to trump reality. Do my church members know their Bible? Can they give a defense of the attacks against it? Can they rightly divide the Word of Truth? Do they have a Biblical worldview that understands creation (young-earth), eschatology (pre-trib), salvation (Jesus as propitiatory sacrifice), grace (free from the Law), and so much more? Have I developed a congregation that could, and would, stick with it through a months-long study of the book of Numbers?  Or Leviticus?  If I have not developed this kind of Biblical hunger, then I’ve just allowed them to be deceived by thinking they’ve had Bible study, experienced worship, and come away a better (and more Christ-like) person. Since I will stand before God someday to be judged for reality (not feelings), I will be satisfied to spend my time and energy developing a Biblically-literate congregation.

I reject the church as a program organization over which I am the CEO

Finally, the CEO model of Pastor has to go. I know that almost every missional-community church-growth model pastor’s conference says this same thing, continually reminding pastors that they are not CEOs. Then, having given the obligatory rejection of CEO style leadership, they tell the Pastor that he should be known as the “Lead Pastor” (lead…short for leadership, a key CEO trait). They instruct him in the best means of vision development and “vision casting.” They Peter Drucker him to spiritual death. They study the Bible, not looking for Biblical truth, but looking for leadership traits of Moses (one of the worst leaders of all time), Gideon (zero leadership capability), Nehemiah (who was not a priest nor a pastor, but a government official), Jesus (who did nothing but follow His Father), or Paul (who said pastors should “preach the Word”).

Going further, these pastor’s conferences (or books) talk about all the programs and paradigms the church could/should implement to develop its missional-community. Of course, as soon as you create any kind of ministry (i.e. program) in the church, it requires some oversight, which requires the Pastor to leave his pastoral function and begin acting like the conference/book instructed him to act:  like a leader.

Don’t call me Lead Pastor. Don’t call me Senior Pastor (been there, done that). Don’t call me Teaching Pastor (is there any other kind?). Just call me Pastor, and let me devote my life to prayer and the ministry of the Word, ministering to the flock under my care. I happen to believe that if a person attends a church where they cannot call the Pastor and talk to him, they don’t really have a Pastor.

Conclusion

I’ve just rejected everything that has become the favorite methods of the missional-community church, which it uses as it bows down to its idol called church-growth. I’m sure some have said “amen” all the way through. If that was you, you’ve probably struggled to find a place to worship and call your church home. Others have come to the end with a righteous rage, wondering how I could so “not get it.” Whichever side you are on, I encourage you to run to the Bible and use it as your only source of revelation about the will of God in church, society, and your own personal life.

- See more at: http://www.randywhiteministries.org/2014/01/02/leaving-church-growth-movement/#sthash.tjgpfX0W.dpuf

Nuclear Bomb Necessary to Put Down Israel

Iranian cleric and lawmaker reveals that Iran 'needs' a nuclear weapon to 'wipe Israel off the map'; also reveals US 'need' for Iran deal.


Nuclear talks in Geneva
Reuters

Iranian lawmaker, cleric, and Majilis (council) member Mohammed Nabavian declared Monday that Iran does need a nuclear bomb - to destroy Israel.

Iran would be able to build a nuclear bomb in “two weeks” if it gets “access to 270 kilograms of 20 percent [enriched uranium], 10 tons of 5 percent, and 20 thousand centrifuges,” Nabavian stated, according to Iranian media reports. 

“We are not looking for a nuclear bomb, but having a nuclear bomb is necessary to put down Israel."
Regarding Iran's resumed diplomatic relations with the US, Nabavian stated, "If Obama asked for a meeting five times before the visit to New York and several times during the visit, it's because over these eight years measures were taken [by Iran] and, as a result, the United States [now] needs Iran."

"In Syria, the U.S. did not manage to attack and was humiliated. In practice, Obama was humiliated because he did not stand up to Iran, and hence it is necessary to meet with Iran's president to show that he is a strong man and tell the world: I brought Iran to the negotiating table after 30 years."

According to MEMRI, Nabavian made the remarks in a speech that he delivered at a political activists' conference in Mashhad (northeastern Iran).

Nabavian also claimed that Iran agreed to a deal only to escape the sanctions imposed on its booming oil trade.

"Forty-nine percent of our budget depends on oil [revenue]. This is a very high figure. This means that half our budget comes from oil money. In [March 2012-March 2013,] we had to sell 2,700,000 barrels of oil daily to supply the budget. Now take into account banking sanctions [even] more severe than the oil sanctions," he mused.

"Since June 2012 all the world's banks have been barred to us and we don't have permission to exchange even a dollar. Think of it, even if we sold 2,700,000 barrels of oil [a day], how could we have conducted the financial transactions?"

Once an agreement was reached, business eased, according to Nabavian. "Finally, Putin sent the governor of his central bank directly [to Tehran] to secure alleviations in the field of money transfers and barter trade. Likewise, China transferred to our account 10 billion toman from the blocked funds."

The deal is set to take affect on January 20, according to recent reports. The interim deal requires that Iran freeze or curb its nuclear activities for six months in exchange for some sanctions relief. In the meantime, Iran and Western powers will try to reach a comprehensive agreement.


Credit to Israel National News

Officials reject concerns over 500 percent radiation increase on California beach

AFP Photo / Spencer Platt

Health officials in California are now telling residents not to worry after a video uploaded to the internet last month seemed to show high levels of radiation at a Pacific Coast beach.

The video, “Fukushima radiation hits San Francisco,” has been viewed nearly half-a-million times since being uploaded to YouTube on Christmas Eve, and its contents have caused concern among residents who fear that nuclear waste from the March 2011 disaster in Japan may be arriving on their side of the Pacific Ocean.

Throughout the course of the seven-minute-long clip, a man tests out his Geiger counter radiation detector while walking through Pacifica State Beach outside of San Francisco. At times, the monitor on the machine seems to show radiation of 150 counts-per-minute, or the equivalent of around five times what is typically found in that type of environment.

After the video began to go viral last month, local, state and federal officials began to investigate claims that waste from the Fukushima nuclear plant has washed ashore in California. Only now, though, are authorities saying that they have no reason to believe that conditions along the West Coast are unsafe.

The Half Moon Bay Review reported on Friday that government officials conducted tests along California’s Pacific Coast after word of the video began to spread online, but found no indication that radiation levels had reached a hazardous point.

“It’s not something that we feel is an immediate public health concern,” Dean Peterson, the county environmental health director, told the Review. “We’re not even close to the point of saying that any of this is from Fukushima.”

Screenshot from YouTube user Kill0Your0TV

According to the Review’s Mark Noack, counts-per-minute does indeed measure radiation, but “does not directly equate to the strength or its hazard level to humans.” And while the paper has reported that testing conducted by Peterson’s department on their own Geiger counters has since revealedradiation level of about 100 micro-REM per hour, or about five times the normal amount, officials are confident that there is nothing to be concerned about.

“Although the radiation levels were clearly higher than is typical, Peterson emphasized that it was still not unsafe for humans,” Noack wrote. “A person would need to be exposed to 100 microREMs of radiation for 50,000 hours before it surpassed safety guidelines by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he explained.”

Screenshot from YouTube user Kill0Your0TV

Even so, officials are still uncertain as to why those levels — even if they are relatively safe — seem to be five-times higher than what is expected. Peterson told the Review he was “befuddled” over the ordeal, but suggested the culprit could be something not too sinister — such as red-painted eating utensils buried on the beach.

“I honestly think the end result of this is that it’s just higher levels of background radiation,” he said.

Researchers at the Geiger Counter Bulletin website have since tried to make sense of the reading on their own, and agree that the levels being detected are several times over what should be expected. According to a post on their website from this weekend, however, an independent testing of soil taken from near Pacifica State Beach tested positive for some radioactive material — but nothing that would have come from Fukushima.

The results of testing conducted by California’s Department of Public Health are expected to be announced later this week.

Credit to RT