Hal Lindsey - Prophetic year 2015 in review

Watch video!

Haredi Orthodox school in London ordered to close

• British chief rabbi supports teaching Islam in Jewish schools

• UK Muslim schools may institute Jewish studies

Inspectors said the school was founded to prevent students from “developing a wider, deeper understanding of different faiths, communities, cultures and lifestyles, including those of England.”

Members of the Jewish community in north London . (photo credit:REUTERS)

Britain’s Department for Education has ordered a haredi Orthodox school in north London to close by next month.

The Charedi Talmud Torah Tashbar school has operated illegally for 40 years, does not teach children English and, according to inspectors, was failing to meet “minimum” standards, the Independent reported Thursday.

The school, which has more than 200 students, encourages “cultural and ethnic insularity because it is so narrow and almost exclusively rooted in the study of the Torah,” inspectors said following an investigation of the school, according to The Independent.

Inspectors said the school was founded to prevent students from “developing a wider, deeper understanding of different faiths, communities, cultures and lifestyles, including those of England.”

The school was unavailable for comment, according to the Independent.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the education department’s chief inspector of schools, said in December that the country’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills may also prosecute those running unregistered Islamic religious schools.

Trump's invisible, poor white army

Donald Trump's mortal enemies in mainstream politics and media have shifted strategy. In the ramp-up to the Iowa Caucuses, Feb. 1, the culprits have been pushing presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio onto a defiant Republican base. The Cartel has taken to discussing Trump as a nightmare from which they'll soon awaken. Candidate Trump's energetic,…

Franklin in the morning - World media silent on child gang rape epidemic

The 3 time-bomb issues candidates ignore

The 2016 presidential campaign has morphed into an enthralling reality show with colorful and entertaining candidates that defy the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter. Acknowledging the campaign's inherent entertainment value, Showtime, the premium cable channel, has ordered a new "real-time" weekly documentary series aptly named, "The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth" – scheduled…

U.S. Church Puts Five Israeli Banks on Investment Blacklist

 Republished from haaretz.com
 The pension fund of the United Methodist Church, the largest Protestant group in the U.S., makes the move in an effort to exclude companies that profit from abuse of human rights; Officials: Israel will try change the decision.
The Associated Press and Barak Ravid Jan 13, 2016 12:03 PM




A tourist photographs a sign painted on a wall in the West Bank biblical town of Bethlehem, June 5, 2015. AFP/Thomas Coex

    Protestant churches split over anti-Israel divestment resolutions
    United Church of Christ votes to divest from companies with ties to Israeli settlements
    United Methodist Church's pension board divests from Israel-linked company
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.697148

The pension fund for the United Methodist Church has blocked five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio in what it describes as a broad review meant to weed out companies that profit from abuse of human rights.

Senior officials in Israel's Foreign Ministry said they are still examining the decision, but added that Israel will make quiet efforts to convince the leaders of the church to change or soften the measure ahead of the Methodist General Conference in May.

The fund, called the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits, excluded Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, First International Bank of Israel, Israel Discount Bank, and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, according to the pension board's website.

The Israeli bank stock the board sold off was worth a few million dollars in a fund with $20 billion in assets. The fund also sold holdings worth about $5,000 in the Israeli real estate and construction company Shikun & Binui, and barred the company from the pension group's investment portfolio.

The pension board identified Israel and the Palestinian territories among more than a dozen "high risk" countries or regions with "a prolonged and systematic pattern of human rights abuses." Other countries on the list include Saudi Arabia, the Central African Republic and North Korea.

The Methodist church has about 13 million members worldwide and is the largest mainline Protestant group in the United States.

The pension board had initiated the review in 2014 with a focus on protecting human rights and easing climate change. A total of 39 companies around the world were excluded from the fund's investments over human rights concerns and nine more were blocked over worries about their alleged contribution to global warming. The fund remains invested in 18 Israeli companies, according to board spokeswoman Colette Nies.

The banks had been among several companies targeted by United Methodist Kairos Response, a coalition of church members who advocate for divestment from companies with business in the Israeli occupied territories.

"This is the first step toward an effort that helps send a clear message that we as a church are listening and that we are concerned about human rights violations," Susanne Hoder, a leader of United Methodist Kairos Response, said Tuesday. "We hope it will also be encouraging to people in the Jewish community who are working for justice."

A competing group, United Methodists for Constructive Peacemaking in Israel and Palestine, said in a statement that the pension board action should not be viewed as divestment from Israel, since the top Methodist legislative body rejected proposals in 2012 to divest from companies that produce equipment used by Israel in the territories. The same body, called General Conference, passed a resolution denouncing the Israeli occupation and expanding Jewish settlements in the territories.

The pension board's decision came at a time when divestment is gaining momentum among liberal Protestants as a tool to pressure Israel over its policies toward Palestinians. Last year, the United Church of Christ voted to divest from companies with business in the Israeli-occupied territories. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) took a similar vote in 2014.

$m.stack.teaserArticleAuthorImage.content.a11yDescription.value

The Associated Press
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.697148

Canadians Panic As Food Prices Soar On Collapsing Currency

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/13/2016 23:18 -0500

inShare73

It was just yesterday when we documented the continuing slide in the loonie, which is suffering mightily in the face of oil’s inexorable decline.

As regular readers are no doubt acutely aware, Canada is struggling through a dramatic economic adjustment, especially in Alberta, the heart of the country’s oil patch. Amid the ongoing crude carnage the province has seen soaring property crime, rising food bank usage and, sadly, elevated suicide rates, as Albertans struggle to comprehend how things up north could have gone south (so to speak) so quickly.

The plunging loonie “can only serve to worsen the death of the 'Canadian Dream'" we said on Tuesday.


As it turns out, we were right.

The currency's decline is having a pronounced effect on Canadians' grocery bills.
 As Bloomberg reminds us, Canada imports around 80% of its fresh fruits and vegetables. When the loonie slides, prices for those goods soar. "With lower-income households tending to spend a larger portion of income on food, this side effect of a soft currency brings them the most acute stress" Bloomberg continues.

Of course with the layoffs piling up, you can expect more households to fall into the "lower-income" category where they will have to fight to afford things like $3 cucumbers, $8 cauliflower, and $15 Frosted Flakes. 

As Bloomberg notes, James Price, director of Capital Markets Products at Richardson GMP, recently joked during an interview on BloombergTV Canada that "we're going to be paying a buck a banana pretty soon."

Have a look at the following tweets which underscore just how bad it is in Canada's grocery aisles. And no, its not just Nunavut: it from coast to coast:

And while some Canadians might think this is a regional phenomenon ...

... folks in the northern parts of the Great White North do have the most cause to cry foul:




No "Jack Nasty" it's not The Great Depression, but as we highlighted three weeks ago, it is Canada's depression and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. "Last year, fruits and veggies jumped in price between 9.1 and 10.1 per cent, according to an annual report by the Food Institute at the University of Guelph," CBC said on Tuesday. "The study predicts these foods will continue to increase above inflation this year, by up to 4.5 per cent for some items."

If you thought we were being hyperbolic when we suggested that if oil prices don't rise soon, Canadians may well eat themselves to death, consider the following from Diana Bronson, the executive director of Food Secure Canada: 

"Lower- and middle-class people — many who can't find a job that will pay them enough to ensure that they can afford a healthy diet for their families" — also feel the pinch of rising food prices"

"The wrong kind of food is cheap, and the right kind of food is still expensive."

In other words, some now fear that the hardest hit parts of the country may experience a spike in obesity rates as Canadians resort to cheap, unhealthy foods. As we put it, "in Alberta it's 'feast or famine' in the most literal sense of the phrase as those who can still afford to buy food will drown their sorrows in cheap lunch meat and off-brand ice cream while the most hard hit members of society are forced to tap increasingly overwhelmed food banks." 

And the rub is that there's really nothing anyone can do about it.
Were the Bank of Canada to adopt pro-cyclical measures to shore up the loonie, they would risk choking off economic growth just as the crude downturn takes a giant bite out of the economy - no food pun intended.

Eye to Eye Part 2 - Bill Koenig and Gary Stearman

The Biblical Truth About Total Depravity - Tom Stegal

Reblogged from bibleprophecyblog.com

Tom Stegall presents a biblical perspective on the topic of Total Depravity. This message disputes the Calvinistic position of Total Depravity which is commonly referred to as the "T" in "TULIP" (an acronym that encapsulates Calvinism theology).

Sinai´s Slippery senses

Sinai’s Slippery Senses
In Defense of the Faith
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Wendy Wippel

One of the weirdest statements the Bible makes occurs in Exodus 20 at a momentous occasion in the history of the Jewish nation, God’s giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. “And the entire nation saw the voices and the thunder”. Saw voices?  And thunder?  What gives?
Well, at least it certainly got their attention.

Now a Jewish holiday called Shavuot, the day commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the seminal moment in Jewish history and the birth of the nation.  Jewish tradition records that “all of the Ten Commandments were revealed simultaneously, in a manner which a person can not possibly articulate. A language, that which a mouth could not say, nor could ears hear." according to the Midrash.

At the very least we can surmise that something very unusual-- something out of normal human experience--, was going on.
Which is interesting for two reasons.

First, from a human standpoint, the statement that the people “saw the voices” seems completely preposterous
We don’t see voices.
At least, not til Isaac Newton, we didn’t.

Newton was one of the first scientists to gather evidence that sometimes, in fact, the neural pathways of the brain get confused.  And when that happens, regions of the brain that are normally committed to solely one function like hearing, or sight, can begin abnormally active cross-talk between regions that don’t normally interact, and the senses get confused.  People smell sounds. They see numbers as colors.

 It’s a disorder now known as synesthesia (meaning “perceive together”)’
And in Sinai several thousand years ago, the revelation of God’s eternal word apparently created such stimulation of human neurons that the people were able to “see” voices and “visualize”  thunder. Not at all preposterous at this point, but a recognized—albeit  very unusual--  neural disorder.
It’s also very interesting from a very supernatural standpoint.

Yakov Gugeinheim, an Israeli physicist and electronic systems specialist also found the description of the  Israelite’s reaction to the giving of  the ten commandments interesting.  And he developed a sophisticated software program that turned sound wave patterns into visual images.
Then he spoke the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into the program.

Intriguingly, for 18 of the 22 Hebrew letters spoken into the system, the sound wave pattern reproduced the shape of the letter itself, supporting the traditional Jewish belief that the alphabet itself has supernatural origin.

Which is also interesting given the hints we have in Scripture that communication from God—both written and spoken—has a distinct power:

"For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."  (Isaiah 55:10-11)

And that’s because God’s word is in explicably but nonetheless inextricably linked to the person of God himself in the form of his son, Jesus, born to redeem mankind from the foundations of the world:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. (John 1:1-3)

Jesus said that not a yod or a tittle would ever pass away before God’s word is proven to be the supernatural word of Go.
The rabbis apparently are fond of saying that when Messiah comes, he will not only explain the word, but he will explain the spaces between the letter.
I can’t wait.
About Wendy Wippel
Last week: Patterns and Prophecies