Humans weren’t designed to know everything that’s happening in the world all the time: the despair, the suffering, the trials, the overwhelming injustices and the immensity of the problems in our modern industrialized, global society, can easily topple us emotionally and even spiritually. The Internet and its various information-pushing innovations over time, have all made it possible to know the massive tragedies in other countries, in real-time, in such a way that it can almost feel like the world is ending. All the time. Man can’t bear the weight of such knowledge.
Tag: News
The attacks upon the evangelical faith, from within, just keep rolling. There is no relenting it seems on which fronts are being compromised, slowly as well as quickly. The issue of theistic evolution (evolution designed and created by God) has been simmering for some time, gaining strength, until finally it has boiled over and become very public, so public that ABC News even did a story on it (see below). And all this is happening within the Reformed scholarly community in particular.
Dr. Bruce Waltke, a highly distinguished Old Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary resigned (from his perspective was forced to resign because of the theology police) due to his issues with “traditional” understandings of Genesis and his acceptance of evolution as a legitimate understanding that fits.
As Rick Phillips points out in this article on the Reformation21 blog, much more is at stake in this debate than issues of science. The very issue of hermeneutics is at stake, that is, our method of interpreting Scripture itself (hence the title of the article Theistic Evolution: A Hermeneutical Trojan Horse). In addition, the issue of the authority of Scripture is also at stake. And the logic is that if it can be argued that Adam and Eve weren’t literal, historical people who God created in the garden but rather products of evolution, there is no stopping how far “reinterpretations” or new interpretations will soon take hold of other doctrines.
Excerpt from this article in which Murdoch speaks about government involvement in journalism:
“As for the government stepping in [to journalism], Murdoch said he feared, and others should to, the growing drumbeat for government assistance should be as alarming as overregulation. That includes providing taxpayer funds for journalism or giving them nonprofit status in exchange for giving up the right to endorse political candidates.
He said that would only prop up those who produce what customers don’t want, subsidizing failure and penalizing success. He said that government inserting itself into commercial journalism should be “chilling” to anyone concerned about the First Amendment.”
Dubai is just a harbinger of things to come for sovereign debt – Jeremy Warner
These are the exact things Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente were warning about a while back. The issue with this surprise Dubai news is not that they may default on $80-90 billion in debt (the news that came out today). Rather, looking into the near future, this event may be a foreshadowing of things to come with the large industrialized nations. That’s why there was a global sell-off.
In 2007 to 2008, a financial crisis came upon the private sector. And so what did governments do? They bought up the debt amounting to trillions of dollars ($15.3 trillion to be exact). So now governments around the world hold an unsustainable amount of debt. Now what? Jeremy Warner explains it well here:
“The fear is that threatened default in this tiny desert kingdom is just a harginger of things to come for government debt markets as a whole. According to new estimates by Moody’s, the credit rating agency, the total stock of sovereign debt worldwide will have risen by nearly 50 per cent between 2007 and 2010 to $15.3 trillion. The great bulk of this increase comes not from irrelevant little states like Dubai, but from the big advanced economies – America, Europe, and Japan.”
“Up until now, markets have assumed that the ruinous fiscal cost of addressing the financial and economic crisis was probably just about affordable to the major economies. That view may be about to be challenged.”
These issues here (amongst others) are exactly why the government should stay out of the free market. Let the companies crash that need to crash. Get rid of the entire category of “too big to fail” and let the market do what it needs to do. Governments, when they intervene, wind up distorting and elongating what should have been a two year economic meltdown at max, only for some form of short-term economic gain. Now, governments are looking like they can’t pay the bills. Lo and behold: Keynesianism in action!
Now we’ll have to see if the rest of Celente’s predictions and forecasting comes true, which is that governments, as a response to not being able to pay debt bills, will have to raise taxes, which will then in response cause some form of a tax revolt among the people. You think the tea parties were crazy? Just wait and see if they try to do this.
- Exclusive – Wells Fargo’s Commercial Portfolio is a ticking time bomb – BankImplode.com
“In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo’s commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books… and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank’s outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank.”
- Wells’ Commercial Real Estate “Ticking Time Bomb” And Coming CRE Woes – Naked Capitalism
“The CRE alarmists may yet be proven right, but the delayed reckoning due to CDS [credit default swap’s] accounting means it may take a while for these shoes to start dropping.”
- Facing the next real-estate collapse – New York Post
“The next wave of the credit crisis is about to hit — a collapse in com mercial real estate and potential explosion of bank failures. With its resources tapped out by the first wave, what should Washington do?
“Over the last year, the Federal Reserve doubled the size of its balance sheet, and took unprecedented action in monetizing government debt and extending credit to financial institutions. Now it must head off inflation and extricate itself from $5 trillion-plus in credit exposure from various bailouts. The Treasury, meanwhile, is issuing debt at the fastest pace in peacetime history.
“Now comes the next crisis. The same factors that caused the residential bubble — easy credit, lax lending standards and booming mortgage-backed-securities underwriting — also drove commercial real-estate overvaluation. But the commercial market lags the residential one by about a year, so this bubble is still popping.”