Iran seems to keep making the case that they need oil to be at least $70 a barrel to survive. So they keep pushing and backing OPEC cuts to stop oil prices from falling and indeed try to get prices to also start rising again. When oil was going up nobody in OPEC wanted to stop the rising cost. OPEC said it was just market conditions, which may have been true, but market conditions may not have had everything to do with the prices. Oil prices didn’t naturally rise a little bit at a time but over a four-year period or so prices climbed to over a 300% price increase. Over a little bit longer period of time the price of milk almost doubled but you don’t need a gallon of milk to get almost everywhere you have to go.
Russia and Iran among others were likely able to afford new military spending sprees with the increased revenue. Did they help facilitate the unnatural rise in oil prices toward that end? Possibly, but it’s hard to know considering wall street speculators had a lot to do with it. Could the speculators have been pushed by outside forces? Again the answer is possibly. Currently the outlook on the economy, together with the US being driven to actually buy less gas, has made gas prices fall back to what would have been very high prices four years but what seem like really good prices today.
Is Iran now trying to push oil prices back up so they can finish their military goals? I think it’s a good possibility. This market downturn may be costing a lot of jobs and doing a lot of real damage but if it helps weaken the forces of Iran and other enemies of peace it may have bought the world more time before a larger war will start. At best its only likely to have bought time not cancelled the situation. And the current scenario might even push those bent on war and destruction into a faster pace as they rush to finish what they started or because they feel war will increase oil prices and help them get to their goals.
It’s all speculation but it’s something to ponder.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
No way Obama could be the antichrist, right?
It's amazing how different end times teachers and websites keep recieving questions about whether or not Obama "the One" is the Antichrist. What amazes me more though is their answer. There tend to be three answers that I have seen. No he's not because he's not a European leader, no he's not because he didn't come out of the Islamic empire or no because too many people think he could be the antichrist.
The first two answers make me think that too many people who study the "end times" are too stuck to their or someone elses interpretation. Even if one of those interpretations is correct, it's too dangerous to say this person or that person isn't the antichrist because they don't fit what we expected. Many people missed Jesus coming because they expected something else. We should only follow what the Bible says concerning the identity of the antichrist, but be careful to understand what the Bible says and what are our intepretations.
The last reason, is also a really bad reason. When people say too many people think someone is the antichrist so they can't be, that almost makes a more convincing argument that they may be the antichrist. If everyone is saying he can't be the antichrist for whatever reason, that makes the candidate all the more possible that he could be the antichrist.
I don't believe the Bible says the antichrist will be a surprise and no one will see him coming. It does say many will be fooled by the antichrist, and even the elect would have been if it were possible (meaning they wouldn't be). But some of the elect may be fooled in the begining stages. Obama may not be the antichrist but if he were to keep doing more and more things that make him look the antichrist, how many prophecy experts will say he's not the antichrist even if he were to setup the obomination of desolation?
I don't think Obama is necessarily the antichrist, but it is possible. It will become more apparent over time whether he is or isn't and if he isn't when the antichrist does come on the scene, if the church is still here it will become more and more apparent.
The first two answers make me think that too many people who study the "end times" are too stuck to their or someone elses interpretation. Even if one of those interpretations is correct, it's too dangerous to say this person or that person isn't the antichrist because they don't fit what we expected. Many people missed Jesus coming because they expected something else. We should only follow what the Bible says concerning the identity of the antichrist, but be careful to understand what the Bible says and what are our intepretations.
The last reason, is also a really bad reason. When people say too many people think someone is the antichrist so they can't be, that almost makes a more convincing argument that they may be the antichrist. If everyone is saying he can't be the antichrist for whatever reason, that makes the candidate all the more possible that he could be the antichrist.
I don't believe the Bible says the antichrist will be a surprise and no one will see him coming. It does say many will be fooled by the antichrist, and even the elect would have been if it were possible (meaning they wouldn't be). But some of the elect may be fooled in the begining stages. Obama may not be the antichrist but if he were to keep doing more and more things that make him look the antichrist, how many prophecy experts will say he's not the antichrist even if he were to setup the obomination of desolation?
I don't think Obama is necessarily the antichrist, but it is possible. It will become more apparent over time whether he is or isn't and if he isn't when the antichrist does come on the scene, if the church is still here it will become more and more apparent.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
How does the world greet president elect Obama?
How does the world greet president elect Obama? On the one hand world dictators like Iran’s Ahmadinejad and terrorist organizations like Hamas welcome him. In reality Russia puts nuclear armable missiles up aimed at Europe, Israel warns him about talking to Iran, the stock markets plummet, the truce between Israel and Hamas comes to an end, Putin threatens to become a Czar in Russia. All of this and it has only been two days.
The world will continue to marvel at Obama even while the world collapses. My only question is, will it continue to collapse under Obama until some other world ruler comes on the scene and looks like the antichrist by being a man of peace, or will Obama magically fix everything himself having more people wonder if he is in fact the antichrist?
The world will continue to marvel at Obama even while the world collapses. My only question is, will it continue to collapse under Obama until some other world ruler comes on the scene and looks like the antichrist by being a man of peace, or will Obama magically fix everything himself having more people wonder if he is in fact the antichrist?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The Obama Antichrist Question
Reprinted from http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/nov/081103a.html
Michael O'Brien Newsletter Regarding Barack Obama and the Question of the Anti-Christ
All Saints Day, 1 November 2008
Dear Friends,
From just north of the border, we Canadians, like other people throughout the world, are observing and praying for the coming federal election in the United States of America. I would prefer to keep private my counsel about political choices, because it is not my country. However, I am receiving letters from American subscribers and visitors to my studio website asking me some rather surprising questions about Barack Obama, related to one of my novels.
During the past year I have read a number of his pronouncements, and saw the smoke and mirrors beneath the rhetoric, but couldn't understand why everyone south of the border (the other south of the border, the 49th parallel) was getting so excited about him, both pro and con. Then a few weeks ago a German friend called me immediately after Obama's speech in Berlin, to say that the presidential candidate had mesmerized the crowds, and that a commentator on German television had said: "We have just heard the next President of the United States...and the future President of the World." My friend felt that Obama bore an uncanny resemblance to the fictional character of the President in my novel Father Elijah. I have received several other letters saying the same thing and asking what I thought about it.
From my own reading of Obama's declarations and stated positions, I knew he was an ultra-liberal, a social revolutionary with visionary pretensions. But the Antichrist? No, not possible, I thought. I felt that he was too shallow a man to be the Son of Perdition, the Man of Sin, the Beast of the Book of Revelation. And I still think so. Obama is a crowd-pleaser with just the right ethos of idealistic crusader. That the crusade and the banners under which it marches are evil does not automatically prove that he is the Antichrist.
But now that I have seen the video of the Berlin speech I think there is more here than meets the eye. He is indeed a powerful manipulator of crowds, even as he appears ever so humble and wholesomely charming. I doubt that he is the long-prophesied ruler of the world, but I also believe that he is a carrier of a deadly moral virus, indeed a kind of anti-apostle spreading concepts and agendas that are not only anti-Christ but anti-human as well. In this sense he is of the spirit of Antichrist (perhaps without knowing it), and probably is one of several key figures in the world who (knowingly or unknowingly) will be instrumental in ushering in the time of great trial for the Church under its last and worst persecution, amidst the numerous other tribulations prophesied in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and letters of St Paul, St. John, and St. Peter.
Of course the mystique that has grown up around him is endlessly reinforced by the liberal media, which presents him to us as a high-minded humanist, a kind of secular messiah (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 675). Yet when all the rhetoric is boiled down to its substance, the man is advocating unlimited state-sanctioned murder, and compounds it by indulging in habitual falsehood. He is well accustomed to playing loose with the truth whenever it is expedient for him to do so; or else he is the victim of the largest memory lapses in recorded history; or perhaps he is just not careful about how he expresses things——a blurring or selectivity regarding facts for the purpose of aggrandizing his public image. There is a controversy currently raging in the (admittedly unreliable) forum of the internet, prompted by an African-American talk show host in Los Angeles who listed 39 significant details that Barack Obama claimed were facts about himself, but on further investigation were proved to be simply untrue. There has been some wild-fire debunking of the debunking, and then more counter-debunking, but it remains obvious that forthrightness and clarity are not major concerns in the Obama camp.
What are we to make of a man who has appeared out of semi-obscurity and become, nearly overnight, so very much an idol of the popular imagination? That he intends to become the most effective advocate of murder of the unborn ever seen in America should give us pause. Murder and lies are as old as the lands east of Eden, of course, but when they are charmingly packaged, proposed as reasonable and just policies (with a smile, a resonant voice, and an appealing flash of the eyes), one begins to wonder just what is afoot in the modern age. It brings to mind a passage from the first Act of Shakespeare's Hamlet:
"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..."
The line is from a scene where prince Hamlet has just encountered the ghost of his father, who informs his son that he was poisoned by his own brother Claudius (the "smiling, damned villain"), who after murdering him, seized the king's crown and his queen.
Barack Obama is an image-maker, creating his own myth as he goes along. This would be a sad defect in any human being, but it takes on ominous proportions in a person who may become, after November 4th, one of the most powerful figures in the world. How is it possible that such a tragic turn of events may come about, if indeed a majority of Americans choose to believe the smile and the myth? Why is it that so many people have come to believe that a mirage is reality, even destiny? Do pro-Obama voters hanker for a world figure who would heal old divisions between races and religions, thus heralding a new age for mankind? During this time of near intolerable tensions, does he appear to be the one who can reconcile Islam and Christianity, Africa and America, occident and orient, black and white, rich and poor? Do they see his racial origins as a symbolic victory over the history of racial oppression? Do they see in him the good-hearted "under-dog", the gutsy street fighter who agitates for the rights of the "little guy," whose meteoric rise to a position of maximum influence represents themselves enthroned at last in the high seat of power? Is this why they ignore his every grave fault and hungrily consume his vague idealist platitudes as if these were a kind of new gospel for the third millennium? Our hero. Our visionary. Our Great Friend and spokesman in the forum of the world?
Clearly, contemporary man needs heroes. But why not choose a genuine one, why not look a little deeper and work a little harder to find a man of courage and principle, and if it helps in the historical healing process, why not a very different kind of black man, say a person like Alan Keyes, a scholar, former ambassador, experienced in different levels of government, and (it might be added) an African-American married to a woman from India. Moreover, he is a devout Catholic who believes in moral absolutes and has amply proved that he will stand firm to defend them regardless of the cost to his own career. He knows that kings and presidents cannot usurp the natural law, the moral order of the universe, without bringing down judgment upon their nations. But it need not be Keyes. It might be any number of other men and women of clear thought and clear principle. Surely there are "Ten Just Men" still out there somewhere in America. So why Obama? And why does he rise and rise as his mouth smiles and smiles, exuding sincerity as he speaks lies and death?
And why, most horribly, most shamefully, are so many Christians of malformed or unformed conscience supporting him? Is it because they have never been clearly instructed in the truth, never understood the foundation upon which the moral cosmos is built? Is morality for them merely another system of abstract "values" in a crowded playing field of such systems, from which one may pick and choose? In the case of Catholics, for example, have they been blinded by a diet of theological nuances and deadly little loopholes offered to them by the committees of national episcopal conferences — committees that have absolutely no authority over Catholics, yet which are widely revered as a kind of alternative Magisterium? Have they been deadened by a habitual dismissing or dissembling of the solid teaching given to them by the universal Church under Peter? Have they grown accustomed to listening to opinion shapers who tell them that certain excellent apostolic Bishops in America who teach the truth without compromise are merely hidebound reactionaries, moralistic extremists, contemporary manifestations of those old boogymen who still haunt the American psyche — the Chillingworths and Dimmesdales and the judges in The Scarlet Letter? And so it goes, this over-reaction to Puritanism played out over centuries, an over-reaction that breeds tragedies a thousand times worse than Salem's. Lies compounding on lies, and it all floats on an ocean of spilled innocent blood. And who can gaze at that ocean (or be splashed by it) without coming to a radical choice: One either turns away into a deeper state of denial, or one turns heart and mind toward the splendor of Truth, and changes one's life accordingly.
Is this why many of our Catholic people have become impulse-driven impressionists? Of course, the blindness is not due to the failure of pastors alone. The Ministry of Disinformation (by which I mean most modern media) has played a major role. There is also the erosion of truth in the education systems, combined with the gradual confusion and weakening of conscience through our addiction to the "soma" drugs supplied by the entertainment industry. Other factors may be the war in Iraq, or Republican economics, or the Bush administration, or the structure of Capitalism itself, or any number of prudential questions in the sociopolitical order, all of which are presently tangled nests of moral dilemma. But why do they not see that these questions are secondary to the fundamental issue of life itself? Why would they replace one reigning oligarchy with another kind of oligarchy — moreover, one that would kill vast numbers of its own citizens?
"I call on heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live...." (Deuteronomy 30:19)
May God bless and guide you,
in Jesus our Saviour,
with prayers and fasting,
Michael O'Brien
Michael O'Brien Newsletter Regarding Barack Obama and the Question of the Anti-Christ
All Saints Day, 1 November 2008
Dear Friends,
From just north of the border, we Canadians, like other people throughout the world, are observing and praying for the coming federal election in the United States of America. I would prefer to keep private my counsel about political choices, because it is not my country. However, I am receiving letters from American subscribers and visitors to my studio website asking me some rather surprising questions about Barack Obama, related to one of my novels.
During the past year I have read a number of his pronouncements, and saw the smoke and mirrors beneath the rhetoric, but couldn't understand why everyone south of the border (the other south of the border, the 49th parallel) was getting so excited about him, both pro and con. Then a few weeks ago a German friend called me immediately after Obama's speech in Berlin, to say that the presidential candidate had mesmerized the crowds, and that a commentator on German television had said: "We have just heard the next President of the United States...and the future President of the World." My friend felt that Obama bore an uncanny resemblance to the fictional character of the President in my novel Father Elijah. I have received several other letters saying the same thing and asking what I thought about it.
From my own reading of Obama's declarations and stated positions, I knew he was an ultra-liberal, a social revolutionary with visionary pretensions. But the Antichrist? No, not possible, I thought. I felt that he was too shallow a man to be the Son of Perdition, the Man of Sin, the Beast of the Book of Revelation. And I still think so. Obama is a crowd-pleaser with just the right ethos of idealistic crusader. That the crusade and the banners under which it marches are evil does not automatically prove that he is the Antichrist.
But now that I have seen the video of the Berlin speech I think there is more here than meets the eye. He is indeed a powerful manipulator of crowds, even as he appears ever so humble and wholesomely charming. I doubt that he is the long-prophesied ruler of the world, but I also believe that he is a carrier of a deadly moral virus, indeed a kind of anti-apostle spreading concepts and agendas that are not only anti-Christ but anti-human as well. In this sense he is of the spirit of Antichrist (perhaps without knowing it), and probably is one of several key figures in the world who (knowingly or unknowingly) will be instrumental in ushering in the time of great trial for the Church under its last and worst persecution, amidst the numerous other tribulations prophesied in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and letters of St Paul, St. John, and St. Peter.
Of course the mystique that has grown up around him is endlessly reinforced by the liberal media, which presents him to us as a high-minded humanist, a kind of secular messiah (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 675). Yet when all the rhetoric is boiled down to its substance, the man is advocating unlimited state-sanctioned murder, and compounds it by indulging in habitual falsehood. He is well accustomed to playing loose with the truth whenever it is expedient for him to do so; or else he is the victim of the largest memory lapses in recorded history; or perhaps he is just not careful about how he expresses things——a blurring or selectivity regarding facts for the purpose of aggrandizing his public image. There is a controversy currently raging in the (admittedly unreliable) forum of the internet, prompted by an African-American talk show host in Los Angeles who listed 39 significant details that Barack Obama claimed were facts about himself, but on further investigation were proved to be simply untrue. There has been some wild-fire debunking of the debunking, and then more counter-debunking, but it remains obvious that forthrightness and clarity are not major concerns in the Obama camp.
What are we to make of a man who has appeared out of semi-obscurity and become, nearly overnight, so very much an idol of the popular imagination? That he intends to become the most effective advocate of murder of the unborn ever seen in America should give us pause. Murder and lies are as old as the lands east of Eden, of course, but when they are charmingly packaged, proposed as reasonable and just policies (with a smile, a resonant voice, and an appealing flash of the eyes), one begins to wonder just what is afoot in the modern age. It brings to mind a passage from the first Act of Shakespeare's Hamlet:
"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..."
The line is from a scene where prince Hamlet has just encountered the ghost of his father, who informs his son that he was poisoned by his own brother Claudius (the "smiling, damned villain"), who after murdering him, seized the king's crown and his queen.
Barack Obama is an image-maker, creating his own myth as he goes along. This would be a sad defect in any human being, but it takes on ominous proportions in a person who may become, after November 4th, one of the most powerful figures in the world. How is it possible that such a tragic turn of events may come about, if indeed a majority of Americans choose to believe the smile and the myth? Why is it that so many people have come to believe that a mirage is reality, even destiny? Do pro-Obama voters hanker for a world figure who would heal old divisions between races and religions, thus heralding a new age for mankind? During this time of near intolerable tensions, does he appear to be the one who can reconcile Islam and Christianity, Africa and America, occident and orient, black and white, rich and poor? Do they see his racial origins as a symbolic victory over the history of racial oppression? Do they see in him the good-hearted "under-dog", the gutsy street fighter who agitates for the rights of the "little guy," whose meteoric rise to a position of maximum influence represents themselves enthroned at last in the high seat of power? Is this why they ignore his every grave fault and hungrily consume his vague idealist platitudes as if these were a kind of new gospel for the third millennium? Our hero. Our visionary. Our Great Friend and spokesman in the forum of the world?
Clearly, contemporary man needs heroes. But why not choose a genuine one, why not look a little deeper and work a little harder to find a man of courage and principle, and if it helps in the historical healing process, why not a very different kind of black man, say a person like Alan Keyes, a scholar, former ambassador, experienced in different levels of government, and (it might be added) an African-American married to a woman from India. Moreover, he is a devout Catholic who believes in moral absolutes and has amply proved that he will stand firm to defend them regardless of the cost to his own career. He knows that kings and presidents cannot usurp the natural law, the moral order of the universe, without bringing down judgment upon their nations. But it need not be Keyes. It might be any number of other men and women of clear thought and clear principle. Surely there are "Ten Just Men" still out there somewhere in America. So why Obama? And why does he rise and rise as his mouth smiles and smiles, exuding sincerity as he speaks lies and death?
And why, most horribly, most shamefully, are so many Christians of malformed or unformed conscience supporting him? Is it because they have never been clearly instructed in the truth, never understood the foundation upon which the moral cosmos is built? Is morality for them merely another system of abstract "values" in a crowded playing field of such systems, from which one may pick and choose? In the case of Catholics, for example, have they been blinded by a diet of theological nuances and deadly little loopholes offered to them by the committees of national episcopal conferences — committees that have absolutely no authority over Catholics, yet which are widely revered as a kind of alternative Magisterium? Have they been deadened by a habitual dismissing or dissembling of the solid teaching given to them by the universal Church under Peter? Have they grown accustomed to listening to opinion shapers who tell them that certain excellent apostolic Bishops in America who teach the truth without compromise are merely hidebound reactionaries, moralistic extremists, contemporary manifestations of those old boogymen who still haunt the American psyche — the Chillingworths and Dimmesdales and the judges in The Scarlet Letter? And so it goes, this over-reaction to Puritanism played out over centuries, an over-reaction that breeds tragedies a thousand times worse than Salem's. Lies compounding on lies, and it all floats on an ocean of spilled innocent blood. And who can gaze at that ocean (or be splashed by it) without coming to a radical choice: One either turns away into a deeper state of denial, or one turns heart and mind toward the splendor of Truth, and changes one's life accordingly.
Is this why many of our Catholic people have become impulse-driven impressionists? Of course, the blindness is not due to the failure of pastors alone. The Ministry of Disinformation (by which I mean most modern media) has played a major role. There is also the erosion of truth in the education systems, combined with the gradual confusion and weakening of conscience through our addiction to the "soma" drugs supplied by the entertainment industry. Other factors may be the war in Iraq, or Republican economics, or the Bush administration, or the structure of Capitalism itself, or any number of prudential questions in the sociopolitical order, all of which are presently tangled nests of moral dilemma. But why do they not see that these questions are secondary to the fundamental issue of life itself? Why would they replace one reigning oligarchy with another kind of oligarchy — moreover, one that would kill vast numbers of its own citizens?
"I call on heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live...." (Deuteronomy 30:19)
May God bless and guide you,
in Jesus our Saviour,
with prayers and fasting,
Michael O'Brien
Monday, November 3, 2008
Hope and Change and World War 3?
As much as I hope it’s not true, a young charismatic man with a gift for giving speeches and telling people that he will save them from themselves and the economic crisis and from being looked down at by the world is about to become the leader of the lone superpower in the world. This sounds similar to the way Hitler came to power.
Obama has also called for a national civilian defense force that is as strong as and as well funded as the military.
There are news stories of Egypt and Syria building up troops along the border with Israel. Iran has been threatening that Israel is going to be wiped off the map. Iran is also enriching uranium, which they say is for nuclear power but that many fear is for a nuclear weapon. Last weekend there was an earthquake in Iran that an Iranian scientist said was a nuclear test.
Is the world about to change?
Obama has also called for a national civilian defense force that is as strong as and as well funded as the military.
There are news stories of Egypt and Syria building up troops along the border with Israel. Iran has been threatening that Israel is going to be wiped off the map. Iran is also enriching uranium, which they say is for nuclear power but that many fear is for a nuclear weapon. Last weekend there was an earthquake in Iran that an Iranian scientist said was a nuclear test.
Is the world about to change?
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