Christ Our Light

Dying He destroyed our death
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who
believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
John 3:16

Rising He restored our life
"I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
John 11:25

Any Questions

Gang Threats

Chaos is at our Door: Why a dangerous world is closing in. (Part 3 of 5)

It’s not just enemy state actors, like foreign terrorists, but also foreign and domestic drug cartels and criminals that are responsible for the growing threats faced by Americans. America’s police community knows that every U.S. city of any appreciable size already has a serious, established, drug-funded Mexican drug-cartel presence.

The Justice Department admits: Mexican drug gangs are operating in more than 1,000 U.S. cities; 20,000 gangs with at least a million members are embedded coast to coast; more than 100,000 street gang members have been documented in Obama’s hometown of Chicago alone.

Add to that volatile mix the thousands of hardened, dangerous criminals that are being released from prisons all over America. When states can’t or won’t spend the money needed to imprison their criminals, and those prisons become overcrowded, the courts say to set them free. So now the floodgates are open as our nation’s prisons are purged.

The U.S. Justice Department is releasing federal felons, and in California inmates are being released early. And consider this: Terrorists have known for 25 years that our southern border is so porous and unprotected that crossing into the U.S. is like crossing the street. Drug smugglers, kidnappers, human traffickers, and criminals of all kinds can invade our country from the south every day.

Where all these released criminals end up, no one knows. But you can bet on this: They’re among us, embedded throughout our society. For all you know, you pass them in your car on your way to work.

Even if you take terrorists and criminals out of the picture, chaos is an ever-present danger to Americans today, especially when you factor in the undercurrent of social unrest that seethes beneath the surface of much of our society.

How many times have we seen peaceful protests in this country degenerate into riots, looting, shootings, arsons and worse? And not all protests are intended to be peaceful.

How many times have we seen crowds turn into angry mobs after court decisions they didn’t like, sports team defeats they felt were unfair, or natural disasters that collapsed civil order?

Who among us can say with certainty that we’d never face that same kind of out-of-control mayhem and brutality in our own city or hometown?

Dont Panic

Cyber Threats

Chaos is at our Door: Why a dangerous world is closing in. (Part 2 of 5)

An EMP attack is far from the only way of wreaking havoc on America’s infrastructure or blacking out our power grid. Cyber-attacks through the internet, for example, are a new and growing danger to our nation’s most sensitive government, military and financial operations.

Many experts worry that they could shut down our nation’s financial system, locking up bank accounts, freezing credit cards, and putting our economy into a tailspin.

Worse, according to 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, the danger of cyber terror is even more immediate and deadly. “Hackers can threaten the control systems of critical facilities like dams, water treatment plants, and the power grid.” Being able to remotely control a dam, pumping station or oil pipeline could unleash large-scale devastation.

Terrorists could deliver a knockout punch with more conventional means as well. Last year, in what was called “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred,” unknown individuals used rifles to disable 17 electrical transformers near San Jose, Calif.

It took technicians almost a month to get the facility back online, and that was just one substation. What if terrorists did the same thing in coordinated attacks all across the country? According to Wellinghoff, they could disable the grid and black out much of the United States.

Whether it’s through an EMP, a massive cyber-attack, another 9/11, or just isolated sprees of murder and mayhem, military and homeland security officials agree it’s just a matter of time before the U.S. faces some kind of terrorist attack.

It might be along the lines of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, where terrorists launched a dozen coordinated attacks, gunning down innocent victims at hotels, a bar, a train station, a hospital, and a movie theater. In all, they killed 164 innocent people.

Or it might be like the attack on Westgate Mall in Kenya last year. Four armed terrorists linked to al Qaeda were able, thanks to Kenya’s strict anti-gun laws, to spend four days torturing, mutilating and gunning down shoppers with almost no fear of reprisal. They killed 63 innocent people and wounded 175 more before they were stopped.

So ask yourself: Could suicidal terrorist mass murderers try to bomb an American hotel, an American train station, shopping mall or movie theater? Don’t think that a group of terrorists aren’t smart enough to pull it off, eventually, or that a single determined person with an agenda isn’t going to be successful.

Chaos

EMP Threats

Chaos is at our Door: Why a dangerous world is closing in. (Part 1 of 5)

Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President, recently wrote, “You won’t hear about this from the mainstream media, and few politicians dare to discuss these things openly”. His comments were not meant to be intentionally alarming or apocalyptic, but the reality is that we may be living in some of the most dangerous times in human history.

Does that sound like some crazy exaggeration to you? Well, consider this: Recently, in The Wall Street Journal, former CIA Director James Woolsey warned that “the most significant threat to the U.S. in the world” is the threat of catastrophe caused by an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. And that danger appears to loom larger every year.

Even if no blast, shock or fallout reaches the ground, the cascading avalanche of infrastructure failures caused by an EMP can create a national catastrophe; because an EMP is designed to destroy the electronic equipment upon which so much of modern life is built.

In the short term, an EMP will drown out radio communications, like radio, TV and cell phones, to air-defense radar systems, to police, fire and EMS frequencies. Over the long term, an EMP blacks out the power grid, plunging much of the continental U.S. into darkness and chaos lasting for months, if not years.

Collapse of the power grid, in turn, would have a domino effect on the infrastructures Americans depend on most for survival. Landline telephone and cell phone systems, the internet and all the vital signals the internet carries, military command and control, banking and financial systems, gas pipeline and gas stations, nuclear power plant safeguards, hospital and emergency room functionality. Public water and sewage services, perhaps our most urgent and immediate life support systems of all.

This isn’t some feverish, paranoid fantasy. It’s not some fabrication from “Doomsday Preppers.” It’s the kind of scenario that the most informed national security experts in the country, including military commanders, emergency response planners and scientists have been warning politicians about with increasing urgency for more than a decade.

China and Russia have considered limited nuclear-attack options that employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack, and in 2004 Russian military officials warned U.S. government investigators that North Korea’s military had recruited Russian scientists to develop nuclear EMP weapons.

Designs for variants of such weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter century. Yet, while the media should be alerting the public to this danger, and our nation’s leaders should be setting up systems to protect us, we get adolescent media gossip about the latest celebrity tweet.

If this all sounds inconceivable to you, the government’s own congressional EMP Commission reports that within a year of a national blackout, as much as 90 percent of the population of the U.S. could die due to starvation, disease and the collapse of civilization as we know it.