Heat And Drought

This summer, thousands of new high temperature records have been set all over the country. Weather conditions are much drier than normal in most of the nation.

In fact, the drought that we are experiencing right now is being called the worst drought in more than 50 years. More than 1,000 counties in the United States have already been declared official disaster areas. There is no end in sight to the drought.

All over America this drought is killing the corn causing the price of corn to soar. The following is from a recent Financial Post article....

Chicago Board of Trade corn for December delivery has soared 54% since mid-June, reaching a contract high of US$7.78 on Monday and approaching its record price near US$8. Soybeans for November delivery soared to a new contract high of US$15.97 before slipping back a few cents. Crop watchers were alarmed that corn rated poor-to-very poor jumped to 38%, versus 30% last week and 11% a year ago.

The record high for the price of corn is just $7.99 a bushel. Many believe that the price of corn will soon blow well past that price and eventually reach $10 a bushel.

Unfortunately, there is not much hope on the horizon. It is being projected that these very hot and very dry conditions will persist well into August.

Wildfires

The extreme heat has also been responsible for an unusual number of wildfires in the western United States this year. The recent horrific wildfires in Colorado made headlines all over the nation. Sadly, these wildfires are part of a rising trend. The truth is that the 6 worst years for wildfires in the United States ever recorded have all happened since the year 2000. What is causing this to happen?

What is causing so much of the country to go up in flames?

Tornadoes

Earlier this year, many areas of the heartland of America were absolutely ripped to shreds by very powerful tornadoes.

More tornadoes happen in the United States than anywhere else in the world, and unfortunately we have seen a tremendous amount of tornado activity in this country in recent years.

In 2009, there were 1146 tornadoes in the United States. In 2010, there were 1282 tornadoes in the United States. In 2011, there were 1691 tornadoes in the United States. Overall, 2011 was the worst year for natural disasters in U.S. history.

Where will 2012 rank when everything is all said and done?

Fukushima

Radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be affecting Americans for many years to come.

Most Americans do not think much about Fukushima anymore, but the truth is that Fukushima is still putting out a tremendous amount of radiation, and that radiation travels eastward towards us.

A couple of months ago, one reporter discovered that radiation levels in rain falling on Los Angeles were five times above normal.

We don't hear about this in the mainstream media, do we?

One recent study concluded that the highest concentration of Fukushima radiation in the Pacific Ocean will eventually be just off the west coast of the United States.

But our "authorities" tell us that there is no reason to be concerned. As a result, most Americans will continue to ignore the incredible tragedy that continues to unfold at Fukushima.

If you are not sure what to think about what is going on at Fukushima, perhaps the following statistic will get your attention....

Recent tests have shown that 36 percent of all children living in the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan have abnormal growths on their thyroid glands. After the Chernobyl disaster, less than 2 percent of all children living in the area surrounding Chernobyl were found to have abnormal growths on their thyroid glands.

Economic Collapse

The last recession was the worst economic crisis America has faced since the Great Depression. Our economy has yet to even come close to recovering from it.

Now we are on the verge of another global financial meltdown that appears likely to be even worse than the last one.

Peter Schiff, the president of Euro Pacific Capital, says that the U.S. economy is headed for a crisis that will make the recession of 2008 and 2009 look like a walk in the park.

So what is going to happen if the economy goes into the toilet and unemployment skyrockets much higher than it is now?

That is frightening to think about.

Poverty Explosion

Even during this "economic recovery", poverty in America continues to soar.

For example, since Barack Obama has been president, the number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 32 million to 46 million.

Overall, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives benefits from the federal government according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That is an all-time record high.

The Death Of American Cities

The United States once had dozens of great manufacturing cities that were the envy of the entire globe. Today, many of those cities have degenerated into crime-ridden, drug infested hellholes.

Things have gotten so bad in Detroit that thousands of homes are literally being torn down in an effort to "make the city safer"....

As the next step in an April deal between financially strapped Detroit and the state of Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder is finalizing a plan to tear down thousands of abandoned houses in a bid to make the city safer.

Detroit has been hard-hit over the past four decades by a steep drop in population, a steadily eroding tax base and crippling budget deficits, resulting in countless barren streets punctuated by vacant lots and burned-out buildings.

Increase In Crime

Have you noticed that crime is on the rise in many of our communities?

The murder rate in Chicago is up 38 percent so far this year. Justifiable homicide rose by 79 percent in Detroit during 2011.Criminals are getting bolder and are doing things that we have not seen before.

For example, on a Saturday night a mob of 300 teens invaded a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Florida and went absolutely wild. They started stealing stuff, breaking stuff, and throwing food at each other without any concern for what the security guards would do. When have we ever seen stuff like this happen in America before?

America already has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire planet by a very wide margin.

How many more people do we plan to lock up?

Meanwhile, even many Americans who are not considered to be "criminals" are becoming very cold-hearted. Just check out what happened in Arlington, Virginia, recently. A video surveillance camera captured footage of numerous people walking right past a man who had just been hit by a car and was dying on the sidewalk. He was lying face down and bleeding. Nobody even went up to him to see if he was okay.

If you were in a similar situation, would you stop to help that man?

Gang Violence

All over America, gangs are taking over local communities.

According to the FBI, there are now a total of 1.4 million gang members living in America. Just since 2009, that number has risen by 40 percent.

To get an idea of how deeply Mexican drug cartels have infiltrated our cities, just check out the maps in this article.

As I wrote the other day, there are only 200 police officers in Chicago's Gang Enforcement Unit to go up against an estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city of Chicago. With numbers such as those, it is easy to see how violence in many of our cities could spiral out of control very, very quickly.

War

The United States continues to get pulled into more wars, while the conflicts that we are already involved in never seem to end.

Recently, 22 NATO supply trucks were destroyed in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan has already lasted much longer than World War II did with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama has gotten the U.S. military involved in conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and a whole bunch of other places. The following is from a recent Wired article....

The center of the US drone war has shifted to Yemen, where 23 American strikes have killed an estimated 155 people so far this year. But you wouldn't know about it - or about the cruise missile attacks, or about the US commando teams in Yemen - by reading the report the White House sent to Congress about US military activities around the globe. Instead, there's only the blandest acknowledgement of "direct action" in Yemen, "against a limited number of [al-Qaida] operatives and senior leaders."

The report, issued is the first time the United States has publicly, officially acknowledged the operations in Yemen and in nearby Somalia that anyone with internet access could've told you about years ago. But the report doesn't just fail to admit the extent of the shadow war that America is waging in the region. It's borderline legal - at best. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to inform Congress about any armed conflicts America is engaged in. Friday's report isn't just uninformative about Yemen. It doesn't even mention the US campaign in Pakistan, even though the Defense Secretary says America is "at war" there.

So what is next?

There are endless headlines warning that war with Syria is coming.

Other headlines warn that war with Iran is coming.

Where will this all end?

Anxiety Epidemic

Americans today are unhappier and more anxious than ever before.

The following is from a recent Business Insider article....

According to a recent World Health Organization study, 31 percent of Americans are likely to suffer from an anxiety problem at some point during their lifetimes -- compared to 25.3 percent of those in Colombia, and 24.6 percent in New Zealand, the countries that rank second and third. You'd think people in developing or unstable states -- those preoccupied with concerns farther down on the Maslow Scale -- would be more anxious than we are. Not so. "According to the 2002 World Mental Health Survey, people in developing-world countries such as Nigeria are up to five times less likely to show clinically significant anxiety levels than Americans, despite having more basic life-necessities to worry about," writes Taylor Clark, author of Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool. "What's more, when these less-anxious developing-world citizens emigrate to the United States, they tend to get just as anxious as Americans. "The United States has transformed into the planet's undisputed worry champion," Clark adds.

Obesity Epidemic

Of all the major industrialized nations, the United States is the most obese. A recent Gallup survey found that Americans are more concerned about our obesity epidemic than ever before. Nobody can deny that we are getting fatter.

Back in 1962, only 13 percent of all Americans were obese.

Today, approximately 36 percent of all Americans are obese.

Drug Addiction Epidemic

The United States has a higher percentage of drug addicts than any other major industrialized nation does.

We love to escape the pain of our every day lives.

At this point, the United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use in the entire world.

The United States also has a higher percentage of people addicted to prescription drugs than anyone else does.

So what does that say about us exactly?

Child Abuse Epidemic

In the United States, we treat our children very badly.

Sadly, there have been more than 3 million reports of child abuse reported in the United States every single year. The United States has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.

Teen Pregnancy Epidemic

When our kids grow up, they tend to be very sexually active as teens. Amazingly, the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate on the entire planet. All of this sexual activity is rapidly spreading disease among our teens. According to one study, one out of every four teen girls in the United States has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

Divorce Epidemic

We like to make movies and television shows about families, but the truth is that the family structure in the United States has been breaking down for a very long time.

Today, the United States has the highest divorce rate in the world by a very wide margin.

Some example for the rest of the world we are, eh?

16 Trillion Dollar National Debt

Right now the U.S. national debt is $15,884,155,929,632.05.

We will shortly cross the 16 trillion dollar mark.

This is the greatest debt in the history of the world. It is beyond criminal that we plan to pass this debt on to future generations.

Our greed has destroyed the future for our children and our grandchildren. Yet we continue to borrow trillions more because we just can't help ourselves.

Political Nightmare

On top of everything else, we have a horrifying lack of leadership here in America.

Our last four presidents have been four of the worst presidents in U.S. history. In 2012 we are faced with an incredibly depressing choice at the polls.

Is Barack Obama really the best that the Democrats can do?

The American people elected an incompetent con man to the highest office in the land. Virtually every decision he makes is wrong. Virtually everything that he has tried to do while in office has been a failure.

The Republicans dislike Barack Obama so much they picked the candidate most like Obama out of the entire Republican field to go up against Obama.

What kind of sense does that make?

Is Mitt Romney really the best that the Republicans can do?

Right now the best selling point Republicans have for Romney is this...."You better vote for him or you will get another four years of Obama".

Mitt Romney would certainly also be a bad president and would lead us down the exact same road Obama has.

This fall, Americans will either get to vote for the worst president in U.S. history or another guy who will almost certainly be one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.

How depressing is that?

So as this nation continues to fall apart, we are guaranteed to have an absolutely horrible leader in the White House.

Perhaps we are really cursed.

VOL ADDENDUM

In 2009, the pharmaceutical industry spent $4.5 billion -- the budget of a small country -- marketing Cymbalta, an anxiety drug. Americans spend $200 billion a year on prescription meds. What does this say about us a nation that calls itself Christian and where we are taught from the Bible that anxiety is a sin and we swallow more tranquilizers and anxiety drugs the equivalent of which equals the GDPs of the bottom 35 African nations.

It stands to reason that the crap we put in our bodies has everything to do with these ad dollars. Cymbalta launched into the list of top 10 psychiatric drugs last year, after being 16th in 2008.

The Death of Mainline Protestantism

To this sad litany of truths is the fact that nearly all the mainline Protestant denominations have capitulated to pansexuality with absolutely no transcendent gospel to proclaim, more willing to roll over to the culture than to challenge it with the Good News. With few exceptions - The Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Church, being the largest two denominations. along with myriad small evangelical churches will survive but they will not be enough to halt the gadarene slide. The shallow theology of mega churches will force them out of business as their leaders die off. The vast majority of Roman Catholics in the U.S. are cultural catholics, mostly immigrants who view their faith as a side bar to their "real" lives. They will not halt the cultural slide. In fact they will, in time, join it.

Social critic Dr. Os Guinness says we must not harbor the illusion that America is a Christian nation and all we need to do is get right with God. "I believe strongly that this is a time rather like Augustine's, when he broke the identification of the church with the Roman Empire. We need to break any suggestion that the kingdom is bound up with Britain or Europe or America."

EDUCATION

Education in America is not about how to think. It is about rote learning of information and spewing back the same. The Closing of the American Mind by Anthony Bloom criticizes the modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Philosophy professors involved in ordinary language analysis or logical positivism disregard important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and fail to pique the interest of students.

Literature professors involved in deconstructionism promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with these imperatives.

The Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke-that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought-has led to this crisis.

GUN MADNESS

Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. Firearm violence may cost our country as much as $100 billion a year.

Highly educated people are killing ordinary Americans with easily obtainable high-powered weapons at gun shows where often no background checks are required. U.S. Prisons are filled with one time killers. By contrast the number of murders by firearms in Britain in 2011 was 58.

SPORTS

Americans spent more than $8 billion on sports logo apparel in 2010, but that does not include billions more spent on players. An NFL Quarterback can make $10 million while one in five Americans collects food stamps and hundreds of thousands of Americans face foreclosure. 15 million children live below the poverty line. Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children's well-being. They are the next generation.

TELEVISION

Television has turned the vast majority of Americans into shallow mush, short term memory, one-line thinkers. Vigorous discourse has all but gone out the window except in some universities. Americans are trained now to react not think. The feel good or feel-my-pain culture we live in has permeated everything from church sermons to society with pop culture dominating the scene and sex infiltrating almost everything we look at, think or buy.

CULTURAL COLLAPSE

America is slowly dying. Dr. Os Guinness says a day of reckoning for the American Empire -- and for Its Christians is upon us.

"We're seeing the division and decline of the West. We're seeing the relative or maybe absolute decline of American power. And we're seeing the deep captivity of the church in the Western world.

"The parallels are unsettling. Rome faced economic collapse, a failure of religion, and barbaric foes literally knocking at the gates. Like Rome, America faces its own barbarians: Islamic terror, cultural rot, and a debt crisis among them. Yet these barbarians, both ancient and modern, don't determine the empire's fate as much as reveal it.

"Another time of testing has come. Another day of reckoning is here. This is a testing and a reckoning - let me say it carefully - that could prove more decisive than earlier trials such as the Civil War, the Depression and the cultural cataclysm that was the 1960s. As citizens of the world's lead society and leaders of Western civilization, Americans owe themselves and the world a clear answer at this momentous juncture."

END