"And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee."
(Psalms 39:7)
For The Elect's Sake
Dear Friends,
Greetings! In the book of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 22, a book and chapter we often quote from, Jesus said; "And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened." Satan wants to destroy all mankind and creation in his defiance and rebellion against God, but God is not going to allow this to happen. God is going to shorten those days and bring an end to Satan's rule on earth at the Battle of Armageddon.
However the time of trouble is very rapidly approaching! As Luke 21:25-26 points out; "And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken".
As you read the following articles, which can be a bit disconcerting, remember also another quote from Psalms 91; "I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust."
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Space Storm Alert:
90 seconds from catastrophe
By Michael Brooks, New Scientist
It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.
Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "We haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859.
"From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.
There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.
The second problem is the grid's interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen.
"It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."
According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people. From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.
First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.
There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.
Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.
The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."
Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.
Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.
Nuclear power stations wouldn't fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.
With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."
Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. "If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse," says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.
"I don't think the NAS report is scaremongering," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team. Green agrees. "Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful," he says. "This is a fair and balanced report."
Such nightmare scenarios are not restricted to North America. High latitude nations such as Sweden and Norway have been aware for a while that, while regular views of the aurora are pretty, they are also reminders of an ever-present threat to their electricity grids. However, the trend towards installing extremely high voltage grids means that lower latitude countries are also at risk. For example, China is on the way to implementing a 1000-kilovolt electrical grid, twice the voltage of the US grid. This would be a superb conduit for space weather-induced disaster because the grid's efficiency to act as an antenna rises as the voltage between the grid and the ground increases. "China is going to discover at some point that they have a problem," Kappenman says.
Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is "very fragmented" in Europe, says Hapgood.
Europe's electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany's grid - to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables - caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated we don't fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place," Hapgood says. "Most of the time it's alright, but occasionally it will get you."
The good news is that, given enough warning, the utility companies can take precautions, such as adjusting voltages and loads, and restricting transfers of energy so that sudden spikes in current don't cause cascade failures. There is still more bad news, however. Our early warning system is becoming more unreliable by the day.
By far the most important indicator of incoming space weather is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). The probe, launched in 1997, has a solar orbit that keeps it directly between the sun and Earth. Its uninterrupted view of the sun means it gives us continuous reports on the direction and velocity of the solar wind and other streams of charged particles that flow past its sensors. ACE can provide between 15 and 45 minutes' warning of any incoming geomagnetic storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems for a critical event, so that would seem passable.
However, observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth. "It arrived faster than we can do anything," Hapgood says.
The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens. Kintner says his students show a "deep indifference" when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. "It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible," he says.
The report outlines the worst case scenario for the US. The "perfect storm" is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity - something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth's field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.
What's more, at these times of year, electricity demand is relatively low because no one needs too much heating or air conditioning. With only a handful of the US grid's power stations running, the system relies on computer algorithms shunting large amounts of power around the grid and this leaves the network highly vulnerable to sudden spikes.
If ACE has failed by then, or a plasma ball flies at us too fast for any warning from ACE to reach us, the consequences could be staggering. "A really large storm could be a planetary disaster," Kappenman says.
We should learn the lessons of hurricane Katrina, though, and realise that "unlikely" doesn't mean "won't happen". Especially when the stakes are so high. The fact is, it could come in the next three or four years - and with devastating effects. "The Carrington event happened during a mediocre, ho-hum solar cycle," Kintner says. "It came out of nowhere, so we just don't know when something like that is going to happen again."
Maybe that's why some of the Endtime warfare, described in Ezekiel 38, and 39, and Revelations, is conducted by men on horseback, with swords and spears and armor. Is that primitive weaponry, figurative or literal? We are heading toward the days when we will find out!
As this man said, the fact that this sort of thing is unlikely, doesn't mean it won't happen. The people of Noah's day thought it was unlikely the flood would happen. There are a lot of "unlikely" events predicted in the Endtime, which will probably involve some surprises for all of us in the ways they come to pass.
In the meantime, hold tightly to the Lord, staying in touch with Him and keeping an eye on the signs of the times. There is nothing to fear when you are holding His hand and claiming His promises. With His help, protection and guidance, you can face whatever the future holds with faith.
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Scientific American
June 17, 2009
NASA's Mission to Bomb the Moon
NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet.
The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole.
Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.
The attack on the Moon is not a declaration of war or act of wanton vandalism. Space scientists want to see if any water ice or vapour is revealed in the cloud of debris.
Though the Moon is mostly a dry airless desert, they believe ice could be trapped in crater shadows near the south pole which never receive any sunlight. If so it could provide vital supplies for a manned moonbase.
Last year, British scientists identified regions where water might be found on the Moon and estimated that there could be enough to fill one of Europe's largest reservoirs.
The spacecraft will not head straight for the Moon. First it will orbit the Earth a number of times while its precise target is identified. Finally, it will send the missile into the Moon at twice the speed of a bullet on October 8.
The shepherding spacecraft will follow close behind, taking pictures and analysing the ejected debris as it looks for evidence of water. It has just four minutes to do this before it crashes into the Moon itself, producing a spectacular explosion that should be visible in amateur astronomers' telescopes.
(Romans1:22,28, says; "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient".)
NASA Moon Bombing is Cause For Worry
By Ted Twietmeyer
6-22-9
(Excerpt from a longer article)
There also remains an even bigger and more important question - what happens if they disturb the Moon's orbit? Few people alive today remember what NASA said when the spent Lunar Landers were ejected and crashed into the Moon. NASA stated that the seismograph instruments the Apollo crew left behind showed that after a Lunar Lander crashed into the Moon, that it "made the Moon ring like a bell for more than 30 minutes." Would this same thing happen if the Moon were made of solid rock?
The Lunar Lander ascent stage weighed just 10,334kg. which is about the equivalent weight of an 11 ton truck.
The mass of the Moon has been calculated to be 7.36 1022 kilograms. That's a 7.36 followed by 22 zeroes.
So how could an 11 ton spacecraft, which weighs even less on the Moon because gravity is 1/6 that of Earth - make 7,360,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of rock ring for half an hour? Who could believe this?
This appears to strongly prove the Moon MUST be hollow. And if the Moon is actually hollow, it will take far less to disturb its orbit than anyone currently realizes. How many millions of kilograms of force will bombing the Moon generate? We are not being told that figure.
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CNN
September 10, 2008
Large Hadron Collider fired up in 'God particle' hunt
Startup has been eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world
It's the largest particle accelerator in the world and costs about $9 billion
Lawsuits allege it could generate black holes that could eat the Earth
CERN, Switzerland (CNN) -- Scientists Wednesday applauded as one of the most ambitious experiments ever conceived got successfully underway, with protons being fired around a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider -- a $9 billion particle accelerator designed to simulate conditions of the Big Bang that created the physical Universe -- was switched on at 0732 GMT to cheers and applause from experts gathered to witness the event.
While observers were left nonplussed by the anticlimactic flashing dots on a TV screen that signalled the machine's successful test run, among teams of scientists involved around the world there were jubilant celebrations and popping champagne corks.
In the coming months, the collider is expected to begin smashing particles into each other by sending two beams of protons around the tunnel in opposite directions.
Skeptics, who claim that the experiment could lead to the creation of a black hole capable of swallowing the planet, failed in a legal bid to halt the project at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed the project as a major achievement for Europe.
"The repercussions of this scientific investment without precedent in the history of humanity will be essential not only for the intimate knowledge of our universe, but also for the direct applications in fields as varied as intensive calculation or even medicine," he said.
The collider will operate at higher energies and intensities in the next year, potentially generating enough data to make a discovery by 2009, experts say.
They say the experiment has the potential to confirm theories that physicists have been working on for decades including the possible existence of extra dimensions.
They also hope to find a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson -- sometimes referred to as the "God particle," which has never been detected, but would help explain why matter has mass.
The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot "soup" of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a huge detector specialized to analyze that question.
Since this is exploratory science, the collider may uncover surprises that contradict prevailing theories, but which are just as interesting, said Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
"When Columbus sailed west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn't find what he thought he was going to find, but he did find something interesting," said Lykken, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of six experiments inside the collider complex.
TIME.com:
Collider triggers end-of-world fears
Colliding with nature's best-kept secrets
Why should the layperson care about this particular exploration? Years ago, when electrons were first identified, no one knew what they were good for, but they have since transformed our entire economy, said Howard Gordon, deputy research program manager for the collider's ATLAS experiment.
"The transformative effect of this research will be to understand the world we live in much better," said Gordon, at Brookhaven National Laboratory. "It's important for just who we are, what we are."
LE="margin-bottom: 0in">Fears have emerged that the collider could produce black holes that could suck up anything around them -- including the whole Earth. Such fears prompted legal actions in the U.S. and Europe to halt the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, alleging safety concerns regarding black holes and other phenomena that could theoretically emerge.
Although physicists acknowledge that the collider could, in theory, create small black holes, they say they do not pose any risk. A study released Friday by CERN scientists explains that any black hole created would be tiny, and would not have enough energy to stick around very long before dissolving. Five collider collaborators who did not pen the report independently told CNN there would be no danger from potential black holes.
France 24
Monday 09 February 2009
European giant atom-smasher relaunch delayed to September
Previously scheduled for spring, then summer, the relaunch of the giant Big Bang atom-smasher in Switzerland has been delayed until end of September. A major breakdown had marred its multi-billion dollar launch one year earlier.
AFP - Europe's Big Bang atom-smasher will not now restart until the end of September, following a major breakdown that marred its multi-billion dollar launch one year earlier.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) broke down only days after being switched on by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September 2008, causing more than 30 million Swiss francs of repairs (20 million euros, 26 million dollars).
"The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October," CERN said Monday in a statement from its Swiss headquarters.
(Psalms106:29; "Thus they provoked him to anger with their inventions: and the plague brake in upon them." Ecclesiastes 7:29; "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.")
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Washington's Blog
July 2, 2009
In Economic Crisis
An Economy Bigger than Russia, Brazil, Canada, India or Spain Is About to Default
An economy bigger than Russia, Brazil, Canada, India or Spain is in imminent risk of defaulting on its debts.
Which nation am I talking about?
Not a country . . . but the state of California.
California's GDP was around $1.812 trillion in 2007.
According to the International Monetary Fund, that is bigger than the 2008 GDP of every country in the world except the US, Japan, China, Germany, France, UK and Italy .
Given that California has more people than any other state in the US, and some of the largest agricultural, manufacturing, high-tech and defense sectors in the nation, you would think that helping California would be important.
And yet - instead of helping California - the federal government is giving aid to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the other financial giants who helped to cause the financial crisis, and to Israel and other foreign countries.
Does that make any sense?
Note: Depending on which source is cited (CIA World Factbook, World Bank, or IMF), California ranks somewhere between 7th and 10th in world GDP.
(Isaiah10:1-3; "Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless! And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your glory?")
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Hindustan Times
July 2, 2009
Britain braces for 100,000 swine flu cases a day
Britain on Thursday admitted that there could be over 100,000 cases of swine flu per day in the country by the end of next month.
The rising number of swine flu cases mean trying to contain the virus is no longer an option, Health Secretary Andy Burnham said in a statement on Thursday.
"The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August," he said.
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To say the future may look a little daunting after reading the above articles, would be an understatement! We must remember however, to cling to, and have faith in God's promises. Jesus said; "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee". (Hebrews 13:5) And; "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38-39) And of course Psalms 23:4; "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."
These are promises He has given to us! "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" (Numbers 23:19)
Would you like to be amongst the elect? All you have to do is elect to receive Jesus as you saviour. Jesus said; "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." (John 6:37) " Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." (Revelation 3:20)
Jesus is standing at the door of your heart right now waiting for you to open that door and invite Him in, so that He can give you eternal life. All you need to do is to pray a simple prayer: Dear Jesus, I know I have done wrong and sinned against you and others. I ask that you please forgive my sins, come into my heart, give me eternal life, and help me to love you and others. Amen.
"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." (Romans 10:9-10)
If you would like to receive more information concerning salvation we invite you to write us or do a search on the web site to learn more about your salvation.
We also invite you to contact one of our mystics if you need assistance concerning a question or problem you may have.
Until next week, may God bless you and make you a blessing to others.
Almondtree Productions
" Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall."
(2 Peter 1:10)