New World Order Update

The controversial Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP, continues closed-door meetings with business leaders while the heads of state of the U.S., Mexico and Canada now openly urge them to launch a public relations campaign to counter growing criticism of the trilateral cooperative some fear is a step toward a North American Union. The information is contained in an internal memo from Canada's Foreign Affairs and Internal Trade ministry, obtained by World Net Daily under an Access to Information Act request. The text of the undated memo is an internal government summary of the third SPP summit meeting held Aug. 20-21, 2007, in Montebello Quebec. The first sentence of the memo makes clear, the North American Competitiveness Council, or NACC, was the only participant invited to meet behind closed doors with the SPP bureaucrats. The SPP consists of 20 working groups plus the attending cabinet officers from each country and the heads of state.

The NACC is a largely secretive SPP advisory council of representatives of 30 North American corporations selected by the Chambers of Commerce in the three nations. The PR offensive is clearly discussed in the third paragraph of the internal memo, where the paragraph discusses comments made by the three heads of state in the closed door discussions, noting, "He also urged NACC members to assist in confronting and refuting critics of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)." The "He" in the sentence is not identified. The fourth paragraph continues the PR theme: "In closing, all leaders expressed a desire for the NACC to play a role in articulating publicly the benefits of greater collaboration in North America."

• JJ Commentary: The only question remaining about the formation of the North American Union is when, not if. Similarly, the Asian Union is also well underway. It will not be all that long before the one-world government prophesied in Revelation 13:8

Global Warming??

For snow-weary residents of the Midwest and New England, spring can't come soon enough. Locations such as Madison, Wis., and Concord, N.H., endured their snowiest winter since records began, and parts of the western USA also saw a much snowier-than-average winter, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The U.S. winter of 2007-08 — which meteorologists classify as the months of December, January and February — will go down as the coldest since the winter of 2000-01, with a national average temperature of 33.2 degrees, NOAA reported Thursday. However, it's the record snowfall that may be the most memorable element of this winter.

• JJ Commentary: Short-term weather is hard to predict. Long-term forecasts (such as global warming) are nigh impossible.

Illegal Immigration Costs Rising Fast

Illegal immigration is costing Arizona border counties millions a year for law enforcement and criminal prosecutions, diverting money from parks, libraries and other law-enforcement efforts, according to a study to be released Tuesday. The costs to the four border counties in Arizona increased 39 percent, from $19.2 million in fiscal 1999 to $26.6 million in fiscal 2006, researchers at the University of Arizona and San Diego State University found. For the nation's 24 border counties in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, the costs related to illegal immigration in fiscal 2006 were $192 million, more than double the costs in 1999.

The study was commissioned by the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition, a non-profit group of border-county officials who want the federal government to reimburse their county jails and prosecutors offices for legal costs. The coalition, which began looking at the impact of illegal immigration on border counties in 1999, paid for the study using a Justice Department grant. Researchers estimate the costs of illegal immigration on county law enforcement borderwide at $1.2 billion in the past eight fiscal years.

• JJ Commentary: Keep in mind that these costs are only for law enforcement and criminal prosecutions. When you add emergency hospital care, education, welfare, etc. to the equation, the overall costs are humongous.

The Other Side of the Warming Debate

Global warming is a natural process, not likely the result of human activities, argued more than 100 internationally prominent environmental scientists in papers presented at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, which concluded in New York this past weekend. The conference, organized by the Heartland Institute, sought to refute the contention promoted by Al Gore and the U.N. that there is an "established scientific consensus" that human beings are causing the earth to warm catastrophically. The event attracted more than 500 people, including scientists, economists, policy experts and members of the public from around the world.

"Is global warming 'An Inconvenient Truth,' as Vice President Al Gore charges, or a 'Global Warming Swindle?' Harriet Johnson, spokeswoman for the Heartland Institute asked in a statement distributed at the start of the three-day conference. "The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say – over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films," a notice on the Heartland Institute website proclaims. "But they have lost the debate."

Environmental scientist S. Fred Singer kicked off the conference by releasing a report entitled, "Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate," summarizing a three-year international scientific research project conducted by the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC, that Singer headed. "There are many factors that affect the climate," Singer told WND. "What we can now exclude by scientific evidence is the argument that greenhouse gases are an important factor in causing global warming." Singer and the NIPCC agree that global warming occurred in the 20th century, but disagree human activity is responsible. He argues instead that natural causes are likely to be the dominant cause of the scientifically observed global warming under discussion.

The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982. Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism. “The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”

• JJ Commentary: Ice Ages and Global Warming have long been a cycle of nature before humanity had any impact at all. Greenhouse gases do contribute to the warming, but to a minor extent compared to natural factors.

Obama Twists Biblical Principles

Some recent remarks by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama linking same-sex relationships to Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount are raising some eyebrows in the Christian community. During a Sunday campaign stop in Nelsonville, Ohio, Pastor Leon Forte of Grace Christian Center in Athens, Ohio, asked the Illinois senator to address social concerns. Your campaign sets a quandary for most evangelical Christians," Forte said. "They believe in the social agenda that you have. They have a problem with what the conservatives have laid out as the moral litmus test about who is worthy and who is not."

As part of a lengthy videotaped response, Obama referred to the speech by Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew, as well as some anti-homosexuality statements made by the apostle Paul which he called "obscure": I will tell you that I don't believe in gay marriage, but I do think that people who are gay and lesbian should be treated with dignity and respect and that the state should not discriminate against them. So, I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don't think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans. That's my view. But we can have a respectful disagreement on that.

• JJ Commentary: Romans 1:26-27 is not “obscure” but rather direct and clear, showing that homosexuality is not just an Old Testament issue. Of course, the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ other teachings implore us to love everyone, including sinners and our enemies. But that does not mean that we condone the sin.

Secular Humanism Triumphs Over Homeschooling

A ruling from an appeals court in California that a homeschooling family must enroll their children in a public school or "legally qualified" private school is alarming because of the way the court opted to order those results, according to a team of legislative analysts who have worked on homeschooling issues in California for decades. The ruling, when it was released several days ago, sent ripples of shock through the homeschooling community. World Net Daily has reported on the order handed down to Phillip and Mary Long over the education being provided to two of their eight children. The decision from the 2nd Appellate Court in Los Angeles granted a special petition brought by lawyers appointed to represent the two youngest children after the family's homeschooling was brought to the attention of child advocates. The lawyers appointed by the state were unhappy with a lower court's ruling that allowed the family to continue homeschooling, and specifically challenged that on appeal.

The court essentially concluded that the state provided no circumstance that allowed parents to school their own children at home. "We find no reason to strike down the Legislature's evaluation of what constitutes an adequate education scheme sufficient to promote the 'general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence.' We agree … 'the educational program of the State of California was designed to promote the general welfare of all the people and was not designed to accommodate the personal ideas of any individual in the field of education,'" the ruling said.

• JJ Commentary: Make no mistake. The recent trend toward banning homeschooling is a religious issue. Most homeschools are Christian-based, while public schools have become indoctrination centers for satan’s counterfeit religion, secular humanism.

Faith Under Fire

According to Mission Network News, the amount of persecution against Christians in India continues to increase, and there's no sign of things improving. A Gospel for Asia story states that nearly 40 Christians were kidnapped February 27 by anti-Christian radicals in Himachal Pradesh. The extremists reportedly took the Christians to a religious temple and are trying to force them to renounce Christ and return to the country's dominant faith. Gospel for Asia's Daniel Yohannan says, "They do this to try to scare people from following Christ. It's kind of like, 'If you follow Christ, this is what's going to happen to you.' But it always seems to backfire because more people get saved after the persecution."

• JJ Commentary: Persecution has always been the way the Gospel spreads best, from the scattering of the original Apostles till now. Unbelievers are more impressed by those who cling to their faith under fire than those who spout the words of faith from positions of comfort and prosperity.