Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

Were you under the impression that your credit card transactions are private? As you will see below, there are actually multiple government agencies that are gathering and storing records of your credit card transactions.

And in turn, those government agencies share that information with other government agencies that want it. So if you are making a purchase that you don't want anyone to know about, don't use a credit card. This is one of the reasons why the government hates cash so much. It is just so hard to track.

In this day and age, the federal government seems to be absolutely obsessed with gathering as much information about all of us as it possibly can. But there is one big problem.

What they are doing directly violates the U.S. Constitution. For those that are not familiar with it, the following is what the Fourth Amendment actually says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment is essentially dead at this point. The federal government is investigating all of us and gathering information on all of us all day, every day without end.

Many Americans have never even heard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but Judicial Watch has discovered that they are spending millions of dollars to collect and analyze our financial transactions...

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) revealing that the agency has spent millions of dollars for the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions. The documents also reveal that CFPB contractors may be required to share the information with “additional government entities.”

Judicial Watch was able to obtain some absolutely shocking documents thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request that it filed in April. The following is a summary of some of the things those documents show...

•Overlapping contracts with multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data as shown in the task list of a contract with Argus Information & Advisory Services LLC worth $2.9 million

•An “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract with Experian worth up to $8,426,650 to track daily consumer habits of select individuals without their awareness or consent

•$4,951,333 for software and instruction paid to Deloitte Consulting LLP

•A provision stipulating that “The contractor recognizes that, in performing this requirement, the Contractor may obtain access to non-public, confidential information, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or proprietary information.”

•A stipulation that “The Contractor may be required to share credit card data collected from the Banks with additional government entities as directed by the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR).”

How do you feel about the fact that the government has contracts with "multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data"?

How do you feel about the fact that your credit card data and other "non-public, confidential information" may be shared with "additional government entities"?

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton put it very well when he said that this "warrantless collection of the private financial information of millions of Americans is mind-blowing. Is there anything that this administration thinks it can’t do?"

But of course the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not the only one keeping records of your credit card transactions.

We have also recently learned that the NSA is doing it too. The following is from a recent Time Magazine article...

Networks are most likely giving the government “metadata.” That is, the credit card issuers could provide the NSA details such as an account or card number, where and when a purchase was made, and for how much. Even though the exact items purchased aren’t revealed, Brian Krebs, who blogs at KrebsOnSecurity.com, says “merchant category codes” in such data give clues about what was bought.

If the NSA is collecting data at the processor level, “at that point the transaction gets cleared and posts to an account, so, yes, you can track it down to a person,” Aufsesser says.

The NSA conceivably could — and probably would — be able get the names of individual account holders from banks issuing credit cards. ”I don’t see how you would anonymize it,” says Al Pascual, senior analyst for security, risk and fraud for Javelin Strategy & Research.

We are rapidly becoming a "Big Brother society" where the government tracks virtually every move that we make.

And don't think that you can escape this by not using credit cards or by staying off of the Internet. The truth is that we are being tracked in hundreds of different ways.

For example, have you heard of automated license plate readers?

They are being installed on police vehicles all over the nation, and the amount of information that they are gathering on all of us is frightening.

A computer security consultant named Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city of San Leandro, California for a record of every time that these license plate readers had scanned his vehicle, and what he discovered absolutely stunned him...

The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.

That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.” The single patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.

At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.

Most Americans do not even know that these devices exist, but they have been "collecting millions of records" and feeding them into law enforcement databases all over the nation.

In San Diego alone, more than 36 million license plate scans have been fed into a regional database just since 2010...

In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Like the Northern California database, the San Diego system retains the data for between one and two years.

“License-plate data is clearly identifiable to specific individuals,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is like having your barcode tracked.”

Is this the kind of society that we want to become?

Do we really want the police to be taking millions of photographs of us?

Do we really want all of our financial transactions to be fed directly into federal databases?

Do we really want the government to track every phone call we make and every email we send?

As I wrote about recently, it has been documented that literally thousands of companies have been handing over customer data to the NSA.

Is this the kind of legacy that we want to leave for our children and our grandchildren?

Fortunately, it appears that at least some Americans are waking up to all of this.

According to a brand new Rasmussen survey, 56 percent of likely voters in the United States now believe that the federal government is a threat to individual rights...

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters now consider the federal government a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights. That’s up 10 points from 46% in December.

While 54% of liberal voters consider the feds to be a protector of individual rights, 78% of conservatives and 49% of moderates see the government as a threat.

Overall, only 30% believe the feds today are a protector of individual rights. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

If the American people do not stand up and demand change, the people that are constantly violating our privacy are going to continue to do so.

Sadly, the vast majority of the politicians in both major political parties seem to think that there is nothing wrong with the status quo. So I wouldn't expect any major changes in the short-term. But hopefully government surveillance will start to become such a major issue with the American people that the politicians will be forced to start addressing it.

A team of Japanese scientists has cloned a mouse from a single drop of blood, demonstrating for the first time that mice can be duplicated using "circulating blood cells."

Announcing their findings in the journal Biology of Reproduction, the researchers described how they took blood from the tail of a donor mouse, isolated the white blood cells and used the nuclei for cloning trials. This process is called "somatic nuclear cell transfer", the same cloning technique scientists used to produce Dolly the sheep in 1996, the BBC reported.

The cloned female mouse lived a full life and was able to reproduce, the researchers told the BBC. They added that the easy availability of the circulating blood cells gives them hope that they can now reproduce more scientifically valuable lab mice.

A high Iranian politician believes the Syrian revolution could be the catalyst for sparking a worldwide conflagration that will usher in an era of Muslim domination of the world.

“One can smell from the crisis in Syria the coming … of the end of times and the coming of the last Islamic messiah,” said Ruhollah Hosseinian, a member of the Islamic regime’s parliament. Previously he was deputy of the Intelligence Ministry and a member of board of trustees of Islamic Revolution Document Center.

Shiites, whose clerics rule Iran with an iron fist, believe that at the end of times, the 12th Imam, Mahdi, a 9th century prophet, will reappear with Jesus Christ at his side, kill all the infidels and raise the flag of Islam in all four corners of the world. Many analysts believe Iran is seeking nuclear capability to bring on that Armageddon.

Based on hadiths by Muhammad and his descendants, the Syrian revolution is a start to the coming of Mahdi, Hosseinian said in a speech quoted Thursday by Fars News Agency, a media outlet run by the Revolutionary Guards.

“Imam Sadegh (the Shiites’ 4th Imam) has stated, when the masters of the yellow flag (Lebanese Hezbollah) engage in a conflict with anti-Shiite elements in Damascus and Iranian forces join them, this is a sign and a prelude to the coming of his highness (Mahdi),” Hosseinian said. “We see that (now) the masters of the yellow flag are engaged with anti-Shiite groups in Damascus. Perhaps this is the event that promises the coming and that we must prepare ourselves.”

Hadiths from Ali, the Shiites’ 1st imam, also state that a sign of the coming will be the fall of the walls of Damascus. A tight-knit coalition of Syrian loyalists, Hezbollah fighters and Iranian forces is fighting against a loose coalition of Syrian rebels and al-Qaida fighters. The anti-Assad forces have brought their fight to inside Damascus.

Hosseinian told the audience that they should prepare themselves for war.

“The coming of his highness is assured … the prophet has promised that people from the east, which according to the hadith means Iran, take power and prepare for the government of Imam Mahdi.”

Hosseinian said that because of the belief in Mahdi, many Christians have converted to Shiism, “including a French philosopher who converted to Shiism and wrote … that because of the Shiites’ belief in Mahdi and that a human being will appear to establish justice in the world … this was the reason ‘for me’ to become a Shiite.”

WND reported on June 23 that the Islamic regime’s newly elected president, Hassan Rohani, attributed his victory in the June 15 voting to the 12th Imam, showing the deep belief of regime officials of the coming of Mahdi.

“This victory and the epic saga are without a doubt due to the special kindness of the Imam Zaman (Mahdi) and the measures taken by the supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), especially his guidance and words. … Without his management, then it was not clear if the people of Iran would witness such a day filled with joy,” Rohani said.

Ayatollah Movahedi Kermani, in his Friday prayer speech last week congratulating Rohani for his election, said that, “Before the reappearance of Imam Zaman (Mahdi), the struggle will reach its peak … in that fight there won’t even be mercy on the womb in the mother’s belly.”

He urged Muslims to prepare the grounds for the coming of Mahdi.

Recently Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, the Iranian military chief of staff, criticized President Obama’s decision to provide weapons to rebel factions in Syria and warned, “Obama has made his most dangerous blunder today as president of the U.S. when, with the deceit of the Israelis, he issued an order of sending weapons for terrorists in Syria. Today the shipment of arms to the Syrian terrorists won’t solve anything as the Syrian nation with its national army will force the Israeli mercenaries to retreat and escape.”

As WND reported exclusively last year, a joint war room was created among Iran, Hezbollah and Syria to defeat the opposition in Syria and respond to any possible attack by U.S. or NATO forces with a directive for an immediate response to fire a barrage of missiles from the three allies not only toward Israel but also at American assets in the region.

The British paper The Independent reported on June 16 that Iran has decided to send 4,000 troops from its Revolutionary Guards forces to Syria to assure President Bashar Assad’s survival.

Israel is "running out of time," Secretary of State John Kerry told the American Jewish Committee in Washington this month. A two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict must be reached soon or "the insidious campaign to de-legitimize Israel will only gain steam," he warned. "Israel will be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state, but it will not be able to fulfill the founders' visions of being both at once."

It's an old refrain, erroneous but popular: Israel must make peace with the Palestinians — "peace" being defined as the creation of a 22nd Arab state — before high Arab birthrates turn the Jews into a minority in their own land.

In Jerusalem a few months ago, President Obama echoed the same claim.

"Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine."

This so-called "demographic argument" may sound compelling, even ominous. But it rests on an obsolete stereotype of Arab women as baby mills, outbreeding their Jewish sisters at such a pace that it is only a matter of time before Jews are numerically overwhelmed on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

In the 1960s, when the fertility rate for Israeli Arabs (9.2 births per woman) soared far above that of Israeli Jews (3.4 births per woman), that demographic challenge certainly seemed plausible. Yasser Arafat liked to say that the ultimate weapon in his arsenal against the Jewish state was "the womb of the Arab woman." The Palestinian Authority has always understood the propaganda value of population data.

As the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics began its first census in the West Bank and Gaza in 1997, the bureau's director, Hassan Abu Libdeh, assured the New York Times that the results would amount to nothing less than "a civil intifada." In 2005, the bureau predicted that Jews would be a minority in "historic Palestine" (i.e., west of the Jordan River) by 2010. Now it says the tipping point will come by 2020.

Don't count on it.

Arafat's boast notwithstanding, Palestinian women, like women throughout the Muslim world, are bearing far fewer children than they used to. Within Israel proper, the birth rate among Muslims has trended steadily downward and stands now at 3.5 children per woman. It is even lower for Palestinians in the West Bank — just 2.91, according to the CIA Factbook.

In a 2012 survey by the Population Reference Bureau of family planning in the Arab world, 72 percent of married Palestinian women (ages 15 through 49) said they preferred to avoid a pregnancy. That was typical of the modern Middle East: The same survey showed most Jordanians (71 percent), Egyptians (69 percent), and Syrians (68 percent) felt the same way.

But while Palestinian birth rates have dramatically declined, Jewish birth rates in Israel have been heading up. Israel now has the highest fertility level of any modern industrialized nation. The fertility gap between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, a yawning 5.8 in the 1960s, is just 0.5 today.

Defying longstanding conventional wisdom, writes former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger, it is Israel's Jewish population that is undergoing a remarkable surge, rising from about 80,000 per year in 1995 to 130,000 in 2012. (The annual number of Israeli Arab births has held steady at between 35,000 and 40,000).

It is easy to get tangled in debates over the statistics — Ettinger led a detailed demographic study that exposed serious flaws in previous projections — but the bottom line is that demography, far from being a looming liability for Israel, is a strategic asset.

The 6.3 million Jews living in Israel and the West Bank represent 66 percent of the area's population (not including Gaza, which Israel entirely relinquished to the Palestinian Authority in 2005). "Anyone suggesting that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River is either dramatically mistaken or outrageously misleading," Ettinger argues.

Is the "peace process" is worth pursuing? Would a two-state solution end the conflict? These demographic trends can't answer such questions. What they can do is remove the artificial pressure on Israel to do something – anything – before the sword of Damocles falls.

And maybe, just maybe, they can open a few eyes among those who have been waiting, like Arafat, for "the womb of the Arab woman" to put an end to the Jewish state. Israel, now home to nearly half of the world's Jews, is a permanent fact of life in the Middle East. Any genuine peace process must start by accepting that reality.

After the Supreme Court's recent monumental gay marriage rulings, the media reported that America has had a rapid change of heart on the issue over the past year.

But that's not exactly true. The nation didn't get to this point overnight.

Ten years ago, CBN News began exposing a secret, long-term strategy to convert America into a pro-gay culture.

Boy Meets Boy

The 2005 film "Brokeback Mountain" was one of Hollywood's biggest and boldest attempts to gain sympathy, if not outright support, for those practicing the homosexual lifestyle.

But it is not just an isolated effort. There is a well-planned propaganda campaign at work -- a campaign laid out all the way back in the 1980s.

The movie Brokeback Mountain looks like a big, bold, manly Western movie. But instead of the usual "boy meets girl" romance, this film's about "cowboy meets cowboy."

"It is very, very propagandistic because the entire purpose of the movie is to make homosexuality seem like something good and appealing, and to make people who are opposed to homosexuality bigots and homophobes," said David Kupelian, author of The Marketing of Evil.

There have been homosexual movies for years, but they are usually marketed to gay and art-house audiences. That was not the case with "Brokeback."

"They are marketing Red State, Bush-country America," Kupelian said.

But the way the studio did that was by opening it up in just five Blue State cities where there were large, built-in gay audiences. Consequently, the first showings had blockbuster numbers.

"And they get these high numbers and all the buzz going," Kupelian said, "and then pretty soon it's sort of like the emperor's new clothes effect: we're all looking at that -- even middle, Christian America, saying, 'Everybody else says this movie is so great. I need to go see it to see why it's so great.'"

The Homosexual Agenda

Is there an actual agenda at work here?

Authors Alan Sears and Craig Osten, in a book called The Homosexual Agenda, warn about a complex and well-thought-out strategy to make America "gay friendly" and hostile to those who resist.

These Christian authors quote extensively from After the Ball, a 1989 gay manifesto that laid out this agenda.

Many gays deny such an agenda exists.

Gay activist Toni Broaddus, the executive director of Equality California, asserts, "There's no secret plan or even public plan at this point."

But the authors of After the Ball discuss in the book about a 1988 summit of gay leaders in Warrenton, Va., who came together to agree on the agenda.

These authors are Marshall Kirk, a reportedly brilliant researcher into the brain, and Hunter Madsen, a Harvard-trained expert in public persuasion tactics.

The two men proposed using tactics on 'straight' America that are remarkably similar to the brainwashing methods of Mao Tse-Tung's Communist Chinese -- mixed with Madison Avenue's most persuasive selling techniques.

The purpose of this brainwashing?

According to Kirk and Hudson, it is to use "...the very processes that made America hate us, to turn their hatred into warm regard -- whether they like it or not."

First, they proposed homosexuals and their liberal allies should desensitize heterosexuals by getting homosexuality talked about as much as possible in the straight world.

"The main thing," the authors said, "is talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome…You can forget about trying right up front to persuade folks that homosexuality is a 'good' thing. But if you can get them to think it is just 'another' thing, meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders -- then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won."

Sears said, "We're talking about a demand for a behavior that not only wants to not be condemned, but to have every affirmation from every possible point that it is correct, it's good and it's approved."

Now look at the media. Over the past decade there was a tidal wave of gays and gay themes -- the Showtime hit "The L Word" follows the lives of a group of lesbians.

From shows like NBC's "Will and Grace" to ABC's "Modern Family, gay themed shows have taken a prominent role in primetime.

"Desperate Housewives" and "The Office" even made time for the occasional gay guy subplot.

Gays as Victims

Another point that Kirk and Madsen push is to "portray gays as victims of circumstance and oppression, not as aggressive challengers...Gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection, so that straights will be inclined, by reflex, to assume the role of protector."

Benjamin Bull of the Alliance Defense Fund said, "Suddenly those who choose homosexual behavior...sodomy...are victims. It's crazy!"

But have homosexuals won on getting themselves seen as a persecuted minority?

Turning to the movies, the wildly-popular "Saved" portrays born-again Christians as cruel homophobes trying to re-program poor, young misunderstood gays in their midst.

"Trembling Before God" is about how Orthodox and Hasidic homosexuals are persecuted and not accepted.

"The Conspiracy of Silence" argues that some gay priests are hounded to death because they cannot act out their homosexuality.

And the good, kind, understanding homosexual next door has been seen in so many movies and TV series that he has become somewhat of a cliché.

These days, roughly 30 regular homosexual characters are being beamed into your home by the major networks every week.

As Kirk and Madsen put it, "The average American watches over seven hours of TV daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan Horse might be passed."