NC Renegades

One of the epicenters of the global financial crisis that started during the second half of last year is Japan, and it looks like the markets in the land of the rising sun are entering yet another period of great turmoil.  The Nikkei was down another 390 points last night, and it is now down more than 1,300 points since a week ago.  Why this is so important for U.S. investors is because the Nikkei is often an early warning indicator of where the rest of the global markets are heading.  For example, the Nikkei started crashing early last December about a month before U.S. markets started crashing really hard in early January.  So the fact that the Nikkei has been falling very rapidly in recent days should be a huge red flag for investors in this country.

I want you to study the chart below very carefully.  It shows the performance of the Nikkei over the past 12 months.  As you can see, it kind of resembles a giant leaning “W”.  You can see the stock crash that started last August, you can see the second wave of the crash that began last December, and now a third leg of the crash is currently forming…

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about 600 videos ago.

David DeGerolamo

Leading evangelist Franklin Graham has labeled PayPal “hypocrite of the year” after the organization announced Tuesday that it is aborting its plan to open an operations center in Charlotte, North Carolina, because of an objection to the state’s recently passed transgender law.

The California-based organization, which serves as a popular online payment alternative, announced two weeks ago that it was going to expand to Charlotte with a new operations facility that would have employed about 400 skilled workers.

But after North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed legislation into law that prohibits the city of Charlotte and other local governments from enacting ordinances that force places of public accommodation to open restrooms to members of the opposite biological sex, the leaders at PayPal decided to take a political stance by abandoning their plans to move to the state.

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“PayPal gets the hypocrite of the year award!” Graham expounded in his post. “Congressman Robert Pittenger made a great point yesterday: ‘PayPal does business in 25 countries where homosexual behavior is illegal, including five countries where the penalty is death, yet they object to the North Carolina legislature overturning a misguided ordinance about letting men in to [sic] the women’s bathroom? Perhaps PayPal would like to try and clarify this seemingly very hypocritical position.'”

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by Sam Culper

A report produced last month for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) examines the rampant criminality across Latin America and determines some best practices for implementing community security. What Works in Reducing Community Violence (download) points out that Latin America consists of nine percent (9%) of the world’s population but accounts for a third (33%) of all homicides globally.

Because regions of the U.S. may undergo changes that result in a close resemblance to the economic and security conditions found throughout Latin America, it’s very important to understand their security picture and then draw conclusions and lessons learned from their challenges. Poor economic conditions and poverty already lead some individuals towards criminality and gang activity, and when economic conditions in the U.S. deteriorate and become sustained, there’s a greater likelihood that communities deal with increased criminality and gang activity.

The report identifies six dimensions of what they call “community violence.” They are:

• Lethality;
• Location;
• Involvement (number of individuals involved);
• Spontaneity;
• Activity Type (crimes of passion versus organized crime); and
• Frequency

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Is America a better place today than it was back in 1956?  Of course many Americans living right now couldn’t even imagine a world without cell phones, Facebook or cable television, but was life really so bad back then?  60 years ago, families would actually spend time on their front porches and people would actually have dinner with their neighbors.  60 years ago, cars were still cars, football was still football and it still meant something to be an American.  In our country today, it is considered odd to greet someone as they are walking down the street, and if someone tries to be helpful it is usually because they want something from you.  But things were very different in the middle of the last century.  Men aspired to be gentlemen and women aspired to be ladies, and nobody had ever heard of  “bling”, “sexting” or “twerking”.  Of course life was far from perfect, but people actually had standards and they tried to live up to them.

So how did it all go so wrong?

Could it be possible that life in America peaked back then and we have been in decline ever since?

Before you answer, I want to share with you a list of comparisons between life in America in 1956 and life in America in 2016…

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Sixty years ago was the year of my birth.  I remember Davy Crockett on Walt Disney on Sunday nights. Today, Disney no longer represents the values and traditions of Walt Disney. Westerns were a staple that has been replaced by vampires. Political parties actually had some respect. Is nostalgia important?

Looking back sometimes is a means to move forward. We still need Divine providence to guide our steps.

David DeGerolamo