12/10/05 Notes
Washington State Democrats promote anti-Christian merchandise. You've seen that fish symbol that a lot of people put on their cars to show that they are Christians? Well, it seems that the Washington state democrats had a fish symbol of their own promoted on their website. It was that fish in flames with the word 'hypocrite' on it. After a blogger picked up on it and exposed it, the symbol was removed from the democrat website. But the blogger had saved a picture of the original page just in case. Now the Democrat webpage in question just the remaining four items on it: four ribbons, each with a different slogan: 1. Don't Blame Me: Blue State Pride; 2. Support Our Environment; 3. Support Diversity; 4. Give Peace A Chance. The last one also displays what has become known as the traditional peace symbol, which by the way, is an upside down broken cross.
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National ID Card Being Considered? This week, attendees at an Infosecurity conference in New York debated the merits of a national ID card system. Mr. Tom Ridge, the former head of the Homeland Security Department, called them 'inevitable'. He said national security requirements would bring the cards into being.
...Along those lines, did you know that President Bush issued an executive order back in 2004 directing the Homeland Security department to come up with an identification system that would establish government-wide standards to identify Government employees and contractors, and that once the standard was in place, that the use of the identification would be required to gain physical access to Federal facilities and logical access to Federally controlled information systems.
...Not much to argue with there. We need security, no doubt about it. But we are going further down a road that may take us to place we didn't want to go and end up at a point of no return. Here's a prediction. The day is coming when no one will be able to access a computer system anywhere without providing identification. Computer terrorism, hacking, viruses, identify theft, online fraud, thievery, etc. all will bring about support for this initiative. All financial transactions will be handled electronically, without the need for people to carry cash or credit cards. This will help reduce crime further, I suppose we will be told, because it should reduce muggings and strongarm robberies since no one will be carrying cash. Incidentally, as you may have guessed, here's the source of that prediction: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he had that mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." Revelation 13: 16,17.
...The apostle John was recording what he saw in a vision. He had no understanding of computers or the world in which we live. I have read many fanciful stories of how we will all either be wearing some kind of tattoos. People who say that indicate that it will somehow be considered by everybody in the world to be a beauty mark. The mainstream opinion from the end times writers I have read is that it will be some sort of chip implanted under the skin so that scanning devices can read it.
...On the other hand, I wonder if what the apostle John saw was people putting their hands into biometric scanners, or holding their heads in place in front of optical recognition retina scanners, and he assumed that there was a physical mark, not realizing that there would someday be machines sophisticated enough to positively identify a person by their unique God-given physical attributes. It seems to me that biometric scanning would be more secure (and easier to gain acceptance) than a chip that could be taken out of one person and put into another.
...Here's a section of the President's above-mentioned Executive Order that details the requirements of the ordered idenification system:
"Secure and reliable forms of identification" for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically; and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process."
...It seems to me that is a system that could easily be expanded to include everyone else, too.
...If you are interested in reading more about this issue, here is a link that links to a lot of other sources (and countries). Apparently this issue is being debated all around the world.
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