The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in the School Shootings

Turns out Chris Pinto was just on vacation over the holidays and I CAN still hear his radio shows, thank You Lord.  Wish he had put up some kind of announcement but anyway he's back.  And as usual giving me information I wouldn't otherwise be aware of and as usual getting me upset about the condition of the world and the church and especially our dangerous ignorance of who our enemies really are along with a feeling of helplessness about it all.  Of course I know God is in charge, and helplessness throws me back on Him, which is what is always needed anyway.

Today's show Pharmakeia - The Missing Link in the Gun Control Debate"? is focused on the Sandy Hook school murders and related incidents that have created the usual furor against guns and the usual government plans to do away with the Second Amendment, which of course is not the culprit.  But Satan's agents want us deprived of this Constitutionally provided means of self-defense so that's where the emphasis goes. 

Pinto's show yesterday, Jesuits, Gun Control & The War on the Constitution got into the influence of the Jesuits on the push for Gun Control, and not only that but the war on the Constitution in general, and I may say more about that eventually.

As you ponder the connection between drugs and these murders the Biblical Greek term Pharmakeia comes to mind.  That word or another version of it is translated "witchcraft" in at least one place in the KJV and as "sorceries" in other places.  (Galatians 5:21, Revelation 9:21, 18:23, 21:8, 22:15). 

PHARMAKEIA as witchcraft means getting possessed by demons through the use of mind-altering drugs.  Some people on these drugs, or just coming off them, report hearing voices telling them to commit murder. 

Christians are generally taught the meaning of this Greek term but for some reason the actual influence of drugs in our modern world isn't clearly laid out for us by our pastors, so now we find out about it after twenty years of murders that are most likely "pharmakeia" in the Biblical sense of Satanic influence. 

Not all people are affected by these drugs this way of course but even the drug companies have had to label some of the psychiatric drugs with POSSIBLE influences in some pretty scary directions, including "homicidal ideation." 

The world of course denies the reality of Satan so it's only going to be Christians who will even take note of this connection, but since the media hasn't been keeping us informed about this connection we haven't known about it either.  We may hear that such and such a murderer heard voices which we will attribute to demonic instigation but without any knowledge of the connection with drugs they were taking.  Maybe the saddest story is that of Andrea Yates who heard such voices telling her to murder her children, and she strongly felt this was Satan talking to her, but we weren't told about any connection with psychiatric drugs she was on and of course nonChristian authorities have no clue that there could be a connection and probably just dismiss her statements about Satan as imaginary anyway, just the form her psychiatric illness happened to take.  A hallucination.  But Satan and his hordes are real and they can possess people and speak into their minds.

The class of drugs known as hallucinogens have traditionally been used by shamans for the express purpose of contacting spirits and getting possessed by them, in order to have the powers they impart or grant to the possessed one, and that includes the illegal hallucinogens which people are trying to get legalized, thanks a lot, even marijuana.  The more demons among us the better, right?  People who take those drugs are implicitly asking to be demon-possessed whether they know it or not, but now it appears that you can be INADVERTENTLY demon-possessed by taking prescribed psychiatric drugs. 

Some of the drugs implicated are PAXIL, PROZAC, ZOLOFT, EFFEXOR, RITALIN, LITHIUM, many of the well known antidepressants, even the pain killer VICODIN in the case of James Holmes, the shooter at the theater in Aurora, Colorado. 

What makes the difference in who gets affected in this way and who doesn't?  Various kinds of vulnerability are involved, but that includes those who are addicted to violent and demonic movies, video games etc. 

Some of the references Chris Pinto points to are, first from World Net Daily, David Kupelian on The Giant Gaping Hole in Sandy Hook Reporting. 

...it is simply indisputable that most perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications:

• Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999 during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves.Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox – that’s 1 in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.
• Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban “semiautomatic assault weapons” in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.
• Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.
• In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill., killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania.
• In Paducah, Ky., in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school’s lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.
• In 2005, 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac.
• In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Ky., killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.
• Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danysh’s description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder is chilling: “I didn’t realize I did it until after it was done,” Danysh said. “This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun.”
• John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty.
• Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartrending crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.” And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well-publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.And what exactly does “rare” mean in the phrase “rare adverse events”? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug.Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues.
• One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them.”I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger,” he recalled. “Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it.”Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders.Paxil’s known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others.The preceding examples are only a few of the best-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes – there are many others. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is undeniable that when certain people living on the edge of sanity take psychiatric medications, those drugs can – and occasionally do – push them over the edge into violent madness. Remember, every single SSRI antidepressant sold in the United States of America today, no matter what brand or manufacturer, bears a “black box” FDA warning label – the government’s most serious drug warning – of “increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24.” Common sense tells us that where there are suicidal thoughts – especially in a very, very angry person – homicidal thoughts may not be far behind. Indeed, the mass shooters we are describing often take their own lives when the police show up, having planned their suicide ahead of time.
  .Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/#JUBZZACrCx2UKPPB.99

Some other references Pinto pointed to:
60 School Shootings Linked to Psychiatric Drugs Over the Last 20 Years

CCHR Says Federal Investigation Into Psychiatric Drugs and Violence Long Overdue

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog, is calling for a federal investigation into the link between psychiatric drug use, school shootings and other acts of senseless violence, calling the investigation long overdue, and citing the supporting evidence.
On Dec. 17th, the Los Angeles Times article, “Adam Lanza’s family had kept a watchful eye on him,” cited sources who say Lanza had been ‘medicated’ as early as age 10. WFSB Eyewitness News, a Connecticut CBS affiliate, reported on Dec. 19th in the article, “Adam Lanza underwent psych evaluations in years past,” that Adam Lanza “had some disorders” and Eyewitness News learned that Lanza “did undergo some sort of psychiatric evaluation sometime within the past few years.”
The questions that need to be answered are what “medications” was Adam Lanza prescribed, when was he prescribed them, and for how long.
The importance of answering these questions, as well as the need to launch a federal investigation into psychiatric drugs prompting acts of violence, are based on the following:
·    CCHR’s website documents that at least fourteen school shootings were committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 109 wounded and 58 killed. This list comprises only those cases where information about the shooter’s psychiatric drug use has been disclosed, which is often not the case. For example, according to CNN’s article on July 12, 2012, “Who is Dr. Lynne Fenton?”James Holmes, the suspected perpetrator of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, was confirmed to have been under the care of psychiatrist Lynne Fenton, yet no mention has been made of what psychiatric drugs he may have been prescribed.
·    More than 11,000 adverse reaction reports are on file with the US FDA between 2004 to 2011. These reports include 300 cases of homicide, nearly 3,000 cases of mania and over 7,000 cases of aggression. By the FDA’s own admission, only 1-10% of side effects are ever reported to the FDA, so the actual number of side effects occurring are most certainly higher.
·    CCHR’s site also documents that 22 international drug regulatory warnings have been issued on psychiatric drugs citing effects of mania, hostility, violence and even homicidal ideation. Dozens of high profile shootings/killings have been committed by teenagers under the influence of psychiatric drugs, and there has yet to be a federal investigation on the link between psychiatric drugs and acts of senseless violence.
More than a decade ago, a few insightful lawmakers in New York were concerned enough about the link between psychiatric drugs and acts of violence, that they introduced groundbreaking legislation: New York Senate Bill 1784, introduced in 2001 by then Senator Owen H. Johnson, would have required law enforcement agencies in New York to collect data on certain violent crimes and what, if any, psychiatric drugs the offender may have been on during the commission of the crime.

Google listings for School Shootings and Psychiatric Drugs

Here's a  website devoted to this topic.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

Some of my past Christmas messages just because I already said it there.

The Messiah again:

Bible Believers Persecuted by Catholics in Mexico

Just posted at my Catholicism blog Chris Pinto's plea for prayer for persecuted Mexicans, important enough to flag here:

http://enemyofchrist.blogspot.com/2012/12/prayer-request-catholic-church.html

More on the push for gun control

Chris Pinto's latest radio shows, dealing mostly with the tragedy in Connecticut and related matters:

The Connecticut Tragedy

The predictable calls for gun control are everywhere in the wake of this tragedy as usual, and one of the claims is that gun control in the UK is a good example of success in cutting back on crime.  Not according to this article:

Culture of violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decade  

Gun crime has almost doubled since Labour came to power as a culture of extreme gang violence has taken hold.

The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year - a rise of 89 per cent.   In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold.  

In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled. The statistic will fuel fears that the police are struggling to contain gang-related violence, in which the carrying of a firearm has become increasingly common place.  

Last week, police in London revealed they had begun carrying out armed patrols on some streets.   The move means officers armed with sub-machine guns are engaged in routine policing for the first time.  

Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, said last night: 'In areas dominated by gang culture, we're now seeing guns used to settle scores between rivals as well as turf wars between rival drug dealers.  

'We need to redouble our efforts to deal with the challenge.' He added:

'These figures are all the more alarming given that it is only a week since the Metropolitan Police said it was increasing regular armed patrols in some areas of the capital'.

Read more:      

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...s-89-decade.html#ixzz2FO1GbyOV

And not according to this video either:

And here's today's Chris Pinto radio show on more or less the same subject:
America in Decline


And here's a video of the similar situation in Australia since their gun confiscation:


And Chris Pinto's next show (Wednesday the 19th) is on the subject of this Australian confiscation.

(Note: He starts this radio show with a plea he received for prayer for Mexican believers who are being persecuted by Catholics.)

Singing In the Christmas Season

Oh hear them sing the Truth in public places:

Christmas Carols Flash Mob in a Mall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnt7euRF5Pg&sns=em

Joy to the World in a Mall Food Court

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9865b-K9s2w

Hallelujah Chorus at Macy's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU

Sing praises to His Holy Name!

Treachery in the Founding of America

A few weeks ago Jan Markell hosted a discussion on her Understanding the Times radio show, America's Roots and Founders, about the Founding Fathers of America, with Eric Barger and Jill Martin Rische, along with pastor Dan Fisher, in which the aim was to argue against those who say that the American Founders were not Christian. 

It was clear right from the start that there's a really huge confusion about these things that has to be resolved.  I was rather surprised that the main focus was on proving that the Founders were not Deists, surprised because I did think that idea had been clarified by now. 

First let's be clear that the Founders whose faith is in question are mainly the Big Five: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and Thomas Paine.  Although I was vaguely aware of problems with their beliefs for some time, over the last few months I've been convinced in stark and startling ways, mostly through Chris Pinto's film Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers, that they were far from Christian, and in fact were clear rejectors of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  This is what needs to be discussed here.

Other men involved in that era were brought up on the program but they only tend to confuse the issues further.  Patrick Henry for instance was clearly a Christian, he referred to Christ and to the gospel of salvation on many occasions.  Many preachers of the gospel were also discussed who were certainly Christians.  John Jay was mentioned, who was definitely a Christian.  There were many true Christians in various roles in government during the founding era, and in the Revolutionary War.  Much time was spent on the subject of the "Black Robed Regiment"* made up of Christian pastors who preached for Revolution and willingly fought and died for it.  And certainly the Christian foundations of America go back to the earliest settlers who were also true Christians, the Puritans and Pilgrims, and the nation can look back to them for strong Christian inspiration. 

But there is nevertheless a controversy about the true beliefs of the five founders I list above, the shapers of the new union through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and other documents.

It is quite true, as the participants on the program all agreed, that these Founders were not Deists in the sense that we understand that term to mean belief in a God who is not involved in human affairs.  Certainly Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Franklin believed in Providence and in prayer, and the protection of God over a country that adhered to His moral laws.  And a great deal of what they say along those lines can sound awfully Christian to Christian ears, much of which was quoted on the program.  Franklin, for instance, who was considered the least religious, nevertheless is the one who called for prayer by the Constitutional Congress. 

The confusing thing is that they can sound so Christian and yet in fact reject the essentials of the Christian faith.  ALL of them deny the Deity of Christ, even in the case of Adams and Jefferson ridiculing it.  Adams was a Unitarian, so he officially denied the Trinity, he also ridiculed it in his letters as did his wife Abigail, and ridiculed such basic Christian doctrine as that Christ was God incarnate born of a virgin.   Jefferson denied ALL the supernatural elements of the Bible.  Franklin said he doubted the deity of Christ.  Washington refused to take communion at his Anglican church while he was President in Philadelphia.  His pastor called him a "Deist" in so many words, though there is reason now to regard that designation as not quite on the mark as I go on to discuss below.

Yet they all approved of the MORALITY of Jesus Christ, or at least some of the morality taught in His name.  That's really ALL they approved of.  They thought it would be fine if the nation were founded on that MORALITY, but certainly not on the gospel of salvation by Christ, which they considered to be a primitive myth not worthy of belief by intelligent people   They were men of the Age of Reason, as Paine titled his book that made it once and for all evident that he was no Christian however much he might have supported Christian principles in a general sort of way through the Revolutionary era.  These were Enlightenment men, who believed that human reason was the arbiter of all truth, so they rejected all claims to supernatural occurrences such as a virgin birth or resurrection from the dead as contrary to Reason, and believed humanity was growing up and would soon do away with such foolishness.  Sound familiar?  Lot of that we hear today as well.

The God they believed in was the God of Masonry and Unitarianism or even the God of Reason if that makes any sense, but NOT the God of the Bible.

Gregg Frazer is a scholar who is affiliated with John MacArthur's Masters College who did a thorough study of the beliefs of the Founding generation and published his findings in a book, The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution in which he argues that they were neither Deists nor Christians.  He came up with a new term, "theistic rationalism" to describe their beliefs. 

They did believe in a God who intervened in human affairs, they did believe in prayer, they did believe the nation needed to submit to God's moral law if it was to prosper, but they also adamantly and pointedly rejected the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.

Surely it doesn't serve our cause to go on being deceived by this.  America has plenty of true Christian history to lean on that we can invoke, including true Christian leaders who went on affirming the Christian nature of the nation even after the Founders had done their dirty work of treachery against the majority Christian population. 

And that is how I've come to think of it. They were traitors.  Chris Pinto's film Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers, makes this clear.

The Understanding the Times broadcast starts out quoting the famous line from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...

And we as Christians have pointed to that reference to the Creator to prove the Christian underpinnings of the Declaration.  But this turns out to be a deception.  Chris Pinto in his film about the founders points out that the concept of "self-evident" truths is an Enlightenment idea, that in fact it was specifically put in the Declaration as a CONTRADICTION to the Biblical claim that it is GOD who determines our equality, NOT REASON.  Reason declares some philosophical positions to be self-evident according to human judgment but to a Christian it is the Biblical revelation that establishes humanity as equal because of our descent from Adam and Eve.  The "Creator" referred to in the Declaration is not the God of the Bible, but "the God of Nature" who is more compatible with the antiChristian beliefs of the Founders.

In his film Pinto also interviews ex-Mormon and expert on Mormonism and Masonry, Ed Decker, who states that the Declaration of Independence was written on a MASONIC LAMBSKIN.  THAT was supposed to be such a great boon to the nation, but to a Christian it ought to be recognized as blasphemy and a denial of the God of the Bible.

A pastor who researched the beliefs of the founding fathers is also quoted in the film as having discovered that they were all "infidels," and also that it had been debated whether or not to refer to God in the Constitution and it was decided NOT to.

Now, that ought to be enough to show that the founders that are so often misreprsented as Christians were actually antichrists (those who deny that Jesus is God come in the flesh) and traitors to the Christian population of America.

But Pinto also delves deeper and finds some very interesting historical background on the concept of "religious liberty" as written into our Constitution.  This concept goes back to the Catholic monarch James II of England who introduced something called The Declaration of Indulgence which would have rescinded strict limitations on the role allowed to Catholics and others in political positions.  Here's what I found Douglas Wilson saying about that, which is what Pinto's film also affirms:

Why Anglicans Matter to the Rest of Us by Douglas Wilson.

In the brief and troubled reign of James II, an event took place that illustrates how connected Anglicans and non-Anglicans can sometimes be.  James the Second was a fervent supporter of the interests of Rome, and during his reign—in the memorable phrase of J.C. Ryle—“traitors were hatched in the sunshine of corruption.”

James had begun his reign by persecuting the Nonconformists—jailing the great Richard Baxter after a farce of a trial, for example, and being responsible for the death by drowning of the young Scottish martyr Margaret Wilson. Because of this kind of thing, the pitch was set for the song he intended to sing, and the Nonconformists were reinforced in their intention not even to get their Psalters out.

But in April of 1688, James issued a “Declaration of Indulgence” along with a requirement that the declaration be read in all the chapels and churches of the kingdom by their officiating ministers. Seven bishops refused to have anything to do with it, and their subsequent trial was the cause celebre that brought James down in the Glorious Revolution.

But there was a striking element in this Declaration of Indulgence. James was trying to make room for the Church of Rome, and yet the declaration allowed both Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters the freedom to perform worship publicly. Before the bishops had made their decision to refuse to obey the king, the Nonconformists stepped forward, in the words of Ryle, “to their eternal honour,” and offered their support to the bishops in their defiance of the king, even though it meant their continued exclusion and exile. “They refused to be bribed just as they had formally refused to be intimidated.”

 “They would have none of the Royal indulgence, if it could only be purchased at the expense of the nation’s Protestantism.  Baxter, and Bates, and Howe, and the great bulk of the London Nonconformists, entreated the clergy to stand firm, and not to yield one inch to the King.” (J.C. Ryle,

Light from Old Times (London: Thynne & Jarvis, 1924, p.438)

How NICE the idea of Religious Liberty sounds.  And haven't we all affirmed this idea with pride in our tolerant nation?  We've even thought it is in keeping with Christian principles.  How hard it is then to begin to consider that it could be a huge deception that is only turning the nation over to internal enemies.  What Muslim nation allows nonMuslims to hold office?  NO nation that has an established religion allows members of another religion that kind of power.  But America stupidly does.

James was looking for a way to give Rome a foothold in England again after they had so wisely limited her influence, and the nation wisely rejected his plot.

But guess what. What England so intelligentlhy rejected got enshrined in our American Constitution. Plots within plots that nobody ever suspected.

Things are NOT what they seem.  We Christians need to wake up and start to realize that we're threatened in ways we had no idea.  May God give us wisdom even at this late hour.

===================
* The stories of the Black Robed Regiment which were told by Pastor Dan Fisher on the radio show, are very inspiring and something we should know more about.  But I have to wonder why nothing was made of the fact that Mormon Glenn Beck has been invoking the Black Robed Regiment in a way that confuses the "Christian" basis of American history even further.  Understanding the Times is a DISCERNMENT ministry.  Let's have a little more DISCERNMENT there folks.