Initial Contact

Recently God revealed to me my first contact with a demon in the natural. It was years ago and I always wondered what it was my friend and I had encountered that night. So here is what happened:

September, 1988. Me and my friend Gregg were long-time friends. We had joined the Army on the buddy system. So with the prospect of basic training on our minds, we decided to go camping, fishing and just relax. We had just graduated high school a few months prior and were due to report for basic training the next month.

The spot we chose to set up camp was in an area we locals call the Big Ditch. It is a flood control system which diverts excess water from the Big and Little Arkansas rivers. It is flanked on both sides with thirty-foot-high earthen dikes. This system skirts the city and reconnects on the southeast side of the city, making the Arkansas river. This was the spot we chose, mainly because it was close, was wooded, and was a great place to fish.
After a hard day of walking , setting up camp and fishing (to no avail), we got hungry and decided to walk into a nearby part of Wichita for food. We took a two flashlights and headed out into the darkness. We decided to make our trek on top of the dike, as the grass was knee-high and made it difficult at best to see debris deposited from previous floods. As we were walking and talking we would have to stop every thirty seconds or so as we kept running into skunks. We would not see them in the tall grass until we were literally at point-blank range for the skunks. The thought of being sprayed by a skunk had us using all of our senses and on high alert.

As we were slowly making our way to town we heard footfalls in the woods to our right. The wood line was about sixty to seventy yards from us. We just kinda ignored the sound coming from the woods until we noticed that whatever it was making the footfalls in the woods was paralleling us. It made us feel as though we were being stalked. When we would stop to get a better listen at it, it would stop. We shined our flashlights at the woods in the area where we thought it should be, but nothing. I don't remember why, but I was about ten feet behind Gregg. We had stopped and were shining our flashlights on the woods yet again.

All of a sudden, the grass at the wood line started to part, right where we both had our flashlights trained, like something was moving through it and it was coming right at us... it continued quickly through the grass, splitting it apart as it went. As the grass parted, we got the sense of a violent and very deliberate charge. The grass parted from the wood line sixty to seventy yards away and up the thirty foot dike to Gregg's feet, turned around and retreated about half way back down the dike where it stopped... in under one second. I know it was under a second because we had no time to react to it moving towards us. It was surreal and completely foreign to us. So we did what two eighteen-year-old tough guys should have done-- WE RAN!
I had not thought of that event in my life in quite some time. Then all of a sudden I had a memory of it and God told me it was a demon. I always wondered why we couldn't smell the skunks that night. We could not smell them over the demon I suppose! My initial contact was scary then, but looking back I think its pretty cool.

God bless you all,
Saul

How many more signs do we need? Maybe the big neon sign posted below?

U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar Wed Mar 18 15:16:16 UTC 2009

By Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar. Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket. Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform. "It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency," he said. Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value -- though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits. Some analysts said news of the U.N. panel's recommendation extended dollar losses because it fed into concerns about the future of the greenback as the main global reserve currency, raising the chances of central bank sales of dollar holdings. "Speculation that major central banks would begin rebalancing their FX reserves has risen since the intensification of the dollar's slide between 2002 and mid-2008," CMC Markets said in a note. Russia is also planning to propose the creation of a new reserve currency, to be issued by international financial institutions, at the April G20 meeting, according to the text of its proposals published on Monday. It has significantly reduced the dollar's share in its own reserves in recent years. GOOD TIME Persaud said that the United States was concerned that holding the reserve currency made it impossible to run policy, while the rest of world was also unhappy with the generally declining dollar. "There is a moment that can be grasped for change," he said. "Today the Americans complain that when the world wants to save, it means a deficit. A shared (reserve) would reduce the possibility of global imbalances." Persaud said the panel had been looking at using something like an expanded Special Drawing Right, originally created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 but now used mainly as an accounting unit within similar organizations. The SDR and the old Ecu are essentially combinations of currencies, weighted to a constituent's economic clout, which can be valued against other currencies and indeed against those inside the basket. Persaud said there were two main reasons why policymakers might consider such a move, one being the current desire for a change from the dollar. The other reason, he said, was the success of the euro, which incorporated a number of currencies but roughly speaking held on to the stability of the old German deutschemark compared with, say, the Greek drachma. Persaud has long argued that the dollar would give way to the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency within decades. A shared reserve currency might negate this move, he said, but he believed that China would still like to take on the role. (To read Reuters Global Investing Blog click here; for the MacroScope Blog click on blogs.reuters.com/macroscope; for Hedge Fund Hub click on blogs.reuters.com/hedgehub) (editing by Patrick Graham)