The Thomas Chronicles

While writing my previous post, two related news items came in.

1. Iran has formally threatened the Strait of Hormuz to hurt Western economies should either America or Israel attacks.

Iranian Major General Mohammed Ali Jafari said, “Regarding the main route for exiting energy, Iran will definitely act to impose control on the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.”

It seems they’ve declared that closing or disrupting the Strait of Hormuz will be one of their opening moves in this potential war. 20 to 40 percent of the world’s energy passes through those narrow waters.

2. It was reported today in China View and other locations that Iran is digging 320,000 graves on their border provinces for our troops.

“We do not wish the families of enemy soldiers to experience what Americans had to go through in the aftermath of the Vietnam War,” said Baqerzadeh, who is also head of Iran’s search committee for missing soldiers.

The preemptive measures would decrease the time during which slain soldiers would be buried, the Iranian military official said, adding “the burial of slain soldiers will be carried out decently and in little time.”

I would say this is more than the usual rhetoric, wouldn’t you?

Update 7/1/08:

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, in a energy starved world, closing or disrupting this supply would lead to at least a Great Depression. If you think it’s just about oil, you are absolutely correct.

I try to explain to people (if they are willing to listen) that petroleum doesn’t just go into your cars. It makes all your plastics, all the fertilizers for our food– in a word, it is what drives out entire world. We are practically bubblewrapped in petroleum products.

So, when people chant, “No blood for oil!” think about this. Without oil, millions will die from starvation, poverty, and eventually, disease (no plastic syringes and no plastics in machinery to create the vaccines). There will be plenty of blood flowing without oil, more than we can imagine.

We know what life without oil is like— it’s the kind of life during the Civil War on back where people were white-haired, toothless and dying by 40 years old.

North Korean Disarmament

People have been golf clapping at North Korea’s actions of late.

It was report last week as a diplomatic victory for the Bush Administration. North Korea has suddenly— and seemingly without any smoking-gun reason— has decided to fold on virtually every point in the negotiations to halt their nuclear weapons program.

All this comes after over two decades of diplomacy, which were full of mendacity and trickery on their part. Their delaying tactics, including an enormous incentives package naively negotiated by the Clinton Administration, allowed them to create functioning nuclear weapons, one of which they detonated unin 2006.

But one thing no one— and I mean NO ONE, not the MSM, not bloggers, not talking heads (not that I heard of)— in the media has ask is: why now? After all of North Korea’s maneuverings and defiance for over the past 20 years, why have they chosen at this time to cave?

Allow me to set the stage for what I think the implications of this are.

I blogged last week about our proximity to war with Iran. It leaked through CBS consultant, Michael Oren, that Israel had quietly approached the United States and said in effect:

“If you won’t attack Iran, we will.”

I’m sure you don’t need me to spell out what would happen should war erupt in the Middle East between Israel and Iran, but for those unversed in how intertwined things are, allow me to elucidate.

Iran have allies in Russia and China, both of whom are heavily invested in Iran. Russia has given them countless technological transfers, including their burgeoning nuclear weapons technology, and China is heavily dependent on Iran for energy, without which they sink as a country.

Periphery players are Iranian sponsored proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, Lebanon (which is predominately controlled by Hezbollah now) and Syria, who is a close Iranian ally.

All these players, not to mention Europe, has an incredibly large stake in the outcome of this crisis, and I don’t believe any one of them are willing to sit on the sidelines as a spectator. Not when their survival depends on it.

Should conflict erupt, Israel’s only ally, the United States, will also not idly sit by and watch the Jewish race be destroyed from the face of the earth. One Holocaust is enough, as far as the United States is concerned.

How does all this fit in with North Korea’s recent cave-in to all our demands, evidenced in their very public destruction of their nuclear cooling tower?

In the fall of 2007, September in fact, Israeli warplanes destroyed a secret site in Syria which was housed nuclear material— material that originated from North Korea.

Since North Korea is up to its earlobes in international intrigue with nuclear material in the Middle East, if the United States were to attack Iran any time in the immediate future, North Korea would have to also be on the cross-off list of rogue regimes. I.E. If we’re gonna put down one nuclear-aspiring rogue regime, we’re going to have to take down the one with ready nuclear capabilities as well.

We couldn’t afford to have a nuclear hostile sitting on our flank on the Korean Peninsula that could deal us tremendous amount of harm (Japan would be in jeopardy). Optimal would be to take them both out at the same time.

I don’t think North Korea would sue for terms if they didn’t know for certain that we are proceeding to Tehran. The fact that they would fold totally and in an instant underlines just how close we are.

I think North Korea went belly up to get out of our way, fearing they would be in our sights.

I think this also means that we are on the doorsteps of open war with Iran… and possibly World War III…

In keeping with my bleak theme of late, I now turn Iran.

For years now, the United States and our allies have been trying to talk Iran down from a cliff that they clearly want to jump from. We are talking, of course, of their nuclear weapons ambitions.

Such ambitions are serious enough considering their heavy investments in terrorist organizations, like Hamas and Hezbollah; but not content with destablizing the region through international terrorism, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

And with achieving the proverbial “bomb”, they have also achieved their means to following through on their threat.

It should be noted here that the Iranians are not Arabs. They are Persians. They are the oldest continuous civilization in the world, older than China in unbroken continuity. We underestimate them at our peril.

And the Persians don’t bluff.

Then, two days ago on June 24th it was leaked to CBS consultant Michael Oren that if the United States will not strike at Iran’s nuclear build up, Israel will.

“The Israelis have been assured by the Bush administration that the Bush administration will not allow Iran to nuclearize… Israelis are uncertain about what would be the policies of the next administration vis-à-vis Iran.”

In other words, Israel is not going to wait for the U.S. Presidential election. They will act before then unless we act first. Which means such an attack could happen some time within the next four months.

News of this leak is reverberating through the world, and many fear that we are on the edge of a precipice and World War III. Some articles like this one, even outlined how it could start.

Israel, without doubt, does not have the resources to sustain a war with Iran. If they do attack Iran, they will be destroyed by their opponents, unless the U.S. (whom is their closest ally) does not provide military relief (i.e. combat Iranian forces).

Now here is where it gets hairy (and scary).

Iran’s closest ally is another powerful country, you may have heard of it; Russia. They have together (Iran and Russia) what is called a ‘mutual cooperation agreement’ which includes a stipulation that explicitly aims to allow, encourage, and protect the Iranian atomic program.

In short, Russia has agreed to defend Iran - specifically if their nuclear ambitions are derailed by another country.

What’s more - Russia has a very similar agreement with their closest ally, and you have heard of them too, they boast ‘the million man army’; China. The agreement between Russia and China is far more blunt. They aim to work together militarily and economically in order to counter ‘western’ hegemony in both fields.

However, what this author failed to factor in is the terrible necessities of Europe, China and likelihood of the surrounding Arab nations joining the conflict against Israel and America.

Europe would have to be dragged into the fray because their lifeline depends on Russia and Middle Eastern natural resources. If those supplies fail to reach them, their lights go out; and European winters are very, very cold.

Ditto China. China is buying oil futures like there was no tomorrow because, like Europe, if the oil does not flow from the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz, their lights also go out. The difference between China and Europe is that China is desperate in extremis. I suspect they wouldn’t need any nudging from Russia to enter the war or to fulfill their treaty commitments.

China’s very survival depends on the war’s outcome.

It is clear that Israel does not trust a possible Obama Presidency. Why should they?

Obama’s advisor has met with Hamas on numerous occasions. Obama’s church gave an open invitation to Hamas to promote their propaganda in their church bulletin.

The fact that he has left the church alleviate any concerns with regard to Obama’s relationship with this church. If anything, his farewell comments to the church indicated that he approved of what the church has done.

“This is not a decision that I come to lightly, and frankly it’s one that I made with some sadness…Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized. We have many friends among the 8,000 congregants.”

…

“It’s clear that now that I am a candidate for president, every time something is said in the church by anyone associated with Trinity, including guest pastors, the remarks will be imputed to me, even if they totally conflict with my long-held views, statements and principles.”

It seemed he showed great reluctance to leave a church that shouts racism from the pulpit and supports terrorists.

Israel’s misgivings are not unfounded.

So, instead of sitting on their hands to see the election’s outcome, Israel is going strike, and God help us when or if they do.

Early last year, beekeepers and various news organizations noted with astonishment how the honeybees in the United States are vanishing. Last year, beekeepers on the East Coast have lost up to 70 percent of their honeybees, while their counterparts on the West Coast lost 60 percent. This was noted in the New York Times and other publications and there hasn’t been any answers as of yet.

This is probably old news for some people, but it was new news to me. I venture off into broad esoteric subjects from time to time to hear what people on the fringe are saying and doing. I encountered the subject of the incredible vanished honeybees on one of these ventures and thought to myself, “What the heck? This can’t be true.”

Like many other topics, I did some digging off the net to corroborate the story. Being familiar with some journalistic techniques I learned in college (I was a Journalism minor), I set out to find at least three independent sources to confirm the initial report I heard.

I didn’t have to look very far. Low and behold, this story has been quietly cascading across the world for over a year. From Canada to China, from Taiwan to England honeybees around the world are vanishing, and the scientists, despite mapping out the genetic code of honeybees two years ago, are utterly dumbfounded.

It would be one thing if beekeepers found their bees laying prostrate dead in and around the bee colony, but that is oddly not the case. In most cases, the bees are simply– gone.

Millions of bees around the world has vanished without so much of a good-bye and the only traces they’ve left behind are their dead or dying offspring. Diana Cox-Foster, who works with the CCD Working Group, told the UK’s Independent newspaper that researchers into this phenomenon were “extremely alarmed” and that this crisis “has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry.”

Moreover, she added, the symptoms of the bee’s demise and disappearance “does not seem to match anything in the literature”.

One Florida beekeeper, Dave Hackenberg, said, “They weren’t dead, they were just gone.”

In Britain, John Chapple, who chair the London Beekeepers’ Association, lost all 14 of his bee colonies and he said, “I could attribute some losses to a failing queen bee or wax moths, but there were a few I could find no reason for.” And elsewhere he was quoted as saying, “The mortality rate is the highest in living memory and no one seems to know what’s behind it.”

Well, “mortality rate” is a bit of an assumption actually. Beekeepers have walked the effective range of their honeybees and, in the cases where the bees have disappeared from their colonies, they haven’t found a single bee. No bodies. Nothing.

As one part-time beekeeper said, it was “like somebody had moved out of their house”.

Scientists have started calling this phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Some of them have hypothesized that the strange disappearance has to do with an HIV-like virus afflicting them. In fact, “[t]races of every disease that has affected bees over the last 100 years are now being found in the stomachs of the infected insects.” Although this fact is interesting to note, that neither explains the sudden inexplicable disappearance of bees from their colonies nor that fact that, in most cases, no bodies are found.

Even as peculiar and as alarming as this is, many people are not aware of the implications of such a massive die-off of bees. As of now, the only people noticing it are the beekeepers, farmers and various aficionados of the bizarre and inexplicable. But people will take note of it soon. They would have to.

Why? Because a full one-third of all our food is either directly or indirectly related to honeybee pollination.

And with 60 to 70 percent of our bees vanishing out of thin air, we might see a dramatic decline in our food production. In addition to producing honey, the pollination done by honeybees is vital to the process of reproduction in plants. Various crops like almonds, fruits, and other crops depend heavily on the pollination done by bees.

But don’t take the severity of the situation just from me, Albert Einstein said:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Needless to say, what is at stake is much more than just honey.

Because of the massive disappearance of honeybees, some farmers are becoming desperate.

Crop farmers have tried to pollinate their crops without bees, and in some cases they’ve gotten very creative. They’ve tried blowers and even mortar shells. Scientists have tried using other bees, like the blue-orchard bees which seem more resilient in colder temperatures than the honeybee, for the purpose of pollination, but they agree that none comes close to the effectiveness of honeybees.

With the recent rice shortage, the new fungal infection, Ug99, that, according to the UN can affect one-fourth the world’s wheat crops, and the droughts and flooding across the world affecting food production, this bizarre disappearance of bees makes the future seem even more ominous. Indeed, the enormity of what we’re facing sounds almost Biblical in scale.

Could this be the first rumblings of the famines foretold in our Christian prophecies?

… it might just be.

Consider one thing more.

The disappearance of bees began in late 2006, took on steam in early 2007 and became a worldwide phenomenon by the end of that same year. If the bees finish their disappearing act by the end of this year, and if Einstein was correct in his four-year assessment, then we will be in deep trouble by 2012…

Since Judeo-Christian tradition has always linked honeybees and the honey they produce with the presence of God’s grace, is it a coincidence that mindless, motiveless violence like the Virginia Tech Massacre in April 2007 is increasing as the honeybees vanish?

Is God’s grace withdrawing from the Mankind?

An acquaintance of mine asked me yesterday if there is any good news going on in the world. I rattled my brain for a bit to see if any good news dropped out, and strangely, I couldn’t think of any. Indeed, all forecasts on the immediate horizon seem to be either bad or worse.

The more optimistic predictions by people with, no doubt, more sunny dispositions that myself attempt to allay fears by pointing out that we haven’t yet seen a precipitous fall and that although our economy is slowing down, there are indications that we are seeing some leveling off.

That, however, isn’t optimistically suggesting that these fears are unfounded and are part of hysterical “fear-mongering”. They aren’t saying that we are hitting a dry patch and we’ll soon return to the sunny uplands, ascending to infinity and beyond. Even their optimism acknowledges the fact that we’re riding a downward incline.

So, why this bleak outlook of the world? We’re seeing a confluence of many different factors all happening at the same time, and the fear is that a synergy would occur between them and produce a catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen. The factors are to multitudinous to be enumerated here but they are there– all over, in fact– if you want to search them.

This brings me to the old question: Is the cup half full or half empty?

I think that to dodge the question and say that there’s a whole pitcher of lemonade somewhere on the kitchen counter would be to ignore the facts.

If one is to focus strictly on this proverbial cup, is it half empty or half full? Firstly, we have to acknowledge that a) there is a cup; it exists and b) that there is water in it. Secondly, one must acknowledge the fact that there is a finite supply of water.

The difference between a man seeing the cup as half full or half empty is the difference of whether or not he is grateful for what is, in fact, there. He cannot close his eyes and say that the cup is actually full when it is not; he cannot play make-believe since reality is incapable of playing along.

No, the key is gratitude; being thankful for what was given. Gratitude sees the cup as half full; ingratitude see the cup and say that what’s there is not nearly enough.

Well, I try to see things as half full and savor all the many blessings I’ve received. Being drenched in ill tidings around the world, to see things as half full is a contrary action for me and I’m sure it is true for most people as well. We cannot give in to despair nor give in to our fears. But we cannot shirk away from what we see transpiring either.

So, I have a question for people reading these words.

Have you encountered genuine pieces of good news out there for our future?

For myself, the best news I can think of is the certain and absolute knowledge that my Lord Jesus Christ will return, that despite how things appear now, I know we’re winning and I know we’ll win. More souls will be saved in this time than the rest of time combined.

Days like these you just don’t even want to turn on the news.

The Lunatic:

TURLOCK, Calif. — Police killed a 27-year-old man as he kicked, punched and stomped a toddler to death despite other people’s attempts to stop him on a dark, country road, authorities said.

Investigators on Sunday were trying to establish the relationship between the suspect and the child they say he killed Saturday night. The Stanislaus County coroner said the boy appeared to be between 1 and 2 years old based on his size, according to county sheriff’s deputy Royjindar Singh.

“It’s been a long night of wondering, ‘Why?’ — not only for the officers and the passers-by who stopped and tried to help out, but for anyone. Why would somebody do this?” Singh said.

The Insane:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — North Carolina authorities say they are investigating whether police were warned that a woman with five dead spouses was trying to hire a hit man to kill one of her husbands.

Authorities reopened the cold case last year, and last month, charged 76-year-old Betty Neumar with one count of solicitation of murder in the July 1986 death of Harold Gentry.

Detectives say Neumar tried to hire several people to kill Gentry. Lead detective Scott Williams says that police are looking into the possibility that one of those would-be hit men went to police before Gentry’s death, but no one took him seriously.

Grandma and the hitmen…

How about the Inexplicable:

BLANCHARD, Mich. — No one quite understands the term “striking it lucky” better than 16-year-old BreAnna Helsel. The Michigan teen survived being struck by lightning and went on to win $20 in the lottery the next day.

Helsel was at her home in Blanchard, about 50 miles northeast of Grand Rapids, watching thunderstorms roll by on June 6 when she noticed rain entering an open kitchen window.

“She went to close the window and the lightning came through and hit her,” her mother, Linda Johnson, told The Daily News of Greenville. “We think it must have hit the house or something.”

Then there’s the constant natural disaster in the Midwest:

Even as flood fears eased in Iowa City, the state’s south and east prepared for new problems ahead for a string of towns along the Mississippi River.

Sandbagging was under way in Burlington, a key rail hub, to build the city’s levee system and protect it from the river; 350 people had been evacuated.

Two more deaths were reported, bringing the state’s death toll from flooding to five. A 35-year-old man apparently drowned in Iowa River floodwaters near Wapello, and a woman was killed near New London when her stopped car was hit by a National Guard bus involved in flood duty.

“It’s likely that we will see major and serious flooding on every part of the southeastern border of our state from New Boston and down,” Gov. Chet Culver said. “We are taking precautionary steps, we are evacuating where necessary, but that is going to be the next round here.”

Elsewhere in the soaked Midwest, National Guard soldiers hoped to fill about 500,000 sandbags by Monday to fortify levees along a 15-mile stretch of the Mississippi River near Quincy, Ill., and flood waters began to recede in parts of western Michigan.

The Iowa River’s crest arrived early and lower than expected, possibly because of a number of levee breaches downstream that opened the channel, the National Weather Service said. Gov. Chet Culver called word of Iowa City’s crest “a little bit of good news,” but cautioned that the situation was still precarious.

The Supreme Court continues it’s attempted coup d’etat over the other branches of government:

The Supreme Court made it easier Monday for some foreigners who overstay their visas to seek to remain in the United States legally.

The court ruled 5-4 Monday that someone who is here illegally may withdraw his voluntarily agreement to depart and continue to try to get approval to remain in the United States.

The decision essentially embraced a proposed Justice Department regulation governing the treatment of similar cases in the future.

Issuing decrees from the bench without Congressional or Presidential approval flies in the face of a democracy. Somehow the Supreme Court has become the legislators of the law and its interpreters. They are the law now.

This is just what I found off the surface of the various news aggregates. A total of 5 minutes of scanning the news…

Update:

Here’s another one filed under the Mouth of Madness:

ORLANDO, Florida (AP) — Authorities say one person has been killed and five others injured in an attack outside an Orlando, Florida supermarket.

Orlando police spokeswoman Barbara Jones says one person was fatally stabbed Monday morning in a parking lot. Four others were taken to a hospital.

One is in critical condition and another is in surgery. The conditions for the others involved are not yet known.

Jones says one person was treated at the scene. All appeared to have some injury from cutting.

It’s not yet clear what prompted the fight. No arrests have been made.

Is it just me who’s noticing this rash of people knifing each other out of the blue? It’s comprehensible to me why anyone would run out and stab people in a wild melee. It’s almost like a spreading madness. First Japan (see here), now Orlando… then Chicago, then Los Angeles, then Britain…

Some of these stabbings arose out of fights, others are from psychotic breaks, but the sudden spike in these kinds of killings are just plain bizarre.

I keep thinking about the deteriorating American landscape in Atlas Shrugged. Train derailments (here, here, and here), abandoned factories, nationalized industries (In the book, it was a rail line in Mexico), etcetera, etcetera .

Excellence, industry, creativity is regulated and repressed, and it is done under the obscene pretense for the concern of the common man or some noble cause. These things are replaced with mediocrity and self-righteous indolence; but excellence and industry is primarily replaced with looting.

Yes, looting.

We are lesser men looting over the carcass of others long past, whose achievements built the foundations upon which we stand. Their voices, once a resounding trumpet across all the nations and across all the world, are now soft whispers lingering there in the back of our minds.

They are our forefathers, the men who fashioned this nation into being and breathed life into a near empty wilderness continent.

Are we to devolve into vultures picking off the wealth and industry of our forebearers instead of adding to it? Have we become nothing but looters who think themselves superior because of our new laptops and iPods?

These were the thoughts scrolling through my mind as I read the article from my last post. Here is a fuller rendering of that section in that article:

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.’s “Millennium Project,” says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the “Millennium Development Goals,” this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Their plan is clear. Divest America of her self-created wealth to jumpstart a world government, a New World Order, as it were. However, if we allow the United Nations to tax us, we’ve just given up one of the most basic elements of sovereignty, the right to rule ourselves as we see fit.

If these Internationalists, if these Globalists win, our freedom will not be far behind, for how can free men stand free when our very ability to make decisions is taken from us?

That, my friend, is not freedom. It is the chains of slavery.