The Thomas Chronicles

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.

I watched Bill Hemmer and Meghan Kelly this morning on Foxnews over some warm instant gruel cereal. They were showing the “sights and sounds” of the Pope’s visit to Washington D.C. The camera panned across a jam-packed baseball stadium from field level to the nose-bleeds. There was a sense of quiet excitement, anticipation for the Pope’s arrival. As Catholics poured into the stadium, reports circulated from the organizers that the demand for tickets to the event doubled. Some Catholics drove for miles from other states to just catch a glimpse of the Pope.

Watching this spectacle reminded me of a brief exchange I had with my friend yesterday. We watched an interview with a “common man” Catholic (It was actually a woman.) who said that she anxiously wanted to see the Pope to revive her faith, which had been waning for quite some time. Seeing the Pope, she said, could change all of that.

I turned to my friend and said, “Boy howdy, I’m really Protestant, aren’t I?”

“Yup.”

“I don’t see how a man can reinvigorate a person’s faith.”

My friend said later, today in fact, that to place such weight on one human being has the taste of idolatry in it to us because, well, we’re Protestants to the core.

And yet, when Pope Benedict XVI entered the stadium in his “Pope-mobile”, you could tangibly feel the Holy Spirit washing through the crowd. Faces were suddenly lit aglow and arms and hands waved as he passed. Somewhere nearer the stage, a choir was singing a solemn Catholic liturgical song (It might have been in Latin; I don’t recall.).

When the screen switched back to Bill Hemmer and Meghan Kelly, you could see how taken they were with the scene, and, I don’t know if this is the right word, but they were overwhelmed and looked flushed. They stumbled around for a bit for a segue into Wall Street news on the economy, you have Brenda Buttner, the senior business correspondent for Foxnews, fumble around verbally as well. She said, Wall Street should be looking at the Pope’s public mass to hear Pope Benedict’s message of hope.

Even I, sitting in my recliner over dried fruits and some indecipherable green cereal gruel (It was actually pretty good cereal despite it’s unsavory appearance.) felt the Holy Spirit wash through the television thousands of miles from the actual event. I have not a doubt in my mind that the papacy is a very real phenomenon as “The Holy See”. You can feel its spiritual potency even if you’re not Catholic. I have doubts and serious reservations about the Catholic doctrine of “infallibility” in the Pope and other doctrines which I won’t get into, but I don’t think that it negates the papacy as the successor of St. Peter.

Pope Benedict XVI has be reviled and criticized and shunned throughout most of the world. His comments have precipitated riots and murder in the Islamic world (surprise, surprise), and his comments also garnered the sharp criticism of the European intelligentsia. It has been widely noted for quite some time how the Pope is referred to with disdain, disgust and general disapproval from secularists and others worldwide. I think this is so because of the certainty of his faith, the keen intelligence with which he defends and advocates Christianity and speaking the objective truth without the deliberate ambiguity of moral relativism which adopts and discards “truths” with equal alacrity.

As I said, I’m no Catholic, but I think it says something terrible good and wonderful about our country that we received Pope Benedict with welcoming arms and much fanfare. President Bush, who doesn’t meet anyone at the airport in his entire Presidency and stays in the White House, met the Pope.

Is this yet another sign of a Christian revival in our beloved land? I think so.

I’ve talk to a few people who watched this movie, and they universally panned it. From the jittery camera direction to the “amaturish acting”, quite a few of my associates roundly dismissed the movie as a queasy thrill-ride version of the Blair Witch Project, whose infamy in camera jittery-pokery was, and still is, legendary. I believe ‘nauseated’ is the term. Among them, I was of the minority opinion. But then again, for readers of this blog, this should come as no surprise.

Like my compatriots, I could have done without all the shaking and hair pulling and screaming hysterics. It was a sensational movie to begin with. How much more sensational is a thirty story beast rampaging Manhattan? However, I think the movie provides invaluable insight, if you have the eyes to see it.

First of all, if you go see this film and want to derive anything meaningful from it aside from the obvious, you must accede to the premise of the story off the top without question. Know that you are going to get wobbled out of your membranes and jolted until something falls out. That’s just a given. Two is to approach this with an open mind and not treat it as just another scary monster gore-fest. At least, this is how I tried to approach this movie.

When I left the theater, I was dazed but not because of the shaking camera. As a Christian, I looked at that movie and thought, “Is this how people are going to react when calamity befalls us as it surely will?”

As far as it goes, the group, collective dynamics exemplified in the movie is SPOT ON. I’ve been to parties almost exactly like the one portrayed in the movie, although admittedly less posh, and the human interaction between the characters is pretty darn realistic. The halting semi-coherent speech. The desperate desire to have all the information about what’s going on while refusing to give any information to others. The psychotherapy relationship dramas. These characteristics are the traits of people thirty years old and younger.

On the flip side, also exemplified in the movie is the intense loyalty and bonds between the characters to where they would follow each other willingly toward death, even as an alternative is presented to them. This trait is also ubiquitous to my generation and younger, and by the way, it’s this generation that’s in Iraq right now.

But the main insight I derived from the movie is one based upon my faith’s assertions of the End Times. I think the monster in the movie is metaphor for the Apollyon and his hoard. The Bible describes these creatures as being scorpion-like, which I think is portrayed in the movie.

10And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

11And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

I think that JJ. Abrams used this scripture as the starting point of this movie and built the plot around it. Strangely enough, I haven’t seen another Christian seeing the connection between this movie and Revelation. Though of course, this movie doesn’t present the coming of Apollyon, the Destroyer, exactly as the Bible laid it out, but it has echoes. I’ll not analyze it more than this.

I’ll sign off tonight on a side note. Over the course of a couple of months, I’ve spoken to relatives and acquaintances in Houston and Los Angeles and everyone said they feel in their bones an impending calamity befalling our nation. I’ve seen this reflected in the anxiety we all feel about this current Presidential election and in the daily news reports around the world, as though we’re all holding our breaths, waiting.

I also find it interesting that for the holiday season this past November and December, we were treated to two apocalyptic-esque movies, The Mist and I Am Legend. And now we have Cloverfield.

What this ultimately means, who knows? But I don’t lightly blow off the collective anxiety and fears emanating from all corners of our entire nation. Something is clearly happening. I’m just not sure I know what that is.

And another thing…

For people who complain about Cloverfield’s wobbly camera action, I’ve got a question. What’s the difference between all the stomach churning “home video” feature of this movie and all the strobing, flashing, epileptic visual style of actions movies? To me, they are only a two degree difference between them.

I’m back in Houston, Texas spending some quality time with my folks. They’re a loud, high energy bunch, and I love them dearly. Coming from a traditional Vietnamese family, I discovered on this visit that my kin had expanded some. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing little munchkins running about, mostly infants and some a bit older.

At one point in the festivities, I looked around at all the members of my clan and thought of the seeming incongruities created by living in America. My family are Americans through and through, and they have become Texans through and through. I imagine that from the outside to people unaccustomed to the incredible melting pot that is America, they might well scratch their noggin how one can be American, Vietnamese, and Texans at the same time.

All my brothers speak with a Texan twang. They do it unconsciously and they’d probably deny it if anyone were to point it out. My oldest brother actually sounds like a southern trailer park tow-truck driver over the phone.

I thank our Lord Jesus Christ that my family made it to these shores where they can have freedom and experience life in abundance instead of being left in the jungles of Vietnam to be killed or “re-educated” after the fall of Saigon.

How far we’ve come from those overcrowded boats and refugee camps to this night…

It is now morning and a hush has fallen over the city. There are thousands of men, women and children streaming into churches this day for the celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus. They come from all walks of life. The rich. The poor. The Whites. The Blacks. The Hispanics. The Asians. The large and the small. The educated and the illiterate. The hungry and the fed.

The Kingdom of God is not about externals; whether you’re popular and well loved or not, whether you drive a brand spanking new car or a old rusted beater. It’s about individual souls making it home to their Creator God, and on this day over two thousand years ago, our Creator took on our fallen state and became a Man.

And, thus, hope entered our world on that day; it is the hope that we won’t be tossed to our fate into the grip of death, to deteriorate into the abyss eternally away from the Light and Love of God. We were offered a path home through Jesus’s sacrifice at Calvary, and that offer stands to this day.

Merry Christmas to all you readers. May the Lord bless you and keep you on this holy day, for as the song goes,

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room;
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n and nature sing.
And heav’n and heav’n and nature sing.

It’s a constant source of oddity to see otherwise educated people deride Christianity. A commenter on Bookworm’s blog,Mr. Dagon, and many like-minded people relish in pointing out the horrors of Christendom in history but have they asked themselves the simple inauspicious question, Christianity is horrible in comparison to what?

The Spanish Inquisition was eventually smashed by other Christians, notably the “heretic” Protestant Queen of England, Elizabeth I. The crusading Templars were eventually smashed in Southern France by the Christian King, Phillip IV of France.

The point I’m making is that Christendom in its heyday policed itself and punished itself for its transgressions.

We find no concomitant acts by the atheist secularists and the Muslims to police themselves in whatever manner.

Instead of being repentant of the roughly thousands years in which they’ve stormed, killed and slaughtered Christians from all of North Africa into Spain to the very gates of Vienna, Muslims decry Christianity for the Crusades and blame the West for the desolation they’ve made for themselves. It is incomprehensible to most people that ALL of North Africa was populated by white Europeans as it was during Rome’s day until Islam swept through and murdered them. It was once verdant and fertile soil. Now as in almost all the lands inside the Islamic Crescent the earth has become a barren desert full of sand and desolation.

Instead of repenting of the hundreds of millions of people who were slaughtered, from the periodic communist purges in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, et al to the concentration camps of the fascism of Germany and Japan, the secularists continue on their road toward utopian nihilism. Indeed, the entire bloodbath that was the 20th Century was the product of the Enlightenment where Mankind for the first time in history decided it could dispense with God and create a heaven of this earth.

More is the tragedy that this blind belief in Mankind’s ability to create his own heaven on earth, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, has not yet died away with the hundreds of millions who died this past century; no, it continues now into the 21st Century. It wears different faces, dons different facades, but ultimately they all place their sacrifices on the alter in worship of Man. Entire nations and entire peoples were brought to ruin, and when this story finally ends and its last chapter finally written, people would remark, if there be anyone left, with amazement at the lengths Man would go to have his own deification.

In Christendom, God interpreted badly brought about tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of deaths, while ideology in the absence of God has rendered hundreds of millions dead. By sheer body count, Christendom has inflicted only a fraction of the devastation than has secularism.

This fact is beyond question, but it’s not one many atheists, or many Christians for that matter, would point out.

As a side note, I watched an interview with David Horowitz, a professed agnostic, on C-Span the other day and he gave in passing the comparison between Christianity and secular atheism.

Here’s a bit of interview I transcribed:

David Horowitz: The 19th Century is the really the crisis of religious faith. Religions, organized religion were a way of consoling people of the meaninglessness of their lives. A life without a God to redeem our existence without a redemption, without a future paradise; our lives are utterly meaningless…

… But either there is a God who redeems us or there’s not, and now for people who think there’s not life would be intolerable unless they had another hope. And that hope, Marxism is the most articulate… a secular Messanism a secular redemption is what a lot of people have find the consolation in…

There is obviously a whole atheist movement, but they have a similar, they have a religious passion which is that if we get rid of religion, then we’re going to have rationality, we’re going to have the enlightenment. Well, no we’re not, no we’re not.

Marxism is an enlightenment philosophy and look at the unbelievable misery that Marxists have caused. There is no exit. That is explains why Marxism is resurgent today. Atheists can’t do without some kind of faith and Marxism is a articulate a faith as one devised by Mohammed…

***Update Below***

YahooNews reported today that the American Medical Association just approved the use of radio frequency identification tags, or RFIDs, to improve “”safety and efficiency of patient care”.

Oh joy.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Doctors could soon be storing essential medical information under the skin of their patients, the American Medical Association says.

Devices the size of a grain of rice that are implanted with a needle could give emergency room doctors quick access to the records of chronically ill patients, the nation’s largest doctors group said in a report.

The association adopted a policy Monday stating that the devices can improve the “safety and efficiency of patient care” by helping to identify patients and enabling secure access to clinical information.

These radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) are already used by Wal-Mart and other businesses to speed up their shipping systems by sending out small signals that can be scanned more easily than bar codes.

Implanting them in people “can improve the continuity and coordination of care with resulting reductions in adverse drug events and other medical errors,” said the report prepared by the association’s ethics committee.

….

They may also cause interference with electrical devices like defibrillators and it has not been determined what impact they would have on prescription drugs.

The report concluded that it is “likely that utilization of RFID devices for medical purposes will expand.”

….

The FDA may eventually approve “active” devices which contain internal batteries and can be updated as a patient’s condition changes.

While I can understand all the arguments against this device, such as it interfering with a heart defibrillator and all the concomitant privacy concerns, I have a very simple argument against this. The Christian one.

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.

-Revelation 13:16-18

Is this what they meant by “active” devices?

These devices have been around for quite a while now, but they’ve been sitting below the radar. Back in August of 2005, Foxnews had a special report about these devices and concluded that Americans have a widely held deep distrust of RFID implants.

Arthur Caplan, PhD, who is the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania believes that American distrust of these devices are understandable but irrational.

Americans may think their medical information is top secret. But Caplan says that we have far less privacy than we think we do, given the number of people who can legitimately see our medical records. And the potential benefits of RFID implants outweigh their risks, Caplan argues.

“You are more likely to die or be harmed by lack of medical information about you than by people knowing too much about your medical information,” he says. “In an emergency, it’s important for doctors to know what your allergies and medical problems are, who your relatives are and how to reach them, your blood type, and so on.”

But Caplan says that Americans’ distrust of things like RFID implants runs deep.

“The idea of putting something in your head or in your arm frightens people and stirs up privacy worries, even if they don’t make a lot of sense,” he says. “Americans have an almost obsessive drive to protect their personal privacy.”

Halamka, however, is already dreaming about future upgrades.

“If a chip could also serve as a GPS, reporting my location, or act as an emergency transponder, requesting rescue, I would definitely upgrade,” he says.

The AMA’s approval of this device went down without a whimper. Apparently, its passage wasn’t important enough for Americans to protest…

The ironic part of all this is that we have had one movie after another practically screaming to warn everyone of a potential technological tyranny. 1984, Brave New World, Minority Report, THX 1138, The Island, The Matrix— the list is endless.

And we are going full speed ahead. Just ask the British.

Update:

Seeing that this is a very serious subject, I thought I’d further clarify my comments above about the chip being related to the Mark of the Beast. The key thing in my understanding of this scripture is the willing surrender of the individual will to the Beast. That is, if someone sneaked the chip into your body unawares, I don’t think that means automatic damnation. I think it turns of the renouncing of Jesus the Christ.

That, however, is just my opinion. I think all Christians should be asking Jesus on this matter and take their direction straight from Him. This is far too important a topic for personal opinions to decide.