The Thomas Chronicles

This happened in my hometown of Houston, Texas. Apparently, some Islamic group called the Book of Signs Foundation is distributing Islamic Korans on the doormats and doorknobs of people’s homes.

So far, the group claims to have disseminated 30,000 Korans throughout Houston and some Houstonians are none to happy about it.

One resident said, “If we went into a Muslim country and left a Bible, we would be in prison and then decapitated a few years later.”

The Foxnews reported that these Korans were “targeting neighborhoods believed to be most receptive of the Quran or in need of a better understanding of Islam.”

“In need of better understanding“?

Perhaps the Muslim group, Book of Signs Foundation, has a somewhat limited understanding of Texans.

I know many Houstonians take an indifferent or a dim view of Mormons riding around their bikes with black slacks and black ties while distributing their Book of Mormons.

With this in mind, I don’t think they would take well to the distribution of a book that calls on every Muslim to kill infidels, Jews or else make them submit to Islam.

Maybe I’m off here but I think that was a tremendous waste of paper.

I’d rather not see the latest in the Batman movies. I’ve been a fan of the Batman movies ever since the first Tim Burton movie back in 1989. I’ve even checked into the comicbooks from time to time despite (or because of) Frank Miller’s psychotic rendition.

But this is one Batman movie is not what I had in mind as a good time for one overwhelming reason. The death of Heath Ledger.

I believe this role ultimately killed him and I don’t see how anyone can rationalize it. He said the role got under his skin. The sociopathic madman in the Joker got inside him when he played that role, haunted him, refused to let him sleep, as though the evil he portrayed latched onto him.

Heath Ledger described his sleepless nights and mental exhaustion as he wrestled with his role as the “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic” Joker in the new Batman film.

He died overdosing on sleeping pills.

I know there are some who say they’re going to see this movie in honor of Ledger, but I think it’s darn close to morbid.

… to be entertained by the movie that killed Heath Ledger— kind of like laughing over a man’s grave, there’s just something not right about it…

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…

Here are a couple of quotes from the book I’m reading:

“These days, people spent too much time striving to understand their feelings—and then ended up with none that were genuine.”

Dialog quote:

“Didn’t you say civilization is as fragile as glass?”

“Maybe it’s worse than that,” she said. “Maybe it’s a mirage.”

“There are always those who’d like to turn out the lights. So far we’ve been lucky. They’ve always just been shy of a majority.”

She turned from the view as if it pained her. “Are we safe here?”

“No.”

“I mean for just a little while?”

“No. Not even for a little while.”

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?