The Mound of Sound

With a deranged zealotry that would make a diehard Wahabist jealous, some American fundamentalists are floating the image of Obama as the Anti-Christ of their fondest dreams. From the Times of London:

“Really. Just because their own candidate is a teeny bit dull, that’s no reason for US republicans to start linking poor old Obama to the feared coming of the Antichrist. But Hal Lindsey, a leading figure in U.S. apocalyptic Christian circles,has written on WorldNetDaily that Obama’s recent overseas tour blazed a trail that the Antichrist was sure to follow. Faithworld explains that in apocalyptic circles “Antichrist is often portrayed as the leader of a world government who will probably emerge from the United Nations or some other multilateral institution loathed by the right.

“… the Bible says that such a leader (the Antichrist) will soon make his appearance on the scene. It won’t be Barack Obama, but Obama’s world tour provided a foretaste of the reception he can expect to receive,” wrote Lindsey,“He will probably also stand in some European capital, addressing the people of the world and telling them that he is the one that they have been waiting for. And he can expect as wildly enthusiastic a greeting as Obama got in Berlin.”

On the other hand, nowhere that I can find in the Apocalypse mentions that the Beast or Antichrist wears natty tailored suits and a grin. It takes a bit of a stretch to see Obama as “a beast coming up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten diadems, and upon his heads names of blasphemy. … and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion.”‘

So the born-again weasels aren’t exactly saying Obama is the Anti-Christ, just that he looks like the evildoer.

Hal Lindsey may be shrewdly dancing around the issue but his point will undoubtedly strike a chord with the like minded.

Most political scandals are based on “anonymous sources.” This one comes via a couple of very prominent sources – Nigel Inkster, former assistant director of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, and Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence.

The Times Online reports that both Inkster and Dearlove have confirmed American author Ron Suskind’s account that, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003, Tony Blair sent a top spy to the Middle East who reported back that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The information was relayed to the White House where it was summarily dismissed:

Suskind’s book, The Way of the World, claims, “…that the former Prime Minister sent a top British spy to the Middle East in 2003 — three months before the invasion — to dig up enough intelligence to avoid war but that President Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, dismissed any claims or possible evidence that would stop military action.

In [the book], the Pulitzer prize-winning author Ron Suskind also claimed that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a backdated, handwritten letter purportedly from the head of Iraqi Intelligence to Saddam. The letter, which came to light nine months after the invasion, was meant to demonstrate a link between the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda.

The forgery, adamantly denied by the White House, was passed to a British journalist in Baghdad and written about as if genuine by The Sunday Telegraph on December 14, 2003. The article received significant attention in the US and provided the White House with a new rationale for the invasion, Suskind claimed. The White House called the allegation absurd.

Suskind said that at the beginning of 2003 MI6 sent one of its top agents, Michael Shipster, to the region. Mr Shipster held secret meetings in Jordan with Tahir Jalil Habbush, the head of Iraqi Intelligence. The meetings were confirmed by Nigel Inkster, former assistant director of MI6.

Mr Habbush was put on the White House’s list of most-wanted Iraqis but according to Suskind he was paid by the CIA in October 2003 to write the forged letter to Saddam, dated July 1, 2001, saying that the putative September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq. This was the letter publicised in The Sunday Telegraph.”

So what is the significance of these revelations? Most likely it’ll be little to none. What this information does is merely confirm the steadily growing body of evidence that the conquest of Iraq was a war crime, an entirely illegal war of aggression, quite wilfully perpetrated by a gang of radicals who used every contrivance at their disposal to manufacture justifications for their acts.

Speaking of war crimes, a panel of six anonymous US military officers has unanimously found Gitmo inmate Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s one-time chauffeur, of providing material support for terrorism. The jurors, who may not be identified, reached their career-saving verdict following a closed trial that featured secret evidence.

My Dad was born on a small farm in southwestern Ontario. He was born in the farmhouse, on the kitchen table to be exact. No hospital, no birthing classes, none of that stuff we now take as absolutely essential.

My Dad grew up in a house where you pumped your water, by hand. Heat came from a wood stove, light from coal oil lamps. No electricity, no indoor plumbing. Certainly no telephone. When those things arrived, they were revolutionary. His life was a succession of revolutionary advances.

He remembered quite clearly his father’s first car, a revolutionary advance over the horse drawn wagon. He remembered quite clearly seeing his first airplane and his first airplane ride at a county fair. He remembered the ice box giving way to the electric refrigerator. Revolutionary.

In the span of his lifetime almost everything changed as revolution begat revolution. The way we produced and distributed food changed. We became estranged from the farm and umbilically connected to the grocery store. The way we travelled and travel itself underwent revolutionary change. The way we communicated was a succession of quantum advances. Relationships among individuals, with communities, societies and governments were radically transformed.

My Dad was born into a world with few creature comforts. In several respects the world at his birth more closely resembled the world of previous centuries than the world of today, just decades later. His was a primarily agrarian society. Industrialization had taken hold but the fruits of it had barely reached the stage of mass consumption. He was born long before the world population first reached 2-billion.

The great majority of all the scientific developments in the history of mankind occurred during my Dad’s lifetime. Medical breakthroughs led to the most massive expansion of longevity in man’s history. Mechanization was brought down to the level of the individual to the point of a near total dependency on everything from computers to cellular phones, lawnmowers to power tools to kitchen appliances.

Now these advances seem to be running out of steam or maybe it’s just that their inevitable side-effects and repercussions are beginning to catch up. Now we stand poised to reap the whirlwind of our revolutionary advances and excesses – overpopulation, pollution, desertification, species extinction, resource exhaustion and the depletion of renewables, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and, of course, global warming.

In my Dad’s lifetime we developed the means to create truly existential threats. Nuclear Armageddon, cataclysmic global warming. We have perched ourselves at the edge of this precipice and we did it without thinking, almost inadvertently. We have abruptly come to realize that the mantra of growth that we embraced for so long may have failed us. The challenge for the coming decades may be to make sense of all these revolutionary changes and retake the control over our lives that we surrendered to them.

It’s not easy to believe that global warming is a hoax or just bad science. It takes a lot of hard work not to get it and that chore is getting harder by the day. However, if you’re willing to shoulder this Herculean burden, here are a few tips to help you on your way.

1. Don’t Look Up. This is the most important rule. Look down and only down. Don’t look up and, in particular, don’t look around. You’ll need to put on the blinders and stuff your ears with cotton if you’re to have any hope of avoiding the contamination of legitimate science and the rapidly mounting research on global warming.

If you stare directly at your feet you’ll probably find no discernible evidence whatsoever of global warming. But, be careful – you might not be so lucky if you look up, even briefly. If you look up you might get a glimpse of those places where global warming is already going full bore – places like central Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, the American south, most of Australia and Europe and Asia. You don’t want to look at those places and you really don’t want to even take a quick peek at the Arctic.

2. Don’t Be Too Fussy. Another important rule. There are people and organizations out there that’ll tell you what you want to hear – that the whole global warming thing is a crock or a conspiracy by the worldwide scientific community. They will assure you that the science is inconclusive or that greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the problem or that this has all happened before or even that we’re entering an era of global cooling. They’ll fill your mind with whatever they can manage to pack in there but – and remember this – don’t be too fussy about what they’re telling you or who it’s coming from.

Aren’t you getting tired of all this “peer review” nonsense? Truth is truth after all, whether it’s peer reviewed or not. Just because the experts you want to hear can’t come up with any research that’s actually been reviewed (i.e. “tested”) by other experts in their field doesn’t mean that they’re giving you a big load of hooey. Remember, after all, that global conspiracy by the scientific community.

Don’t waste your time looking into the background of these experts. Just because they previously worked for Big Tobacco in spreading doubt about the link between cigarettes and cancer and just because they now take funding from Big Oil to spread doubt about the link between fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, that’s sheer coincidence. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

3. Stand Your Ground. Sooner or later you’ll be pressured by someone from the Looney Left – and that includes all governments and their militaries, all national institutes of science, most industries, the environmentalists, you know, the entire “fringe” group – to learn a bit about anthropogenic global warming by reading the latest research and studies and environmental news. Don’t do it. They’re only trying to knock you off balance.

Stick with Fox News or NewsMax or the open mouth talk shows – the lower the better. They’ll feed you their message until you can’t hear any more. If they can’t spin something away, they’ll just make something up. Either way, you’ll get what you were looking for.

4. Be Strong. These past ten years have been tough on Denialists. Truth alone has taken a huge toll on their ranks. Many of the mere “doubters” have already defected leaving only the hard core deniers to man the barricades. The True Unbelievers now tend to be the shills and the cranks but, hey, everyone is entitled to his opinion, eh?

So hang tough, the next decade promises to be so much harder than the last one.