Whose Revenge?

I always was a moderate, where Barack Obama’s birth certificate was concerned.  From the time the “certificate of live birth” was presented in 2008, I never believed it was real.  I am just two years older than the president, and was born in the nearest state to Hawaii (California), so I hope I wasn’t being unreasonable to expect that his birth certificate would look a little bit like mine.  But that certificate didn’t look like mine at all.  All it had was the date of birth, the city, and the names and racial backgrounds of the parents; the latter is there because I understand one’s ancestry is a bigger deal in Hawaii than it is in other states.  The cartoon below, from a Filipino in Hawaii named Corky Trinidad, illustrates that point:

My birth certificate also had the name of the hospital, and the signatures of everyone involved except myself; none of that appeared on Obama’s certificate.  A more complete birth certificate was released in 2011, which had the missing data from the first one, but still I was suspicious, because the administration waited so long to show it, though they claimed they had nothing to hide.  By contrast, when questions arose about John McCain’s birth, he released his birth certificate without hesitation, and that was that.  Evidently some reporters were too dumb to remember that the Panama Canal Zone was part of the United States, as recently as 1999.

On the other hand, I did not feel a false birth certificate was grounds for impeachment, should it turn out that Obama was born abroad.  My reason was politics; with the Democrats in control of the Senate, I do not believe any attempt to remove Obama via impeachment will succeed.  Just remember what happened when it was tried on Bill Clinton, and Congress was Republican-controlled back then.  I always felt it would be better for everyone if Obama completed his term, was voted out of office in 2012, and like Ronald Reagan in 1981, Obama’s successor would begin working on undoing the damage he has done.

Finally, I was more concerned about the other records we don’t have from Obama’s life.  With all other presidents, we know trivial facts about what they did before going to the White House.  Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and had children by them, Abraham Lincoln was a rail splitter, and Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, to name a few.  But we can’t say anything like that about Obama.  The missing records include his Selective Service Registration, the grades and papers from the colleges he attended, scholarly articles published while in school, medical records, and baptismal records from the church he attended in Chicago.  Even many records of his attendance and voting in the Illinois State Senate are not available, prompting some to call the period from 1995 (when he first ran for the State Senate) to 2004 the “lost years.”  When it comes to dark horse presidents, Obama is the darkest of all, no pun intended.

Well, now Andrew Breitbart’s blog has released the booklet that came out in 1991 to promote the books of several authors, including a 29-year-old law student named Barack Obama.  Here Obama is introduced as a promising new author who was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”  This is the column in question:

And click here to read the Breitbart.com article, “The Vetting.”

Of course Obama’s supporters will say this is faked evidence.  For me the clincher is the reference to the New Kids On The Block, on the next page of the booklet.  Anybody who remembers 1991 will know how popular that band was back then.  I was working at Ticketmaster at the time, and I referred to phone calls about NKOTB as an “evergreen information request,” because I always got those calls, whether the band was on tour or not.

As with the birth certificates, I don’t think this by itself will end Obama’s presidency; it will just add to the weight of accumulated evidence against him, most of it having to do with his actions since becoming president.  What I’d like to know is who really released the booklet, and why.  Is this the bombshell Breitbart’s heirs threatened to throw out, when Breitbart died suddenly last month?  Or did the Clintons have something to do with this?  You know they weren’t happy about Obama defeating Hillary in 2008; I don’t think she will ever again have as good a chance of winning the Democratic nomination, or the presidency, as she had in that year.  Could this be the Clintons’ revenge?

There Is No God But God, and Christ Is His Son

A few years ago, I suggested that an Islamic Reformation might be the best way to end the War On Terror, because for the terrorists, it would take the wind out of the sails of their ideology. You can see what I wrote at http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/reform.html .  Well, the books mentioned in the article below look like the books that could do it.  They ask the kind of questions about Islam that liberal theologians have been asking about Christianity for the past two hundred years.

http://www.danielpipes.org/11280/uncovering-early-islam.

Back in the 1980s I read “Agent of Byzantium,” an alternate history by Harry Turtledove.  The story was set in the early 1300s, and the protagonist, Basil Argyros, is a secret agent for the Byzantine Empire.  Unlike the real world, in this story the Byzantine Empire was still going strong in the fourteenth century — and so was its main enemy, Zoroastrian Persia.  The difference was that in that world, Mohammed did not found Islam, but instead became St. Moamet, the greatest missionary since St. Paul.  St. Moamet ended his days in Spain, where he wrote many songs, the most popular of which was “There Is No God But God, and Christ Is His Son.”

Now the books Daniel Pipes talks about in the above article ask if Islam got started that way — as a Christian sect.  In the Middle Ages, Christian theologians did not see Islam as a new religion, but as a heresy, a bogus form of Christianity.  What if they were right?  And who was the “historical Mohammed?”  Is the historical account of him, as I put forth in Chapter 9 of my Middle Eastern history, accurate?  Did Mohammed perform any miracles, as the Hadiths (traditions) assert?  Or did Mohammed even exist at all?  Let’s see if such questions get Moslems thinking about their real place in the world.

A Palestinian Confession

I have been saying for years that Yasser Arafat was really an Egyptian; he was born in Cairo, to a family that lived in Egypt as far back as the mid-18th century. Now a Hamas leader admits that the Palestinians are really just Arabs.

And nearly ten years ago, a set of unanswerable questions about the history of Palestine was posted on the Internet.  You can see my copy of the quiz here.  Now this week, the Israeli comic strip “Dry Bones” has posted its own version of the quiz.  Read it and see if the questions stump you as badly as they stumped me.  I bet the author, Yaakov Kirschen, will give a Shmendrik award to those who pass the quiz.

Happy Contacts, Past and Future

Tonight marks the beginning of this year’s Passover, so Chag Sameach!  For those who missed it last year, here again is Google Exodus, the video that shows what the Exodus would have looked like with today’s cyber-technology:

On the other hand, if you would rather see the original story, here’s how the Exodus would have looked if you were there:

Now the Exodus is the story of first contact between God and most of the Israelites.  Before Moses, the only Israelites that knew God personally were the patriarchs, namely Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph.  Because of that, and because of some verses from the Book of Ezekiel (Ezek. 20:5-9), I believe that during the centuries between Joseph and Moses, most of the Israelites probably fell into the idolatry of worshipping Egyptian gods.  Click here to see some other comments I wrote about Moses and the Exodus in 2010.

If you’re a Star Trek fan, today is a day of first contacts, too.  According to Star Trek’s future history, fifty-one years from today (April 5, 2063), humans and Vulcans will first meet, when a Vulcan ship lands at Bozeman, Montana to meet Zefram Cochrane, the first man to travel faster than light.  Here’s a webpage about that First Contact Day.  And here’s a video showing that event, from the final scene of Star Trek 8:

Live Long and Prosper!

Sports Karma

When I last wrote about college basketball, I forgot to mention that tomorrow’s Final Four game is a classic grudge match, because it pits the University of Kentucky Wildcats against the University of Louisville Cardinals.  For Kentucky, I’m sure this game will be more important than the NCAA championship game, no matter who plays in it.

Because I consider Lexington my real home, I’ll be rooting for the ‘Cats, of course, but let’s show the right team spirit. In politics, it sends the wrong message to support a candidate because he/she is not the other candidate.  Remember what happened to the Republicans in 1996, and the Democrats in 2004.  During the long 2004 campaign, for instance, I was in a “battleground state” (Florida), but I never met a real John Kerry supporter.  Not one!  All the people I met who had a political opinion were either Bush supporters or Bush haters; I didn’t consider “Bush haters” to be Kerry supporters because if the Democrats had nominated a baboon to run against Bush, most of them would have voted for the monkey anyway.  And nobody knew what Kerry stood for; I don’t think even Kerry knew what he stood for, except to oppose whatever George W. Bush was for.

Coach John Calipari is saying the same thing could bite us in sports.  I have friends in Louisville who are for the ‘Cards, and after the game, I expect all of them will still be my friends, even if the Cardinals go on to win the championship.  So everybody, let’s just have a good time, okay?  The only other time during the year when Kentucky gets this much attention is when the horses race at the Kentucky Derby, and we want to make our state look as nice in the media as it is to those of us living there.  Click on the link below to read the rest of the coach’s comments.

Calipari Says Don’t Root Against Anyone, It Could Come Back to Bite You

What I Think About the Election (so far)

The safest bet I can make about this year’s presidential election is that unexpected things will happen.  In fact, they already have.  Did you see the “Flavor of the Month” business we have had since last summer, where every month a new Republican candidate rises to the front of the pack, only to be replaced a few weeks later?  I don’t remember that ever happening before.  In a normal election year, the GOP would have settled on one candidate by now.

Long-time readers will remember that last year, Herman Cain was my first choice for president.  Since he dropped out of the race, I have not been able to get very excited about the other candidates.  In terms of ideology, Rick Santorum’s views are closest to mine; we’re both neo-cons, after all.  However, Mitt Romney is the only remaining Republican who has been in the public spotlight for less than fourteen years; Santorum, Gingrich and Paul have been in Congress long enough to be considered “expired,” in my opinion.  Go to this piece I wrote four years ago, for more about presidential candidates and expiration dates.  Therefore Romney may be the only one who can beat Barack Obama, if this is a normal election year.

I say “normal” because 2008 was not a normal election; when I wrote about it in one of my history papers, I called it “An Election Like No Other.”  Obama broke a rule that had stood since 1800, by becoming the first Democrat to win without the South.  All previous Democratic winners, from Jefferson to Clinton, had carried at least four states from the former Confederacy.  Obama got just three of them (Florida, North Carolina and Virginia), and even if he had no Southern states, he would have won the election anyway, because he carried the entire North and half of the West.

Here’s the next pattern that could be broken:  the thirteen questions below, when answered, have predicted which party would win in every election since 1860.  This is from my Autopundit page.  The first five are “positive” questions, meaning that for every one that is answered yes, the party in power (the Democrats) gets one point:

1. Is the incumbent party’s candidate charismatic?  Yes, the media makes sure of it.
2. Did the current administration score a major success in military action or foreign policy?  I would say No, inasmuch as the Bin Laden raid, while it was a success, it wasn’t big enough to give him a jump in the polls for long.
3. Did the current president make major changes in domestic policy?  Unfortunately, Yes.
4. Is the incumbent running for re-election?  Yes.
5. Has economic growth over the past four years produced a Gross Domestic Product that grew by an average of at least 1% more than it did during the previous four?  Definitely No.

The other eight questions are “negatives.”  For each one that is answered no, the Democrats get one point:

6. Did the opposition nominate a war hero or charismatic candidate?  No.  In fact, over my lifetime, I think the only Eisenhower and Reagan were the only Republican candidates who were considered charismatic.
7. Is there a strong independent or third party candidate?  Too early to tell.  What will Donald Trump do?
8. Was there a major scandal in the current administration?  No.
9. Was there a major foreign or military reversal?  Not yet.
10. Was there an election year recession or depression?  Yes; in fact, it’s the same one we had in 2008.
11. Did the incumbent party win with less than 51% of the vote last time?  No.
12. Did the incumbent party go through a major battle for the nomination?  No.
13. Was there major social unrest?  Yes.  Whether you think of the Tea Party or the Occupy Wall Street movement, it doesn’t make the current administration look good.

Of the thirteen questions, seven are currently in Obama’s favor, four are against him, and two are toss-ups.  If either question #7 or #9 becomes a No, I predict Obama will be re-elected.  Otherwise, his Republican opponent will win.

Finally, this may count as a major scandal (see #8 above).  You probably heard last week about Obama making the Catholic Church his enemy, by announcing that Catholic universities and hospitals would have to pay for their patients/students who get birth control or abortions.  This not only offended Catholics, but most other Christians as well.  When he saw he had stirred up a hornet’s nest, he tried to backpedal by saying the new rules would not have to go into effect for a year or so.  Sorry Mr. President, but sin does not have a statute of limitations.  If this stays in the news, you will be a one-term president.  You would have been better off if you were in charge of a country that has a socialist tradition, but not a Christian one — like Albania.  For more about this story, click on the link below.

When Karl Marx Speaks, Obama Listens

Please Stay Home, Al Gore

We are coming up on the end of January.  So far we have had four months that were cold enough for snow, and during that time there were exactly two snowstorms.  My co-workers are starting to suggest that we’re having a mild winter because I brought milder weather with me from Kentucky.  I haven’t had to worry much about driving in the ice and snow, anyway.

However, yesterday I got another idea – we haven’t heard from Al Gore lately.  In recent years, whenever he made a speech on global warming, a terrible winter storm would strike somewhere in the country.  For example, he was in Washington, D.C., addressing Congress at this time in 2009, and we got the worst ice storm in Kentucky’s history on the very same day.  Is there any reason we blame the former vice president for that storm?  More than one global warming conference has been cancelled by these seasonal tempests, and it has happened often enough for the Urban Dictionary to give the phenomenon a name – “the Gore Effect.”  Myself, I feel that God is having fun at Gore’s expense, showing that He has more control over the weather than any politician does.  And God will do it again if anyone acts like a modern-day King Canute, by promising to make the oceans stop rising.  Wait a minute, didn’t Barack Obama promise that in 2008?

Mr. Vice President, if you are at home in Tennessee, waiting for the Superbowl or just enjoying the millions you have made over the past decade, please stay there.  We like it when the only concern we have during the winter is keeping warm, and here in New England, when winter storms come along, we get hit the hardest.

KV64

Speaking of objects more than three thousand years old (see the previous message), it was reported yesterday that another tomb was discovered in Egypt, at the famous Valley of the Kings.  This is the 64th tomb discovered in the valley so far, hence the name KV64 that archaeologists have given it.  It is the second tomb found there since the discovery of Tutankhamen’s burial place, 90 years ago.

Not everyone buried in the valley was a king; among the non-royal people buried there was Maiherpre (KV36), and Yuya and Tuya (KV46).  Now it looks like the occupant of this tomb was also non-royal.  The tomb was very small by the valley’s standards, just a vertical shaft and one room, but it contains a sarcophagus that appears to be undisturbed.  The name on the sarcophagus is Nehmes-Bastet, a singer in the great Temple of Karnak during the XXII dynasty, and the daughter of the high priest of Amen.  That means her family was probably the same one that rescued and relocated most of the royal mummies near the end of the XXI dynasty, after their tombs were robbed.  It also appears the tomb was reused; some artifacts in it suggest that it was originally carved out 400 years earlier, during the XVIII dynasty.

One of the blogs I read said that the tomb was probably discovered last spring, but it was kept secret because of all the unrest in Egypt at the time (remember the looting at other sites and in the Cairo Museum).  Now the Swiss archaeologists who excavated the tomb have announced their discovery because they plan to open the sarcophagus at the end of this week.  Here are some links if you want to read more:

New Archaeological Discovery at the Valley of the Kings

KV64 is the Tomb of Ni Hms Bastet

A Lost Tribe in Israel?

This morning our Internet Service Provider, Windstream, was down all over the country.  For me it was just an inconvenience.  I couldn’t check my e-mail, but I could still surf the Web, because my landlady uses Comcast for her ISP.  Leive, however, was virtually cut off from the world (we haven’t watched TV since 2009) until Windstream came back, around 1:30 PM.  Having an Internet connection may not be the most important thing in today’s world, but it ranks up there with air.

Because the temperature was around 18 degrees when I went to work, I had frost covering half my windshield.  At a traffic light I tried to clear it off by rolling down my window, reaching out, and dumping the contents of my water bottle on it.  What a dumb idea – it might have worked if it was hot water – but because the water was already cold, it froze instantly.  I had to pull into a driveway, get out, and scrape off the new ice before I could continue.  Forty years in Florida did not prepare me for life in colder climates!

In political news, you may have heard how Newt Gingrich caused all kinds of wailing when he called the Palestinians “an invented people.”  I’m inclined to agree, because of the questions on this page.  However, I’m not planning to endorse the former Speaker of the House, because I don’t think he can beat Obama.  Why?  Not only does he carry a lot of political baggage that makes him look bad, but he’s expired.  To see what I mean by that, read what I wrote about John McCain on January 31, 2008, where I called him and Ron Paul “expired” as well.  Newt was first elected to Congress in 1978, so the last presidential election where he had a good chance of winning was in 1992.  Michael Savage doesn’t think that Newt can win either, and has offered him one million dollars to drop out of the race.

Speaking of the Palestinians, on Sunday I saw an intriguing video from earlier this year, which announced that some Palestinians are secretly converting to Judaism.  They can’t do it openly, because Hamas and the PLO will kill them for sure if they know who converted, alas.  The main reason why they are doing it is because they have discovered that as many as 85 percent of them have Jewish ancestry; their forefathers were pressured to convert to Islam from the seventh century onward.  The second video was filmed in a Bedouin community that was mostly Jewish, until about 200 years ago, and the oldest members can remember some Jewish customs they used to practice, like lighting the Sabbath candles.

 

For me, this means two things.  First, the Palestinians insist that no Jews live in the areas they control, like Gaza and Ramallah, but they will never make “Palestine” completely Judenrein, if some of them are Jewish themselves.  Second, while we have been looking to Ethiopia, India, and other distant places for the Ten Lost Tribes, we may have one right under our noses – in Israel’s heartland.  And I have a feeling that later in this century, when the Islamists fail to deliver on their promises and Islam is totally discredited, the trickle of Palestinian conversions to Judaism will become a flood, as this page predicts.

Happy Thanksgiving 2011!

May everyone reading this have a most blessed holiday with family and friends!

In 1789, President George Washington issued his official Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, where he gave four good reasons for a nation to celebrate this kind of holiday.  All of them are still relevant today:

“It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.”

Finally, I have a short but funny video from The Red Green show.  In the past I have posted several videos from the fellow I call the “Canadian Tim Allen”; for today I particularly recommend the video I posted on December 4, 2010.  In today’s video he tells us exactly what he’s thankful for.  Give thanks and enjoy your feast!