I watched the “Special Investigations Unit” tonight on the CNN - Christiane Amanpour’s piece “Ahmadinejad: Soldier of God”, she interviewed an imam (or some other religious functionary) at a place called the “Bright Future Institute”, a Shi’a think-tank expressly set up to divine the future arrival (or rather, revelation from his 1200-year old hiding spell) of the imam Mohammed al-Hassan Mahdi.

My question is: Could Islam, and in particular, Shi’a Islam, set the stage for the rise of the end-time final Antichrist prophesied in the Bible, along with becoming the Mystery of Iniquity — the end-time mystery religion that will deceive all but those Christians who completely trust in Christ?
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h/t to Dan Riehl :

Looks like Bill Richardson has gotten his vibes from Denny “Whatzisneck” Kucinich and Cindy “Peace-at-all-costs-even-death-Mama” Sheehan, and has donned a tinfoil hat that even Ron Paul might envy. That’s right, calling for “ALL TROOPS OUT”, with all the flair of the last helicopter chugging slowly upwards at its max payload, as hapless Iraqis swarm the embassy in scenes rosily reminiscent of Saigon in 1975.

As Dan Riehl suggests, he might be pulling the plug on his “nice guy” face to his campaign thus far. But, Riehl also thinks that Richardson - while certainly lacking firepower to pull through the primary in the #1 slot, he might make a good VP (for Hitlary) instead of Obama.

I’ll have to disagree that Richardson is positioning himself here as a possible VP - any less than Obama has a shot (see also Riehl’s “no two-glass ceiling rule”). The man’s populist riff is going to alienate him from the center-left with a few extra hooks approach to Big Tent Democratic campaigning Hitlary and Pony are doing.

I’m trying to cipher out though, what looks like a very sharp swing toward Lefty Loony Land. There’s the previously mentioned “ALL TROOPS OUT” (gotta be in all caps now) thing, which has been mauled by both Congress and the POTUS in a handful of iterations, and then his embracing of sanctions and diplomatic pressure to get Ahmadinejad and/or the Ayatollahs to play nice and stop non-working on their non-nuclear weapons non-program.

Ah yes, sanctions. We all remember how fast those made Saddam cave in on his foreign policies we “weally, weally disagweed with”.

No doubt he means it too, being a diplomat sometime during his career. As quoted from his campaign site:

“With sanctions for bad behavior and economic benefits and security guarantees as rewards for good behavior, we can strengthen Iranian moderates and pragmatists and integrate Iran into the community of peaceful nations…”

Ummm. Sure… and I’m willing to bet that the moderates we are thinking of, are Shah-loyalists and reactionaries in the minds of the Revolutionary Islamic Gov’t of Iran, and are well observed and/or silenced by the Quds Force if they get too uppity. But while I do think they understand overwhelming military might, and the ruination of their nation as an incentive to stall for time — treading ever so carefully — they’d LAUGH themselves into ruptured spleens if we suddenly reversed course and went back to status quo antebellum and scrimped and begged for them to “pwease don’t make any nucwear weapons, pwetty pwease?” through UN channels.

Perhaps he is trying to suction up the loose ends of those dissatisfied Kos Kidz, MoveOn.org, MyDD, and other chronic ultra-lefties who are starting to see that Obama’s chances are growing slimmer, and that Jon Edwards’ and Frau Hitlary’s shifting all over the map (except of course, to the far left of the Kossack Oblast)… all but ensuring that those two will be some combination of VP/Presidential team.

Will the far left Krazy McMoonbats stick with him? Is there any hope they can carry him, along with whatever moderate Dems (and I dare doubt that any Blue Dogs will be barking up his tree) might flock to him? It might even stir up the fringes enough to make the man consider an independent run once the Hitlary/Edwards ticket is cinched 14months hence*.

If that happens, look for nice “Third Candidate Siphon” to draw enough Dem votes off of Hitlary to let Fred! have a decent margin for victory.

This, I’d like to see.

S0… New York’s Governor Elliot Spitzer has lifted the “proof of residency” requirements that had been enacted under the previous (Pataki) administration, which will make it very much easier for immigrants to get driver licenses - regardless of status.

I wonder now… how many people could conceivably get licenses - and thereby, “legitimacy” (since a driver license is one of the most frequently presented forms of photo ID) toward accomplishing other business in our country, for things like gaining admission to pilot training programs, or renting large cargo vans?

Granted, the convergence of large numbers of aliens of unknown (and unquestioned) legal residency status of getting a driver license and renting cargo vans or attending pilot school is probably quite small: so small in fact, that perhaps only 18-20 of these aliens at particular time might have also taken advantage of loosened controls on aliens’ access to credentials normally reserved for citizens and resident aliens with valid visas or other legal status.

Ya know, just like those 19 kind, well-mannered young Saudi men who volunteered their flying experience to help the pilots and aircrews of at least four airliners take a break and play some pinochle back about six years ago this September.

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SPECIAL NOTE:
If perchance you are not a reader of Harry Turtledove’s works, particularly the so-called “Southern Victory” series (also known unofficially as “Timeline-191″) — this post will have little meaning for you. The series is actually a collection of two trilogies, a tetralogy, and a stand-alone “prequel” that spans from 1861-1945 in an alternate timeline where the Southern Confederacy (hereinafter: CSA) wins the Civil War and a follow-on war to it a generation later… with rather intriguing analogues and twists in the lives of numerous “point of view characters”, some of whom span several generations.

It is an awful lot of reading, and Turtledove’s writing style can get a bit repetitive as well as a touch didactic (he is a history professor, after all)… and as I started at the tail end of the series (and am reading the “back story even now) from which most of this post can be understood - the last tetralogy called “Settling Accounts”.

For the full-blown spoiler-fest at Wikipedia, go here.

SPOILERS ABOUND FROM THIS POINT FORWARD!

I think that balance of power for the post-CSA world will initially be pretty simple:

In North America, The USA pretty much has everything locked down from its border with Russia (at Alaska Oblast) down to whatever state Mexico finds herself in. Texas is a nominally independent Republic, having what may yet turn out to be a Faustian deal with the USA for it not getting completely pummeled by the overwhelmingly angry, powerful, and nuclear (here called “superbombs”) armed US Army.

The CSA is pretty much terminated… (more…)

I was probably smacking my head against the wall to hard trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my use of the Phoogle code (a very nifty PHP script which makes use of the Google Maps API) when I finally got around to moving a site I’ve been working on to its place on a production server - hosted on GoDaddy.com.

Needless to say, their tech support folks are less than terribly helpful, as they pointed out that Phoogle’s file_get_contents($apiURL.urlencode($address)); function, which calls out to the Google Maps web service, is not permitted on GoDaddy’s hosts. Tough cookies on that.

This makes a certain amount of sense from a security standpoint - having site (user) accessing and running remote scripts through the (GoDaddy’s) host could open doors to all sorts of unfriendly riff-raff who might want to do not-so-nice things.

The GoDaddy support guy gave me some workaround that involved using a proxy server for HTTPS (not particularly needed, and the workaround gave me headaches just looking at it — and that said, I may need to consider any future choice to host a site with them again - for reasons not related to the sensible-ness of the handling the security issue this way).

Anyways, I turned to my good friend, Google Search…

… which after a few hours of parsing the tech blogs and odd mailing list weirdness that it can turn up, such as helpful and well meaning folks telling the poor frustrated sod trying to get his Phoogle on a file_get_contents() shunning host to simply edit his web.config or php.config file with this or that tweak — yes, I’m sure that’s fine on my personal development box, but I suffer little delusions of getting within a bargepole’s length of accessing anything that looks like a .config file on my mass-marketed web host.

Eventually, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, Google ‘fessed up this link to Alex Hillman’s Development blog, dangerouslyawesome.

Mr. Tillman’s workaround proved to not induce any migraines, because it replaced one line of code (the file_get_contents() function) with seven lines of somewhat awe-inspiring and imposing cURL functions.

It looked like this:


$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 0; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $apiURL.urlencode($address));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$addressData = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);


Apparently this was originally designed to work with DreamHost… but it works on the GoDaddy host all the same.

I hope this helps someone else, as the power of the Interwebs propagates this about the Infotainment Super-Duper-Highway… as I sure do hate seeing other folks leave code-induced brainstains on the side of the walls.

Some 500-odd years ago, a man by the name of Johann Walther - a disciple who followed Jesus after the pattern of Martin Luther - penned the words to an old church song:

(Johann Walther, 1496-1570)

A very rough and loose interpretation (my German is extremely rusty, much less any good in Medieval German of Martin Luther’s time. As such, this more of my interpretation than a literal word-for-word go of it.

Therefore, if anybody reading this is more fluent than I, then I shall kindly accept any correction you might offer) of this follows:

And so, a nice song, which was later co-opted in the aftermath of the Thirty-Years War to implore the various and often fractious German dukedoms and principalities and the Hansa Free Cities to unite as Germans against the multiple foreign threats that seemed to rampage through the patchwork collection of states making up the Holy Roman Empire (in a state of decline at that time).

Despite some of its weaknesses, it has a question and a lesson to offer us - even if it didn’t directly come into conflict with Islam as its contemporary, the Bzantines did — and much the same as the American Colonies did, when Benjamin Franklin drew the famous “Unite or Die” sketch of the snake cut into numerous parts.

How long shall we neglect God’s words and honour sin, and uphold those in esteem who fabricate lies as their stock in trade… and fail to wake up as a single nation, hold those in political authority accountable, and unite against the domestic and foreign threat of Islamism and the political bodies and persons who would sell our heritage and birthright, even our very lives, to the Islamist slavers for their continued power in the present regime, or that which would replace it under the dark, repressive pall of Sha’ria ?