Liveblogging the Apocalypse™

There’s a lot of bad stuff out there that is either getting short shrift, else, as usual, superficial and supercilious attention by our “professional” media.

We begin with Time Magazine‘s horrifically tabloid “youth” site — aimed at those too intellectually challenged to read People, evidently:

ANIMALS

Why Did Thousands of Birds Drop Dead in the Arkansas Sky?
By: WILLIAM LEE ADAMS (2 hours ago)
Topics: ANIMALS, ARKANSAS, BEEBE, BLACKBIRDS, DEAD BIRDS, DEAD BIRDS ARKANSAS, FALL FROM SKY, RED-WINGED, RIVER

New Year’s Day should be about turning over a new leaf. But for residents of Beebe, Arkansas, January 1, 2011 meant turning over thousands of bird carcasses that had fallen from the sky.

In scenes befitting an apocalyptic thriller, residents woke to find the corpses of at least 1,000 red-winged blackbirds strewn across their lawns, streets and rooftops. An aerial survey revealed that all the avian casualties dropped within a one-mile stretch of town. The bird remains were so concentrated that motorists passing through the area struggled to avoid crushing them.

(See the TIME photo essay, “Thousands of Birds Die on Louisiana’s Raccoon Island.”)

[...]

(Read about the German zoo that is attempting to re-orient a gay vulture.)

Theories to explain the sudden death of the blackbird flock have come thick and fast. Speaking to CNN Radio on January 2, Karen Rowe, an ornithologist for the AGFC, said that the incident isn’t that rare, and is often caused by a lightning strike or high-altitude hail. Initial examinations of the dead birds showed trauma, including head injury. Such trauma could have resulted from something contacting them in the air—or from impact with the ground.

[...]

(See the Top 10 Killer-Animal Movies.)

Officials speculated that fireworks set off by New Year’s revelers could have startled the birds from their roost, and caused them to die from stress….

(See the German shepherd puppy who got stuck in a wall.)*

[* Note that I have kept the imbecilic and pandering links to other dreck on the website intact (minus links). Gay vultures?!? GAY VULTURES!!?!?!? Good grief.]

Press Vulture (gender preference unknown)

Just how idiotic this is is pointed out by an eyewitness in the “comments” section:

JD @ 06:40:45
[Name and address withheld by HVS]

First of all, the birds started falling around 10PM. I was there. Saying that they fell because of stress related to fireworks is the only explanation? Come on! If that was true more than one species of birds would have died. And also how come we don’t get this same effect on the 4th of July? Fireworks started going off closer to midnight, not at 10. Lightning strike or high-altitude hail? What does an ornithologist know about weather? Since I was there, I can say that I didn’t see any sort of lighting all day. Even the local Meterologists have all said that its are rare possibility because no storm was picked up by radar except for the tornados in the northern part of the state. Plus, more than one species would have died, not just one.

How come one species of birds died just like one species of fish have died? It makes sense that more species would have turned up dead by now.

Ah, but JD presumes that rational thought is involved in this.

And has carried out a preliminary, RATIONAL analysis. JD has asked the next question, rather than mindlessly accepting whatever cockamamie explanation has been floated by local yokel authorities to forestall panic in the streets and mass conversion to satanic cults.

Rather than admit that it is mysterious (and avian autopsies will begin today, it is reported), someone comes up with a glib explanation and someone else pooh-poohs it. Now, it is reported that 4,000 to 5,000 blackbirds died on New Year’s Eve, and that 100,000 dead fish (also one species) washed up dead in a nearby river. The Guardian (UK) snarks:

In a devoutly Christian state such as Arkansas, it’s a sequence of events that could get residents leafing through the Book of Revelation for portents: anything up to 5,000 blackbirds fall dead from the sky, and then 100,000 fish wash up along a river.

Environmental officials, however, insist they expect to find scientific explanations for the Biblical-seeming phenomena.

Isn’t that just precious?

[Latebreaking: even the New York Times has now picked up on the story, which will be published on page A-11 of tomorrow's edition.]

The point of unexplained phenomena is that they are unexplained, and searching for the explanation is generally a wise choice. When thousands of birds fall out of the skies, and hundreds of thousands of fish die something sure as hell happened. The hubris of media and “officials” and “experts” is that they refuse to accept that one shouldn’t make judgments until one has a reasonable number of facts. Is it an important story or not?

WE DON’T KNOW.

But, as JD did, we MIGHT try to exclude some possibilities, and the “fireworks” thing still sounds somewhat absurd. But MSNBC has been reporting it this evening, as you know, something funny, and with the obligatory “apocalypse” snark and the “fireworks” theory.

If nothing else, we remain silly and superstitious little apes. Yes: it’s interesting. No: there isn’t an answer, yet. No: it’s not appropriate to relegate it to asinine puns and arched eyebrows.

On the other hand, if one believes in omens, the bombing of the Church in Alexandria, Egypt on New Year’s Day is a very ugly one.

Some might consider it a bit of payback for the flaying of Hypatia and the burning of the Library of Alexandria by Christians, but that would miss the point.

Hypatia

Here’s the point: Pamela Geller and the New York Post are probably just as much responsible for that bombing as al Qaeda.

What?

You heard me.

From USA Today:

Does Egypt bomb blast signal rising ‘Christianophobia?’
Jan 03, 2011 08:38 AM
By Ahmed Ali, Associated Press
Islamophobia, a sadly familiar term, and now has a parallel — “Christianophobia”

The bomb attack that killed 21 Christians leaving Mass in Egypt “offends God and all of humanity,” says Pope Benedict XVI, who is painfully aware of and dismayed by attacks on Christians around the globe.

President Obama condemned both the attack in Egypt and an earlier one that killed 20 in a marketplace in largely Muslim Nigeria. Obama pointed out that Muslims as well as Christians were killed over New Year’s weekend, although the terrorism in Egypt was directly aimed at people at prayer.

[...]

Is faith under fire — Christian or Muslim — worrying you? Do efforts such as the one by Oklahoma voters to ban Sharia law (currently stalled in the courts) have a parallel with restrictions on Christianity elsewhere?

And, quoting somebody else’s blog, this gets dropped in:

This handy map shows where the state forbids the practice of Christianity (red) and where violence against Christians is endemic (orange).

Handy.

You begin to see what I’m talking about?

By ginning up their outrage at Islam, Geller and Murdoch’s various organs (mostly transplants harvested from orphans in Rio de Janeiro, one suspects) have managed to create an impression of virulent anti-Muslim sentiments in the American mainstream … IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE WATCHING FROM ELSEWHERE.

And they showed the Western achilles heel: that our tolerance isn’t REALLY tolerance at all.

I realize that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t give a shit. He sells the same phony sex scandals and branded bullshit patriotism in three variants to three different nations that all made the mistake of speaking English. But we Americans have seemingly shown the world that our vaunted tolerance and inclusiveness are a sad and tragic sham, and that we can be goaded into making stupid and nation-crippling mistakes merely by pissing us off.

Now, this may or may not be the case. I believe that tolerance is the ONLY way to forestall a bloodbath that will last for decades. But the impression that has been gained by those who adhere to Osama bin Laden’s (RIP) philosophy is clearly that attacking Christians, per se, is the way to ignite a holy war against Western depravity or infidel-ness or whatever.

Fine: we EXPECT bloodthirsty fanatics to behave like bloodthirsty fanatics. But never mistake evil for stupidity. The CIA did train them, after all — thinking that they were teaching them to fight Russkie COMMUNISTS and socialists, of course.

But in attempting to win an election by playing the usual race and xenophobia cards that the old Dixiecrats love so much (they used to be Democrats, but now, having changed parties, they run the GOP), the Rupert Murdochian Reicht has handed al Qaeda the lever to use as a wedge, and shown just where the crack in the wall is to pry at.

There are one billion Muslims and about another billion Christians. If that split can be enacted, we’re looking at another round of religious wars to rival the Crusades, the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War, put together.

And I can see the snowball starting to roll at the top of the hill. The Pope just poured his little cup of Holy Gasoline on the fire, and the USA Today columnist has added her widow’s mite of napalm.

The President attempted to damp the fires of rage and passion, but this only gave our rabid righties the ammunition they needed to mindlessly attack. From David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine (if a ‘magazine’ can be said to exist sans paper):

Denying the Jihad Against Christians
Posted by Robert Spencer on Jan 3rd, 2011

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran (Regnery), and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).

[Hey, that's how it OPENS. Emphasis added.]

An Islamic jihad-martyrdom suicide bomber murdered twenty-two people and wounded eighty more at the Coptic Christian Church of the Saints in Alexandria, Egypt on New Year’s Eve. Predictably enough, this mass murder has not resulted in any worldwide revulsion against Islamic jihadists, or general recognition of how Islamic supremacists and jihadists are persecuting Christians not only in Egypt, but in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, and elsewhere also. Instead, it has brought only new and imaginative twists on the usual evasion, obfuscation, denial and finger-pointing that generally follow jihad attacks.  Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was one of the first to muddy the waters …

[...]

But the facts didn’t stop Barack Obama, either. Obama’s statement was better than Mubarak’s in that he acknowledged that “the perpetrators of this attack were clearly targeting Christian worshipers.” However, he also claimed that the attack killed and injured people “from both the Christian and Muslim communities.” No Muslims were actually killed or injured in the attack. And if the perpetrators (unnamed by Obama) were indeed “clearly targeting Christian worshipers,” what was Obama’s point in going out of his way to say that Muslims were hurt also? Did that claim make the crime more heinous in his eyes? Or did he think that it would mitigate the harsh reality of the fact that believing Muslims, acting in the name of Islam, were the anonymous perpetrators that he dared not name?

Great call there, dude. If I ever do a follow up to “George W. Bush, Agent of al Qaeda” I’ll be sure to add you in. Mr. Spencer has thus far advanced al Qaeda’s cause far in excess of his pitiful peckerwood of a poisoned pen.

But I guess hate is like nicotine: incredibly addicting and pleasurable to the addict, and incredibly easy to rationalize.

Thousands of blackbirds falling from the skies is spooky stuff. Hundreds of thousands of dead fish is kind of eerie. And the bombing of a Christian church in Egypt is an horrific tragedy.

But the apocalypse isn’t riding in with those New Year’s Day events.

It’s riding in on the new Klan mentality of Americans. It’s riding in the ancient paranoias and prejudices that are being exploited by literal terrorists to whip up the same fear and lunacy that led us into two land wars in Asia (despite having been clearly warned in The Princess Bride) and a nearly bankrupt government saddled with a half-trillion-dollar-a-year war machine.

But the snowball is rolling down the hill, and that’s scarier than any four horsemen.

Next up: One third of the seas turn to blood.

Courage.