Dinosaur Hospital

I like this photo of Reagan and I’m going to use it whenever possible.

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This is my mash-up of Bush and Obama. I was aiming for something a little more disturbing than the popular versions I’ve seen floating around the Internet. I, uh, I think I got it.

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Flowcharts are pretty trendy right now, so I made one.

Poor ol’ Mahmoud, it probably helps with the stress.

Today I got my first Mac. I was delighted to discover that it shipped with Apache and PHP5. So, I spent some time getting MySQL and PHPMyAdmin working on the machine. All of that hummed along at a steady pace where I easily came across the answers to my questions. Then, the snag. I had downloaded the entire blog to my computer and it wasn’t working. I recognized the problem as some sort of .htaccess issue early enough but was unable to find the exact answer to my problem.  I dug around for a while before I found anything even close to the solution that I needed. Several blogs list out multiple steps to enable OSX to allow .htaccess mod_rewrite to happen.

They were all wrong.

My /etc/apache2/users/user.conf looked like this:

<Directory "/Users/user/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

The only file you have to change to get mod_rewrite working is this one. So, open user.conf:

sudo pico /etc/apache2/users/user.conf

Make it like this:

<Directory "/Users/user/Sites/">
Options All
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Then you restart Apache:

sudo apachectl restart

And you’re all done. Hopefully this will help somebody.

If you haven’t seen this popular video yet, here it is:

My response to this video is meant to function in tandem with Tiny Frog’s examination of the statistics and Snope’s review of the techniques used in the video to elicit a specific response from the viewer. I’ve only skimmed these articles, primarily for assurance that mine differs, so I won’t guarantee their content is flawless.

Let’s begin, with minutes and seconds noted.

00:40 “According to research, in order for a culture to maintain itself for more than 25 years there must be a fertility rate of 2.11 children per family. With anything less the culture will decline historically no culture has ever reversed a 1.9 fertility rate. 1.3 – impossible to reverse because it takes 80-100 years to correct itself and there is no economic model that can sustain a culture during that time.”

Which research? There are no sources mentioned in the video yet.

01:30 Here a citation rears its head. It’s this article by Ed Vitagliango entitled “Europe’s Chastisement? — How the Abandonment of Christianity May Be Leading to Disaster.” Since the title is detrimental to the overall veracity of the claims, I didn’t read the entire article. I merely confirmed that the information the video quotes exists. Vitagliango quotes many people and ultimately no sources are cited.

02:00 A river of depressing fertility rates in Europe crowd the screen. The video cites Williamson, whom I will address a little later.

02:18 The narrator delivers a nugget, “historical research tells us…” Well, good for the research. Research apparently so historical it doesn’t need citation.

02:25 A humorous shift manifests in the narrator’s tone when mentioning, “Immigration, Islamic immigration.”

02:50 The citation reads “Bryan J. Williamson – Global Jihad: Lifting the Veil on Islam”, the most cited source in the video. Bryan J Williamson is a man without a Wikipedia page and a Google search for the title of this book or report returns mostly people commenting on how they can’t find anything on him. However, I did find the book or report, available at Virgin Mary’s Bayside Prophecies Store for five dollars. In the brief description Communism is tied with Nazism which is tied again to “fundamentalist Islam” (this is again tied to the Islamic Revolution, which is a complicated claim and I doubt this pamphlet will cover it adequately).

All of that aside, France does not record race, ethnicity or religion in their census. So the source of these numbers isn’t the government and is apparently an almost-secret memo released through an obscure store on the Internet.

More or less, the next minute is consumed with information pulled from Williamson.

03:47 At last another source but I can’t quite make it out. Looks like “From blog site al-Farram” but I can’t read the URL they list. I can see that the post was in the section “photos” though. I envision someone holding a sign at a rally stating that “50% of all newborns are Muslim.”

03:57 Another switch of source for the section on Russia. I can’t read the source at all but at least it’s a new one.

04:11 Now the video cites the “The Brussels Journal – The Voice of Conservatism in Europe.” The search on their site was malfunctioning (some pagination problem) so I couldn’t find the “25%” used in the video. I did find this article, named “The Rape of Europe” (which I hope is not an allusion to this) where Europeans are encouraged to emigrate (to Australia?) in order to escape the Muslims, which are referred to as a plague. This messy business is accomplished entirely through quoting “experts.” It might be worth noting their featured book is “Defeating Eurabia” and for some reason they host American conservative advertisements. Also The Brussels Journal is in English, entirely.

04:39 The source here is the “Germany Federal Statistics Office.” On their site I couldn’t find the quote from the video. Par for the course so far. Though I’m not sure I searched too thoroughly on this one.

05:05 It looks like this quote by al-Gaddafi is real. Here are some other quotes from the esteemed Libyan “Leader.”

“I have nothing but scorn for the notion of an Islamic bomb. There is no such thing as an Islamic bomb or a Christian bomb. Any such weapon is a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons. This is in line with our definition of—and opposition to—terrorism.”

“I’ve got two idols in my life — President Lincoln and Dr. Sun Yat-sen.”

“The black people’s struggle has vanquished racism. It was God who created colour. Today Obama, a son of Kenya, a son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America.”

So, he’s a bit strange but doesn’t seem likely to plot an Islamic takeover of Europe. Additionally he is not qualified to issue a fatwa of the caliber necessary to initiate an invasion. Though, someone should look into the connection between al-Gaddafi’s pro-Islamism and pro-Obama-ism.

05:23 Once again, no sources.

05:34 Mark Steyn is the source cited here. The paper they quote does exist and the fertility rate they pull out is actually in the paper. Sadly, though, Steyn cites no sources. The immigration figures are in Steyn’s paper too, but no denotation as to from where these immigrants came. Are we to assume they all come from Islamic countries?

06:00 Bryan J Williamson is quoted again for fertility rate in America, from the same publication. Supposedly “Latino immigrants” are healthy for the European Christian culture? Why? I think this highlights a major problem with the video. They put forth an idea of “Christendom” faced off against “Islam” in a cultural clash. This glosses over the cultural differences between Europe, America and Mexico/Central America. As well as the cultures within these countries. Of course, it also glosses over the Islamic world in the same fashion.

This 9 million Muslims in the United States figure is inflated. Generally I’ve seen estimates of about 6 million and Wikipedia puts the population somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million.

06:30 I imagine this meeting to determine a strategy to “evangelize” America, if it happened, was likely akin to a Southern Baptist Conference meeting. A brief search for the conference revealed only links to the very video that mentions it. Hmm…

This video reminded me of something I heard on NPR a few days ago, I believe. It was the idea that advancing women’s rights and women’s education will lower the birth rate. So even if the Muslim women who have immigrated to the West are having children at an impressive rate, as this video claims, their children are unlikely to continue the trend. A quick search revealed only this article on the topic, but it’s getting late.

CNN continues their coverage of Iran today.

The crowd chanted “Ya Hossein, Mir Hossein,” the first a reference to the revered Shiite imam and the second a reference to Moussavi. Then there were more chants of “Allah wa Akbar,” or God is great.

No. No I don’t think there were. Whoever wrote this would probably benefit from this – specifically point seven.

Arabic letter waw (و) is used as vâv for [v], because Arabic has no [v] but Persian has no [w]

You might say, “well of course they kept the [w] sound, this is takbir afterall!” Not quite. In prayer and other religious phrases the [v] will replace the [w]. Further, the Farsi-accented takbir is normally translated as “Allah-o akbar”. And finally, of course, “Allah wa akbar” pretty much makes no sense.

Perhaps too many of CNN’s staff were pulled for Obama’s Beer Summit.

It’s the first image from the next installment in the mega-blockbuster series.