Bhutto’s assassination-Pakistan

As Benazir Bhutto’s wood flag-laden coffin was laid to rest and angry mourners protested her murder less than two weeks before elections, the Daily Telegraph proudly proclaims * Bhutto’s death is victory for Islamic hardliners at Daily Telegraph (UK), Dec 27.

Thousands mourn Bhutto as unrest spreads

Bhutto was killed after a suicide attacker shot at her and then blew himself up as she left a rally, police and witnesses said. Authorities initially said she died from bullet wounds, but Dr. Mussadiq Khan, a surgeon who treated her, said Friday that she died from shrapnel to the skull.

Funny, isn’t it, that President Pervez Musharraf’s most powerful political opponent would be assassinated so close to the election? And the official line coming from Musharraf is blaming the attack on the resurgent Islamic militants Pakistan is fighting along the border region with Afghanistan, pledging in a nationally televised speech that “we will not rest until we eliminate these terrorists and root them out.”

Unfortunately, this seems to be very similar to Karzai’s claiming the expelled Brits were holding jirgas with the Taliban.

The election was seen as a pivotal step toward restoring democracy here, eight years after Musharraf seized power in a coup. It also was intended to restore credibility to the government after Musharraf used a six-week state of emergency to arrest thousands of political opponents and crack down on the independent judiciary.

Bhutto’s death seems to be a mere extension of this crackdown, and a warning to any opponents about the upcoming election. It will be interesting to see if any voices ring out from Pakistan against Islamic extremism now…it will be the Iraq Information Minister type of pronouncements, no doubt.

Bhutto as representative of Pakistan People’s Party, popular among legions of poor, served two terms as prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She had been vying for a third term if her party did well in the Jan. 8 parliamentary elections. She spoke openly about the need to oppose Islamic extremism and for that reason, was lauded by the west.

Jacob Laskin:

Trained at the best American and European schools, including Harvard and Oxford, Bhutto, was a natural in appealing to the Western world’s hopes that the Middle East become a more modern, more tolerant place. Her election as prime minister in 1988 only improved her standing in the West, not least because it made her the first democratically elected female prime minister in an Islamic country. Here, at last, was a woman who could lead the Islamic world from its persistent dark age.

But Bhutto was not always what she appeared to be.

Under her leadership, Pakistan in the 1990s became one the leading patrons of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Even as she promised to take her country into the 21st century, Bhutto secretly provided military and financial aid to Islamic guerillas whose ideology placed them closer to the middle ages. Publicly, she rejected any affiliation with the Taliban. Behind closed doors, she subscribed to the view that they were a pro-Pakistan force that could help stabilize Afghanistan.

Much like our Pashtun-born friend, Hamid Karzai.

Duped by Bhutto’s act was the Clinton administration and prominent Democratic Congressmen like Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson. As reporter Steve Coll noted in Ghost Wars, his detailed account of the rise of Islamic fanaticism in Afghanistan, when it came to supporting the Taliban, “Bhutto had decided that it was more important to appease the Pakistani army and intelligence services than to level with her American friends.”

Even then, there were those who cautioned that Islamic militants, once empowered, would prove impossible to control. Either out of naiveté or political calculation, Bhutto didn’t listen. Like her father before her, she failed to realize the fanatical force that she helped unleash.

The price for that terrible error in judgment, it now seems, was her life.

Of the leading suspects in yesterday’s assassination the most likely would seem to be those Taliban and al-Qaeda forces who have grown increasingly powerful in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern territories. Indeed, just prior to her return to Pakistan after an eight-year exile, a number of death threats surfaced. Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud instructed Islamist cells in Karachi to kill Bhutto upon her arrival. His command was very nearly carried out in the October suicide attack in Karachi that killed 140 people, even as Bhutto escaped unharmed. Bhutto herself suspected the Taliban and al-Qaeda suicide squads were responsible for the bombing in October.

Timeline

March 26: First joint protests organized by the parties of exiled former prime ministers Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

July 3-10: Pakistani troops besiege the pro-Taliban Red Mosque in Islamabad, then storm the building a week later. More than 100 people die during the course of the crisis.

July 20: Bhutto and Musharraf hold secret meeting in Abu Dhabi on a possible power-sharing deal to sideline Sharif.

Oct 18: Bhutto returns to Karachi from Dubai after eight years in self-exile. Two suicide bombers attack her homecoming parade hours later, killing 139 people.

Oct 31: Bhutto says she has heard rumours Musharraf will impose a state of emergency and postpones planned trip to Dubai. She flies to Dubai the following day.

Nov 3: Musharraf imposes state of emergency, suspends the constitution and arrests key opposition figures, citing Islamic extremism and judicial interference.

Oct 18: Bhutto returns to Karachi from Dubai after eight years in self-exile. Two suicide bombers attack her homecoming parade hours later, killing 139 people.

Oct 31: Bhutto says she has heard rumours Musharraf will impose a state of emergency and postpones planned trip to Dubai. She flies to Dubai the following day.

Nov 3: Musharraf imposes state of emergency, suspends the constitution and arrests key opposition figures, citing Islamic extremism and judicial interference.

Nov 4: Police crack down on the opposition. The United States, a key Musharraf ally, voices concern.

Nov 7: Bhutto announces plans for mass protests.

Nov 9: Hours before a planned rally in the city of Rawalpindi police Bhutto under house arrest at her Islamabad home. The order is late lifted.

Nov 11: Musharraf say parliament will be dissolved on November 15 and elections should be held by early January.

Nov 12: Bhutto rules out further power-sharing talks with Musharraf. She is placed under house arrest again to prevent her leading a mass procession.

Nov 13: Bhutto for the first time urges Musharraf to resign and says she will never serve under him as prime minister.

Nov 16: Musharraf swears in the interim government. Bhutto is freed from house arrest. US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte arrives in Islamabad and speaks to Bhutto by telephone.

Nov 26: Bhutto and Sharif file their nomination papers for the election. Musharraf’s office announces he will resign from the army on November 28 and take a new oath as a
civilian leader.

Dec 27: Bhutto is killed in a suicide attack at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi.

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the communist definition of truth

The other night as we gathered around the Christmas tree, I was talking with Dad about the communist version of truth. It doesn’t matter what it is I say or what facts I cite, because facts don’t matter to the evolutionary darwinists.

This was true under the Soviets, which was why Lysenko got away with his version of biology for 30 years, and why some dissenting scientists to Stalin’s ‘creative biology’ died in concentration camps.

So, it occurs to me that the fellow from Millard Fillmore’s bathtub isn’t really interested in ‘facts’. The truth doesn’t matter to him either, because he has his own definition of the ‘truth’, which furthers his agenda.

The classical concept of ‘truth’ as conceptualized by Aristotle, for example, were summarily rejected by Karl Marx in his theses on Feuerrbach.

Communism doesn’t end with economic and political reform. By definition, it further demands the abolition of both Religion and the Absolute Morality founded upon Religion. The irony is that Communism supposedly attempts to enhance civility within society, but removes all notions of Absolute Morality, the very cornerstone of civility. Furthermore, after Communism is instituted by the people, the system becomes Totalitarian, resulting in greater oppression of the people it was designed to “serve.” This fact is well documented throughout the history of Communist nations.

The practical results of Communism have been horror and atrocity for those under communist rule. So much so, advocates of Marxism have made every attempt to point out where communist leaders have strayed from the fundamental teachings of Karl Marx, in an attempt to absolve Communism. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Marxist influence brought about many of these horrors. The irony is, Marxism renounces religion, not because of religious doctrine, but because of the actions of “religious” men. No one could accuse a religion such as Christianity of evil doctrine. However, it seems that men are intrinsically evil and need only an opportunity to express this inherent reality. One must look at the overall outcome of a philosophical doctrine on society, both good and bad, not specific instances of abuse. Christianity, for example, has been used by wicked men to do much evil, but its underlying doctrine has been the cause of much good in the world. Communism, on the other hand, has brought only atrocity into the world. Communism has not brought relief to the majority as promised, nor has it ended oppression as purposed. Communism has only served to remove Morality from the masses — a dangerous and costly experiment.

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Evolution as a religion

There is no evidence whatsoever that evolution is true. Nobody has ever observed a star evolve from hydrogen, life evolve from chemicals, a higher species evolve from a lower species, a man from an ape, or anything like that; nor have they been able to create any of that in a laboratory. No one ever observed evolution in action, no one knows how it works, or even how it might work, even if it were true. Nobody has ever seen it happen, despite thousands of experiments that have tried to produce it, and nobody has come up with a workable explanation to explain it.

It has been falsified at least as far as today’s world goes. This does not prove it happened in the past, but evolutionists should at least recognize that evolution is not science, because it is not observable. Evolution must be accepted on faith.

There is no evidence that evolution took place in the past. As we’ve seen through Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings, the tree of life, vestigial organs, etc., there is no evidence from biology, the fossil record, taxonomy or genetics that evolution is true or ever has been. Nobody has ever recorded evolution in any kind of creature into a more complex kind of creature, so the blind faith that requires someone to believe that an organism as complex as the human body could jump out of the primordial soup by accident must be tremendous.

All known vertical changes go in the wrong direction. An average of at least one species has become extinct every day since records have been kept, but no new species have evolved. Stars explode, comets and meteorites disintegrate, the biosphere deteriorates, and everything dies, so far as historical observations go, but nothing is evolving into greater complexity.

Prehistoric changes in the sedimentary rocks of the earth’s crust, where billions of fossils of former living creatures were preserved we can clearly observe, show extinction, not evolution. Numerous kinds of extinct animals are found, like dinosaurs, for example, but never in all of these billions of fossils, is there a transitional form. No fossil has ever been found with half scales and half feathers, half legs and half wings or a half-developed heart, half-developed eyes, or any other such indicator.

If evolution is true, there would be millions of transitional types among these multiplied billions of fossils – in fact, EVERYTHING should show transitional features. If one were to rely strictly upon observed evidence, past evolution is false.

Evolution is imaginary and not even part of the real world, which leaves creation as the necessary explanation.

And there is a lot more evidence in genetics, biology, the fossil record, taxonomy and so on, for creation.

This is confirmed in quantity by the law of decay, the law of conservation in quality, and the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

The first law says, in all real processes, the total quantity of matter and/or energy stays constant, even though it changes in form. A parallel principle in biology notes that ‘like begets like’. Dogs are dogs, donkeys are donkeys, wolves are wolves, although they can appear in many varieties. The Second law notes that the quality of any system-the usefulness, its complexity, its information value-tends to decrease. In living organism, true vertical changes go down-not up. Mutations cause deterioration and a loss in genetic code, individuals die, species become extinct. In fact, everyhting in the universe is headed downward toward cosmic death.

The First Law states in effect that nothing is being created or evolving. The Second law notes that there is, instead, a universal tendency for everything to disintegrate down, and finally to “die”. The whole universe is growing old, wearing out, headed toward stillness and death. This universal “increase in entropy” leads directly to the conclusion that there must have been a creation of things in the past; otherwise everything would now be dead, since they’re universally dying right now.

It is logical, therefore, to believe in a primal creation by past supernatural processes because we cannot deduce anything about it except that it happened. The process of creation, the duration, the order of events, -are hidden by virtue of the fact that our present world processes do not create, they only conserve in quantity and deteriorate in quality.

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Top 10 Climate Myth-Busters for 2007

Thursday, December 27, 2007
By Steven Milloy

“I’ve made up my mind. Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

That saying most appropriately sums up the year in climate science for the fanatic global warming crowd.

As Al Gore, the United Nations, grandstanding politicians and celebrities, taxpayer-dependent climate researchers, socialist-minded Greens, climate profiteers and other members of the alarmist railroad relentlessly continued their drive for greenhouse gas regulation in 2007, the year’s scientific developments actually pointed in the opposite direction. Here’s the round-up:

1. Cracked crystal balls. Observed temperature changes measured over the last 30 years don’t match well with temperatures predicted by the mathematical climate models relied on by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), researchers reported.

The models predict significantly warmer atmospheric temperatures than actually occurred, despite the availability of more and better quality data and improved modeling efforts since the late-1970s.

“We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models be viewed with much caution,” the researchers concluded. Read more…

2. The big yellow ball in the sky. The Sun may have contributed 50 percent or more of the global warming thought to have occurred since 1900, according to a new historical temperature reconstruction showing more variation in pre-industrial temperatures than previously thought.

The researchers found that “the climate is very sensitive to solar changes and a significant fraction of the global warming that occurred during the last century should be solar induced.” Read more…

3. Pre-SUV warming. Another new temperature reconstruction for the past 2,000 years indicates that globally averaged temperature 1,000 years ago was about 0.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the current temperature. Since that climatic “heat wave” obviously wasn’t caused by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, the current temperature is quite within natural variability, deflating alarmists’ rash conclusions about the warming of the past 50 years. Read more…

4. A disciplined climate. Runaway global warming — the alarmist fantasy in which a warmer global temperature causes climatic events that, in turn, cause more warming and so-on in a never-ending positive feedback loop — was cornered by new data from researchers at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH). The new research sheds light on the mechanism by which the atmosphere self-regulates. Read more…

5. A gnarly wipeout. Climate alarmists gleefully surfed a 2005 study that claimed greenhouse gas emissions would slow Atlantic Ocean circulation and cause a mini ice age in Europe. But an international team of researchers reported that the intensity of the Atlantic circulation may vary by as much as a factor of eight in a single year. The decrease in Atlantic circulation claimed in the 2005study falls well within this variation and so is likely part of a natural yearly trend, according to the new study. Read more…

6. A pollution solution. A new study reported that the solid particles suspended in the atmosphere (called “aerosols”) that make up “brown clouds” may actually contribute to warmer temperatures — precisely the opposite effect heretofore claimed by global warming alarmists.

“These findings might seem to contradict the general notion of aerosol particles as cooling agents in the global climate system …,” concluded the researchers. Read more…

7. Lazy temperature? Researchers reported that the rate of manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions was three times greater during 2000 to 2004 than during the 1990s. Since increasing atmospheric C02 levels allegedly cause global warming, the new study must mean that global temperatures are soaring even faster now than they did during the 1990s, right?

Wrong. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Climatic Data Center, ever-changing global temperatures are in no way keeping pace with ever-increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Read more…

8. Don’t plant that tree! Researchers reported that while tropical forests exert a cooling influence on global climate, forests in northern regions exert a significant warming influence on climate. Based on the researchers’ computer modeling, forests above 20 degrees latitude in the Northern Hemisphere — that is, north of the line of latitude running through Southern Mexico, Saharan Africa, central India and the southernmost Chinese Island of Hainan — will warm surface temperatures in those regions by an estimated 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. Read more…

9. The Tropical Arctic. Dutch researchers reported that during a period of intense global warming 55 million years ago — when the Arctic Ocean was as warm as 73 degrees Fahrenheit — there was a tremendous release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But which came first, the warming or the greenhouse gases?

It was the warming, according to the researchers. Read more…

10. Much ado about nothing. In a report to Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revealed greenhouse gas regulation to be quite the fool’s errand. In estimating the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases 90 years from now under both a scenario where no action is taken to reduce manmade emissions and a scenario where maximum regulation is implemented, the estimated difference in average global temperature between the two scenarios is 0.17 degrees Centigrade.

For reference purposes, the estimated total increase in average global temperature for the 20th century was about 0.50 degrees Celsius.

That’s what researchers have reported this year. And let’s not forget the spanking a British high judge gave Al Gore’s movie for all its scientific inaccuracies and the thrashing non-alarmist climate scientists gave to alarmist climate scientists in a debate sponsored by the New York debating society Intelligence Squared.

Al Gore and the alarmist mob claim the debate about the science of global warming is “over.” Given the developments of 2007, it’s easy to see why they would want it that way.

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