One Way Streets

One of my missionary friends, who is now serving in an Islamic country that shall go unnamed and previously worked in Uzbekistan before being thrown out, sent me a sad and hardly shocking email today.

Dear prayer partners

There is a young brother in Uzbekistan who needs God’s help. Would you pray for him.

Please pray for D***. He is a faithful young man (about 22 I think) who, because of his unique maturity, has been leading and pasturing a group of believers in ******, Uzbekistan. I’ve sat and prayed with this brother many times and have heard first hand his heart for the Lord.

He is facing probable arrest by authorities because he leads an ‘illegal’ Christian house church (who have tried to register and become legal and been rejected with no explanation). He has already faced rejection from his parents and other family. He feels that he may have to flee the country to avoid arrest. Another complication is that his wife is pregnant.

It is no exaggeration to say that Uzbek prisons are some of the worst in the world. Please cry out to God for this dear brother!!

I’ll let you know when / if I know more.

Blessings,
G*****

This sort of thing happens every day throughout the Islamic world, as a hard and vicious wall is thrown up against any belief other than Islam. Children are thrown out of the house, or worse. Customers leave a business. Pastors are thrown in prison. Bibles are burned.

And this sort of thing happens every day throughout the Christian world:

First, we heard about a large group of Somali Muslim airport cabbies in Minneapolis refusing to provide service to travelers carrying alcohol or using dogs. At first, the airport moved to accommodate, but then the Somalis lost the battle to impose coercive interpretations of sharia (Islamic law) upon airport travelers. We recently have also seen airports, schools and universities agreeing to install foot-washing stations for Muslim airport cabbies and students at a significant cost to taxpayers in the name of special accommodations for Muslims. In Lincoln Park, Michigan, a few Muslim women insisted that a co-ed health club to which they signed up provide them a women’s-only room for exercise. Fitness USA acquiesced under fears of litigation despite the fact that the Muslim women signed up for no such guarantee with their enrollment contract. (Islam Watch)

We allow this to happen in our land because we believe in freedom, of course. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the prosecution of minority religions to go on throughout most of the Muslim world? How about for each church the Saudis or the Uzbeks allow to remain open, we will install a foot-washing station?

Sunday Scan

Bringing Honor Back To "Monica"

Here's a story out of Afghanistan that would be completely wonderful, were it not for the five wounded US soldiers that are central to it:

CAMP SALERNO, Afghanistan (AP) - A 19-year-old medic from Texas will become the first woman in Afghanistan and only the second female soldier since World War II to receive the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest medal for valor.

Army Spc. Monica Lin Brown saved the lives of fellow soldiers after a roadside bomb tore through a convoy of Humvees in the eastern Paktia province in April 2007, the military said.

After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said.

"I did not really think about anything except for getting the guys to a safer location and getting them taken care of and getting them out of there," Brown told The Associated Press on Saturday at a U.S. base in the eastern province of Khost. ...

Brown, of the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, said ammunition going off inside the burning Humvee was sending shrapnel in all directions. She said they were sitting in a dangerous spot.

"So we dragged them for 100 or 200 meters, got them away from the Humvee a little bit," she said. "I was in a kind of a robot-mode, did not think about much but getting the guys taken care of."

For Brown, who knew all five wounded soldiers, it became a race to get them all to a safer location. Eventually, they moved the wounded some 500 yards away and treated them on site before putting them on a helicopter for evacuation.

"I did not really have time to be scared," Brown said. "Running back to the vehicle, I was nervous (since) I did not know how badly the guys were injured. That was scary."

The military said Brown's "bravery, unselfish actions and medical aid rendered under fire saved the lives of her comrades and represents the finest traditions of heroism in combat."

Can you imagine having that maturity, esprit de corps and selflessness at the age of 19? I just asked that of Incredible Daughter #2, who happens to be 19, and she just shook her head and said, "That's crazy."

It does take a little crazy to be a good soldier, and five guys in her unit and all of America have a very good, and a little crazy, soldier to thank this morning for her valor.

Name The Fanatical Motivation

What motivated these fanatics? I had the answer five words into this story ... but had to read 18 paragraphs before BBC provided just a hint:

Suspected militants arrested in western China earlier this year were planning attacks on the Beijing Olympics, a Chinese official says.

Two people were reported to have been killed and 15 arrested in a raid on 27 January in Urumqi, Xinjiang province.

Officials now say their aim was to attack the August Olympics.

The alleged plot was disclosed as officials also revealed that a plane crew prevented an apparent attempt to crash a jet on an internal flight.

The incident occurred on Friday.

Put "militants" and "Western China" together and what do you have? Islamists! BBC can't bring itself to say that, though. Way down at paragraph 18 and beyond we find:

China has been struggling for years to contain separatist sentiment among the Uighur minority in Xinjiang.

Some Uighurs have campaigned for the mainly Muslim province to become an independent republic.

There it is: "mainly Muslim." And then you can read "separatist" to mean "wanting to set up a Shari'a theocracy."

Not that the media would ever make it that clear.

Gagging On Universal Health Care

A lot of us smell a rat on hearing the Dem-patter on the need for a system of universal health care. "Smell a rat" is just a figure of speech, of course ... [cue the sinister voice] ... or is it?

LONDON (Reuters) - A patient was told there was no reason why he couldn't have surgery in a hospital, despite the smell caused by a dead rodent trapped in the building's ceiling.

Andrew Cowper was due to have an operation at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Hertfordshire when staff "were made aware of a dead rodent in the single storey unit's roof space," the hospital said in a statement.

The hospital said its experts concluded that the dead animal was outside the operating theater and posed no risk.

Cowper, 19, who had been waiting 11 months for the unspecified operation, opted out, despite the experts opinion that it was perfectly safe under the rule of England's national health care system to be cut open within feet of a decomposing rodent.

Why I'm Not As Famous As Lileks

You remember Benny Sharon, the drugged-up Hebrew University prof and latter-day Timothy Leary, who recently postulated that Moses (I think that's Moses on the right and Jethro on the left) was stoned when he had a vision of God giving him tablets, and that the real hand-off never occurred. I thought my post on Sharon was pretty clever ... then I read what James Lileks had to say in his Bleat on the subject (with a hat-tip to Jim).

Talk about an effective rebuttal!

I just remembered that I called the Bob Davis show this morning to talk about the new theory re: Moses and the Ten Commandments: dude was high. Apparently a professor somewhere has suggested that the entire experience was the result of a mushroom or some such ceremonial intoxicant. I called to say I didn’t believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn’t have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they’re freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish. Never mind the problem of getting the tablets down the mountain – anyone who has experience of watching stoners try to assemble pizza money when the doorbell rings doubts that Moses could have hauled stone tablets all the way down.

After the chuckles (or "grass-giggles" if you will) die down, Lileks gets to The Big Point:

Sure: you cannot call them Commandments without someone doing the Commanding, and once they’re not commandments they lose the moral authority that supercedes the individual precepts. It doesn’t mean they’re not good ideas still; it just means they are one set of ideas in competition with other ideas that found their origin in the rude clay of history.

That, my friends, is why people who so enjoy sinning spend so much time and energy attacking the foundations of religion.

Whaling War Escalates

Paul Watson, a founder of GreenPeace who now has moved on to forcefully impose his anti-human view on others as captain of the anti-whaling ship Sea Shepard, is facing some stiff opposition this time around as Japanese whaling boat captains are standing up to his grandstanding:

Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd group's protest ship Steve Irwin, said on Friday he was shot, but survived because he was wearing a Kevlar vest.

Japan's fisheries agency said coastguard officials had only thrown "flash grenades," which are used for crowd control and are not regarded as weapons, after activists threw stink bombs on to the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru. (source)

Tit for tat, I'd say.

Previously, the Japanese seized two whale-lovers who boarded a whaler and held them for quite some time, keeping them handcuffed to an outside railing to enjoy the Antarctic weather until an Australian fisheries patrol vessel intervened.

C-SM readers know I grew up in Japan, but you probably don't know that one day when I opened my bag lunch at school, I found that our housekeeper had made me a pineapple and canned whale meat sandwich. Yum ... not.

In my eleven years in Japan, my encounters with whale meat were slim to almost none. The Japanese whaling industry says whaling is cultural to the Japanese -- but whale meat is rarely served and hardly popular.

Still, anyone who stands up to holier-than-thou Watson -- a certifiable jerk-off who, when just 10, shot a kid in the butt to stop him from shooting a bird, and who once said "earthworms are far more valuable than people” -- is a hero in my eyes.

For more on the chief thug of eco-terrorism, read the bio on Activist Cash or this one on Target of Opportunity (a bit of a scary site in its own right). Skip Wikipedia; it's a bunch of bullsh ... propaganda.

Muff Diving?!

Yes, there is a town in Ireland called "Muff," and yes, there is a SCUBA diving shop there named after the town.

That's just one of the bizarre bits of info on European towns I learned on Spiegel's quiz based on the odd nature of European town names. (You're going into the quiz with a one-question advantage, thanks to me!)

If you thought "muff diving" is a bit obscene, just you wait ... it gets much more X-rated than that!

Making Jerry Brown Look Good

It's common knowledge that Cal. AG Jerry Brown is using global warming grandstanding as a stage for a run for the governorship -- Moonbeam II, if you will.

Frightening as that thought is, Brown just became a minor irritant in the scheme of things, as reported by the SF Wrongicle:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is considering a 2010 run for governor - a campaign that would embrace many of the same divisive causes he has championed as mayor, including same-sex marriage, universal health care and protections for illegal immigrants, The Chronicle has learned.

Newsom has long been rumored to be a potential contender in what is likely to be a crowded field of Democrats looking to succeed Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a list that includes Attorney General and former Gov. Jerry Brown, former state Controller Steve Westly and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio ["Grease-Zipper"] Villaraigosa.

In recent months, Newsom has quietly been meeting with Democratic campaign strategists and other supporters to discuss a gubernatorial run, and he is now "certain to at least consider the possibility," said Eric Jaye, a Newsom confidant and political consultant.

When asked whether he was planning to run, Newsom said, "A number of people in the last few months have reached out and talked to me about it."

Could there be better proof of the premise that big fish in small ponds tend to think they can be big fish in big ponds? Can you imagine how Newsome's honoring of a gay porn studio would play in Fresno? How his city's sanctuary city status will play in Orange County and San Diego? And shall we consider the stinking $229 million black pit that is the city's finances?

(If you want a good rundown of the bizarreness of life under Newsome, here's a list of SF-watcher Bookworm's posts on Baghdad by the Bay.)

Bring it on. Let the Dems strut their stuff in the Cal primaries, turning off sane Californians by the multitudes.

Separation Of Church And State, Secularist Style

"When you put on your Jesus glasses," Dr. James Corbett told the students in his Advanced Placement European history class at Capistrano Valley High School, "you can't see the truth."

The doc also shared with his class that he just doesn't think much of believers ... any believers:

... Conservatives don't want women to avoid pregnancies. That's interfering with God's work. You got to stay pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen to have babies until your body collapses. All over the world, doesn't matter where you go, conservatives want control over women's reproductive capacity. Everywhere in the world, from conservative Christians in this country to, um, Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan. It's the same. It's stunning how vitally interested they are in controlling women.

In fact, he thinks religion draws a society down:

People ... in the industrialized world the people least likely to go to church are the Swedes. The people in the industrialized world most likely to go to church are the Americans. America has the highest crime rate of all the industrialized nations and Sweden has the lowest. The next time someone [like your parents] tells you religion is connected with morality, you might want to ask them about that.

The US does, in fact, have the highest crime rate -- a function of excellent and transparent record keeping as much as anything else. But if Corbett were to look at crime rater per capita -- the stat that matters, since he's talking about individuals' relationships with God here -- he'd' find that many much more secular industrialized nations, Finland, Denmark and the UK, all have higher crime rates.

Godless Sweden's rate is lower, but it has a higher per capita adult suicide rate than religious America. Corbett didn't share that with his students.

Moving on through this fascinating review of European history, we find the doc saying this:

I love Rush Limbaugh. A fat, pain in the ass liar. And boy is he a liar. Unbelievable.

And this important analysis of European history:

U.S. regulators -- U.S. regulators say they added new warnings about the potential risks of sudden hearing loss among men who are using Viagra, Cialis or Levitra. So what they've been telling you for all these years, that you'll go blind, isn't true. ... So you know, you know, so if you run into somebody who is, you know, deaf and whose pants felt stiff, he's probably using the drug. They're happy, but they're deaf.

In the same class, after denouncing the Boy Scouts for being "in their own mind a homophobic and racist organization," he said:

It's simple. It's called separation of church and state.

In his mind, there is no religion called "Secularism," but it's evident by his comments that there is, and he is a devout believer in that faith. One of the students in his class, Chad Farnan, has filed a lawsuit with the assistance of the Christian legal group Advocates for Faith and Freedom. Read the full complaint here.

Farnan liked Corbett's class at first, then, according to yesterday's OC Reg, he became more and more uncomfortable, and gave a recording of one of Corbett's classroom rants to his mother. All quotes in this story are from that one tape, from one class.

This isn't the first time Corbett's gotten in trouble for his views, according to the Reg:

Corbett has been involved in at least two prior court cases as a Capistrano Valley High teacher. In 1993, he was named in a lawsuit brought by colleague John Peloza, a biology teacher who challenged Capistrano Unified's mandate to teach evolutionary theory.

Corbett was listed in the suit as one of the defendants with a "class-based animus against practicing Christians" who attempted to "force" Peloza to teach evolution through "harassment and intimidation." A trial court and an appeals court ruled against Peloza, although the appeals court said the complaint was "not entirely frivolous" and awarded attorney fees to Peloza.

Despite this, Corbett is still teaching, and Capistrano Valley High principal Tom Ressler hasn't commented on his teacher's latest transgression yet, except to say that 33 percent of Corbett's students flunked the state's Advanced Placement exam. (Actually, he said 66 percent passed, but I thought I'd emphasize that Corbett is a lousy teacher, too, not just a bigot.)

Were a teacher to lead his students in prayer, you can bet that Corbett would be at the front of the crazed pack, calling for that teacher's "fat, pain in the ass" head. Were a teacher to attempt to teach the true history of Communist violence and abuse, or the terrorist acts of the Palestinians, you can bet that Corbett would be the loudest voice crying "Foul!" (or something more profane).

Yet he feel free to encourage kids to have premarital sex and to not trust their parents ...

So you know, some parents are objecting, saying [handing out birth control pills is] taking too much power away from the parents. Parents are pretty irresponsible. And so is the Bush administration with its abstinence policy. Spending billions of dollars [!!] on something they know doesn't work, wonderful. Wonderful. Idiotic.

... to not trust America, and above all, to not be a fool who believes in God.

And we pay him to do this, and if the school district -- the school district my taxes go to, as a matter of fact -- doesn't fire him, we will pay for his defense.

Update: Here's a follow-up article on the spirited debate the first article on Corbett generated.

Sunday Scan

Tell Me If This Hurts

This hurts, Doc. From an op/ed on health care solutions in today's OC Register:

Many more doctors and nurses have been hired [by Britain's National Health Service]. Unfortunately, their productivity has declined, as the number of patients seen by each physician has declined over the same period.

Britain has imported more than 20,000 physicians from Third World countries in the past three years, as after 60 years of experience the NHS has failed to attract and retain British physicians. Most of the imports are undoubtedly well-qualified, even those few who blow up cars and airports in their spare time.

The author, Richard Ralston, a health care advocate, notes that the NHS is a model for many who would reform America's health system along Socialist lines. Cou-Hillary!-gh. He highlights for us some elements of the model:

• No knee replacements for women weighing more than 180 pounds and men more than 218 pounds.
• Heart bypasses denied for smokers.
• "Patients 80 years and older have been denied treatment for stroke because, after all, what is the point?"
• No longer changing sheets between patients -- just turning the sheets over, instead. Staph, anyone?
  
• British patients taking "surgery vacations" so they don't need to wait for surgery at home.
  

Feeling Insignificant

An anonymous LAT editorial took a swipe at those who would stand up to the secularization of American culture. Writing on the SCOTUS decision not to take up the forced removal of a cross from LA County's seal, the ever-tolerant LAT scathed:

The county offered up a new cross-less seal that also banished the Roman goddess Pomona (we can't show favoritism to pagans, you know) and replaced oil derricks with a cross-less view of Mission San Gabriel. People went berserk. The deaths of inmates in county custody, or patients at county hospitals, or children in county-supervised foster homes attract only a fraction of the invective that the change to the ridiculously insignificant county seal brought.

No criticism was directed the ACLU's way for bringing the lawsuit, even though if the seal were "ridiculously insignificant," criticism is certainly due. Instead, the LAT reduces to "ridiculously insignificant"' the concerns of those of us who see a very real threat in the ACLU's efforts to remove God from the public square, and paints us as a "berserk" bunch who would put this trifling concerns above whatever issue du jour concerns the godless heathens editorial writers at the Lost Angels Times.

The Trouble With Mormons

Now that the NYT has stopped forcing us to pay to get angry at Maureen Doud, I'm reading her again. Good thing. She's clarified what's so wrong about Mormons. Here's what she wrote today about the Mormon temple near her hometown:

It did seem like an alien world, an impression that was enhanced when we took a tour of the temple and saw all the women wearing white outfits and light pink lipstick.

Ooooh. There goes my vote for Mitt.

To ice her case, Doud turns to Jon Krakauer, who's Under the Banner of Heaven was not a kind portrayal of Mormon history. He delivers for her this line:

“J.F.K.’s speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn’t a religious fanatic,. Mitt’s was to tell evangelical Christians, ‘I’m a religious fanatic just like you.’”

Doud then jumps on the "religious fanatic" theme:

The world is globalizing, nuclear weapons are proliferating, the Middle East is seething, but Republicans are still arguing the Scopes trial.

Sure we are, Mo. Just a bunch of fanatics stuck in a time warp; not that different from the Mohammed Teddy bunch in Sudan.

Ignorance and intolerance has found a Petri dish it loves to fester in at the NYT.

Edwards Answers Oprah

Yeah, this should work:

Democrat John Edwards announced Sunday that actors Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins will join him on Iowa's frigid campaign trail.

Edwards' announcement came as media mogul Oprah Winfrey stumped here for Barack Obama during the weekend ...

Just last week, Edwards was joined on the stump by actresses Jean Smart, who plays the first lady on the popular FOX series "24," and Madeleine Stowe, who has appeared in such films as "The Last of the Mohicans" and "Twelve Monkeys." Last month, performers Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne campaigned in Iowa for Edwards.

Bacon, Robbins, Smart,Stowe, Raitt and Browne between them have the drawing power of Oprah's little toenail.

And perhaps someone should remind Pretty Boy that the entertainment industry has done oh so much for politics, proving its worth with Al Gore, then re-proving it with John Kerry.

Academics (Snark!) For Ron Paul

Twenty-one, count 'em, twenty-one academics have signed an Academics for Ron Paul statement as of this writing.

These are an illustrious bunch. Netz Katz. Ivan Pongracic, Jr. Ralph Raico. Aeon J. Skoble. Household names all.

And darn good grammarians, too:

Paul is the only presidential candidate with a proven record of defending academic freedom across-the-board.

That would be "defending academic freedom across the board."

Pass the Methane, Mom!

Gee willikers, there's less then 10 years left to deal with global warming!

Does that mean -- puleeeze, God! -- that by 2018 we won't have to listen to this tripe anymore?

Probably not, but it's a good enough intro to this story:

A new species of bacteria discovered living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth could yield a tool in the fight against global warming.

University of Calgary biology professor Peter Dunfield and colleagues discovered a methane-eating microorganism in the geothermal field known as Hell's Gate, near the city of Rotorua in New Zealand. It is the hardiest "methanotrophic" bacterium yet discovered, which makes it a likely candidate for use in reducing methane gas emissions from landfills, mines, industrial wastes, geothermal power plants and other sources.

"This is a really tough methane-consuming organism that lives in a much more acidic environment than any we've seen before," said Dunfield, who is the lead author of the paper. "It belongs to a rather mysterious family of bacteria (called Verrucomicrobia) that are found everywhere but are very difficult to grow in the laboratory."

Methanotrophic bacteria consume methane as their only source of energy and convert it to carbon dioxide during their digestive process. Methane (commonly known as natural gas) is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is largely produced by decaying organic matter.

Set if we let these little guys go free in methane-rich environments like landfills, they'll convert the methane into CO2, screwing up every single global warming model the Warmies have created.

Ironic, isn't it, that all these big believers in anthropomorphic global warming believe we've screwed everything up, but can't imagine that we can actually fix things. So they don't factor human ingenuity into their models, just assuming we'll go roasting off to oblivion, like so many overheated lemmings.

U.N. Solves Global Warming!

Not content to deal with pursue practical approaches like methane-eating microbes, the UN jet-setted 8,000 Warmie bureaucrats to Bali to emit hot air endlessly.

The UN is big on symbolism, and they've done a magnificent job of being symbolic in Bali:

Further rigors, according to a report from China’s Xinhua News Agency, include the demand that all motor vehicles entering the beach area surrounding Bali’s Nusa Dua conference complex run on biofuels.

Claudia Rosette harumphs:

That sounds problematic, if the Xinhua report is accurate that only a few gas stations in Indonesia routinely sell biofuels, and they not on Bali, but are clustered around the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, on the island of Java, more than 500 miles from the UN conference.

The UN is nothing if not a good source of comedy.