13-14 July 2005
14 July, Thursday, 3:15 a.m.
Well, here I am again. Couldn't get to a computer to talk yesterday, but I've got to finish off with some info from Monday, and add some new stuff today. I have been required to do a lot more with Gail, she has had to have help with matters mundane (grocery shopping) and significant (helping work on pricing on our "new" import-export business). She has to pepper me full of questions while I try to work on blogging, or send me out on yet another errand. The frustration, frankly, is building, but that is something I will have to work through. You do that when you're married.
Here is some of the articles that I really found thought-provoking today. I can't discuss them, I just have to give you the link to each one. Sorry.
First, in Answers in Genesis, a really good article for those into science issues, called "Pseudogene function: Regulation of Gene Expression." It is an insightful expose of the notion long advanced by evolutionists in the area of genetics that pseudogenes--antisense RNA, are just lost and wayward genes of no particular good in development of the genetic makeup of living beings, or worse, that they are mutant genes that have lost their use. It is apparent that instead, "junk DNA", as they are sometimes called, have been discovered to have more and more use in the building of every living cell's basic framework, that they are not evidence of a genetically-based movement to some kind of "transitional form." To learn more about that, click to this article here, authored in Answers in Genesis by John Woodmorappe, M.A., a scientist on staff with AIG Museum of Creation History in Georgetown, Kentucky, USA.
The second good article is found in the Christian Century, in which, in the July 12th edition, Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life, has sold almost 65 million copies (not counting all the podcasts and audio books and hits on his website), has led the major move by over 150,000 evangelical churches, mostly in the USA, to eradicate what he calls "five 'giant problems' that oppress billions of people: global poverty; diseases, such as AIDS, that affect billions of people; illiteracy among half the world's population; spiritual emptiness among billions of people who don't know their purpose in life; and self-centered leadership." He already had led about 42,000 churches in the aftermath of the December 2004 Asian tsunami disaster to aid its victims, in the largest single source of volunteers for the aid effort for the people of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India. It is producing an unlikely set of alliances, of arch-conservative ministers like Pat Robertson, Billy & Franklin Graham, and James Dobson along with Warren, and well-known leftists and celebrities as George Clooney, Bob Geldof, and Bono of U2. Once again, the secular world has underestimated the ability of the conservative evangelical Christian community to be flexible and firm, compassionate on the poor and desperately destitute and yet firm in upholding their principles and faith (opposing abortion, gay marriage, Darwinian evolution, rank secularism in culture, pornography, arrogant statism and socialism, radical Islamism, stoutly declaring orthodox faith in the Bible, Jesus' uniqueness as God, etc.). This article is from a publication that is from an ostensibly Christian organization that is notably left-of-center.
One really great article Wednesday in the blog The Belmont Club, which has done yeoman service in presenting a balanced view of the war in Iraq, as well as the war against Islamist terrorism (which is how I will stubbornly refer to the present war, not the sterile term 'War on Terror'), which does a great job of cautioning people all over the world, but especially here in the USA and the West, that this war is not, and cannot be a mere war against all Islam, and certainly not against the majority of Muslims. Wretchard (pen name), who has come to be one of the most dependable bloggers, has poignantly talked in "Al Jadida" about the tragedy of the suicide bombing attack of another coward working for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, murdering 27 children and wounding over 70 others, in order to take out one U.S. National Guardsman, handing out candy to children and food packages and other gifts to local Iraqis. It is notable in the news reports that there is no more talk among the Iraqis blaming the Americans for these bombings. They know that this is now a war on the part of less than 16,000 foreign fighters and Baathists against a nation of 27 million people. The important thing that was said in Wretchard's article is that Westerners, especially we Christians and conservatives, need to give up the notion that we are in some modern version of the Crusades. For all our concentration on the tragic bombing in London last week, we have to remember that on Sunday more people in Iraq were killed by these thugs, and that these children especially, are not part of the war against the West, or against Christianity, or civilization, they are its most common victims. Sometimes they have been through tragic accidents or even gross negligence by the occasional coalition soldier, but a hundred times more often by the Al Qaeda thugs of al-Zarqawi, in allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Let me include the quote that I find most telling and salient here:
"There are those who, after the London bombing, had convinced themselves that all Muslims were enemies of civilization. There are sound arguments for that: the existence of the Jihad, the silence of most Islamic clergy. But what of the children? What of the Muslim children who are the targets of these "freedom fighters", "resistants" or "militants", whichever the BBC prefers to call them? In what category do they belong? The empirical fact is that no group has been killed more often and more brutally by the "Jihad" than Muslims themselves. During the French Algerian war several times more Algerian Muslims died than French. Anyone with a calculator can see the same is true in Iraq. One of the targets of the London bombing was a subway station frequented by British Muslims. The first objective of terror, indeed of the Terror, and the first objective of the Jihad is to maintain internal control over its base. For as long as internal control can be maintained, a terrorist movement need not defeat its armed enemy. It will never lose; hence in the estimation of the Peace generation, it will always win.
"Logically, a large part of the War on Terror will consist of creating an insurgency within the insurgency. Fighting Islamic extremism must comprise organizing a revolt against Islam's internal oppressors. That would include waging intellectual war against Islamic fundamentalism within its own theological context -- a reformation -- it will include creating clandestine cells to strike at the gangs which beat women and intimidate men within the community. It will require all the skills of a resistance fighter struggling against bearded Big Brother. The Left has a word for such people: "Uncle Toms". That is how they've already characterized Hirsi Ali. That is to be expected. But many conservatives have also been blind to the urgent requirement of creating a liberation movement within Islam, in part because they half believe all Muslims are themselves the enemy; in part because they despair of Muslims ever rising up against the medieval institutions which constrain them; in part because they haven't thought about it. But they should. That pile of bloody children's slippers on an Iraqi street is a tally of spirits who were created to be free."
The basis for the eloquence of the Belmont Club story, along with others on Monday and Tuesday, is the sad, horrifying, but necessary to report eyewitness accounts coming through Grayhawk in the blog The Mudville Gazette, which is one of the many fine "milbloggers" that have worked with coalition military in Iraq (not just American, there are some UK and Australian ones I'll report from in the future, too). The graphic nature is devastating, but it gives the right perspective, and places the blame where it belongs (hint: it's not on the American soldiers, or President Bush).
Attorney Scott Johnson at Powerline blog on Wednesday has, among others, withered the continuing lie about Karl Rove violating some law by 'outing' CIA analyst Valerie Plame in discrediting her and her lying ex-diplomat husband Joseph Wilson in connection to the continuous false claim, constantly regurgitated around the world, that George Bush's entry into the war with Iraq was prearranged and based upon false pretenses. The notes and e-mail of Time correspondent Matthew Cooper affirmatively show that Rove, the president's political director and a long-time friend, DID NOT break the law or act improperly. The article, "Somebody Feed 'Em Some Cat Food," is devastating in its expose of the ulterior motives of the mainstream media (we call it MSM).
This story is complemented very nicely by Leon H., writing in the blog Red State, in his article, "Night of the Living 'Known Fact.' " It simply blasts the left's continually parroting the theme that the U.S. 9/11 Commission had found no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, therefore no justification for the Iraq war. That lie was abundantly condemned by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, as well as by the British commission investigating British intelligence's role in the matter, and has now been thoroughly exposed and discredited since by the discoveries from captured Iraqi intelligence documents and from interrogations of insurgents and former Baathists, a point not lost upon Leon H. The most telling lines, backed by considerably documented information, is on this last line:
"Further, Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents that we continue to recover after the 9/11 commission's report, that the connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda was real and even greater than the one stated by the Bush administration before the war:..."
Well, I guess that's all for now. I'll be sending blog referrals to all of my online community lists later. More on business to come. God bless, au revoir.
Well, here I am again. Couldn't get to a computer to talk yesterday, but I've got to finish off with some info from Monday, and add some new stuff today. I have been required to do a lot more with Gail, she has had to have help with matters mundane (grocery shopping) and significant (helping work on pricing on our "new" import-export business). She has to pepper me full of questions while I try to work on blogging, or send me out on yet another errand. The frustration, frankly, is building, but that is something I will have to work through. You do that when you're married.
Here is some of the articles that I really found thought-provoking today. I can't discuss them, I just have to give you the link to each one. Sorry.
First, in Answers in Genesis, a really good article for those into science issues, called "Pseudogene function: Regulation of Gene Expression." It is an insightful expose of the notion long advanced by evolutionists in the area of genetics that pseudogenes--antisense RNA, are just lost and wayward genes of no particular good in development of the genetic makeup of living beings, or worse, that they are mutant genes that have lost their use. It is apparent that instead, "junk DNA", as they are sometimes called, have been discovered to have more and more use in the building of every living cell's basic framework, that they are not evidence of a genetically-based movement to some kind of "transitional form." To learn more about that, click to this article here, authored in Answers in Genesis by John Woodmorappe, M.A., a scientist on staff with AIG Museum of Creation History in Georgetown, Kentucky, USA.
The second good article is found in the Christian Century, in which, in the July 12th edition, Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life, has sold almost 65 million copies (not counting all the podcasts and audio books and hits on his website), has led the major move by over 150,000 evangelical churches, mostly in the USA, to eradicate what he calls "five 'giant problems' that oppress billions of people: global poverty; diseases, such as AIDS, that affect billions of people; illiteracy among half the world's population; spiritual emptiness among billions of people who don't know their purpose in life; and self-centered leadership." He already had led about 42,000 churches in the aftermath of the December 2004 Asian tsunami disaster to aid its victims, in the largest single source of volunteers for the aid effort for the people of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India. It is producing an unlikely set of alliances, of arch-conservative ministers like Pat Robertson, Billy & Franklin Graham, and James Dobson along with Warren, and well-known leftists and celebrities as George Clooney, Bob Geldof, and Bono of U2. Once again, the secular world has underestimated the ability of the conservative evangelical Christian community to be flexible and firm, compassionate on the poor and desperately destitute and yet firm in upholding their principles and faith (opposing abortion, gay marriage, Darwinian evolution, rank secularism in culture, pornography, arrogant statism and socialism, radical Islamism, stoutly declaring orthodox faith in the Bible, Jesus' uniqueness as God, etc.). This article is from a publication that is from an ostensibly Christian organization that is notably left-of-center.
One really great article Wednesday in the blog The Belmont Club, which has done yeoman service in presenting a balanced view of the war in Iraq, as well as the war against Islamist terrorism (which is how I will stubbornly refer to the present war, not the sterile term 'War on Terror'), which does a great job of cautioning people all over the world, but especially here in the USA and the West, that this war is not, and cannot be a mere war against all Islam, and certainly not against the majority of Muslims. Wretchard (pen name), who has come to be one of the most dependable bloggers, has poignantly talked in "Al Jadida" about the tragedy of the suicide bombing attack of another coward working for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, murdering 27 children and wounding over 70 others, in order to take out one U.S. National Guardsman, handing out candy to children and food packages and other gifts to local Iraqis. It is notable in the news reports that there is no more talk among the Iraqis blaming the Americans for these bombings. They know that this is now a war on the part of less than 16,000 foreign fighters and Baathists against a nation of 27 million people. The important thing that was said in Wretchard's article is that Westerners, especially we Christians and conservatives, need to give up the notion that we are in some modern version of the Crusades. For all our concentration on the tragic bombing in London last week, we have to remember that on Sunday more people in Iraq were killed by these thugs, and that these children especially, are not part of the war against the West, or against Christianity, or civilization, they are its most common victims. Sometimes they have been through tragic accidents or even gross negligence by the occasional coalition soldier, but a hundred times more often by the Al Qaeda thugs of al-Zarqawi, in allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Let me include the quote that I find most telling and salient here:
"There are those who, after the London bombing, had convinced themselves that all Muslims were enemies of civilization. There are sound arguments for that: the existence of the Jihad, the silence of most Islamic clergy. But what of the children? What of the Muslim children who are the targets of these "freedom fighters", "resistants" or "militants", whichever the BBC prefers to call them? In what category do they belong? The empirical fact is that no group has been killed more often and more brutally by the "Jihad" than Muslims themselves. During the French Algerian war several times more Algerian Muslims died than French. Anyone with a calculator can see the same is true in Iraq. One of the targets of the London bombing was a subway station frequented by British Muslims. The first objective of terror, indeed of the Terror, and the first objective of the Jihad is to maintain internal control over its base. For as long as internal control can be maintained, a terrorist movement need not defeat its armed enemy. It will never lose; hence in the estimation of the Peace generation, it will always win.
"Logically, a large part of the War on Terror will consist of creating an insurgency within the insurgency. Fighting Islamic extremism must comprise organizing a revolt against Islam's internal oppressors. That would include waging intellectual war against Islamic fundamentalism within its own theological context -- a reformation -- it will include creating clandestine cells to strike at the gangs which beat women and intimidate men within the community. It will require all the skills of a resistance fighter struggling against bearded Big Brother. The Left has a word for such people: "Uncle Toms". That is how they've already characterized Hirsi Ali. That is to be expected. But many conservatives have also been blind to the urgent requirement of creating a liberation movement within Islam, in part because they half believe all Muslims are themselves the enemy; in part because they despair of Muslims ever rising up against the medieval institutions which constrain them; in part because they haven't thought about it. But they should. That pile of bloody children's slippers on an Iraqi street is a tally of spirits who were created to be free."
The basis for the eloquence of the Belmont Club story, along with others on Monday and Tuesday, is the sad, horrifying, but necessary to report eyewitness accounts coming through Grayhawk in the blog The Mudville Gazette, which is one of the many fine "milbloggers" that have worked with coalition military in Iraq (not just American, there are some UK and Australian ones I'll report from in the future, too). The graphic nature is devastating, but it gives the right perspective, and places the blame where it belongs (hint: it's not on the American soldiers, or President Bush).
Attorney Scott Johnson at Powerline blog on Wednesday has, among others, withered the continuing lie about Karl Rove violating some law by 'outing' CIA analyst Valerie Plame in discrediting her and her lying ex-diplomat husband Joseph Wilson in connection to the continuous false claim, constantly regurgitated around the world, that George Bush's entry into the war with Iraq was prearranged and based upon false pretenses. The notes and e-mail of Time correspondent Matthew Cooper affirmatively show that Rove, the president's political director and a long-time friend, DID NOT break the law or act improperly. The article, "Somebody Feed 'Em Some Cat Food," is devastating in its expose of the ulterior motives of the mainstream media (we call it MSM).
This story is complemented very nicely by Leon H., writing in the blog Red State, in his article, "Night of the Living 'Known Fact.' " It simply blasts the left's continually parroting the theme that the U.S. 9/11 Commission had found no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, therefore no justification for the Iraq war. That lie was abundantly condemned by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, as well as by the British commission investigating British intelligence's role in the matter, and has now been thoroughly exposed and discredited since by the discoveries from captured Iraqi intelligence documents and from interrogations of insurgents and former Baathists, a point not lost upon Leon H. The most telling lines, backed by considerably documented information, is on this last line:
"Further, Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents that we continue to recover after the 9/11 commission's report, that the connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda was real and even greater than the one stated by the Bush administration before the war:..."
Well, I guess that's all for now. I'll be sending blog referrals to all of my online community lists later. More on business to come. God bless, au revoir.
