Green SCIENTISTS have warned that Christmas lights are bad for the planet due to huge electricity waste and urged people to get energy efficient festive bulbs.
GRINCH CSIRO researchers said householders should know that each bulb turned on in the name of Christmas will increase emissions of greenhouse gases. As does every breath exhaled by a terrorist.
Dr Glenn Platt, who leads research on energy demand, said Australia got 80 per cent of its electricity by burning coal which pumps harmful emissions into the atmosphere. So does cow flatulence.
He said: "Energy efficient bulbs, such as LEDs, and putting your Christmas lights on a timer are two very easy ways to minimise the amount of electricity you use to power your lights." I'd rather shoot terrorists and eat cows.
He said the nation's electricity came from "centralised carbon intensive, coal-based power stations" which were responsible for emitting over one third of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. Switch to nuclear.
Dr Platt added: "For a zero-emission Christmas light show, you may consider using solar powered lights or sourcing your electricity from verified green power suppliers." Or using candles.
#1
Why don't those "Scientist" spend their time inventing a better Christmas light, instead of pooping on someone's holiday?
Posted by: Grolush Darling of the Hatfields3195 ||
12/25/2008 3:15 Comments ||
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#2
Well, then, the answer is obvious. The government should sell a Christmas Light credit that allows one to offset their holiday illumination by buying said credit.
#3
FYI - Qualifications of Dr Glenn Platt (of CSIRO) to comment on Climatology from here (includes a pic)
Background
Dr Platt's background in electrical engineering and wireless communications has given him a sound platform to apply his theoretical knowledge to the world of distributed energy management and intelligent agents.
Numerous industry roles, including his experience as a research engineer in Denmark with Nokia Mobile Phones, have given him an understanding of the practical characteristics of real-world systems and how research can be applied to solve specific challenges.
Academic qualifications
Dr Platt studied electrical engineering at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, completing a thesis titled Power line carrier communication methods.
During his undergraduate degree he won a scholarship to study overseas and spent time studying at Ohio University, USA. His Doctorate was in electrical engineering in the area of telecommunications.
'I have been interested in how and why things work from a very early age' says Dr Platt. 'I used to be a member of CSIROs Double Helix club and I can vividly remember a science show they performed at high school where they showed us how rockets could be made. After the show, I went straight home and tried it for myself I had to have a go and know how it was done. Ive always been very inquisitive!'
In other words he's as qualified to comment on Global Warming as I am. I wonder if he thinks he can perform surgeries too, after all he has that 'Dr.' in front of his name.
#5
Send the dude to North Korea for the next holidays. He can have a 'Christmas Lights Free' experience along with bark soup. See how he can save the planet by reduced consumption up front and personal.
#10
disparaging:
a) a western tradition of lighting christmas lights for decoration
b) celebrating a Christian holiday season
c) in the name of phony AGW cult
it's a three-fer for Dr. Platt! Perhaps this will even merit an email from the Goracle?
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/25/2008 10:58 Comments ||
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#11
If Christians don't wake up and realize that they are on the receiving end of a cold war right now, they'll wake up one day fairly soon and be on the receiving end of government rifles.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
12/25/2008 11:09 Comments ||
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#12
And how many jet-setting fact finding missions did the good Dr need to determine this "fact"?
#13
I've been lobbying the genetic engineering folks for a long time. Stupid lawyers and eco types keep holding them back.
THE SOLUTION IS DO-ABLE!
It goes like this:
1) Kits to add a firefly gene are so common an artist even made a flashing bunny.
2) Synthetic genetic timers are in the tool kit of MIT genetic enginners.
3) A synthetic genetic timer that clocks itself based on the daily light dark ratio (Photosynthesis gives it to plants and they use it) can cause itself to trigger for say about 1 month either side of the solstice. For Oz they could use the longer day solstice...
4) The trigger in 3 would enable the firefly gene kit in 1.
5) The combined kit would be applied to conifers and other trees you wanted to flash at Christmas time...
No stringing outside lites, No effort but planting the trees. (or infecting existing ones with a virus containing the genetic modification).
A better show each year.
Win Win Win...
and
Could you imagine the view from space on a winters night with all of say Canada's forests flashing? Awesome....
#14
I say: Bogus scientists with nothing better to do than say everything under the Sun harms the planet...harm the planet. The sooner they reach stasis the better.
#15
Christmas lights bring joy to millions on the shortest days of the year. AGW is just the latest passing cult of the self-appointed expert posers, the Chicken Littles of the human species.
#19
If Christians don't wake up and realize that they are on the receiving end of a cold war right now, they'll wake up one day fairly soon and be on the receiving end of government rifles.
Yes. It's pretty overt in Britain these days, not so hidden here either.
In the five years I lived in Pakistan, a constant feature was the ever-present ISI minders who followed me wherever I went. Their surveillance was crude. On one occasion they seated themselves next to a table at which I was hosting Maleeha Lodhi, (later Pakistans Envoy in Washington) at the height of the Kargil conflict.
Nervous and rattled by the proximity of the ISI goons, Ms Lodhi even declined to accept from me a copy of the infamous Musharraf-Aziz conversation that had been taped by the R&AW during the Kargil conflict. It was, therefore, not difficult to spot the ISI goons swarming over the village of Faridkot to intimidate ordinary citizens and erase all evidence that the captured terrorist Mohammed Ajmal Imran 'Kasab and his parents had lived there.
In urban centres ranging from Sialkot and Multan to Dera Ismail Khan, the ISI has spread out to erase evidence of the other terrorists being Pakistani nationals. Thus, despite professions of readiness to co-operate, Pakistan is erasing all evidence of its involvement in the carnage.
Sadly, the Manmohan Singh Government has bungled badly by stating there was no evidence of ISI involvement in the Mumbai carnage. At a recent public meeting in Washington, the former Commander-in-Chief of Indias Eastern Fleet, Vice-Admiral Premvir Das, explained the immense complexity of the operations undertaken by the hijackers who boarded a Pakistani ship in Karachi, hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, navigated using global positioning systems and transferred weapons, ammunition, explosives and an outboard motor in turbulent waters, into a small boat.
Admiral Das averred: "It is just not possible for ordinary jihadis, trained in camps in Muridhke, to do this. Only people with rigorous military training could have done what these people did". In short, the entire commando style operation had the backing of elements from the Pakistan army and navy.
Despite this, it is inexplicable why the Manmohan Singh Government does not publicly speak of circumstantial evidence of ISI/Pak military involvement.
New Delhis pusillanimity on this score has inevitably led to foreign leaders like Senator John Kerry giving the Pakistan military establishment a clean chit on the Mumbai carnage. While there is sympathy in western capitals for India after the Mumbai attack, western chanceries now appear to believe that India is acting like a supplicant in pleading for them to act against Pakistan.
Given the Western and particularly American reliance on Pakistan for logistical support in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the Americans now believe that expressions of sympathy and understanding alone will deter New Delhi from taking any action that adversely affects their operations in Afghanistan.
Sensing this, Pakistan regularly threatens them that it will move its troops to the Indian border unless they "restrain" India. Is it not, therefore, time for India to tell its friends that they should reduce their dependence on Pakistan and that they should hold out the threat of economic and military sanctions against Pakistan, if the latter continues to stonewall on dismantling the infrastructure of ISI sponsored terrorism?
Ever since the NATO Summit in Bucharest in April 2008, NATO officials have been seeking alternative routes bypassing Pakistan for supplying their forces in Afghanistan. During the NATO Summit, Russia agreed to facilitate a land transport corridor to Afghanistan. Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have been approached for the same purpose and Azerbaijan and Georgia have been sounded out for a Caucasian corridor to Afghanistan through Turkmenistan, via the Caspian Sea.
Such moves will reduce Western dependence on Pakistan and effectively undermine Pakistans ability to blackmail its American allies. Recent attacks on NATO supply convoys near Peshawar appear to be part of a calculated Pakistani effort to force the US to plead for more Pakistani military support.
India should now let it be known that it feels the US should not be deterred from imposing sanctions on Pakistan if it persists in its refusal to act against terrorism emanating from its soil and that the US should actively reduce its dependence on Pakistan for its operations in Afghanistan. Indian security will after all not be as seriously affected as American security interests if Pakistan chooses to move elements of its four divisions, now on its western borders, to its borders with India.
If Pakistan continues to blackmail the US with threats of pulling out troops from its western borders to its eastern borders, India can justifiably say that Pakistans threats will not deter it from to acting to protect its interests, if the US and others do not go beyond paying mere lip service to Indian forbearance.
There may be fears that this will lead to growing Talibanisation of Pakistan. But would a spread of Taliban control towards the capital Islamabad also not lead to the weakening of the Pakistan army, which is, after all, the lead player in sponsoring terrorism against both Afghanistan and India?
Further, can the Pakistan army afford to create a situation that would lead to NATO air-strikes deeper into Pakistani territory? In the present power structure of Pakistan, President Zardari and his Government play second fiddle to the army establishment. This will not change unless the army is isolated and forced to give up its favourite pastime of "bleeding" India.
These are policy options that New Delhi must adopt and articulate before the Obama Administration assumes office. President-elect Barack Obama has, on more than one occasion, endorsed Indias right to "self-defence" The incoming Administration is also more open to ideas, like widening the dialogue on Afghanistan by bringing in not only the countrys Central Asian neighbours but also Russia, Iran and India.
It is true that China which, in a way, was responsible for the Mumbai carnage by blocking moves in the UN Security Council to get the Jamat-ud-Dawa declared a terrorist organisation will continue to stand by its "all-weather friend" Pakistan. But once the US and its NATO allies decide to call Pakistans bluff, work on alternative supply routes to Afghanistan and threaten Pakistan with sanctions if it does not dismantle the infrastructure of ISI-sponsored terrorism, Pakistan and China will be compelled to comply with the demands of the international community.
The leverage that India has to make the US and its NATO allies act on these lines lies is its ability to compel the Pakistan army to move from its western to its eastern borders, should it chose to do so.
In dealing with Pakistan, we would be well-advised to take note of the analysis by Canadian academic Salim Mansur, whose family was almost wiped out by Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh in 1971.
Mansur notes that the army-dominated establishment in Pakistan is "ideologically anti-Hindu and anti-Semitic" He adds: "The attack on Mumbai could not have been launched without large-scale planning and logistics support, and these could not have been provided without a secure base of operations in the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities".
One hopes that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has shed many a tear over Pakistan being a "victim of terrorism" and still fights shy of speaking of ISI involvement in the Mumbai carnage, will take note of Mansurs words.
The author is a former Ambassador to Pakistan
Posted by: john frum ||
12/25/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Pakistan has been playing a double game with US for long on its afghan borders siphoning and diverting funds from US for fomenting terror in India and purchasing military hardware to fight India. It is time now for US to find alternate supply route to NATO & US forces other than Karachi. US should discard Pakistan in its war against terror and stop funding. Unless this is done, Pakistan will continue to terrorise its peace loving neighbours
The attacks in Mumbai have brought forth a parade of subtle and not-so-subtle denial. The sound of gunfire and the counting of the dead had not yet been finished in Mumbai when the terror apologists had already explained it. Aryn Baker writing in Time Magazine, spoke of how "the roots of Muslim rage run deep in India." His article meandered over economic disparities faced by Indian Muslims and the need for justice, else the people like the gunman in the Oberoi Trident Hotel would "keep calling." Tariq Ali stated, that India needs to look closer to home to Kashmir where "conditions have been much worse than Tibet." Martha Nussbaum, writing in the Los Angeles Times about the Mumbai attacks focused her entire article on the terrible doings of the "Hindu Right." Arundhati Roy, asked us to "contextualize" the Mumbai attacks as a choice for India to make between "justice and civil war." And parts of the Pakistani blogosphere and Pakistan television and sites like countercurrents.org were alive with murmuring of a conspiracy by--who else?--Hindus, Jews and Americans, all to defame Muslims. Practically all these Ostrich-like responses, burying their head in the sand with various forms of denial and apologia, chose to ignore the elephant sitting in the room--the reality of Pakistan-based Islam-enabled terrorism. Sacrificing this elementary truth to the gods of politically correctness, helps no one--including the many Muslims, among them Pakistanis, who are genuinely aghast at these acts.
The first kind of apologia is denial. This generally takes the form of elaborate conspiracy theories--such as the most popular theory doing the rounds of the Muslim world after the 9/11 attacks, "the Jews did it." For what? "To blame the Muslims" of course. It appears that the entire world is engaged in the construction of elaborate hoax plots to kill themselves simply to blame Muslims. The version doing the rounds in the Mumbai terror attacks was that the attackers were Hindu, evidenced by the fact that one of the photographs of a suave young man, casually toting an AK-47 with a back-pack full of ammunition, showed him wearing a thick red band on his arm. "Tying a red thread or cord around the wrist is a Hindu practice" proclaims the blog, titled "Evidence being deliberately ignored" perhaps not quite aware that the Hindu practice involves a sacred thread or mauli, not a broad band, though at least one report pointed out that they were specifically instructed to wear a red band to cause confusion. And wearing a band is hardly clinching evidence versus the spate of satellite, phone, ordnance-based and confessional evidence that is available. Already this "clinching" evidence of the "Hindu band" has been picked and quoted up by numerous people with Muslim names posting comments on the news as incontrovertible proof of the conspiracy. But the conspiracy theory proponents are not found only in the anonymous blogosphere. It is broadcast as the explanation on mainstream Pakistani TV. No less than Maulana Syed Nizamuddin, All India Muslim Personal Law Board general secretary, has latched onto the ascription of the Mumbai attacks to Muslims as a conspiracy. Abdul Rahman Antulay of the Congress, in remarks disowned by the party, has come out with his own version of the conspiracy. So the arrest of the Pakistani operative of Lashkar-e-Taiba; the selective targeting of Americans, Britons, Hindus and Jews, the "Western powers" and Yehudi-Hindu "devils" that form the backbone of the Islamist terror universe; the evidence of traced satellite calls to Pakistan, is all rendered meaningless by this single red-band. The explicit instructions they carried to "kill indiscriminately, particularly white foreign tourists, and spare Muslims" that led them to spare the Turkish Muslim couple at the Taj and massacre the 13-year old American girl is of no consequence.
All this, say the conspiracy theorists, is simply a grand plot to "defame Muslims."
Denial is an understandable emotion. There are many Muslims in India and abroad, who go about their quiet lives, just like everyone else. They are neither scholars nor historians delving deep into their texts or constructing grand histories. Their lives revolve around their close circles and their concerns for them. They have been told that Islam is a religion of a peace, the greatest religion, and that is enough for them. They cannot identify with these mass-killers and fear being associated with them. They have seen good Muslims all around them, in their friends and family. Denial, then is an understandable response at being told that the killers are Muslim espousing Islamic causes.
The second form of apologia is the apologia of "just cause." This form of apologia bandies about every imaginable excuse--economic disparities, the pulling down of the structure of the Babri Masjid, the situation in Kashmir, the riots in Gujarat, the alleged persecution of "minorities" in India and so on and so forth as the reason for terror. All this must apparently be fixed, we are told, before the terror will go away. The choice as the doyen of selective apologia, Arundhati Roy, herself informs us in an article about the Mumbai attacks that the choice is between "justice" for all these things and "civil war" in India. How that relates to Pakistan-based terror groups with a pan-Islamic mission killing Jews in Mumbai is somehow lost in the fog of her own picturesque prose. Yes, somehow, the persecution of the Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh to the point of elimination in Pakistan and to truly genocidal proportions in Bangladesh, has yet to generate bands of Hindu terrorists turning into random mass-murderers in those countries. By contrast, Muslims have increased, both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms in independent India. These are simply facts to be acknowledge. Severe genocidal persecution would show up in census data. Ask the Tibetans. The Tibetan genocide by the Chinese, a real genocide in an age of hyperbole, in which over 1 million Tibetans have been killed, their monasteries have been destroyed and their identity and culture under attack has continued for decades, have scarcely turned Tibetans into taking AK-47's into their hands and blasting Chinese tourists in Mumbai. The Ahmediyas, an unorthodox Muslim sect, are likewise a severely persecuted minority in Pakistan who have not take recourse to terror. Nor did Buddhists the world over start blowing people and declare Muslims as their enemies because of the great injustice in the destruction of the magnificient Bamiyan Buddhas, a marvel of far greater grandeur than the obscure and relatively insignificant Babri Masjid, by the Taliban.
Who remembers the riot in India a few years ago where a particular community was targeted and hundreds were killed and over twenty thousand people were rendered homeless? This is not Gujarat 2002 but something that took place after that--Assam in 2003. Its victims were "Hindi-speaking" Biharis living in Assam, some for generations. It is a riot that has virtually vanished from history. No "Concerned Citizens" tribunal went to do a probe. No Nussbaum's write about it. No campaigns will be launched to deny the Chief Minister of the state at the time (anyone remember the name?) a US Visa. No University Chairs will be created in its name. There is not even an entry in Wikipedia. The Biharis are among the poorest and most underprivileged groups in India, many of them facing discrimination as they seek employment as migrant laborers across India. One wonders why the Biharis have not unleashed a reign of terror across India, despite being the repeated target of attacks, most recently in Mumbai itself. When Poverty, discrimination, even selective targeting during riots and killings from Assam to Mumbai is amply available to Biharis as a justifying "context."
The final apologia is the apologia of mitigating circumstances--that of poverty and lack of education. Among its recent proponents--none other than the good doctor Chopra, amiably turning Larry King's questions on the Mumbai attacks into the "root causes" of "poverty", "education" and lest we forget, "fundamentalist Hindus." In the bliss generated by the chanting of mantras and the counting of dollars, while carefully distancing himself from Hinduism to skillfully market himself to the broader American public, Dr. Chopra also distanced himself from reasoned analysis. If poverty and lack of education were the root causes, it is strange that most of the 9/11 suicide-attackers were both well-to-do and educated as is Osama Bin Laden himself. The "Indian Mujahideen" that claimed responsibility for recent bomb blasts included well-educated and well-off software engineers and college students. Of course all these arrests have already been dismissed by the apologists as part of the unending conspiracy against Muslims. The Versace T-shirt wearing Lashkar-a-Toiba attacker in Mumbai who gleefully shot down bystanders and police officers alike may have been poor, but it was not poverty that turned him into a lethal killer. That required something else. The trained Mumbai attackers had little problem using the GPS or Google Earth to carry out their blood-soaked plots. Neither poverty nor lack of education is the "root cause" propelling these cold-blooded and merciless killers.
This is not to say that innocents, Muslims and others, are not targeted by the Indian State or that the Indian police is not often sloppy, venal and corrupt. The problems with the Indian state are manifold and are the subject of other writings. However, the Indian state is by- and-large an equal-opportunity oppressor in addition to being blissfully incompetent. But its acts alone do not yield clues into the phenomenon of terrorism by Islamic groups in India.
By their choice of targets, and by the causes they espoused, there is sufficient cause to conjecture that the Mumbai attackers were Muslims, mostly from Pakistan, fighting for what they considered as Islamic causes. They were specifically indoctrinated using Islamic concepts and the promise of Islam-justified heavenly rewards. And, in this case, they were specifically the product of the terror apparatus from Pakistan. Now whether Islam is properly or improperly used and how deeply the Pakistan state is implicated are reasonable follow-up research questions.
But we can ask these questions properly once we go past the three forms of apologia. Whether or not other Muslims agree with their actions, the first step is to admit the existence of Islam-inspired terror groups. Denial and apologia, both by Muslims and by others on their behalf, is much more damaging to Muslims. This is because, even when the thought censors of political correctness refuse to look at this inconvenient truth, it doesn't go away--it simply becomes part of private conversation rather that open public discourse. And it is these private conversations, about anti-Muslim conspirators on the one hand and all-guilty Muslims on the other, which are far more dangerous to the future of a harmonious India.
On the other hand, once we plainly admit of Pakistan-based Islam-inspired terror without pretending it away, we are able to examine it in the light and come up with possible solutions. This will be the subject of the next article.
Sankrant Sanu is an independent writer based in Seattle.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/25/2008 00:00 ||
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Several major signs of a coming Indian-Pakistani war surfaced Dec. 24.
Indian troops reportedly have deployed to the Barmer district of southwest Rajasthan state along the Indian-Pakistani border. Furthermore, the state government of Rajasthan has ordered residents of its border villages to be prepared for relocation. The decision reportedly came after a meeting among the state's director-general of police, home secretary and an official from the central government. Stratfor confirmed the report with an Indian army officer.
According to India's ZeeNews, the Pakistani army replaced the Pakistan Rangers that regularly patrol the border with India. The Pakistani troop movements were later confirmed by U.K. Bansal, the additional director-general of India's Border Security Force (BSF) in Barmer, Rajasthan.
As Stratfor reported Dec. 22, there is a high probability of India using military force against Pakistan after Dec. 26, when a deadline expires for Pakistan to deliver on Indian demands to crack down on Islamist militant proxies that threaten India. With low expectations that Pakistan has the will or capability to deliver on these demands, India has spent the past month preparing for military action against Pakistan. Pressure is now ratcheting up on both sides of the border, with Indian Air Marshal P.K. Barbora, air officer commanding-in-chief of the Western Air Command, telling reporters Dec. 24 that as many as 5,000 targets in Pakistan have thus far been identified, while saying that many of the militants hiding out in camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir have already fled.
It should be noted that the area of Rajasthan where Indian troops are deploying and where villagers are preparing to evacuate is a long distance from Kashmir, where conflict between India and Pakistan typically takes place. Barmer district is adjacent to Jaisalmer district, where India's Southwestern Air Command is located. Any attacks based out of the Barmer district would involve mechanized and armored forces that could threaten the core Karachi-Hyderabad-Islamabad corridor -- Pakistan's only transit corridor that links the Pakistani heartland of Punjab with the coast. Given that cash-strapped Pakistan is a net food and energy importer and is already flirting with bankruptcy, India has a military opportunity at hand to cut off Pakistan's economic lifeline. Furthermore, a potential cutoff would likely complicate the flow of fuel and supplies to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Any ground troop movement in southwestern Rajasthan is likely to be accompanied by air strikes against militant targets outside of Kashmir and possibly against intelligence facilities in Pakistan's urban areas.
The timing of Indian military action is still unclear, as it will take some time for India to mobilize its forces and evacuate locals along the border area. But given these recent troop movements, it could be a matter of days before the world witnesses another Indian-Pakistani war.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/25/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
...there is a high probability of India using military force against Pakistan after Dec. 26...
There is also a high probability of Pakistan getting most of its fighters blown out of the air on the 28th.
#2
as many as 5,000 targets in Pakistan have thus far been identified, while saying that many of the militants hiding out in camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir have already fled
Learn from Israel's mistakes: don't target terrorist camps---target Paki infrastracture.
#3
INdian PM has said.. no war.. however, if there is a war.. it might turn out to be a defining movement in the worlds history. As I have mentioned in some other blogs.. Mumbai Nov 26, 2008 of our times might well be similar to the assasination of the Archduke Ferdinand which started WW1
#4
There's no doubt that in Pakistan and India we've got our Austria and Serbia, I doubt the Chinese are as dumb as the Germans. Things didn't turn out too well for the Russians either.
#5
I'm with NS. Backing Pakistan (a failed state) is a big loser. There's nothing for the Chinese to gain from it. Except for a chunk of Indian territory and I don't suspect that's worth a war to them.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
12/25/2008 12:41 Comments ||
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#6
Given that both parties are nuclear armed, this could get very ugly, very fast. There is a motivation for India to go nuclear and hit hard early to take out the Pakistan's capability to respond. Peace is dependent on rational behavior from the Pak government. And how likely is that?
#7
Who cares if they have a nuclear exchange. The prevailing winds in winter are from the northeast. If they went full easterly, the Iranians would get it.
Not only has there been no sense of outrage over the Islamofascist attacks in Mumbai, India that began on November 26 and lasted until the 29th; the event that took the lives of 170 people and wounded hundreds of others has quickly receded to being just one more atrocity in the name of Allah.
As the world looked on, the perpetrators were referred to as gunmen, militants, and extremists, but rarely as the jihad terrorists that they were. If you cannot name your enemy, you can never really defend yourself against them or go on the offense against them.
One specific target in Mumbai, a city that is home to thirteen million Hindus and Muslims, was the Chabad Center, a gathering place for Jews where Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, and others were slain. Only the bravery of their childs Indian nanny saved their infant son, Moshe, now orphaned as one of the Jews that far too many Muslims want to exterminate.
In a personal post on the Carter Center website, former President Jimmy Carter reported on a meeting in Damascus, Syria, with Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, one of the two factions claiming to represent Palestinians. The occasion was the anniversary of the founding of Hamas. Carter noted that Hamas was putting all their eggs in Obamas basket to secure their objectives, while failing to note that the destruction of Israel is its primary objective.
Carter also took time to lament that Hezbollah, another Palestinian terrorist organization, lacks missiles to defend itself from Israeli aircraft after a visit to Lebanon. You may recall that Hezbollah initiated a war in 2006 against Israel by capturing an Israeli soldier and then by raining down hundreds of rockets on the northern region of Israel. These days, the Israeli overflights provide UNIFIL, a United Nations peace keeping force, with ample evidence of the weaponry being smuggled into Lebanon from Syria. UNIFIL has done nothing to stop the traffic and, at the first shot fired, will withdraw its forces.
Thats because, since 1947 when the Jewish state was declared and immediately attacked by its Arab neighbors, the United Nations has passed more than a hundred resolutions concerning the Palestinian refugees that resulted from that war. Not one resolution has been passed regarding Jewish refugees that were forced to flee from Arab nations, often where their families had lived for generations.
Bethlehem, the site of the birth of Jesus, is an active center for the other Palestinian faction, Fatah, which was driven out of Gaza at gunpoint by Hamas. This occurred after the Israelis had unilaterally withdrawn, forcing its Jewish residents to leave. It has been the launch ground for hundreds of rockets against Israel ever since.
Writing in a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report, contributing editor, Harold Evans, took note of how Fatahs television station and in its schools, Palestinian children are taught that suicide bombing is much to be desired. Martyrdom is bliss. As Evans points out, Children being taught murder by rote is child abuse, a mental deformation more damaging than physical injury, adding that This endlessly fraudulent education has had devastating effects on the prospect for peace.
These refugees are now into their fourth generation because none of the Arab nations surrounding Israel would accept them as citizens, confining them for sixty years in slums called camps. Who oversees these camps? The United Nations. Who funds much of UNRWAs efforts? American taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars thus far.
By contrast, since 1948 Israel has taken in more than 850,000 Jews driven from Arab nations. The Palestinian refugees have swelled from approximately 650,000 to some five million, all seething with hatred toward Israel, pawns of Arab nations, and providing a reservoir of terrorists.
If you want peace in Bethlehem this year, next year and beyond, the United States has to stop funding UNRWA. It has to stop funding Fatah as a partner for peace. It has to insist that true peace requires a renunciation of stated goals of extermination and destruction.
The United States and its allies must name terrorists anywhere and everywhere for who they are. Theyre not militants or extremists. They are the cold-blooded Muslim killers of innocent people in Mumbai, in Bali, in Haifa, in London, in Beslan, Russia, to name just a few places, and, on September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington, D.C.
Each day of electricity cuts increases the prospect that Palestinian Water Authority engineer Saadi Ali's nightmare will come true. Ali, in charge of the North Gaza Emergency Sewage Treatment Project, lives in constant fear of a recurrence of the calamity that took place in March 2007 when the dirt embankments surrounding a temporary infiltration pond of sewage water collapsed, and the effluent water that flooded the nearby Bedouin village of Umm al-Nasser led to the drowning deaths of five people. About 1,000 people were evacuated from their homes, animals died and considerable damage was caused to property and crops.
The temporary infiltration basin was originally built to lower the level of water in the nearby giant sewage lake that has slowly developed. Last November, the PWA, which is directly accountable to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, was slated to empty the lake and transfer the sewage water to new infiltration basins seven kilometers to the southeast away.
However, the initial operation of the emergency project's pumping station has been delayed for over a month now. Ever-lengthening electricity cuts, the result of Israel reducing the fuel supply to the bare minimum both to Gaza and its power plant, have severely hampered the project's activation.
Ali and the team of contractors and laborers working with him feel powerless in the face of the following threatening facts. The artificial sewage lake has a total area of 350 dunams that is one kilometer long and contains 2.5 million cubic meters of effluent water with depth ranging from eight to 13 meters. The site of the lake overlooks an inhabited agricultural area of over 1,000 dunams with a population of 10,000.
The dirt embankments surrounding the lake could collapse for a variety of reasons: heavy rainfall, stray Qassam rockets, mortars launched by the Israel Defense Forces, exchanges of gunfire.
The long, frequent electric power cuts are much more than simply "inconvenient." They are causing serious environmental harm that will also affect Gaza's Israeli neighbors. The flooding of the region surrounding the sewage lake would not only endanger the lives of many people, it would also inflict damage on fields and fill the open irrigation wells with sludge that would immediately contaminate the aquifer.
"About a month ago, the electric power cuts lasted between six and eight hours, and we tried to navigate our way around them," Ali said in a telephone conversation with Haaretz on Monday from Gaza. "Today, every electric power cut lasts 12 hours, and the power is then supplied for six hours. Since there is a shortage of natural gas for cooking, many people use electricity - when it is available - and the current is too weak to operate the [pumping station's] machines."
Another reason for the delay is the absence of the expert responsible for the operation of the new electric power system. He is a resident of Bethlehem and all the requests that he be granted an entry permit to Gaza have so far been denied.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/25/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Pals swimming in their own sewage. What an apt metaphor.
#5
They have learned that they often get it both ways. The people that fund them don't seem to realize/care that the money is transfered two weapons. They just look through their tears and see what is needed, needed so desperately and listen to the Pals explaination of how it is Israel's fault and they give, give, give and blame, blame, blame.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In the five years I lived in Pakistan, a constant feature was the ever-present ISI minders who followed me wherever I went. Their surveillance was crude. On one occasion they seated themselves next to a table at which I was hosting Maleeha Lodhi, (later Pakistans Envoy in Washington) at the height of the Kargil conflict.
