Came up with this this morning……

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Seems silly I know, but this is not just a headline created to tantalize only to misdirect you to a conversation about how much the Muslims hate the Jews or some other rhetoric. There is a real chance that the Pashtuns, the majority class of Afghanistan and the Taliban are descended from one of the “Lost Tribes” of Israel.

A little background. Around 750 b.c the Assyrians conquered ten of the tribes of Israel and carried them off to Assyria. About 150 years later around 600 b.c. the Babylonians under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II, invaded Israel and transplanted the two remaining tribes of Jews, Benjamin and Judah and exiled them from Israel. During this time, many of the 12 tribes were scattered and “Lost”. While many of these these last two tribes of Jews were to return to Israel over time, many of the other ten tribes did not and apocryphal claims to lineage from one of those Lost Tribes have been made by various people as distinct as the Bulgars to the Chaing Min of China.

The Afghans seem to have the strongest claim to this lineage and many scholars are intrigued by the stories, place names, even the ancient (though now abandoned) synagogues that dot the Afghan landscapes. Many of the Pashtuns themselves and Muslim authorities do not deny that there is a connection. Many of the words in Pashtun are very similar to Hebrew, In fact the term “Afghan” is thought to be a derivative of “Ephraim”, one of the Lost Tribes.

This is, apparently (although not to me), all common knowledge. Now to the interesting part of this story. Genetic testing has progressed to the point that a definitive answer may be just a few months to a year away. According to the British newspaper, The Observer,

Now an Indian researcher has collected blood samples from members of the Afridi tribe of Pashtuns who today live in Malihabad, near Lucknow, in northern India. Shahnaz Ali, from the National Institute of Immuno­haematology in Mumbai, is to spend several months studying her findings at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. A previous genetic study in the same area did not provide proof one way or the other.

It would be a most historically interesting and ironic if it was proven that one of the most oppressive Muslim groups in the world were descended from Israel. What moral, ethical, and future ramifications if any this would bring remains to be seen but the possibilities do tend to boggle the mind.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/israel-lost-tribes-pashtun

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I just don’t understand the thinking here.

Scientists to launch solar activity satellite

There’s no way to predict space weather. Officials hope the Solar Dynamics Observatory can provide information to help change that.
“This is the most advanced spacecraft we’ve ever designed to study the sun and its dynamic behavior,” Fisher said. The sun, he said, “has this trick of converting magnetic energy into other kinds of energy that can affect the Earth.”

“I believe we’re up to the point now where we can probably predict when something like this is more or less likely and you can at least take precautions,” Fisher said about solar weather. A warning system, for example, could help power grid operators avoid an outage by taking some of the grid’s load off or finding alternative configurations.

The sun’s effect wasn’t an issue for the Earth until the technological advances in electronics over the last hundred years, he said.

The sun’s effects weren’t an issue for the Earth until the last 100 years?? Are you serious? The Sun provides 99% of the Earths energy, and that is only a fraction of it’s output. How can you say that the sun has no effect except on electronics?

There is a serious disconnect here folks. They admit they know little to nothing about the sun:

The observatory is “going to give us good awareness of the dynamics of the sun, and we’re going to be able to make estimates on when we should take precautions with our satellites or with airline operations or with Department of Defense systems,” Fisher said. “We have an increasing pressure on science to try and predict what’s going to happen on the sun, and that’s the scientific bent of this (SDO) satellite, is to try to get a handle on it.”

and;

“Space weather forecasting is in its infancy … just like hurricane forecasting was years ago,” according to an article on NASA’s Web site by Liz Citrin, SDO project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,

Yet they make definitive statements, The sun’s effect wasn’t an issue for the Earth until the technological advances in electronics over the last hundred years, he said., with no empirical data to support it.

How can you have a serious discussion on climate change with this kind of attitude?

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There are too many people defining themselves as conservatives who are anything but. Republican. Democrat. Doesn’t matter. Just as I pointed out in an earlier post about those who mislabel themselves as “progressives” or “liberals”. We need a litmus test. Most politicians view a litmus test as an anathema. They, almost without exception, are loathe to even address the subject and then only in the most dismissive of terms. Why? I believe for two reasons.

1) Political self preservation. If a politician is boxed in by his core beliefs, what he has said defines him, then he is constrained by those beliefs and doesn’t have room to maneuver back room deals. He will draw fire every time someone thinks he is not living up to those ideals.

2) Failure to list just one so called conservative ideal will cause him to not be elected. There is an argument to be made here. Conservatives have tended to practice a theology of rigid platform of belief. I am not saying that there should be moves to be all inclusive or to overlook many shortcomings because, well, “he’s one of us”. No, that is the failing of the republican party. We can have the big tent, so long as it is a conservative one. The Tea Party, for example, is in the nascent stages of this process of self definition, what “we stand for”.

I believe we need a litmus test where a list of conservative ideals are met or not, but in no particular order or or order of importance. There are too many one note conservatives out there, and you can’t please them all. This is the strategy the democrats have embraced and it is destroying them. You can be inclusive and exclusive all at the same time.

Take ten (for an arbitrary number) ideals that we can agree on as defining conservatism (gun rights, pro life stance, smaller government, etc.) and require that a politician meet, say 7 of them in order to meet the minimum threshold of being defined as a conservative that you would support. Don’t hold them to any one particular stance, just because that one stance happens to be, for you, the end all, be all issue. By doing this, it allows us to have the big tent of inclusiveness while at the same time allowing some discrimination in who we call conservative.

I am not going to make the list right here, right now. Maybe it is for the best that each of us make up our own minds and decide what those ten tenets of conservatism are for ourselves. Or maybe we need a Tea Party consensus on what those tenets are. It is not for me to decide for you here.

I will say though that If we go the route of having a Tea Party type consensus, as soon as that is accomplished we need to find out who currently in congress meets those standards, regardless of party. If they don’t, list who they are and when they are up for reelection and find someone who does meet the standards to run against them. In this way we can purify the conservative movement, unapologetically define our beliefs and hold those politicians who call themselves conservative to live up to those ideals without unrealistic expectations.

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On the right you hear the term progressive and liberal being thrown around quite, well, liberally. It is often said in conjunction with not a few caustic adjectives. While watching Glenn Beck the other day and watching him describe in a paint by numbers way why liberals and progressives are bad, I got to thinking. I had heard both progressive and liberal terms all my life and they never had anything but a negative conotation. But what, EXACTLY, do they mean. I decided to look up the terms and see for myself.

lib⋅er⋅al
  /ˈlɪbərəl, ˈlɪbrəl/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [lib-er-uhl, lib-ruhl] Show IPA
Use liberal in a Sentence
See images of liberal
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–adjective
1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism.
4. favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
5. favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression: a liberal policy toward dissident artists and writers.
6. of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.
7. free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant: a liberal attitude toward foreigners.
8. open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
9. characterized by generosity and willingness to give in large amounts: a liberal donor.
10. given freely or abundantly; generous: a liberal donation.
11. not strict or rigorous; free; not literal: a liberal interpretation of a rule.
12. of, pertaining to, or based on the liberal arts.
13. of, pertaining to, or befitting a freeman.

pro⋅gres⋅sive
  /prəˈgrɛsɪv/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [pruh-gres-iv] Show IPA
Use progressive in a Sentence
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–adjective
1. favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are, esp. in political matters: a progressive mayor.
2. making progress toward better conditions; employing or advocating more enlightened or liberal ideas, new or experimental methods, etc.: a progressive community.
3. characterized by such progress, or by continuous improvement.
4. (initial capital letter) of or pertaining to any of the Progressive parties in politics.
5. going forward or onward; passing successively from one member of a series to the next; proceeding step by step.
6. noting or pertaining to a form of taxation in which the rate increases with certain increases in taxable income.
7. of or pertaining to progressive education: progressive schools.
8. Grammar. noting a verb aspect or other verb category that indicates action or state going on at a temporal point of reference.
9. Medicine/Medical. continuously increasing in extent or severity, as a disease.

Holy Cow!
Who wouldn’t want to consider themselves “free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant…” or “making progress toward better conditions”. I mean come on. I think that Beck and most conservatives have it wrong. I think that everyone is misusing the terms “liberal” and “progressive” at least as these definitions refer to them in the dictionary. Or could it be that there is a liberal bias in a so called egalitarian tomes that define our language?

Compare that to:

con⋅serv⋅a⋅tive
  /kənˈsɜrvətɪv/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv] Show IPA
–adjective
1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
4. (often initial capital letter) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5. (initial capital letter) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.
6. having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative.
7. Mathematics. (of a vector or vector function) having curl equal to zero; irrotational; lamellar.
–noun
8. a person who is conservative in principles, actions, habits, etc.
9. a supporter of conservative political policies.
10. (initial capital letter) a member of a conservative political party, esp. the Conservative party in Great Britain.
11. a preservative.

Moving on, maybe we need to stop calling so called liberals and progressives by the terms that do not truly define them. Maybe we need to stop pussy footing around and call them by their true names, socialists and communists. Mr. Beck, stop playing into their game. How many young people when trying to discern for themselves what to believe reach for a dictionary and decide that maybe being a liberal or progressive is not such a bad thing to be?

I will leave you with two other definitions, you decide which best describes many in our current politcal state including the President and the people he surrounds himself with:

so⋅cial⋅ism
  /ˈsoʊʃəˌlɪzəm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [soh-shuh-liz-uhm] Show IPA
–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

com⋅mu⋅nism
  /ˈkɒmyəˌnɪzəm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [kom-yuh-niz-uhm] Show IPA
–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.
2. (often initial capital letter) a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.
3. (initial capital letter) the principles and practices of the Communist party.
4. communalism.

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