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Pakistan delays ruling on death penalty for Christian woman accused of blasphemy

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Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism
Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism

This story appeared in several Christian sources, but I went looking to find the details in a far left source: Al-Jazeera.

Excerpt:

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has delayed an appeal into the country’s most notorious blasphemy case against a Christian mother on death row since 2010, after one of the judges stepped down.

[…]Bibi was convicted and sentenced to hang in 2010 after an argument with a Muslim woman over a bowl of water. Her supporters maintain her innocence and insist it was a personal dispute.

But successive appeals have been rejected, and if the Supreme Court bench upholds Bibi’s conviction, her only recourse will be a direct appeal to the president for clemency.

[…]Rights groups complain that the controversial legislation is often abused to carry out personal vendettas, mainly against minority Christians.

Now would be a good time to pray for Asia Bibi.

I saw another interesting story in the news that I think shows why we need to be more hawkish in our foreign policy with nations like Pakistan and Iran.

ABC News reports:

The destroyer USS Mason fired defensive countermeasures in response to what may have been incoming missiles, a defense official said . The ship had been attacked two times before in the past week, which triggered retaliatory strikes against radars used by Houthi rebels in those attacks. The Pentagon is investigating the incident.

“A U.S. Strike Group transiting international waters in the Red Sea detected possible inbound missile threats and deployed appropriate defensive measures,” said a U.S. defense official. “Post event assessment is ongoing. All U.S. warships and vessels in the area are safe.”

The destroyer USS Nitze and the USS Ponce, an afloat forward staging area ship, were close to the Mason at the time.

U.S. officials had said earlier Sunday that the Mason had come under attack from two inbound missiles that originated in Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen.

[…]The Houthis are an Iranian-backed rebel group that in January 2015 overthrew the Yemeni government. Since March 2015, they have been fighting a Saudi-led coalition that intervened militarily in Yemen to restore that government to power.

You’ll recall that Obama decided to give Iran a $1.7 billion ransom, $400 million of it in cash, in order to help them with their sponsorship of terrorism and their nuclear weapon development. Perhaps the missiles fired at our ships were bought with money from U.S. taxpayers, funneled to the Houthis via Iran? Thanks, Obama.

Obama is also bringing in over a hundred thousand Muslim refugees (but almost no Christian refugees) tot the United States, and giving them green cards. There was just a news story about that, reported in the Houston Chronicle.

Excerpt:

A Houston man who pledged his allegiance to ISIS and plotted to detonate homemade bombs in local shopping malls pleaded guilty Monday to a terrorism-related charge.

Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, a 24-year-old father, stockpiled circuitry components, wireless remotes and other bomb-making implements in his west Houston apartment, according to court documents.

“I want to blow myself up. I want to travel with the Mujahidin,” he once said, according to prosecutors. “I want to travel to be with those who are against America. I am against America.”

[…]Al Hardan originally entered the country as an Iraqi refugee in 2009. He gained legal permanent residence in 2011 and settled in the Houston area.

Wow, he got a green card in 2 years. People who can speak English who come here with advanced degrees to work, pay taxes and follow the law, have to wait over a decade for a green card. But this refugee got right in at the head of the line. Obama priorities.

Well, what is the Democrat attitude to these domestic terrorists? Is it that the government needs to crack down to protect the public? Of course not. The bigoted taxpayers are not their main concern.

The Daily Caller reported on leaked Clinton e-mails reveal the standard Democrat attitude to domestic terrorism committed by radicalized Muslims:

After Syed Farook was identified as one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman expressed dismay that Farook had an ethnic-sounding name rather than a stereotypical white one, newly released emails show.

“Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter,” Podesta wrote in a Dec. 2, 2015 email to Karen Finney, a Clinton campaign spokeswoman.

He was referring to white MSNBC host Christopher Hayes, who had reported on Twitter that Farook was identified as one of the San Bernardino shooters.

“Damn,” was Finney’s response to the tweet, which she forwarded to Podesta.

That’s Hillary Clinton’s view of radical Islam.

So, is there a plan to address Christians in Pakistan getting the death penalty for being Christian, missile attacks against Navy ships by Iran-backed groups, and domestic terrorism here at home? Yes, Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch has a plan for dealing with radical Islam. This is the great plan that moral relativists on the secular left are offering to address radical Islam. Are you ready?

Here it is from the Daily Wire:

Speaking to the audience at the Muslim Advocates’ 10th anniversary dinner Thursday, Lynch said her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America and vowed to prosecute any guilty of what she deemed violence-inspiring speech.

“The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence,” she said.

[…]After touting the numbers of “investigations into acts of anti-Muslim hatred” and “bigoted actions” against Muslims launched by her DOJ, Lynch suggested the Constitution does not protect “actions predicated on violent talk” and pledged to prosecute those responsible for such actions.

Democrat priorities, American voters.

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New study: unborn child’s heartbeat is detectable at 16 days

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I'm Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this study
I’m Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this study

A new study conducted by University of Oxford was published in the journal eLife. (H/T Dad)

Here is the report from the Oxford University website:

When does our heart first start to beat? Until now, researchers thought that the first time our heart muscle contracted to beat was at eight days after conception in mice, which equates to around day 21 of a human pregnancy.

Now, a team funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) at the University of Oxford has demonstrated earlier beating of the heart in mouse embryos which, if extrapolated to the human heart, suggests beating as early as 16 days after conception.

In the study, published in the journal eLife, researchers looked at the developing mouse heart and found that the muscle started to contract as soon as it formed the cardiac crescent – an early stage in heart development. In mice, this crescent forms 7.5 days after conception, which is equivalent to day 16 in the human embryo. Previously, it was thought that the heart started to contract a stage later, when the heart appears as a linear tube.

Here’s how they did it:

By adding fluorescent markers to calcium molecules within the mouse embryo, the team was able to see at exactly which point in time the calcium tells our heart muscle cells to contract and then become coordinated enough to produce a heartbeat.

The team also found that this initiation of beating was essential for the heart to develop properly at an early stage and that a protein called NCX1 plays a key role in the generation of the calcium signals needed to produce the beating action of the heart.

The heart is the first organ to form during pregnancy and is critical in providing oxygen and nutrients to the developing embryo. The process of heart development is highly conserved between mammalian species, meaning that these findings may add considerably to our understanding of how the human heart develops.

Abortion is another one of those issues where conservatives are determined to abide by what the progress of science reveals, while liberals are determined to block out what science reveals.

Here is a nice video that shows how unborn children develop in the womb:

From the moment of conception, a new set of human DNA is formed, different from the mother, different from the father. And already the little unborn child is in relationship with his or her mother. He or she is depending on her to honor her obligation to him or her, because it was she who chose to have sex, and who chose the man to have sex with, and who chose when in the relationship to have sex with him.

Those of us who are Christians have always believed that abortion was morally wrong, going write back to the beginning of the Christian faith.

This is from Birds of the Air.

Summary:

Recently I came across a reading of the Didache. “The what?” you may ask. The Didache is a book written somewhere in the first or second century. For a long time it was up for consideration as Scripture. It was believed to be the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Eventually it was agreed that the book was an excellent book, but not inspired Scripture. So I was pleased to be able to download this admirable book containing good teachings from the early Church fathers.

The book seemed to be largely a lot of quotes from Scripture. You’ll learn the basic rules of Christianity — “First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself.” You’ll learn that “grave sins” are forbidden, like adultery, murder, fornication, and so on. (They specifically include pederasty in the list.) There are instructions regarding teachers, prophets, Christian assembly, and so on. Lots of the normal, good stuff. But, since this was written sometime prior to 200 AD, I was somewhat surprised at this instruction: “You shall not murder a child by abortion” (Didache, Ch 2).

Christians really would benefit from looking at the moral values of the early church. These days, we tend to decide what is right and wrong based on our feelings, including the feelings we have when other people like us or don’t like us. But deciding things based on your feelings was not real popular with the earliest Christians. They decided what to do based on what was morally right, and they always protected the weak rather than favoring the selfishness and hedonism of the strong.

One the reasons I could never be an atheist is that I would have to shut my eyes to science, and not let science provide me with the facts that undergird my reasoning about moral issues. Most of the atheists I know don’t care about science. They just want to do what makes them feel good, and they don’t care who else gets hurt.

News

Millennials who elected Obama will face high taxes, poverty and unemployment

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We can't raise taxes enough to fix this overspending
We can’t raise taxes high enough to fix this much overspending

My regular readers have probably noticed that I have stopped blogging about day-to-day politics, ever since the Republican primary candidates with conservative records (Cruz, Jindal, Walker) were eliminated from the GOP primary. I have heard though that the mainstream media is going all in to elect Hillary Clinton. My concern is that many people rely on television news and will never think about two really important issues. First, Obama has been the worst President in the history of the country and has destroyed the economy for decades to come. Second, his disregard for national security and weak foreign policy has emboldened the enemies of Western democracies, e.g.  Russia, Iran, etc. We will see the consequences of this (wars and terrorism) for years to come. Those are the real challenges we face as a nation.

This Hoover Institute article by Victor Davis Hanson explains the big picture that the mainstream media doesn’t care about.

Excerpt:

Consider the $20-trillion national debt. Most Americans accept that current annual $500 billion budget deficits are not sustainable—but they also see them as less extreme than the recently more normal $1 trillion in annual red ink. Americans also accept that the Obama administration doubled the national debt on the expectation of permanent near-zero interest rates, which cannot continue. When interest rates return to more normal historical levels of 4-5% per annum, the costs of servicing the debt—along with unsustainable Social Security and Medicare entitlement costs—will begin to undermine the entire budget.

Count up current local, state and federal income taxes, payroll taxes, property and sales taxes, and new health care taxes, and it will be hard to find the necessary additional revenue from a strapped and overtaxed middle class, much less from the forty-seven percent of Americans who currently pay no federal income taxes. The Obama administration has tried to reduce the budget by issuing defense cuts and tax hikes—but it has refused to touch entitlement spending, where the real gains could be made. The result is more debt, even as, paradoxically, our military was weakened, taxes rose, revenue increased, and economic growth remained anemic at well below 2% per annum.

The national debt is one ticking time bomb, but there are others. Illegal immigration and Muslim refugees create additional financial problems for the next generation of entrepreneurs and workers:

Illegal immigration poses a similar dilemma. No nation can remain stable when 10-20 million foreign nationals have crashed through what has become an open border and reside unlawfully in the United States—any more than a homeowner can have neighbors traipsing through and camping in his unfenced yard.

Likewise, there are few multiracial societies of the past that have avoided descending into destructive ethnic chauvinism and tribalism once assimilation and integration were replaced by salad-bowl identity politics. Common words and phrases such as “illegal alien” or “deportation” are now considered taboo, while “sanctuary city” is a euphemism for a neo-Confederate nullification of federal immigration laws by renegade states and municipalities.

Illegal immigration, like the deficits, must cease, but stopping it would be too politically incorrect and painful even to ponder. The mess in Europe—millions of indigent and illegal immigrants who have fled their own failed states to become dependent on the largess of their generous adopted countries, but without any desire to embrace their hosts’ culture—is apparently America’s future.

Progressive Christians and  left-leaning Republicans join Democrats in imposing costs on the next generation of taxpayers with open borders immigration policies. The bill for importing people who take more in welfare than they pay in taxes has to be paid by someone. Not only will taxes on individuals go up, but taxes on businesses will cause them to create fewer jobs, or move their production to countries that have lower taxes on business.

The rest of the article talks about more ticking time bombs created by young leftist voters. Obama’s anti-police rhetoric has created a crime crisis that will require more police, more incarceration and higher insurance premiums. Obama’s anti-school-choice policies have made it harder for the next generation to get the education they will need to offer value to employers. Without skills, you won’t have a job, and you will be poor – poorer than your parents’ generation.

Although most young leftists are ignorant about foreign policy, that did not stop them from voting to cause crises that will harm our economy, and may also draw us into war. Territorial disputes involving strong countries like Russia and China could easily lead to war. Sponsors of terrorism like North Korea and Iran have gained strength during Obama’s reign of stupidity. Wars that impact trading partners or allies will cost taxpayers money. And millennials are the ones who are going to get the bill for a failed foreign policy.

The article doesn’t mention other crises like the trillion dollar student loan bubble, or the next mortgage lending crisis, or the unfunded pension programs crisis, or Medicare going bankrupt, and then Social Security shortly after, etc. No one in the mainstream media mentions these things, and the millennials aren’t aware of these problems. It’s not in their culture to put financial concerns above having a good time. But closing your eyes doesn’t make a threat disappear. Millennials can’t study English in college, rack up student loans, spend all their money on alcohol, work minimum wage jobs, then travel to Europe in their 20s, and expect everything to work out when they get serious about career and savings at age 30. These crises – which millennials voted for – are going to make their lives harder than their parents’ lives ever were.