Amish - An orthodox tribe, unlike orthodox muslims, allowed to live their own style

• Don't stare, gawk, or otherwise be disrespectful of the Amish.
• When driving, keep an eye out for slow-moving Amish buggies (especially at night), and give them plenty of room when following or passing. Keep headlights on low-beam and stay away from the horn, except for a short toot when passing, to avoid spooking the horses.
• Do not enter private property without permission.
• No photos or videos, please. Most Amish consider posing for photographs to be an unacceptable act of pride and do not allow pictures of themselves. The Amish will usually allow you to photograph their homes, farms, and buggies if you ask respectfully, but even this can be intrusive and is better avoided. If you must take pictures, consider a telephoto lens, and avoid taking any photos which include recognizable faces. A picture of the rear of an Amish buggy as it travels down the road probably won't offend anyone.
• Do not feed or pet horses that are tied to a hitching rail or harnessed to a buggy.
• Out of respect for their privacy, it is best to avoid approaching the Amish unless they appear open to company. They are just like you and don't really appreciate strangers knocking at their door. When you do have a need to approach a group of Amish, it is polite to speak to a male, if possible. If you are sincerely interested in talking to the Amish to learn more about their culture, then your best bet is to patronize an Amish-owned business and talk with the shopkeepers. Most Amish people enjoy talking with outsiders, if they don’t feel like they are regarded as animals in the zoo.

Amish Country - Dos and Dont's When Visiting Amish Country

dont be direspectful to amish, but be curteous :) it is their lifestyle, let them live the way they want to live... let them prevent their children from goin to school... let them violate(or go against) the laws of their govt. when it comes to muslims, everyone wants to civilize the ' uncivilized and barbarian fundamentals' if they want to live as per their understanding of their religion under their cultural obligations.

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An interesting discussion :) on recent afghan war

lightoftruth wrote: When will libs demand Obama pull out of Afgan instead of increasing our presence in that quagmire? What will libs do when Obama attacks Pakistan after the taliban takes it over?????

No one attacks a nuclear armed nation, & The Taliban will never take over Pakistan.

I think you are getting to much sugar in your diet Old mate, this is definately a sugar overdose post that you made.

In New Strategy, U.S. Will Defend Kabul Environs - UnitedStates.com FOREIGN* & DEFENSE - NEWS - Forums

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Deal acceptable in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan: US

By Anwar Iqbal
WASHINGTON, Feb 20: The United States has rejected the truce in Swat but US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday that Washington could accept a similar agreement between the government and Taliban militants in Afghanistan.

The US rejection was conveyed by its special envoy Richard Holbrooke who called President Asif Ali Zardari on Thursday evening to tell him that the Swat deal was tantamount to surrender by Pakistan.

Later, Mr Holbrooke told CNN that the Pakistani leader had assured him that the Swat deal was only an “interim arrangement” to stabilise the restive region and that he had not yet signed an agreement with the militants.

In a separate briefing on Friday, Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Poland that the United States could accept a political agreement between the Afghan government and Taliban rebels along the lines of the Swat deal.

Full story on Deal acceptable in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan: US -DAWN - Top Stories; February 21, 2009


:)

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Liberal Fascism

By Nick Cohen
IT is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism.

Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share.

Few of Goldberg’s contemporaries will grant him the same courtesy. He lives in a western culture where “smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident in the truth of their ill-informed opinions” accuse him of being “a fascist and a Nazi” simply because he is a conservative. Meanwhile, the heart-throb-savant George Clooney can assert that “the liberal movement morally has stood on the right side”.

Behind the insults and the self-righteousness is the assumption that politics runs on a continuum from far left to far right. Goldberg sets out to knock down this false paradigm and show that much of what Americans call liberalism, and we call leftism, has its origins in fascism.

Liberal Fascism is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal. The title comes from H.G. Wells, the most strenuous intellectual advocate of totalitarianism on the early-20th-century British left. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti,” he told the Oxford Union in 1932, “for enlightened Nazis. The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. The Fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition of a far grander scale.”

Wells saw no difference between communism and fascism and Goldberg puts a compelling case that neither should we. Mussolini began as a socialist agitator. The Nazis were a national socialist party which despised bourgeois democracy and offered a comprehensive welfare state.

I agree that all totalitarianisms are essentially the same, and that far leftists combined with far rightists in the 1920s and 1930s and are doing so again now. But I had difficulties with Goldberg’s concept of totalitarian unity. Communists killed different people to fascists. If you were a peasant farmer in Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, they allowed you to live — as long as you did not cross them.

In America, flustered liberal critics have had far greater difficulty with the notion that they and their predecessors are the inheritors of ideas that began in the fascist movement. Goldberg certainly leaves them little left to be proud of as he provides an alternative history of an America that Simon Schama lacks the intellectual courage to confront.

He begins with Woodrow Wilson and shows that before Mussolini came to power, a Democratic president imposed a militarised state. When America entered the First World War, the progressives of the day used the conflict as an excuse to arrest dissidents, close newspapers and recruit tens of thousands of neighbourhood spies.

Beginning with the Black Panthers, multiculturalism has also placed racial and religious identity above all else and beyond the reach of rational argument. Fascism was a pagan movement, whose mystic tropes are repeated by new age healers, vegetarians and greens.

Repeatedly he insists that he does not want to allege that, for instance, Hillary Clinton’s admittedly sinister desire for the state to take the place of the family makes her a totalitarian, merely that her ideas come from the totalitarian movement.

Liberal Fascism is a bracing and stylish examination of political history. That it is being published at a time when Goldberg’s free market has failed and big government and charismatic presidents are on their way back in no way invalidates his work. Hard times test intellectuals and, for all its occasional false notes, Goldberg’s case survives. n

— The Guardian, London

DAWN - Editorial; February 11, 2009

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Distant planet is ‘an orbiting hell’

PARIS, Jan 28: Astronomers have observed a planet some 200 light years from Earth that, for a few hours, becomes 700 degrees Celsius hotter every time its elliptical orbit brings it close to its sun.

The scientists, in a study released on Wednesday, said they had generated the most realistic images ever captured of the exoplanet, the name given to planets outside our Solar System.

They used infrared data collected from Nasa’s space-based Spitzer telescope to gain pictures of a strange world exposed briefly to an inferno.

One image shows a thin blue crescent on the “dark” side of the planet, opposite its star, while the scorched side glows a deep, crimson red.

Known as HD80606b, the planet is a giant ball of gas that has four times the mass of Jupiter, the biggest planet of our system.

Researchers led by Gregory Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz analysed data collected in November 30 hours before, during and after HD80606b’s closest approach to its star.

From the telescope’s vantage point, the planet passed behind the star — an event called a secondary eclipse — just before reaching its maximum temperature of 1,227 C (2240 F), hotter than molten lava.

It was an unexpected stroke of luck, making it possible to measure the exact temperatures of the star and the planet separately.

“This is the first time that we’ve detected weather changes in real time on a planet outside our solar system,” said Laughlin. “The results are very exciting because they give us important clues to the atmospheric properties of the planet.”

As the atmosphere heats up and expands, it produces fierce winds — moving at five kilometres per second — that flow away from the day side towards the night side.

The planet’s rotation causes the winds to curl up into large-scale storm systems that gradually peter out as temperatures cool, Laughlin said.

HD80606b swings around its sun in an elliptical orbit every 114 Earth days. It is one of about a dozen so-called “hot Jupiter” extra-solar planets which spin on their axes in such a way that the same surface is always facing their respective stars.

The photo-like images were generated by a computer programme that calculated the colour and intensity of light coming from the glowing planet.

“These images are far more realistic than anything that’s been done before for extra-solar planets,” said UCSC researcher Daniel Kasen, who developed the programme.

When closest to its star, the sunlight beating down on the planet is more than 800 times stronger than at the far end of its egg-shaped orbit.—AFPDistant planet is ‘an orbiting hell’ -DAWN - Top Stories; January 29, 2009

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