No Opt-out Of Sharia Law

Sharia is 'such a lovely place'.

Afghan Man Faces Execution After Converting to Christianity

Under Afghanistan's new constitution, minority religious rights are protected but Muslims are still subject to strict Islamic laws.

And so, officially, Muslim-born Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and not for practicing Christianity.

Which means that if he simply decided the religion he was born into was bunk and he didn't want to accecpt some new equivalent drivel, he'd have no case at all.

Prosecuting attorney Abdul Wasi told the judge that the punishment should fit the crime.

He says Rahman is a traitor to Islam and is like a cancer inside Afghanistan. Under Islamic law and under the Afghan constitution, he says, the defendant should be executed.

Not panicking, really. Really?

1. The chest CT scan from 17 days ago still hasn't shown up at the doctor's office. The office says they will now disregard the instructions on the hospital's voice-mail and insist on talking to a human.
2. A couple of weeks ago, the doctor felt something rising in my neck as I swallowed and said I should get a thyroid ultrasound. I've been prone to sore throats for the last couple of years, but I thought it was just my post-nasal drip coming back. Also, singing hurts a bit, and it didn't used to.
   
   So last Monday I call and get the ultrasound scheduled for today. In the mean time, I get a bad sore throat with laryngitis that feels like a cold I'm fighting off, but concerns me because of what the doctor said. I still have the sore throat and I cough a lot if I don't keep drinking, eating, and/or having a cough drop in my mouth. It's gone on long enough for it to be weird for a cold I'm not really getting, but I do have traces of other symptoms.
   
   At the ultrasound appointment, when the tech is done getting the pictures, she tells me I can't go until a radiologist comes in to see me. She disappears for quite a while. Eventually I find someone to ask if I can get some water, and the someone else asks people in the area who's in charge of me, and the tech comes back in and says I can go. When I ask why she thought I needed to see the radiologist, that it gave me some concern, she gave a nonsense answer. And said my doctor would have the results in 3–4 business days. This from the same radiology department that still hasn't delivered the CT scan results.

I'm doing a so-so job of keeping all this in the back of my mind, but that's getting harder.

From the U.S. Major General Charged w/ Training Iraqis in 2003-03

Major General Paul D. Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004, has a New York Times op-ed piece on Rumsfeld. Some excerpts:

In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down.

. . .

Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned — cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.

Only Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff when President Bush was elected, had the courage to challenge the downsizing plans. So Mr. Rumsfeld retaliated by naming General Shinseki's successor more than a year before his scheduled retirement, effectively undercutting his authority.

. . .

Mr. Rumsfeld has also failed in terms of operations in Iraq. He rejected the so-called Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force and sent just enough tech-enhanced troops to complete what we called Phase III of the war — ground combat against the uniformed Iraqis. He ignored competent advisers like Gen. Anthony Zinni and others who predicted that the Iraqi Army and security forces might melt away after the state apparatus self-destructed, leading to chaos.

. . .

Last, you don't expect a secretary of defense to be criticized for tactical ineptness. Normally, tactics are the domain of the soldier on the ground. But in this case we all felt what L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy in Iraq, has called the "8,000-mile screwdriver" reaching from the Pentagon.