Moborate

For the last five or six days I had been contemplating how best to present the information contained on a website that someone had stumbled upon and forwarded to me. Not because one did not believe the authenticity of the information on it but because it left unanswered a number of questions. Not least of which was who was behind the website and to what end. I could make a fairly straightforward and educated guess about the persons behind the site even though the site's owners had chosen to disguise their ownership while registering it. Zulfiqar Mirza swears on the Quran (Photo: PPI) After today's "atom bomb" presser by the redoubtable former Sindh Home Minister / PPP Senior Vice President / Sindh MPA Zulfiqar Mirza , I think it is quite obvious who is behind the site. The site of course is the imaginatively titled terroristleaks.com and contains pretty much all the information Mr Mirza spoke about and brandished in his presser today. Not only does it have the facs...

Without further ado... [ Update 1: The above video may not play because it has been pulled from Youtube by Geo . In that case you can watch the video here  or try the following embed: Update 2: I fully expect the above videos to be taken down eventually. Please check the comments section for new links that readers may post for the video in case you cannot view them from the given links. If you do come across new working links that are not already known, please do share them with others in the comments section.] I don't subscribe at all to the sectarian twist this video takes towards the end, which is obviously motivated by other concerns. But the first half should be enough to get an idea of the reality of this televangelist. I'd love to see the face of the numerous people taken in by his faux piety and "gentleness" right about now. Keep in mind that this man is currently the Managing Director of ARY 's religion channel QTV . What is it they say? Har Cheez Meezan...

Consider the following lines from an AP  distributed article published in Dawn today: "With... government all but paralysed by scandal, the Supreme Court has taken command of some of the nation’s thorniest issues in what activists hail as an overdue flexing of judicial muscle but critics call an unconstitutional power grab.   In the past month, the court has frozen..., disbanded..., reversed the seizure of..., and begun searching for billions in illicit cash stashed abroad.   To many..., the judges are simply filling the vacuum left by politicians who have failed to protect the poor or battle corruption that has grown rampant across the nation. “Because these guys aren’t doing anything, the court is the only saviour right now,” said...   Parliament collapsed in pandemonium over the winter and reopened last week to similar chaos as lawmakers traded barbs and accused one another of graft and financial mismanagement....   The deluge of scandals and criti...

On Geo 's Aapas Ki Baat show today, Najam Sethi referred to an interview that Imran Khan gave a few days ago and expressed incredulity that more notice had not been taken of the explosive claims the PTI chief had made. In it, Sethi said, Khan had claimed that a message had gone out from the army chief General Kayani to the Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry not to drag the army into its battles with the government, and specifically that if the Supreme Court invoked Article 190 of the constitution (requiring all executive and judicial authorities to come to the aid of the Supreme Court), it should not expect the army to come to its aid. I was truly surprised because I too had not heard about this claim anywhere and, if true, Sethi's incredulity would be absolutely spot on. Leave aside the whole question of what Article 190 actually states - for the record, there is no mention of the military in it and, in any case, even if the SC invokes 190, it does not automa...

The recent spate of violence, mayhem and bloodletting in Karachi has drawn a number of responses, ranging from the outraged to the resigned, the depressed and confused . And all of them are understandable on their own terms. It would be fair to say, however, that in a city as teeming, complex and diverse, there is no single truth about the causes for the flare-up that trumps all others. Every actor in this sordid saga can (and does) point to the actions of other actors as an excuse for their own villainy. 'The burnt out ends of smoky days' (Photo source: Times of Karachi) If the MQM operates like a mafia, there is also no denying the underworld nexus that parties like the PPP and ANP are using to carve out their own slice of turf in the city. If Karachi's law enforcement is inefficient, corrupt and politicized, it is not an aberration from the rest of Pakistan where the writ of the state has been steadily eroded. If politicians are venal and self-serving about their po...

I have been musing a little bit about belief, especially after a couple of outraged comments on the previous post about the absurdity of the moon-sighting charade that occurs ever few months. We get similar comments every time we post something about the irrationality that seems to pervade the thinking of literalist followers of religion. There really is no way to argue against belief. If someone actually believes with all their heart that white is actually black or that the placement of Venus relative to Mars will affect your chances of finding true love, how do you argue against it? A belief, by definition, resists interrogation. A good part of religion involves blind trust - that a beneficient god (or gods) exists, that everything that occurs has a hidden, deeper meaning, that there is a goal to strive towards, and that the path to that goal as defined by the religion is the best route to achieve it. I should point out that I have no issues with people's personal spiritual belie...

Stung by intense criticism of the cretinism of Pakistan's maulvis and their perennial inability to reconcile even the basic concepts of natural science with their warped ideas of religion, the Ruet-e-Hilal (Moon-Sighting) Committee has this year attempted to allay some of the concerns by going out of their way to address them... Here's Mufti "I Love Muftas" Muneebur Rehman , head of the central Ruet Committee attempting to sight the moon... Meanwhile, here's Peshawar mosque Qasim Jan's Mufti Shahabuddin Popalzai , head of his own Ruet Committee attempting to do a moon landing in his own inimitable style... First of Ramzan mubarak. Or Second of Ramzan. Or whatever. And don't miss the full moon on the 12th of Ramzan.