RUTHFULLY YOURS

The largest music festival in Sweden will not go on next year because, for the second year in a row, more than a dozen sexual assaults of young girls marred the event.

Last year, more than 40 young girls reported being sexually assaulted. Men described as being of “foreign origin” were responsible.

Despite increased security this year, the assaults continued.

Breitbart:

Festival safety manager Ulf Bowein was asked why the sex attacks were continuing to happen despite the increase in the number of personnel and tighter security precautions. He said: “That’s a good question—ask those who commit the infractions instead.”

“Unfortunately, it’s like anywhere in the community. We have a number of individuals who commit the crime,” he added.

Bowein noted the number of attacks had gone down in number since last year. Reports claimed that men, largely described as being of “foreign origin”, had sexually molested up to 40 girls at the festival.

The news prompted British band Mumford and Sons, who headlined the event, to announce a boycott for future performances until the situation was brought under control. The band did not feature at all in this year’s event.

Sex attacks became common at Swedish festivals last year, so much so that officials estimate the number of sex attacks at outdoor music festivals increased by 1,000 per cent in 2016.

The targets of the sex attacks are generally young girls, many of them underage. 17-year-old Alexandra Larsson was one of the victims and she described what happened to her: “First, someone touched me on the butt a few times. I turned around and inquired who had done it, but got no answer.”

“This was repeated several times. Finally, someone touched me on the genitals. Then I got angry and turned around and shouted, ‘Whoever it was, you are an idiot!’”

Festivals are not the only locations for sex assaults as various reports have shown that girls in Sweden have been attacked in railway stations, and even in public schools.

It should be noted that authorities have not identified the perpetrators of the assaults this year. Less than a month ago, two “African migrants” were arrested for sexually assaulting numerous women at a railway station.

SEOUL—The U.S. warned North Korea that it is ready to fight if provoked, as Pyongyang claimed another weapons-development breakthrough following its launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile a day earlier.

The regime, having demonstrated its capacity to reach the U.S. with a missile, on Wednesday touted another achievement of the test launch: It claimed that its missile warhead—the forward section, which carries the explosive—can withstand the extreme heat and pressure of re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

If true—the claim couldn’t be independently verified—that would clear another hurdle in developing a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach American cities.
As tensions between Washington and Pyongyang rose, Gen. Vincent Brooks, the top American military commander in South Korea, said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. and South Korea are prepared to go to war with the North if given the order.

“Self restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” Gen. Brooks said. “We are able to change our choice when so ordered.…It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”
North Korea said it successfully test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile, a claim that could escalate tensions between Pyongyang and the rest of the world. Image: KRT/AP

Earlier in the day, allied armies conducted a rare live-fire drill, launching tactical surface-to-surface missiles off the east coast of Korea—an action they said was aimed directly at “countering North Korea’s destabilizing and unlawful actions on July 4.”

The drill and tough language appeared meant to reassure Seoul after North Korea’s successful ICBM test, a significant advance.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described the development as an escalation of the threat to the U.S. It came despite years of sanctions and warnings aimed at preventing Kim Jong Un’s regime from reaching the milestone.

Washington has considered military action against North Korea, but pulling the trigger presents serious risks. Seoul, a city of 10 million, sits just 35 miles from the North Korean border, where Pyongyang has assembled artillery that could inflict devastating damage on the densely populated South Korean capital.

“A single volley could deliver more than 350 metric tons of explosives across the South Korean capital, roughly the same amount of ordnance dropped by 11 B-52 bombers,” said a report published last year by Austin, Texas-based geopolitical consultancy Stratfor.

While Americans were celebrating Independence Day, North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, with a potential range that some experts estimate could reach the United States. As The Wall Street Journal reports, in an editorial headlined “The North Korean Missile Crisis”:

Tuesday’s missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, has an estimated range of 6,700 kilometers, which puts Alaska within range. America’s lower 48 states may still be out of reach, but the test shows the North has overcome most of the obstacles to a long-range missile.

Enough, already. There is no safe way to end the North Korean menace, but the threats from Kim Jong Un’s regime are amplifying at a clip that suggests it is even more dangerous to allow the Kim regime to carry on. While the world has watched, for years — and while the United Nations Security Council has passed one sanctions resolution after another — North Korea has not only been carrying out ballistic missile and nuclear tests, but enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium to amass ever more bomb fuel. As the Journal editorial also notes, North Korea by now “has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads as well as chemical and biological weapons.”

The threat is not solely that North Korea — well versed in shakedown rackets — could target the U.S. with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, or that North Korea can add nuclear weapons to the massive arsenal with which it has long threatened Seoul.

A further danger is that North Korea could proliferate its advancing nuclear missile technology, or even the weapons themselves, to other rogue states, such as Iran — with which Pyongyang has trafficked and cooperated for decades in missile development, and according to some press accounts (please see my discussion of reporting by Douglas Frantz), in nuclear weapons development as well.

The Pyongyang regime was part of Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, supplied taboo nuclear-related materials to Qaddafi’s Libya, and has a record of proliferating nuclear technology (the clandestine Al-Kibar reactor built with North Korean help in Syria, destroyed by a 2007 Israeli air strike). It is alarmingly plausible that when Pyongyang brags up its missile and nuclear tests, the global headlines double as North Korean advertising to actors around the globe who might be interested in North Korea’s illicit wares.

The total abrogation of personal autonomy for the parents of baby Charlie Gard as courts in the United Kingdom and in Europe simultaneously and arbitrarily decided what his parents can and cannot do for their extremely ill child is another symptom of the chilling or, should I say, killing world of socialism.

In his 2004 collection of readings for the humanities titled Being Human, editor Leon Kass writes about Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky who was held in the USSR as a political prisoner from 1963 until his release in 1976. Kass writes that “Bukovsky reflects on the ‘soul of man under socialism,’ this ‘new type of man’ who is subject to totalitarian rule.” Bukovsky ponders what it “means to retain one’s human dignity as a citizen of a state” when socialists demand a dream of universal equality while ensuring the “suppression and ultimate destruction of the individual, in body and in spirit.”

And while the pervasive rallying cry of socialists is “equality,” Bukovsky writes that “the defining characteristics of a socialist regime is that ‘the individual may not possess the least inalienable right’ and that the system requires ‘slaves, not conscious citizens.'”

Thus, “the regime is immovable, infallible, and intransigent, and the entire world is left with no choice but to accommodate itself to this fact.”

Despite the fact that the Gards raised money to continue treatment for their baby, the European powers-to-be have denied them this choice. To add salt to the wound, they cannot even take their child home to die.

Ms. Yates said: ‘We’ve been talking about what palliative care meant. One option was to let Charlie go home to die. We chose to take Charlie home to die. That is our last wish. We promised our little boy every single day that we would take him home.’

His father Chris, 32, said: ‘Our parental rights have been stripped away. We can’t even take our own son home to die. We’ve been denied that. Our final wish [was] if it all went against us can we take our little boy home to die and we are not allowed.

‘They even said no to a hospice.’

The couple, who have previously lost battles in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, claim they also asked doctors to allow them a final weekend with Charlie but say this request has been denied.

‘We begged them to give us the weekend,’ Ms. Yates said, ‘Friends and family wanted to come and see Charlie for the last time. But now there isn’t even time for that. Doctors said they would not rush to turn off his ventilator but we are being rushed.

‘Not only are we not allowed to take our son to an expert hospital to save his life, we also can’t choose how or when our son dies.’

Bukovsky writes that in “a regime of terror the individual cannot have any rights — the least inalienable right possessed by a single individual instantly deprives the regime of a morsel of power. Every individual from childhood on must absorb the axiomatic fact that never in any circumstances or by any means will he be able to influence the regime one jot.”

In fact, “socialized medicine’s killing isn’t just about money, but power.” As Daniel Greenfield explains, “it would have cost the NHS less to allow his parents to take Charlie to America” but this would have sent the “message that socialized medicine is flawed.” It would expose the horrible underbelly of the socialist regime.

Yet far too many still do not understand that we can never “acquire freedom and security, until we refuse categorically to recognize this paranoid [socialist] version of reality and oppose to it our own reality and our own values.”

“Moral opposition” is critical as government control becomes all consuming. But it is frightening that so many millennials who have not been educated on this “ism” are found to favor it. Bukovsky writes that “it is difficult for man to resist this dream and this noble impulse, particularly for men who are impetuous and sincere.” But the reality of this pseudo-nirvana must be revealed.