RUTHFULLY YOURS

This DoD budget is apparently aimed at diminishing our defense capacity. And it’s a product of diminished mental capacity. Why aren’t generals and admirals resigning instead of going along with this?

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-hagel-defense-budget-is-based-on-dangerous-guesswork/article/2544860-

Release of the 2014 Pentagon budget should have been an epiphany for America’s allies and enemies.

It continued the process of reducing America’s military to pre-World War II size, but — as we can infer from the remarks of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel — there’s some sort of strategic realignment close at hand.

Inklings of that realignment were detected before Hagel made his announcement. When President Obama warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that he shouldn’t invade Ukraine, there was a faint echo of the “red line” he drew for Putin in Syria.

How Putin will react to Hagel’s announcement can be predicted: content, bordering on gleeful.

In his Monday press conference Hagel said, “You have fewer troops, fewer ships, fewer planes. Readiness is not the same standard. Of course there’s going to be risk.” But what that risk will be, or how great it will be, he didn’t say.

If you look at our armed forces, managing risk is one of their principal businesses. They’re responsible for deterring or defeating any nation or nonstate actor (to use the current euphemism for terrorist network) that threatens or attacks us.

Hagel’s announcement was too much like the warning the Air Force sounded years ago about the F-22. Originally, the Air Force said it needed 750 of the enormously capable warbirds

The Rising Sex Traffic in Forced Islamic Marriage

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=9fa9e6bf57&e=ce445aaf82
Western nations are facing what has been called an “epidemic” of forced marriages of their young Muslim women. While those who compel young Muslim women and girls into marriages could be charged with human trafficking offences and also in some cases placed on the national register of sex offenders, governments also should target for prosecution all those who are involved in the solemnisation of these illegal marriages.

This article first appeared in the March 2014 edition of Quadrant.

In 2008, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (here) and Nicholas Phillips, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales (here), both suggested that the UK could consider, in Lord Phillips’s words, “embracing Sharia law” because “there is no reason why Sharia Law, or any other religious code should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution”. Williams commented: “it’s not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system”.

However, two recent widely reported cases of marriage between Muslim men and under-age girls raise troubling questions about these assumptions. One case in New South Wales where an imam married a twelve-year-old girl to a twenty-six-year-old man with her father’s consent is before the court.

In another case involving a custody battle, however, a judgment has been made that questions the way Western jurisdictions interact with sharia marriage regulations, specifically in relation to the widespread practice of conducting private, unregistered religious marriages. A Sydney Muslim girl aged fourteen was forced by her parents to become the child “bride” of a twenty-one-year-old man. Her mother had told her she would “get to attend theme parks and movies and eat lollies and ice-cream with her new husband”. Instead she endured years of sexual and physical abuse and intimidation before fleeing with her young daughter. Her story only saw the light of day ten years after her wedding when she pursued custody of her daughter through the courts.

This “marriage” was never registered with the state: it would have been impossible to do so because the girl was too young to marry under Australian law. A particularly troubling aspect of her story is that she reported her predicament to her school teacher, who under Australian law was a mandatory reporter of child sex abuse, but it seems no report was made, and no intervention attempted.

In passing judgment in favour of the woman, Judge Harman invited the authorities to take matters further: the “groom” could be presumably be charged by the police with sexual offences against a child and placed on the sex offenders register. He and the girl’s father—who in accordance with Islamic tradition would have been the two parties to the marriage contract—could also be charged with trafficking offences. There would also almost certainly have been an exchange of money—the mahr—handed over by the man to the girl or her father in accordance with Islamic law.

The UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, defines people-trafficking as:

Can Israel Defy a Second Term President?
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, February 28, 2014, http://bit.ly/OJtyku

The assumption that second term US presidents are omnipotent, and therefore can bulldozer their way through anything – including the exertion of insurmountable pressure on Israel – ignores the most fundamental elements of the US political system: limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances and the centrality of the constituent, deliberately designed to avoid an all-powerful Executive.

Second term Presidents may wish – but are unable – to extricate themselves from the strict constitutional constraints, demonstrated by the power of the US constituency and the co-equal, co-determining Congress, which have been systematically pro-Israel.

The mystique of the Second Term Imperial Presidency tends to smother Israeli policy-makers and public opinion molders, who misunderstand the US political system, which is dramatically different from the Israeli and European systems.

Contrary to conventional misperception, second term presidents reach their peak on inauguration day, as has been documented since George Washington’s second term, when the US was on the verge of a civil war. From then forward, most second-term presidents have been burdened by the second term lame-duck slump.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372197/print

This feels like old times. Across the pond at the Telegraph, Tim Stanley and Daniel Hannan are having a friendly disagreement on the question of whether the Nazis were in fact socialists. I don’t usually wade into these arguments anymore, but I’ve been writing a lot on related themes over the last few weeks and I couldn’t resist.

Not surprisingly, I come down on Hannan’s side. I could write a whole book about why I agree with Dan, except I already did. So I’ll be more succinct.

Fair warning, though, I wrote this on a plane trip back from Colorado and it’s way too long. So if you’re not interested in this stuff, you might as well wander down the boardwalk and check out some of the other stalls now.

Stanley makes some fine points here and there, but I don’t think they add up to anything like corroboration of his thesis. The chief problem with his argument is that he’s taking doctrinaire or otherwise convenient definitions of socialism and applying them selectively to Nazism.

Stanley’s chief tactic is to simply say Nazis shouldn’t be believed when they called themselves socialists. It was all marketing and spin, even putting the word in their name. Socialism was popular, so they called themselves socialists. End of story.

So when Nazi ideologist Gregor Strasser proclaimed:

We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!

. . . he was just saying that because, in Stanley’s mind, socialism was “fashionable.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372188/print The Tea Party still holds the high ground this year for its third national election. The Tea Party turns five years old this week, and the mainstream media are filled with stories saying it has lost clout and influence. Certainly the unfair assaults on it as racist and extremist have taken a toll, but […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303801304579409420120090960?mod=Opinion_newsreel_2
At a Senate Judiciary Committee markup Thursday morning, Texas’s Ted Cruz offered an amendment to prohibit IRS employees from deliberately targeting individuals or groups based on political views. It was unanimously rejected by every member of the Democratic majority.

Few presidents understand the power of speech better than Barack Obama, and even fewer the power of denying it to others. That’s the context for understanding the White House’s unprecedented co-option of the Internal Revenue Service to implement a political campaign to shut up its critics and its opponents.

Perhaps the biggest fiction of this past year was that the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups has been confronted, addressed and fixed. The opposite is true. The White House has used the scandal as an excuse to expand and formalize the abuse.

About a month after the IRS inspector general released his bombshell report about IRS targeting of conservative groups last May, Acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel unveiled a “plan of action” for correcting the mess. One highlight was that targeted groups would be offered a new optional “expedited” process for getting 501(c)(4) status.

The deal, which received little public attention, boiled down to this: We’ll do our job, the IRS said, if you give up your rights. Those taking part in the “expedited” process had to agree to limit to 40% the amount of spending and time (calculated by employee and volunteers hours) they spend on political activity. Current 501(c)(4) rules allow political spending up to 49%, and have no “time” component. The clear point of the “deal” was to use the lure of 501(c)(4) approval to significantly reduce the political activity of targeted conservative groups going forward.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304709904579408950141040072?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond&mg=reno64-wsj

Governonr Du Pont is the very model of a perfect conservative….one of my absolute favorites….rsk

Global warming is back. Not actual global warming, as the decade-long trend of little to no increase in temperatures continues. But the topic of global warming is back in the news. From Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent climate comments in Jakarta to the White House’s 2014 “year of action” plan on carbon emissions, global warming has garnered more ink and pixels than we’ve seen in a while.

It’s an open question whether this renewed emphasis reflects sincere concern about global warming or is just the Obama administration playing to part of its base prior to the midterm elections. Either way, the White House and the eco-left must be disappointed by polls that continue to show Americans do not share their sense of urgency. Even though many believe some warming exists and is at least partly anthropogenic, the vast majority consider it a low priority. In a January Pew Research poll, climate change was ranked 19th out of 20 items for the president and Congress to address.

The warming alarmists might earn more support if they acted less like they had something to hide and actually allowed open debate. Perhaps they could respond to their critics rationally instead of reflexively branding them heretics, suitable for whatever is the modern university and research center equivalent of burning at the stake. Real science does not fear those who challenge it, does not work to have challengers’ articles banned from science journals, and does not compare skeptics to Holocaust deniers or, as Mr. Kerry did in Jakarta, members of the “Flat Earth Society.”

Warning labels are in vogue. ‘Cigarettes can seriously damage your health’. ‘Caution — hot liquid!’ Anti-Israel advocates also want to develop public fear and loathing. ‘Warning — Jewish-made products can kill!’

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4763/the_lawless_label_made_by_jews

For how much longer can the war of words over the legality of settlements rage back and forth? Even a final verdict, for or against, would be unproductive.

Legal or not, some 400,000 Jews in 130 settlement towns aren’t going anywhere, and demanding that they go reflects a desire for ethnic cleansing that we may relegate to a league for criminal maniacs.

Those without a bone to pick would accept facts on the ground and enter a war of words that will go somewhere. Europe’s trade policy for ‘occupation’ products has a murky record that looks set to get grubby. Now there’s a war worth fighting.

“There do not appear to be any European Commission laws which could be breached by a member state taking the decision to ban the import of settlement produce…”

With this ruling, Cambridge professor of international law, James Crawford gave Europe the nod. Go ahead — ban settlement products.

Observe the slippery slope. Notice how freely one can slide from labeling products to a blanket ban on products. From there to a blanket ban on everything made in Israel is no more than a slip.

Egypt claims miracle cure for HIV and Hepatitis
Almost certainly a political miracle rather than a medical one, Egypt’s claim to have an instant cure for HIV and Hepatitis shows the lengths the coup leaders will go for legitimacy

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4758/egypt_claims_miracle_cure_for_hiv_and_hepatitis

Two days ago, Egyptian media began big campaigns about a miraculous device (billed as ”Complete Cure”) invented by Egypt’s armed forces for treating HIV/AIDS and the Hepatitis C virus.

The news stories depicted the machine as a breakthrough, and a real miracle for completely curing patients of any of the two resistant diseases, giving hope for 18 million Egyptians with Hepatitis C and tens of thousands with HIV. (All this in no time at all — only 16 hours for the cure and one minute for detecting the disease.)

According to the Egyptian media, with the device there is no need to take a sample of the patient’s blood to detect the infection. Moreover, Egypt’s national TV channels ran a video that showed a physician making tests for an HIV patient using the device and telling him, “your tests are so great; you had HIV but now the disease vanished.”

The reports said that ”Complete Cure” is two machines in one: ”C Fast” (for treating Hepatitis C) and “I Fast” (for treating HIV). Furthermore, the reports confirmed that the military had been working for 22 years on the project and although ”C Fast” had been ready to go since 2006, the inventing team preferred to wait until it could test the effectiveness of the machine on HIV patients.

There’s even more. Major Dr. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, leader of the machine-inventing team, stressed that Egypt will not export the machine to other countries so that it can be protected from international monopoly and the black market. He was quoted in the Al-Ahram newspaper as saying, “Marshal el-Sisi once said, ”we lagged behind and we should jump rather than walk so that we can compete with others”, and this is the first jump.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4766/a_nation_through_its_faith

Daniel Johnson is the Editor of Standpoint

It is easy to denigrate democracy while enjoying its benefits as Israel knows all too well. And it seems that Herzl’s dream of a Judenstaat, a Jewish state, is still not fully accepted in Europe

In My Crazy Century, an excellent new memoir by the Czech writer Ivan Klíma (Grove Press, £16.99), the author recalls a visit to Britain in the mid-1960s. As a journalist on the magazine Literární noviny he took full advantage of the slight thaw that preceded the Prague Spring in 1968, soon to be crushed by the Soviet invasion.

In London Klíma went to see the Leftist guru Isaac Deutscher, politely explaining that as a Czech Jew he had “barely survived one bloody dictatorship only to begin serving another” — hence his efforts to promote democratic reform.

Deutscher would have none of it, proposing instead the slogan: “Never return to the old democracies but do return to the regenerated Soviets of the people’s representatives.” Klíma was aghast: “He was recommending this to me, someone who

It is easy to denigrate democracy while enjoying its benefits. This phenomenon is most obvious in relation to Israel, still the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.