RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Justice Department attorney casually remarked to Judicial Watch’s president Tom Fitton that the “Lois Lerner e-mails” that provide crucial evidence of the U.S. government’s effort to suppress conservative political activity probably survived efforts to destroy them because “the federal government backs up all computer records to ensure the continuity of government in event of a catastrophe.” This brings to public attention a highly classified, closely compartmentalized program, called “continuity of government” that the Reagan Administration instituted as part of its seriousness about the Cold War. Like so many others, this program has taken on a life of its own. Apparently, advances in data processing and storage have enabled the government to include the minutiae of government activities in this program – something outside its original scope.

The Justice Department attorney who mentioned “continuity of government” told Fitton “that retrieving the emails from Lerner…would be ‘too onerous’ – a legal burden that can exempt an agency from complying with FOIA requests.” This “onerousness” is bureaucratic ­­- due to the program’s extraordinary security classification – rather than technical.

The immediate question, whether the data stored under this program is for the government’s internal use only or for the good of the country as a whole, stands for the larger one: whether the government’s vast and growing security apparatus exists for the government to protect the public or whether it exists for the government to protect itself against the public.

The following makes no attempt to resolve this essential question. Rather, it casts light onto the origins of “continuity of government,” in which I was tangentially involved while on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It also mentions some public glimpses of how the program has evolved beyond its origins, and how its use or misuse might cast an unbecoming light on the federal government.

Circa 1980, the U.S. government gradually (albeit partially) awakened from a quarter-century-long, self-induced delusion that, while it would have to make lots of preparations for the day on which it might “push the button” of nuclear war, it would not have to make any preparations for the day after because nuclear war would be the end of the world. Never was there the slightest scientific basis for this. Furthermore, there was never any doubt that the Soviet Union was making all the plans it could to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war. But faith in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) offered U.S. officials the twin comforts of posturing as “more horrified than thou” about nuclear war and of abdication of responsibility concerning it. By the late Carter administration and into the Reagan administration, however, the fact that Soviet strategic weaponry was designed specifically to kill weapons rather than populations forced officials to confront the fact that, almost certainly, they would survive to face life on “the day after.”

SIMPLY PUT, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of connecting any device to the internet, from home appliances to wearable technology such as watches, to cars. These days, if a device can be turned on, it most likely can be connected to the internet. Because of the IoT, objects to objects, people to people and objects to people can communicate quickly and efficiently.

Imagine a world where your alarm clock notifies your coffee maker to start brewing when you wake up; or your car is communicating with other cars on the road, exchanging information about speed and position to reduce the number of accidents; or your office technology automatically orders supplies when they are low. Seems a little like The Jetsons, but this will soon be our reality – and in some cases, already is.

According to Gartner, there is expected to be nearly 26 billion networked devices on the IoT by 2020, giving any business, no matter the industry, access to endless amounts of vital, real-time data about their company and customers. Inside and outside the workplace, the IoT has the potential to change the way we work and live.

Just like many industries, government agencies are looking for ways to cut costs and become more efficient, and have realized the IoT is one way they can achieve productivity gains. Over the last five years, the federal government has spent more than $300 million on IoT-related research and Cisco estimates that the IoT will be valued at $4.6 trillion for the public sector in the next ten years.

So where are we seeing IoT adoption in the public sector?

An area that has shown promise and growth is public infrastructure and transportation. Opportunities abound within facilities management, grid and energy planning, and environmental impacts like waste management and water meters – with the IoT driving smart cities and smart urban mobility.

For example, smart parking applications are already informing citizens where the open parking spots are in a busy city, video and data analytics are helping cities identify how many passengers are in a vehicle for High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane compliance and cities are able to monitor and manage traffic and congestion.

Its differences with other Islamic-supremacist groups are irrelevant.

The beheading of yet another Western journalist, Steven Sotloff, has ignited another round of commentary suggesting that the Islamic State is the worst terrorist network ever. There is value in this: The current jihadist threat to the United States and the West is more dire than the threat that existed just prior to the 9/11 attacks, so anything that increases pressure for a sea change in our Islamic-supremacist-enabling government’s policies helps. Nevertheless, the perception that the Islamic State is something new and different and aberrational compared with the Islamic-supremacist threat we’ve been living with for three decades is wrong, perhaps dangerously so.

Decapitation is not a new jihadist terror method, and it is far from unique to the Islamic State. Indeed, I noted here over the weekend that it has recently been used by Islamic-supremacist elements of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army against the Islamic State. It was only a few years ago that al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg. Jihadists behead their victims (very much including other Muslims) all the time — as Tom Joscelyn notes at the indispensable Long War Journal, the al-Qaeda-tied Ansar al Jerusalem just beheaded four Egyptians suspected of spying for Israel.

Yet, the recent Islamic State beheadings, in addition to other cruelties, is fueling commentary portraying the Islamic State as more barbaric and threatening than al-Qaeda. This misses the point. The Islamic State is al-Qaeda. It is the evolution of the ruthless al-Qaeda division that grew up in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In order to make the Islamic State seem different from al-Qaeda — i.e., to make it seem like something that has spontaneously appeared, rather than something Obama ignored and empowered — some reporting claims there are “ideological” and “doctrinal” differences between the two. This is true in only the most technical sense, a sense that is essentially irrelevant vis à vis the West.

Why is anyone still talking about OSLO as if it were still relevant. The PalArabs and their so-called authority have flouted every single paragraph of that ill conceived agreement formulated by the combined idiocy of Rabin/Clinton/ Madeleine Halfbright/ Dennis Ross and Yasser Arafat…..It belongs in the dustbin of history along with King George’s Treaty of Hard Labor of 1763…..rsk

There is considerable confusion about the recent action of Israel’s civil administration declaring 988 acres of West Bank territory as state land. In general, West Bank territory may be divided into three legal categories: state land, private land, and land whose status is to be determined. The territory in question had the status of territory whose status is to be determined. Before the declaration of the land as state land, an investigation had to be undertaken by Israel’s civil administration that took several years in order to ascertain its exact status.

Those who oppose the recent declaration have 45 days to appeal the Israeli decision. When Palestinians have brought proof of ownership of contested territory to Israeli courts, including Israel’s Supreme Court, the courts have at times issued decisions calling on the Israeli government to restore the property in question to its Palestinian claimant, even if that requires dismantling the private homes of Israeli citizens. The determination of territory as state land as opposed to private land is a necessary action which helps avert errors in the future when these areas are developed.

But looking at the decision of Israel’s civil administration in a wider diplomatic context, it should be remembered that the Oslo II Interim Agreement, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat at the White House in 1995 (and witnessed by the EU), established a division of the West Bank into three areas: Area A, where the Palestinians had full control, Area B where there was mixed Israeli and Palestinian security control but full Palestinian civil control, and Area C, where Israel had full military and civilian control. Israeli responsibilities in Area C included the power of zoning and planning. The territory which Israel declared as state land is within Area C.

It should be stressed that the architects of the Oslo Agreements understood, as a result, that Palestinians would develop areas under their jurisdiction while Israel would develop areas it controlled as well. That is why there was no settlement freeze in the original Oslo Agreements. Over the years the Palestinians witnessed that what will determine Israel’s borders are negotiations and not construction; after all, Israel dismantled all its settlements in Sinai when it made peace with Egypt in 1979 and it withdrew all its settlements from the Gaza Strip as part of its Gaza Disengagement in 2005.

Obama Called ISIS ‘Jayvee’ When the Intel Said They Were Already Varsity

Back in January, President Obama told the New Yorker’s David Remnick that the group then known as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, or the Islamic State in the Levant, was not that big of a threat.

At the core of Obama’s thinking is that American military involvement cannot be the primary instrument to achieve the new equilibrium that the region so desperately needs. And yet thoughts of a pacific equilibrium are far from anyone’s mind in the real, existing Middle East. In the 2012 campaign, Obama spoke not only of killing Osama bin Laden; he also said that Al Qaeda had been “decimated.” I pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.

The al Qaeda flag flying in Fallujah was flown by ISIS.

“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.

“Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”

No worries.

But who is the “we” Obama refers to there?

The Cold War was won by the West in 1989. It was an absolute but short-lived victory. Almost immediately, a revisionist coalition — both anti-American and anti-Western — emerged. It has now turned into a major geopolitical player, centered on the two post-communist Great Powers: Russia and China. It includes many emergent powers in the former Third World, from Iran and Turkey to India, Brazil, and South Africa.

The new anti-Western coalition works either through bilateral or multilateral agreements, or regimes or older international networks like the Non-Aligned Movement. One important multilateral regime is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which started in 1996 as a common strategic forum for China, Russia, and Central Asian countries, and was later on strengthened by the accretion of “observers,” (India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia), “dialogue partners,” (Belarus, Sri Lanka, Turkey) and “guest attendances” (the CIS, ASEAN, and Turkmenistan). Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, boasted at one SCO conference that it was comprised of “half of humanity.”

A lot about the new anti-American and anti-Western coalition is to be learned from Eurasia Review [1], an intriguing global online information site that claims a few thousand daily visitors. Eurasia Review was founded in 2009 and is currently reportedly owned by Buzz Future LLC, an American company based in Albany, Oregon. However, earlier information points to addresses in Australia, Spain, and Switzerland. The founder and president, Robert Duncan, is a journalist with both educational and professional roots in Spain.

Eurasia Review describes itself as:

[A]n independent journal and think tank that provides a venue for analysts and experts to disseminate content on a wide-range of subjects that are often overlooked or under-represented by Western dominated media.

It elaborates:

Despite the combined Eurasia and Afro-Asia areas containing over 70% of the world’s population, analysis and news continues to be dominated by a U.S. slant, and that is where Eurasia Review enters the picture by providing alternative, in-depth perspectives on current events.

What is the real agenda of the Climateers? Read:Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (New, Revised and Expanded Edition)By Rael Jean Isaac

Limiting carbon emissions won’t work. Better to begin adjusting to a warmer world.

The Obama administration is instituting a variety of far-reaching policies to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Are any of these capable of making a difference? Simple arithmetic suggests not. Given this reality, we would be wise to consider strategies that complement and may be more effective than mitigation—namely, adaptation.

According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, in 2012 the world emitted a little over 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide. China was the No. 1 emitter, accounting for more than one-fourth of the carbon produced. The U.S. was second, emitting about one-sixth.

China and India, among other developing countries, argue that they should be allowed to increase carbon emissions. They’re still developing and require higher rates of economic growth. Moreover, they aren’t responsible for previous emissions, and on a per capita basis U.S. emissions are much higher.

These arguments have merit but must be measured against the reality of carbon growth. Consider China: Its carbon emissions increased by an average 8.6% a year between 2002 and 2012. Were China to continue at this pace for 27 years until it reaches today’s U.S. GDP per capita, it would emit 99 gigatons of carbon in 2041 alone, or three times the world’s current emissions.

This scenario is too pessimistic. As countries develop, they become more efficient in energy use. But even if China tapered its emissions growth from 8.6% to zero over the same 27 years, it would still emit as much carbon in 2041 as the entire world does today. And that’s not including emissions growth from India, Africa and South America.

Perfect storms don’t come much more perfect than the Rotherham child-abuse revelations currently rocking the U.K. Everything modern that Britain is famous for fretting over—from class to race, pedophiles to official incompetence—is implicated in this sordid story of abuse in and around a northern English town once known for producing steel.

All eyes have been on Rotherham since a report into child sexual abuse there was published on Tuesday last week. Commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council, the report makes grim reading. It says that from 1997 to 2013, 1,400 children and teenagers were subjected to “appalling abuse” by gangs of older men. Some of the victims, almost all of them girls, were trafficked around Britain to be sexually abused. They were often threatened with violence against their families to stop them from seeking help.

The report, by public-policy professor and former social worker Alexis Jay, says a key reason the abuse went on for so long was because of the “collective failures” of the local authorities, including police. Despite being presented with what Ms. Jay calls stark evidence that abuse was taking place, the Rotherham authorities underplayed the problem. The institutions charged by modern society with protecting the vulnerable from the malevolent through their inaction allowed the abuse to continue.

It took the press, one of the most maligned institutions in Britain, to do what reporters are so often criticized for doing—digging dirt—for the Rotherham abuse to become a national story. Dogged reporters at the Times of London, owned by the same company as this newspaper, played a central role in exposing child abuse in towns like Rotherham and forcing an investigation.

Why were officials so unwilling to poke their noses where they most certainly did belong? Because of the race and class of the perpetrators and victims, according to the Jay report. The vast majority of the abusers were of Pakistani and Muslim origin; the vast majority of their victims were white and working class.

Ms. Jay’s report finds that fear of appearing racist held back Rotherham’s officials from giving the case the attention it so obviously deserved. Many of those interviewed by Ms. Jay talked about their “nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.”

Arguably the UK’s most successful domestically produced export to Israel has been parliamentary democracy. Arguably its most successful domestically produced export to the Arab world has been the anti-Semitic blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to bake their Passover matzah or for other ritual purposes. What is curious is that there are so many in Britain for whom the latter “achievement” resonates more and finds expression in new domestic iterations of this hoary, murderous British creation.

The blood libel first appeared in Norwich, England in 1144. A subsequent libel in the same vein, concerning the death of a boy in Lincoln in 1255, was immortalized by Chaucer’s reference to it in “The Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. At least into the early twentieth century, versions of the libel could be found in collections and recordings of British ballads.

The anti-Semitic libel enjoyed wide popularity across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and blood libel accusations were often accompanied by the mass murder of Jewish communities. Versions of the libel have persisted in Europe into the present century.

In the Arab world, evidence of successful European introduction of the blood libel can be traced at least as far back as the Damascus blood libel in 1840. But it is particularly in recent decades that the blood libel has won almost ubiquitous currency among Arabs. Former Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass published The Matzah of Zion in 1986, promoting the blood libel as fact, and the book gained a very wide audience and has gone through many reprints . There have been a number of Arab television dramatizations of the blood libel and myriad assertions of the libel’s veracity by Arab religious and political leaders.

In April 2013, the Palestinian non-profit MIFTAH, founded by Hanan Ashrawi and funded in part by the British Council, took President Obama to task for hosting a seder at the White House. MIFTAH complained: “Does Obama in fact know the relationship, for example, between ‘Passover’ and ‘Christian blood’..?! Or ‘Passover’ and ‘Jewish blood rituals?!’ Much of the chatter and gossip about historical Jewish blood rituals in Europe are real and not fake as they claim; the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.”

During the recent Israeli-Hamas fighting, Hamas official Osama Hamdan declared (translation by MEMRI): “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence.”

Israel was told not to take down Arafat or Hamas would take over. Now Israel is being warned that if it destroys Hamas, ISIS will take over.

The distinction between Hamas and ISIS is obvious. One is a violent Islamic terrorist group that is determined to destroy Israel. And the other is a violent Islamic terrorist group determined to destroy Israel. Hamas is funded by Qatar. So is ISIS. Hamas likes to wear green. ISIS sticks to black and white.

If you have to choose between genocidal Islamic terrorist groups, go with the one that has a wider range of color in its wardrobe. Your civilians will regret it, but at least their killers will look fabulous.

Also ISIS hates Shiites while Hamas accepts Iranian weapons.

Clearly Hamas is moderate and ISIS is extremist. Maybe if ISIS also agrees to accept Iranian weapons with which to kill Jews, we will all be able to breathe a sigh of relief at its new moderate attitude.

The good news is that in the last few months Al Qaeda also became moderate. Numerous news stories tell us that Al Qaeda thinks that ISIS is “crazy”. Al Qaeda has less to say about it than the Western pundits speaking on its behalf, but it’s rumored that Zawahiri beheaded a Western aid worker without inviting Baghdadi which is considered a major snub in the high society codes of top terror groups.

That raises the question, should we have destroyed Al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Wouldn’t it have been better to leave it intact to prevent ISIS from taking over? Indeed didn’t weakening Al Qaeda make it possible for ISIS to emerge as a dominant global Jihadist force? Look for this to become a major theme of mainstream media foreign policy commentary and of Obama’s new Iraq strategy.

The only way to defeat terrorists is by not fighting them. Only by doing nothing can we hope to prevail.