RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lieutenant-Commander Steven Mackenzie, who has died aged 95, played a notable part in the covert operations of the Inshore Patrol Flotilla for the Secret Intelligence Service and SOE; he subsequently served with MI6 in Europe, the Far East and Latin America.

In March 1942, at Falmouth, Mackenzie took command of Le Dinan, usually known by its registration number, N51, a 65ft Concarneau fishing trawler, with Lewis guns mounted amidships and a crew of eight. The mission (code-named “Marie Louise”) was to extricate Colonel Rémy and bring him and his wife and children back to England under the noses of the Gestapo who were hunting them.

Rémy was the field name of Col Gilbert Renault, head of the Confrérie de Notre Dame, which was to become one of the most important of all the Free French intelligence networks in enemy-occupied France.

At a secluded anchorage at New Grimsby in the Scilly Isles, the hull, bulwarks, deckhouse and masts of N51 forsook their naval grey and were repainted in shades of green and brown. A registration number, a Breton name and French flags on either bow were added. Sten guns, pistols and grenades were put aboard, and revolver and small arms practice shoots were held on the shore.

After several failed attempts, the party sailed in June 1942. Mackenzie’s First Officer was Daniel Lomenech, a Frenchman who knew the Breton coastline well. They had an RAF escort until they were half way across the Channel, but there followed three nerve-racking hours of unescorted sailing before dark, crossing an area forbidden to fishing vessels; a sighting by a German air patrol would mean an attack.

“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan said. The days of the medium however are being left far behind.

The newspaper, the radio and the television set that coiled together into the media to provide a bewildering array of information and entertainment have been infinitely complicated and simplified. The day when the last newspaper runs off the last printing press, the last radio broadcast fades into a hum of static and the last television signal winks out is not that far away. The internet is a true media,

The internet through the desktop, the television set and the mobile device is capable of duplicating the mediums we knew, but it also ushers in unlimited competition. Every medium was limited in the amount of content that it could or would provide. There were only so many pages in a newspaper, radio and television could only be experienced in real time and only as many programs as would fit into a broadcasting schedule on a single channel. Everything had limits. The internet has few limits.

The only meaningful hard limit on the internet is the human attention span. Content isn’t quite infinite, but it easily surpasses what any single person could even begin to take in. The sheer amount of options alone exceed the available time to enumerate them at any given moment. Technological limits have been proven to be soft limits. But there’s only so much human attention to go around.

A President who thinks that extending unemployment compensation “creates jobs” is so out of touch with reality that it should come as no surprise that Obama has the worst record of unemployment rates since the days of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The latest employment figures for December showed that the economy only added 74,000 non-farm jobs, the fewest in three years! The government claims that the unemployment rate dropped 0.3%-the first time in 60 months that it dropped below 7%. And the official rate is bogus. The government only counts people as unemployed only if they are actively looking for work.

As of October 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that “The U.S. now has 90.6 million ‘non-institutionalized’ men and women over the age of 16 not working-an all-time high. That’s 10 million above the 80.5 million when President Obama took office. With total unemployment at 144.3 million, for every three Americans over the age of 16 earning a paycheck there are two who aren’t even looking for a job. That’s an ugly portent for American prosperity.”

In a September 2013 edition of Investor’s Business Daily, Betsey McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “Beating Obama-Care”, wrote that “After 4-1/2 years of the Obama presidency, an unprecedented number of Americans have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, low-wage earners are suffering most and the U.S. is fast becoming a nation of part-time workers.”

The following draft press release was provided to this reporter in confidence by a well-placed source within the Obama Administration. Candace de Russy)

Democrats in Congress are enthusiastic about the new “Affordable Citizenship Act” which President Obama introduced by Executive Order at midnight on New Year’s Eve. All existing citizens of the U.S. except those who work for the government will soon have received letters in the mail informing them that their current citizenship has been cancelled. This is due to the exciting new grandfathering clauses in the new Act which are designed to improve the U.S. citizenship experience for all human beings throughout the world.

Automatic Re-Granting of Citizenships

As President Obama will explain in a forthcoming TV address, persons who have lost their citizenships can simply reapply for one of the new and better citizenships on offer at the broken.gov website and at the Acorn Citizenship Fairness Offices (ACFOs) which have been set up in DMV locations throughout the country.

The new Act replaces the existing system with three new levels of citizenship, Platinum, Green and Gold.

HOMOSEXUALITY IS ILLEGAL IN MOST AFRICAN NATIONS- USUALLY ENFORCED BY SHARIA LAWS…RSK

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has signed into law a ban on same-sex marriage in Africa’s most populous nation.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry slammed the decision Monday.

“Beyond even prohibiting same-sex marriage, this law dangerously restricts freedom of assembly, association and expression for all Nigerians,” he said in a statement.

“People everywhere deserve to live in freedom and equality. No one should face violence or discrimination for who they are or who they love.”

Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, characterized the law as a “big setback for human rights for all Nigerians.”

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the bill passed by the Senate at the end of last year introduces a 14-year prison sentence for people who are convicted of entering into a same-sex marriage or civil union.

Afghan President Hamid Karzi has recently authorized the release of 72 prisoners, regarded as a threat to the security of the United States. The State Department has vociferously objected to that decision. On Thursday, Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman said, “These 72 detainees are dangerous criminals against whom there is strong evidence linking them to terror-related crimes, including the use of improvised explosive devises, the largest killer of Afghan civilians.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney added, “We are very concerned about the release of any detainees who would pose a threat to U.S. forces.”

Yet, just in order to get the Palestinian Authority to deign to sit down at the negotiating table with Israel, the United States pressured the Israelis to release 104 terrorists, all of whom are responsible for the most heinous crimes imaginable. It is an absolute fallacy to believe that the terrorists that murder Israeli or American Jews on the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv are any less a threat to the survival of Western civilization as we know it, then those released on the streets of Afghanistan.

Any one of them, whether they be from a Sunni Islamic group such as Al Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Ansar al Sharia, or a Shiite Islamic group such as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Al Quds Force of Hizb’allah, delights equally in the murder of either American or Israeli civilians. Not to believe this is to make a distinction without a difference.

“True Detective” comes with all the ingredients for one of those dark, atmospheric series built around a search for a mysterious murderer—think “The Killing.” Set in Louisiana, it is awash in atmosphere and authenticity, along with overtones of the occult emanating from a sensationally ugly homicide, all peculiarly irrelevant to the reasons for this saga’s electrifying power. Det. Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), police veteran, is assigned to the murder case of a young prostitute, along with Det. Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey)—a self-possessed man who keeps his distance to a degree the genial Hart can’t abide. He expects more, some sharing of thoughts, from the partner at his side all day.

Hart has reason to regret his wish when Cohle does venture to chat a bit, early in the first episode. In a word or two here and there he’s soon delivering subtle but unmistakable indicators of the cold-eyed observer he is—indicators, too, of the wit and eloquence of this script by series creator Nic Pizzolatto, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. They’re also signals to Hart, vague but disturbing ones, that his new partner’s views are unlike any he can grasp, alien to all that he understands to be normal and right.

A family man, Hart doesn’t, himself, always follow the straight and narrow, but his transgressions—mainly his taste for sexy women other than his attractive wife—are, as he sees it, the essence of normality. A kind of right for a hardworking detective, and even a good thing for his marriage. A man needs release, he’s given to explaining—for the good of the family. His partner Cohle’s transgressiveness is a very different kind—the real thing, and deeply offensive to Hart.

Though you wouldn’t know it from our current political tempers, the wealth of 20th-century America wasn’t created in Washington, D.C. It was built by the likes of Tom Jones, the Californian and aerospace visionary who died last week at age 93.

Jones’s spectacular career spanned the modern age of aviation—from victory in the Pacific in World War II to the era of stealth and drone aircraft. Fresh out of Stanford with an engineering degree, he worked for Douglas Aircraft and helped design the planes that won the war against the Japanese fleet.After a postwar stint advising Brazil’s nascent aviation system, Jones went to Rand Corp. and wrote a path-breaking study on “The Capabilities and Operating Cost of Possible Future Transport Airplanes.” A major theme of his career was adapting new technology in ways that were effective and affordable for military platforms.

He pursued that credo at Northrop, a faltering aviation company that he turned into a giant over his 37-year tenure, including some 30 years as CEO starting in 1960. He helped to make the company, now Northrop Grumman, a backbone of American national defense.

The judge’s ruling that it was not anti-Semitic for the fifteen-year-old to declare, “Let’s burn the Jew” as he set fire to his classmate’s hair is a disturbing case that reveals the talons of anti-Semitism in both the courtroom and the school system, and represents an open tolerance for again hating “the Jew.”

Anti-semitism sank to a new low in Canada after a Winnipeg judge ruled that grabbing a Jewish classmate, flicking a lighter to her hair and saying, “Let’s burn the Jew,” was not anti-Semitic. The incident took place between two fifteen-year-old classmates, where the defendant pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon. The lawyer for the defendant implied that it was the girl’s fault that her hair caught fire — because she pulled away. Then Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Robert Finlayson agreed with the defense that the action was one of teen impulsiveness.

The victim not only stated that the incident “changed her world upside down,” but that she needed therapy to deal with her fears and felt that she was blamed by some people in the school for making too much out of the incident.

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Canada expressed horror at Finlayson’s ruling. In a press release, CEO Avi Benlolo stated that he could not imagine “the same decision would have been rendered had the perpetrator targeted any other minority group in a similar way.”

In December, two new studies, one funded by the German government, found that the majority of Muslims believe that Islamic Sharia law should take precedence over the secular constitutions and laws of their European host countries.

“Critics of Islamic ideology and its organizations are constantly confronted with lawsuits and have to legally defend themselves against the accusations of blasphemy or incitement-to-hatred. Even if it does not come to a conviction, such processes cost a lot of time and money…Thus… we are experiencing a de facto application of Islamic law.” — Felix Strüning, Gustav Stresemann Foundation Report.

“[It] must be recognized: democracies must beware of those who believe a free society is something that needs to be vanquished.” — Die Welt.

What follows is a chronological review of some of the most important stories about the rise of Islam in Germany during 2013:

In January, the Turkish-run Kuba Camii Mosque in Eschweiler, a city situated along the German-Belgian-Dutch border and about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Cologne, for the first time began publicly calling Muslims to prayer.

The call to prayer was described as an “historical event” and was attended by numerous dignitaries, including the Turkish consul and the Turkish attaché.