RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.steynonline.com/6129/any-way-you-slice-it

UPDATE! Below, the Israeli cabinet minister, invited to surrender more land to the Palestinians, asks his BBC interviewer, “Would you hand over half of Britain to someone who keeps on killing you?”

Keep that question in mind as you consider the scenes at the Old Bailey, England’s central criminal court, at the sentencing of the two Sarf London jihadists who hacked to death a British soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, on the streets of Woolwich in broad daylight:

Violence broke out in the Old Bailey dock today after Lee Rigby’s murderers began hurling abuse at the judge and fighting with prison guards during their sentencing.

Michael Adebolajo, 29, was given a whole-life term, while Michael Adebowale, 22, was jailed for life with a minimum of 45 years – meaning he could be back on the streets by the age of 67.

In extraordinary scenes, the two Muslim extremists yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘You (Britain) and America will never be safe’ during their sentencing at the court in Central London…

The killers had to be pinned to the ground by nine security guards and Rigby’s family began sobbing as they watched the incident in horror, being handed tissues by court staff.

The relatives were forced to get up from their seats, cowering away from the violence which was happening just feet away, according to reporters in court.

As Laura Rosen Cohen comments:

No remorse from the murders, no respect for the court or for the law, and yet the possibility for the jihadist murders of a free life, once again, as “extremist” senior citizens in jolly old London town.

What’s interesting is the point at which Messrs Adebolajo and Adebowale decided they’d had enough:

The struggle in the dock was triggered when the killers, both wearing Islamic robes, reacted angrily to comments that Mr Justice Sweeney made about their extremist beliefs.

He told them: ‘You each converted to Islam some years ago. Thereafter you were radicalised and each became an extremist, espousing views which, as has been said elsewhere, are a betrayal of Islam.’

At which point the two murderers yelled, “That’s a lie!” and “It’s not a betrayal of Islam!”

http://www.steynonline.com/6130/east-of-suez

Ship me somewheres east of Suez where the best is like the worst
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst…
Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay”

Two days ago, I wrote about Chuck Hagel’s sleepy announcement of the downsizing of the US military, and compared it to Washington’s predecessor as dominant power:

First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward…

The symbolic moment came 46 years ago, in January 1968. Hugh Hewitt sprang it on me quite out of the blue in one of our weekly radio chats back in October 2011:

HUGH HEWITT: Now I described it as sort of America’s East of Suez moment, and very few people knew what I was talking about. You do, but do you think it’s that order of a retreat for America?

MARK STEYN: No, I wouldn’t put it on that scale. That’s still to come. By East of Suez, you’re referring to the Labour government’s…

HH: Yes.

MS: …review in the late 1960s…

HH: Yup.

MS: …when in effect, they decided to shrink Britain’s presence in the world very considerably. And Denis Healey, I believe, was, if memory serves…

HH: …Healey was the foreign minister.

MS: He was, Denis Healey was the defence minister.

HH: Defence, that’s it.

MS: And the reality here, the reality here is that moment, the East of Suez moment, is still to come for the United States. The U.S. currently accounts for 43% of global military expenditure, more than most other major powers combined – Britain, China, Russia, whoever, all wrapped up. The American presence abroad will shrink. It will shrink because we have taken on domestic entitlements that combined with our overseas commitments, are unsustainable. And we will discover, as the British government discovered in 1968, that if it’s the choice between unsustainable domestic spending, or retreating from global power, it’s always easiest in a democratic society to retreat from global power. So I believe the real East of Suez moments will be hitting us in mid-decade, and certainly by 2020.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/02/27/democrats-defeat-cruzs-effort-to-protect-americans-from-irs-abuses/?print=1

As an enthusiastic fan of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), I am sorry that an ongoing project prevented me from participating in PJM’s Cruz symposium. But this relevant news just came over the transom, so I thought I’d at least pass it along.

As I’ve previously noted, Obama administration officials have been working the codify in federal law the IRS harassment and obstruction of conservative organizations that President Obama and Attorney General Holder claimed to find “intolerable,” “inexcusable,” “outrageous,” and “unacceptable” back when the scandal first came to light. As usual, it has been Senator Cruz leading the charge to try to stop them.

In the Senate today, Cruz offered two amendments that would have safeguarded the First Amendment rights of Americans against being profiled and targeted for IRS harassment. Specifically, it would have made it unlawful for IRS employees to:

[W]illfully act with the intent to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate, or single out and subject to undue scrutiny any person or organization in any state.

One might think that discriminating against groups based solely on their political beliefs is something so manifestly wrong and un-American that everyone could agree it should be prohibited – especially after all the Obama administration’s bloviating about how terrible it is. Instead, Democrats unanimously opposed the Cruz amendment. Their majority assured the measure’s defeat.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/02/28/criminal-background-checks-thats-racist/?print=1 Stop underestimating the crackpot ideas the race-left will cook up.  The latest in-fashion example of America’s structural racism is the criminal background check. The complaint goes like this. Racists who are looking for ways to engage in employment discrimination against blacks can use criminal background checks in hiring. Since blacks have been convicted of […]

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/if-you-like-crimea/?print=1

Garry Kasparov sums it up, in a tweet posted by PJM’s Bryan Preston [1]: “Dictators like Putin don’t ask why use power. They ask why not.”

That’s the bottom line for understanding what is happening as gunmen take over the airports and set up check points in Crimea. Reportedly these are well-armed soldiers without military insignia, but there’s little doubt that they are there in service of the Kremlin. This is an ethnic-Russian-majority region of Ukraine, a place long primed for trouble. In 1783, Catherine the Great wrested Crimea from the Turks. In 1954, during the Soviet era, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic gave Crimea as a Potemkin fraternal gift to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the borders suddenly mattered, and newly liberated Ukraine was in possession of Crimea, complete with the seaside resort of Yalta, the regional capital of Simferopol [2], and the port of Sevastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

A Return to Hidden Law http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372282/print   Longtime readers of the G-File might think about taking a speed-reading course. They also may remember that, about 14 years ago, I used to write about “hidden law” a lot. I returned to it in today’s column on the Arizona brouhaha.   Hidden law was a term coined […]

http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/why-you-should-be-excited-about-future-tech/d/d-id/1114036

ure, robotics, the Internet of Things, data analytics, and other disruptive trends are intimidating, but they will improve our lives.

What will the next decades bring?

It’s no exaggeration to say we’re on the cusp of scientific and technological advancements that will change how we live.

Renowned futurist Dr. Michio Kaku characterizes this technological shift as moving from the “age of discovery” to the “age of mastery,” a new period in our history where we’ll be able to harness our technologies and control our destinies.

Last May, The McKinsey Global Institute published an informative analysis that examined the economic impact of global technology trends. The study, called “Disruptive Technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy,” identified the technologies that matter most to the global economy, sustainability, and improving the human condition.

[If we don’t control the technology we depend on, someone else will — and we might not like the consequences. Read Technology Automation: Who’s The Boss?]

The McKinsey study, along with Google’s recent acquisitions of artificial intelligence and robotic companies, and my own company Xerox’s special history of innovation (at PARC), inspired me to compile a list of three areas where technological transformation will shape our lives.

The digital age and The Internet of Things
We’ve come a long way from the cumbersome, slow PCs of the 70s to Google Glass and paper-thin mobile devices. We are now at the footstep of quantum computing in the cloud with flexible and wearable electronics. Cisco, which termed the “The Internet of Everything,” predicts that 50 billion devices, including our smartphones, appliances, and office equipment, will be wirelessly connected via a network of sensors to the Internet by 2020.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2014/02/24/gary-peters-obamacare-and-the-war-on-julie-boonstra

Senator Carl Levin is finally doing the country a great service- he is retiring, and Gary Peters who would be an incumbent in District 14 one of the challengers running to replace Levin. The filing deadline is April 22, 2014 and the primary is in August so many other contenders may yet emerge. Wouldn’t it be loverley if Peters lost and also forfeited his seat..RSK
Gary Peters’ Shameful War on a Brave Woman by Peter Roff
Powerful allies are helping this Senate hopeful silence a woman and her health care story.

U.S. Rep. Gary Peters, D-Mich., wants to be a United States senator, but he has a problem. He’s engaged in a “war on women” – make that a single woman – whom he’s trying to silence because he doesn’t like the story she has to tell.

Her name is Julie Boonstra. She’s a Michigan mother currently battling leukemia. Her medical coverage has been adversely affected by the onset of Obamacare. She’s had the courage to let people know about her struggle by speaking truth to power in an ad sponsored by Americans for Prosperity’s chapter in her state.

“My insurance was canceled because of Obamacare. Now the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable,” Boonstra says. “I believed the president. I believed I could keep my health insurance plan. I feel lied to. It’s heartbreaking for me. Congressman Peters, your decision to vote for Obamacare jeopardized my health.”

For her courage in speaking out she is being vilified by those who argue she is simply not telling the truth. Peters, citing a so-called “fact checking” by the Washington Post, is trying to shut her up by having his lawyers send letters to television stations around the state telling them to demand more proof of what she says or pull the ad.

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: