Mark Steyn: Sharia’s Protector

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Photo Credit: Steyn Online

Photo Credit: Steyn Online

Rohullah Qarizada is one of those Afghans you used to see a lot on American TV in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s fall. Trimly bearded, dapper in Western suit and tie, he heads the Afghan Independent Bar Association in Kabul. Did you know Kabul had a bar association? A few years back, I ran into one of the U.S. prosecutors who helped set it up, with a grant from the Swedish foreign ministry. Mr. Qarizada currently sits on a committee charged with making revisions to the Afghan legal code. What kind of revisions? Well, for example: “Men and women who commit adultery shall be punished based on the circumstances by one of the following punishments: lashing, stoning.”

As in stoning to death. That’s the proposed improvement to Article 21. Article 23 specifies that said punishment shall be performed in public. Mr. Qarizada gave an interview to Reuters, explaining that the reintroduction of stoning was really no big deal: You’d have to have witnesses, and they’d better be consistent. “The judge asks each witness many questions,” he said, “and if one answer differs from other witnesses then the court will reject the claim.” So that’s all right then.

Stoning is making something of a comeback in the world’s legal codes — in October the Sultan of Brunei announced plans to put it on his books. Nevertheless, Kabul has the unique distinction of proposing to introduce the practice on America’s watch. Afghanistan is an American protectorate; its kleptocrat president is an American client, kept alive these last twelve years only by American arms. The Afghan campaign is this nation’s longest war — and our longest un-won war: That’s to say, nowadays we can’t even lose in under a decade. I used to say that, 24 hours after the last Western soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. But it’s already as if we were never there: The last Christian church in the country was razed to the ground in 2010.

At this point, Americans sigh wearily and shrug, “Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire,” or sneer, “If they want to live in a seventh-century s***hole, f*** ’em.” But neither assertion is true. Do five minutes’ googling, and you’ll find images from the Sixties and early Seventies of women in skirts above the knee listening to the latest Beatles releases in Kabul record stores. True, a stone’s throw (so to speak) from the capital, King Zahir’s relatively benign reign was not always in evidence. But, even so, if it’s too much to undo the barbarism of centuries, why could the supposed superpower not even return the country to the fitful civilization of the disco era? The American imperium has lasted over twice as long as the Taliban’s rule — and yet, unlike them, we left no trace.

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Former Christian Singer Turned Secular Pop Star Katy Perry: ‘I Don’t Believe in Heaven or Hell’

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Photo Credit: Christian News

Photo Credit: Christian News

In a recent interview with Marie Claire Magazine, pop star Katy Perry, a former contemporary Christian artist, announced that she no longer believes in Heaven or Hell nor professes to be a Christian.

“I don’t believe in a Heaven or a Hell, or an old man sitting on a throne,” she advised the magazine. “I believe in a higher power bigger than me because that keeps me accountable. Accountability is rare to find, especially with people like myself, because nobody wants to tell you something you don’t want to hear.”

“I’m not Buddhist, I’m not Hindu, I’m not Christian, but I still feel like I have a deep connection with God,” Perry continued. “I pray all the time for self-control, for humility. There’s a lot of gratitude in it. Just saying ‘thank you’ sometimes is better than asking for things.”

As previously reported, Perry, an evangelical minister’s daughter, was raised in California, and was brought up to avoid secular music and television programs. She began singing as a Contemporary Christian artist at age 15, and released her first national album in 2001. In an interview with CCM (Contemporary Christian Music Magazine), she stated that one her musical influences was Keith Green, who was known to be bold in his lyrical witness for Christ.

However, in 2007, Perry signed with with the secular label Capitol Records, and released her first single, I Kissed a Girl, a number one hit that talks about experimentation with lesbianism. The popularity of Perry’s single brought continued national attention until she became one of the most well-known pop artists in the secular music industry.

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Alaska’s Chill Arriving in Time for Green Bay – Chicago Football Game

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Photo Credit: NOAA/NWS

Photo Credit: NOAA/NWS

On Christmas morning, Chicken, AK (yes, that’s the name of the place) stood frozen in time at -58 degrees. Chicken is located in far eastern interior Alaska. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), other locales nearby were almost as cold (-40 and lower). Figure 1 (from Facebook) shows some of the frigid readings.

Greg Fishel, a TV meteorologist from Raleigh, NC, couldn’t resist the opportunity to pun, “Fowl weather indeed.”

Brian Brettschneider noted that he, “liked how the Chicken daily summary is listed as ‘Chicken COOP’ as is Chicken COOPerative Station. CQNA2 : CHICKEN COOP : -53 / -58 / 0.00 / 0.0/ 20

Well, while Alaska shivered, south Florida basked in seasonally tropical warmth. Just ask the pink flamingos, decked out in their holiday finery, shown here (Fig. 2).

All kidding aside, this air mass is already affecting the northern Plains and will be the first of the next in a series of brutal arctic invasions. Longer range computer and human projections indicate that temperatures from eastern Montana across the northern tier into New England are likely to be well below average for much, if not all, of the next two weeks (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). Some of this cold air will spill southward, but not even close to the extent that our northern states and Canada will experience.

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Fukushima? Strange Flu Hitting Pilots, Attendants at Alaska Airlines (+video)

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Photo Credit: Free Patriot

Photo Credit: Free Patriot

A strange illness has been attacking flight attendants and pilots employed by Alaska Airlines. On December 23 and 24th, twenty four flights were cancelled due to a lack of personnel. Bobbie Egan, spokesman for Alaska Airlines, stated a “very unusual” cold and flu season hit the airline’s Pacific Northwest hub, and the entire region was affected.” The outage affected 270 passengers.

While the airline is calling it a flu, there is some speculation that the story is a cover for something else. There is a mysterious flu hitting the southeast and Texas, but there didn’t seem to be a “companion” statement from the Center for Disease Control that often follows the diagnosis of that flu. It would seem that if the Alaska Airlines flight crews were struck with the mysterious flu of the Southeast, the CDC would have issued a statement as they have in other instances.

What could be going on? This has certainly been an odd year for Alaska Airlines flight crews!

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The World Braces for Retirement Crisis

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Photo Credit: AP/Eugene Hoshiko

Photo Credit: AP/Eugene Hoshiko

A global retirement crisis is bearing down on workers of all ages.

Spawned years before the Great Recession and the financial meltdown in 2008, the crisis was significantly worsened by those twin traumas. It will play out for decades, and its consequences will be far-reaching.

Many people will be forced to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65 — to 70 or even longer. Living standards will fall, and poverty rates will rise for the elderly in wealthy countries that built safety nets for seniors after World War II. In developing countries, people’s rising expectations will be frustrated if governments can’t afford retirement systems to replace the tradition of children caring for aging parents.

The problems are emerging as the generation born after World War II moves into retirement.

“The first wave of under-prepared workers is going to try to go into retirement and will find they can’t afford to do so,” says Norman Dreger, a retirement specialist in Frankfurt, Germany, who works for Mercer, a global consulting firm.

Read more from this story HERE.

We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn

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Photo Credit: James Sarmiento

Photo Credit: James Sarmiento

The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.

The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools” and “The Five Year Party.” To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.

The problems stem from two attitudes. Social preoccupations trump the academic part of residential education, which occupies precious little of students’ time or emotions. Second, students’ view of education is strictly instrumental and credentialist. They regard the entire enterprise as a series of hoops they must jump through to obtain their 120 credits, which they blindly view as an automatic licensure for adulthood and a good job, an increasingly problematic belief.

Education thus has degenerated into a game of “trap the rat,” whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.

The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don’t even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.

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Suicide Bomber Strikes Russia. Another ‘Black Widow?’

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Photo Credit: Sergei Karpov/Reuters

Photo Credit: Sergei Karpov/Reuters

A suicide bomber detonated the equivalent of over 20 pounds of TNT near the entrance to a railway station in the central Russian city of Volgograd Sunday, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens.

The blast, which blew out the front windows of the huge Stalin-era structure, was recorded by CCTV and rebroadcast by the state-funded RT network.

In a statement the Kremlin’s Investigative Committee, Russia’s top police body, said that the bombing was “according to available evidence” the work of a female suicide bomber who triggered the device, which was loaded with shrapnel, as she approached the metal detectors near the station’s entrance and became nervous when she spotted a police officer. According to the statement, the casualties might have been far greater if she had succeeded in penetrating into the inner waiting area, which was crammed with New Year’s travelers preparing to board trains.

No one has claimed responsibility.

A similar bombing barely two months ago, which demolished a Volgograd city bus and killed six people, was revealed to be the work of a female suicide bomber from Russia’s insurgency-wracked southern province of Dagestan. Such women have been dubbed “black widows” because they often turn out to be family members of Islamist rebels killed by Russian security forces, recruited to stage revenge attacks on “soft” Russian targets.

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Brainlike Computers Learn from Mistakes

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Photo Credit: Erin Lubin/The New York Times

Photo Credit: Erin Lubin/The New York Times

Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.

Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.

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Kelly Clark, Lawyer Who Won Boy Scouts Abuse Case, Dies at 56

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Photo Credit: O'Donnell Clark & Crew LLP.

Photo Credit: O’Donnell Clark & Crew LLP.

Kelly Clark, a lawyer whose successful child molestation lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America in Oregon led to the release of a trove of documents containing thousands of accusations of sexual abuse, died on Tuesday at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He was 56.

The cause of death had not been determined, said Paul Mones, his co-counsel on the suit against the Boy Scouts.

Mr. Clark argued child molestation cases before the Oregon Supreme Court more than a decade before his 2010 lawsuit against the Boy Scouts. Two of those cases resulted in decisions that established a far longer statute of limitations for molestation and allowed for institutions to be held liable when individuals under their authority commit abuse.

The plaintiff in the 2010 lawsuit was Kerry Lewis, who said he had been molested by an assistant scoutmaster, Timur Dykes, in the early 1980s. Mr. Dykes, who had served time for child abuse, had admitted to a Mormon bishop that he had molested several scouts. The bishop alerted the families of Mr. Dykes’s victims but did not warn the other boys in the troop or the authorities. Mr. Dykes was soon able to volunteer with the Scouts again.

“They knew that their charismatic assistant scout leader Timur Dykes, to whom kids flocked like bees to honey, had admitted to molesting 17 scouts, including Cub Scouts,” Mr. Clark told NPR shortly after his closing arguments in the case.

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Coming in 2014: Extremely Smart Watches and Wearable TVs

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Photo Credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Photo Credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

For technological innovation, 2013 was a remarkably boring year. Apple, often the hotbed of “new,” mostly just updated familiar devices in different colors and with crisper screens. Social media companies fought over who had better photo filters. And Silicon Valley start-ups offered more of less, with slight iterations on existing products.

But 2014 has a lot of promise.

Predicting the future is a lot more difficult than evaluating the past, but you could wake up on Jan. 1, 2015, in a different digital winter wonderland.

No, you won’t lie in bed while your humanoid robot helper makes you bacon and eggs and walks the dog — which is also possibly a robot, made by Google. That’s more of a 2035 prediction. But you might wake up to the call of a watch on your wrist — not your cellphone on your night table. This year we’ve seen some efforts at smartwatches, like those made by Pebble; next year, these gadgets could look a lot better.

“Smartwatches, which connect to your smartphone, are going to create an entirely new category of computing in the coming year,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a former Forrester analyst who specializes in wearable computing. She noted that the long-awaited Apple smartwatch, which is expected to be announced in 2014, could change the way we engage with our wrist in the same way Apple changed the cellphone industry in 2007.

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