The big news from their respective sides of the Atlantic was the sentencing of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and the confidence vote in UK PM Theresa May. Neither party merited the final score.
I would find the standard operating procedure of US federal justice - squeeze till you squeal - utterly repugnant even if it were not so selectively applied. Me on October 19th 2016:
Comey's FBI is hopelessly corrupted - and certainly more corrupt than J Edgar Hoover's FBI...
That was months, and in some cases years, before the revelations about Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page et al. Michael Cohen is a sleazy shyster even by the standards of his grim trade, but the issue is the ability of the feds to get you on something once they decide it's in their interest to do so. Which is not the hallmark of any real justice system.
~In that respect, the more interesting federal prosecution in the news yesterday was an under-reported story out of New Jersey. Per The North Jersey Record:
Feds: NJ woman forced Sri Lankan woman to marry her, enslaved her for 9 years
"NJ woman"? One of those real-housewives-of-New-Jersey types? No, this is one of the real housewives of the new New Jersey:
A Secaucus woman has been accused of enslavement for allegedly forcing a Sri Lankan national to work for nine years without pay, federal prosecutors said.
Ah, a "Secaucus woman": That narrows it down. Any chance of a name?
Alia Imad Faleh Al Hunaity, 43, was arraigned Wednesday in federal court in Camden and charged with forced labor, alien harboring and marriage fraud...
What did "Sri Lankan nationals" do to deserve being enslaved by these crazy out-of-control "Secaucus women"?
America's newspapers would rather go out of business than tell you anything approximating to the reality of the situation - that this is a wealthy woman from Araby who would like to live as she does back in Saudi or the Emirates, which means importing the indentured servants she enjoys back in the old country. A third of the population of Saudi Arabia are "foreign workers", mostly laboring in agriculture or domestic service. Just shy of a million are Sri Lankan. Because Saudis are the laziest buggers on the planet, and, having been enriched by oil, have no desire to make so much as a cup of tea for themselves.
So Ms al-Hunaity brought over her servant, enslaved her, and, in order to evade US immigration law, entered into a fake lesbian marriage:
COUNT ONE (Marriage Fraud)
On or about April 11, 2018, in Hudson County, in the District of New Jersey and elsewhere, the defendant, ALIA AL HUNAITY, did knowingly and unlawfully enter into a marriage with Victim-1, an alien in the United States, for the purpose of evading a provision of the immigration laws of the United States.
I have written for years about the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition - Amsterdam's once famous "Homo Hotel" relaunching itself as a Muslim enterprise, the most fierce opposition to gay marriage in the Aussie referendum coming from the most Muslim constituencies, the orientational cleansing of London's East End...
But you have to hand it to the more enterprising Mohammedans: Secure in the knowledge that Allah will cut them some slack, they're willing to do whatever it takes - including tying the same-sex knot in order to import their slaves. One day the last elderly Episcopalian gays in San Francisco will notice that every other couple in the Castro District now seems to be a chap called Mohammed and the fetching young Bangladeshi houseboy who never leaves the house.
If you find the vibrancy of multiculturalism totally vibrant, stories like the above are far more interesting than whatever used to be in the paper before Secaucus women started pretending to be hot under the hijab for Tamil totty willing to do the jobs Americans won't do, like being same-sex Sharia slaves for immigration fraudsters. As Steve Sailer adds:
See, immigrants are too assimilating rapidly to modern America's highest values, such as gay marriage, creating more social progress than you thought imaginable. Did boring old white 1950s white men like Dwight Eisenhower engage in lesbian marriage slavery?
I don't think so!
Progress!
~Are the US midterm elections over yet? I think so, just about. The last GOP state senator from Orange County, California has thrown in the towel. Orange County used to be typical of solidly Republican Nixon-Reagan-Pete Wilson California. Then it became a Republican redoubt in solidly Democrat California. Now it's just a slightly less solidly Democrat fiefdom in otherwise solidly one-party-state California. Yet most exhaustive analyses of "five ways Democrats pulled down the Orange curtain" talk about everything except the only thing that matters - the demographic transformation of the Golden State by untrammeled mass unskilled immigration.
Are similar trends discernible elsewhere in supposedly red and purple states? Why, yes: Florida, Arizona, the mid-Atlantic, and even Texas, without which Republicans are dead as a national party. By 2010, 74 per cent of babies delivered at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas were to non-citizens, the overwhelming majority in the country illegally. Those newborns are now approaching their ninth birthdays. In another nine years they'll be voting. By 2010, sixteen per cent of all births in the state were "anchor babies". What do you reckon it is now?
What's the T-shirt slogan? "Don't mess with Texas!" But somebody has messed with Texas - and Republicans, as with almost anything else that matters, do nothing about it.
~We have some special events planned for 2019 in The Mark Steyn Club, including the second annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise, sailing from Vancouver through Alaska's beautiful Inside Passage to Skagway and Glacier Bay. (Those Steyn cruise cabins are selling fast, and pricing is better the earlier you book.) Club members also enjoy special member pricing on over forty products at the Steyn store, including this year's Steynamite Christmas Specials. So, if you've been thinking about signing up, you can find more details about the Club here - and, if you've a chum who'd enjoy our audio fiction, video poetry and much more, don't forget our limited-time Christmas Gift Membership, which includes a special presentation set of three of our most popular Tales for Our Time.
See you on the telly with Tucker tonight at 8pm Eastern - and tomorrow evening right here with the second of our Christmas Tales.
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Sharia lesson of the day: Taqiyya -- lying to infidels is OK.
Example: Telling an infidel that taqiyya is forbidden by the Koran.
Yeah- handy, isn't it, that duplicitousness (including denial of it) is Koranically codified.
Paradoxically, the only followers you can "trust" are the decapitators.
In more culture news that doesn't quite rise to the level of Sapphic Sharia, I report that the new tyranny of mandated pronouns has successfully invaded the world of science. I'm just returning from a science conference and was surprised and saddened by seeing a person's nametag that included not only his given name, but his preferred pronouns. At least the obvious biological male did choose "he,his", i.e. cisgendered, but I was saddened that anyone would feel the need to bother.
I know from some of your previous posts that you are a scientist and familiar with anthropomorphic global climate change baloney. I don't know how old you are but Science isn't what it used to be. Chick science was once a term of derision and now it is the mainstream. I am an engineer and engineering has been gutted too.
I am forced to say that someone with an androgynous name should commit to one team or the other. (I know it is a sign of moral weakness but I was triggered by your correct use of the "not a real term" of cisgendered.)
Thanks Walt. Yeah, I'm an earth scientist by way of both physics and engineering. And I'm old enough to lament a great tradition of my alma mater being gutted on the sword of political correctness. Yes, Engineering at U of T (not Texas, not Tennessee, but Toronto) got rid of its fight song that used to be sung while being accompanied by the Lady Godiva Memorial Band. What have we sunk to?
An all girl band? I have been admonished here in the comments section not to call the women ladies but perhaps some of the Mark Steyn Club members are alumna. The cavalry had a command of horse holders to the rear! I wish you had been on our sports schedule, the mental picture is worth more than a thousand words. In answer to your question, we have sunk pretty low but we still have room to go lower.
Quite convinced at this point that it's all an elaborate sniveling, attention-consuming dodge to excuse the awful lack of mathematics competencies in the U.S, to deflect scrutiny of the complete national failure of the wealth-consuming U.S. Education Behemoth. The French public school system cranks out every year world-wide diploma classes of students male and female who have qualified to begin pre-calculus level math at the age of 16. In the US most students at age 18 graduate without achieving that level and without the ability to even hold a pencil to be able to write out the calculations.
Everything's on lurid pompous display EXCEPT the mathematics competencies.
To note: France only rated 5th in math at one point, after Singapore, Czech Republic, Russia... but it's useful to note that unlike those countries, France maintains schools across Africa and many African francophone countries have their education systems modeled after the French, as many anglophone African countries model their after the British model (O levels A levels), so they have proved for decades that they can achieve competitive levels pretty much everywhere with anyone. Not in the US. but in other countries, a majority of the head-scarved young ladies left school with their mathematics at pre-calculus or higher level, and they speak/read and write more than one language fluently and can hold a pen properly.
Meanwhile, US Education has created a high-financed priority model that doubles down on not math or science but 'identity.' Can't build a bridge, balance a checkbook or figure out how to double a cookie recipe with that, but they can berate, bully and scare anyone who has the temerity to question any of it.
Actually, it was sadly an all male band. In my specialty (Eng. Sci.), our first year class totaled 165, of which 3 were female.
Hey Walt, I think you misinterpreted that comment as me admonishing you, in the way (you thought) I misinterpreted your comment re "ladies" and use-of-a-certain-anatomical-term (I totally agree with your point... it bothers me that genital-reassignment is front and centre of public discourse, and - even worse - public policy).
In any case, you should feel free to lady away, as Mark does!
PS. For what it's worth I would "like" your comments if a "like" button existed; the one about the potential role of ancient cannibal rituals in dealing with the emerging demographic challenges in Malaita comes to mind! Likewise, your "gateway drug" / addiction for Big Government on another thread. Great stuff.
Awesome alliteration abounds as militant Muslim murders multiply causing commenters' Christmas cheer collapse.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
My alliteration rhymes too.
thanks for reminding us that this real people.The willfully ignorant reporting is nothing new , left or right. That may be why journalists are rated by the public as on par with used car salesmen or real estate agents.
What religion you have isn't the issue. The issue is believing that a specific religion has the right to carry out their own justice and enforce the laws stated in their religion instead of the laws established by our governments. But we're seeing blind eyes to this issue more and more. The scriptures of Islam apply to all and so does the Constitutional rights of the USA. Such contradictions that the left will ensure that both will be one in the same.
Mark's mention of the number of babies born to undocumented, illegal aliens at Parkland Hospital reminds me of a story I recently read in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Tenet Healthcare has been forced to repay close to $400 million to the Feds, Georgia and South Carolina. Why? Because of a nifty scheme in which Tenet paid "La Clinica Familia," operator of clinics catering to undocumented, illegal aliens, $12 million for such services as translation. Tenet claimed they were just trying to make their Labor and delivery units attractive and hospitable to the clients La Clinica served. And guess what! When these mamas showed up at the hospitals Tenet operated in Georgia and Hilton Head (?!), they qualified for Emergency Medicaid. In a few years, we taxpayers paid $400 million for Tenet to deliver TWENTY THOUSAND new citizens in just six hospitals. Former Tenet executives are now being pursued by the US attorneys in Atlanta and SC for their roles in the scheme that funneled La Clinica mamas to Tenet hospitals, bypassing closer ones en route.
Amazing. Not a thing exaggerated to make that title a stretch.
The sooth is not soothing. No wonder it doesn't make the papers. California's the template. Flood the state with other countries' populations and continuity with America is severed. Someone was thinking ahead, naming the towns in Spanish.
Only in America can Muslims be inspired to enter into queer marriages.
It sounds to me like Make America Great Again is succeeding beyond our wildest imagination!
With the Honourable Ahmed D. Hussen Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship that immigrated to Canada from Somalia in 1993 signing up Canada on the UN Global Compact on Migration in the International conference that is currently held in Marrakesh, Trump administration should become more concerned about proper wall on US northern border then on the wall on southern border. All objections to this compact on the Canadian side have been practically muzzled. The conservative party of Canada which is officially the opposition to the Liberal Government of Justin Trudeau is afraid to raise the issue for being labeled Islamophobic by the Liberal MSM which has 99.99% control over all media publication in Canada. Although the compact is not officially binding however the Canadian jurisprudence quite often accept international agreements as enforceable in Canada whether they have been labeled as binding agreement or not. This global compact has provisions that are wider than just orderly migration it also contains provision that limits voicing objections to global migration and legalize muzzling any publications that publishes objection to global migration. None of the major search engines provided it one actually provided spin article that called concern about freedom of objection 100% baloney. The only source that I found with actual text of the compact is here:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/12/09/uns-global-compact-on-migration-is-sinister-dangerous-and-wrong/
Since current government of Canada is a major promoter of the compact it is expected it will be also major supporter of migration of unvetted unskilled migrants to its borders. It is unlikely that those migrants will settle in Timmins, Yellowknife, Churchill Manitoba, Labrador and those kinds of locations because "Baby it is Cold outside" in the winter and too many black flies, mosquitoes, deer flies etc. in summer they will seek move on to the warmer and greener pastures and welcoming benefits south of the border. The notion that the Global compact on migration is dead on arrival because US will not sign on to that is a bit short sighted.
I thought these Muslims coming after us infidels had a heart of war within them as exhibited by the running down of pedestrians on the sidewalks and pedestrian malls, setting up and detonating nail bombs at teenage pop star concerts, hatcheting innocent people to death while they wait at a train station or cross a city street, or shooting at folks singing carols at a Christmas Market, or maybe a little raping in other public places, but now it's unclear. Is it a heart of war they harbor within or do they merely want our entire countries for their own and we're getting the rite of passage initiation.
Either way, how does a country combat that? It's not as if it's invisible. It's not as if it hasn't begun. What are we supposed to do? A great big wall combined with e-verify, removing people from the country of residence who are on watch lists, disposing of watch lists, combined with outlawing Sharia would be a good start.
Merry Christmas!
"Outlawing sharia" is something that every Western nation should have done a very long time ago. It is a law code entirely incompatible with any other. Even if it were wholly benign, rather than utterly mediaeval, that would still be true, because sharia purports to be the unalloyed word of allah, making it immutable and, therefore, superior to any law code drawn up by Man. That's convenient for muslim criminals today, since sharia has a lot to say about what you shouldn't do and what you should and how you should do it, but it doesn't get very specific about stuff like drive-by shootings, or drug-peddling, so they're OK. If the prophet were concocting his cult today, I expect he'd remember to include a bit of product placement for halal firearms.
The reality is that sharia not only endorses, but actually mandates actions declared criminal by probably every other legal code in the world. Politically correct cultural relativists either cannot or will not see it, but a system of lawless laws is a paradox. Lord Woolf, once the senior judge in the UK, made a prize fool of himself some years back, when he praised the Chinese legal system; that would be the one which is hideously corrupt, presumes guilt, denies appeals and hands out death sentences like confetti. I think, however, he stopped short of suggesting that Chinese law should be allowed to run parallel to our own law in the United Kingdom. Yet, shockingly, sharia courts do operate in the UK and, far from shutting them down as illegal, the authorities have consistently indulged them.
That is insanity cubed.
Thank you, Owen. I guess it's a huge problem that we all agree needs to be fixed. The question is, it a solvable problem? It takes will and courage. But if there was the will to form an international panel on climate change which turns out not to be a problem at all, then there could be a panel created for this, too.
"Is it a solvable problem?"
As long as those responsible for enforcing our own laws prefer to defend alien ones, no, it is not.
You denounce the Chinese legal system. by itself it is not corrupt but there are corrupt judges at least as much as in the USA, as to presumption of guilt and lack of appeal it is at least as just and not worse than the US legal system. How many innocent people have been incarcerated and executed because of overzealous prosecutors and incompetent defense attorneys and biased juries, how many guilty persons have got scot free on technicalities, incompetent and lenient prosecutors and biased jurors? Hands out death sentences they don't waste time on deciding if a particular method carrying out death sentence is cruel and unusual punishment once it was beheading by a sword replaced by a gunshot in the back of the head. As to high number of death sentences considering that the population is four times the population of USA and murderers cannot escape death sentence on technicality or by bribing or intimidating juror or by killing witnesses also death sentence can be imposed for gross and egregious corruption, sabotage, revealing state secrets, treason, defection, cowardice in front of the enemy, inciting riots and terrorism. Also the legal code is country wide there are no anti-death penalty states and Governors. Based on those factors the number of executions is not excessive
"The reality is that sharia not only endorses, but actually mandates actions declared criminal by probably every other legal code in the world." Good summary, in fewer than 25 words, by Owen.
As for whether it's solvable, our host has often pondered:
"How do you solve a problem like Sharia?"
Oh, come on! In Chinese courts, the assumption is that the defendant isn't there by coincidence. The rozzers have arrested you for a reason, so you must be guilty: rather circuler reasoning. When the court convicts you, that's that. You have no recourse to to appeal. I think someone wrongly arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to death is entitled to think that the number of executions is about to become excessive. Stop trying to defend the indefensible.
You're right! China's justice system sounds like just what we need! Let's repeal the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the US Constitution before anyone else gets hurt.
See my reply to Owen Morgan
A rewrite of My Sharia Amour seems overdue...
Yes! Though not sure how it would run when Mark does it live....
At the end, she runs off with her lesbian slave, leaving Mark heartbroken.
Back in the good ol' days of the National Football League when the Oakland Raiders were still a relevant team they had a slogan "Just Win Baby!" The obvious import of that phrase was that they didn't really care how they won, fair or foul, just as long as they won. That phrase seems apt for the modern Democrat Party. Whether its importing faux lesbian muslim slavers and every pregnant woman from Tijuana to San Salvador, or the elimination of the Electoral College and the Senate; Just Win Baby. We'll figure out the details later.
Well, the details may be a little sketchy to the LGBTQ+ and recreational marijuana set, but not to readers of Mark Steyn. It could get interesting when all the little Jesuses from south of the border and all the little Mohammeds from across the ocean come into conflict about just how things are going to run in the U.S.. My money is on the Jesuses, but one thing is for sure, old white folks like I will be when that time comes won't figure much into the calculus of either. Even less will the LGBTQ+ set fit in. They don't seem to be very popular with either demographic.
"Just Win Baby" is a great slogan so long as your winning. Not so much when the winning is over.
MARK! I'm dying.
"...stories like the above are far more interesting than whatever used to be in the paper before Secaucus women started pretending to be hot under the hijab for Tamil totty willing to do the jobs Americans won't do, like being same-sex Sharia slaves for immigration fraudsters".
/we are not worthy
PS: I bet you were sitting on that picture for ages, just waiting for the right news peg. Drudge reports that Lesbaneses is the top search term for internet content of a **cough cough** mature nature.
Lol. I'll wager that Mark has been waiting since 2011 to use that photo:
'You'll be the first Middle East strongman brought down by lesbianism...
"Release the lesbian bloggers!" commands Assad.
"Er, what lesbian bloggers?" says his vizier. "This is Damascus, remember?"
... The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of "Paula Brooks," shortly before "Paula" was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker from Ohio.'
(Steyn in The Orange Country Register, "Why liberals fell for 'Muslim lesbian blogger' hoax.)
That picture is trolling gold. When Muslims complain and The Left stays quiet as church mice, it will be episode #67845784779 of liberal fecklessness.
Yeah, the ongoing Democratic project to stuff red states with blue voters (illegal alien sub-division) is continuing full blast. California is a one-party state and we are on the way to becoming a one-party nation in all things that matter. Already many Democrats (smarmy socialist sub-division) are calling not-so-subtly for an end to the Electoral College and the abolition of the Senate. All in the name of democracy of course.
Ninety-two year old "Big John" Dingell", the former Congressman whose family owns the Dingell District in Michigan, recently called for the abolition of both the Senate and Electoral College. "Big John" is about as much of an Establishment Democrat as you can get and if he is pushing for these changes in ye olde' Constitution then the defenestration of these two features is very high up on the party wish list. We are heading full-bore down the road to Banana Republicville and there doesn't seem to be a thing we can do about it. I just hope that I live long enough to see the day when "coalition" of Democrat identity groups realizes that they don't need sanctimonious white liberals like Pelosi, the Clingons, Schumer, Adam Schiff and the Dingells anymore.
Loved "the Clingons." The phrase, that is. Of course, as a 10-year-old I was watching the very first showing of the very first episode of the original Star Trek series . . .
"Clingons". Hah! Well said.
We are happy to see Austin get the new Apple campus without paying the fortune that New York had to pay for Amazon. However, the prospect of California liberals moving to Texas is repugnant.
Great. Now I can't get rid of this earworm:
It's the Sri-i-i-i-i Lankan women,
Gimme, gimme, gimme the Sri Lankan blues...
Josh: Personally, I prefer the more traditional "Ceylon, Ceylon, Slaver".