The worst is just beginning

From the Secretary of the Treasury

The worst is just beginning.

Sharia already in force in parts of the UK

If this were just a civil matter, I wouldn't be too worried, but in a criminal case? This is bad news indeed.

From the Daily Mail

The British sharia 'crime' court in a cafe where knifemen walk free

Last updated at 16:32pm on 8th February 2008

Sharia law "courts" are already dealing with crime on the streets of London, it emerged today.

The revelation came after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, called for an "accommodation" with parts of the Islamic legal code in a speech which attracted widespread condemnation.

The Archbishop said parts of civil law could be dealt with under the sharia system but already some communities have gone much further - and it was revealed today that a teenage stabbing case among the Somali community in Woolwich had been dealt with by a sharia "trial".

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In action: Elders consider a case in a Sharia court

Youth worker Aydarus Yusuf, 29, who was involved in setting up the hearing, said a group of Somali youths were arrested by police on suspicion of stabbing another Somali teenager.

The victim's family told officers the matter would be settled out of court and the suspects were released on bail.

A hearing was convened and elders ordered the assailants to compensate the victim.

"All their uncles and their fathers were there," said Mr Yusuf. "So they all put something towards that and apologised for the wrongdoing."

An Islamic Council in Leyton also revealed that it had dealt with more than 7,000 divorces while sharia courts in the capital have settled hundreds of financial disputes.

Today's revelations came as controversy raged over Dr Williams's call for parts of sharia law to be adopted in Britain.

His comments were condemned by Downing Street, the Tories and the chairman of the Government's Equalities and Human Rights Commission.

They were described as a "recipe for chaos" by Culture Secretary Andy Burnham.

Along with the Islamic Council in Leyton, there are reports of at least two other sharia courts sitting in London.

There are also courts in a number of other areas of the country with high Muslim populations, including Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, Birmingham and Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

Read more...

• Brown slaps down Archbishop's call for Islamic Sharia law to operate in Britain
• Sharia UK: What exactly does it mean?
• He regards himself as a unifier. Pity his own Church is so divided

Most are understood to concentrate on divorce cases - although such judgments are not recognised in British law - as well as financial disputes.

Suhaib Hasan, a spokesman for the Islamic Sharia Council in Leyton, which was set up in 1982, said that he and his colleagues dealt with more than 200 cases a year, ranging from inheritance to marriage and divorce.

"From the beginning, people have wanted our services. More and more come back to us. Each month we deal with 20 cases," he said.

On its website, the Islamic Sharia Council warns those who use its services that the divorces it grants cannot invalidate a union under British civil law and advises that a separate civil divorce should be obtained.

As well as giving advice on legal matters, such as inheritance, the website also gives general guidance on Muslim practices including the need for beards and the need for women to cover themselves in public.

It also covers issues such as whether women should train as doctors.

It supports this as a "lesser evil", but suggests that training should take place at an all-female college and that future treatment should be given to "women only".

Sharia in the UK

I've been predicting several years that given the decline in Christianity in the UK , the low birthrate of secular people in Britain and their decision to import vast numbers of (rapidly breeding) Muslims, that Muslims would be able to impose Sharia (the barbaric code of laws that Muslims are required by their religion to try to impose on their host country) in England. Apparently, I have company in that belief. Because newspaper articles tend to disappear quickly, here's the text of the article:

Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is 'unavoidable', says Archbishop of Canterbury

Last updated at 17:22pm on 07.02.08

Controversial: Dr Rowan Williams believes the introduction of Sharia law to Britain will help maintain social cohesion

The Archbishop of Canterbury has today said that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is "unavoidable" and that it would help maintain social cohesion.

Rowan Williams told BBC Radio 4's World At One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

He says that Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He added Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".

Dr Williams said there was a place for finding a "constructive accommodation" in areas such as marriage - allowing Muslim women to avoid Western divorce proceedings.

Other religions enjoyed such tolerance of their own laws, he pointed out, but stressed that it could never be allowed to take precedence over an individual's rights as a citizen.

He said it would also require a change in perception of what Sharia involved beyond the "inhumanity" of extreme punishments and attitudes to women seen in some Islamic states.

Dr Williams said: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system.

"We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances."

He added: "There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.

"It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general.

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Sharia law in Britain would provide Muslims with an alternative to our divorce courts

"But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them.

"In some cultural and religious settings, they would seem more appropriate."

But his views were condemned today by senior Tory MP Peter Luff, who said: "This is a very dangerous route which we should not go down. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You can't have a little bit of sharia law.

"We should not start introducing new different legal systems alongside ours."

But the Archbishop defended his position saying people people needed to look at Islamic law "with a clear eye."

"They should not imagine, either, that we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and just associate it with ... Saudi Arabia, or whatever," he continued.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states: the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women."

There were questions about how it interacted with human rights, he said.

"But I do not think we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights just because it doesn't immediately fit with how we understand it."

Dr Williams said Orthodox Jewish courts already operated in the UK, and anti-abortion views of Catholics and other Christians were "accommodated within the law".

"The whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways the law of the land pays respect to custom and community, that's already there."

He said the issue of whether Catholic adoption agencies would be forced under equality laws to accept gay parents showed there was confusion on the matter.

"That principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy.

"But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that."

He said he accepted people might be surprised by his call but urged them to consider the wider question.

"What we don't want is a stand-off where the law squares up to people's religious consciences, on something like abortion or indeed by forcing a vote on some aspects of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in the Commons ... we don't either want a situation where, because there's no legal way of monitoring what communities do, making them part of the public process, people do what they like in private in such a way that that becomes another way of intensifying oppression within a community."

Sharia law was originally more enlightened in its attitude to women than other legal systems, he pointed out, but did now have to be brought up to date.

"But you have to translate that into a setting where that whole area of the rights and liberties of women has moved on.

"The principle and the vision which animates the whole Islamic legal provision needs broadening because of that."

Responding to comments by one of his senior bishops that Islamic extremism was creating communities with "no-go areas" for non-Muslims, he said it was "not at all the case that we have absolute social exclusion.

"But we do have a lot of social suspicion, a lot of distance and we just have to go on working at how that shared citizenship comes through."

The Bishop of Rochester, The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, said last month that non-Muslims faced a hostile reception in places dominated by the ideology of Islamic radicals.

Dr Williams said the use of the phrase "no-go areas" had sparked controversy because it reminded people of Northern Ireland.

"I don't think that was at all what was intended; I think it was meant to point to the silo problem, the sense of communities not communicating with each other.

"Many Muslims would say that they feel bits of British society are no-go areas for them."

Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, welcomed the comments.

"These comments further underline the attempts by both our great faiths to build respect and tolerance.

"Sharia law for civil matters is something which has been introduced in some Western countries with much success; I believe that Muslims would take huge comfort from the Government allowing civil matters being resolved according to their faith.

"We are however disappointed that the Archbishop of Canterbury was silent when Mr Nazir-Ali was promoting intolerance and lying about no-go areas for Christians in the UK by Muslim extremists.

"Unless he speaks out against this intolerance, Muslims will take his silence as authorisation and support for such comments.

"The Ramadhan Foundation will continue to work with the Church of England to build understanding and respect for our two communities."

Dr Williams's comments are likely to fuel the debate over multiculturalism in the UK.

But he insists that Sharia law needs to be better understood.

At the moment, he says "sensational reporting of opinion polls" clouds the issue.

Houston Metro's Greatest Hits

If you want Light Rail for your city, please make sure they don't design it like this:

U.S. only civilized nation not comiting demographic suicide

I heard a discussion about this on the radio yesterday. In short, the U.S. birthrate is back above the replacement level for the first time since 1971. This is not the case in other Western countries which face dwindling and aging populations. This means that such countries have to rely on immigrants from poor countries with growing populations. In Europe, this means Muslim countries. If this trend continues then in my lifetime Islam will be the majority faith of Britain.

From USA Today:


Fertility rate in USA on upswing

The fertility rate among Americans has climbed to its highest level since 1971, setting the country apart from most industrialized nations that are struggling with low birthrates and aging populations.

The fertility rate hit 2.1 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates released by the National Center for Health Statistics. It's a milestone: the first time since shortly after the baby boom ended that the nation has reached the rate of births needed for a generation to replace itself, an average 2.1 per woman.

"What matters is that the U.S. is probably one of very few industrialized countries that have a fertility rate close to or at replacement level," says José Antonio Ortega, head of the fertility section at the United Nations' Population Division.

A high fertility rate is important to industrialized nations. When birthrates are low, there are fewer people to fill jobs and support the elderly.

Fertility in the USA went up in every age group from 2005 to 2006, the biggest jump coming among those 20 to 24 years old. The U.S. population topped 300 million last year, and the Census Bureau projects growth to 400 million by around 2040.

Developed countries in Europe and Asia have launched several government initiatives to encourage more births, from financial bonuses and extended family leaves to subsidized child care.

The wide availability of birth control options and more career opportunities for women have caused fertility rates to hit low levels in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany and Russia. France, renowned for its family friendly policies, remains the exception with a fertility rate of 2.

"What is paradoxical is that the U.S. doesn't have those (family friendly) policies and it has higher fertility," Ortega says.

Fertility experts say that economic prosperity, immigration and better job security for working mothers contribute to more births.

"We do know that birthrates ticked up quite a bit among the most affluent," says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. "Kids are luxury goods, and some of this uptick may be stay-at-home moms."

It also has become easier for women to negotiate leaves from work to stay home with their children. "Women now feel much more entitled and much more confident, especially as they're getting more education," Coontz says.

U.S. fertility hit its low of 1.7 in 1976 after the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. Another factor: the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion.

"It's not so much that abortion lowered the birthrate but abortion, coming on top of the birth control pill, really made it much more clear to women — and to men — that childbearing was a choice," Coontz says.

A boom in the number of young people can enhance economic competitiveness because they're usually the source of new and creative ideas, says Bill Butz, president of the non-profit Population Reference Bureau.

"Many policymakers and decision-makers in Europe, whether they talk about it or not, are envious of the U.S. fertility rate … because our social security issues will not come as fast as theirs," Butz says.

The stakes are clear, Ortega says: "If you're below replacement, you will eventually have a declining population and a faster aging process."

I hate to start out like this...

I really hate having my first post being one that could lead someone to think I'm anti-gay, but here's a map of San Francisco. The percentages on the map is the percentage of male same sex couples living together (which is a proxy for how gay a neighborhood is) and the rate of infection with MRSA staph (a new super-drug-resistant staph bacteria). I'll let the map pretty much speak for itself.
Just remember teh butseks leaves fissures in your behind that provide the perfect breeding ground for all kinds of nasties.