RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/25/who-another-deadly-failure-of-globalism/

Bloated international bureaucracies such as the World Health Organization have demonstrated their inability to fulfill their enormous mandates—and other countries around the world should follow our president’s lead and find a better use for their taxpayers’ resources.

It’s time to be brutally honest about the World Health Organization (WHO)—the institution is a daily testament to the deadly failures of globalism.

The WHO was designed to keep humanity safe from disease outbreaks and epidemics, but it’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the crisis worse. From the earliest days of the outbreak, the United Nations-backed organization blatantly parroted Chinese government propaganda, helping the communist regime spread misinformation at a tremendous cost in human lives.

On January 14, for instance, the WHO tweeted that the novel virus is not spreading between people, attributing the findings to the Chinese government. “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the group wrote.

Clearly, this was not the case—and the experts at the WHO should have known better than to believe China’s baseless claims, much less issue a statement that only could have been interpreted as a call to resist any efforts to prevent the spread of the new virus. At the time, Chinese authorities were already silencing doctors and researchers who tried to raise an alarm about the virus—which should have served as a clear clue that the regime should not be trusted. Doctors who posted information about the coronavirus on Chinese social media were confronted and reprimanded in late December, and at the start of January, the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered labs to stop testing virus samples. Both actions should have raised immediate red flags at the WHO.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/25/protecting-the-precious-nhs/

It can be hard to persuade free people to allow their government to intrude into their lives; in the UK, the chief means by which the government convinces the people of their need for that intrusion is the nonstop propaganda telling them that their very lives depend upon the government.

Eight years ago, I wrote about the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, which presented in song, dance, and spectacle a history of Britain so ideologically tendentious as to rival the Communist propaganda of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. 

The basic narrative, in case you missed it, was this: a green and pleasant land is mutated by capitalism into a place of dark satanic mills and then, thanks to leftist agitation, metamorphoses into a glorious welfare state whose crown jewel is the National Health Service. Featuring a veritable army of children in sickbeds and women in nurse’s outfits, and leading to a climax in which the letters “NHS” were spelled out in lights, the whole thing had the feel of an unusually fervent worship service.

As Andrew Gilligan observed in the Telegraph, the NHS had finally undergone its “final transformation from a healthcare system into a religion”; a Tory MP who dared to call the show “leftie multicultural crap” quickly caved under pressure, assuring the BBC that “we all love the NHS.”

Two years ago, spurred by a word in a Theresa May speech, I was moved to revisit the topic of the NHS. The word was “precious.” May used it to modify “NHS,” as in “our precious NHS.” As I wrote at the time, “one might easily forgive her for describing, say, Britain’s finest doctors and nurses as—oh, I don’t know—how about ‘treasured’? Or for using such language to celebrate modern medicine—robot surgery, wonder drugs, cutting-edge diagnostic technology.” But the woman was referring to a government bureaucracy!

As I soon discovered, May was far from the first to call the NHS “precious.” In fact, “our precious NHS” turned out to be something of a cliché. I found this depressing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15935/denmark-fake-bible

Unperturbed, in 2020, the Danish Bible Society (DBS) published a complete and revised Bible with the same anti-Israel New Testament version intact, plus a translation of the Old Testament, replacing the word “Israel” with “us”, as in Psalm 121:4 (“He who watches over Israel [DBS: ‘us’] will neither slumber nor sleep”), as Jan Frost reports.

As in this case, trading “Israel” for “us” is not simply replacing one word for another; it switches the concept. DBS pretends that we get the divine watchfulness. It has been stolen. The original recipient, Israel, has been replaced and robbed of its privileges.

DBS seems to be attempting to discard Israel. The Society appears to be emulating the current social attitude that develops from the anti-Israelism of Muslim immigrants and that is picked up by other Danish parts of society. Who commissioned this Bible edition? Who paid for it? Who profits from a fake Bible? Who stands for the truth of the Christian faith in Denmark?

With the authorized 1992 Danish Bible translation in place, the Danish Bible Society (DBS), nevertheless, issued a revised New Testament in 2012 completely omitting the word “Israel” or replacing it with “Jews” or “us”. The strange reason for this extraordinary action was, as Danes recall, to prevent Danish Lutheran Christians from confusing biblical Israel with the modern State of Israel. Danish Christians protested vehemently. Unperturbed, in 2020 DBS published a complete and revised Bible with the same anti-Israel New Testament version intact, plus a translation of the Old Testament, replacing the word “Israel” with “us”, as in Psalm 121:4 (“He who watches over Israel [DBS: ‘us’] will neither slumber nor sleep”), as Jan Frost reports.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15933/china-coronavirus-winning

Last January, no doubt underestimating the threat to France itself, President Emmanuel Macron made a gift of five million surgical masks to the People’s Republic. When it became clear, just three weeks later, that France itself might urgently need the masks, Beijing came out with a barrage of excuses to avoid restitution. And when the French agreed to buy masks at three times the price, China signed the contract but sold a good part of the masks at five times the price to last-minute private buyers from the United States. Beijing has played the same trick on a number of other countries, notably Chile, which last week lodged formal protest.

One thing is certain: public opinion in many countries is today more hostile to doing business with China. And that could adversely affect both normal trade and “sweetheart” deals like the one Britain planned to conclude with Huawei.

Campaigns to boycott Chinese goods have already started in more than 40 countries on all continents.

“Is China Winning?” This was the cover headline that the British weekly The Economist unfurled earlier this month for a lengthy report on how the major powers might emerge out of the current coronavirus crisis.

This is not the first time that a section of Western media, often including The Economist, pronounce the Western democracies, especially the United States, as losers in comparison with rivals and/or enemies.

In the 1980s, the magazine beat the drums for “Japan As Number One”, echoing Ezra Vogel’s book-length rodomontade for the so-called “faultless economic model.” In the 1990s, The Economist, with President Suharto on its cover, predicted the rise of Indonesia as one of the world’s top economic powers. And in 2005, the magazine offered another sensational cover with the headline: “Has Iran Won?”