https://patriotpost.us/articles/71024-video-whos-sneaky-ties-to-chinas-most-powerful-communists-2020-06-01
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/06/the-slow-strangulation-of-hong-kong/
“The stifling by China of democratic development didn’t prevent Hong Kong making one of the few successful transitions from Third World poverty to prosperity and modernisation, not only in Asia, but anywhere. On present trends, it looks set to make the journey in reverse.”
The Chinese Communist Party has no peer when it comes to strategic thinking, even if the thinking is wrong or repellent. Anyone else, anywhere else, would have thought that if the Hong Kong chief executive couldn’t cope, the sensible thing to do would be to replace her with someone who could. But no. The party’s answer is to replace its representative in the territory, someone most people wouldn’t have known existed. It’s the right answer, too, for that’s where the real power lies. The new man, Luo Huining, is one who unlike his predecessor isn’t encumbered with any experience of Hong Kong matters. Luo is a party loyalist long familiar with imposing party discipline and organisation in troublesome regions.
It’s an honest answer, too. Chief executive Carrie Lam can continue to twist ineffectively in the breeze, a fit demonstration of the powerlessness of old colonial mechanisms, while the new order gets on with the real task. And the real task is not to address mass protests or their causes, as one might think. Rather, the party’s new representative has announced that his task will be the further integration of Hong Kong into the surrounding provinces of China, especially Guangdong. That means the people of Hong Kong can just get used to the fact that Beijing is not going to take any notice of their demands for democracy and openness; they can start getting used to the inevitability of being more like the rest of China.
Luo has also asserted the right of Beijing to supervise affairs in Hong Kong. The territory’s autonomy is beginning to resemble the autonomy the party promised Tibet when it took over there.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/06/01/two-nyc-corporate-lawyers-charged-in-failed-molotov-cocktail-attack-on-nypd-n2569817
Two Brooklyn lawyers, including an Ivy League graduate corporate attorney, are facing federal charges over accusations they tossed a Molotov cocktail into an NYPD vehicle early Saturday morning during a protest over the police killing of George Floyd.
Colinford Mattis, 32, a corporate lawyer and member of Community Board 5 in East New York, was charged along with fellow attorney Urooj Rahman with the attempted attack on an empty police cruiser parked outside the 88th Precinct station house in Fort Greene.
[…]
Authorities say Rahman, 31, tossed a bottle filled with gasoline through a broken window into the cruiser just before 1 am Saturday but the Molotov cocktail failed to ignite. Rahman jumped into a van driven by Mattis and they sped off, court papers allege.
The attempted torching was captured by video surveillance cameras outside the precinct stationhouse on DeKalb Ave., according to court papers.
Cops gave chase and stopped the van nearby on Willoughby St. They found the makings of another Molotov cocktail in the back seat along with a gasoline container, authorities say.
“No rational human being can ever believe that hurling firebombs at police officers and vehicles is justified,” said Brooklyn U.S Attorney Richard Donoghue.
This isn’t about Floyd anymore, folks. Maybe for a millisecond, it was and that’s sad—because there appear to be protests mostly in smaller urban and suburban areas where it is peaceful. There’s also footage of officers voicing support for the protests and praying with the activists. As for the mob, however, President Trump has to make moves to put it down. It’s been nearly a week of chaos. It’s time to re-establish law and order.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/01/minneapolis-rioters-burned-one-of-americas-most-beloved-independent-bookstores-to-the-ground/
Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s were legendary among the community of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery readers—and now they’re gone.
Venerable Minneapolis science fiction and fantasy bookstore Uncle Hugo’s and its sister store in the same building, Uncle Edgar’s, which specialized in mysteries, were both burned to ruins last Friday night by rioters.
The store took its name from two major awards in the genre fields, science fiction’s Hugo awards, and mysteries Edgar’s. Independent bookstores are a threatened American institution, and Uncle Hugo’s was considered a flagship operation. Owner Don Blyly was noted for his ability to adapt to modern bookselling conditions and serve an audience of devoted genre readers. With most independent book shops, the margins are low and often owners are in the business as much for love as for money. For Don Blyly, it doesn’t matter anymore.
The books are burned. His shop is gone.
“There was a call from the security company around 3:30 this morning that the motion detector was showing somebody in the building. I threw on clothes and headed over there,” said Blyly in an email. “When I was 2 blocks away, I received a call that the smoke detectors were showing smoke in the store. Every single building on both sides of Chicago was blazing and dozens of people dancing around.”
Uncle Hugo’s was located at 2864 Chicago Avenue, in Minneapolis. Blyly pulled into the parking lot belonging to the dentist office next door to his shop. Flames were already leaping out the front windows of the Uncle Hugo’s side of the store.
“It looked to me like they had broken every window on the front of the Uncles and then squirted accelerant through each broken window. It looked hopeless to me, but I went around to the back door to see if I could get to a fire extinguisher. As soon as I opened the back door a wave of very thick black smoke poured out, so I quickly closed the door again.”
https://jonathanspyer.com/2020/06/01/a-new-alliance/
Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and Qatar form emergent power nexus in the Islamic World
The name of fugitive Indian Salafi Islamist preacher Zakir Naik is little known in the west. Naik, founder of the Mumbai-based Islamic Research foundation, is currently being pursued by the Indian authorities on charges of money laundering and hate speech. Naik is a popular Islamist preacher in his native country. He has been referred to as ‘perhaps the most influential Salafi ideologue in India,’ and ‘the world’s leading Salafi evangelist.’ Naik’s views on such subjects as homosexuality, apostasy and the Jews are as might be expected (the first two deserve the death penalty, the third ‘control America.’) The Indian authorities note evidence that two of the seven terrorists who carried out a deadly attack at a café in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on July 1, 2016, claimed inspiration from his teachings.
In himself, the fugitive preacher is of only passing interest. Zakir Naik’s activities are worthy of further note, however, because the list of his supporters and their activities on his behalf cast light on an emergent nexus in the Islamic world deserving of greater attention. This crystallising alliance looks set to be of considerable consequence in the period opening up, not least for Israel and some of its partners in the region and beyond.
Zakir Naik, fleeing from the Indian authorities, has been the lucky recipient of permanent resident status in Malaysia. There, his case has become something of a cause celebre. The Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), which has four ministers in the current government, is vociferously opposed to acceding to Indian calls for his extradition.
Reports in a number of Indian media outlets claim that the (unusual) granting of permanent residency to the fugitive preacher came as a result of a request from the government of Pakistan. The reports further suggest that ‘Pakistan is also using its relations with…Turkey and Qatar to provide funding to Zakir Naik.’
A civilization which takes millennia to build can be destroyed overnight.
The jungle is always on the perimeter, watching and waiting to reassert its primacy.
When the jungle sees stores looted, police cars burning and innocent bystanders beaten – when it sees the life savings of decent men and women of all races go up in flames, and a muted response from authorities – it smiles. The time for tear gas and rubber bullets isn’t on the 4th night of rioting, but the first.
When it sees aides to a presumptive presidential candidate helping rioters to make bail – it grins.
When it sees police officers assassinated across America, and buckets of ice water dumped on cops during summer months, and mayors and governors respond with “naughty, naughty” – it’s ecstatic.
When it sees criminality excused with cries of “institutionalized racism” and “the legacy of slavery and segregation,” — it’s elated.
When it notes that all of this comes on the heels of a three-month lockdown (placing law-abiding citizens under house-arrest), which we accepted as meekly as lambs — it’s exuberant.
When it notes that during a “national crisis” (occasioned by an epidemic with a mortality rate of less than 0.4 %), abortion clinics were kept open while churches and synagogues were padlocked, the jungle is delirious.
How long was it from the fall of the Bastille to the guillotine, from the October Revolution to the gulags and firing squads, from brown shirts and communists fighting in the streets to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust?
Creatures like Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, Karen Whitmer (the Detroit dominatrix), Gavin Newsom and dithering Joe Biden aren’t the guardians of representative government but its gravediggers.
Ashes drift across America; savages can be seen capering on the nightly news, and Antifa and BLM fan the flames.
https://spectator.org/misquoting-mlk-to-legitimize-violence/
It was inevitable that George Floyd’s death would spark protests against police brutality and that mendacity would characterize the attendant media coverage. True to form, the press affected dismay when the demonstrations devolved into violence, yet reported the riots with obvious approbation. The most obscene example of this was the widespread use, in headlines and ledes, of an out-of-context Martin Luther King quote suggesting that the civil rights leader would have condoned the mayhem. USA Today, for example, ran a feature story bearing the following title: “ ‘A riot is the language of the unheard’: MLK’s powerful quote resonates amid George Floyd protests.”
This grotesque misrepresentation of Dr. King’s views is only possible by cynically cherry-picking eight words from a 1966 interview during which he repeatedly emphasized that violence was counterproductive to the progress of the civil rights movement. Mike Wallace interviewed him for “CBS Reports” on Sept. 27, 1966, and the primary topic of discussion involved divisions within the movement concerning overall strategy. The myth that King had somehow endorsed violence went mainstream in 2013, when “60 Minutes Rewind” posted a clip from the Wallace interview and irresponsibly titled it using the same out-of-context quote. The interview transcript begins with this unambiguous statement:
KING: I will never change in my basic idea that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. I think for the Negro to turn to violence would be both impractical and immoral.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/500315-it-wasnt-just-religious-liberty-that-chief-
The big story is even bigger than it appears to be at first blush.
Close to midnight on Friday, while rioters used the killing of George Floyd as a pretext to set America aflame, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling that declined to enjoin the states of California and Illinois from restrictions on communal worship imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Most startling was that Chief Justice John Roberts not only joined the court’s four left-leaning justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan) in declining to uphold religious liberty. Roberts also wrote a brief opinion explaining his decision.
That opinion is an eye-opener. Roberts accords the right to worship no deference by virtue of its being a fundamental liberty expressly protected by the First Amendment. We are to see it as an activity like any other activity, commercial or social, the pros and cons of which technocrats must weigh in fashioning regulations. The opinion, moreover, champions the power of government officials to dictate to the people who elect them without “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary” — exactly the power that the Bill of Rights, and the incorporation jurisprudence by which the court has applied much of it to the states, are meant to deny.
This is truly remarkable because it is so gratuitous.
https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/why-it%E2%80%99s-so-hard-biden-pick-running-mate
The candidate known for his gaffes topped himself when he told an African American interviewer that if he had trouble choosing between him and Donald Trump for president, he “ain’t black.” Later, after Joe Biden’s advisers finished smacking their heads, the former vice president issued a groveling apology.
That was good enough for some black politicians and commentators. Take Donna Brazile, the Democratic Party’s interim chair in 2016. After the apology, she considered the issue over and done. CNN and NBC barely mentioned it. “Nothing to see here. Let’s move on.” Other black politicians and celebrities were less forgiving, though few said it disqualified the former vice president. Whether they were harsh or forgiving, all African American commentators agreed on one thing: Democrats cannot take black votes for granted this November.
Strategists in both parties saw their point. Trump was already striving to win black support before the pandemic crushed the economy. Now, as the economy reopens, he will renew that appeal and exploit Biden’s comment. Even a small increase in his 2016 vote total among African Americans could be decisive in swing states.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16082/china-what-we-must-do
The truth is that the United States is defending more than just its position in the international system. We are defending the international system itself, the system of treaties, conventions, rules, and norms.
Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, does not believe in that system. He is trying to impose China’s imperial‑era notions of the world.
In short, Chinese rulers believed that they had the mandate of heaven over tianxia, meaning “all under heaven.” Recently, his pronouncements have become unmistakable.
In the last few months, Xi Jinping has seen an historic opportunity because the United States has been stricken by the disease that China itself has pushed out… What must we do? First, let us talk about what we must not do. We must not save Chinese communism again. In the past, American presidents, when China has been stressed, had ridden to the rescue of the Chinese state.
On May 13 of last year, Beijing declared a “people’s war” on the United States. This means the contest with China is existential. There is going to be one survivor. It is either going to be the Peoples’ Republic of China or the United States of America, but not both.
What should we do? In my call for action, there are eight items. First, we need to cut off trade with China. Now, I know a lot of people think we should not do this, or this would be unfortunate. Yes, this is unfortunate, but the point is that China’s communism cannot be reformed, so the only way we can protect American society and Americans is to reduce our exposure to China and our great exposure, of course, is trade… we should not be enriching a hostile state with the proceeds of commerce with the United States.
China’s Communist Party does not have sovereign immunity…. We have the Global Magnitsky Act.
We need to “rip and replace” all the equipment in our telecom backbone that has been supplied by Huawei Technologies… China has been using that company’s equipment to spy on others. We should have no Huawei equipment in our backbone
Also, we should be turfing out even more Chinese journalists. Those “journalists”… work for China’s intelligence services.
Unfortunately, China does not believe in comparative advantage, it does not believe in being a responsible member of the international community. Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is what many people think is unthinkable, and that is to cut our ties with China…. We cut our ties until… the Communist Party no longer rules [and] the Chinese people govern themselves…. I believe the Chinese people eventually will get this right.
China has attacked America with coronavirus. At this moment, more than 100,000 Americans have been killed. We brace ourselves for the deaths to come.
Today, I’ll do two things. First, I’ll talk about the nature of that attack. The second thing, what we must do to protect ourselves.
First of all, China is not, as many people will tell you, just a competitor. It is an enemy. China is trying to overthrow the international system, and in that process, it is trying to make you subject to modern-day Chinese emperors.
