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Ruth King

China Takes Over Hong Kong: EU Shrugs by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16101/china-takes-over-hong-kong

“Germany is leading the whole Europe, they’re so ambitious, they want to be leader but morally they are so collapsed.” — Ai Weiwei, artist, La Repubblica, June 1, 2020

“China is a predator and Europe is its prey”. — François Heisbourg, French scholar, Le Figaro, May 29, 2020.

There is no mediation with Chinese imperialism.

“Why die for Hong Kong?”, the Europeans shortsightedly seem to say today.

During the last year of protests, Hong Kong’s demonstrators have waved the American flag. China well knows the meaning of that small outpost on its doorstep, with its freedom of speech and rule of law. Have you seen the European flag being waved in Hong Kong? No, and with good reason.

In the aftermath of China’s approval of a new national security law for Hong Kong, which de facto ends the autonomy of the former British colony guaranteed by an international treaty, two Anglo-Saxon democracies immediately protested very loudly.

The United States and the United Kingdom tried to convene a meeting of the UN Security Council to deal with the matter (China prevented it). Then the governments of the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada released a joint statement stressing that the international community has a lasting interest in the stability and autonomy of Hong Kong. The UK even announced that it will extend to more than three million residents of Hong Kong a renewable one-year visa and the eventual possibility of obtaining British citizenship. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the possibility of canceling the privileged commercial status that the US has so far given to Hong Kong, and President Donald Trump announced sanctions against Chinese leaders responsible for introducing the national security law in Hong Kong.

Scott Adams has had a brilliant insight about the demand for reparations By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/scott_adams_has_had_a_brilliant_insight_about_the_demand_for_reparations.html

Whenever Democrats push race to the forefront of the news, reparations pop up. The theory is that, because their forebearers were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, blacks will never catch up economically to whites. It doesn’t matter that there are no slaves or slaveowners today; that most whites are not descended from slaveowners; or that racism impoverished, rather than enriched the South.

Scott Adams’ brilliant insight cuts through all this: The comparison isn’t between black wealth and white wealth in America. Instead, the comparison must be the difference between black’s average net worth in America versus black’s average net worth in Africa. After all, the act of stealing blacks from Africa is the “but for cause” of all wrongs done to blacks.

Adams imagines a neutral space alien calculating reparations. He informs earthlings that black versus white net worth in America isn’t the correct calculation:

“If I’m going to calculate the, let’s say, the theft from the black community, if you were to measure the theft — let’s say just theft – that this slavery was. In other words, you stole the productive part of their lives, etc., and you used it for yourself. So here’s the number I need: I need how does the average economic situation for the average black person in this country and then, to compare it, I want to compare it to the average life of a black African.:

And you say, “What?”

To Those in Blue By Eileen F. Toplansky

When will there be a March to Support Law-Abiding Police Officers?

As the country sees the spectacle of anti-cop rants and total disrespect for the badge, I am reminded of the 1925 piece by William Faulkner titled “The Cop.”  It is way past due to hearken back to the time when, as a young lad, he would desire to

… be a patrolman; in a blue coat and swinging a casual stick and with a silver shield on my breast, I would pace the streets away with the measured beat of my footsteps.  What to compare with this grandeur?  To be the idol and fear of the lads, to be looked upon with respect by even grown people; to be the personification of bravery and the despair of criminals.

What a different time and place.  Almost a century ago, most folks understood the danger that police faced and had a respect for the thin blue line that protected them from criminals and murderers.

Fast-forward, and can we really be surprised at the anger and dismay expressed by New York police boss Michael O’Meara as he declares, “Nobody talks about all the police officers that were killed in the last week in the United States of America and there were a number of them.”

Terror in the Cradle of Liberty: How Boston Became a Center for Islamic Extremism Ilya Feoktistov

https://mailchi.mp/peaceandtolerance/apt-webinar-our-new-book-on-radical-islam-in-new-england?e=c4e6370125

How the Muslim Brotherhood obtained a foothold in Boston through an organization called the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB).

• How the ISB built the largest mosque in the Northeast to radicalize Boston’s Muslims.

• How the ISB’s radical leadership defrauded the political and civic leaders of Boston, who accepted the mosque as an authentically moderate Muslim force for good.

• How Jewish leaders, knowing about the antisemitism of the ISB mosque leaders, decided nevertheless to give the mosque a kosher stamp, giving political cover to the rest of Boston’s civic and political leadership to embrace the mosque.

• What mosque leaders are preaching to Boston Muslims now, in 2020.

Ilya and Charles will name names of those Jewish leaders who refuse to tell Boston’s Jews, or anyone else, what they know about the radicals who own and run the mosque. They will show the primary source videos and documents described in Ilya’s book, which expose the extent to which Boston’s leaders have ignored and aided Islamist extremist efforts in the city.

This willful ignorance has cost the city significantly: Fourteen leaders, donors, and congregants of the Islamic Society of Boston — including the Boston Marathon bombers — are either in prison, awaiting trial, on the run, or dead due to their involvement in Islamic terrorism.

Ilya based his book on thousands of documents obtained from years of on-the-ground monitoring of the ISB’s activities, from the ISB’s internal financial and governance records subpoenaed during its defamation lawsuit against its critics, and from moderate Boston Muslims who have been fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in Boston even longer than we have.

No need to plead guilty The fashionable doctrine of ‘white privilege’ is fatally undermined by the facts (December 2019)

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2019/no-need-to-plead-guilty/

“Tempting though it is to just sit back and allow the left to self-harm, we shouldn’t do that. Racial politics is so ugly, and so fundamentally dangerous, as we know from the history of the twentieth century, that we have to expose concepts like “white privilege” for the toxic nonsense that they are. Those of us who live in Britain and America – among the least racist, most tolerant societies on earth – have a duty to stand up to this tsunami of gobbledygook before it sweeps us all away.”

The concept of “white privilege” is some-times credited to the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois, but the phrase didn’t enter the lexicon until it was used in a 1989 paper by the feminist academic Peggy McIntosh. “As a white person, I realised I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage,” she wrote in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” With the American accent very firmly on “white” rather than “privilege” or any other aspect of class which British ears would so much more readily hear.

Not only is McIntosh white, she is, by any measure, astonishingly privileged. She grew up in an affluent suburb of New Jersey where the median income was four times the national average, and her father, who was a high-ranking scientist at Bell Laboratories, owned patents in several valuable electronic inventions.

After attending Radcliffe, UCL and Harvard, where she earned a PhD, Peggy married Dr Kenneth McIntosh, the son of a Columbia professor. According to William Ray, a Canadian journalist who wrote about her for the online magazine Quillette last year: “Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.”

But when McIntosh writes about her “privilege” she doesn’t mean in this conventional, upper-class sense. Rather, she is referring to the advantages she enjoys in virtue of being white and which, in her view, all white people share. The “knapsack” she unpacks isn’t a $1,000 Burberry backpack of the kind Peggy and Kenneth might take on a hike in the Adirondacks. No, it’s a bag full of useful things that all white people carry with them, regardless of how disadvantaged their upbringing.

Given the success of Indians across the Anglosphere, it would make more sense to talk about “brown privilege”

The Centre Cannot Hold Kevin Donnelly ******

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-centre-cannot-hold/

While published in 1919 the lines from Y.B.Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ have never been more insightful and apt.  Yeat’s writes of a time when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and in the same poem “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

Like the China-virus that has swept the world, causing death, disease and economic and financial collapse, Western societies are also facing an virulent infection represented by a rainbow alliance of radical, cultural-left theories ranging from postmodernism and deconstructionism to LGBTIQ+, post-colonial and radical gender and feminist theories.

As a result of the Black Lives Matter campaign millions around the world have illegally marched and demonstrated, risking infection by the China-virus and causing untold violence, harm and social unrest. Chanting meaningless slogans condemning white supremacism and police violence the millions involved ignore the reality, as noted by the Wall Street Journal’s Heather MacDonald, that in America “a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black man than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer”. 

It’s also a fact that African-Americans commit more crimes than white Amercians.  MacDonald writes that in 2018 “African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population”.

In Australia, as argued by the Aboriginal academic at the Australian Catholic University Anthony Dillion, the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody is also overstated and, as a result, other more pressing issues are ignored.  As examples Dillion cites “homelessness, poor health, violence and unemployment”. 

Never mentioned by those condemning white supremacism are the unacceptable high levels of domestic violence, especially against women, where even though Aborigines represent about 3 per cent of the population; they represent 23 per cent of intimate-partner homicide victims.

The mindless and knee-jerk attacks against the British author J.K. Rowlings for  daring to state the obvious — that gender and sexuality are binary and a man who transgenders wanting to be a woman will always be a man — also illustrates how politically correct ideology now dominates. Rowlings joins a long list of others vilified and attacked on social media, including the Australians Germain Greer and Barry Humphries plus the Americans Camille Paglia and the tennis great Martina Navratilova for being “transphobic”.

The Media’s Latest Attempt to Stir Covid Hysteria : Alex Berenson

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1271135876379299848.htmlTop of Form

1/ This panic is likely to prove even more embarrassing than previous panics. Here’s why: the media is both confused and conflating several different data points in an effort to stir hysteria. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.)

What do I mean?

2/ So: you’ve heard positive tests are up in several states. True. The media refers to these as “cases,” as if positive tests have clinical significance by themselves. They do not. The vast majority of people with positive tests do not become ill enough to need hospitalization…

3/ Much less intensive care or ventilator support. For people under 50, this is true in the extreme. But the daily age distribution of positive tests is rarely if ever supported…

4/ Second: you’ve heard overall hospitalizations are up in some states. This is also true. THIS IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG. Overall hospitalizations are rising because people are returning to hospitals for elective (and in some cases very necessary) surgeries that were postponed…

5/ Now, in some of these states COVID-related hospitalizations have also risen (though they make up a tiny fraction of overall hospitalizations). Scary, right?

No. When people go to the hospital for elective surgeries they are now routinely tested for COVID…

6/ Whether or not they are symptomatic. Hospitals have financial and legal as well as medical incentives to do this. IF THEY ARE POSITIVE, hospitals will report them as COVID patients (since, technically, they are), EVEN IF THEY HAVE NO COVID SYMPTOMS.

7/ This fact accounts for the bizarre disconnect between the fact the number of people going to emergency rooms with influenza-like or COVID-like symptoms is NOT rising (and remains in the low single digits) even in states reporting more hospitalizations…

8/ As well as the fact that fewer hospitalized cases are now progressing to ventilators (I can’t swear to this in every state, but it appears to be a trend)…

9/ And the fact that deaths no longer seem to have any relationship to case counts in many states (true even accounting for the fact that deaths lag).

The question you should be asking yourself: why aren’t Europe and Asia seeing post-lockdown spikes if this trend is real?

10/ And don’t say masks. Masks are not routine in Europe. So either COVID is somehow different post-lockdown in Europe (and different in different states, too)… or this is just one last gasp of panic porn.

THE FREE SPEECH UNION ON TWITTER

https://twitter.com/SpeechUnion/status/1269314030663012352

The Free Speech Union on Twitter: “1/ An alarming number of people are losing their jobs at the moment – or being suspended from them, pending investigations – because they’ve criticised some aspect of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The Thoughtless Campaign against Western History By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/attacks-western-civilization-about-power-not-progress/

I n his recent cover story for National Review, Andrew Roberts, the most recent of many biographers of Winston Churchill, warned that, though their methods are “obviously not so appallingly extreme,” a new wave of zealots — as found among Instagram influencers and the dominant media class — are “now succeeding where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis failed” in undoing Western civilization. That’s a strong statement. And yet, these days, the examples bombard us.

Across Europe, as in America, many have taken to attacking statues of controversial historical figures. In Bristol, England, a 125-year-old statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was thrown into a nearby harbor. In London’s Parliament Square, a statue of Winston Churchill was graffitied with the words “is a fascist,” (“wait until they hear about the other guy,” one Twitter user responded). The mayor of London has promised to review all statues, landmarks, and street names associated with slavery to ensure that they “suitably reflect London’s achievements and diversity.” The Spectator’s satirical column, “Steerpike,” suggested starting with Downing Street (“named after George Downing, who defended from first-hand experience the economics of West-Indian slavery”) as well as Buckingham Palace (“built by John Sheffield . . . who was the founding governor and largest shareholder of the Royal African Company”).

Stand up America! American Privilege is Colorblind! by Linda Goudsmit

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24252/stand-up-america-american-privilege-is-colorblind  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

Get off your knees and stand up America! Americans stopped kneeling to tyranny in 1776.  

Our country vehemently rejects submission and adamantly rejects white supremacy AND black supremacy. Racial pandering and prostrating is un-American. It is reverse discrimination and political exploitation of the black community by race-baiting Democrats. Law-abiding Americans, black and white, want equality and ordered liberty. Freedom and equality is a colorblind American privilege. 

Rioting and anarchy never lead to peace – they are the precursors of tyranny. Costumed, kneeling Nancy Pelosi and her globalist handlers are deliberately fomenting racial divisiveness, social chaos, and anarchy in their bid to make America ungovernable and defeat President Trump in November. Chaos is the Democrat party political strategy and the preferred political strategy of tyrants. This is how it works.

 

Tyranny is a binary social structure of rulers and the ruled. The ruling masters, monarchs, oligarchs, emperors, and dictators all consider the subjects they rule to be property. Not in America! In America we belong to ourselves. It is a privilege to be an American citizen and to live in a society where individual rights, upward mobility, and private property create a robust middle class that supports freedom. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome, is the privilege and guarantee of equality in America.