RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15956/china-expansion-asia

The incident prompted a furious response from the Vietnamese government, which accused Beijing of violating its sovereignty and threatening the lives of its fishermen. The US State Department said it was “seriously concerned”….

The dispute concerns China’s recent announcement that it intends to administer two disputed groups of islands and reefs in the waterway. One district covers the Paracel Islands, and the other has jurisdiction over the Spratlys, where China has built a network of fortified man-made islands. The Philippines has a presence of its own on at least nine islands and islets in the area, and bitterly opposes Chinese attempts to extend its influence.

Despite the Trump administration’s preoccupation with tackling the coronavirus pandemic, Washington is not prepared to tolerate China’s aggressive actions. Three ships from the US Seventh Fleet, together with an Australian frigate, have responded by sailing through the disputed waters in a show of force.

China’s communist leadership may believe that they can take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to bully their Asian neighbours. But this show of force by the US Navy should send a timely reminder to Beijing as to which country is the real military power in the region.

While the rest of the world is preoccupied with tackling the coronavirus pandemic, China is intensifying its efforts to extend its influence in the South China Sea by intimidating its Asian neighbours.

The arrival of China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier, together with five accompanying warships, in the South China Sea earlier this month has resulted in a significant increase in tensions in the Asia-Pacific region as Beijing seeks to take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to flex its muscles.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/china_committed_an_act_of_war.html

Xi and the CCP thugs running China committed a deliberate act of war the moment they banned air travel from Wuhan to all other Chinese cities while allowing international flights to proceed unmolested to the far corners of the globe.  They did this despite knowing those flights out of China comprised desperate souls escaping a homegrown pandemic and a communist regime willing to let them die to save face.  It was an artificial diaspora intended to seed humanity with the Xi Plague.

It has been shown that ChiVid-19 came from a “wolf” bat, a particular type of bat not sold in the Wuhan “wet” market located mere feet from China’s only level 4 research lab — a lab that, coincidentally, was studying various strains of coronavirus.

Did China deliberately unleash COVID-19?  I doubt it.  Hanlon’s Razor dictates that one should never put off to malice what can be explained more easily by incompetence.  No, COVID-19 is not a deliberately created biological weapon.  While the infectious nature is perfect, its kill rate is minimal, rendering it marginal as a weapon of war.  The actual weapons being worked on in China’s labs are likely much more deadly.

The WuFlu was a viral study gone awry — an accident that escaped the lab because although China is a first-world manufacturer, it is a third-world country with a per capita income not much greater than Botswana’s.  China is a nation where tens of millions of people still live in caves and half the population still does not have indoor plumbing or toilets.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/scotland-blasphemy-law-repeal-new-speech-restrictions-replace-old-ones/

Out with the old and in with the new.

On Friday, reports emerged that the Scottish Parliament had introduced a bill decriminalizing blasphemy. No one has been prosecuted under the blasphemy law in question for 175 years, but still, the law “no longer reflects the kind of society in which we live,” the government said.

Fair enough, one might think. But look closer: The new bill does not simply repeal the dormant blasphemy law, as reports suggest. Instead, it replaces the law with a new one, designed for actual use in the 21st century. Reflecting “the kind of society in which we live,” the new bill is neither freer nor more liberal than the old one; it merely enshrines the policing of a different kind of speech.

The single sentence abolishing “the offence of blasphemy,” does not appear until part four of the Hate Crimes and Public Order (Scotland) Act. In part one, the drafters make the bill more palatable by creating enhanced penalties for existing crimes that are “aggravated by prejudice.” In explaining how this could be applied, Lord Bracadale, who conducted an independent review of the legislation, gave ministers two hypothetical scenarios:

A man who was annoyed at the noise his gay neighbor made putting out the bins in the early morning engaged in abusive shouting, in the course of which he made comments about the neighbor’s sexual orientation including hoping that “people like you die of AIDS. . . .”

A man shouts at a disabled person in a wheelchair on a street saying, “get out of my way you cripple” and proceeds to tip them out of their wheelchair . . .

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/europes-moment-of-truth/

The COVID-19 crisis has pushed the euro zone to its breaking point.

O n April 16, responding to the COVID-19 crisis, French president Emmanuel Macron said Europe had arrived at its “moment of truth.” Economics is a “moral science,” he insisted. The euro zone’s financially stronger nations, therefore, have an obligation to look after their weakest partners by establishing a fund that “could issue common debt backed by a common guarantee.” It was the expected high-minded call for a technocratic solution, and it dodged the fundamental underlying political question. In a euro zone still based on nation-states, the strong, broadly speaking, ‘northern’ members have always asked why they should aid their weaker southern counterparts. Today, leaders of those northern states are being called to help the southern members on a scale never before contemplated. Not surprisingly, when they all met in a videoconference on April 23, they ignored Macron.

Europe is indeed at a moment of truth, but European politicians have yet to grasp how bleak that truth really is. All economic forecasts today are too optimistic. Even the strongest European countries will have their hands full coping with domestic economic distress. In such conditions, everyone is on his own. Cooperation is hard enough within federal states, as recent tensions in Germany and even more so the U.S. demonstrate. Cooperation on the scale required within the euro zone, based as it is on the E.U.’s confederation of nation-states, would require a remarkable political revolution.

All economic forecasts are optimistic