RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13881/ukraine-mariupol-report

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has not articulated the final objective of his proxy war in eastern Ukraine, his actions seem to indicate that he is determined to create a land bridge from Mariupol to Odessa — two major seaports vitally important to Ukraine’s economy. Putin’s overall strategy in Ukraine, also not publicly stated, seems to be to strangle it economically by disrupting shipping between the Odessa and Azov Sea ports, with the aim of eventually subjugating Ukraine to Russia.

“If Putin wants to do something about Mariupol,” a Ukrainian sailor said, “he has only a short time in which to do it. We have a small navy. We hope your country [America] will give us more ships to defend the port.”

“This time,” said a Ukrainian army platoon leader at the front, “if the Russians come, we are not going to let them through. We would rather die.”

On April 3, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin — upon winning the war Syria while protecting his beleaguered client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, from a rebel uprising supported by the U.S. and Sunni Gulf states — had some more good news. US President Donald J. Trump had given instructions to the American military to begin planning for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. Although the official decision was announced only on December 21, the Kremlin evidently gambled that Trump might be serious about the withdrawal.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13885/north-korea-human-rights

American leaders have been wrong. The best way to get what we want from North Korea, whether it be “denuclearization” or anything else, is to reverse decades of Washington thinking and raise the issue of human rights loudly and incessantly. The same is true with regard to North Korea’s sponsor and only formal ally, the People’s Republic of China.

Kim Jong Un knows how inhumane his rule is — he has, after all, had hundreds of people executed — so if we do not talk forcefully about, say, Otto Warmbier, Kim will think we are afraid of him. If he thinks we are afraid of him, he will see no reason to be accommodating. It is unfortunate, but outsiders cannot be polite or friendly.

It is time to let Kim know that America no longer cares about how he feels or even about maintaining a friendly relationship with him. That posture, a radical departure from Washington thinking, is both more consistent with American ideals and a step toward a policy that Kim will respect.

“I’m in such a horrible position, because in one way I have to negotiate,” U.S. President Donald Trump said at CPAC on March 2, while talking about efforts to disarm North Korea. “In the other way, I love Mr. and Mrs. Warmbier, and I love Otto.”

Trump believes he faces a dilemma: that his efforts on behalf of the parents of Otto Warmbier — the University of Virginia student whom North Korean authorities detained, brutalized and killed — undermine his ability to take away nuclear weapons from Kim Jong Un, the leader of that horrific regime.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/so-what-if-the-clinton-foundation-fleeced-norway-bring-on-the-chardonnay/

Hillary Clinton visited Norway last week, an event that brought to my mind, anyway, the fact that, adjusting for population, no country has been more generous to her family’s stupendously sordid con operation than has the land of the fjords.

The numbers are scandalous. Between 2007 and 2016, the Norwegian government transferred no less than 640 million kroner in taxpayer money to the Clinton Foundation. Given the average exchange rate during that period, that sum would’ve been roughly equivalent to $100 million. This means that each and every Norwegian citizen, without being asked, put about twenty dollars into the pockets of that crooked enterprise.

The official reason for these massive payouts was that the Norwegian government wanted to help mothers and children in Africa. In 2016, Norway’s purported newspaper of record, Aftenposten, ran an article in which Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at NYU, said that the real motive was to buy influence for Norway in the corridors of American power.

Well, that’s one reason, but there are others. One is this: Top-level Norwegian politicians are as ambitious as politicians anywhere. For many of them, becoming a member of parliament or cabinet official or even prime minister in a country of six million people isn’t quite enough to satisfy the old ego. How to solve this problem? Fortunately, a solution is already in place. Norway has long paid a hell of a lot more into major world organizations, from the UN on down, than other countries of its size. In fact, it spends more per capita on international development than any nation on Earth. Yes, this means that Norwegian citizens are getting ripped off.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/10/the-french-genocide-that

This is horrific history.  While the atrocities against the Vendees took place the American Constitution was crafted by our remarkable founding fathers which guaranteed limited government, checks and balances, separation of powers, popular sovereignty and individual rights. rsk

The Secret History

On March 4 2011, the French historian Reynald Secher discovered documents in the National Archives in Paris confirming what he had known since the early 1980s: there had been a genocide during the French Revolution.1 Historians have always been aware of widespread resistance to the Revolution. But (with a few exceptions) they invariably characterize the rebellion in the Vendée (1793–95) as an abortive civil war rather than a genocide.

In 1986, Secher published his initial findings in Le Génocide franco-français, a lightly revised version of his doctoral dissertation.2 This book sold well, but destroyed any chance he might have had for a university career. Secher was slandered by journalists and tenured academics for daring to question the official version of events that had taken place two centuries earlier.3 The Revolution has become a sacred creation myth for at least some of the French; they do not take kindly to blasphemers.

Keepers of the Flame

The first major Revolutionary mythographer was the journalist and politician Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), who became the first President of the Third Republic of France in 1871. He made his name in the 1820s with a bestselling 10-volume history of the Revolution. Purely as history his work was sloppy and unreliable; but the point was to celebrate the subject, not examine it. Thiers does not excuse atrocities in the Vendée; indeed he scarcely mentions them.

Unlike Thiers, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) actually looked at documents when researching his seven-volume history of the Revolution (1847–53). Michelet, more than any other historian, is responsible for the official mythology representing the Vendée rebellion as a would-be civil war instigated by deluded, credulous peasants who did not understand that they were fighting against Progress itself—a kind of 18th Century version of the gilets jaunes protests.