RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/european-union-brilliant-insidious-construction/

Unable to change course, the union must and will crash spectacularly.

More than usual, I’ve been thinking about France. Or rather, daydreaming about it. I listen to Stacey Kent records, where she sings in that distinct style of French bossa nova. It’s a style of jazz music that is relaxed, never tired. None of the drug-fueled creativity of American bebop, just that propulsive rhythm section and a chanteuse you’re supposed to love. French people seem to know that they can get away with doing just a little less than the minimum required. It’s part of their style.

And certainly it is true about their politics. In the face of the Yellow Vest protests, French president Emmanuel Macron abandoned his campaign pledge to stand firm behind his reform agenda. He rescinded tax increases and promised more spending outlays, expanding his budget deficit beyond the European Union’s threshold of 3 percent of GDP. The EU’s budget commissioner, Günther Oettinger, said the EU would make an exception and accept the rule-breaking French budget.

No such exception is made for the new Italian government, which seeks approval for a budget that has a 2.4 percent deficit. The EU wants to clamp down on Italy’s debt, which at 130 percent of GDP is more than twice the EU’s limit of 60 percent. (France exceeds the limit as well, however, with a debt roughly equal to its GDP.) And in the eyes of the EU, Italy’s government is an enemy, made up of “populists” and occasional critics of the EU. No allowances are made for them, even though Italy has gone through political upheaval similar to or greater than France’s.

All this should be a reminder that there is nothing much to envy about European Union membership. If you’re a relatively wealthy Western European nation, it is a source of instability. Brexit is treated as a “shambles,” but to an outsider it looks orderly and civilized compared with what is happening in the European Union itself. The immediate political effect of the Leave vote was to strengthen the U.K.’s most long-lived mainstream parties: Tory and Labour. Meanwhile, on the Continent, the traditional political parties in European Union member states continue to shrivel and die. The Yellow Vest protests have moved on from French cities to Brussels. So-called populists parties continue to make gains.

The European Union is a brilliant and insidious construction. Franco-German interests are obviously paramount. But it attracts the political class of smaller countries by removing difficult questions of governing from their parliaments and providing offices of authority without accountability that seem to have more shine than their national governments. Because Germans don’t want to be seen as utterly dominating the bloc, the political offices at the very top are doled out generously to second-tier members such as Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, and Portugal.

https://pjmedia.com/yellowribbonproject/contact-ceases-with-u-s-hosta

An American hostage held by Iran for 1,197 days lost contact with his family nearly two weeks ago, raising fears that Nizar Zakka — already in frail health — may have been removed from his cell to be subjected to torture.

Zakka was heard from again briefly today, according to his attorney, confirming days of punishment at the hands of the Iranians for refusing to relent to their demands.

Zakka visited Tehran in September 2015 at the invitation of the Iranian government to speak at a conference on women’s entrepreneurship and employment, and was seized as he tried to catch a return flight to Washington. The State Department even helped fund his trip, according to his colleagues.

He was sentenced to 10 years on espionage charges a year after his arrest, and his family warned months ago that Zakka is in “very bad health.”

Zakka, a Lebanese-American and permanent U.S. resident, is secretary-general of the D.C.-based IJMA3 group, which lobbies for the information and communications technology industry in the Middle East. Zakka earned degrees from the University of Texas after graduating from the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Ga., in 1985. He used to work as a software engineer at contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root in the early ’90s.

Since being invited and kidnapped, Zakka has weathered six protest hunger strikes — all while lobbying on behalf of fellow inmates to improve their conditions and refusing to film any propaganda “confession” video for the Iranians.

Early this year, an Iranian doctor hired by Zakka’s family said the hostage may have cancer, but Iranian authorities were not allowing necessary diagnostics. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/12/lone-wolves.html

Canadian Columnist Mark Steyn tackles a term, “lone wolf,” which describes not so much any jihadist as it does the authorities that fossick around a box of Islamic Crackerjacks in search of a motive, in strenuous evasion of the fact that the perps were Muslims motivated by Islam .

The suspects suffer from “mental illness,” their cranial instability probably the most safest label they pin to a killer without being accused of not being “diversity’” friendly.

“This term ‘lone wolf’ is a cop-out…the idea that they somehow have to have a membership card in Islamic State or in al Qaeda for it to be official, fully-credentialed terror, like getting a hairdresser’s license in New York State is completely preposterous” he stated.

Steyn added that the rhetoric of “lone wolf” terrorists allows those who do not want to admit that radical Islam is a problem to brush off terror as isolated incidents, saying “all jihad is local. That actually suits them, to say, ‘oh no this is just some mentally ill guy in Ottawa and this is another guy who’s a bit goofy in New York and there’s no connection between the two.’ Because otherwise you have to treat it like your other big story. You have to treat it like ideological Ebola and you have to stop the infection…”

In other words, the term “lone wolf” permits authorities to hopscotch over the reality of Islam-fueled terrorism, and thus avoid the hypothetical unpleasantness of offending Muslims or their “religion,” and probably the accusation of “racism” (even though the practice of Islam is not confined to any one race; but apparently this is a difficult concept to communicate).