RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-725005

In a two-part interview with Israel’s Channel 14 on Tuesday and Wednesday, the nephew of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei praised the masses who’ve been risking and losing their lives to extricate themselves from the grips of the ayatollah-run regime.

A France-based expat, Dr. Mahmoud Moradkhani has been following from afar the ongoing protests in his home country, spurred by the murder in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police for not wearing her hijab properly.

Moradkhani, who left Iran in 1986, seven years after the Islamic Revolution, to study medicine in Paris, is the son of Khamenei’s sister, Badri Hosseini Khamenei. Her whereabouts have been in question since December 7, when he tweeted an open letter that she penned in support of the rallies.

“I oppose my brother’s actions,” she began in the post that went viral. “I express my sympathy for all mothers mourning the crimes of the Islamic Republic regime [from the time of its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] to the current era of the despotic caliphate of Ali Khamenei.”

She concluded the lengthy missive by declaring that “the people of Iran deserve freedom and prosperity, and their uprising is legitimate and necessary to achieve their rights,” adding, “My brother wrongly considers the voice of his mercenaries and money-grubbers to be that of the Iranian people. He is rightly deserving of the disrespectful and impudent words that he uses to describe the oppressed, but brave, Iranian people.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19231/belgium-energy-suicide

Security of energy supply seems, for some officials, to be an abstract concept. It is anything but. In practice, when energy security is not guaranteed, it means blackouts and an explosion in energy costs, as well as, for many, having to choose between “heat or eat”.

When energy costs become insane — even higher than neighboring countries — industrial companies stops investing. Then they stop maintaining the existing productive apparatus. In the end, they leave the country.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Belgium is the only Western country that has shut down a fully operational nuclear reactor… The closure of a second nuclear reactor, under exactly the same conditions, and without the slightest operational alternative, is planned for the beginning of 2023.

Most of the major environmentalist organizations have been actively supported and financed by the Russian Federation, with Russia hoping that if they could discourage the West from developing energy sources, the West would turn to Russia for energy imports — as it did. This financial support did not have to be direct: it was enough to create “environmental foundations”, headed by the leaders of the major environmental organizations, and massively financed by Moscow.

The current Belgian Minister of Energy… was a 50% partner in the law firm BLIXT, which represented, in Belgium, the interests of Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom, the country’s main energy company.

Voters have eyes to see their dwindling bank accounts and their 17-degree living rooms in the winter. Belgian voters see the winter bristling with looming blackouts, leading to darkness and cold. They also see unemployment and the accelerated disappearance of their savings.

There is an overwhelming majority in the Chamber to repeal the 2003 law on the destruction of Belgian civil nuclear power. The repeal would allow the government to enter into serious negotiations with ENGIE-Electrabel for the extension of the entire Belgian nuclear power system. The government could then decide whether or not to allocate massive investments in the construction of new nuclear reactors, after the example of what has recently been approved in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Sweden.

Is it not high time for a new parliamentary majority, supported by an overwhelming majority of the Belgian population, to accept the responsibility to avoid returning to “the cold and the dark”?

Belgium’s situation is dramatic. While our neighbors have taken and are taking measures to cushion the energy crisis, maintain their budgetary health and guarantee their energy supply, Belgium is in a situation of clear and obvious failure on all three counts. I will only deal here with the energy misery, which is entirely avoidable and caused by the anti-nuclear tendencies of two environmentalist political parties, Ecolo and The Greens.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-night-the-lights-went-out-in-europe/

Politico Europe, a publication marinated in green politics, has named Russian President Vladimir Putin as one of its “power players of the year” — for, in the publication’s words, “advancing Europe’s green agenda.”

“By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not — clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security,” the news outlet explained approvingly.

It went on to note that Putin “invaded Ukraine after the EU had spent two years laying the foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions by 2050. That meant the policy machinery for a total remake of the European energy economy was already moving. All it needed was a nudge.”

You would have to be pretty severely afflicted with Climate Change Derangement Syndrome to celebrate a silver lining in Putin’s murderous attack on Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Europe has sprinted so far ahead of the United States in its quest to end the use of fossil fuels that many U.S. politicians, environmentalists and media voices look on with envy.

But how is Europe’s Green New Deal going now that Putin has given it “a nudge”?