RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17471/china-dominate-near-earth-space

Communist China seems not only to be directly challenging the US lead in space exploration; its space plans also appear to include an ambitious military dimension, much of whose contents look as if they are controlled by the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). These PLA programs include a vast array of counter-space weapons systems designed to degrade or destroy US space assets.

Even if there are areas where the US and Chinese space programs could serve universal concerns… sadly, it would seem foolhardy to cooperate on any program with the CCP. It has not made a secret of its intent to unseat the US as the world’s leading superpower… within the next 15-30 years. It has already declared war on the US; the US just seems not yet to have read the memo. China seems to be trying to maneuver a surreptitious surrender, by undermining the US from within, accompanied by the threat of a costly, high-powered war. Unfortunately, many in the US seem to be complying.

Meanwhile, in America, we appear busy with diversions — educating our children to hate our country; allowing our government to torpedo our economy by killing growth and launching a ruinous debt; disabling our energy supply while boosting that of our adversaries; exploding our taxes while making us support countless illegal migrants — that are enabling Communist China to fulfill its dream: enfeebling America to take control not only of “near-Earth” space but everything under it as well.

Communist China’s Space Program is demonstrating that it is on a trajectory possibly to surpass the US in the military and scientific exploration in our solar system. China is planning a space spectacular to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on July 23, 1921. Today, June 17, China launched a three-astronaut crew who will inhabit the command module of its soon-to-be-completed Tianhe Chinese Space Station. This planned human launch follows the June 10 multiple satellite deployment from Northern China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. One of these satellites is designed to track near-earth asteroids.

As early as the mid-1950s, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong declared, “We too will make satellites.” Following that declaration, China aggressively began to compete with both the former Soviet Union and the United States in space — an ambition seemingly energized by China’s desire to develop a nuclear bomb and the means to deliver it. China’s Space Program, called the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” project, was from its inception, placed under the aegis of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, thereby underscoring the military orientation of its activities in space.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/16/election-2021-in-iran-where-murderers-still-rule/

On June 18, the mullahs in Iran will hold their presidential “elections.” It’s almost universally accepted that genuine elections are anathema to the ruling religious dictatorship. This year, if the International Criminal Court were to do its job, the candidates would essentially be called in to form a police line up. They are a who’s who of mass murderers, international terrorists, thieves and embezzlers.

The frontrunner is Ebrahim Raisi. I first saw him when I was being tortured as a young woman in the 1980s — as I was pregnant.

Let me set the context first. For the Iranian people, Raisi’s name is synonymous with the 1988 massacre, when it is estimated that at least 30,000 political prisoners were brutally murdered in prisons across Iran simply for promoting democracy After Raisi announced his candidacy this month, young Iranians took to social media in protest and the hashtag “1988 Henchman Raisi” (in Farsi) quickly started to trend.

In 1988, the 28-year-old Raisi became a notorious member of the “Death Commissions,” appointed by former Supreme Leader Khomeini, to round up thousands of political dissidents in prisons. The majority of those killed, including teenage girls and pregnant women, expressed open support for the main democratic opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Amnesty International has called it an ongoing crime against humanity because the regime dumped the bodies in unmarked mass graves and has been covering up the evidence ever since. Last year, several top United Nations human rights officials called for a long overdue international probe into the 1988 massacre.

Now, one of the main perpetrators is running for president. After all, this is a regime that is at war with the Iranian people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17468/germany-failed-hezbollah-ban

In retrospect, Germany’s much-vaunted Hezbollah ban appears to have been little more than a publicity stunt aimed at silencing critics of the German government’s pro-Iran foreign policy.

Hezbollah has effectively evaded the ban by transferring many of its activities to charities and cultural centers controlled by Iran.

Iran’s main base of operation in Germany is the Hamburg-based Shiite Imam Ali Mosque and the associated Islamic Centre of Hamburg (Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, IZH).

“Like all pro-Iranian institutions, IZH is based on the model of the Islamic state of Allah and the ideas of the 1979 revolution with the aim of expanding and Islamizing the entire world. Western values, liberal ideas or the free democratic basic order are in contradiction to this. Due to the history and the animosity between Iran and Israel, the teachings of IZH have a strong anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli attitude.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Hamburg branch.

“Although it contains ‘democratic’ elements, this doctrine does not serve to establish the rule of the people, i.e., democracy, but rather to establish the rule of Allah, whose ‘guardians’ are Shiite Islamic scholars. Therefore, Hezbollah spreads an extremist Islamist ideology and represents a threat to the constitutional order.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, North Rhine-Westphalia branch.

“For Hezbollah, Germany represents a space for logistical and financial support services. Although its supporters in Germany are well networked internally, they are not very visible to the outside world because they are careful not to be openly connected with Hezbollah.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Rhineland Palatinate branch.

“One gets the impression that no one has really tried to completely shed light on and smash the structures of Hezbollah in Germany.” — German MP Benjamin Strasser.

The Hezbollah ban was in fact a compromise measure between German lawmakers who wanted to take a harder line against Iran and those who did not. As a result, the ban fell far short of a complete prohibition on Hezbollah and was apparently aimed at providing the German government with political cover that allowed Germany to claim that it had banned the group even if it had not.

One year after Germany banned Hezbollah from operating on its soil, the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based Shiite terrorist group’s presence in Germany is stronger than ever.

In the twelve months since the ban entered into effect, Hezbollah’s propaganda and fundraising activities in Germany have continued apace; the number of its followers in the country has increased; and the Hamburg mosque which serves as Iran’s main base of operations in Germany has gained in influence.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/15/no-leaders-attended-the-g7-summit/

When I was a child, I made the mistake, as many children do, of thinking that the actors I saw in movies were in some way responsible for their lines. As the playwright Moss Hart heard from a lady sitting behind him: “Actors say the cleverest things!”

But it didn’t take me long to notice that while an actor can make good material great, he cannot make bad material good. If you give him stupid and implausible things to say, he will look stupid and implausible. He may or may not be aware of how he looks; that’s not his job: His job is to act the way someone tells him to act, and to say what someone tells him to say.

And that brings us to the picture of the G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall. Nobody who watches the film of these people arriving, coming down the boardwalk carefully spaced, hygienically elbow-bumping in lieu of shaking hands, and finally taking up positions for their photo op—nobody would believe these people are world leaders. Because they aren’t. They aren’t running the western world. They are run by the people who really are running the western world—people whose names we don’t know. The people on the beach in Cornwall are there simply in recognition of the working man’s need to see an elected head of state. They are actors.

A Rasmussen poll in March found that just 47 percent of Americans believe Biden is actually doing the job of president. At least as many people believe the job is being done by some other person or persons behind the scenes. And that 47 percent who believe Biden is doing the job must think it’s an awfully easy one, since you don’t have to remember where you are or with whom you are speaking. Even as an actor, Biden’s powers are failing.

It is hardly more plausible that Boris Johnson, a man who looks and talks like a buttered scone, is actually determining policy in Britain. Remember his great pandemic speech: “I must give the British people a very simple instruction: You must stay at home. . . . If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the power to enforce them . . .” That would have stuck in the throat of any real leader of any real democracy. Churchill would be vomiting in his grave. But Boris Johnson’s eyes were burning with earnestness as he relayed the instructions given to him by the civil service bureaucracy and whatever other hidden powers are running his mouth.

Justin Trudeau meanwhile seemed genuinely hurt when nobody liked his little Bhangra dance routine back in Delhi in 2018. It’s not entirely his fault: He was in Indian costume, and he slipped into the role. He forgot for a moment that his full time job was pretending to be a prime minister.

You could replace Biden with any Hollywood actor—George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep—and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference in how the country is being run or what policies are pursued. You could replace Biden with a paper cup. That might destroy the illusion (though not by much). Biden is a figurehead, rather more embarrassing than the Queen of England, and rather less powerful.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/anatomy-lynching-lloyd-billingsley/

“Their lives were taken in a brutal, cowardly, and brazen act of violence. This killing was no accident. This was a terrorist attack motivated by hatred in the heart of one of our communities.” 

That was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking to reporters last Tuesday. Over in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan blamed the attack on “growing Islamophobia” in Western countries that “needs to be countered holistically by the international community.”

Ontario premier Doug Ford proclaimed that “justice must be served for the horrific act of hatred that took place.” London, Ontario, mayor Ed Holder told reporters, “this was an act of mass murder, perpetrated against Muslims, against Londoners, and rooted in unspeakable hatred.” London detective superintendent Paul Waight said, “there is evidence that this was a planned, premeditated act, motivated by hate. We believe the victims were targeted because of their Islamic faith.” 

Mustafa Farooq of the National Council of Canadian Muslims said “this is a terrorist attack on Canadian soil, and should be treated as such.” What, exactly, was this carefully planned terrorist attack that had drawn such international wrath?

On June 6, Salman Afzaal, 46, his wife Madiha, 44, their daughter Yumna, 15, Fayez, nine, and Salman’s mother, Talat, 74, immigrants to Canada in 2007, were waiting an at intersection when they were struck by a truck driven by 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman. The crash killed all but Fayez, who remains in hospital. 

Police arrested Veltman, reportedly wearing body armor, a military-style helmet, and a Nazi T-shirt. He allegedly laughed about the crash, indulged in strange chanting, and requested that a movie made of him. As one headline put it “Christian terroristwho mowed down Muslim family ‘was laughing’ as he got out of blood covered truck.” 

The sole source for these details was a “veteran cabbie,” now allegedly too traumatized to speak, so the spokesman was Iranian immigrant Hasan Savehilaghi, who operates the cab company. Since Savehilaghi had not been a witness on the scene, the account was entirely hearsay. Savehilaghi did not explain how Veltman had planned to be driving near the intersection precisely when the Afzaal family was waiting to cross the street. 

Nathaniel Veltman, it turns out, is one of six children, including a twin sister, and grew up in a Christian family in Strathroy, Ontario. Veltman attended Fanshawe College in London and works at a local egg packing company. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/g7-and-globalist-diplomacy-fetish-bruce-thornton/

The most recent G7 summit has come and gone, accomplishing little except to remind us how useless and dangerous has been our long fetish for diplomacy. These meetings and other multinational confabs are merely part of the New World Order’s marketing campaign to convince the free West that multinational technocratic elites are better at advancing national interests than are the sovereign peoples to whom government office-holders are accountable.

Here in the U.S., such advertising campaigns also provide progressives with a permanent partisan club for beating conservatives and foreign policy realists who want to put America’s national interests and security ahead of those of some mythic “global community,” a euphemism for nations who talk globally but act locally.

American Democrat and Republican globalists have for decades smeared nationalism and promoted instead greater integration into the “rules-based international order.” Conservative presidents who resisted were pilloried as unsophisticated jingoists and trigger-happy militarists clinging to worn-out ideas from a more savage time. Ronald Reagan, with his allegedly crude, unnuanced “we win, they lose” and “evil empire” rhetoric was mocked as a dangerously naïve warmonger, with his arms build-up and “Star Wars” fantasies about anti-missile defense systems. But Reagan’s success showed that for diplomatic “covenants” to be effective, there had to be a credible “sword” backing the agreement.

This caricature of Republican presidents ran wild during the George W. Bush years. The second war against Saddam Hussein was attacked as a “failure of diplomacy” despite the serial diplomatic failures of Hussein’s violating more than a dozen UN Security Council resolutions as well as the terms of the Gulf War armistice. Typical was the statement of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who said he was “saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.” Of course, the New York Times also peddled this DNC talking point, writing of Bush’s “failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war,” despite Bush’s spending several  months trying to get the UN Security Council to “help.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/a-hesitant-half-hearted-stand-against-china/

Beijing appeared piqued by the transatlantic unity on display as a triumphant Joe Biden marshaled his European counterparts to defend world order at a dizzying series of summits in Cornwall and Brussels this week. Today, it sent 28 jets through Taiwan’s air-defense-identification zone, its largest-ever incursion. But surely Chinese Communist Party officials, and other American adversaries, were also relieved that the statements from these meetings were watered down by hesitant European governments.

The G-7, NATO, and U.S.-EU summits yielded communiqués setting out ambitious goals aimed at shoring up and retooling these alliances for the 21st century’s greatest challenges, among which the president says is autocracy’s global competition with democracy. “I think we’ve made some progress in reestablishing American credibility among our closest friends,” Biden said at the G-7 summit. There, the leaders of the world’s largest economies committed to hundreds of billions of dollars in global infrastructure investment to counter the Belt and Road Initiative and called out Chinese human-rights abuses.

National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan explained how the G-7 delivered an apparently unified statement on China despite disagreements between members. “When you add it all up, actually, the whole became greater than the sum of its parts, because there is a broad view that China represents a significant challenge to the world’s democracies.” 

The math can be described otherwise: These alliances can go only as fast as the lowest common denominator of agreement between these countries allows them to go. Which is why these gatherings yielded directionally promising statements but were nevertheless hindered by countries who are loath to confront the CCP. The G-7 explicitly rapped Beijing for its coercion of Taiwan and human-rights abuses, while making oblique mention of forced-labor practices in a separate section — because EU, German, and Italian officials were more circumspect. The portion on COVID origins calls for a transparent investigation, but it calls for one under the aegis of the compromised WHO investigation process.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/swiss-nix-carbon-tax-just-before-biden-arrival-11623786757?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Talk about awkward. Right after President Joe Biden and other leaders of advanced economies celebrated their expensive climate promises in Brussels, Mr. Biden had to fly to Switzerland—where voters have just rejected expensive climate promises made by the country’s politicians.

Judging by the photograph accompanying this column, Swiss Federal President Guy Parmelin and President Biden kept things cheerful and may have done their best to avoid the topic as they discussed Wednesday’s planned meeting in Geneva between Mr. Biden and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

But to the extent that Mr. Biden is aware of where he is and what’s just happened at the polls, he must be disappointed. John Revill of Reuters reports from Zurich:

Swiss voters rejected a trio of environmental proposals on Sunday, including a new law intended to help the country meet its goal for cutting carbon emissions under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change…
The result was a defeat for the Swiss government which supported the new law that included measures such as increasing a surcharge on car fuel and imposing a levy on flight tickets.
The rejection meant it would now be “very difficult” for Switzerland to reach its 2030 goal of cutting carbon emissions to half of their 1990 levels and to be become net neutral on emissions by 2050, Environment Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17416/china-war-on-india

China’s border actions against India have been described as a “salami tactic”. China seems to be seeking to dominate territory through incremental operations too small to attract international attention and not large enough to spark an actual war with India — but sufficient to accumulate real results over time in the form of gained territory. It is similar to the tactic China has been using in the South China Sea.

For this purpose, China uses gray-zone warfare, a maneuver at which the country has become expert, especially against Taiwan. The concept entails actions that fall just short of war — others have termed it “indirect war” — but the purpose is the same: to overcome resistance — or a perceived enemy — by inducing exhaustion.

“Overall, China’s increasing ties to the Indian Ocean and beyond have expanded enormously over the past two decades…. Crucially… it appears that China does intend to develop some sort of Indian Ocean force.” — Christopher Colley, Wilson Center, Washington D.C., April 2, 2021

“If India is weakened militarily and economically… its value as a counterweight to China and the broader U.S. goal of countering China’s regional influence would also be undermined.” — Daniel S. Markey, Council on Foreign Relations, April 19, 2021.

One year after China ordered an attack on the disputed border between India and China in the Himalayas — which deteriorated into a situation in which 20 Indian soldiers and several Chinese soldiers were killed — tension along the border remains high.

“China’s occupation since May 2020 of contested border areas is the most serious escalation in decades and led to the first lethal border clash between the two countries since 1975,” according to the “2021 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” published on April 9, 2021 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Military tensions between China and India go back nearly six decades to the 1962 Sino-Indian war, when China began attacking India. Although relations subsequently improved, the shadow of the war remains partly in the form of disagreement between the two countries about where the exact border — or the Line of Actual Control (LAC), as it is called — is located.

In January, China reportedly withdrew nearly 10,000 soldiers from depth areas on its side of the LAC while keeping front-line soldiers in place. Despite 11 rounds of talks — the latest on April 9 — de-escalation remains elusive. China refuses to disengage from two friction points in Hot Springs and Gogra.

In May, Indian Army Chief General MM Naravane told Indian troops to keep a watch on Chinese activities along the LAC. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly begun annual war drills in “in-depth areas… located 100 to 250-km from the Line of Actual Control (LAC).”

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/boriss-mind-turns-to-mush

Whatever you may think about Boris Johnson’s character or fitness for the great office of Britain’s prime minister that he currently occupies, there has never been any serious questioning of his brain capacity. This is deemed to be sufficient to negotiate with the EU in Latin while simultaneously writing his book on Shakespeare and beating Emanuel Macron at strip poker. 

However, something horrible appears to have happened to the Johnson grey matter. An early symptom of this affliction (which he seems to have contracted directly from an earlier and distressing victim of Cabinet Cognitive Collapse, Michael Gove) was his evangelical promotion of “net zero” carbon emissions to arrest “climate change”.

Through this policy, he intends to fleece the poor for the high-minded privilege of freezing to death, ramp up inflation and cripple the economy while undoing much of the industrial revolution. This is in order to alter the composition and course of the climate, a system which is impenetrably complex, non-linear and chaotic but whose alteration he seriously proposes to achieve by reducing one already minute factor in its composition — the equivalent of the attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers in Jonathan Swift’s satirical island of Laputa.

Further evidence of alarming prime ministerial brain malfunction emerged recently when, in the wake of the row over the England football team being booed by fans for “taking the knee” before a qualifier match for the Euros, the prime minister first urged fans not to boo the England players for “taking the knee;” but after pressure to go further in backing the team’s gesture, his spokesman then said: 

The Prime Minister respects the right of all people to peacefully protest and make their feelings known about injustices.

But “taking the knee” is not to protest against injustice. It is to support the agenda of Black Lives Matter, a violent, anti-west and anti-white movement which pioneered the gesture. This has been adopted by well-meaning but ignorant people, who naively believe they are signalling their opposition to racial prejudice and injustice when in fact they are signalling their support for racial prejudice and injustice — against white people. So deeply has this mind-rot penetrated society that, as one journalist told me in all seriousness the other day in a radio discussion: 

There’s no such thing as racism against white people.