RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/08/when-panic-is-mistaken-for-policy-2/

Since this so called “pandemic” began, apparently more than 500 Australians have died from COVID-19. To put this into perspective, this is less than half the number of Australians who die every year from skin diseases, and about one-fifth of those killed in car accidents. Most of these deaths are among people in or above their 80s and living in aged-care homes, although that hasn’t stopped Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews trying to rewrite facts with misleadings ads.We know also that those under 60 without pre-existing medical conditions face an extremely small risk of dying from coronavirus — indeed, very little chance of even getting very ill.

Every life matters, of course. However, according to a seminal study carried out by Justin Silverman and Alex Washburne, the coronavirus mortality rate may well be as low as 0.1 per cent, “similar to that of flu”.[1] Based on data coming from New York City (the hotbed of the “pandemic” in the U.S.), only 1.7 per cent of those in their 70s who contracted the virus have acquired any symptoms which were severe enough to require medical care.[2] For those under 18, hospitalisation from the virus was only 0.01. [3] 

This is only about hospitalisation and not death caused by the coronavirus. Of course, nothing is said here about the many others who never became sick enough to even get tested. The overwhelming majority who contract this virus do not have any significant risk of dying, says Dr Scott W. Atlas, a former chief of neurology at Stanford Medical Center. [4] The magazine Science reports that 86 per cent of infections are never documented. Even if most of us eventually catch the coronavirus, there will be mild or no symptoms for, well, practically everyone.

Accordingly, we should be taking special measures only for the most vulnerable – namely the elderly who are already suffering from chronic illnesses – and let the great majority get on with their lives.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16432/turkey-gas-discovery

“Turkey’s never-ending military challenge against world powers in seas and land” makes for hundreds of stories of Turkish heroism in the media, which is largely controlled by Erdoğan and his business cronies.

Now comes the promise of tens of billions of gas-dollars from the Turkish merchant of dreams. Experts say production at the Black Sea field could start in 7-10 years, at best. Erdoğan has promised 2023 for production. In that election year, Turkish voters may question the availability of natural gas, or, more realistically, they may ask Erdoğan why they are still paying high gas bills to heat their homes.

Turkey’s economy minister, Berat Albayrak, has said that the discovery of a large natural gas field off Turkey’s Black Sea coast will change Turkey’s [political] axis. “Neither the West, nor the East, Turkey’s new axis is Turkey,” said Albayrak, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law. The discovery, at an estimated 320 billion cubic meters (bcm) of deep sea gas, marks a historic day for Turkey, Erdoğan said, the beginning of a new era.

Erdoğan announced that production at the site could start by 2023 — when Turks will go to ballot box for presidential and parliamentary elections. Officials in Ankara hopes the discovery will meet Turkey’s natural gas needs for 7-8 years, and earn the national economy $65 billion.

There is unprecedented euphoria in the pro-Erdoğan media. There is massive propaganda talk of “a Turkish moment,” of “Turkey on the way to becoming a global power.” All this is understandable in a country with a per capita GDP of barely $9,000, an ailing economy and a plunging national currency — and in need of epic stories to keep voters within the realm of hope. How much of this newfound Turkish hope is fact-based? Could the “Turkish moment” really be coming? Will Turkey be a global power with 320 bcm of natural gas? There are a number of reasons to be cautious about the Turkish optimism.

Hydrocarbon discoveries in the shape of “breaking news” have been part of Erdogan’s propaganda machinery since 2004. “This is the ninth discovery since then… I was hoping for them to discover ready-to-use gasoline this time,” joked columnist Yılmaz Özdil.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/02/its-china-stupid/

A new report from the Pentagon paints a chilling portrait of the challenge the Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States and the world.

The annual report to Congress, “Military and Security Developments Concerning the People’s Republic of China,” details the comprehensive effort the Chinese have launched to achieve global military and economic superiority. 

The 200-page report tells us the CCP seeks “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” by which it means to revise the international order and “return” China to global preeminence.

On the military front, China has already surpassed the United States in shipbuilding with the world’s largest navy, land-based conventional and cruise missiles, and integrated air-defense systems. 

“China is the top ship-producing nation in the world by tonnage and is increasing its shipbuilding capacity and capability for all naval classes,” the report informs us. The United States largely gave up its shipbuilding and merchant marine industries decades ago. 

China’s leadership understands something that America’s leaders forgot: military power flows from economic power. While Washington encouraged the offshoring of America’s industries, Beijing knows its military depends on a growing industrial and technological base.

The integration of civilian industries and military objectives is all-encompassing. The policy is known as military-civil fusion (MCF):

MCF encompasses six interrelated efforts: (1) fusing the China’s defense industrial base and its civilian technology and industrial base; (2) integrating and leveraging science and technology innovations across military and civilian sectors; (3) cultivating talent and blending military and civilian expertise and knowledge; (4) building military requirements into civilian infrastructure and leveraging civilian construction for military purposes; (5) leveraging civilian service and logistics capabilities for military purposes; and, (6) expanding and deepening China’s national defense mobilization system to include all relevant aspects of its society and economy for use in competition and war.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-to-move-ahead-with-taiwan-trade-deal-expects-beijings-ire_3485952.html

WASHINGTON—As the United States moves forward with talks toward a bilateral trade deal with Taiwan, the State Department is expecting backlash from the Chinese regime, while hoping for the best.

The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of retaliating against other country’s decisions that involve what it deems as threats to its power. The regime’s response to a U.S.–Taiwan deal would be “all about Beijing’s decision matrix,” said David Stilwell, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs.

“But, our job is to obviously think through what those are and anticipate them,” Stilwell said in response to a question by The Epoch Times during a media call on Sept. 2.

“If you look at the language from the three communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act … the economic relationship, cultural exchanges, all those things are fully allowed. There’s nothing that prohibits those things. And so there should be no lash back. The efforts to increase prosperity between the two countries should have no effect.”

Taiwan opened the door on Aug. 28, when President Tsai Ing-wen announced she would move to lift restrictions on imports of U.S. pork and beef.

“This decision is based on our national economic interests and consistent with our overall strategic goals for the future,” Tsai said in a translated statement.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo welcomed the news.

“This move opens the door for even deeper economic and trade cooperation,” Pompeo wrote on Twitter on Aug. 28.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-boat-people-11599001124?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Hong Kong once was a refuge for Vietnamese and mainland Chinese who fled their homeland on boats in pursuit of freedom. Now Hong Kongers are fleeing their own city in the same way, and not all of them make it to safety.

The Chinese Coast Guard last week intercepted a boat carrying a dozen Hong Kongers, who ranged in age from 16 to 33, trying to sail to Taiwan. Some of the boat people faced serious charges related to pro-democracy activism or their role in last year’s protests.

At least one, democracy supporter Andy Li, was arrested in August under the new national-security law and faces up to life in prison if convicted. Hong Kong has long prided itself on an independent judiciary, but the accused understandably fear that the Communist Party will dictate from now on what happens in the Hong Kong courts as it does in China.

The Chinese Coast Guard arrested the 12 for unlawfully crossing the border. Little is known about their fate, except that they are detained in the mainland. On Monday the state-run China Daily wrote in an English-language editorial that “Hong Kong lawbreakers should give up the illusion of evading justice by seeking shelter on the island [of Taiwan] or elsewhere.” Beijing may want to make a chilling example of these unlucky fugitives.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16443/charlie-hebdo-mohammed-cartoons

France is starting to reflect on the dramatic decline in its freedom of expression.

“My unfortunate client will be freedom….” — Richard Malka, attorney for Charlie Hebdo, Le Point, August 13, 2020.

Western democracies have paid dearly for the right to freedom of expression and, if not protected and exercised, it can disappear overnight.

“If our colleagues in the public debate do not share part of the risk, then the barbarians have won”. — Elisabeth Badinter, French philosopher; the documentary “Je suis Charlie”, September 9, 2015.

Yesterday, one day before the opening of the trial for 14 defendants accused of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks in France, which included the murders of their fellow journalists and cartoonists on January 7, 2015 at their Paris office, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo republished the “Mohammed Cartoons” under the title “Tout ça pour ça” (“All of that for this”). “We will never give up”, they said.

The defendants in the trial, some in absentia, “face a variety of charges related to helping perpetrators carry out attacks that killed 17 people over three days in January 2015.” In addition to the 12 victims in and around the office of Charlie Hebdo, a police officer was murdered in the street and four people were murdered in a kosher supermarket.

François Molins, then public prosecutor of Paris, recalled his arrival at the Charlie Hebdo office. He found “the smell of blood and gunpowder. In the newsroom, it is carnage. It is more than a crime scene, it is a war scene, with a frightening tangle of bodies”.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/09/07/viktor-orbans-mandate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The Hungarian prime minister has succeeded through democratic means

When Hungary declared a state of emergency in March to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators in the West immediately spread the news that the European Union’s first dictatorship had arrived. Parliament was suspended. There would never be elections again. Hungary’s health-care system would collapse because its prime minister, Viktor Orban, had given the nation’s money away to cronies and squandered more of it in a doomed attempt to make soccer more popular. Criticism of the government was forbidden, forevermore. Political arrests would begin. A colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, Dalibor Rohac, wrote in the Washington Post that, absent a major pushback from Brussels and Washington, D.C., Hungary would emerge “a full-fledged dictatorship.” The U.S. political analyst Liz Mair — no fool, I think — confidently predicted of Orban, “He’s going to wind up putting Gypsies in permanent detention.”

Of course all of this was wrong. There was no diplomatic pushback. Brussels gave a preliminary ruling that the emergency law contained no threat to democracy; it was passed constitutionally. Hungary experienced its relatively small surge of cases and deaths, but its hospital system survived, even if it’s not up to Western European standards, and did just fine. Orban’s rule by decree included scoring some opportunistic points: He rushed through a park renovation opposed by a mayor of the opposition party and made it so that state-issued ID cards carry the birth sex of the holder. If these are abuses, they are more mild than the attempt by California governor Gavin Newsom to make rent-control schemes permanent through emergency powers. Two Hungarians were detained by police departments for criticizing the government, suspected of breaking laws against spreading misinformation during the pandemic. In each case it was determined that they had committed no crime, and they were released. By comparison, a law against online disinformation in Angela Merkel’s Germany is so broad and censorious that Russia and the Philippines cite it as a model they would imitate.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16431/uae-palestinians

The message Emiratis are sending: “We did not betray anyone. We have a wise leader who has decided to do what is good for his country, the Palestinians and all Arabs and Muslims. You Palestinians need to get rid of your corrupt leaders.”

“It is time for this region to enjoy peace, stability and development,” Al Kaabi remarked. “Over the past decades, conflicts and tension have ravaged the region and many opportunities have been lost in order to find the right path that leads people to a prosperous life, and makes hope possible.” — Hamad Al Kaabi, editor of the Abu Dhabi-based Al-Ittihad newspaper, August 14, 2020.

“I was against Israel, but today I’m not. Time has shown us who the real friend is and who is the enemy.” — Emirati social media user, Twitter, August 17, 2020.

The reactions of the Emiratis to the Palestinian campaign of incitement against the UAE is another sign of the growing disillusionment of many Gulf citizens with the Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian issue. The reactions also show that for the first time in many years, Arabs have the courage openly to say that they prefer peace with Israel over continuing to support the Palestinians, who cannot get their act together and have chosen to align themselves with Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and the enemies of peace and stability.

As Palestinian leaders continue to condemn the United Arab Emirates for its agreement to normalize relations with Israel, Emiratis have responded by dismissing charges that the UAE betrayed the Arabs and Muslims, as well as Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem and the Palestinian issue.

The main message the Emiratis and other Gulf citizens are sending to the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs and Muslims is something to the effect of: “We did not betray anyone. We have a wise leader who has decided to do what is good for his country, the Palestinians and all Arabs and Muslims. You Palestinians need to get rid of your corrupt leaders.”