RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15895/uk-victimhood-culture-terrorism

“There is currently no specially allocated government funding for victims of terror. While they can claim money…. survivors of the Manchester terror attack say that they are forced to wait years for funds to come through…” — Gabriella Swerling, The Telegraph, March 18, 2020.

It is paradoxical, to say the least, that in the era of “victimhood culture” — in which a multitude of identity groups compete for the prize of most victimized — where even subjectively perceived slights are registered by UK police as “non-criminal incidents” — victims of terror, who have suffered severe physical and psychological life-disrupting injury as the result of actual manifested hatred, have to fight for their rights.

The paradox becomes especially striking when compared to the care taken by British authorities not to offend Muslim communities from where the various suicide bombers have emerged.

There appears to be little in the way of a similar level of concern for the trauma, alienation and isolation that terror victims experience after losing their hearing, their sight or the use of their limbs in terrorist attacks motivated by extreme hatred of which they were unfortunate enough to become victims.

In March, Hashem Abedi, the brother of Salman Abedi, who carried out the suicide bombing attack at the Manchester Arena in May 2017 was convicted for his role in the terrorist attack. Twenty-two men, women and children, aged eight to 51, were killed in the attack; 264 “were physically injured”, and 670 have “reported psychological trauma as a result of these events”, according to bbc.com.

The conviction brought back into focus the plight of the survivors of terrorism and their relatives, as the victims of the Manchester bombing spoke to the press about feeling “abandoned” by British authorities.

“After the bomb, the government said we would get all the help and support we need, but we’ve not had anything…When you’re a victim of terror, you can’t just be signposted to normal services. We need specialised trauma help… like soldiers and police officers,” said Martin Hibbert, who was paralyzed in the Manchester Arena bombing.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/why_china_wont_reform.html

The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fears chaos and loss of control more than anything else, and this explains much of its seemingly erratic behavior. 

The matter goes back to be bargain that the CCP has struck with the Chinese people. The deal is this: the Communist Party gets complete political control over the country in return for ever-increasing standards of living. This means no elections, no demonstrations, no rule of law, and no dissent from below as to how the show is run. The CCP is an illegitimate regime and can stay in power only if it can continue to pay off economically. 

Up until now this has proven to be a win-win situation. Of course, it was always predicated in U.S. allowing China to lie and cheat on every trade agreement it ever signed and to turn a blind eye to stealing our technology. This worked for the past 25 years. But now the Chinese economy is facing strong headwinds which throw that arrangement arrangement into doubt. These include an American president who will not play the patsy to China’s predatory trade practices and its massive theft of U.S. intellectual property and the worldwide blow-back from China’s Wuhan virus.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-end-of-hong-kong/

The 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain to the People’s Republic of China marked the end of Western colonial rule in the region. Optimistic Western policy hands hoped that the final mending of the “unequal treaties,” as they were called by the Chinese Communist Party, would initiate Beijing’s integration into the rules-based world order.

Recent events in Hong Kong put paid to this hope.

The days of China’s “peaceful rise,” when the CCP steadfastly denied its hegemonic ambitions, are long gone. In light of China’s clampdown on Hong Kong, the transfer of the autonomous region now appears to have entailed swapping one imperial government for another. As if to remove any doubt, China’s National People’s Congress bypassed the Hong Kong Legislative Council this week and imposed a new national-security law. The law, which bans all “seditious activity,” effectively nullifies the Hong Kong Basic Law according to which the territory is guaranteed autonomy from the Mainland until 2047.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded appropriately in announcing that, under the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act passed last year, Washington would no longer consider Hong Kong independent of China. The White House will reconsider the privileges and immunities granted to the autonomous region, including its preferential trade status, visa exemptions, and flexible foreign-exchange regime.

Critics argue that the measures will cause undue economic harm to the region. Hong Kong’s economy will suffer, but the millions of Hong Kongers who have taken to the streets in protest have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they value freedom over GDP growth. Indeed, the rule of law is what allowed Hong Kong to build a thriving economy in the first place. The short-term harms from reduced trade and investment pale in comparison to the disaster of Mainland dominance of Hong Kong. Worse, allowing China to violate the 1984 Sino–British Joint Declaration, registered at the U.N., will send a signal that the U.S. is unwilling to stand by a basic element of the international order.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/run-the-numbers-survey-the-folly/

As of May 22, Australia had suffered 7,088 cases of COVID-19 and 102 people who died with the virus, the majority were males between 70 and 89. A sizeable proportion of those admitted to hospitals’ intensive care unitss were suffering from comorbidity issues such as cardiac disease and diabetes. Australia’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) has told a Senate Inquiry that the Australian government’s actions in locking down the economy saved 14,000 lives.

In the meantime, Camilla Stoltenberg, director of Norway’s public health agency, has confessed:

Our assessment now, and I find that there is a broad consensus in relation to the reopening, was that one could probably achieve the same effect – and avoid part of the unfortunate repercussions – by not closing. But, instead, staying open with precautions to stop the spread.

The cost to the Australian economy of the global pandemic could be as high as one thousand billion dollars with an additional direct cost to the taxpayer of $260 billion this year alone. It will be a while before our Prime Minister and the premiers admit the lockdown was entirely unnecessary and unjustified.

Rampant alarmism

With the support of 289 or more top economists, four economists, Edmond, Hamilton, Holden and Preston (2020) deny “that there is a trade-off between the public health and economic aspects of the crisis.” I answered this here. Two of the four, Richard Holden and Bruce Preston estimate that without lockdowns and similar interventions, but presumably with voluntary social distancing, 90 per cent of our population of 25.5 million would have resulted in 225,000 deaths, based on an assumed fatality rate of 1 per cent, and yielding an incredible rate of 882 deaths per 100,000 residents.

The claimed deaths saved are higher than argued by Australia’s CMO by a factor of 16 times. The same methodology yields nearly three million COVID deaths in the U.S. and seventy million deaths globally. But is this simply fanciful alarmism and fearmongering designed to frighten all Australians into acceptance of continuing lockdowns and restrictions on normal life, or is it an astute economic analysis?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16052/russia-arctic-empire

These Russian claims have not yet been adjudicated by international law courts, the United Nations, or by any bilateral or multilateral treaty.

Russia’s blanket claims of territorial sovereignty pose a direct challenge to “Law of the Sea” conventions such as the “Freedom of Navigation” (FON) principle, championed by the U.S. and other Free World navies.

The aspirations of the five polar nations — Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S. — may also have to contend with the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China.

Perhaps a prudent path for the U.S. and Free World countries to adopt in the Arctic, given Moscow’s comprehensive advance and the China-Russia tandem, would be to maintain its nuclear submarine superiority while closely monitoring Russia’s own Northern Fleet based in the Arctic base of Murmansk. NATO successfully carried out this mission during the Cold War.

Moscow sent a spectacular message last month to the world’s other Arctic powers: Russia is determined to dominate the region. Russian transport aircraft, breaking the record for the highest altitude jump ever, parachuted a group of their Spetsnaz (Special Forces) over the Arctic. from a height of almost 33,000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet). Russian paratroops then executed a military exercise operation before reassembling at the Nagurskoye base, the northernmost military facility in Russia.

Any rival’s attempt to catch up and surpass Moscow’s head start in the Arctic is unlikely to succeed. Russia has a geopolitical advantage in that its sovereign land abuts over half of the Arctic’s territorial waters. Historically, Russia’s czars and commissars were frustrated in their attempts to secure warm-water ports, which would have benefited commerce and military force projection. Now, with environmental warming and subsequent accelerating ice-melt in the Arctic Ocean, Moscow appears poised to control the newest maritime corridor, “the Northeast Passage.” This waterway will unite Russian Europe with Russia’s Far East provinces adjacent to Pacific waters. The “Northeast Passage” could shorten the transshipment of goods from Asian countries to Europe by two weeks, rather than shipping goods through the Suez Canal route.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/29/chinas-communist-regime-shows-its-true-totalitarian-colors/

‘You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” That was Rahm Emanuel’s now-infamous prescription for the Democratic Party following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Now, China’s applying that same dictum globally, as the Wuhan virus ravages nation after nation, freeing Beijing to do its mischief.

For years, Americans of all political stripes operated under the delusion that China, though nominally communist, was becoming more like the West every day. Our massive, but one-sided, trade with the country would bring changes, we thought. An inevitable consumer economy in China would expand, and bring with it ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy.

China would moderate its behavior, the argument went, perhaps eventually easing its military threats against Taiwan, and letting Hong Kong maintain its status as a free-trading city-state outside of Beijing’s direct control.

That was our folly and our delusion, as we’re now finding out.

To begin with, China’s lies at the very beginning of the pandemic show, at best, gross negligence and incompetence, and at worst, intent to murder. As retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently wrote for the Hoover Institution, “Beijing piled lies atop heaps of corpses.”

With the world still distracted by fears of the coronavirus pandemic’s deadly impact and much of the West’s economy shut down, China used the crisis to expand its power by bullying its neighbors, crushing all dissent in Hong Kong, and making not-so-subtle military threats against the U.S.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/south-korea-is-the-pivot-in-the-huawei-wars/

South Korea has told Washington that restrictions on semiconductor sales to Huawei and other Chinese companies are “unacceptable,” according to industry sources. Seoul is trying to mediate between Beijing and Washington following the US Commerce Department’s May 18 announcement that sales of computer chips to companies on its “entity list” will require a license if they are produced with US technology, even if they are produced overseas by foreign companies.

After the US temporarily banned exports of high-end smartphone chips to China’s ZTE Corp in Aprl 2018, Huawei began a crash program to design its own chips. The Commerce Department’s new rules are designed to close what it calls a loophole in US export restrictions, the fabrication of Chinese-designed chips in Taiwan.

The extraterritorial assertion of control over third-party sales of products made with US equipment is unprecedented, and has no basis in international law, South Korea has remonstrated with Washington. China bought almost twice as much from South Korea during the last 12 months as the United States. Sixty percent of all Asian trade stays within Asia, due to tight integration of industrial supply chains. The Korea Times in a May 27 editorial denounced “Washington’s egocentric actions and Beijing bashing,” warning that “a  new Cold War and a trade war will deal a severe blow to Korea.”

President Trump bet the farm on the Huawei chip ban, I argued in a May 22 analysis. The US present has a monopoly on some key chip-making technology, in part because the R&D cost of challenging US companies is huge compared to the size of the equipment market. If the US uses its advantage to suppress technology elsewhere, China and other countries will put the resources required into breaking the US monopoly. China may not be able to buy chips made with US companies, but Chinese companies can hire anyone they want, and Chinese electrical engineers are conducting most of the research in the field. The US may extract short-term advantages, but at the cost of losing one of its last remaining advantages in high tech.

https://spectator.us/norway-health-chief-lockdown-tame-covid/

Norway is assembling a picture of what happened before lockdown and its latest discovery is pretty significant. It is using observed data — hospital figures, infection numbers and so on — to construct a picture of what was happening in March. At the time, no one really knew. It was feared that virus was rampant with each person infecting two or three others — and only lockdown could get this exponential growth rate (the so-called R number) down to a safe level of 1. This was the hypothesis advanced in various graphs by Imperial College London for Britain, Norway and several European countries.

But the Norwegian public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on March 12, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’ Here’s the graph, with the R-number on the right-hand scale:

https://spectator.us/xi-using-fear-covid-crush-hong-kong-autonomy/

The Hong Kong government has recently extended its COVID regulations banning gatherings of more than eight people until June 4. How convenient. Last year, according to organizers, 180,000 people gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989. In future, being an organizer may well land you in court under a new national security law, which Beijing announced last week at its annual National People’s Congress.

Perhaps we should have expected it. After all, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, lays down that the Hong Kong government should enact such a law, and the big party meeting in October told us that the ‘legal systems and implementation mechanisms for protecting national security’ would be set up. But given the recent protests, now did not seem the time to add fuel to the fire. In 2003, the then chief executive Tung Chee Hwa tried, but backed down in the face of 500,000 protesters. Later he resigned on the grounds of ill health, although he is still curiously vigorous in his support of Beijing’s interests.

The General Secretary in Beijing is not for turning. Xi Jinping is a man who doubles down. The attempt to introduce an extradition law in Hong Kong led to massive protests. Beijing allowed HK Chief Executive Carrie Lam to agree only to withdrawing the extradition bill. It gave instructions that continuing protests were to be met with increasingly fierce police tactics — ruining the excellent relations ‘Asia’s finest’ had hitherto enjoyed with the people.