RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15930/victimhood-culture-uk-rape

“Almost 19,000 children have been sexually groomed in England in the past year, according to official figures that have prompted warnings of an ‘epidemic’. Campaigners say the true figure is far higher….” — The Independent, December 2019.

“The government’s repeated failure to acknowledge the role of racism and religious bigotry in grooming gang crime has led to inadequate investigation, protection and prosecution,” one survivor, who wanted to remain anonymous, told The Independent in December 2019.

In the era of “victimhood culture”, in which so many groups vie for the top spot of “most victimized”, being an actual victim of sexual abuse apparently has little currency among the social justice elites. Where, for example, are the feminists in all this? Where is the “me too” movement?

As the government is too squeamish publicly to debate the findings of the review, it is bound to be even more terrified of being seen as specifically targeting ethnic rape gangs to stop their crimes — yet that is what victims such as Ella are asking them to do. Not to mention that basic democratic principles of the public’s right to information are being completely disregarded.

In July 2018, Britain’s then Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered a review into the characteristics of child sexual grooming gangs. “The scandal of child grooming gangs is one of the most shocking state failures that I can remember,” he said.

“I will not let cultural or political sensitivities get in the way of understanding the problem and doing something about it. It is a statement of fact… that most of the men in recent high profile gang convictions have had Pakistani heritage… I’ve instructed my officials to look into this unflinchingly.”

The review was long overdue, to say the least. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC that the rape and sexual abuse of underage girls had been “on an industrial scale”: “Young girls… being abused over and over again on an industrial scale, being raped, being passed from one bunch of perpetrators to another bunch of perpetrators”. According to The Independent:

“The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw gangs undertake the organised sexual abuse of children from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act. Rotherham Council finally commissioned an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, which found in August 2014 that some 1,400 children, most of them white girls, were abused by predominantly British-Pakistani men”.

Girls as young as 11 were raped by “large numbers of male perpetrators”.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/the-unelected-cant-wash-their-hands/

“The true measure of all that has been inflicted upon the Australian people will emanate from the above narrow infections/death parameters well after the hysteria around this virus has dissipated. Australians thrown on the scrap heap will not forget. There will be constant reminders of the damage that has been wrought and the misery inflicted, and continuing to be inflicted, upon millions. Public health authorities will not be able to hide behind their corrupted models and their ‘saving lives’ mantras when exactly the opposite is both true and obvious. The attempts now by Australian public health authorities to decouple the ruinous effects of their heavy-handed response from the social and economic fallout will not go unchallenged.”

As the back-slapping of state and commonwealth public health authorities and their politician overlords echoes through the mainstream media the real costs of their misguided approach to managing COVID-19 are starting to emerge. While our politicians and CMO’s daily pronounce their efforts in “flattening the curve” and “saving lives”, they focus as the measure of their self-determined success on two numbers alone — confirmed cases of COVID-19 and associated deaths as the only measures of their success.

The World Health Organisation now concedes the virus is likely to become yet another endemic coronavirus that is here to stay. Antibody prevalence studies from Spain to New York indicate that prevalence of the virus is ten- to twentyfold greater than officially confirmed cases. In Spain this means there are 2.5 million cases, rather than 220,000. To add to the implausibility of containment as a strategy, a whopping 26 per cent of Spanish cases were entirely asymptomatic. The containment strategies have failed and the horse has bolted. Extrapolated globally, this would indicate 50–100 million cases, and that is probably wildly conservative as the virus runs unchecked in many Third World nations. Yet the impact on lives, health and wellbeing through the asphyxiation of the real economy has rippled throughout the whole of Australian society, resulting in an outcome that is profoundly and incalculably negative. The obsession with infections and deaths in assessing the impact of this response is as scientifically absurd as the models that informed it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/europes-anti-lockdown-moment/

The reopening sentiment is spreading, and it’s not all right-wingers who are doing the protesting.

America’s worship of civil liberties was on display as anti-lockdown protests swept from Lansing, Mich., to San Diego, and from Madison, Wis., to Boston’s Beacon Hill. From London to Seine-Saint Denis, from Munich to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a similar defiance of state intrusion is now arising in parts of Europe. As in the United States, the question is still open: Will these protests channel the growing lockdown fatigue into a cogent, constructive case for reopening, or will they descend into paranoia?

A recent hotspot of anti-lockdown fuss has been Germany, where both media and the government have raised the alarm about the far right’s sway in driving people to break the quarantine and social-distancing rules. This past weekend saw radical groups co-opt protests in Dortmund and Munich, where a reporter was attacked and police had to disperse 25 vandals, respectively. A reporting crew from the center-left late-night satirical heute-show was similarly assaulted in Berlin the previous weekend, claiming the popular Moroccan-German comedian Abdelkarim as a victim. Germany’s crippling memory of extremism (so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has a way of penalizing political deviance on the right to this day, and these acts of violence surely didn’t help give the protests a good name in the public eye, either.

Resistance to lockdowns has gotten a bad name in France, too, after a young local from Villeneuve-la-Garenne was thrown off his motorbike and sent to the hospital with a broken leg by a police-car door flung open. The incident sparked a wave of riots across the northern Paris suburbs reminiscent of the three-week-long émeutes in 2005 that saw 8,000 cars set ablaze by restless youths protesting police abuse. The quarantine has brought long-simmering tensions in these largely low-income, immigrant, and poorly housed suburbs to a boiling point, with locals decrying heavy-handed policing, spending cuts in public services, and the unequal impact of school closures that leave low-income kids lacking Internet access with little means to keep up with schoolwork.

https://spectator.us/lives-vs-lives-global-cost-lockdown/

‘There have been as many plagues in history as there have been wars,’ wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ So it was this time. The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. It all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level.

We know the national costs. In the United States, there is joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million unemployed. The Bank of England forecasts the UK economy will fall by 14 percent this year — the steepest decline since 1706. Similar trends can be found across the industrial world. The global economy is veering toward an economic depression not seen for generations.

Yet this argument, to many, seems crass. How consequential is an economic loss in balance when lives at risk from COVID-19 are at stake? Understandably, few find such calculations compelling — and tend to side with those who advocate for prolonged lockdowns lasting for months or more. If this were about lives vs money, it would be easy to understand. But look deeper, and this is about lives vs lives — on a scale that has not, so far, been very much discussed. Lockdown will, on a global level, hit the poorest hardest.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/uk-illegals-migrants-are-medicine-being-imported-katie-hopkins/

You might think Britain has enough problems right now.

Cowering in our homes like sewer rats smelling disinfectant, unemployment quietly sneaking to 20% under cover of the government’s furlough scheme and Boris apparently absent without leave under the spell of Wilfred, his newborn child.

But you would be mistaken.

According to the government and the usual suspects, what Britain needs right now as our economy collapses and our health service runs out of cash is to import a few more problems for the country to deal with. Illegal immigrants are the medicine being imported into this sickly nation.

I watched in disbelief as 50 illegals from Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia were flown into my country this week from crowded migrant camps in Greece.

We were told these were desperate people, ‘refugees’, the ‘most vulnerable’ with severe health conditions, looking to join family member in the UK. But they looked remarkably chipper as they sprang up the steps to board the plane, smiling and waving for the cameras with their new trainers and $250 Apple AirPods in their ears.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-new-coronavirus-thinking-11589498695?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

A strange thing happened in Germany this week: Covid-19 started spreading a bit faster and officials and the public managed to cope. It’s an important benchmark for other governments as they allow their own economies to emerge from viral hibernation.

Scientists at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government’s epidemiological advisory service, calculate that the coronavirus resumed its spread through the population as the country’s lockdown started easing in late April. The reproduction rate, or R0, was above 1 for several days this week, and as high as 1.1 last weekend. That means that each person infected with the virus transmits it on average to 1.1 other people—exponential growth.

This is as much a political event as a medical one. It seems inevitable that the coronavirus will spread as rapidly as any respiratory virus as lockdowns ease. But Chancellor Angela Merkel made a transmission rate of less than 1 a central plank of her reopening plan.

In an April press conference, Mrs. Merkel instructed Germans on precisely how overwhelmed hospitals would become at each level of R0 above 1. The RKI estimated the transmission rate at around 0.8 before Mrs. Merkel started easing the lockdown. Germans were warned that restrictions might return if the disease resumed its spread.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/travel-qed/2020/05/my-days-as-an-outcast-of-the-ocean/

Before my wife and I went cruising we had taken what seemed all the appropriate precautions, checked the government’s advisory website and accepted the cruise line’s assurance we’d be perfectly safe from the Wuhan wog. That proved to be true, but wandering the Pacific in search of a port to accept us was another matter.

The PA came to life: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. On behalf of our flight crew, I welcome you all on board the Qantas repatriation flight, Honolulu – Sydney.”

The cabin, full to the luggage racks with weary, sweaty and anxious Australians from the cruise ship Norwegian Jewel (above), exploded with cheers and clapping. The captain continued: “Every member of our crew is a volunteer. We came to Honolulu to bring you home.” The cheer was louder.

“We volunteered to come for you because we felt that our passengers might be our parents. grandparents, brothers and sisters.

“We are all Australians here”.

The cabin fell eerily quiet after that, many faces streaked with tears. “This is our last flight before most of the Qantas international fleet is grounded. All we ask is that when this is over and you start flying again – remember who came to your help in time of need and, hopefully, you will choose Qantas”.

There was silence. Then someone in the back shouted: “Three cheers for the Captain!” The entire plane responded: “Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!” Another voice, this time a female one: “Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie!” All 300 passengers responded with a deafening “Oi, oi, oi!”

Crew members, standing in the isles for the obligatory safety-briefing intro, were smiling indulgently and singing out themselves. There were cheers for an 18-year-old flight attendant, whose birthday was that day, and for the flight crew. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16016/china-coronavirus-how-the-eu-is-betraying-europe

Chinese ambassadors, particularly those based in Western capitals, simply resort to blackmail, threatening to deny governments vital medical supplies to cope with the pandemic if they do not comply with Beijing’s wishes.

All these countries have good reason to want to stand their ground against Beijing. Italy has been the target of a skilful fake news campaign by Beijing with cleverly edited videos that show Italians showing their gratitude for China’s help in the pandemic when no such demonstrations took place.

The French government was outraged after the Chinese embassy in Paris accused French care-workers of abandoning their posts, thereby causing elderly residents to die; while Germany has complained that Chinese diplomats tried to pressure officials to make positive statements on how Beijing was handling the coronavirus pandemic.

As the EU, by constantly capitulating to Beijing’s demands, has shown it is totally incapable of protecting the interests of member states, the governments of Europe are finally waking up to the reality that, in order to defend themselves against China’s bully-boy tactics, they will have to look after themselves.

The latest capitulation by the European Union in the face of Chinese intimidation demonstrates that, when it comes to protecting the interests of member states, the Brussels bureaucracy is no match for Beijing’s new breed of warrior diplomats.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the more notable features of China’s response has been the willingness of senior Chinese diplomats to intervene forcibly in defence of China’s interests.