RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/swedens-covid-death-rate-now-ten-times-higher-than-norways/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

There have now been ten times as many COVID-19 deaths in Sweden than Norway on a per capita basis.

According to the Worldometers website, 435 out of every one million Swedes have died from the virus, while the virus has killed 44 out of every million Norwegians.

Norway imposed a lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus early on March 12, but the country reopened schools early in May. “Our goal is that by June 15 we will have reopened most of the things that were closed,” Norway’s prime minister said at a press conference earlier this month.

Its neighbor Sweden, by contrast, took a more lax approach: The government banned events with more than 50 people and shut down universities and secondary schools but imposed few other restrictions.

Swedish government officials said lockdowns could do little to save lives over the long term and that their more lax approach would let their society reach herd immunity more quickly and lessen the economic pain the country would endure. “About 30 percent of people in Stockholm have reached a level of immunity,” Karin Ulrika Olofsdotter, the Swedish ambassador to the United States, told NPR on April 26. “We could reach herd immunity in the capital as early as next month.”

https://justthenews.com/world/europe/denmark-finland-say-they-saw-no-increase-coronavirus-after-schools-re-opened

The Nordic countries of Denmark and Finland are reporting no increase in the spread of coronavirus since opening their respective schools, further suggesting that children are less likely to be sickened by COVID-19 and spread the virus. 

Denmark began sending its children back to school on April 15, just over a month after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen issued an extensive nationwide lockdown. They were kept spaced apart in classrooms and on playgrounds, while sanitation measures such as hand-washing stations and deep-cleaning procedures were put into place. 

Similar measures were put into place in Finland to keep children from congregating in large groups. The country’s education minister, Li Andersson, predicted that reopening schools would “have a minimal impact on the pandemic, but grand benefits for children.”

Both countries say the pandemic has not spiked since schools re-opened. Cases and deaths in Denmark appear to have peaked in early April. Finland’s infection rate appears to have peaked around the same time, though its death rate remained almost entirely flat throughout the pandemic, aside from two one-day spikes late last month. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/killing-your-own-neighbors-uzay-bulut/

A Turkish pro-government writer recently threatened the political opposition in the country and her own neighbors with death on national TV.

On May 3, Sevda Noyan said on Ülke TV that in the event of a coup attempt, her family can kill at least fifty people, including some neighbors. She said she made a list of people to kill.

Referring to the events following the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, when many supporters of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan took to the streets upon the president’s call to defend the government, Noyan said:

“We couldn’t do what we exactly wanted [on July 15, 2016]. We got caught unprepared.

“Do not get it wrong; get it right,” she continued. “My family alone can take down about fifty people. We are very well equipped materially and spiritually. We stand by our leader; we will never let him be thrown to the wolves in this country. Let them watch their steps. There are 3-5 [neighbors] in my gated community; my list is ready.”

The moderator of the show, Esra Elönü, supported Noyan, saying: “They should watch all their steps.”

Following the coup attempt in 2016, many people were arrested and jailed in Turkey for allegedly “helping stage the coup attempt.”

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.