RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15871/afghanistan-shady-peace

There are several fundamental problems with the “deal” touted by the administration as a ticket to peace in a land torn by war since the 1970s. To start with, it is not at all certain that the cast of characters that negotiated the “deal” actually do represent the Taliban…. Like the Mafia in Italy, it included a large number of “families” who came together… to set up an “Islamic emirate….” Today, we could identify a dozen groups of different sizes claiming the brand…. The only thing that unites the cartel members is a common dream to recapture Kabul and restore the “emirate” that allowed them to rule their patches of territory as they pleased.

The “deal” itself is a model of dangerous naiveté. It aims at exchanging something tangible and easily verifiable, that is to say the withdrawal of American troops, against something intangible and not easily verifiable in the form of a promise to prevent terrorist acts against American interests. More importantly, there is no mechanism for making the Taliban dealmakers pay for failure to honor it.

Any peace deal should be aimed at finding a place for them within the new Afghanistan, not the other way around, that is to say reshaping this new Afghanistan the way the mullahs want. They should disarm, accept the constitutional frame and seek a share of power through the ballot box.

Next, despite zigzags, the new Afghanistan, though cumbersome, corrupt and chaotic is stumbling forward on the right path; it is far better, or less bad, than anything the Taliban could or would offer…. The US won the war and the Taliban lost. The only way to peace, since the start of history, has been for those who lost to submit to the will of those who won.

Even before he entered the White House, Donald Trump insisted that, as president, he would avoid the policies that led to some of his predecessor Barack Obama’s glaring foreign policy failures. And, yet, he now seems set to pursue one of those failed policies with gusto by embarking on what could lead to a premature disengagement from Afghanistan.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-canadian-way-of-dealing-with-a-pandemic-ineffective-clueless-and-dishonest/

The only thing certain about the etiology of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it originated in and spread from China. Whether the local origin of the disease was a wet market in Wuhan specializing in bat soup or a Chinese lab with inadequate safety protocols is immaterial. The culprit in the lethal melodrama that is being played out around the globe is China.

Yet, if we are to believe many of our politicians and journalists, the good guy working to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 is—you guessed it—China. Some self-serving politicians in the U.S. would like to refer President Trump to the International Court of Justice in the Hague for crimes against humanity for his handling of the crisis—Ohio State Representative Tavia Galonski apparently can’t stomach Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine, which ironically has already saved the life of fellow Democrat Karen Whitsett. A reporter for Phoenix TV tried to put Trump in a bad light by asking whether he was cooperating with China, in her estimation obviously the heroic partner in the struggle. It turns out that Phoenix TV has intimate ties to Communist China and is linked with the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. Joe Biden is a big fan of Communist China and has profited from his family’s business relations with the regime. Trump is beset by those who would like to see him fail in his ongoing effort to find a way between averting economic collapse and maintaining public health. Nonetheless, Americans can remain confident that a responsible president, for all the trials and confusions he must contend with, has their wellbeing at heart and labors tirelessly to provide a solution to the current disaster.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/a-world-turned-upside-down/

Commenting on the course of history, former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is famously quoted as saying, “Events, dear boy, events.” The historian, H.A.L. Fisher, described history as “one damn thing after another”.

The historical record is replete with the unexpected. You might call them black swan events, as has Quadrant contributor Mark Powell. It might be argued that, but for the sudden impact of the coronavirus, the future be completely different. Yet, as in relation to past events, a retrospective on 2020 might conclude that the Western world in particular was on the cusp of a seismic economic, social and cultural shift, and the Wuhan virus provided the catalyst.

Superficially, totalitarian and authoritarian states — China, in particular, the ultimate source and cause of this pandemic — will seek to pretend that they have the pandemic under control and proclaim business as usual. After all, the Beijing regime’s legitimacy rests in part on its ability to hide the human cost of its ideologically driven denial of the coronavirus during those first critical weeks.

Up until now, we have witnessed the curious paradox of a totalitarian state being able to take advantage of an economically borderless world. The self-proclaimed economic purists were so sold on the notion of free trade that they failed to notice the fraud at its core. Donald Trump intuitively recognized what the established paradigm utterly failed to see. At the very least, China may no longer be able to take advantage of a borderless world. Perhaps China, feeling itself increasingly cornered, will become more overtly aggressive. The world, and in particular, our region may become more unstable. Defence preparedness will assume a renewed urgency.

Among all nations, nation-state borders have become the crucial line of defence against COVID-19.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15870/coronavirus-elderly-abandoned

In addition to the ethical questions raised by the rationing of healthcare according to age, the denial of medical attention to the elderly, many of whom have paid into the social welfare system all their lives, also casts a spotlight on the shortcomings of socialized medicine in Southern Europe, where austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank have resulted in massive budget cuts for public healthcare.

In documents leaked to several Spanish media, the Catalan Emergency Medical Service (Servicio de Emergencias Médicas) instructed doctors, nurses and ambulance personnel to inform the families of older patients suffering from coronavirus that “death at home is the best option.” … The protocol also advised medical personnel to avoid referring to the lack of hospital beds in Catalonia.

“My father started working at the age of 14 until he was 65. He never asked for anything. On March 18, he needed a respirator to avoid dying and was denied…. This is the Spain we have. My father’s generation built this country, its reservoirs, roads, agriculture, working 14 hours a day, coming out of a postwar period. And they are being left to die.” — Óscar Haro, YouTube video, March 20, 2020.

In November 2019, two months before the coronavirus first appeared in Spain, the Spanish government revealed that nearly 700,000 patients were on a waiting list for surgeries. Nationwide, patients had to wait on average 115 days to receive surgery; in Catalonia, patients had to wait nearly six months; in Madrid patients had to wait for six weeks.

The severity of the coronavirus crisis in Italy and Spain, where elderly patients are being allowed to die for the benefit of the young, is due in large measure to the austerity measures associated with their membership in the eurozone. The large numbers of dead, especially among the elderly, appears to be the price that Italians and Spaniards are paying to be part of a monetary union which they never should have joined.

With well over a half-million confirmed cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Europe, a growing number of regional medical authorities have begun issuing guidelines and protocols that call for hospitals to prioritize younger patients over those who are older.

In Italy and Spain, the two countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic in Europe, doctors in overwhelmed intensive care units have for weeks been making life or death decisions about who receives emergency treatment. The new protocols, however, amount to government directives that instruct medical personnel effectively to abandon elderly patients to their fate.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/uks-concern-for-boris-johnson-overrides-politics/index.html

Something extraordinary is happening in the middle of this extraordinary crisis. While the physical health of the world is in peril, a new kind of health is emerging in which the emotional connections between people start to strengthen along new, fresh lines. I call this social hfealth.

This can be seen most clearly in the world of politics where old borders and enmities are dissolving. For evidence of this, look no further than my home country, Britain, and the response to the hospitalization due to complications from coronavirus of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I have known Boris for 30 years, from when he was editor of The Spectator, the famous conservative magazine. I was briefly in charge of high-value donor fundraising for the Labour Party and am the daughter of a man so left wing that Bernie Sanders flew over to the UK to give the “Eric Hobsbawm” lecture at the famous Hay Festival.
Boris doesn’t do boundaries. If he likes you, he likes you. If you are not of his political persuasion, no matter. This underscores both his popularity with the public — he won a landslide in the general election in December — and the response to his medical predicament.

When “Boris” (we refer to our leader by his first name, unlike Americans, who seem to refer to theirs by his surname) was taken into St. Thomas’ Hospital opposite the Houses of Parliament last Sunday evening and then moved on Monday night into intensive care, you could almost hear the collective gasp of grief and concern.

In the Daily Telegraph, house Bible of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party and where he was a popular columnist for many years, you would expect the kind of sentiment expressed by Allison Pearson who wrote: “the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic, and by extension, the health of the nation itself. All 66 million of us are metaphorically pacing the hospital corridor, desperate for news.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/recognize-taiwan-to-punish-china-for-the-novel-coronavirus_3306719.html

As we move cautiously to the post-virus phase, many are necessarily considering how to do so. Most obviously, how to revive the economy without jeopardizing our people or, worse, rekindling the pandemic.

Of almost equal importance is how to deal with the country that instigated the world wide epidemic in the first place—Communist China—how to impress upon them that next time they have a viral outbreak they have to be honest, indeed totally transparent about what occurred, even if that means revealing information that is embarrassing to the regime.

We don’t want another disaster with thousands or even millions of deaths across the globe, not to mention enormous financial dislocation in almost every country on Earth.

This would strike at the heart of the CCP’s self-image, humiliating and weakening them in the eyes of the world. It would, in essence, put Communist China in its place and likely even have economic ramifications, making their “Belt-and-Road” initiative less attractive to nations around the globe.

The People’s Republic has always insisted on being the sole representative of China, brow-beating other nations to going along with them with the implication that one day they would either invade or subsume Taiwan anyway.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/italys-prime-minister-says-the-risk-is-real-that-the-eu-could-break-over-coronavirus-pandemic/

The European Union is undergoing unprecedented stress as a result of differences over how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

EU finance ministers have been unable to come to an agreement over how to distribute the debt burden among bloc nations. Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte warns that the risk to European unity as a result of the lack of agreement is real.

Guardian:

“It’s a big challenge to the existence of Europe,” Conte told the BBC. “If  Europe fails to come up with a monetary and financial policy adequate for the biggest challenge since world war two, not only Italians but European citizens will be deeply disappointed.”

Speaking shortly before the ministers started their discussions, Mário Centeno, the former Portuguese minister who is president of the Eurozone group, said the EU needed to build a financial safety net as Europe “dipped into recession” with “all in lockdown, casualties rising by the hour and with no end in sight”.

“We either sink or swim together”, Centeno said as he called on ministers to show the “necessary spirit of compromise”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15869/who-tedros-resign

Rather than criticising Beijing for its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak, Dr Tedros instead praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his “very rare leadership”, and China for showing “transparency” in its response to the virus.

“The W.H.O. really blew it… Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?” — US President Donald J. Trump, Twitter, April 7, 2020.

Why indeed?

As the body responsible for maintaining global health standards, the UN-sponsored World Health Organization (WHO) is supposed to adopt an even-handed approach when dealing with all member states, irrespective of how powerful they might be.

It is for this reason that the blatant pro-China bias the organisation has shown in its response to the coronavirus pandemic has raised a number of serious questions about the WHO’s handling of the crisis.

Under the terms of the WHO’s constitution, which sets out the agency’s governing structure and principles, the Geneva-based organisation is charged with ensuring “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.”

The accusation made by the Trump Administration, that the global body has become “China centric” and has been “biased” in its dealings with Beijing over the pandemic, therefore suggest the organisation has failed in its duty to treat all member states equally.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/peter-hitchens-selective-outrage-bruce-bawer/

Many decades ago, a British couple named Eric and Yvonne Hitchens had two children, both of whom grew up to be prominent journalists and political commentators with strong contrarian streaks. The older son, Christopher, who died in 2011 at age 62, was a lifelong Trotskyite and atheist; the younger, Peter, now 68, went through a period of youthful leftism and unbelief before moving to the right (although he still calls himself a social democrat) and becoming an Anglo-Catholic. There’s one other important difference between the two brothers, and it goes beyond political orientation: while Christopher was a bon vivant of the first water, famous for his wit and charm, who enjoyed cocktails, liqueurs, and a few bottles of wine over dinner and had a glittering circle of friends from all over the political map, Peter is a notorious curmudgeon, wet blanket, moral scold, and full-time blowhard who, on TV or radio or podcasts, seems incapable of making a point succinctly. Also, he has an upper-crust accent that makes Jacob Rees-Mogg sound like Ernest Borgnine in Marty – an accent that, fairly or not, makes him comes off as an unbearable snob. (In fact, his English sometimes ascends to glorious heights of aristocratic mumbling that many a mere American may, at times, struggle to make sense of.)

But let’s come to the point. In recent weeks, Peter Hitchens has been by far the most high-profile critic of the measures instituted in Britain to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In a March 21 column for the Sunday Mail, he asked: “How long before we need passes to go out in the streets, as in any other banana republic?” He accused his government of assuming “grotesque, bullying powers” and of employing “the crudest weapons of despotism,” and charged that his fellow Brits “seem to despise our ancient hard-bought freedom and actually want to rush into the warm, firm arms of Big Brother.” The following Sunday, March 28, he returned to the same topic with equal passion and hyperbole: “As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night, I felt revulsion, anger and grief – as anyone brought up when this was a free and well-governed country would.” Calling Britain under lockdown a “Stasi society,” Hitchens said that he wondered “whether there might also be restrictions on what can be said and published.” Humberside police, he noted with horror, were “already advertising a ‘portal’ for citizens to inform on their neighbours for breaking the ‘social distancing’ rules.” On the third Sunday, April 5, he was back with more of the same.