RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15979/apartheid-coronavirus-lebanon

Many Arabs and Palestinians took to social media to remind everyone that the only apartheid in the Middle East exists in an Arab country [Lebanon].

The latest Lebanese measure did not surprise those who are familiar with this Arab country’s long-standing discriminatory policies of apartheid towards Palestinians.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), “Palestinians in Lebanon cannot work in as many as 39 professions and cannot own property [real estate].”

The Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Samidoun… revealed that Palestinian refugees are “barred from 72 regulated professions, including medicine, public transit, farming and fishery.”

It now remains to be seen whether “pro-Palestinian” groups and individuals in the West will denounce Lebanon for its continued racism and discrimination against Palestinians.

Is Lebanon using the coronavirus pandemic to carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?

A directive issued on May 1 by the Lebanese General Security, an agency responsible for immigration in Lebanon, bars, until further notice, the return of “foreign maids” and Palestinian refugees, even if their families have lived in Lebanon for generations. In the eyes of the Lebanese, there is apparently no difference between a “foreign maid” and a Palestinian Arab.

A Palestinian born and raised in an Arab country, in other words, is still considered by that Arab country to be a foreigner.

The May 1 directive, signed by Brigadier General Walid Oun, director of general security at the Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut, says, “accompanying maids and people of Palestinian descent” may not board Lebanese expatriate evacuation flights. These are Palestinians from Lebanon who left the country to search for work and are now seeking to return home.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/is_iran_going_home.html

Aside from the devastation of the Wuhan virus, Iraq closed its 1,000-mile southern border with Iran for “security reasons” after months of Iraqi protests against Iranian interference in its domestic affairs.  Oil prices flirted with zero in the wake of the Russia-Saudi oil war, and demand dropped owing to the virus, further gutting the treasury.  Iran harassed U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, but according to Navy sources, the action was clearly for domestic consumption and posed no actual threat (although a mistake on either side could have had major repercussions, making President Trump’s warning more than reasonable).  Germany, Tehran’s strongest defender in Europe, pulled the plug on Iran’s proxy army Hezb’allah.  More than 390 members of the U.S. House of Representatives — including Ilhan Omar, not normally an opponent of the Iranian government — called for extending the international arms embargo against Iran, set to expire in October.

Iran’s Quds Day celebration has been canceled.  The rallies and marches, an annual celebration of anti-Semitic glee, with their slogans and speeches and the “death to Israel” chant, will not take place in 2020, although the Iranian public has been assured that the supreme leader will make a speech.

And in Syria, things are blowing up.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15996/china-trade-imbalance

China’s communist leadership quickly recognized that if the U.S. continued to demand economic reciprocity, China could easily lose its ability to claim solo superpower status for the remaining decades of the 21st Century.

China found an “accidental” biological and economic weapon that has the potential to achieve their singular strategic goal: removing a strong and powerful international competitor, the United States.

As Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Soviet state, is reported mockingly to have said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” China’s leaders have long believed that America’s unsustainable trade imbalance with China is that rope. Add the global pandemic crisis introduced by China and Beijing sees victory without an artillery shell being fired.

Like blinders falling from the eyes of those who have long avoided the truth, this new clarity will create a united, engaged, and resolute international community prepared to confront Beijing’s agenda of global dominance.

China’s leaders are shrewd students of history and they apply those lessons every day as they pursue their agenda for global dominance.

For example: They know the decline and fall of the Soviet Union came about not because of military might or the square miles under control. Rather, it imploded because the West, and specifically the United States, used freedom of thought, capitalism and the enormous power of the free market to marginalize, reduce, and collapse the Soviet Union. They simply couldn’t compete on any level with the West. From technology to the quality of life provided for its people, the Soviet Union became a nation without a future. Fortunately, it ended with a tired sigh rather than a nuclear exchange.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/castration-nation-katie-hopkins/

Sometimes I think I need to read this in black and white to actually believe it might be true.

A quarter of the British workforce is sitting at home in its pajamas receiving 80% of its pay, up to a maximum of £2,500 ($3,000) a month, guaranteed by the government until the end of June.

A similar scheme has been put in place for the self-employed.

The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “Since the launch, 800,000 employers have used the Job Retention Scheme to furlough 6.3 million jobs. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that the scheme would cost the Treasury a total £39bn.”

This incredibly over-generous scheme by the British government was grasped at hungrily by big business eager to retain labor without any of the costs.

Even small- and medium-sized business owners, usually reluctant to turn to the state for support and with resilience built into their models, caved to the scheme. It was simply too generous to refuse. The state now holds their employees in its warm embrace, just as with all the rest.

As for the employees, most have been delighted, and with good reason. In their minds, government money is free money, the invisible golden goose in the sky is laying golden eggs to pay for them to stay-cation with their family.

Prohibited from working under the furlough scheme, the need to do any work at all, or to feel any kind of guilt about taking money for doing nothing, has been completely absent from these sedentary fools.

They fail to see that what they are actually gobbling up, along with their takeaways and Netflix box sets, is almost as much cash as it costs to fund our NHS (National Health Service) on a monthly basis.

Talk to any head teacher or NHS manager and they will tell you the same woeful story of “key-workers,” fearful of being asked to work through the lockdown while others sit at home, self-isolating on day one due to “a vulnerable adult at home” showing “symptoms.” Give many the opportunity to do nothing without penalty, and that is exactly what they will do.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15994/coronavirus-europe-china

The equivocation of European leaders is a reflection not only of Europe’s geopolitical weakness and economic overdependence on China, but also of a moral vacuum in which they refuse to stand up for Western values.

Meanwhile, the French government allowed the Chinese telecom company Huawei to supply parts for its 5G mobile network. The concession was made after China threatened to retaliate against European companies in the Chinese market.

“No country with a skerrick of self-respect can allow this behavior to go unpunished. I have already suggested some punitive measures designed to wound the regime’s pride without harming the Chinese people: cancel the Huawei deal; pass a Magnitsky-style Act targeting senior CPC figures; champion the Uyghurs at every opportunity (e.g. rename the London street that houses the Chinese embassy after a Uyghur political prisoner); and recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. All I would add, upon reflection, is this: grant British citizenship to Hong Kongers born before 1 July 1997, their children and grandchildren.” — Scottish political commentator Stephen Daisley.

“We increasingly hear words of admiration in Europe about the speed and efficiency of the Chinese market economy, the rigorous nature of its crisis management. All the time gladly ignoring the fact that China’s successes rest on a highly perfected system of digital surveillance that translates the perversions of the KGB and Stasi into the 21st century.” — Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, Europe’s largest publishing company.

“It is remarkable that German politics, with its love of moralizing, seems to throw its values out the window when dealing with China. What is at stake here is nothing less than what kind of society we want to live in and our concept of humanity.” — Mathias Döpfner.

Australia and the United States are leading a campaign for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Senior officials in both countries are seeking to determine if the virus originated in nature or in a Chinese laboratory. They are also calling on the Chinese government to account for its handling of the initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan.

In Europe, where the pandemic has killed more than 100,000 people and caused economic devastation on a scale not seen since the Second World War, political leaders have been deafeningly silent on demanding accountability from China. While a handful of European officials have agreed in principle that there should be an investigation at some undetermined point in the future, most appear afraid to challenge China directly.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15992/iran-spreading-coronavirus

At the same time that the airline [Iran’s Mahan Air] was flying to China, it also continued operations to other countries in the Middle East, with the result that it has now been accused of spreading the virus to a number of countries including Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and Lebanon. Mahan Air has so far declined to comment on the allegations

Sources within the airline are said to have told the BBC that dozens of Mahan Air’s cabin crew were showing symptoms of Covid-19 after the flights to China, but that when staff tried to raise concerns about the airline’s management of the crisis and provision of safety equipment, they were silenced.

Claims that Iran has been responsible for spreading the virus throughout the Middle East could also have a negative impact on Tehran’s hopes of persuading the International Monetary Fund to provide a $5 billion bailout package. The IMF says the request is still under consideration, but it is unlikely the organisation will be prepared to provide funding to a regime whose irresponsible behaviour threatens the well-being of other countries.

Mounting evidence that Iran has been instrumental in spreading the Covid-19 virus throughout the Middle East adds a whole new dimension to the regime’s already well-established reputation for being a malign influence in the region.

Iran has already acquired the unwelcome distinction of becoming the country in the Middle East that has been worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic, registering more than 6,000 deaths according to official figures. There have, however, been repeated accusations that the Iranian authorities have sought to cover up the true extent of the outbreak, and that the death toll may be twice that number.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-chinese-challenge/

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Over the past decade America has been in denial about China’s emergence as a global power. We couldn’t believe a country that for generations was a byword for poverty could compete with us. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016 we’ve transitioned to anger. As matters stand, we’ll be bargaining before long.

For thousands of years China’s internal weaknesses—natural disaster, famine, plague, civil unrest, and foreign invasion—kept its attention inward. We are now at the greatest turning point in Chinese history since its unification in the 3rd century B.C. China is turning outward—but doesn’t want to rule you. Like the Borg in Star Trek, it wants to assimilate you.

President Trump is right to insist that America’s status quo with China can’t continue. He campaigned against their systemic theft of U.S. intellectual property and the migration of our manufacturing to China. He reversed 20 years of benign neglect toward China’s challenge to our strategic dominance and took vigorous steps to check China’s expansion. But he hasn’t succeeded. Thus far he has addressed symptoms rather than causes. Our trade war with China settled into an uneasy truce by the end of 2019, with modest damage to both economies but no clear winner.

Industrial Revolution

The past year was a watershed. As matters stand the United States will be overtaken by China in the next several years. China is developing its own intellectual property in key areas. Some of it is better than ours—in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, cryptography, and electronic warfare. In other key fields like quantum computing—possibly the holy grail of 21st-century technology—it’s hard to tell who’s winning, but China is outspending us by a huge margin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/freedom-fighters-led-by-american-tried-invading-venezuela-11588722164

BOGOTÁ, Colombia—Seasick and vomiting aboard fishing boats packed with guns, ammo and two-way radios, the ragtag band of fighters—including two American veterans of the Iraq war—made their way from Colombia to the Caribbean coast of Venezuela.

But their plan to arrest Venezuela’s authoritarian government and free political prisoners collapsed before they hit shore. The two-boat invasion force, made up mostly of Venezuelan military defectors, ran into helicopter gunships, snipers and even irate fishermen.

The Venezuelan government said it has captured 13 “terrorists” and killed another eight.

“They were playing Rambo,” crowed President Nicolás Maduro during a TV address as he held up the passports of the two detained Americans. On Twitter, the botched raid was quickly dubbed “The Bay of Kids,” a modern-day version of the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs landing in Cuba.

On Tuesday, questions were swirling around the true nature of the amphibious landing as soldiers mopped up what was left of the tiny invading force that, according to President Trump, had received no U.S. support.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/caught-with-his-pants-down/

Today was the best day for me so far as this absurdly heavy-handed lockdown is concerned.  I woke to read the immensely satisfying news about Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College – the man who headed the team that modelled the impact of this coronavirus and came up with the apocalyptic prediction that over two million Americans and half-million Brits, give or take a hundred thousand here or there, would die unless immediate and severe lockdown steps not implemented and enforced.  Leave aside that nothing remotely like what he and his team predicted has transpired in Sweden (where they ignored his advice to lockdown and just urged the old and vulnerable to isolate themselves while keeping restaurants, bars, the general economy open) or Taiwan (ditto) or Japan (mostly ditto).

No, what was absolutely delightful and cheered me up no end was that Professor Ferguson had resigned  from the main “scientific” committee advising the UK government. I’ve used scare quotes because a good number of the people on the committee are not hard scientists.

Why did Ferguson resign?  You will just love this:  it turns out the scientist/modeller whose advice has played a biggish part in the world’s response to this corona virus, and who has been insisting for months that all and sundry must observe the strictest of government lockdowns, had himself been ignoring them. During the lockdown he ardently advocated he was bonking his mistress, the married Ms. Antonia Staats, who would sneak away to meet him for a bit of face-to-face lockdowning and viral exchanges with the man who massively and repeatedly over-estimated things viral in the past, like BSE’s effects and foot-and-mouth too.  The unlockdowned married mistress Ms. Staats would travel across London to catch up with her virile virus predictor and have his greatness thrust upon her.

The point here isn’t that Professor Ferguson was married (though he was, but maybe separated).  Nor is it that his carnal compadre, a green left activist climate-change alarmist,  was herself married (though she was).  No, no, no!  The point is that these authoritarian types who are happy to impose heavy-handed rules on you and me aren’t prepared to live by those rules themselves.  One set of rules for you.  Another, much preferable set, for them.