RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15923/iran-struggle-oil-price

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has tried to put a brave face on the latest setback to hit the regime, claiming that Iran is unlikely to suffer as much as other countries from the oil price drop because it is less reliant than others on crude exports.

If that were truly the case, then Tehran would not be asking the IMF for a bailout, and Mr Rouhani, together with Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister, would not be begging Washington to remove sanctions.

The truth of the matter is, for all the regime’s attempts to claim it has everything under control, that the country is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the ayatollahs are fast running out of options to save themselves.

At a time when Iran’s Islamic regime is already facing unprecedented pressure over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as its disastrous handling of the economy, the global slump in oil prices could well prove to be the final straw for the ayatollahs.

Even before this week’s dramatic collapse in global oil prices, which saw the key gauge of U.S. crude prices, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark, tumble into negative territory for the first time in history, the mullahs were already under intense pressure over their catastrophic running of the country during their four decades in power.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/facing-new-crises-macron-repackages-old-bad-ideas/

The French president sees COVID-19 as yet another opportunity to deepen European integration.

At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.

Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”

They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.

In his view, the interviewers report, COVID-19 represents an opportunity to put an end to the “hyper-financialized world,” a phantom that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of communitarians, academics who refer to “late capitalism,” and European politicians. (Recall that, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an earlier French president, Nicolas Sarkozy — seemingly oblivious to the political and economic developments of the previous hundred years — announced that laissez-faire capitalism was “finished.”)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/katie-hopkins-video-life-under-lockdown-uk-frontpagemagcom/

Britain’s freedom fighter unveils The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

[This video is brought to you by a David Horowitz Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration. Please help the Freedom Center continue to bring you these vital perspectives on the news – perspectives that you won’t find anywhere else. Donate to the Freedom Center HERE.]

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

This new Glazov Gang episode features Katie Hopkins, U.K.’s freedom fighter. Katie unveils Life Under Lockdown in the U.K., shedding a sober and telling light on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/gordon_chang_calls_the_coronavirus_probably_a_deliberate_leak_and_probably_an_act_of_war_.html

We had a Zoom meeting with China expert Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, last night and learned that Chang thinks the “release” of the coronavirus into the public sphere was either “accidental,” which he disputes, or deliberate, to gain a march on the U.S., which is out of favor and being degraded and derided by the important media and groups in China.

In other words, it was no “wet market” selling bats for soup.  It was, as some have been saying for…months, the Level 4 Biolab, which failed U.S. inspection as far back as 2018, in safety protocols as a Level 2 hazard, rather than a Level 4 safety security, making it likelier that such haphazard safeguards could readily enable a leak or two.  Refrigerator seals crucial to containment were…breached.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Chang warns, is no friend of the United States.  Nor must we rely on him for any of our vital supply lines.

Although unquestionably at the top of the Mainland ladder, now, Chairman Xi, who leads the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, is not a guaranteed lifelong mainstay of the party or the country, as he has been lauded after jockeying himself into the permanent seat a few scant years ago — as there are tectonic rumbles against his leadership evident to observers today.

In keeping with this observation, Chang says we must stop giving China our business, particularly in critical arenas like pharmaceuticals, and stop behaving favorably toward China, as we do with our allies.  Chang repeats that this entire coronavirus saga, over months of death, infection, fear, and barely managed emergency, is nothing short of an all-out war.  Xi knew of, and tried to maximize, our dependency on China to resupply our personal protective equipment and other necessities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15915/coronavirus-west-911-moment

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on…. Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

For decades China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.

China’s arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.

Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5’s repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.

The coronavirus pandemic is a 9/11 moment. Al Qaida had been at war with the West for years before the destruction of the twin towers. But it took that barbarism to galvanise its largely supine prey into action.

Now we have Covid-19. Unlike 9/11 we have seen no evidence so far that China deliberately unleashed this virus on the world. There is certainly evidence, however, that it resulted from the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and that Beijing’s habitually duplicitous and criminally irresponsible actions allowed it to spread around the globe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on. The reality, in Beijing’s book, is that the cold war between China and the West, which began with the communist seizure of China in 1949, never ended. Despite the Sino-Soviet split and subsequent US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, for the Chinese leadership the US was still the implacable enemy.

Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15916/coronavirus-belgium-carnage

There were no masks, so the government decided to announce that no masks were needed. This supreme culmination of the ineptitude of the Belgian government still can be found online on the personal website of Health Minister Maggie De Block: “Wearing masks to protect yourself from the coronavirus makes little sense”.

No masks, no screening, almost no tests and people left to die in nursing homes — that has been Belgium’s situation in the middle of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Influenza of 1918. This Belgian carnage is entirely due to the tragic incompetence of the Belgian governing “elites” — and was completely avoidable.

It is too soon to make a final assessment on the management of COVID-19 by the countries of the world, but one thing is sure: Belgium is in the middle of a great carnage.

It all began in 2015, when the government of Prime Minister Charles Michel (today’s European Council president) decided to destroy Belgium’s entire “strategic stock” of 63 million protective face-masks, including the precious FFP2 type — 1,200 pallets carefully stored and guarded by the army in the Belgrade Barracks, in Namur. Because they were “out of date,” said Minister of Health Maggie De Block, who is still on the job today. “Not at all,” said the main union of the Belgian army, “these masks were incinerated… to ‘make room’ for housing refugees.” In 2015, Belgium and Europe were overwhelmed by migrants at the invitation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the laws of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights made it effectively impossible to reject them.

The entire strategic stock was thus incinerated, and never replaced — another decision of De Block, which, given the regularity of epidemics and pandemics, amounts to a crime. “To govern is to foresee”, said Emile de Girardin.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/un_shocked_shocked_that_iran_would_execute_a_17yearold.html

Taking a break from blaming Little Satan (Israel) and Big Satan (USA) from all the world’s problems, now the Wuhan, China coronavirus pandemic, the U.N. did something shocking.  Yes, just when you thought you couldn’t be shocked by the U.N.’s incompetent, bizarre behavior, the U.N. fools you and shocks once again.  What did it do that was so shocking?  The U.N. was shocked, shocked, shocked to learn:

UN experts ‘shocked’ as Iran executes young offender

GENEVA, Switzerland — United Nations rights experts accused Iran of violating international law on Tuesday for executing a prisoner who was just 17 years old when he committed a crime.

Shayan Saeedpour, alleged to have committed murder in August 2015, was hanged on Tuesday, United Nations special rapporteurs Javaid Rehman and Agnes Callamard in a statement. (snip)

“We are shocked that the Iranian authorities have once again defied their international obligations by executing a child offender,” the UN experts said.

“We have repeatedly reminded the Iranian government and judiciary that international human rights law is clear: the application of the death penalty to child offenders is strictly prohibited and its practice is an egregious violation of the right to life.”

What?  The U.N. is shocked to learn that Iran has “once again defied [its] international obligations” and expects the Iranians to obey “international human rights law”?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-laboratories-in-wuhan-11587486996?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Mr. Cotton, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Arkansas.

The U.S. government is investigating whether the Covid-19 virus came from a government laboratory in Wuhan, China. The Chinese Communist Party denies the possibility. “There is no way this virus came from us,” claimed Yuan Zhiming over the weekend. Mr. Yuan is a top researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. He is also secretary of the lab’s Communist Party committee. He accuses me of “deliberately trying to mislead people” for suggesting his laboratory as a possible origin for the pandemic.

Beijing has claimed that the virus originated in a Wuhan “wet market,” where wild animals were sold. But evidence to counter this theory emerged in January. Chinese researchers reported in the Lancet Jan. 24 that the first known cases had no contact with the market, and Chinese state media acknowledged the finding. There’s no evidence the market sold bats or pangolins, the animals from which the virus is thought to have jumped to humans. And the bat species that carries it isn’t found within 100 miles of Wuhan.

Wuhan has two labs where we know bats and humans interacted. One is the Institute of Virology, eight miles from the wet market; the other is the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, barely 300 yards from the market.