RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-censorship-helps-spread-the-virus-11580071968?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Xi Jinping has acknowledged that the “accelerating spread” of a new coronavirus from the central Chinese city of Wuhan is a “grave situation.” To stop the virus’s spread, the Chinese government has barred residents of Wuhan and nearby cities from traveling and blocked outbound flights, trains, buses and ferries. But if this develops into a catastrophe, the cult of personality around Mr. Xi and the Communist regime’s efforts to control information will deserve much of the blame.

For a precedent, look back to 1918, when the Spanish flu broke out amid World War I. In the U.S., government officials and the press did all they could to play it down lest it hurt the war effort. While the Los Angeles health chief declared there was “no cause for alarm” and the Arkansas Gazette described the disease as the “same old fever and chills,” people were dying by the thousands.

The name “Spanish flu” was a misnomer. In the countries where it originally surfaced—France, China and the U.S.—the news was suppressed by censorship and self-censorship to maintain wartime morale. (China sent only civilian laborers to the battlefield, but it declared war on Germany in August 1917.) Not until King Alphonse XIII of neutral Spain fell ill did news of the virus spread widely.

Between the spring of 1918 and early 1919, three waves of Spanish flu tore across the planet, facilitated by censorship and secrecy. The results were catastrophic: 50 million people were killed world-wide, including nearly 700,000 Americans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_obamaclintoninduced_mess_in_libya_continues_to_grow.html

The chaos that the Obama-Clinton diplomacy unleashed in Libya continues to grow. It started when U.S.-French-NATO-led military intervention toppled Col. Moammar Qaddafi in 2011. After his government fell, Qaddafi was then beaten and sodomized with a bayonet by an irate mob of Libyans before being shot to death. This prompted our illustrious Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to show the class she is noted for by crowing, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Yes — Qaddafi, who was no threat to America, died. But so did any semblance of stability in Libya and the ensuing chaos still reverberates to this day. Due to the power vacuum created by Qaddafi’s abrupt removal, Libya has now become a battleground for proxies motivated by Libya’s oil wealth and fighting for geopolitical influence and over ideological differences. The country is a confusing mess. Here is a thumbnail sketch to sort out the parties currently involved.

Tripoli is the seat of the provisional government. It is backed by the United Nations and is supported by Turkey, which has over 1,000 troops there along with another 1,200 or so battle-hardened Syrian fighters. 

On the other side is the warlord Khalifa Hifter, a former Libyan army general. He is backed by Russia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is reported that Russia has brought in about 1,500 mercenaries. These include skilled snipers and personnel to guide artillery and air support.  This situation is dangerous and could lead to a direct conflict between Turkey and Russia.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15376/eu-integration-report

It is worth noticing that the European Commission places the responsibility for integration of third-country nationals exclusively on the shoulders of EU member states.

The most conspicuous aspect of the report is how it insists that integration of people who have come mainly from the Middle East and Africa is merely an issue of ensuring that the rights that they are entitled to under EU and national laws be fulfilled and everyone will live happily ever after. It takes a lot of denial of the facts to reach such a conclusion….

First, the report appears to operate on the premise that EU countries have unlimited resources at their disposal with which to care for third country nationals. It completely ignores, for example, that countries such as Sweden, as a result of the high number of migrants that they have taken in, are now experiencing financial hardships that make it difficult even properly to take care of their own nationals.

Second, the report completely disregards how poorly the project of multiculturalism in Europe, including the integration of people from the Middle East and Africa, has fared until now.

The Six Country Immigrant Integration Comparative Survey… conducted 9,000 telephone interviews in Germany, France, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and Sweden. The respondents were Turkish and Moroccan immigrants. Two thirds of the Muslims interviewed said that religious rules were more important to them than the laws of the country in which they lived.

The EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights instead has chosen to ignore reality. The question is why.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights recently published a report in which it warned Europe against creating a “lost generation” of migrants aged 16-24, who had arrived in Europe between 2015 and 2018. The report focuses particularly on the experiences of those young people who arrived in 2015-16 and looks specifically at the five EU member states with the most asylum applicants: Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. The report also includes Greece, as it is a first EU member state of arrival.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/righteous_anger_vs_politics_as_usual.html

There is anger and then there is righteous anger. Peter Finch yelling out the window, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

From Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, where parts of a whole are coming undone, to Hong Kong to Puerto Rico to France and Venezuela, people are mad as hell.

Consider Lebanon. Independent in 1943, but occupied by Syria from 1975-2005, and brought into Iran’s orbit through the creation of Hezb’allah in the early 1980s, the same constellation of politicians have held power since the end of the civil war in 1990. Americans appear to worry most about the security implications of Hezb’allah, a U.S.-designated terror organization with its own army and a drug/weapons/money racket in South America, pulling strings in Beirut. And worry, too, about the U.S. armed and trained Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), working alongside and sometimes in cooperation with Hezb’allah. Hassan Nasrallah calls the LAF “a partner.”

But how did Lebanon come to this point and why are people angry now?

Multiethnic and multicultural, Lebanese politics are sliced into sectarian segments; you are Druze or Shiite or Maronite Christian. The government has no national commitments, only confessional ones, which makes it easy to set one group against another, leaving the best-armed and richest on top, i.e., Hezb’allah. That is also a recipe for corruption — take care of your own and the devil take the rest, also the devil is the rest.  Lebanon ranks 147th out of 183 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Index. There are 6-7 million Lebanese (numbers vary widely because so many live abroad). Government debt is $89.5 billion and interest payments consumed 48 percent of domestic government revenues in 2016. The debt-to-GDP ratio is 151% with an annual growth rate of negative 0.2 percent for 2019. The Lebanese pound has lost more than 60 percent of its value in recent weeks on the black market. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15414/sweden-welfare-crisis

Within a generation, Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, will have a population in which the majority of people are of foreign background. How will integrating immigrants take place then, and which group will be integrated into which?

At the same time, many children born in Sweden learn Swedish so poorly that they cannot really speak it, because there is not enough Swedish spoken in some preschools and grade schools. This change is unfolding at a rapid pace.

It is not just Swedish society that will look radically different within a decade. The Swedish welfare state, which has been the hallmark of the Swedish state around the world, is also changing or possibly even being phased out.

The Swedish welfare state has often been praised by the left in the United States. After the migration crisis of 2015, however, when Sweden was flooded by Syrian refugee claimants, Sweden is now facing a welfare crisis that threatens the entire Swedish welfare state model.

Sweden had 9.7 million inhabitants in 2015, before it received 162,000 asylum seekers. 70% of those asylum seekers came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. 70% of those asylum seekers were also men. The migration crisis created an unsustainable financial and social situation that caused the Swedish political establishment to rethink its stance on asylum migration, which, until then, had been extremely liberal.

Asylum migration has continued, nevertheless. Between 2016 and 2018, more than 70,000 additional migrants have applied for asylum in Sweden, and more than 105,000 asylum migrants have been granted asylum.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/after_his_behavior_at_davos_did_prince_charles_snub_pence_in_jerusalem.html

Although it’s hard to imagine now, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Prince Charles had a sort of glamour about him, a mixture of sophisticated playboy and Prince Charming. He was good looking(ish), athletic, and handled himself well at state affairs. His stock went up even higher when he married Lady Diana, a vapid young woman who wore clothes well and managed to catch the world’s imagination.

They were an ill-suited couple. He fancied himself an intellectual and she was a publicity-hungry, walking emotional wound. Their marital battles revealed him to be a sleazy, entitled, unkind, boring, pompous, unfaithful lout. When Diana died, Charles re-fashioned his image. He was the good father to his boys, and he got to marry the woman he loved, the horsey, but good-natured, Camilla.

Camilla or not, Charles is still a pompous, hypocritical boor. His latest unpleasant behavior involves climate change and, possibly, Vice President Pence. When it comes to climate change, Charles made obeisance to the shrill, neurotic Greta Thunberg and endorsed plans to destroy the world economy — but he still doesn’t think the socialist belt-tightening that goes with climate change applies to him (emphasis added):

Prince Charles demanded global green taxes as part of a radical push to tackle climate change in a seminal speech at Davos today.

The Prince of Wales met Greta Thunberg at the Word Economic Forum after flying in to Switzerland on a private jet – but did not hold talks with Donald Trump.

Charles even sounded like the 17-year-old Swedish activist as he asked VIPs: ‘Do we want to go down in history as the people who didn’t do anything to bring the world back from the brink? The only limit is our willingness to act and the time to act is now’.

He then begged delegates, including wealthy global business leaders: ‘This is why I need your help, your ingenuity and your practical skills to ensure that the private sector leads the world out of the approaching catastrophe into which we have engineered ourselves.’

Speaking just 24 hours after President Trump used his speech to reject environmental ‘prophets of doom’, Charles called for new eco-taxes, greener fuels and hydrogen-powered planes by 2030.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/interesting_things_are_happening_in_iran_following_soleimanis_death.html

When President Trump ordered the military to strike Qassem Soleimani, a legitimate military target responsible for the deaths of hundreds of troops, Democrats were up in arms. How dare Trump bait the Iranians by striking someone so close to Ayatollah Khamenei? They were certain that Trump had just ignited World War III.

Republicans were more confident that the strike would, at the very least, remove a dangerous character from the Iranians’ forty-year-long war against America and, at the best, topple the regime. This last belief was based upon the fact that the Iranian regime is fragile now that Trump walked away from Obama’s terrible Iran Plan and reinstated sanctions. The economy is collapsing and people all over Iran are coming out in protest. After forty years of a repressive theocracy, the Persian people, a people accustomed to beauty and life, have had their fill of Islam’s cruel puritanism.

Michael Ledeen, an experienced foreign policy observer, thinks that the Republicans may have been correct because there are strange doings in Iran – all good if one wants to see that abysmal regime collapse:

The elimination of Qassem Soleimani has produced surprising results. It turns out that the United States received intelligence on Soleimani’s movements from a variety of sources, some within his Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, others from Israel’s vaunted intelligence apparatus. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15474/libya-erdogan-muslim-brotherhood

The concern now is that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will use the failure of international mediators to end the fighting to intensify his support for the GNA, thereby strengthening the position of the numerous Islamist militias that are backing the UN-backed body.

Mr Erdogan was an ardent supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood when it held power in Cairo, and there is mounting concern, especially in Europe, that the Turkish leader has now set his sights on establishing a similar regime in Libya.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to intervene militarily in the Libyan conflict not only raises the prospect of the conflict entering a new and more dangerous phase; it also promises to provide a significant boost for the Islamist militias that are vying to take control of the country and establish a Muslim Brotherhood-style government in Tripoli.

Mr Erdogan’s justification for sending Turkish troops to Libya, which has the backing of the Turkish parliament, is to provide support for Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj, the head of the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA).

The GNA is under enormous pressure as a result of the offensive being undertaken by General Khalifa Haftar, the rebel Libyan leader who, with the backing of Russia, France and the United Arab Emirates, has overrun large swathes of the country and is now attempting to seize control of the Libyan capital.

The strength of Gen. Haftar’s position was graphically demonstrated earlier this week when Haftar’s forces seized control of Libya’s vital oil production facilities on the outskirts of Tripoli, a move that has cut output to almost zero.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15467/eu-stance-iran-mullahs

It is worth noting that, the EU did announce a positive step. In light of the revelations concerning Iran’s assassinations plots, minor sanctions were imposed on sectors of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, as well as on Saeid Hashemi Moghadan, the deputy intelligence minister.

However, these do not go nearly far enough, particularly if the EU is inclined to continue its support for the JCPOA.

It is incumbent upon the EU to stop softening its tone toward the Islamic Republic, and instead join the Trump administration in imposing maximum pressure on the ruling mullahs of Iran. The more the EU appeases the Iranian government, the more it empowers it to pursue aggressive and terrorist activities.

The European Union really needs to do two things as soon as possible: stop criticizing the Trump administration for its Iran policy, and halt its appeasement policies toward the ruling mullahs of Iran who have committed some of the worst crimes against humanity, not only in Iran but abroad.

On January 19, 2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated their commitment to keep Iran nuclear deal alive. Europe has been working to implement a special purpose vehicle that will allow countries to continue trading with Iran, despite US sanctions, known as INSTEX.