RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15478/turkey-truthophobia

The ways through which the Turkish state silences dissent are typical of the unfree world.

A clear majority of Turks think that their rights are systematically violated and that they are not equal before law. Then half of them keep voting for Erdoğan (and his allies). These two facts point to a third, and unpleasant conclusion: Millions of Turks know that their country is not free and just, but they keep voting for the leader who is responsible for the gross democratic deficit…

This is a bad message to Erdoğan: You will keep winning votes no matter how maliciously you crush dissent. We are with you and your undemocratic rule.

In 2014 the government of Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan banned YouTube and Twitter, fearing that millions of young Turks could otherwise read “dangerous content” on social media. The Constitutional Court declared the bans unconstitutional. In 2017, the Turkish government banned Wikipedia. That ban was removed only recently, after two and a half years. It is not that Wikipedia is a reliable source of information. Banning it altogether is a rogue state behavior. It is not, however, only about Wikipedia: in Turkey, truth, regardless of its source, is feared and often banned.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15483/animal-cruelty-beheaded-christians

The Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria described the area as “killing fields”, like the ones the Khmer Rouge created in Cambodia to exterminate the population.

“We are Aramaic people and we don’t have this right to have anyone protect us? Look upon us as frogs, we’ll accept that — just protect us so we can stay in our land”. — Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf, the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, home to many of the Christians who fled jihadis, National Catholic Register, April 7, 2017.

In an era of round-the-clock information… the abominations suffered by Christians have been left without images, while the brutality against the Chinese pig was streamed all over. Christians are an endangered species; pigs are not.

One of the last Nigerian Christians was executed by an Islamic State child soldier. Slaughterhouses’ workers go on trial in France for abuses to animals. But the same France has already repatriated more than 250 ISIS fighters, the same people who turn Iraqi churches into slaughterhouses.

First there was the beheading of 11 Nigerian Christians during the recent Christmas celebration. The next day, a Catholic woman, Martha Bulus, was beheaded in the Nigerian state of Borno with her bridesmaids, five days before the wedding. Then there was a raid on the village of Gora-Gan in the Nigerian state of Kaduna, where terrorists shot anyone they met in the square where the evangelical community had gathered, killing two young Christian women. There was also a Christian student killed by Islamic extremists who recorded his execution. Then pastor Lawan Andimi, a local leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria, was beheaded.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51048366?utm_source=pocket-newtab

A virus – previously unknown to science – is causing severe lung disease in China and has also been detected in other countries.

More than 80 people are known to have died from the virus, which appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December.

There are already almost 3,000 confirmed cases, and experts expect the number will keep rising.

A new virus arriving on the scene, leaving patients with pneumonia, is always a worry and health officials around the world are on high alert.

Can this outbreak be contained or is this something far more dangerous?

Coronavirus: Your questions answered

Wuhan: The London-sized city where the virus began

China coronavirus: What we know so far

What is this virus?

Officials in China have confirmed the cases are caused by a coronavirus.

These are a broad family of viruses, but only six (the new one would make it seven) are known to infect people.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which is caused by a coronavirus, killed 774 of the 8,098 people infected in an outbreak that started in China in 2002.

“There is a strong memory of Sars, that’s where a lot of fear comes from, but we’re a lot more prepared to deal with those types of diseases,” says Dr Josie Golding, from the Wellcome Trust.

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.