RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/orbans-switch-back-to-the-center-right/

The European election results were fairly clear — the mainstream centrist parties declined again; the Greens and Left-Liberals benefited from this and rose in much of Western Europe; and the populists gained too in France, Poland, Italy, and Hungary, but not quite as well as expected elsewhere. (For a deeper dive into these events and their significance, see my column here). Not all is clear, however. A pall of obscurity hangs over the “populist” parties, not only about what they believe but even about what should they be called.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have written a good book about them — National Populism. While they concede that there are quite deep ideological divides between different parties, arising from their different national political cultures, they put them all into the same box labelled “national populism.” That’s not an unfair label. Indeed, many analysts in the European media, being left-liberal and acting on the principle of “No Friends to the Right,” calls them many much more hostile names.

But the term “populism” reflects the earliest stage in the rise of these parties when they were essentially protest parties angry that remote liberal elites had misgoverned their countries and avoided being held to account for their failures. Populists were then groping towards an understanding of what went wrong and how to put it right. The longer they are around in politics — and most European countries now have populists in their parliaments — they develop more serious analyses and more positive policies. If they don’t manage that, they will eventually disappear as the voters move on from being angry to wanting problems solved. And if they do, we will discover the color of their political philosophy and give them a different and more informative name.

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/washington-is-wrong-about-chinas-economy/

Americans want to believe that their economy is doing well and that China’s economy is doing badly, as President Trump keeps saying. One shouldn’t blame Trump for this – underestimating competitors is America’s national pastime.

A recent embarrassing example was a report by Wells Fargo analyst Roger Read featured on CNBC, claiming that a fall in the growth rate in China’s diesel consumption “is most likely tied to economic factors and the effects of the tariff ‘war’ with the US.”

As physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said, this isn’t even wrong. The fellow from Wells Fargo failed to observe that China’s rail traffic is growing 10%, year-on-year, which is also the rate of expansion of China’s rail network. The more China ships by rail, the less dependent it is on diesel trucks.

The relationship is robust statistically (I’ll spare you the econometrics, which show that lagged values for changes in diesel demand predict changes in rail traffic). The analyst also failed to observe that heavy truck sales reached an all-time record in March 2019, driven by vehicles powered by natural gas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273888/glazov-video-uk-police-escort-muslim-mob-attack-frontpagemagcom

In this new Jamie Glazov Video, Jamie discusses UK Police Escort Muslim Mob to Attack Tommy, and he sheds a disturbing and tragic light on When Britain died.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Tommy Robinson reveal “If They Murdered Me,” where he exposes how the UK authorities deliberately put him in harm’s way:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/boris-johnson-is-being-prosecuted-over-a-campaign-slogan/

Britain’s censors have found yet another silencing tool.

Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

It was also a claim that — like many others made by both sides in the course of the referendum campaign — was not quite as accurate as, shall we say, it might have been. Although it is true that Britain’s notional EU bill was then about £350 million a week (in fact a little more), that figure was quoted before taking account of the annual deduction that Mrs. Thatcher had first secured for the U.K. back in the 1980s and, for that matter, other payments channeled to Britain via Brussels. After adjusting for all that, Britain’s real weekly contribution was probably a little more than half the infamous £350 million.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-chinas-war-on-christians-11559256446

June 4, 1989, was a seminal day for China’s faithful, as the Chinese government massacred thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The same day, Communist Party leaders watched as pro-democracy candidates in Poland supplanted Communist rule—with Pope John Paul II’s indispensable support. Together the events jolted Beijing into tightening its control over religion.

Post-Tiananmen, Christian groups were made to register with state “patriotic” associations or risk punishment as “evil cults.” Anxious to maintain access to Western markets, Beijing selectively enforced these rules in large cities. The rural Christian underground bore the brunt of church closings and mass internment of their members in labor camps.

Chinese Christianity still experienced spectacular growth in the next 30 years. Today there could be well over 100 million Chinese Christians. All but 36 million practice their faith outside government control. Purdue sociologist Fenggang Yang has projected that China could have nearly 250 million Christians by 2030. The Communist Party numbers 90 million.

President Xi Jinping last year began enforcing religious regulations to rein in church growth and bend Christian belief to party dictates. Mr. Xi gave direct control of churches to the officially atheistic Communist Party. Some urban underground megachurches were shut down. Thousands of congregants were arrested and several prominent Protestant pastors received lengthy prison sentences. Earlier this month, the regime launched a nationwide campaign to eradicate unregistered churches.

Mr. Xi calls this policy “sinicization.” The goal is to make religions “instruments of the Party,” the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions asserts. The government confirmed this when it inadvertently posted internal documents—downloaded by ChinaAid, a nonprofit Christian human-rights organization—revealing that it intended to “contain the overheated growth of Christianity.”

Last year in Henan province, 10,000 Protestant churches were ordered shut, even though most were registered with the state. During 2018, more than one million Christians were threatened or persecuted and 5,000 arrested. Among them is an American permanent resident, Pastor John Sanqiang Cao, 60, who is serving seven years for “organizing illegal border crossings” to deliver aid in Myanmar. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/29/investigation-reveals-doubling-nhs-rationing-cataract-surgery/

NHS rationing of cataract operations has doubled in just two years, with patients increasingly denied cases until they are at risk of blindness, an investigation reveals.

Charities warned of “shocking” restrictions, which are in defiance of national guidance.

The figures from across the country show a sharp increase in the number of areas where the NHS is refusing to fund the operations until vision is badly compromised.

It comes despite warnings from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence that the NHS must not rely on sight tests to decide whether surgery is warranted.

Experts say the rise of rationing is leaving vulnerable pensioners in misery and isolation, and increasing their risk of suffering falls.

The research, published in the BMJ, found that in 2018/19, 22 per cent patients in England referred for cataract surgery were forced to go through tests to establish how poor their vision first. This is a rise from 6 per cent in 2016/17.

And almost 2,900 cases were rejected – a rise from 1,301 refusals two years earlier.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/30/hungary-tourist-boat-capsizes-danube-leaving-seven-dead-21-missing/

Hungarian authorities are preparing to salvage the wreck of a sight-seeing boat that sank after a collision on the River Danube in Budapest left at least seven tourists dead and 21 people missing.

The salvage operation forms part of a massive search and rescue mission following the accident that late on Wednesday night when a small sight-seeing boat carrying 33 South Korean tourists and two Hungarian crew members was struck by one of the massive cruise vessels that ply the length of the Danube.

Concerns were raised on Thursday morning that the tragedy had been an “accident waiting to happen”, as the river had become so congested with tourist boats jostling for space on night tours. Hungarian police on Thursday launched a criminal investigation.

The force of the impact in Wednesday night’s collision sent the smaller boat, the Mermaid, to the bottom of the river but left only scratches on the cruise vessel, a hotel ship owned by Viking Cruises. Seven people were pulled from the water with minor injuries but the fate of the others remains unclear.

In Budapest rescuers have enlisted the help of a river mine sweeper to locate the wreck of the Mermaid.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/father-organised-d-day-nation-rallied-support-largest-assault/

In the early hours of June 6 1944, Allied forces launched the largest combined naval, air and land assault ever assembled.  Nearly 7,000 vessels including battleships, destroyers, minesweepers and assault craft poured across the English Channel to land more than 132,000 ground troops across five Normandy beaches.

In all, 18,000 paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines, while 11,590 Allied aircraft flew in support.  “D-Day” simply denoted the date the invasion would commence. The stakes were surmised by how that name would go down in history.

The success of the invasion depended on the courage of those who were required to sacrifice everything for the liberation of Europe. But those brave souls were the tip of a vast planning operation which had been years in the making and strained every sinew of the British war effort.

Responsibility for ensuring the smooth passage of hundreds of tonnes of vehicles and ammunition lay with one man: Major General Sir Leslie ‘Bill’ Williams.

As head of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), he was in charge of operations on D-Day and implementing a plan to shift 380,000 tonnes of ammunition and 190,000 vehicles in the two months following.

In advance of the invasion, he rallied those on the home front in Britain to pack 350m items which would follow the troops over to France. Children, members of the Women’s Institute and those deemed unfit for military service were all recruited for the cause. While diminished by serving troops at the time who nicknamed them ‘blanket stackers’, their efforts were later commended by King George VI, who described it as “a remarkable story”.