RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/surprise_iaea_finds_uranium_traces_in_tehran_where_netanyahu_told_them_to_look.html

Samples taken by investigators from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency at the so-called “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran — where Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them to look — have come up glowing.

Iran has yet to explain those traces of uranium, says the nuclear watchdog agency, according to two diplomats who are tightly connected with the agency’s inspection work

According to Reuters, a quarterly IAEA report issued a week ago did not mention the sample results because inspection-related matters are highly confidential. But it did say Iran’s cooperation could be better.

Better.  Uh…  yeah!  And so could IAEA’s communications, not to say honesty, on the matter, even with the need for secrecy.  But don’t expect it.  

 Although Prime Minister Netanyahu is too restrained and too diplomatic while President Donald Trump  is not, now that both have been more than vindicated, they should crow loudly “I told you so!  I told you so! Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!”  And then demand more information on what Iran is really doing.  And demand more access from Iran.  And demand other countries condemn and also restrain Iran.  

https://www.steynonline.com/9726/johnson-vs-johnson

Across the continent and an ocean, Westminster continues to be roiled by Brexiteers and Remoaners locked, like the latter seasons of Dynasty, in ever more demented plot twists. Today Her Majesty’s Government suffered its first resignation since Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister. The Minister for Universities and Science quit, and is leaving Parliament. His name is Jo Johnson. Any relation? Why, yes. He’s Boris’ brother. In the normal course of events, no normal person knows who the Minister for Universities is, or indeed that such a post exists, or, if aware of this grand office, what the chap who holds it does all day long: He ain’t a heavy, he’s his brother – that’s all. But the junior Johnson, a Remainer, has walked out on the senior Johnson, a Leaver, so it’s the biggest thing since Cain fired his Secretary of State for Sheep-Herding. Boris was his brother’s keeper, but he couldn’t keep him. So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain.

~All sides are throwing around media accusations of “constitutional outrage”, ever since Boris got the Queen to prorogue Parliament and was instantly ungraded from PM to Caudillo of the new dictatorship. I am more sympathetic to the charges against his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, has been claiming for months to want a general election. Indeed, there is no reason not to have one. On Tuesday the Prime Minister formally lost his majority, when some Tory nobody I’d never heard of crossed the floor and became a Liberal. So Boris and his team cannot govern. Indeed, even their minority is shrinking by the hour, as he removes the whip, expels and deselects those who vote against him on Brexit.

And yet Corbyn voted down Boris’ motion for a general election – because the Opposition Leader is determined to force the Government to enact not its own but the Opposition’s policy, by making Boris go to Brussels, grovel, and beg for another extension of Britain’s zombie membership in the European Union. To put it in American terms, the legislative branch wants to maintain the executive branch in power purely as its dead-eyed sock puppet. That is certainly a constitutional abomination, and, cautious as she is in such matters, I have no doubt the Queen regards it as such.

https://youtu.be/VzpaMf3pZGU

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14827/christians-massacred-media-ignore

“In the same week as the awful attack on the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand… more than two hundred Christians were killed in Nigeria. There was hardly any mention of the latter in the news. There were no marches for martyred Christians, no tolling of church bells ordered by governments, no ‘Je suis Charlie’ t-shirts… no public outrage at all.” — Fr. Benedict Kiely, Crisis Magazine, September 4, 2019

NASA’s satellites observed the Amazon fires, prompting world leaders to pledge to protect the rainforest. But the burning, chopping and murder of Christians is not tracked by satellites and their suffering is not seen on our televisions and newspapers. Actually, it seems in the West as if the persecution of Christians does not even exist.

The Vatican and Pope Francis have a choice: to shed light on these persecuted Christians or be accused of willful blindness…. The Vatican should dedicate the next synod to them.

“In the Amazon rainforest, which is of vital importance for the planet, a deep crisis has been triggered by prolonged human intervention, in which a ‘culture of waste’ (LS 16) and an extractivist mentality prevail”, the Vatican stated.

“The Amazon is a region with rich biodiversity; it is multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious; it is a mirror of all humanity which, in defense of life, requires structural and personal changes by all human beings, by nations, and by the Church.”

That is why a Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region has been scheduled to meet in Rome from October 6 to 27. In an interview with Italian paper La Stampa, Pope Francis said that one of the biggest challenges to the Amazon region is the “threat to the life of the populations and territory which derives from the economic and political interests of the dominant sectors of society.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14828/moscow-divided

Putin has also succeeded in establishing Russia as the key player in war-torn Syria by marginalizing not only Iran but also Turkey and the United States. Putin adulators are especially proud of his success in playing the Iran card against the United States while squeezing the Tehran mullahs for unprecedented concessions.

The impression one gets in Moscow these days is that reality may have started to bite at the edges of the hubris nurtured by Putin’s opportunistic tactics and the weakness of the Western, especially European, response.

Well-to-do Russians, the backbone of Putin’s system, are sore about the fact that they are no longer treated as welcome friends in the Western world, to which they think they belong. The less privileged Russians are equally unwilling to find their nation grouped together with a number of “Third World” countries such as Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.

In Russia, August is often regarded as the uncertain season closing the short summer and opening the path to the long duet of autumn and winter. It was, therefore, no surprise in a recent visit to Moscow to see that sense of uncertainty reflected in the political mood of the Russian elites.

To be sure, the uncertainty one notices is still in filigree. Officials and intellectuals supporting the current government are still full of self-confidence, not to say bombast, defending President Vladimir Putin’s “strongman” politics. Nevertheless, conversations regarding the political situation in Russia soon reveal three sources of uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety.

The first is an as yet tentative concern that though Putin’s current presidential term has some four more years to conclude, it is not at all certain that the current ruling elite could find someone of similar stature to carry the torch. In other words, Putinism may end as other “isms” formed around a charismatic leader, something like Gaullism, Peronism or even Titoism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/brexit-new-referendum-proposal/

For those seeking to undo the voters’ decision, the clock never runs out.

London — The European Union is the new Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Any hopes that the British government might actually go ahead and achieve Brexit, after more voters supported it than have ever voted for anything in the entire history of this formerly great country, were pretty well dashed this week when Prime Minister Boris Johnson suffered a spectacular series of defeats in the House of Commons, capped by the utterly humiliating departure of his own brother Jo, a Remainer, who quit both his brother’s government and his seat in the Commons rather than be an ally for the Brexit Johnson has repeatedly promised would occur, “do or die,” on October 31. Jo Johnson said he was putting “the national interest” ahead of party and family.

After many in his own party deserted him, and, more to the point, deserted the country, by joining the pro-EU coalition in Parliament, a bill set to become law on Monday will require Johnson to go on bended knee to the EU to seek a second extension. After that outcome is secured, a general election looms.

In proving that it is terrified of a no-deal Brexit, Parliament has effectively stripped the United Kingdom of all its negotiating leverage and made it probable that nothing like a clean break with the EU will occur. What Britain will wind up with will evidently either be continued EU membership or some sort of sham Brexit like the one that was repeatedly rejected when Theresa May tried to sell it to the Commons.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/robert_mugabe_socialist_curse_of_humanity_is_gone.html

Zimbabwe’s preening socialist strongman, Robert Mugabe, a man who left his once prosperous country a hellhole, is gone, and his end didn’t come soon enough.  He went out as one of the world’s worst curses against humanity.

Here’s the New York Times announcement:

Robert Mugabe, the first prime minister and later president of independent Zimbabwe, who traded the mantle of liberator for the armor of a tyrant and presided over the decline of one of Africa’s most prosperous lands, died on Friday. He was 95.

The death was announced by his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

“It is with the utmost sadness that I announce the passing on of Zimbabwe’s founding father and former President, Cde Robert Mugabe,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday, using the abbreviation for comrade. “Mugabe was an icon of liberation, a pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people. His contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten.”

What a shame he died in his bed.  In more serious times, he would have gone out like Mussolini.

But just the fact that he was able to hang on for as long as he did draws attention worth looking at.

A truly good summary of his life and times appears in the London Telegraph’s obituary of the man this morning:

Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe who has died aged 95, began his 37 years in power as a Nobel Peace Prize nominee credited with creating Africa’s most successful multiracial state.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/the_europeans_keep_rejecting_liberty.html

Modern continental Europe keeps trying to solve its political problem — and then to impose its solution on everyone within reach.  Recognizing this historical process can help us understand European anti-Americanism, strongest perhaps in Germany.  America created the Europeans’ political predicament, and we keep preventing them from adopting the solutions they come up with.

America created the Europeans’ political problem by the magnificent example of the American Revolution and the astonishing, world-changing success of America.  In an interesting version of the story of the emperor’s new clothes, rule by hereditary monarchs, hereditary aristocracies, and established churches was suddenly revealed to be absurd and indefensible.

The only problem was that continental Europe was for the most part incapable of self-rule.  The attempts, for example, by Germany, Italy, and France to achieve reasonably stable regimes of rule by their own people would be comical but for the terrible human consequences of their repeated failures.

With the exception of the Netherlands and a few other European countries that, like Britain, have achieved rule by their own people, the modern history of continental Europe is the story of people trying various experiments in an ongoing effort to relieve themselves of the burden of self-rule.

For a while, it seemed certain that fascism was going to be the European solution.  The Germans and the Italians took the lead, but there were at the same time homegrown fascist movements throughout Europe, even in Britain.  The French earned from Homer Simpson the sobriquet “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” because of their feeble resistance to the Nazi invaders and their swift adoption of a policy of collaboration with their Nazi rulers.  If it weren’t for America’s military intervention, the Nazis would likely have defeated Britain, and fascist Europe would have reached from Ireland’s western shore to Moscow and beyond.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/death-of-a-dictator-11567796547

Africa’s postcolonial era produced many tyrants, but few as destructive as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The perverse accomplishment of the dictator, who died Friday at age 95, was to make a thriving country impoverished, corrupt and oppressed.

Mugabe was born in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and studied in South Africa. He became an enthusiastic Marxist and joined his country’s independence movement in the 1960s. The former schoolteacher turned into a guerrilla commander and served more than a decade in prison. After Zimbabwe became an independent state, he was elected Prime Minister in 1980.

Widely reviled at the end of his life for his many abuses of power, he was feted across the globe earlier in his career by politicians and intellectuals who should have known better. He became a champion of anticolonialism on the left and was even knighted by Britain in 1994. By then the military he controlled had killed thousands of political opponents and civilians.