RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/highbrows-vs-deplorables/

“The idea of Europe is in peril.” Thus begins an 800-word open letter published on Friday in the French newspaper Libération and other several European dailies. Written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, it was signed by thirty “top intellectuals” (as the Guardian put it) from twenty-one countries.

Now, anyone familiar with current affairs will readily agree that Europe – at least Western Europe – is imperiled. It’s imperiled by a European Union whose unelected leaders are determined to convert it into a sovereign superstate with its own army and with ever-expanding powers. And it’s imperiled by hordes of Muslim migrants who, having been forced upon it by those EU leaders, will, barring dramatic reversals, eventually turn the countries of Western Europe into sharia states.

But this isn’t what these “top intellectuals” mean. Note the wording of their letter: they’re not concerned with the well-being of the peoples of Europe; their preoccupation is with the idea of Europe, which is to say with the preservation and fortification of the European Union.

And their message is that the EU is imperiled by – who else? – Europeans themselves.

Who are these “top intellectuals”? The signatories include the renowned novelists Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Milan Kundera, plus an assortment of philosophers, historians, activists, and social critics, some more famous than others. Their tender concern for the EU’s health is not surprising. The EU was always a project of privileged highbrows, who helped it advance from strength to strength by lying to the governed, acting without their consent, and overruling their votes. Now, with Eastern European governments rejecting dictates from Brussels and with Western European electorates, at long last, demanding that their voices be heard and their wishes respected, the EU’s architects and partisans are balking at the audacity with which the deplorables – the peons, the peasants, the proles – are standing up to them. Lévy writes:

“Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity” often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.

Pace Lévy, a feeling of national identity has long been a potent force in the souls of men. For him and other devotees of the “idea” of an EU superstate, it has been Job One to try to eradicate that patriotism and replace it with a newly forged sense of “European identity.” Unfortunately, these EU boosters have discovered that that particular abstraction thrives only in their own demagogic imaginations, and that most of the people of Europe want nothing to do with it. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/01/25

The oil alliance of Opec and Russia has abandoned efforts to drive US shale out of the global energy market, accepting the hard reality of America’s irrepressible frackers for years to come.

“To really fight shale we’d need oil below $40 a barrel,” said Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s wealth fund.

“That is not good for the Russian economy and it is not good for the Saudi economy. It is not practical, and we are not going to try to fight it,” he told the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A string of Opec members would risk incipient insolvency if there were another oil price war along the lines of 2014-2016. Saudi Arabia’s ruling dynasty would struggle to maintain its cradle-to-grave welfare model needed to head off political dissent.

Mr Dmitriev, a key architect of Russia’s oil strategy, said his country was working tightly with the Opec cartel and was now pursuing prices of $60 to $70, deemed the optimal range needed to ensure long-term stability.

Brent crude has crept up into the bottom of this range after a dramatic sell-off in October and November on global recession fears and a soft US line on Iranian sanctions. The Opec-Russia deal last month to trim output by 800,000 barrels a day (b/d) has restored balance to the market.

Germany’s once-in-a-century experiment Energiewende will enter its hot and decisive phase next weekend. Germany is serious about being the only industrial country in the world to simultaneously abandon nuclear energy and coal-fired power.

The 31 members of the government commission “Growth, Structural Change, Employment” will decide on the final plan on Friday evening. It will not be a good plan. It is expensive, risky and will hardly benefit climate protection.

There are plans for a new political intervention in the energy market that is more serious and riskier than the decision to phase out nuclear power. According to the plan, five to ten large power stations are to be shut down by 2022. According to the plan, by 2030 half of the coal-fired power plants which currently provide around 50 percent of Germany’s electricity requirements, will have been shut down.

Power plant operators will receive billions of euros in compensation, the affected federal states and districts more billions as adjustment aid, the coal miners billions as transitional money. And because this massive state intervention in the market increases the price of electricity for everyone, Germany’s energy-intensive industry is also demanding subsidies of between 14 and 54 billion euros by 2030 so that it can survive international competition. All in all, it will cost many billions of euros. However, is all of that tax money well spent?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13598/new-year-old-turkey

The joke goes: One day a political prisoner asks his guard if he could borrow from the prison library a certain work of fiction written by a certain author. The guard answers: We don’t have that book in our library. But if you want, I can bring you its author. He is here.”

HSBC Turkey’s Chief Executive Officer, Selim Kervancı, is being investigated by the prosecutor’s office over a video he retweeted during the Gezi protests five years ago. Kervancı is being charged with insulting Erdoğan for retweeting a video clip from the 2004 German movie “Downfall,” set during Adolf Hitler’s last days and depicting the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Recently, Erdoğan claimed that the Turkish businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala, currently detained and awaiting trial, was working for “the famous Hungarian Jew George Soros.” By adding the “famous Hungarian Jew” to his conspiracy theories, Erdoğan apparently wanted to demonize Kavala and remind the judges that the suspect has a Jewish connection.

Democratic anomaly became the new Turkish normal several years ago. The anomaly, sometimes, offers entertaining moments, too. Take, for instance, Parliament Speaker Binali Yıldırım, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most important political confidant (and former prime minister), who became the joke of the day when he declared: “Animals, too, are living beings”. Someone teased him on social media: “He is right. And I am adding: Plants, too, are living beings.” A few days later Yıldırım, under fire from the opposition because he refuses to resign as parliament speaker although he would run for mayor of Istanbul in nationwide local elections on March 31 (they cite the constitution which bans the impartial parliament speaker from engaging in any political activity), amused a whole nation when he said: “Elections are not political activity”. Not all Turkish anomalies are as entertaining as this one.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13578/christian-persecution-november

After it was announced that Asia Bibi — a Christian women who had spent nearly a decade on death row for allegedly “blaspheming” against Islam — had been acquitted, Muslims rioted throughout early November; in one march, more than 11,000 Muslims demanded her instant and public hanging. A leading Muslim party announced that the judges who had acquitted her deserved death. The lawyer who represented her fled the nation due to many death threats. — Pakistan.

While under arrest, he asked police to allow him to “kill the infidels… otherwise you will become infidels like them.” Authorities later said the man had mental problems and was under the influence of drugs. The Christians replied that the media always present such Muslims who attack churches and Christians as suffering from mental illnesses. — Egypt.

“[A]t least 350 Christian owned properties have illegally been seized. The government has stopped only 50 of these properties from being sold… Iraqi Christians have long complained about the disproportionate targeting of their properties for illegal seizures. These seizures often occur in waves which follow violent incidents of persecution.” — Iraq.

“[T]he government… protect the aggressors and leave the victims mercilessly helpless… The devastation in terms of massacre of lives and destruction of property is unimaginable.” — Rev. Dacholom Datiri, President of the Church of Christ in Nigeria.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/australia-day-matters/
Why Australia Day Matters by Leo Maglen

The heroes of our nationhood were not resistance leaders or freedom fighters, but politicians and statesmen, most now forgotten or only half-remembered. Their creation is an achievement worth celebrating.

An amazing, but little remarked, fact in the current concern about securing Australia’s borders – cue ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ – is that they are entirely maritime. We have no land borders, and Australia is the largest country in the world not to have any any. According to Geoscience Australia, we have a coastline of almost sixty thousand kilometres (mainland plus islands). The perimeter of our territorial waters is probably longer, and the outer edge of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) longer again. Back on shore we have, of course, state borders, and we once built a rabbit-proof fence over thousands of kilometres of outback, but only at sea do we share international borders with other countries (PNG Indonesia and East Timor).

Australia is the only inhabited continent that is not criss-crossed with international boundaries and a patchwork of nation states. Not for us razor-wire fences, concrete barriers, guard-posts, check-points, manned border-crossings, heavily armed border patrols, disputed terrain. We are one country, one nation, spanning an entire continent and its offshore islands. The shape is so iconic, so much the image of our country, that we take it for granted.

It is pertinent to ask how this happy situation came about. It was not, it must be said, anything to do with the first inhabitants, the Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders. Whilst they had spread across the entire continent and adjacent islands, and shared a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, they were divided into around 250 separate tribal groups, each with its own traditions, customs, language and territory, with which it had a strong and deep affinity. Whilst there was, of course, contact between adjacent groups, it is doubtful whether there was any knowledge of, or affinity with, groups beyond this range of contacts, with those living on the other side of the continent. Nor is it likely that the first inhabitants had any concept of the country, of the continent, of Australia, in its entirety. This awareness could only come in the modern era.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/close-enough/

European ‘integration’ is a threat to Nato, Europe, and the U.S.

Alexander Herzen wrote that after any revolution, “the departing world leaves be­hind it not an heir but a pregnant widow.” Yet ever since the election of Donald Trump convulsed the world, Western Europe’s leaders have been speaking as if a new international order had already been born. Last August, French president Emmanuel Macron told his diplomatic corps that “Europe can no longer entrust its security to the United States alone.” Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, a few days later wrote that “the outstanding aim of our foreign policy is to build a sovereign, strong Europe” that can “form a counterweight when the US crosses the line.” In the thinking of Macron, Maas, and their confreres in Brussels, the heir to the dearly departed American-led postwar system has already been named, and that heir is ever-closer European union.

This has been a premature christening. While President Trump has indeed turned up the temperature on Europe with his brash criticisms of trans­atlantic relations, especially in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the labor pains jolting Europe are not of America’s creation. Instead, the continent is in a political turmoil of its own making — a crisis that is directly linked to, and exacerbated by, aspects of the European Union (EU). With Paris and Berlin eying a second Élysée Treaty and Great Britain in the throes of Brexit, today’s Europe is the pregnant widow of Herzen’s imagination. Now is the time for the U.S. to promote the birth of a new alternative to the dogma of integration — a model that gives European nations the flexibility to choose their own destinies.

Over the past two decades, Western European leaders have made two broad claims in support of greater European union. First, they have argued that European integration is responsible for the post–World War II peace. On this point European leaders regularly echo the sentiments of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker: “You only need to visit a war cemetery to see what the alternative to European integration is.” Second, EU leaders have often contended that the Union promotes discussion and coordination without impinging on national sovereignty. In defense of Brussels, one senior European diplomat often emphasizes in private conversations that “where we once fought, we now talk.”

https://www.foxnews.com/world/how-socialism-turned-venezuela-from-the-wealthiest-country-in-south-america-into-an-economic-basket-case

Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in South America, but in recent years millions have fled the country amid mass starvation and violence after socialist policies were enacted and government seized private industries.

Now, as Venezuelans struggle against the country’s current dictator, some Venezuelan exiles in the U.S. are desperately warning Americans to avoid going down a similar path.

“Socialism not only takes away from people the access to basic food and medicines, but also creates an environment in which life is worth nothing,” Giannina Raffo, who fled Venezuela in 2016 but who still works with activist organizations there, told Fox News.

VENEZUELA’S INTERIM PRESIDENT GUAIDO OFFERS MADURO AMNESTY IF HE CEDES POWER

Despite that situation in Venezuela, polls show Americans warming to the term “socialism” in recent years.

Venezuelans who have fled their country warn that their country’s history shows what others must watch for and avoid.

Venezuela’s journey to disaster began in 1992, when a Venezuelan lieutenant colonel named Hugo Chavez led several army units in a coup against the government. More than 100 people were killed in fighting, but his coup was defeated.

However, in the name of national unity, the government released Chavez from prison after just two years.

NIKKI HALEY LED THE WAY WITH VENEZUELA CONDEMNATION AT UN

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25

Conspicuous by its absence in much of the mainstream news coverage of Venezuela’s political crisis is the word “socialism.” Yes, every sensible observer agrees that Latin America’s once-richest country, sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, is an economic basket case, a humanitarian disaster, and a dictatorship whose demise cannot come soon enough.

But … socialist? Perish the thought.

Or so goes a line of argument that insists socialism’s good name shouldn’t be tarred by the results of experience. On Venezuela, what you’re likelier to read is that the crisis is the product of corruption, cronyism, populism, authoritarianism, resource-dependency, U.S. sanctions and trickery, even the residues of capitalism itself. Just don’t mention the S-word because, you know, it’s working really well in Denmark.

Curiously, that’s not how the Venezuelan regime’s admirers used to speak of “21st century socialism,” as it was dubbed by Hugo Chávez. The late Venezuelan president, said Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, “showed us there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice, and it’s something that Venezuela has made a big step toward.” Noam Chomsky was similarly enthusiastic when he praised Chávez in 2009. “What’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela,” the linguist said, is that “I can see how a better world is being created and can speak to the person who’s inspired it.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13542/iran-kidnapping-hostages

This international breach of justice should be a lesson to the UK and other governments: It does not matter if the mullahs reach out their hands out in peace; the Islamist regime of Iran will continue to harm innocent victims on a daily basis.

In response to the snub, the British government should consider bringing to a halt its appeasement policies toward the ruling mullahs. The more they are appeased, the more emboldened and empowered they become to continue violating human rights.

It must be made clear to Iran that, apart from its unacceptable nuclear and ballistic missile build up, the UK — and every country — will also not stand for the capture, torture and imprisonment of the innocent. If the British government speaks in actions rather than words, perhaps these captives could be free to resume the life they deserve again, and the world could be free of a major nuclear threat.

“Sometimes when I come back from the visit with Gabriella, after saying goodbye to her, I feel as if I cannot live without her, I want to go back and hold her. She kisses me so hard. It is hard to say goodbye to her. She blows kisses all the way as she goes up the stairs, and everyone stands there watching.” These are the words of a grieving British mother, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, held in prison in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as she describes saying goodbye to her child.