RUTHFULLY YOURS

The economic crisis in Europe is finally fading, and Mario Draghi and his colleagues at the European Central Bank can breathe a sigh of relief. Their strategy of negative interest rates and asset purchases is paying dividends. But now the recovery brings fresh headaches for Mr. Draghi. It will soon be time to start the complex task of unwinding the extraordinary and unconventional monetary stimulus that has resuscitated the economy.

The immediate problem facing Mr. Draghi is how to phase out the ECB’s asset-purchase program, known as quantitative easing or QE, and then gradually return interest rates to more normal levels. And that is only the beginning.

The ECB’s balance sheet has doubled in size over the past three years. This is partly as a result of QE. But it is also reflects the €750 billion of cheap fixed-rate, long-term funding that the ECB has lent to banks. In some respects those loans, known as TLTROs, are an indirect form of QE, with the ECB lending the banks cash and the banks buying bonds. Either way the ECB is printing money and its balance sheet is increasing. That balance sheet will eventually have to shrink back to more normal levels.

That will take years. Adding to the complexity, Mr. Draghi’s term as president ends in October 2019. He needs to devise an exit strategy from current ECB policies knowing that he won’t be in charge for much of this process. Although he’ll be keen to signal to investors what to expect from the ECB in the years ahead, there’s no point promising a gradual monetary exit if investors believe his successor will pick up the pace.

Alex Azar is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services nominated by President Trump.

Each year in April, the World Health Organization celebrates World Health Day, an opportunity to raise awareness of global health issues. This year, it is also a chance to observe the centennial of the deadliest global health disaster of the 20th century—and the deadliest event of the century, period.

One hundred years ago, on March 11, 1918, at Camp Funston, Kansas, a U.S. Army cook by the name of Albert Gitchell fell ill as he and his fellow soldiers prepared to go to war in Europe. He thought he had a bad cold. Soon after, Corporal Lee Drake went to the infirmary showing the same symptoms. By that afternoon over a hundred others joined them, and eventually, this influenza virus would circle the globe.

Over the next two years, the 1918 influenza pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu, infected nearly a third of the global population, killing more than 50 million people worldwide. At the time, the United States and the world were ill-prepared to combat a pandemic. Influenza viruses had not yet been discovered, there were no vaccines to prevent infection and no medicines to treat it, and the field of public health was in its infancy.

Today, influenza pandemics remain one of our top infectious disease threats. We have a growing set of increasingly advanced tools to detect the emergence of a new strain of influenza virus domestically and abroad, but much work remains to be done.

When it comes to the threat of pandemic flu, as well as other infectious threats, preparedness cannot be confined within borders. The world must work together to focus on the prevention and mitigation of pandemics that pay no mind to borders, and focus the work of institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) on that threat.

Mireille Knoll slaughtered one year after Sarah Halimi

Attempts to mobilize a commemoration march on the first anniversary of the jihad torture/murder of Sarah Halimi were tragically sidestepped by the murder of another Jewish grandmother in the same 11th arrondissement of Paris. The solemn march [marche blanche] in honor of Mireille Knoll, an 85 year-old invalid, drew as many as 30,000 people. Not all of them Jewish.

Yacine Mihoub, the 29 year-old Muslim neighbor that allegedly slit madame Knoll’s throat, stabbed her repeatedly, set her body and her apartment on fire, was a welcome visitor to her modest apartment in a public housing project.

The Islamic Jew-hatred of madame Halimi’s killer, Kobili Traoré, a violent repeat offender, was no secret. Much has been made of his consumption of marijuana leading up to the murder on the night of April 3-4 2017, overlooking the fact that friends had taken him to the radical mosque on rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud that day to “calm him down.”

For eleven months, the investigating judge refused to charge Traoré with aggravating circumstances of antisemitism, despite the evidence, the publicly expressed wishes of President Macron, the articulate concerns of intellectuals, lawmakers, and citizens, the psychiatric report (that discerned clearly antisemitic motives http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sarah-halimis-killer-suffered-a-bouffe-dlirante?f=family#ixzz4sla2iner ), and the recommendations of the public prosecutor. Finally, she questioned the perpetrator and found to her satisfaction that the charge was justified. Though Traoré is interned in a psychiatric unit awaiting trial, he has no chance of getting off with an insanity plea.

Friday March 23rd: A heroic gendarme and a warm-hearted Jewish invalid are slaughtered

Friday morning, Reduane Lakdim, went on a killing spree in the village of Trèbes near the picturesque city of Carcassonne. The 25 year-old soldier who had pledged allegiance to Daech began the day with a carjacking; he shot the passenger dead and left the young Portuguese driver in critical condition with a bullet lodged in his head. Next he shot at a group of riot policemen who were innocently jogging, and wounded one, missing his heart by 3 cm. Then Lakdim parked the car on a supermarket lot, stormed in, gun blazing, screaming allahu akhbar, and fatally shot a butcher and a customer.

The attack that had begun at 11 AM ended at 2:30 PM when Lakdim shot and slit the throat of Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, who had voluntarily replaced an employee used as a human shield. Lakdim was neutralized by commandos that had been waiting outside.

Well, I was wrong in predicting that Viktor Orban’s victory in yesterday’s Hungarian elections would fall short of a landslide. For it was a landslide by the most exacting standards — which more or less destroys the arguments of his opponents and critics that his governing Fidesz party could win only through authoritarianism, gerrymandering, and the dominance of the media by Fidesz and its business allies. What made this landslide still more unexpected, even shocking, was that throughout yesterday the opposition parties had been growing more optimistic about their prospects of scoring an upset victory. The visiting media — to be on the safe side — were hesitating between the headlines “Opposition Wins” and “Democracy Dies.”

Yet when the smoke of battle was clearing last night, with 80 percent of the vote counted, Orban’s governing party had won 49 percent of the popular vote and 134 seats in the 199-seat parliament. It had an almost clean sweep of the single-member constituencies outside Budapest. And it seems likely to obtain a two-thirds parliamentary majority again and thus the continued right to amend the Hungarian constitution. (All the results cited here might change marginally when the final votes have been counted.) This is as clear an endorsement as any government has received from an electorate — and it was given in the teeth of disapproval from the dominant political and cultural elites in Europe.

That’s significant. It can no longer be plausibly argued that Orban is pushing through his “revolution” either by stealth or undemocratically. Voters knew exactly what both Orban and his opponents stood for, and they plumped strongly for him. Certain conclusions flow from that.

The first is that democracy is vital and active in Hungary. Turnout was the largest since 1998 (coincidentally the election that first brought Orban to power). There were long queues outside the polling booths, which in some cases stayed open to ensure that no one who joined the line by the official closing time was denied the chance to vote. And the result — one party winning half of the vote — was conclusive. It simply cannot be explained away as the result of gerrymandering, since a 49 percent share of the total vote would mean a landslide in seats under almost any multi-party electoral system.

The aggressive partition of Syrian territory by Russia, Iran, Turkey and ISIS, has security implications for the United States and our regional allies that cannot be ignored.

The U.S., its allies and its adversaries should understand that President Trump intends to push back on Syria’s criminal behavior, Iran’s regional threat posture, and Russia and Turkey’s delusions of empire.

The Syrian government’s chemical attack on civilians in the rebel-held suburb of Douma this weekend is the complete responsibility of the war criminal Bashar Assad, his Russian bedfellows, and his Iranian bankers. However, the fact that President Trump had announced that the U.S. is nearly finished its mission to defeat ISIS (which is questionable) and wants to leave Syria quickly may have encouraged the others to speed up their efforts to divide Syria’s corpse.

An independent country for only two years longer than the State of Israel, Syria has reverted to its prior status as space across which the competing interests of bigger empires and armies are played out. President Trump claims to be uninterested in who rules Damascus — which is wise of him — but the aggressive partition of Syrian territory by Russia, Iran, Turkey and ISIS has security implications for the United States and our regional allies that cannot be ignored.

Syria — as land — has had many masters:

Persia’s Cyrus the Great beginning in 539 BCE.
Macedonia’s Alexander the Great in 333-332 BCE.
Rome’s Pompey the Great captured it in 64 BCE.
The Byzantine Empire in 395 CE.
The Muslims arrived in the mid-7th century — the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Ayyubid, Zingid and Hamdanid Dynasties.
Crusader states followed by Assassins, Mamluks, and Mongols until the Ottoman Empire conquered the space in 1516 CE.
The French after WWI.
The only ever independent Syria was established in 1946.

During the past week, Londoners have woken to the fact that for the first time in living memory the homicide rate in their capital city has overtaken that of New York. There were 15 homicides in London in February, compared with 14 in New York. In March, there were 22 in London, 21 in New York. In recent weeks in London there has been at least one gang-related stabbing almost every day: often fatal, sometimes not. At least 35 deaths since the start of this year have been gang-related. Doctors talk of the emergency wards in parts of London in the evenings resembling a warzone. Just one of the oddities is that most Londoners remain untouched by this. As Harry Mount wrote at The Spectator last month, it is perfectly possible for a killing to be going on near a smart north-London dinner party.

Nevertheless, given that, among Brits, New York still has a reputation for violence, the comparison has struck a nerve. Apart from focusing the national mind, it has also fired up one of the most subterranean and troubling calculations any political class has to make. How many lives are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of a political position?

In recent years the subject of stop-and-search has been an exceptionally emotive one in the U.K., as it is in America. Because it was deemed to target young black men disproportionately, police and politicians alike found stop-and-search to be a useful tool — not for targeting those people who were thought most likely to be carrying weapons but for parading their own political virtues by objecting to the practice.

Recently, London’s murder rate caught up with New York City’s. Which is weird, because there shouldn’t be any murders in either city. After all, both NYC and the UK have very strict gun laws. As we’ve learned from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left, banning guns leads to fewer gun crimes. (That’s why the Secret Service doesn’t carry them!) So how is this happening? How can such a gun-free utopia be so dangerous? The answer will terrify you: scary, evil KNIVES.

Jason Douglas, WSJ:

A series of stabbings has put the number of murders in London this year on a par with New York, with police and lawmakers blaming the surge on drugs and gang-related violence…

Police said Friday there have been 53 murders in the British capital in the year through April 5, 16 more than the number recorded during the first four months of 2017…

A spokeswoman for the U.K. Home Office said the government is taking action to restrict young people’s access to knives and other offensive weapons, such as banning online stores from delivering knives to homes.

This is serious, people. Common-sense gun control has been such a huge success that now it’s time for the next step: common-sense knife control.

This is bad news for Jack the Ripper.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s knife-confiscation effort even has its own website, with a corresponding hashtag:

#Knifefree, eh? Let’s hope Londoners don’t think this means they’re getting bladed weapons without charge.

No offense to Mayor Khan, but I can think of a few good reasons to have a knife. It can come in handy when you need to:

Cut up a piece of food
Open a box
Perform an emergency tracheotomy
Spread some nice cream cheese on a bagel
Live in a crime-infested $#!+hole like London

If knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have knives.

Banning weapons has never made people safer, and it never will. Criminals don’t follow laws in the first place — that’s why they’re called criminals! — and law-abiding people are just rendered defenseless against attackers. If you ban guns, people will use knives. Or clubs. Or jars of acid. Or whatever else they can get their hands on. Hell, now we know that terrorists and white supremacists will even drive cars and trucks into crowds of people, if that’s what it takes. Bad people are always going to find ways to hurt and kill others. And they’re always going to prey on those they believe to be defenseless. CONTINUE AT SITE