RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_china_lie_exposed.html

The Chinese Communist Party has held only 20 party congresses in its history, one every five years, and few as notable as the just-concluded meeting at which President Xi Jinping claimed his unprecedented third five-year term. In a two-hour address, Xi aggressively signaled that China will focus on national security, invest in a “world class military,” “develop unmanned, intelligent combat capabilities,” and unrelentingly pursue the takeover of Taiwan under the banner of “reunification.”  All this against a backdrop of asserted rising external threats from the West and a forecast of “high winds, choppy waters and dangerous storms.”

It did not take long for Chinese investors to react. On Monday, the Hang Seng plummeted 6.4% (equivalent to a 2,000 drop in the Dow Jones index), for the largest one-day drop since November 2008. The index is down 42% for the year and within 2% of its 52-week low. In the tech sector, e-commerce giant Alibaba fell 10%, bringing its losses to more than $600 billion since it peaked in October 2020. Chip stocks are being dumped in response to expected U.S. export controls. The property sector is facing unrelenting pressure from massive over-building and excess debt. Chinese entrepreneurs are leaving the country. Official and unofficial accounts track massive movements of capital to havens outside of China. All in all, quite the contrast to President Xi’s boasting rhetoric of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

Hidden in the current malaise is a far more startling fact. The Hang Seng index is now officially flat since 1997. In the comparable period, even after U.S. market declines, the S&P index is up 3.2x, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 5.9x. These numbers lay bare the fundamental lie that communism can coexist with, and channel free enterprise growth. Twenty-five years of stagnation, especially during the boom in technology, contradicts the narrative promoted by Chinese leadership, believed by many, that China will inevitably eclipse U.S. economic performance.  Doubling down, liberal pundits such as Thomas Friedman fawn over the command and control powers of the Chinese government, in contrast to our messy democracy, especially when it appeared China was in an unstoppable ascendency from the 1980s onward.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-rebirth-of-mao-zedong/

Mao Zedong (“Chairman Mao” to the Chinese people) served as the dictator of the People’s Republic of China from 1949, when the communists took over China, until his death in 1976.  Historians consider him the greatest mass murderer in human history, with somewhere between 60-70 million (after birth) innocent deaths to his credit.  This far outpaces Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler.  It would be hard to find a greater fiend in human history than Mao Zedong.

But since Mao’s death, no single individual in the Chinese Communist Party has been able to accrue as much power in his hands as Mao did.  Many have tried, but none has succeeded.

Until now.

Xi Jinping has become the most dangerous man on earth, because he, without serious challenge, now unquestionably controls the Communist Party in China, a country with a huge economy, powerful military, and the largest population on earth.  At the current 10th Party Congress of the Communist Party, Xi was given an unprecedented third five-year term as President/General Secretary of the Communist Party.  This is actually unconstitutional in China, though the Chinese constitution is about as weighty to the CCP as the American constitution is to Democrats.  The Chinese Constitution states that a person can only serve two five-year terms.  This constitutional coup by Xi would be almost like, well, a President of the United States ordering the FBI to invade the home of a former President to find information that might prevent that former President from serving again.  Not exactly the same, but close.  Xi will now serve a third term, and no doubt, he will be dictator for as long as he chooses, probably for the rest of his life.  He is 69 years old, so he may be around for awhile.

A very bizarre event occurred on Saturday at the CCP meeting, one that solidified Xi’s power and sent a stern message to anyone in the Party who might dare to oppose him.  Former President Hu Jintao was sitting next to Xi when two men came, grabbed Hu by the arms, and forcibly removed him from the event.  Hu is seen apparently pleading with Xi Jinping, who basically ignored him.  Hu is gone, and nobody knows where.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/27/remember-the-chinese-century-sorry-its-economic-miracle-is-over/

With Xi Jinping’s stunning shift back into Maoist totalitarianism, China is destined to become an economic mess once again. China’s opening to the world economy, particularly to the U.S. and Europe, now looks to be over. A new communist dark age will soon descend.

In China’s 20th party congress, which ended last weekend, we saw a very ugly glimpse of the future for the Middle Kingdom.

Not only did Xi cement his position as absolute ruler of the nation of 1.4 billion, but showed he’ll do anything to keep power. The image of an aging former President Hu Jintao apparently forcibly being led out of the congress by security is an ominous statement of what Xi has in store for the entire nation.

Faced with the sudden shock of what’s to come, China’s financial markets crashed on Monday, as investors realized that it’s no longer the promised land but now a prison-house economy in decline.

It was just 2014, a mere 8 years ago, that liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz heralded the advent of the “Chinese Century.” He and other leftist intellectuals fell in love with the notion of what could be accomplished economically with an authoritarian regime such as Xi’s.

No more saying no! No more dragging your feet! The government can do what it wants, without having to worry about all those pesky free-market naysayers!

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19025/turkey-erdogan-aggression

Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been militarily threatening a fellow NATO ally, Greece, using increasingly threatening language. He also proudly announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised him to make Turkey an international natural gas hub, therefore selling his gas via Turkey, avoiding Western sanctions.

What does Erdoğan get in return? Huge American (and other Western) pats on the back.

Erdoğan, while explicitly threatening a NATO ally, has a plan to seriously undermine Western sanctions on Russia…. The project will enable Turkey to store Russian gas in Thrace and sell it to willing European buyers. This will effectively kill Western sanctions on Russia. Turkey will earn transit fees from every cubic meter of Russian gas sold to European buyers. A win-win for two autocrats.

What was the U.S. administration’s response to all that? Approval for fighter jet sales!… An earlier version of the bill had linked the sale to the condition that Turkey would not use the aircraft against Greece.

Erdoğan is now hopeful that Congress should give the green light to the F-16 deal before the end of the year.

What other insane, anti-Western moves should Erdoğan make before U.S. President Joe Biden understands that Turkey’s Islamist autocrat is a Putin pawn inside the NATO alliance?

Or is Biden a Putin pawn as well?

Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been militarily threatening a fellow NATO ally, Greece, using increasingly threatening language. He also proudly announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised him to make Turkey an international natural gas hub, therefore selling his gas via Turkey, avoiding Western sanctions. What does Erdoğan get in return? Huge American (and other Western) pats on the back.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/22/the-revenge-of-the-technocrats/

Watching prime minister Liz Truss’s short resignation speech yesterday, I couldn’t help feeling that she was selling herself short. She managed to summon up just two achievements to boast about from her 44 days in office: the energy price guarantee and the cut to national insurance contributions. But we all know she’s achieved much more than that. She’s tanked her party in spectacular fashion, for a start. Right now, the only thing in Westminster more unpopular than the Tory Party (a poll today put it at 14 per cent) is Truss herself – she is only slightly more popular than Vladimir Putin among the UK population.

Her history-making achievements don’t stop there. Her premiership was the mother of all political cock-ups, in an era in which they have hardly been in short supply. She may even have succeeded in partially rehabilitating her predecessor, Boris Johnson, who has emerged as a strangely plausible candidate to replace her. (At least he has a democratic mandate.) And beyond the party and personality politics, what makes the end of Truss so tragic is that, ideologically speaking, her premiership has managed to achieve the precise opposite of its goals. Whatever Trussonomics was – the underlying logic was never entirely clear – it is now utterly discredited. Indeed, Truss was only able to limp on for a few more days as PM by getting Jeremy Hunt to rip up her mini-budget in the Commons, while she looked on with a kind of lobotomised zen.

More positively, Truss set out to challenge ‘the orthodoxy’, ‘the Treasury view’, ‘the consensus’ preached by various unelected and unaccountable institutions. She even had the gall to suggest that maybe the Bank of England – whose galaxy-brained governor said in August last year that inflation would be ‘temporary’ – wasn’t working as it should. Her chancellor’s first act in office was to sack Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar, a man no one had ever heard of but whose expertise was apparently all that stood between us and barbarism, in an act that our hysterical media seemed to equate with regicide. Her refusal of a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – another apparently unassailable institution, despite its stellar record of getting things wrong – was seen as another awful heresy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19010/persecuted-christians-radical-muslims

Although the U.S. government had acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians in Syria due solely to their religious identity, it took in only those who by definition were not in any way being targeted by ISIS — Sunni Muslims, with whom ISIS, a Sunni organization, identifies and does not attack.

“You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been ‘genocided,’ they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in and laugh at you and mock you and even threaten you…. [saying] ‘You shouldn’t have converted. You’re an idiot for converting. You get what you get,’ words to that effect.” — Paul Diamond, British human rights lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019.

[The UK Home Office] ridiculed an Iranian female asylum seeker in her rejection letter by writing, “You affirmed in your AIR [Asylum Interview Record] that Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that he would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime. It is therefore considered that you have no conviction in your faith and your belief in Jesus is half-hearted.”

She later said… her Home Office interviewer, “was either chuckling or maybe just kind of mocking when he was talking to me…. [H]e asked me why Jesus didn’t help you from the Iranian regime or Iranian authorities.”

Meanwhile, as the few Christians who seek asylum are highly scrutinized and presented with obstacles, millions of Muslim asylum seekers are taken into the West without any difficulties, and most without even being vetted.

Once Pakistanis in Britain learned that the UK was going to offer asylum to Asia Bibi, they rioted en masse. As a result, then-Prime Minister Theresa May personally blocked Bibi’s asylum application, “despite UK playing host to [Muslim] hijackers, extremists and rapists,” to quote from one headline.

Meanwhile, as usual, the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician because he had defended Bibi — a cleric deemed so extreme as to be banned from his native Pakistan — to enter and lecture in British mosques.

“It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the UK is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians.” — Dr. Martin Parsons, human rights activist, The Express, December 4, 2016.

Western authorities appear committed to discriminating against Christian asylum seekers, while welcoming Muslims ones.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-20-it-is-remarkable-how-badly-putin-has-screwed-up-in-russia

Sometimes I look at the U.S. government under President Biden, and I think that it couldn’t be possible to be more incompetent than this. But take a look at any of the U.S.’s main geopolitical adversaries — besides Russia there’s China, and Iran, and perhaps you might throw in a Venezuela or a North Korea — and you quickly realize that all of them have far, far more incompetent government policy than the U.S. on its very worst day.

For today I’m going to focus on Russia. As recently as five or ten years ago, I was willing to grudgingly concede to Vladimir Putin some decent successes, particularly on the international stage. Starting with a relatively bad hand, I thought he was playing it cleverly in world affairs. But by 2018 I had come to the view that no amount of foreign policy cleverness could overcome Russia’s growing weaknesses, from a stagnant crony-capitalist economy to declining population. In a piece on March 4, 2018 titled “How Are Things Going In Russia?” I went through a litany of negative indicators, from a 40% decline in GDP since 2014 (mostly due to then-declining energy prices), to declining population, to military spending badly constrained by the small economy.

And now comes the invasion of Ukraine. It would be fair to say that the invasion and its consequences have taken Russia from a major player on the world stage to a much less important player. Here are some of the many indicators:

Loss of the fear factor. The biggest benefit of a large army is not actually being able to win a war, but rather being able to intimidate your adversaries into doing your bidding without having to resort to hostilities. When the invasion began in February, everybody assumed that the Russian tanks would roll through Ukraine in a matter of days if not hours. Now, eight months later, Russia is steadily losing back to Ukrainian counter-offenses significant parts of the small amounts of territory it had captured. If little Ukraine can stand up to the Russians so handily, it gives spirit to every one of Putin’s neighbors.