RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/papal-bull-shame-vatican-dealings-china-joseph-zen/?utm_source=Spectator+World+

This week Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the ninety-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, went on trial in Kowloon Magistrates Court as a punishment for supporting pro-democracy demonstrators during the mass protests in Hong Kong. He was arrested in May and, along with four other trustees of a humanitarian relief fund, charged with failing to register the organization properly.

The chances that he will be acquitted are slim, to put it mildly. This is Beijing’s way of confirming that Hong Kong is now a police state. Even a frail and saintly cleric who walks with the aid of a stick is not safe to endorse democracy. No one is.

When Zen was arrested, Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that it coincided with the appointment of the former policeman John Lee as chief executive of its “puppet regime.” “Lee is not just any old cop,” said Patten. “He got the job because he supervised the brutal 2019 crackdown on demonstrations in Hong Kong after two million residents protested against the city government’s plan to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China.” Lee reached so eagerly for the tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets that Patten imagined that he would have “willingly suppressed the young demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.”

https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/28/opinion-is-it-realistic-to-ask-israel-to-meddle-in-the-ukraine-russia-war-bryen/

Israel is walking a fine line between the defense of its people and territory, and its support of Ukraine’s defense against Russia. Ukrainian demands coupled with a just-short-of-antisemitic trope are not going to change the situation for Israel – but may make it more difficult for Jerusalem to continue to be helpful.

Much is being made by Ukrainian officials of Israel’s refusal to supply offensive weapons or the Iron Dome air defense system to Kyiv. Much. The latest version has Israel causing the Russia-Iran military relationship. “This alliance of theirs would simply not have happened if [Israeli] politicians had made only one decision at the time — the decision we asked for,” said Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview to an Israeli outlet. The Israeli government’s decision “was seemingly adopted a long time ago — in 2014, when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine. The decision ‘not to annoy’ the Kremlin, not to help Ukraine for real.”

In an earlier interview Zelensky said he was “in shock” at Israel’s failure to give Kyiv anti-missile systems to help counter Russian attacks. And Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Yevgeny Korniychuk said, “I want the Israeli government to move away from its comfort zone and get back to reality.” (RELATED: BRYEN: Will A Key US Deal Make Lebanon’s Problems Even Worse?)

While Israel’s “comfort zone” is a matter of Israeli discretion, concrete threats to Israel’s security posed by Iran — and mitigated to some extent by deconfliction with Russia — are a matter of fact. As is the length, breadth and depth of Russia Iran military cooperation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iranian-drones-in-ukraine-project-tehrans-power-beyond-mideast-testing-u-s-europe-11666880851

Wave of Russian attacks highlights how sanctions failed to stop Tehran from building a drone army that can arm proxies and friendly governments.

Russia’s expanding use of Iranian drones in Ukraine poses an increasing threat for the U.S. and its European allies as Tehran attempts to project military power beyond the Middle East.

In recent weeks, Ukrainian officials say, Russia has launched more than 300 Iranian drones that have targeted military units, power plants and civilian buildings in the capital, Kyiv. The Ukrainian military said it has shot down more than 70% of the drones, but Ukrainian officials are asking the U.S. and NATO allies for more help to counter the threat. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has vowed to rush hundreds of drone jammers to Ukraine as part of a deepening effort to shore up Ukraine’s air defenses.

The wave of attacks has made Iran Moscow’s most important military ally in its faltering campaign in Ukraine and highlighted how Tehran has created one of the world’s most successful drone fleets despite years of Western sanctions.

“Drones have become the spearhead of Iranian power projection globally,” said Dr. James Rogers, an associate professor of war studies at the University of Southern Denmark. “Iran has one of the oldest and, arguably, one of the most efficient drone programs in the world.”

While the international community focused for years on trying to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran methodically built an army of drones that reached across the Middle East. Iran and its proxies have been accused of carrying out attacks on everything from U.S. forces in Syria and commercial ships in the Arabian Sea to Israeli cities and Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19028/turkey-nato-ally

What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations [the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO] have in common?

With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world’s democratic bloc of nations.

“I told Putin… Let us in so we’ll break up with the EU. The Shanghai Five is better [than the EU]. It is much more powerful. [With membership] we’ll have a chance to be together with the countries with which we share common values” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, January 2013.

And finally, in September 2022, Erdoğan became the first head of a NATO state attending an SCO summit, in Uzbekistan…. Erdoğan went to the summit upon Putin’s personal invitation.

This is the natural outcome of West’s deaf ears and blind eyes. When Erdoğan first spoke of SCO membership for Turkey a decade ago, Western capitals reacted with shy laughter and a misdiagnosis: that Erdoğan was just bluffing to win quicker membership accession to the European Union.

Western bigwigs did not even get the message when in 2013 Erdoğan spoke of Eurasian dictatorships as “countries with which we have common values.” He was just speaking what, to him, was the truth.

Funny, Erdoğan became the first NATO head of state attending an SCO summit while pressuring Congress for the delivery of U.S.-made F-16 Block 70 fighter aircraft for his air force. Behind closed doors in Washington, his envoys and back channels will be telling their U.S. audience that “Turkey’s future is in the Western bloc, that the SCO talk is for Turkey’s balancing act between its commitment to the West and its inevitable proximity with Russia.”

Turks are living in a totally different economic realm than the recent past. Turkey’s official annual inflation climbed to a fresh 24-year high of 80% in August — though ENAG, an independent research organization, estimated the true annual inflation rate at 181% for the same period. Worse may be yet to come.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s currency, the lira, has lost more than half of its value against the US dollar since 2021.

The Shanghai Five group, which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), was created on April 26, 1996 with the signing of the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, in Shanghai by the heads of states of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.

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.