RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/clock_ticking_quickly_for_maduro.html

Down in Venezuela, the people are in the streets and Sr. Maduro got some very bad news. He lost a key military man, as we see in this report:

An active Venezuelan general called on the armed forces to rebel against President Nicolas Maduro and to recognize the opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim chief as pressure at home and abroad grows on the head of state to step down.

In a video circulating on Twitter on Saturday, General Francisco Yanez of the air force’s high command, said most of the armed forces already disavowed Maduro, who claims he is victim of a coup directed by the United States.

“People of Venezuela, 90 percent of the armed forces of Venezuela are not with the dictator, they are with the people of Venezuela,” Yanez said in the video.

“Given the happenings of the last few hours, already the transition to democracy is imminent.”

The high command’s web page lists Yanez, along with a photo, as the air force’s head of strategic planning.

Wonder what other general is next?

There are three possible scenarios for Maduro:

First, the Batista exit, filling up a plane with your belongings and leave in the middle of the night. I should add that my parents did not support Fulgencio Batista but he did leave a very prosperous nation behind. You can’t say that about Maduro.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13667/multiculturalism-britain-january

More than 5,000 people signed a petition to boycott Marks and Spencer toilet paper: they alleged it was embossed with the Arabic word for God. Marks and Spencer, in a statement on Twitter, denied the claims: “The motif on the aloe vera toilet tissue, which we have been selling for over five years, is categorically of an aloe vera leaf and we have investigated and confirmed this with our suppliers.”

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged Britain to make it a legal requirement for Muslim couples to register their marriages civilly before or at the same time as their religious ceremony, because Sharia marriages alone “clearly discriminate against women in divorce and inheritance cases.”

The Guardian reported that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of young girls in Britain are being subjected to so-called breast-ironing, an African practice whereby mothers or grandmothers use a hot stone to massage across the breast repeatedly in order to “break the tissue” and slow its growth. The objective is to stop unwanted male attention.

January 1. A 25-year-old Somali man stabbed three people — including a police officer — at Victoria Station in Manchester. BBC producer Sam Clack, who was waiting for a tram when the attack took place, reported: “The guy, his exact words were, he said: ‘As long as you keep bombing other countries, this sort of sh*t is going to keep happening.’ The suspect also screamed “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest!”) as he was bundled into a police van. Assistant Chief Constable Russ Jackson nevertheless said that officers were “retaining an open mind in relation to the motivation for this attack.” The suspect was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act.

To visit Greenwich is to grasp in an afternoon’s stroll the Britain that was once and is now no more. General Wolfe, whose addition of Canada to the Empire is celebrated here, was brought down by a French musket ball. Today, prostration before the EU is Theresa May’s instinctive first position.

Stepping back and forth between the world’s two longitudinal hemispheres is fun in a quirky sort of way. Of course it requires you to be positioned right above the Prime Meridian. And that, in turn, means you must have decided to spend a London afternoon over in Greenwich, a few miles down-river along a now much cleaned-up Thames and more or less across from Canary Wharf. If you’d somehow been asleep for a quarter of a millennium, and were wholly unaware of Britain’s Empire years, you’d soon be set straight when you visited Greenwich. It’s magnificent!

My wife and I spent a day this past weekend re-acquainting ourselves with this London borough where you’ll find the National Maritime Museum (magnificent!), the Old Naval College (which in its original incarnation had been a retirement home for Royal Navy sailors and is partly a Christopher Wren creation with a splendid chapel), the seventeenth-century Queen’s House, a Greenwich Market first established over three centuries ago and, of course, the Royal Observatory. It’s at the last of those listed attractions where one can hop between hemispheres.

Remember, the east-west division of the world is wholly arbitrary in a way that the north-south split is not. The equator is a fact imposed on the world. Where to draw the up-down line to split the world’s west from its east is a function of nothing more than who happened to be drawing the line and what they prefered. At the height of the British Empire, the world’s largest-ever, the people doing the preferring were in London. And so the Prime Meridian runs right through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. That is why, before political correctness infected everything from banning temporal reference to the shorthand of ‘Before Christ’ to toilets and ‘renewable energy is cheaper if you just ignore the $3 billion in subsidies it gets each year’, we used to talk in terms of Greenwich Mean Time. Everything was based on that, and the arbitrary line drawn there to separate east from west.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/high-ranking-venezuela-air-force-general-rejects-maduro-supports-guaido/

The first defection of a high ranking military officer from the Venezuelan armed forces said in a video that he “doesn’t recognize the dictatorial authority of Nicolás Maduro,” and added “The people have suffered enough.”

General Francisco Yanez of the Venezuelan air force endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who declared himself president two weeks ago.

NPR:

“To order the armed forces to keep repressing the people is to continue killing more people from hunger, diseases and god willing combat between ourselves,” he said. “The people have suffered enough.”

Then Yanez invited the citizens to peacefully defend Guaidó in the streets. “To my armed fellow men,” he pleaded, “I ask you not to turn your back on the people of Venezuela.”

He is the first of the nation’s military brass to voice strong support for Guaidó, who declared himself interim president in January after denouncing the integrity of Venezuela’s presidential elections.

Yanez told the Associated Press that he would not issue other statements until he was authorized by “the commander-in-chief of the legal armed force,” Guaidó.

General Yanez is currently alone. The Venezuelan military, carefully courted and nurtured by both former President Chavez and current President Maduro, are not likely to switch loyalties in great numbers any time soon.

Several factions of Venezuela, including its Military Aviation and the Academy of Aviation, used Twitter to denounce the general. They tweeted a photo of Yanez in his uniform with the word “TRAITOR” scrawled across. The Air Force Command also accused him of switching sides because his father is facing an investigation into corruption.

Although hundreds of generals serve in the Venezuelan military, the announcement represents a victory for Guaidó, NPR’s Philip Reeves reports. The young leader has asked armed forces to still their guns, and hopes to weaken their loyalty to Maduro.

Guaidó passed an amnesty measure for them in the National Assembly. Supporters in the streets have handed out copies of the law to soldiers and police, though analysts say Maduro receives loyalty from top-ranking officers by giving them big paychecks and control of lucrative assets. CONTINUE AT SITE