RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/germany-will-spend-41-million-dollars-discover-hugh-fitzgerald/

Yes, it’s a puzzlement, all right. What makes so many people – mainly Palestinians and Turks in Germany, Palestinians and Moroccans in the Netherlands, Palestinians and Egyptians in Italy, Palestinians and Pakistanis in Great Britain, Palestinians and North Africans in France – so full of hatred for Jews and the Jewish state? What moves Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, and Nihad Awad, and Linda Sarsour, to come down so hard on “the Jews”? This question requires, the Germans believe, generously subsidized deep research, and they are – it’s understandable, given their regrettable past — eager to fund it. And that is what they have just announced they will embark upon such research, as discussed here: “German Government to Spend $40 Million on Researching What Fuels Antisemitism, Racism,” by Sharon Wrobel, Algemeiner, August 4, 2021. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/totalitarian_madness_comes_to_australias_new_south_wales.html

Perhaps because of its incredibly brave troops in WWI and WWII, not to mention the Crocodile Dundee films, Australia shared with America a reputation for being a wild and free place. That’s not so anymore. New South Wales, home to Sydney, the largest city in Australia, has gone so overboard with COVID hysteria that the state is under martial law, and people are not only being told not to talk to each other anymore, they’re also being urged to spy and report on scofflaw neighbors. North Korea couldn’t have done it better. And all this is happening in a state with 5.3 million people solely because of 12,588 cases and 91 deaths since last February.

The Daily Mail summarized where New South Wales stood vis-à-vis COVID as of August 11:

New South Wales has recorded 345 new cases of Covid-19 and two deaths of men in their 90s – as more suburbs are slapped with harsher restrictions in Sydney’s west.     

One of the men had a single dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine while the other had two doses of Pfizer.

Both vaccines are around 90 per cent effective at stopping death after two dos

One died at Liverpool Hospital after catching the disease as part of the hospital’s outbreak which has now killed seven.

The other died at Royal North Shore Hospital and was a resident at Wyoming Residential Aged Care Facility in Summer Hill, in Sydney’s inner west.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/11/after-flirting-with-china-philippines-back-in-u-s-camp/

Chinese aggressiveness has entered a new phase, with military activities ranging from the South China Sea to Taiwan and even vulgarity used as a weapon. Britain would be a “bitch . . . asking for a beating” if its aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth challenged China’s territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea, state media have declared.Bac

Oh, and don’t forget the late, great Hong Kong. Sigh.

With the world’s largest Army, a rapidly-expanding navy, and an air force apparently being stocked with rip-offs of advanced Western technology, the Middle Kingdom is becoming stronger by the year. China has been fairly open about its aim to take over or euphemistically “lead” the world within a generation. Economically, that is. But it sees staking a military claim to anything nearby as a step towards that goal.

Which is why America needs as many allies as possible in the area and why a sudden if difficult-to-explain Filipino about face on a U.S. treaty is a welcome move.

Last February President Rodrigo Duterte announced that The Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) treaty would be abrogated within six months unless renegotiated. The VFA provides rules for the rotation of thousands of US troops in and out of the Philippines for war drills and exercises.

Under the agreement, U.S. military aircraft and vessels are allowed free entry into the Philippines. U.S. military personnel are subject to relaxed visa and passport policies. Abrogating the agreement would put at risk roughly 300 joint military exercises and engagements, said R. Clarke Cooper, until earlier this year U.S. assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.

The VFA is not the entire Mutual Defense Treaty, signed in 1951, but it’s the “nuts and bolts,” Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst with the RAND Corporation told Voice of America. The Mutual Defense Treaty would be severely weakened, and the Chinese regime would be delighted.

It not only costs the Philippines nothing, but brings in revenue from the visiting Americans. Consider that those are essentially the only visitors allowed since March 2020 due to COVID restrictions and those restrictions aren’t likely to be lifted any time soon (the country has never left lockdown and the metro regions just took a step backwards). So even that’s consequential.

Now Duterte suddenly says of the VFA, “Walay problema!” That’s “No problem!” in his mother tongue.

Which is excellent news for Filipinos, Americans, and pretty much the rest of the world but probably has Chinese President Xi “Winnie the Pooh” Jinping in fits because of the message abrogation would have sent Beijing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17634/vaccine-passports-europe

Judging from the large number of banners with the words “Liberty” and “Freedom” that have been present at the events, it seems safe to conclude that many if not most of the marchers simply want freedom of choice.

“If tomorrow you infect your father, your mother or myself, I am a victim of your freedom when you had the possibility of having something to protect you and me. And in the name of your freedom, you may be having a serious form of the virus and you will arrive at this hospital. It is all these personnel who will have to take care of you and perhaps give up taking care of someone else. That’s not freedom, it’s called irresponsibility, selfishness.” — French President Emmanuel Macron.

“The government has thought out the measures very well — anything that is kind of fun is made dependent on vaccination. Do you want to sip an aperitif in a café? Get vaccinated. Do you want to visit your mother by train? Get vaccinated. Do you want to go shopping? Get vaccinated.” — Manfred Haferburg, German commentator, writing for the blog Achgut.

“We are neither anti-vaccine nor pro-vaccine. We are for free choice. Those of us who do not want to get vaccinated do not do so out of ideology but because we realize that there are so many doubts and perplexities about this which is in fact an experimental mass vaccination.” — Protester, Genoa.

“The limits of freedoms are [when they impact on] the rights of other people. One cannot expose others to the loss of life or health.” — Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński.

Protests are erupting in cities across Europe in response to government efforts to impose so-called Covid passports, documents that show proof of immunization against Covid-19. The passports, which effectively reward the vaccinated and punish the unvaccinated, have sparked a heated debate over the constitutionality of government attempts to force people to get vaccinated.

In the last two weeks alone, hundreds of thousands of people of all political persuasions have gathered in at least 300 European cities to protest government overreach and to defend civil liberties. So far, the protests have not had the intended effect of reversing government policies, but they have highlighted that Europeans are thoroughly divided on the issue of Covid vaccines.