RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/so-what-if-the-clinton-foundation-fleeced-norway-bring-on-the-chardonnay/

Hillary Clinton visited Norway last week, an event that brought to my mind, anyway, the fact that, adjusting for population, no country has been more generous to her family’s stupendously sordid con operation than has the land of the fjords.

The numbers are scandalous. Between 2007 and 2016, the Norwegian government transferred no less than 640 million kroner in taxpayer money to the Clinton Foundation. Given the average exchange rate during that period, that sum would’ve been roughly equivalent to $100 million. This means that each and every Norwegian citizen, without being asked, put about twenty dollars into the pockets of that crooked enterprise.

The official reason for these massive payouts was that the Norwegian government wanted to help mothers and children in Africa. In 2016, Norway’s purported newspaper of record, Aftenposten, ran an article in which Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at NYU, said that the real motive was to buy influence for Norway in the corridors of American power.

Well, that’s one reason, but there are others. One is this: Top-level Norwegian politicians are as ambitious as politicians anywhere. For many of them, becoming a member of parliament or cabinet official or even prime minister in a country of six million people isn’t quite enough to satisfy the old ego. How to solve this problem? Fortunately, a solution is already in place. Norway has long paid a hell of a lot more into major world organizations, from the UN on down, than other countries of its size. In fact, it spends more per capita on international development than any nation on Earth. Yes, this means that Norwegian citizens are getting ripped off.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/10/the-french-genocide-that

This is horrific history.  While the atrocities against the Vendees took place the American Constitution was crafted by our remarkable founding fathers which guaranteed limited government, checks and balances, separation of powers, popular sovereignty and individual rights. rsk

The Secret History

On March 4 2011, the French historian Reynald Secher discovered documents in the National Archives in Paris confirming what he had known since the early 1980s: there had been a genocide during the French Revolution.1 Historians have always been aware of widespread resistance to the Revolution. But (with a few exceptions) they invariably characterize the rebellion in the Vendée (1793–95) as an abortive civil war rather than a genocide.

In 1986, Secher published his initial findings in Le Génocide franco-français, a lightly revised version of his doctoral dissertation.2 This book sold well, but destroyed any chance he might have had for a university career. Secher was slandered by journalists and tenured academics for daring to question the official version of events that had taken place two centuries earlier.3 The Revolution has become a sacred creation myth for at least some of the French; they do not take kindly to blasphemers.

Keepers of the Flame

The first major Revolutionary mythographer was the journalist and politician Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), who became the first President of the Third Republic of France in 1871. He made his name in the 1820s with a bestselling 10-volume history of the Revolution. Purely as history his work was sloppy and unreliable; but the point was to celebrate the subject, not examine it. Thiers does not excuse atrocities in the Vendée; indeed he scarcely mentions them.

Unlike Thiers, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) actually looked at documents when researching his seven-volume history of the Revolution (1847–53). Michelet, more than any other historian, is responsible for the official mythology representing the Vendée rebellion as a would-be civil war instigated by deluded, credulous peasants who did not understand that they were fighting against Progress itself—a kind of 18th Century version of the gilets jaunes protests.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/juan-guaido-nicolas-maduro-regime-murdered-blackout-victims/

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó said Sunday that the 17 people who reportedly died as a result of the country’s electricity blackout were “murdered” by President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

“I can’t call it anything else, due to lack of electricity,” Guaidó told CNN. “Imagine if in your country, you wake to the news that there’s been four days without electricity because they steal from electricity plants and 17 people died. That’s murder.”

About 70 percent of Venezuela was plunged into darkness on Thursday and it remains unclear when much of the country, including the capital, Caracas, will get its electricity back. The blackout has resulted in looting and violent crime, and has left hospitals struggling to keep patients alive. The crisis comes as the impoverished country remains in turmoil and the opposition clashes with the Maduro regime’s forces.

Guaidó alleged to CNN that 16 states had zero power and six had partial power as of Sunday, and said the private sector has lost $400 million because of the blackout.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brexit-house-of-commons-vote/

Tomorrow the House of Commons will take another “meaningful vote” on Theresa May’s latest Brexit deal. The whole thing hinges largely on the backstop.

A reminder: The “backstop” is the temporary arrangement which would keep the U.K. in the customs union and single market in order to prevent a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The trouble with the backstop is that the U.K. and the EU want diametrically opposing outcomes with regards to regulatory systems and trade. Indeed, the fact that the EU allowed no clear way out of the backstop in May’s previous deal (rejected by the Commons in January’s “meaningful vote”) was largely why it failed.

Britain’s attorney general Geoffrey Cox has since been tasked with finding a way out of this problem. He offers official legal advice to the British government. Has he found a solution?

Last week Michel Barnier, Europe’s Brexit negotiator, suggested on, um, Twitter, that Brussels is open to giving Britain a concession on the backstop. The trouble is that this is effectively back to square one: Barnier’s concession does not solve the Northern Irish problem, but rather offers an arrangement that the U.K. has already rejected.

Brexiteers believe it is impossible to the integrity of the Union to split the baby — in other words, to have Northern Ireland in a different regulatory system than the rest of Britain. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland agrees. However, if Ireland (still in the EU) and Northern Ireland (out of the EU post-Brexit) were to be under different economic rulebooks, many are concerned that there would essentially need to be a “hard border.”

The EU is exploiting this dilemma for all it’s worth — and has been since day one. At present, May’s latest deal fails to address this adequately. Which is why, in its current form, it will likely fail tomorrow.