RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13580/france-angry

The beauty of capitalism is in its ability to make money out of anything. On Saturday, as all cafés in the Champs-Élysées were shut for fear of attack by “Yellow Vests”, mobile kiosks appeared selling espresso and croissants at double the price.

One of the few shops open away from the battlefield offered a designer version of the “Yellow Vest” at 125 euros apiece, compared of just 20 euros for the shabby original. So far, no “Yellow Vest” T-shirts, posters and mugs. But we expect some next Saturday.

We asked a lady at the next table what she would recommend from the day’s menu and she suggested “Aligot sausage with mashed potatoes”. We took her advice and were delighted by our meal. Which shows that “Yellow Vesters” might have good ideas when they know what they are talking about. Trouble is they often don’t.

“We are angry!” This is the sentence that I have repeatedly heard from Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) demonstrators during the past three weeks while taking the political temperature in France. The assertion seems to refute my first diagnostic in a column last month that the movement reflected boredom rather than anger.

Having talked to dozens of rioters and observed some of their shenanigans including burning car tires, overturning parked cars and smashing shop-windows in posh streets, I am prepared to admit that both anger and boredom might be involved.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13577/vatican-catholics-china

The Vatican may learn the hard way that that the Communist Chinese government does not honor its agreements. Beijing may attempt to extort even more concessions from the Vatican, just as the Chinese regime demands ever more surrender of sovereignty from western companies that do business in China.

It is also highly dubious that the Vatican will purchase peace by this pact: the regime will continue to persecute the Church. If the Communist regime is true to form, thousands more crosses will be taken down from Christian churches, especially in areas that have a high Christian population.

The courageous elders of Chinese Catholicism, who have endured decades of government persecution and regime efforts to divide the Church, may be seen by their flocks as having been bypassed by the Vatican. Many, if not most, Chinese Catholics are likely to view this agreement as a cynical political betrayal by the Vatican rather than a faith-based decision.

“In light of this dismal record, it seems that prudence and caution would seem to be the order of the day in Vatican negotiations with the totalitarians in charge in Beijing, at whose most recent Party Congress religion was once again declared the enemy of Communism.” — George Weigel, Catholic author and political analyst.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/understanding_brexit_in_2019.html

To understand what’s going on in the U.K. after the defeat of Theresa May in the Commons, one needs some background not only on what motivated the Brits to vote to leave the European Union, but more importantly what it is about the E.U. that they particularly dislike.

The first part of it is easy. The English, and it was they who provided the bulk of the “leave” votes, were simply tired of being told what to do by a European Commission that had not been elected by them or anybody else, for that matter. It was a simple matter of sovereignty, especially after the European Commission turned out to be nothing more than a proxy for a new German diktat after Merkel, without consulting anyone, opened the borders of the E.U. to two million Muslim migrants in 2015.

This may have been the proximate cause of the Brexit outcome, but the deeper reasons involve long held fundamental grievances that had been simmering over many years and finally boiled over. That had to do with the direction in which the E.U. is taking Europe. To put it simply, that direction is an unmistakably left-wing course aiming at the creation of a new union of European nations that lack individual sovereignty and are told what to do by their betters – a kind of democratic Soviet Union, which history tells us is not possible.

To be sure, there are many in the U.K. who share these objectives, from the increasingly socialistic left under Jeremy Corbyn to Scottish nationalists and a rabidly pro-E.U. mainstream press, but they are still a minority and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.