RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13369/france-macron-brexit

We are most grateful to French President Emmanuel Macron for revealing that the problem of the “backstop” is far larger than anyone had realized. It was seen as merely a problem of good faith of the EU Commission toward the UK. Now we see that it is also a problem of good faith of all the 27 remaining members of the EU. The problem is 28 times larger than anyone had noticed.

The flaw in Article 20 of the “backstop” is that it permits the customs union dictated by the Protocol to continue forever unless both parties agreed to end it. What is needed is the reverse: a date on which the application of the Protocol ends unless both parties agree to continue it. Indeed, the length of the transition period starting on March 29, 2019 is defined in the reverse manner in the Withdrawal Agreement. So why did the UK’s negotiators fail to demand something of the kind for Article 20?

Although UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative critics do have the power to create a majority against her deal by voting with the opposition, there is a much greater majority in the Commons for preventing a no-deal exit. That is, there are other Conservatives who will themselves join the opposition in feverishly averting no-deal, and with good reason. Apart from May’s Conservative critics, no-deal is unthinkable.

On November 25, 2018, a summit meeting of the 27 remaining countries of the European Union approved the Brexit deal agreed with the UK’s Theresa May. At the end of the summit, President Macron gave a press conference in which he announced how he would abuse the deal to blackmail the UK, thereby making approval of the deal in the UK Parliament unthinkable. This deal must be the shortest-lived treaty in history.

From the moment that Theresa May first presented the proposed Brexit deal to her cabinet on November 14 and to the House of Commons the next day, opposition to it has steadily risen among the MPs of her own Conservative Party. Also the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (DUP), the coalition partner that gives her a small majority in the Commons, is unanimously opposed. May has earned respect for the resolution with which she promotes the deal amid a cacophony of opposed voices that offer no coherent alternative, but also amazement at the stubbornness with which she rejects any change to the deal, thereby ensuring its failure.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/02/spain-reels-far-right-vox-party-storms-andalucian-parliament/

The ultra-conservative and anti-immigration Vox has stormed into the Andalucian assembly in Sunday’s regional election, marking the first time a far-Right party has achieved parliamentary representation on any level in Spain’s recent history as a democracy.

The party that favours the end of autonomy in Catalonia and the expulsion of all immigrants who entered Spain illegally won 12 out of 109 seats in Andalucia’s parliament with 11 per cent of the vote.

“Vox was the party that led the political debate,” said the party’s secretary general, Javier Ortega.

“We put on the table the need to control our borders and end illegal immigration, end abusive levels of taxation and the need to put an end to ideological laws relating to gender.”

Despite running out narrow winner in the region it has ruled continuously for 36 years, the PSOE Socialist party of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez suffered a hugely disappointing result in Andalucia. The party’s all-time low of 28 per cent and 33 seats mean it will not be able to govern with a majority, even with the support of the Left-wing coalition Adelante Andalucia, which includes Podemos.

Spain’s main conservative opposition force, the Popular Party (PP), also lost ground, sliding six percentage points to just under 21 per cent, while the liberal Ciudadanos was the night’s only winner among the established parties, doubling its share to 18 per cent.

Ahead of European and possibly a general election in 2019, Spain’s political scene appears more fractured than ever after the dramatic emergence of Vox on the extreme right of the spectrum.

Despite having seen its number of seats in the Andalucian parliament shorn from 33 to 26, the PP appeared to welcome the arrival of Vox on the political scene.

For the PP’s candidate for the presidency of the region, Juan Manuel Moreno, it was a “historic day” on which “Andalucia had chosen change”, saying he wants to lead a right-of-centre coalition including Vox and Ciudadanos.

https://www.city-journal.org/paris-riots

On July 14, 1789, in Paris, the price of bread had reached its highest point in a century. Parisians held the king responsible, which was in part justified. The royal administration’s meddlesome regulation had made grain commerce among the provinces difficult, leading to local famines. The result: a riot in the capital, and the taking of the Bastille—a mostly empty prison but a hated symbol of the absolute monarchy.

What then followed was a revolution—the French Revolution—taken over by an elite fired by the mad ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: this generation of twentysomething men would invent the first modern dictatorship and shed much French blood before taking on Europe, all in the name of the Republic and according to a Virtue that it claimed to embody. Robespierre, one of the most wild-eyed of the revolutionaries, designated himself the Republic’s messiah, charged with the “purification” of the old world. This history is well known, but it is generally reconstituted in a positive light, baptized with the ideology of “the common good” or “the general will.”

One can’t help but recall this French taste for rebellion, idealized as progressive and ultimately positive, as rioters are currently setting fire to the Champs-Élysées. Might this symbol of consumer society be the equivalent, for contemporary protesters, of the Bastille two centuries ago?

The origin of the present protest is not the price of bread but an increase in gasoline taxes. Yet, with gasoline now occupying a central place in our way of life as bread once did, there is at least some link between the two eruptions. And Louis XVI was guilty by inattention, just as Emmanuel Macron the First, France’s president, seems strangely indifferent to public sentiment. To enact policies that raise gasoline prices—already the highest in Europe—on the eve of the year-end holidays and without offering a justification, was a major political error.

Macron’s mistake was made worse by the justification given after the uprising: the government explained to skeptical citizens that the new tax was actually an ecological measure, and therefore justified, since the goal was not to add to the state’s coffers but to help fight climate change. Obviously no one believes this excuse, including the government that issued it, or so we must hope.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/12/assisted-suicide-of-europe.html

I devoted too little space in my last column, “The Blob and Fake News,”, to the master plan of the UN for world governance, “The “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration,” which Canada will sign on to. Or, rather, the boy Wonder, JustinTrudeau, will sign on to it.

Trudeau, premier of Canada, opined that national borders are an anachronism and obsolete, and should be abolished. In “The Blob,” I wrote:

According to Gatestone, in 2015, he said,

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values –openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

Two years later, Salim Mansur at Gatestone reported,

The Canadian government’s recent announcement that it will be providing more than CDN $600 million (USD $455 million) over the next five years to bail out the country’s financially strapped media outlets — as part of the fall fiscal update about the federal budget ahead of the 2019 federal election — is not as innocent as it may seem.

In response to the announcement, the heads of Canada’s media organizations promptly popped open the proverbial champagne and raised their glasses to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Unifor, a national union that represents Canadian journalists, was even more jubilant. It felt vindicated that its slogan of “Resistance” — which it touts as Conservative Party opposition leader Andrew Scheer’s “worst nightmare” — had so swiftly resulted in opening the government’s wallet, and handing out taxpayers’ money, to an industry that should actually be fighting to remain steadfastly independent of any form of government backing.

In effect, Canadian “journalists,” and journalists everywhere, will become the paid shills of the government and its policies of not saying critical things about Islam or Muslims. Furthermore, rolls of duct tape will be readied to silence any such criticism or to quash it before it even thought of:

The Global Compact requires the media outlets of member-states to adhere to the objectives and refrain from any critical discussions of these objectives that would be deemed as not “ethical” and against UN norms or standards consistent with the ideology of globalism.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/iran-tests-ballistic-missile-in-violation-of-un-resolution/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Iran had test-fired a medium range ballistic missile capable of carrying several warheads.

The test violated a Security Council resolution that calls on Iran not to pursue “any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”

The missile has the ability to hit parts of Europe and any location in the Middle East, the secretary said.

NBC News:

“We condemn these activities,” Pompeo said, “and call upon Iran to cease immediately all activities relating to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official said the country’s missile program was not in breach of U.N. resolutions.

“Iran’s missile program is defensive in nature… There is no Security Council resolution prohibiting the missile program and missile tests by Iran,” state news agency IRNA quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi as saying.

Qasemi did not confirm or deny that Iran had carried out a new missile test.

Iran has repeatedly said its missile program is purely defensive and denied its missiles are capable of being tipped with nuclear warheads.

The resolution makes no distinction between an “offensive” weapon and a “defensive” weapon. The idea that a nuclear-tipped missile would be “defensive” in nature is absurd, but there are Iranian apologists in the U.S. who back Tehran up.

The language of the U.N. Security Council Resolution “calls on” rather than “forbids” Iran from testing its missiles, according to Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council. The very U.N. resolution that Pompeo cited is also the very nuclear deal the Trump administration withdrew from earlier this year, Parsi added.

“We had a functioning deal and you may not have agreed with all the contents of it but it actually contained this conflict,” he said. “Trump came in, ripped it up and now we are seeing more missile tests, we’re seeing escalation and we are seeing a drift towards war.”

Actually, that was one of the biggest deficiencies in the nuclear deal — that it didn’t cover Iran’s ballistic missile program. Parsi, a pro-regime hustler in Washington, is trying to distract from Iran’s violation by shifting the blame to Trump. It doesn’t pass the smell test. CONTINUE AT SITE