RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-swiss-wont-miss-the-burqa-11615332345?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Switzerland voted in a referendum on Sunday to ban face coverings, and it wasn’t a revolt against Covid restrictions. Medical masks are excluded from the prohibition. Its real target is the burqa.

The measure, approved 51% to 49%, prohibits the wearing of full facial coverings in public. No specific garment or religion is mentioned, and the proposal is sex-neutral. The ban includes the balaclavas beloved by anarchists as well as the facial draping worn by some Muslim women. Yet there was never any doubt about the intent. The proposal was introduced by, among others, the nativist Swiss People’s Party, whose campaign featured posters of a black-veiled woman.

Switzerland joins Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany in banning the burqa. A challenge to the French ban was dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights. European democracies differ from America’s in notable ways, and many Americans have reservations about the Swiss prohibition: Aren’t burqa bans an illiberal curbing of religious and expressive freedom? By some reports, fewer than 100 women in Switzerland wear the burqa. Do they constitute so great a threat to the venerable Swiss nation that their constitution, which guarantees freedom of faith and conscience, has to be amended to alter their sartorial practice?

Aware that judgments from afar can sometimes be glib, I put these questions to Elham Manea, author of a book published last month titled “The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism.” A Swiss Muslim of Yemeni descent, she teaches at the University of Zurich’s Political Science Institute and campaigned for the prohibition with “a group of like-minded feminists, leftists and Swiss of Muslim heritage.” (She stresses that she distanced herself from the Swiss People’s Party.)

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/09/piers-morgan-leaves-good-morning-britain-after-criticizing-prince-harry-and-meghan-markle/

Piers Morgan, an English broadcast journalist, is leaving “Good Morning Britain” after he criticized Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah.

ITV quickly announced Morgan’s departure on Tuesday shortly after he walked off the “Good Morning Britain” set, a dramatic exit which broke record ratings, following reprimands from his cohost Alex Beresford about his comments denouncing the ex-royals interview.

“Following discussions with ITV, Piers Morgan has decided now is the time to leave Good Morning Britain,” ITV said in a short statement. “ITV has accepted this decision and has nothing further to add.”

Shortly after the Oprah interview aired, Morgan tweeted out a series of criticisms about the ex-royals, questioning the couple’s intentions and stating that Markle lied multiple times.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-baseless-attempt-to-cancel-win

Woke critics are trying to denigrate the eminent Brit, engaging in falsehoods along the way.

 W hen I started writing books about Winston Churchill and his contemporaries 30 years ago, virulent Churchill-hatred was confined to fascists, Marxists, and the swivel-eyed loons of the “green ink brigade” (so called for their vividly penned letters to the editor). Today, however, it has metastasized into the academy and is in danger of becoming received wisdom on the Left there — which in practice in the modern academy means everywhere.

One might have hoped that this vicious new atmosphere of Churchill-hatred that is being actively fostered in our seats of higher learning would at least not have been furthered at Churchill College, Cambridge, which was created specifically to honor his memory. There, surely, his strengths and weaknesses might have been debated in an atmosphere of objectivity and scholarship. It is, after all, the site of the Churchill Archives Centre, which houses all his papers.

Yet it was at the college, on February 11, that a symposium titled “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill” was held, featuring a panel of three confirmed Churchill detractors and chaired by a fourth in the person of Professor Priyamvada Gopal, who tweeted that “White lives don’t matter” at the time of the BLM demonstrations last summer.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17160/china-tech-war

China, pursuant to [its 14th Five-Year Plan]… will increase spending 7% per year to achieve “major breakthroughs” in areas of “frontier technology.” Specifically, the country, will devote resources to artificial intelligence; quantum information; semiconductors; brain science; genomics and biotech; clinical medicine and health; and deep space, deep sea, and deep earth.

In addition to theft, [China’s leaders] adopted a determined, methodical, and disciplined approach to developing their own innovations. Beijing’s efforts to master key technologies have been massive, state-directed, and government-funded. Government funding has been China’s key tactic…. Ye Yujiang, the head of basic research at the Ministry of Science and Technology, just announced that China’s spending on basic research nearly doubled during the just-completed 13th Five-Year Plan.

Beijing’s effort depends on large, top-down projects. Take the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, a multi-billion-dollar facility spread over 86 acres…. It is the world’s largest quantum research lab.

As a practical matter, the U.S. government has not paid much attention to the development of tech in recent decades.

[I]n building the world’s 5G networks—the fifth generation of wireless communications that will permit an unprecedented connectivity of devices—the [U.S.] let-the-market-do-it approach has been close to a total failure. There are, for instance, no American companies that compete with China’s Huawei Technologies, which President Trump in August 2019 labeled “a national security threat.”

“The threat of Chinese leadership in key technology areas is a national crisis and needs to be dealt with directly, now.” — Dr. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, February 23, 2021.

China believes it is on track to take over the world.

At the ongoing “Two Sessions” in Beijing, the Communist Party has publicly told us how it will accomplish its ambitious goal. If the Chinese ruling organization succeeds, the rest of the 21st century will be painted only in shades of red.

Fortunately, America is beginning to mobilize itself. Americans, however, need to act, immediately. Tech is the real arms race of our era.

On March 5, at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature, Premier Li Keqiang announced the 14th Five-Year Plan, which begins this year.

China, pursuant to the plan, will increase spending 7% per year to achieve “major breakthroughs” in areas of “frontier technology.” Specifically, the country, will devote resources to artificial intelligence; quantum information; semiconductors; brain science; genomics and biotech; clinical medicine and health; and deep space, deep sea, and deep earth.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/03/the-futility-of-the-great-lockdown-melodrama/

Angst and composure: In the third week of March 2020, the world lost its equilibrium. It went into a collective nervous breakdown in response to the “novel” coronavirus. Only now is the world starting to recover its composure. Over-reaction dominated the mood of 2020. Government, media, political and academic classes all catastrophised. Yet reality was anything but catastrophic. In 2020 the total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 was 0.028 per cent of the world’s population. That is smaller than the 0.031 per cent of the global population estimated as excess deaths due to the H2N2 flu virus in 1957-58.[1] In 1918-19, 1.1 to 2.75 per cent of the world’s population died from the “Spanish flu”, which targeted the young.[2] Worldwide 2.2 million persons had deaths attributed to Covid in 2020 compared to the 57 million who died from all causes in 2019.[3]

The increase in total deaths in 2020 in comparable (OECD-type) nations ranged from the negligible to the pronounced when matched against the five preceding years (Table One).

In most cases the increase that occurred was never more than a moderate fraction of the less than one per cent of the population that every year dies from all causes. It might be assumed that the varying national outcomes were the result of government action. However, there is no correlation between the levels of national morbidity in 2020 and the stringency of government restrictions and shutdowns (Table Two).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17129/iran-nuclear-weapon-game

If the Western leaders know anything about the theocratic establishment of Iran, they would be able to see that the regime has used the Shia religion of Islam to justify repressing its population, killing, executing and sponsoring terror groups across the region.

So, what would stop the mullahs from issuing a fake religious ruling if it is going to advance their nuclear program by concealing the fact that they want both nuclear weapons and ensuring the survival of their theocracy?

“The government is empowered unilaterally to revoke any Shahri’ah agreements which it has concluded with the people when these agreements are contrary to the interest of the country or Islam.” — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, quoted in “Iran: The Formation of Trans Identity and Possible Paths Toward the Acceptance of Greater Gender ‘Deviance'”, Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern & Islamic Law [Vol. 9:1].

The important issue for the ruling mullahs of Iran is the survival of their dictatorship. Anything, including religion, can be used to ensure that.

The Iranian regime has acknowledged for the first time that it might pursue openly obtaining nuclear weapons.

The Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi, a close advisor to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pointed out recently that Iran might in fact very likely pursue that path:

“I must make it clear that if a cat is pushed into the corner, it may behave differently from a cat that walks freely. If Iran is pushed into a corner, it will not be its fault [i.e. the pursuit of nuclear weapons] but rather the fault of those pushing it.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-korea-11615245637?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

The Journal reports that Kim Jong Un’s authorized biography is out and a Korean-language edition has been uploaded to the web. The authors are, unsurprisingly, bullish on Mr. Kim. The closing section (“Spinning the World Under the Axis of Sovereignty and Justice”) hails Mr. Kim’s summits with leaders including Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in. Summing it up, the authors gush that “there has never been a time when all the world has been this focused on our people’s greatness and dignity in our 5,000-year history.”

They are not wrong. North Korea, with a gross domestic product estimated at less than $26 billion and a population of 26 million, punches well above its weight. Kim Jong Un doesn’t see himself as the crackpot leader of a failed state. He sees himself as a winner, the uncontested leader of a tiny state that by ruthless dedication has forced the greatest powers in the world to deal with it as an equal.

As another American administration struggles with the difficult and thankless task of developing a North Korea strategy, the Biden team needs to understand that even severe sanctions are unlikely to work. For years sanctions proponents have argued that if the U.S. could only get full Chinese cooperation, North Korea would have no choice but to accept some kind of denuclearization process.

This is unlikely. China, annoyed as it often is by North Korea’s unpredictable and disruptive approach to politics, would never agree to sanctions stringent enough to risk destabilizing a neighboring country. More important, the Kims are not easily swayed by economic pressure. In an effort to contain Covid, Pyongyang has voluntarily imposed an isolation on itself far more devastating than sanctions ever could be. Trade with China is down 80%. GDP is down an estimated 10%. Grain production is slated to fall one million tons below the 5.5 million tons required to feed its populace. Major factories have closed due to shortages of spare parts, and blackouts are widespread.

Despite all this, the government is signaling its determination to stand fast until the pandemic ends. Not for the first time, Pyongyang is demonstrating that it will impose massive suffering on its population to pursue its goals. Perhaps this determination would crack in the face of even direr conditions, but a mass famine did not force the regime to abandon its nuclear program in the 1990s. Sanctions alone, however severe, will not bring this country to heel.