RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/as_germans_freeze_leading_newspaper_calls_green_energy_strategy_a_dangerous_miscalculation.html

The very green Germans have major concerns regarding their dependence on renewables:

‘Die Welt’ Commentary: “Europe Can’t Bail Out The German Power Supply”…Calls Strategy “A Dangerous Miscalculation”
Germany has seriously overestimated how much its neighboring countries are able to help out in the event wind and solar energy fail to deliver, thus putting its power supply at risk.
By P. Gosselin on 11 September 2018

Little attention is paid to the question of just how much “climate change” is a result of human activity — i.e., CO2 emissions into the atmosphere resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.  Does anyone have a handle on this?

A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions

ABSTRACT:We examine tropospheric temperature trends of 67runs from 22 ‘Climate of the 20th Century’ model simulations and try to reconcile them with the best available updated observations (in the tropics during the satellite era). Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/17/parliament-in-france-passes-anti-islamist-bill-n1426249

The lower house of the French parliament passed a hotly debated law that would not only heavily scrutinized Muslim mosques, schools, and sports clubs for Islamist influences but also promote respect for French values like free speech.

The bill passed 347-151, with 65 abstentions. French President Macron is being accused of promoting the bill to attract far-right anti-immigrant voters in the lead-up to the presidential vote next year.

Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally Party finished second to Macron in the 2017 elections, failing to win a runoff. Immigration was a huge issue during the campaign and Macron appears to be trying to protect his right flank with this bill.

Associated Press:

The bill gained added urgency after a teacher was beheaded outside Paris in October and three people were killed during a knife attack at a Nice basilica the same month.

A section that makes it a crime to knowingly endanger the life of a person by providing details of their private life and location is known as the ’’Paty law.” It was named for Samuel Paty, the teacher who was killed outside his school after information about where he taught was posted online in a video.

The bill bolsters other French efforts to fight extremism, mainly security-based.

The argument of opponents is that it unfairly targets a single group and that most of the crimes are covered by other laws. Muslims fear the law will be used injudiciously and could be an instrument of oppression.

But France’s largest Muslim group, the French Council for Muslim Faith, gave its blessing to the bill as did other religious groups. The bill never mentions “Muslims” or “Islam” by name, which was criticized by National Rally as a “half-measure.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/emmanuel-macron-and-the-woke-11613604823?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Classical Western values such as free speech and tolerance need all the defenders they can find these days, so kudos to French President Emmanuel Macron for volunteering for the mission. It’s hardly an easy task, but it’s an important one. Mr. Macron is right to conclude it’s vital to France’s future—and we’d add, to America’s.

Mr. Macron and ministers in his government in recent months have been fighting illiberal and divisive philosophies they say emanate from American universities. Mr. Macron in October decried the influence of “certain social-science theories entirely imported from the United States.”

He means in particular the habit of viewing most matters in racial terms—a core tenet of “wokeness”—and his government wants educational institutions to eschew it. Minister for Higher Education Frédérique Vidal this week promised an investigation into academics “looking at everything through the prism of wanting to fracture and divide.”

This is part of a broader drive to reassert French values after many years of Islamist terror attacks. Mr. Macron also is pushing for a new crackdown on religious extremism, and his law to that end passed through one chamber of the National Assembly this week.

Mr. Macron’s political and philosophical insight is to tie together the fight against violent extremism from outside France and the defense of democratic values within. His October speech detailing his new plan for combating Islamism included a warning that a focus on “post-colonial or anti-colonial” discourse constitutes a form of “self-hatred” of France that allows Islamism to flourish. Officials such as Ms. Vidal also warn against “Islamo-leftism.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-trial-of-nine-pro-democracy-activists-begins-11613481810

HONG KONG—Nine veteran pro-democracy activists appeared together in court Tuesday on charges related to the mass protests that rocked the city in 2019, in a trial that stands out for the number and prominence of the defendants facing prosecution.

They include 82-year-old pro-democracy campaigner Martin Lee, newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and seven others who face charges of illegal assembly that carry possible sentences of up to five years in prison.

While the prosecution of Hong Kong’s opposition has become increasingly commonplace, the defendants in the trial beginning Tuesday are a Who’s Who of an earlier generation of activists who have been fighting for core issues like the rule of law and political participation since before the U.K. returned Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Mr. Lee is a U.K.-trained lawyer who co-founded the city’s first pro-democracy party and helped write Hong Kong’s foundational legal document, the 1990 Basic Law. Others charged include Margaret Ng, a 73-year-old barrister; Albert Ho, a 69-year-old lawyer and activist; Lee Cheuk-yan, a 64-year-old labor leader, and Leung Kwok-hung, also 64, a longtime politician and activist known as “Long Hair.”

Police arrested the group last April in coordinated early-morning raids that surprised many in the city, since those targeted were generally associated with peaceful activism and running for elected office—not the often bitter clashes between young protesters and the police. For many, the arrests signaled that authorities intended to go beyond prosecuting protesters who committed violence to crush the democracy movement itself.

The arrests came just weeks before Beijing announced its imposition of a national security law that would give mainland authorities wide latitude to enforce crimes such as sedition, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers. Today, peaceful marches are essentially banned, and even some slogans are considered illegal.

“This is a political retaliation on the part of the Chinese Communist Party,” Lee Cheuk-yan said of the trial. “Sadly now in Hong Kong, the law is being used as an instrument of political retaliation and suppression.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/frances-macron-wins-national-assembly-backing-for-islamist-separatism-bill-11613501154

France’s National Assembly approved a bill Tuesday that aims to strengthen government oversight of mosques and religious schools and crack down on other practices—from online hate speech to forced marriage—that President Emmanuel Macron says are rooted in Islamist separatism.

The proposed legislation passed the National Assembly, or lower house of Parliament, with a vote of 347-151, garnering support from lawmakers in Mr. Macron’s ranks as well as other centrist parties. It now heads to the Senate.

Mr. Macron and his supporters in Parliament have framed the bill as a response to the spread of “Islamist separatism,” which the president describes as an ideology that aims to build a parallel society in France where religious rules override civil laws. That ideology, the Macron government says, undermines the values of the French Republic—liberty, equality and fraternity—as well as laïcité, France’s strict separation of religion and state.

The proposed legislation requires religious associations and mosques to declare foreign funding of more than €10,000 ($12,000), and to sign a pledge to respect France’s republican values to receive state subsidies. The bill would also make it easier for the government to shut down mosques, associations and schools that are found criticizing republican values.

The proposed legislation would make it a criminal offense for anyone, in the name of ideology or religious extremism, to put pressure on civil servants and public-service providers to deviate from France’s secular values. Under its provisions, a man who refuses to allow a male doctor to examine his wife could face up to five years in jail and a fine of up to €75,000.

France’s conservative party Les Républicains voted against the bill, saying it didn’t go far enough. The vote split the National Assembly’s leftist opposition, with lawmakers from the Socialist Party deciding to abstain. Far-left lawmakers voted against the bill, saying it was an unnecessary measure that risked stigmatizing France’s Muslim population, one of the largest in Europe.

“No, it is not in Muslim places of worship that terrorist attacks are organized,” far-left lawmaker Alexis Corbière said on Tuesday, speaking at the National Assembly ahead of the vote. “This text will only fabricate a new halo of suspicion around all Muslim associations,” he added.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/free-world-should-draw-red-lines-against-communist-china-former-pompeo-advisor_3697498.html

The world needs to wake up to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) bullying and lay down its own rules to deter the regime’s aggressions, the China adviser to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says.

Miles Yu, a Chinese-born academic who helped shape the Trump administration’s China policy, called out the CCP’s tactic of threatening the United States, telling it not to interfere in issues deemed to be the regime’s “internal affairs,” including Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang—which it dubs “red lines.”

“This is [the] Chinese Communist Party’s ‘red line,’ that’s all. It’s not red lines based upon international law,” Yu said in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program.

Most recently, the regime’s top diplomat warned the Biden administration that “any trespassing would end up undermining China–U.S. relations and the United States’ own interests.”

When the regime tells countries that the topic of Xinjiang is a “red line,” what it’s really saying, according to Yu, is, “We’re going to lock up a million Uyghurs in concentration camps, we torture them, we suppress their freedom.

“And you, the international community, … are not allowed to say a word in protest. Otherwise you’re not respecting us.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/chinese-scientist-exported-deadly-pathogens-wuhan-lloyd-billingsley/

It is “extremely unlikely” that the virus causing Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), but for the World Health Organization there’s more to the story. According to WHO mouthpiece Peter Ben Emerek, the issue does not even warrant further study. 

“Phew. That’s China off the hook, then,” wrote Miranda Devine of the New York Post.

Contrary to Emerek, a food safety and nutrition specialist, not a virologist, the WIV warrants plenty of further study. Consider, for example, recent revelations from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Two Canadian government scientists escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory amidst an RCMP  [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigation and internal review have been let go from the Public Health Agency of Canada,” Karen Pauls of the CBC reported on February 6. Canada’s health agency gave no explanation for the dismissal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a virologist from Tianjin, China, and her husband, Keding Cheng.

As Pauls explains, in 2017-18 Qiu made at least five trips to China, including one to train scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, “which does research with the most deadly pathogens.” According to Canadian government officials, Qiu was acting in response to the WIV’s request for virus samples.

In July, 2019, Cheng, Qiu and her students from China were removed from the National Microbiology Lab (NML), Canada’s only Level 4 lab, over a possible “policy breach” and administrative matter.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-far-left-the-far-right-and-democracy-in-germany/

“Out of the ruins of one of history’s most destructive tyrannies, West Germans built one of the modern world’s most advanced and successful examples of the liberal democratic state, the city of laws, the Rechstaat. They did it while an offshoot of the other of the great tyrannies of the twentieth century carried on its work behind the Iron Curtain in the country’s eastern half.”

On February 5, 2020, Thomas Kemmerich, of the centrist Free Democratic Party (FDP) was elected premier (Ministerpräsident) of Thüringen, the former East German state (Land). Elections of state premiers don’t usually make headlines, but this time was different. Kemmerich was elected after the incumbent premier, Bodo Ramelow of the far-left Left Party (Die Linke), had failed to gain a majority in two previous rounds of voting. In the third round, the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, “Alternative for Germany”) dropped its own candidate for the premiership and voted for Kemmerich, who was then elected as premier with the support of members from the AfD, FDP and the CDU (the centre-right Christian Democratic Union). It’s not clear whether the FDP and CDU members knew that the AfD were going to support Kemmerich.

Whether they did or not, in accepting the votes of the AfD, these parties (or at least their Thüringen caucuses) violated a clear taboo in contemporary German politics. Ever since the emergence of the AfD as a significant force in the 2017 federal elections, all of the country’s major parties have agreed to lock out the newcomers, refusing to ally or co-operate with them. In accepting votes from the AfD, even if they also accepted votes from two other parties, Thomas Kemmerich was seen as having broken that compact, as were the Thüringen caucuses of the FDP and CDU.

And since the CDU is currently the senior partner in Germany’s coalition government as well as the party of Angela Merkel, things didn’t stop there. The day after Kemmerich’s election, Merkel, speaking from South Africa, pronounced the vote “unforgivable”. Merkel has been Chancellor since 2005, making her the longest-serving current head of government in the European Union. She’s widely respected both internationally and in Germany, where she’s often known affectionately as “Mutti” (Mum). It should come as no surprise, then, that her swift and clear condemnation of Kemmerich’s election made waves, in Thüringen and in the CDU.