RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/three_nations_going_insane.html

A collection of three samples of outright stupidities from the news.

CHINA SACKS PARTY CHIEFS

China has sacked the top political leaders of virus-stricken Hubei province and its capital Wuhan, the highest-profile figures to be removed so far in a crisis that has killed 1,355.

The removals are the latest in a purge that saw Hubei’s two most senior health officials fired earlier this week as criticism grows over the way the outbreak has been handled, with claims of under-reporting.

The problem is not so much the party chiefs, who may or may not have been incompetent, but the increasing tyranny that rules over China.  The news and social media are full of reports that indicate that the Chinese government is lying about the scope of the event.

For a while, a few years back, it seemed as if China would grow into freedom along with its economy.  However, in 1996, the Chinese started constructing the Great Firewall of China to censor the internet.

In 1996, Beijing enacted a set of interim provisions for governing computer information, and in 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched the Golden Shield project — a national filter that blocks politically sensitive content from entering the domestic network.

Over time, the Chinese dictatorship has gotten worse.

In 2018, China got rid of term limits to allow Xi Jinping to remain in power.

Then, in 2019, China ordered that sacred texts be rewritten.

CHINA is to rewrite the Bible and the Quran to reflect its archaic Communist ideology, new reports claim.

The bizarre order came from the all-powerful Committee for Ethnic Affairs which oversees all religious matters in the state. …

Reports say bible-bashing China wants all major religions to review their holy texts and to adapt them to the “era of President Xi Jinping”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/13/have-lost-four-years-life-desperate-migrants-stuck-squalid-libyan/

When Osas Akahomoen set out from Nigeria in search of work in Europe in 2016, he imagined his qualifications as a welder would help him find a decent job and a living wage somewhere in Europe. 

Instead, he embarked on an odyssey of suffering that would see him kidnapped and ransomed twice, abandoned to die by people smugglers in the Sahara desert, and finally held incommunicado in a barely sanitary ‘detention centre’ in Libya without functioning toilets. 

“There’s no toothbrushes, no running water, there’s lice everywhere. At least in Nigeria I can have a shave. I can brush my teeth,” he said in an interview in the Libyan detention compound where he is being held. “I just want to go back to Nigeria. And I wouldn’t advise anyone else to do what I did. I have lost four years of my life.”

Mr Akahomoen, a thoughtful twenty-eight year old from Nigeria’s Edo province, has been through an extraordinary ordeal. But among the inmates of Libya’s migrant detention centres, it is not out of the ordinary. 

More than 40,000 would-be migrants to Europe have been intercepted at sea since Italy began paying and equipping the Libyan coastguard to do so in 2017.

But the fate of those detained has caused outrage. Last month, the European Union’s commissioner for Human Rights called on Italy to suspend the arrangement because of “serious human rights violations.” 

“Humanitarian rhetoric doesn’t justify continued support to the Coast Guard when Italy knows people apprehended at sea will be returned to arbitrary detention and abuse,” said Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, in a statement calling for Italy to suspend the program.

Oil-rich but sparsely populated, Libya has long been a destination for immigration. Under Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, there were as many as two million migrants workers living and working here, sending remittances back to families across Africa and the Middle East. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sharp-rise-in-coronavirus-cases-raises-questions-about-outbreaks-peak-11581617783

New cases of the coronavirus rose sharply after Chinese authorities changed the criteria for diagnosing the illness, raising questions about how soon the outbreak will peak.

On Thursday, health officials in Hubei province, the epicenter of the infections, announced the largest one-day jump in cases—14,840 on Wednesday, about nine times the number of new cases a day earlier. Epidemiologists, government officials and investors might now need to recalibrate their projections for the trajectory of a virus that remains little understood.

In recent days, investors had pushed U.S. stocks to records as Chinese officials touted gains in the fight against the fast-spreading illness that has gripped central China for the past month, fixing their attention on one number—a drop in the growth rate of new infections—that suggested the virus was running out of steam.

Such a dramatic surge in cases as announced Thursday is likely a one-off. It reflects the shift in how Hubei province authorities are classifying patients as having clinically confirmed infections after they are diagnosed by a doctor, such as through an X-ray, rather than just counting those patients who have positive laboratory identification of the virus.

The new practice isn’t a standard way to diagnose the presence of a specific virus.

“This does not represent a significant change in trajectory of the outbreak,” said Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program. He called the jump in cases “an after-fact of reporting.”

Dr. Ryan said the move would allow authorities to do more public-health investigations, such as by tracking down patients’ contacts, which are needed to contain the outbreak.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15597/italy-salvini-show-trial

In September, Sicilian prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro said that the kidnapping accusations against Salvini were “groundless” and recommended that he be acquitted of all charges. The Court of Ministers, however, overruled Zuccaro, who is now, paradoxically, required to proceed with prosecuting Salvini, even though he has already found him to be innocent.

The charges against Salvini appear to be part of a political vendetta against him as well as his opposition to mass migration. Case in point: Although the decision to prevent those onboard the Gregoretti from disembarking in July 2019 was made by Salvini in close coordination with senior members of the Italian government, only Salvini is facing prosecution.

“No contrary position was taken by the Prime Minister Conte…. This makes the hypothesis of individual action by Minister Salvini completely improbable.” — Senator Erika Stefani, Lega Party, presenting documents showing that other ministers were deeply involved in discussions over the Gregoretti.

“If I have to go to court, I will explain to the judges that defending the borders of my country and protecting citizens was my duty and, serenely, I will go to that courtroom to represent millions of Italians, because I simply did what they asked me to do: to control who enters and who leaves Italy.” — Former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini in a tweet, February 12, 2020.

Like Trump, Salvini’s legal troubles are fuelling his approval ratings…. Surveys indicate that if Italy held elections now, Lega would win a majority together with its conservative allies.

The Italian Senate has voted to strip former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of parliamentary immunity so that he can face kidnapping charges for refusing to allow migrants to disembark from a ship at a port in Sicily.

If Salvini, who leads the anti-mass-migration party, Lega (League), is found guilty, he faces a ban on holding political office and up to 15 years in prison. He has said that he acted in Italy’s national interest and that the charges against him are politically motivated, aimed at silencing criticism of the country’s open-door migration policy.

Under Italian law, ministers enjoy immunity for actions taken while in office — unless the Senate votes to lift that protection. On February 12, the Italian Senate voted 152-76 in favor of lifting Salvini’s immunity, after a parliamentary committee on January 21 recommended the action.

In December, the Court of Ministers in Catania, Sicily, ruled that Salvini should be indicted for “aggravated kidnapping” for depriving 131 migrants onboard the Gregoretti coastguard ship of their liberty by refusing to allow them to disembark. The incident, which occurred over a four-day period in July 2019, was part of Salvini’s “closed ports” policy against illegal immigration and an attempt to force EU member states to share the burden of mass migration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boris-takes-charge-11581621621?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Boris Johnson doesn’t do things by halves, and his reshuffle of the U.K. cabinet on Thursday is a case in point. Having exiled Chancellor Sajid Javid, the Prime Minister now is solely responsible to voters for Britain’s economic performance after Brexit.

Mr. Javid jumped instead of being pushed, but Mr. Johnson won’t be unhappy. The two increasingly butted heads on economic and fiscal policy, and Mr. Javid also disagreed on many matters with Mr. Johnson’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings. The breaking point came Thursday when Mr. Johnson insisted that Mr. Javid fire most of his policy advisers and hand the economic reins to Mr. Johnson’s office. Mr. Javid couldn’t stay on as a matter of reputation and self-respect.

The new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has been a member of Parliament for fewer than five years and is a relative unknown on the public stage. This means Mr. Johnson is now effectively responsible for economic policy. It’s just as well. An oddity of British governance is the traditional division of responsibility between the prime minister and the chancellor, with chancellors wielding outsize power to chart their own course independent of their nominal political boss. Now voters will know exactly whom to credit or blame.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15581/iran-not-saudi-arabia-is-to-blame-for-yem

Now, with the humanitarian crisis reaching a critical juncture with an estimated 80% of Yemen’s 24 million population in need of assistance, aid organisations are finally waking up to the central role the Iranian-backed Houthis have played in creating the disaster.

As humanitarian officials prepare to meet in Brussels this week — Thursday — to discuss the Yemeni aid crisis, the main topic of discussion will be what has been described as the unprecedented and unacceptable obstruction tactics being employed by the Houthis that are preventing vital aid supplies from reaching the country’s starving population.

In their latest bid to seize control of the aid distribution, the Houthis have recently imposed a 2 percent levy on all the international aid agencies operating in the country, prompting one aid worker to claim that the Houthis could be using the aid money to finance the war.

Whatever the outcome, no one will be in any doubt that it is the Iranian-backed Houthis, and not the Saudi-led coalition, who are primarily responsible for creating Yemen’s disastrous humanitarian crisis.

In the five years since Yemen was plunged into its bitter civil war, it has invariably been the Saudi-led coalition, which enjoys the support of the US, Britain and France, that has been blamed for causing what is widely regarded as the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster.

Throughout the conflict the main focus of coverage in most of the Western media has been on the role played by the Saudi military in intensifying the conflict, with Riyadh taking the lion’s share of the blame for the estimated 100,000 Yemenis that have died.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15518/qassem-soleimani-iran-martyrs

Esmail Ghaani, Soleimani’s successor as head of the Quds Force, has promised: “to continue martyr Soleimani’s path with the same force and the only compensation for us would be us would be to remove America from the region.”

So much terrorism has come from Tehran…. as distant as Latin America.

One might also ask why has the United Nations never held Iran accountable for these violations?

One might also ask if the time has finally come for the UN’s largest donors — read the US — to rethink their generosity? Why not, as Ambassador John R. Bolton long ago recommended: “that we should pay for what we want and insist that we get for what we pay for.”

When news broke on the morning of January 3 that Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general who for many years had headed the Quds Force, the powerful extraterritorial operations arm of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), had been assassinated — along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of the Iraqi Ketaib Hezbollah militia — in a US drone strike at Baghdad airport, pundits across the globe burst into print, some to condemn, others to praise his killing.

Neither side seems to want an all-out war. On October 7, 2019, US President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

“… it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home. WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.”

One can only hope that this statement is not as un-thought-through as it appears. While in a democracy war is never a first choice — least of all in an election year — the Western fight against Islamist terrorism and territorial predation is far from at an end. As President Trump has already found out in both Syria and Iraq, when it was even mentioned that troops might be withdrawn, evidently that was understood by some countries as an invitation to help themselves, and more troops had to be sent, often within days. The same “misunderstanding” might be now be taking place in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and Libya as well.

Quite often, troop deployment in these areas does not so much mean “endless wars” as forward deployment. While President Trump is indeed a dazzling negotiator, there are sizeable differences between negotiating, say, business deals and geopolitical ones. Business deals tend to be “win-win”: You have the land and I have the money, or I have the land and you have the money. Geopolitical deals can be stickier: You would like to have — nuclear weapons capability? The Middle East? Control of all the sea lanes on the planet? What is supposed to disabuse a despot of his wish? Will a despot cheat? Will a despot take money given to him not to cheat and use it to cheat? Why would a despot not cheat? Or try to?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/meghan-markle-disaster-british-monarchy-katie-hopkins/

‘Tell us about Megxit!’

It’s the question I am most asked when I open the floor for questions after giving a speech about Brexit and the state of Britain.

And my answer is a straight one: Meghan Markle has been an absolute disaster for the British monarchy. Like some gangster, she has committed a smash-and-grab on the Palace, snatching what can be easily sold, trashing anything of sentimental value.

Her latest stunt – pocketing an alleged $500K for ratting out her husband’s mental health issues in front of a crowd of deep-pocketed JP Morgan bankers – is proof of what many of us suspected from day one: that she was only ever in this for the publicity and the cash.

Markle saw an opportunity for stardom and she pounced on it, like a black widow spider eating her mate, the male redback, when she is done. In nature the male spider has a taste for sacrificial sex, flipping his bare abdomen into the hungry female’s mouth during mating. So too at the Palace, where the Prince-Formerly-Known-as-Harry has been consumed by the woman he was desperate to be loved by.