RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

China’s coronavirus epidemic has spread to nearly every country in Asia, with one little curious exception: North Korea.

Sure, a casual outside observer might note that North Korea is a tightly controlled communist country, but actually, it’s got a pretty porous border with China and, being a totalitarian hellhole, a vigorous black market trade moving in and out for goods.

This might just mean it’s got more coronavirus than it’s letting on.

That’s what the reports are now saying, starting with Australia’s Daily Mercury:

The North Korean capital of Pyongyang was supposed to stage a massive military parade on Saturday to spark its 72nd anniversary celebrating the founding of the country’s armed forces. Last year, the country’s dictator Kim Jong-un presided over a grand procession displaying all of the hermit nation’s new weapons, with an onslaught of soldiers marching in perfect step. This year, nothing like that took place. Local media reports, heavily controlled by Mr Kim and his ruling party, said the Workers’ Party had been successful combating “severe and dangerous difficulties” but didn’t mention the parade at all. That sparked suspicion the coronavirus, which originated in mainland China and has spread to almost 30 countries worldwide, had reached the hermit nation.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/justin-trudeau-is-up-to-his-old-tricks-again-as-canada-heads-down-the-totalitarian-road/

The true north strong and free, as the Canadian national anthem has it, is no longer true, strong or free. It is still north, of course, but this is no cause for celebration. While retaining its position on the geographical compass, it has lost its place on the moral compass. Our “basic dictatorship”-loving Liberal Prime Minister, friend of the late Fidel Castro, is taking the country down the path of increasing socialist control and totalitarian closure: unsustainable debt, skyrocketing taxes, rising unemployment, media bribery, the stink of corruption and—the cake under the icing—“totalitarian tendencies” and gradual police state governance.

As Lee Harding writes in the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, “Canada has no explicit re-education camps. But Trudeau’s leadership has introduced softer forms of forced belief, religious oppression, political indoctrination, restricted communications and mass surveillance.” Bills such as C-16, C-25, C-59, C-75 and C-76 reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on rights, compromise due process and render government transparency dark as night.

We know that Justin Trudeau is a thin-skinned prima donna with a vindictive and imperious nature who cannot tolerate criticism. His latest caper is to go after dissident journalist and author Ezra Levant, founder of Rebel News, for publishing and promoting a book, The Librano$: What the Media Won’t Tell You About Justin’s Trudeau’s Corruption, during the October 2019 election campaign. As one of the very few honest media sites in the country, the network has been consistently maligned in the press and in politically left platforms such as Wikipedia where terms like “far right” and “neo-fascist” are bandied about indiscriminately. Trudeau is clearly counting on public sentiment and media collusion in pressing an utterly fraudulent and indeed farcical case against Levant.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15576/china-coronavirus-li-wenliang

[T]he disease ravaging the country could be, as is now said, China’s “Chernobyl,” the cover up of a disaster eventually leading to the downfall of the regime.

Many analysts expect Beijing to stimulate the economy, but stimulus works only if there is underlying economic activity. With much of the economy shut down, there is not much to stimulate. A dead economy is an existential crisis for a regime whose primary basis of legitimacy is the continual delivery of prosperity.

The boldness of recent demands shows that, due to the outbreak, the Chinese people are starting to lose their fear of Xi and the Communist Party. Rudd and Chinese propagandists are saying the Party will weather this crisis, but when people are no longer afraid, anything can happen.

“If they do not give us an explanation, we will not give up,” said Lu Shuyun, the mother of Dr. Li Wenliang, demanding to know why Wuhan police harassed him while he was trying to save patients.

In this contest, bet on the mother. After all, she has about 1.4 billion angry people on her side.

On hearing the news that Dr. Li Wenliang had died from the coronavirus on January 31, people in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, under strict quarantine, opened their windows and cried. Others took to the streets to blow whistles for the whistleblower. Grief and anger, expressed from China’s streets and balconies and social media platforms, has reached almost unprecedented levels in recent days.

Li, reprimanded with seven other doctors for warning of the outbreak in December, was accused of “spreading false rumors” and “disrupting social order” and, for his brave efforts, was briefly detained, interrogated, and forced to sign an “admonishment notice.” Li undoubtedly contracted the virus treating patients at Wuhan Central Hospital.

The first official announcement of his death, on Thursday night, sparked online outrage. State media, perhaps to mollify public opinion, then said he was alive but critically ill. When he was pronounced dead for a second time, the announcement was followed by a white-hot uproar. Chinese censors scrubbed millions of social media postings supporting the young doctor. Li was 34 years old.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15557/russia-wagner-group

The Kremlin under President Vladimir Putin still manages to exploit opportunities in Africa and Latin America that threaten to diminish U.S. influence. To this end — to extend its power to regions beyond its borders and limited resources — Moscow established the Wagner Group.

The Wagner Group masquerades as a private commercial enterprise, but it is actually a mercenary arm of the Russian Defense Ministry, run by a long-time Putin associate, the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Putin has pledged support to rebel leader General Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA), in his effort to overthrow the UN-recognized government in Tripoli.

One motivation for Putin’s support for Haftar’s rebel army may be Moscow’s desire to gain access to Libya’s oil wells, almost all of which are under Haftar’s control.

The Wagner Group provides Putin with an aggressive force to safeguard his interests, while allowing him plausible deniability in the event of a confrontation with Washington…. One hopes the White House is listening.

Although Russia is no longer the superpower it was during the days of the Soviet Union, when it posed a genuine threat to U.S. interests around the world, the Kremlin under President Vladimir Putin still manages to exploit opportunities in Africa and Latin America that threaten to diminish U.S. influence. To this end — to extend its power to regions beyond its borders and limited resources — Moscow established the Wagner Group.

The Wagner Group masquerades as a private commercial enterprise, but it is actually a mercenary arm of the Russian Defense Ministry, run by a long-time Putin associate, the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. A paramilitary organization that enjoys technical support from the Russian Army — receiving armor, artillery and rocket systems — the Wagner Group may receive direct orders from the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU), the institutional successor to the old Soviet KGB spy organization, in which Putin was a career officer.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/11/israel-upset-at-belgium-for-inviting-terror-supporters-to-un-security-council/

JNS.org – Israel is furious at Belgium for continuing to act against Israel at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), including inviting a “one-sided, radical” pro-Palestinian activist to address council members.

Belgium, who currently holds the rotating presidency for the UNSC, has invited Brad Parker, a senior official for a non-profit called Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), to speak at the council’s session.

DCI-P accuses Israel of committing war crimes, supports the BDS movement and has ties to the US-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“Belgium has positioned itself as one of the Security Council member states most hostile toward Israel,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat told The Times of Israel. “Inviting a one-sided radical activist such as Mr. Parker to brief the Security Council is yet another negative record.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/02/cardinal-george-pell-australias-dreyfus/

The new legal year began this month with various ceremonies, among them the traditional celebration of a “Red Mass” in the Roman Catholic cathedrals of the state capitals. In Melbourne, the judges and lawyers who attended St Patrick’s must have pondered the strange combination of circumstances that have made that imposing Gothic building the alleged locus delicti of Australia’s most publicised and divisive legal case in living memory; and have seen Cardinal George Pell, the prelate whose archiepiscopal seat the cathedral once was, convicted for child sexual abuse – offences committed, it is said, in a sacristy just across the transept from the assembled jurists participating in the Mass.

The Pell case is one of those indicators, like climate change, of where one stands politically. The Left is pretty much anti-Pell en bloc, not so much for any privileged access to evidence, but because he is a conservative, someone who can therefore do no good – just like President Trump, who even if he could somehow fulfil the leftist dream and abolish “global warming” overnight would get no thanks for it. Those who have publicly stated their belief in Pell’s innocence tend to be conservative (Pell’s two most eloquent champions have been Keith Windschuttle, Editor-in-Chief of Quadrant, who has dissected the evidence with a forensic skill unusual even in the highest levels of the legal profession, and columnist Andrew Bolt) but they believe him not because of shared political or other views but because conservative thinking requires good reasons for its conclusions and is not swayed by shallow emotionalism and the shouts of the mob, and the evidence adduced against Pell is about as far from conclusive as any evidence accepted by an Australian court could ever have been.

On March 11, the full bench of the High Court will come together to hear the long awaited appeal by Pell, former Archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, then cardinal in charge of reforming (i.e. cleaning up) the finances of the Vatican, now prisoner no. CRN 218978 at Barwon, Victoria. When it does, the hearing will push whatever is obsessing the media at the time – coronavirus, the horrors of a Trump re-election, the collapse of the British economy after Brexit (that’ll be the wishfully thought-up fake news from the Nine media and the Guardian) off front pages round the world.

https://www.fasfreedom.com/2020/01/russia-and-the-return-of-civilizations-in-the-near-east-part-i/

Part I:

As the new year begins, the Middle East looks eerily similar to the way it has for the last several new years’ eves. Despite civil war in Syria and Libya, those who based their prognosis on the persistence of the reigning paradigm appear vindicated. That paradigm rested on several assumptions. First, the savviness of the rulers of the Arab states, along with the predictability of the traditional opposition (namely the Muslim Brotherhood) survived as the foundation for understanding the region. Second, the outlier power, both geographically and religiously, namely Iran, remains the greatest challenge. Third, the outlier revolt, namely ISIS or al-Qaida, while disturbingly resilient, failed to genuinely challenge the predominance of the ruling elites or established opposition of any Arab nation, and thus remains contained. And fourth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains at the edge of eruption and thus begs resolution.

And yet, as George Elliot observed in Silas Marner, “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

In fact, the warning signs of change are present that very little of what has been will continue to be. In short, as we enter the new year and decade, our understanding of the architecture of the Middle Eastern politics will founder, our imagination will be challenged, and an entirely new “shape” driven by hitherto ignored or nigh-invisible forces will define the Middle East.

In an article making waves, especially among those who are still seeking to realize their dream first articulated during the initial “Arab Spring” that Google and the internet would transform the region, Jonathan Alterman at the Brzezinski Center, believes his studies reveal a rise of individualism informing the current wave of demonstrations in the fertile crescent capitals.

Were such individualism to emerge, then it would indeed upturn the established order. And yet, such a rise in individualism would be startling since it contradicts the essence of familial, social, political, economic and religious life among Arabs Muslims, the culture of which is an amalgam of tribal and communal structures of safety and protection and a theological sense of being on the historically right side of revelation – itself also an intangible structure of protection. Neither pillar serves as a firm foundation for individualism, and in fact, gravitates against it. Thus, if there is indeed a rise in individualism, it would mean a cultural, religious and indeed civilizational shift in these communities. As such, the optimism in the liberal West that the Arab world is finally beginning to modernize would be warranted.

But cultures and civilizations do not easily change. In fact, the historical record shows that their persistence over eras and upheavals is stunning. Indeed, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the Ancient Regime, the underlying culture even after such a cataclysmic event as the French Revolution survived; its structures and patterns just assumed new masters derived from the disillusioned back benches of the old elites. Two thousand miles away, and a century later, the same observation could have been made about the Middle East after the Ottoman collapse: Arab-Ottoman elites, many of whom naturally even spoke Turkish rather than Arabic, who had become increasingly frustrated with the rise of Turkish nationalism rose to take over the residue of the Ottoman imperial administration after the war and became the new elite (in many ways not even new, but now just independent) of the old but now fragmented structures. Students of Russian history would probably make the same observations of the transition from Czar to commissar. Simply put, cultures, absent a millennially traumatic event or population shift, do not change much, and even then, only slightly.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/10/chinas-stranglehold-on-pharmaceuticals-threatens-americans-health-and-u-s-national-security/

As the cases of the Wuhan coronavirus (formally 2019-nCoV) continue to increase, and China and other countries aggressively perform screening, isolation, treatment and tracking of patients’ contacts, demand for various essential medical items is unprecedented, and shortages have been reported. For example, American dentists, who go through large numbers of surgical masks daily, are already finding their supply chain interrupted.

Ironically, most of the world’s supply of masks and respirators, along with other materials essential for health care, comes from manufacturers in China. That creates a vulnerable link in the global supply chain that supports everyday health care in hospitals around the world. However, those problems could pale if shortages spread to the pharmaceutical sector: China has become the world’s largest producer and exporter of the essential “active pharmaceutical ingredients” (APIs) used in the manufacture of drugs, not only in China but also in other countries, including the United States. 

Most of the medicines that Americans take — as much as 90% — are generic drugs that are manufactured abroad. 

APIs in China are currently produced without sufficient quality control to ensure drug safety and efficacy, according to the findings of a report late last year from the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, which was established by Congress in 2000 when China was permitted to enter the World Trade Organization.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-middle-east-conflict-you-havent-heard-about-11581277914?mod=opinion_major_pos6

Iran isn’t the only flashpoint in the Middle East. Less noticed are tensions between Egypt and Turkey over the fate of Libya, where a messy civil war has been raging since 2014. This antagonism could further destabilize the Middle East, which could set off another refugee crisis in Europe. The fight may also disrupt maritime commerce in the Mediterranean and lead to a resurgence of ISIS in Libya.

Two events set off the quarrel. One was Turkey’s decision last month to deploy troops to Libya in support of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj and his internationally recognized Government of National Accord, known as the GNA. Then there’s Turkey’s maritime accord with the GNA in November. Egypt has substantial energy interests in the eastern Mediterranean, and the agreement sets out exclusive economic zones for Turkey and Libya that would hamstring further exploration by Egypt in a region rich in natural gas.

There is no shortage of foreign involvement in Libya’s civil war. Egypt—like Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—backs Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar and the Libyan National Army under his command. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi has provided logistical support to Mr. Haftar as he fights militias loyal to the GNA. There are reports of more direct support from Egypt, including weapons shipments. Turkey, along with Qatar, backs the GNA, which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood—an archenemy of Egypt’s secular, military government.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mini-merkels-mega-meltdown-11581380318?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

German politics was thrown into new turmoil Monday when Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, announced she won’t run for Chancellor next year. The defense minister, known as AKK, was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s preferred successor.

The final straw for Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer and her critics was a conflict with the CDU’s local branch in Thuringia in the former East Germany. State elections there in October were inconclusive, as has become the norm in Germany. The CDU and center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) hemorrhaged votes while the neo-communist Left and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged. After months of negotiations, local CDU leaders agreed to cooperate with the AfD and the free-market Free Democratic Party to form a state government—defying Mrs. Merkel and Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s blanket ban on CDU alliances with the AfD.

Yet Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer—called “mini Merkel” for her close relationship with Germany’s long-time leader—never enjoyed full control of the party. Her selection as leader in late 2018 represented an attempt to suppress debate within the party by rejecting the free-market convictions of Friedrich Merz or the more assertive tone on cultural issues from Jens Spahn, both of whom challenged AKK.