RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/how-fragile-is-irans-theocracy/

Iran’s people barely can scrape together enough calories to keep body and soul together in the big cities, while entire parts of rural Iran are emptying out as rivers and wells go dry. Things are so bad that the number of babies born in Iran has fallen by nearly 25% in the past five years. Only Venezuela is worse off — but the wicked Maduro government remains in power. Regimes that are willing to shoot their people dead in the streets (as Iran shot 1,500 protesters last November) can cling to power even under desperate material circumstances.

As I wrote at Asia Times yesterday:

One average salary pays for a small apartment outside the center, utilities, enough calories to keep body and soul together, and bus fare, which is subsidized. Throw in cell phone service, clothing, fruits and vegetables, and one or two meat meals a month, and an Iranian couple will require two average salaries. According to official data, food price inflation was 28% year-on-year as of December.

Medicine is another matter. Some imported items, for example, insulin pens, can’t be found at pharmacies in some provinces, according to a Persian-language report by IRNA. The Chancellor of the University of Isfahan told the national news agency that imported medicine such as chemotherapy drugs was in short supply, but that most other medication was available.

Import controls to spare foreign exchange have put autos outside the range of most Iranians. A VW Golf costs the local-currency equivalent of $48,000, according to Numbeo, or about 14 years’ average pay.

Reduced consumption has taken a toll on Iranian family life. According to the Tehran Times, citing Mohammed Javad Mahmoudi, head of the committee on population studies of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. According to Mahmoudi, the number of babies born in Iran fell by nearly 25% between 2015 and 2019.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/energy-paradoxes-put-europe-in-a-precarious-position/

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas.

Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it.

Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are either illegal or face so many court challenges and popular protests that they are neither culturally nor economically feasible.

The result is that Europe is almost entirely dependent on Russian, Middle Eastern, and African sources of energy.

The American-Iranian standoff in the Middle East, coupled with radical drop-offs in Iranian and Venezuelan oil production, has terrified Europe — and for understandable reasons.

The European Union has almost no ability to guarantee the delivery of critical oil and gas supplies from the Middle East should Iran close the Strait of Hormuz or harass ships in the Persian Gulf.

Europe’s only maritime security is the NATO fleet — a synonym for the U.S. Navy.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/01/sound-an-alarm-gender-activism-is-about-to-silence-us/

The Victorian government intends to pass a law very soon that may see ordinary citizens imprisoned if they speak up against the chemical, psychological and physical mutilation of confused adolescents. Labor Attorney-General-Hennessey wants to outlaw conversion practices. They are defined in her discussion paper about the proposed Bill as

…any practice or treatment that seeks to change, suppress or eliminate an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to reduce or eliminate sexual and/or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender, or efforts to change gender expressions.

Queensland already has a similar bill before its parliament. It would authorise imprisonment for those who perform what is called conversion “therapy” in that state. Such therapy is defined as a treatment or other practice that attempts to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. That’s very broad. While it is directed to those who provide a health service it includes “alternative” ones, and  will very arguably capture pastors, concerned family members, or other lay people who attempt to dissuade a young person they know from embarking upon a “transition” from their natal sex to its opposite.

Transitioning, in the parlance of the new medico-legal commissariat who run the clinics that administer these treatments, means, firstly, a child taking a drug that blocks the release of testosterone (in boys) or oestrogen (in girls) and then, in the next phase, loading them up with doses of the other sex’s natural hormone; physical mutilation is only involved if it moves to a third phase. It often does.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15440/erdogan-islamic-campaign

Half the population of Turkey is under the age of 32 — a young population. Many of these young Turks are, it seems, pushing back against Erdoğan’s state-imposed Islamization.

The more Erdoğan uses the state’s police power to indoctrinate young Turks in favor of devout political Islam, the more they tend to put a distance between themselves and Erdoğan’s “devout generations” campaign.

Perhaps Erdoğan’s best service to his country is to show young Turks what it actually means to live under an Islamist regime.

Trust for Islamist politics in both the Middle East and North Africa has plummeted since the beginning of the Arab Spring. A survey for BBC Arabic found that since 2012-13, public trust in Islamist political parties in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Sudan and Iraq has significantly declined, from nearly 40% to less than 20%. The survey also found a similar decline in trust for religious leaders in the same countries. In the Gaza Strip alone, public trust in Hamas fell from 45% to 24%. In Turkey, Islam does not appear to be appealing to masses as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan apparently hoped it would.

In 2012, Erdoğan described his political mission as “raising devout generations”, a remark for which Turkey’s main opposition called him “a merchant of religion”. In November 2019, Erdoğan repeated his quest for “devout generations” so that “we will not see alcoholics on the streets”. He boasts that since he came to power in 2002, the number of imam school students has risen from 60,000 to 1.3 million. No doubt, that is an impressive record for an Islamist strongman. But too premature to cheer about.

https://www.ap.org/en-us/

Nigel Farage, the self-declared “pantomime villain” of Brexit, is leaving his favorite theater — the European Union’s parliament in Strasbourg — this week with a sense of mission accomplished.

Ridiculed for years, and thriving on the abuse he got from, and dealt to, pro-EU legislators and politicians, he now feels he got the last laugh. On Jan. 31, the U.K. will be leaving the EU, in a historic loss for the bloc — and a historic gain for the likes of Farage.

“When I first came here, I started saying the U.K. would leave the European Union. Everyone thought it was hilarious,” Farage told The Associated Press in an interview, speaking about his early days in the EU legislature in the late 1990s.

The European Union was still thriving, expanding at the time, and could shrug off a loud and sometimes foul-mouthed British parliamentarian as just a nuisance about to be swatted aside by the force of history of closer integration.

Britain may have been a halfhearted member with rumbling about holding onto sovereignty and complaints about “unelected bureaucraats” from Brussels having too much say in their lives. But thoughts of actually leaving? No. Those were left to fringe politicians like Farage.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/china-taiwan-relations-tsai-ing-wen-reelection-highlights-failure-china-foreign-meddling/

Finally! After the betrayal of Nixon/Kissinger/ Carter by recognizing Communist China’s “One China” policy Taiwan is breaking free and gaining the approval of America…..rsk

President Tsai Ing-wen’s landslide reelection victory is a huge blow to Beijing’s ambitions.

On Saturday, Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive party (DPP), won re-election in a landslide victory that dealt a decisive blow to Beijing’s aggressive efforts to dictate Taiwanese politics.

The first thing to note about Tsai’s victory is that it had a lot to do with the ongoing unrest in Hong Kong. At the beginning of 2019, Tsai had an approval rating in the low 20s. The pro-reunification Nationalist Party (KMT) had won 2018’s local elections, handing the DPP a huge defeat on the strength of voters’ economic concerns. Many Taiwanese weren’t pleased with an economy slowed by Beijing’s coercive measures. China’s autocratic head of state, Xi Jinping, sees Tsai’s pro-independence political stand as the ultimate threat to his aim of reunification with Taiwan and had decided to use China’s economic power to teach her a lesson. Beijing had issued a travel ban in 2018 forbidding mainland tourists from traveling to the island. Since tourism is one of the biggest industries in Taiwan, the ban was projected to result in 700,000 fewer mainland tourists in just six months, costing Taiwan a staggering $900.5 million. Voters backed the KMT later the same year, and Tsai was forced to resign from her position as DPP chair. With a dangerously low approval rating and no political momentum to speak of, Tsai looked to be as good as dead politically this time last year.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15439/china-destroying-multilateralism

If Wang Binyang is selected in March, she will be able to bend international rules to favor her country’s assault on others’ technology. In any event, her nomination reveals Beijing brazen ambition to dominate multilateral institutions…. Beijing’s placement of officials inside multilaterals has greatly facilitated its malign activities.

From its perch on the UN Security Council, for instance, Beijing has placed itself in a position to attack freedom and democracy. It was the force behind a just-passed, Russian-sponsored General Assembly resolution to create a new convention that, many fear, will be used to restrict online expression worldwide.

“Why is the World Bank loaning money to China?” President Trump tweeted on December 6, “Can this be possible?”

The institutions created after the Second World War, unfortunately, are not adapting well to this century. The ardent proponents of multilateralism have failed to protect global institutions. China has undermined them from the inside, and now those advocates are not dealing with Chinese predation but instead taking potshots at Trump’s corrective efforts.

Trump has cooperated with international organizations when he could and has worked to replace the others. As he moves forward, he is creating a more realistic and enduring international order.

China, the world’s leading cyberattacker and master intellectual property thief, in November nominated one of its nationals to head the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization. If Wang Binyang is selected in March, she will be able to bend international rules to favor her country’s assault on others’ technology. In any event, her nomination reveals Beijing’s brazen ambition to dominate multilateral institutions.

Beijing’s placement of officials inside multilateral institutions has greatly facilitated its malign activities. Take the case of Fang Liu, the secretary general of the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Last February, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported that she hindered the investigation of a November 2016 cyberattack, called the “most serious” in that institution’s history. Emissary Panda, a hacker group with ties to the Chinese government, was thought to be behind assaults on the ICAO’s network. Dr. Liu came to the UN’s ICAO from China’s aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

Liu protected, among others, James Wan, the ICAO’s deputy director and head of information and communication technology, who repeatedly undermined the probe into the cyberattacks. Wan has current links to two institutions associated with a known hacker, China’s People’s Liberation Army.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15307/turkey-jailing-journalists

“Scores of journalists remain behind bars or under travel bans as a consequence of an extended, politically motivated crackdown against the media.” — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate”, September 13, 2019.

“A subsequent wide-ranging capture of the judiciary has progressively and severely damaged the rule of law and the public’s right to access information…” — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate”, September 13, 2019.

“Pre-trial detention for hundreds of journalists has lasted for months and sometimes years before investigations are completed and the trials can begin.” — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate”, September 13, 2019.

According to the latest report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Turkey fell below its ranking as the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the first time in four years — dropping behind even China. That rating is not exactly indicative of an improvement in Ankara’s stance towards the media. On the contrary, as CPJ revealed on December 11:

“[T]he fall to 47 journalists in jail from 68 [in 2018] reflects the successful efforts by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stamp out independent reporting and criticism by closing down more than 100 news outlets and lodging terror-related charges against many of their staff.”