RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wokeness-is-putins-weapon-ukraine-western-values-abortion-climate-change-human-rights-protectionism-decadence-xi-jinping-revisionist-powers-11657569787?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Five months into the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s army continues to flounder. Kyiv’s defenders are making up for their smaller numbers and artillery shortages with better commanders, smarter tactics, higher morale and, increasingly, better weapons as Western high-tech arms reach the battlefield.

Mr. Putin has had the most success, paradoxically, in the domains of economics and politics, where the West thought its power was strongest. Fears that a Russian gas embargo could cripple European economies and leave comfortable German burghers freezing in the dark next winter have replaced hopes that Western sanctions would bring Moscow to its knees. Thoroughly intimidated by the consequences of an economic war with Russia, Germany is beginning to weasel out of its pledges to increase defense spending.

Similarly, the early Western optimism that values would unite the world against Russian aggression has fizzled. Led by China and joined by India and Brazil, countries around the world are choosing trade with Russia over solidarity with the Group of Seven.

To counter Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, the West must recalibrate. Since the Russian leader attacked Georgia in 2008, Western leaders have consistently mischaracterized and underestimated the threat that the revisionist powers (China, Russia and Iran) pose. In Georgia, Crimea, the South China Sea and the Middle East, the result has been one unexpected setback after another. To prevent another major setback from this latest and most blatant attack, the West needs to rethink assumptions and conventional doctrines that have demonstrably failed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18683/world-health-organization

“The alarming amendments offered by the Biden Administration to the WHO’s International Health Regulations would grant new unilateral authority to [WHO] Director-General Tedros to declare a public health crisis in the United States or other sovereign nations, without any consultation with the U.S. or any other WHO member. Specifically, the Biden Amendment would strike the current regulation that requires the WHO to ‘consult with and attempt to obtain verification from the State Party in whose territory the event is allegedly occurring in,’ ceding the United States’ ability to declare and respond to an infectious disease outbreak within the United States, dependent on the judgment of a corrupt and complicit UN bureaucracy.” — Rep. Chris Smith, ranking member of the House Global Health Subcommittee, May 18, 2022.
The delay was declared by some to be a huge win…. I believe that the time will be used to develop and market even more diabolical policies. Now is not the time to take a victory lap, it is the time to be ever vigilant.
Similar to the U.S. Disinformation Board that the Department of Homeland Security recently proposed, the WHO would now also be empowered to combat supposed disinformation and misinformation. It is disconcerting that governmental institutions and international organizations are seeking the power and public resources to combat what they determine to be misinformation; it is a development that should concern us all.
The Biden Administration, alarmingly, with its proposed 13 amendments, wanted to give this power to an international organization with no transparency, no accountability to the U.S. or anyone else, and an abysmal track record. Most conspicuously, it disregarded warnings from Taiwan about the human-to-human transmissibility of the COVID-19 virus, and instead colluded with the Chinese Communist Party in lying to the world about the danger of the virus while the CCP shut down domestic travel but encouraged foreign travel.
Expectations are already being created for what the result of these actions will be: unsettlingly, they seek to expand on the authorities the Biden Administration was prepared to concede to the WHO.
[H]ere are some steps that can and should be taken. A more than solid case can be made that the WHO failed spectacularly in the current crisis. There must be a laser-like focus pointing out how the WHO’s actions were politicized and its recommendations were many times deeply flawed. Further, Americans must demand that Congress do thorough investigations of the WHO and U.S. funding going to the organization. Those should be complemented by continued efforts to encourage more whistleblowers to expose additional shortcomings or scandals involving the WHO.
Will the U.S. maintain control of its well-being and sovereignty, and those of our allies, or put our trust in failed international organizations?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18695/brussels-europe-eurabia

“Molenbeek would love to be forgotten, because it is the very example of the failure of the multicultural society, which remains an untouchable dogma in Belgium”. — Alain Destexhe, honorary Senator in Belgium and former Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders, Le Figaro, May 3, 2022.

“[I]n the Brussels region as a whole only a quarter of Belgians are of Belgian origin…. Molenbeek is in fact only the tip of the iceberg of the progressive Islamization in all the major Belgian cities. Islam is increasingly visible in the public space of Molenbeek, and in the month of Ramadan almost all the shops and restaurants in the city are closed during the day. In many neighborhoods, women are no longer able to dress however they want or go out at night, and homosexuals have no right of citizenship. There are, however, hardly any voices to worry about this development, as if French-speaking Belgium, anesthetized in unison by the multicultural media, had resigned itself”. — Alain Destexhe, Le Figaro, May 3, 2022

“Today the Muslim Brotherhood… continues its lobbying and blame games with its imaginary Trojan horse: Islamophobia”. — Assita Kanko, Belgian MEP, who fled Burkina Faso to look for freedom in Europe; Euractive, December 20, 2021

“The aim is clear: normalise radical Islamic codes and ways of life in order gradually to transform our Western societies instead of adapting to our European way of life. As a black woman and a secular Muslim, I know what it is to live under Islamic pressure and I know what it takes to emancipate oneself in order to finally live in dignity…. Europe must urgently pull itself together and reaffirm its commitment to its own values….” — Assita Kanko, Euractive, December 20, 2021.

“Where will we be in 50 years? All of Europe – inshallah – will be Muslim. So, have children!” — Brahim Laytouss, president of the Islamic Cultural Center of Belgium, dhnet.be, March 5, 2019.

The greatest form of cultural racism in Europe today is that of EU elites who censor or support this spectacular change of civilization.

“Of all the European capitals, Brussels is the one through which the Islamist project intends to spread to Europe. Their lobbies are powerful there, so it is much easier for Islamists to break into the system and gradually transform it”. — Djemila Benhabi, Camadian journalist, lecho.com.

“[I]n exchange [for oil], the Saudi king asked the Belgian king Baudouin to grant Arabia a monopoly on representing Islam and appointing imams in Belgium”. The Belgian government officially recognized the Islamic religion. It was the first European country to do so. There followed the inclusion of the Islamic religion in the school curriculum. — Alain Chouet, former “number two” of the DGSE, the French counterintelligence service, from his new book: “Sept pas vers l’enfer” (“Seven Steps to Hell”).

“Eurabia” was born in those years, the years of an energy crisis, European weakness and the great rise of Islam. Sound familiar?

While Lieven Verstraete, an acclaimed Belgian journalist who hosts the program, “De Zevende Dag” (“The Seventh Day”), was recently interviewing two members of the Green Party, he raised the issue of immigration and called Brussels “the perfect example of a city whose neighborhoods are conquered one by one by newcomers”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18693/ukraine-war-unified-command

Soon, the ringside spectators will see that the threat to the world order, or, to be more exact, the international order is bound to affect them in ways that they might not welcome.

In reality… [Zelensky] is not and cannot be [in full command] because he does not control the resources needed for war. He is an effective communicator on behalf of his beleaguered nation and a paragon of courage in adversity. However, he does not have the key to the war chest and the passcode for arsenals of necessary weapons. Nor does he control the flow of electronic and space-based intelligence gathering that plays a crucial role in modern warfare.

[T]he Western democracies will soon face the need to put their armaments industries in high gear. And that means a massive increase in military budgets. Yet, most NATO members are still proceeding with old plans to reduce the size of their armed forces and switch arms production from what is needed in a classical war, such as the one we witness in Ukraine, to warfare in cyberspace or outer space.

It is time for everyone to realize that the war to destroy Ukraine is not a sideshow. This is not a low-intensity war in which one is involved only vicariously. True, it’s Ukrainian blood that is shed on the battlefield. But citizens of almost all other countries also pay a price in galloping inflation, widespread shortages and a growing threat to security.

It is time for NATO, the EU and allies to move beyond the welcome, though largely symbolic, show of unity through symbolic gestures and develop a common analysis of what is involved and what needs to be done to curb Putin. And that would require a mechanism for unified overall political leadership, with Zelensky as field commander.

As a shorthand phrase “the war in Ukraine” may please headline writers and politicians keen on facile simplifications. The phrase gives the impression that the war is going on in a remote place called Ukraine and only tangentially affects the rest of the world. The rest of the world is divided into three categories.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/its_not_just_about_taiwan.html

“China’s goal is not just to dominate the world, but to reduce the rest of us to subservience.” With that terrifying projection, China expert Steven Mosher has been trying to rouse America from its complacency and caution the Biden administration over its appeasement of the Red Dragon. He reads clear and present danger in a leaked video showing Chinese military commanders discussing a 90-day countdown to a Taiwan invasion. Mosher says the video is authentic, and that the Biden administration’s mixed signals on Taiwan smack of a fecklessness that will only embolden China.

Other experts, too, warn of the government’s “strategic ambiguity” toward China as the “reunification” rhetoric with Taiwan has become more aggressive.  There is a growing fear that Chinese President Xi Jinping, having suffered few consequences for his forays into the South China Sea and his crackdown in Hong Kong, will be emboldened to take on U.S. allies and attack American assets.  On July 6th, it was announced that China would join Russia and Iran in war drills in our hemisphere, a clear threat to the security of the United States.

Mosher is no armchair theorizer. He’s fluent in Chinese and was the first American social scientist to visit China, as early as 1979. He is the author of Bully of Asia:  Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order, an overview of China’s ambitions in South Asia. He has served in the Navy, and is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger China (CPDC), an independent task-force based in Washington, D.C.  Mosher’s assessment on Taiwan was presented recently on the Securing America podcast, anchored by Center for Security Policy (CSP) founder Frank Gaffney.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18681/iran-nuclear-deal-reasons

The EU partly wants the deal so it can buy oil and gas from the Iranian regime.

The EU also appears to want the nuclear deal in order not to lose its other economic relationships and trade with the ruling mullahs of Iran. Despite US sanctions, European countries are still trading with Iran; the Biden administration has yet to hold them accountable.

According to the Financial Tribune, Germany is Iran’s top trading partner, and Italy comes in second.

By reaching a nuclear deal, the Biden administration may think that it can claim a foreign policy accomplishment and a political victory, as the Obama administration did, by arguing — falsely — that it had finally curbed Iran’s nuclear program and prevented the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, that was about as accurate as Obama’s claim – which he repeated 37 times — that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”

After the 2015 nuclear deal, however, the ruling mullahs of Iran were not only gifted a newfound global legitimacy. The removal of sanctions also generated billions of dollars in revenue for Iran’s military institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as for Iran’s militia and terror groups. The regime used those revenues to expand its influence throughout the region, especially in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq….The Iranian-armed Houthis ratcheted up their efforts to cause death and destruction in Yemen, and Hezbollah escalated its involvement and control of large swathes of Syrian territory. The region also saw a greater propensity for Houthi rocket launches at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, the deployment of thousands of Hezbollah foot soldiers in Syria, and the constant bombardment of southern Israel with Hamas rockets funded by Iran.

The objective of any nuclear deal with a rogue state ought to be anchored in completely and permanently halting that regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. The objective should not be to further empower and embolden it, or to facilitate it becoming a nuclear state.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/all-miss-boris-johnson-united-kingdom-macaulay-byron/

“As I say, there is a lot to criticize about Boris’s performance. But he got a few big things right and his entertainment value was unparalleled. Boris’s hour strutting and fretting upon the stage reminds me of something Santayana says about the Englishman in Soliloquies in England. “It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.” Noted.”

I think that Thomas Babington Macaulay had the last word about Boris Johnson’s forced resignation as prime minister of the UK: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Macaulay wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

Macaulay’s line needs to be slightly adjusted, it is true, because, ridiculous though public displays of puritanical moralism are, in this case it was mostly Boris’s colleagues in Parliament, not the public at large, that suffered that unbecoming fit of morality. Indeed, throughout it all, Boris — a politician with more élan than any prime minister since Margaret Thatcher — remained popular with the public. He was especially popular, I think, with the American public.

And why not? In the sea of squishy gray on gray that is the political establishment, Boris stood out as a vibrant, technicolor force of nature. He was probably better educated and more amusing than any PM since Churchill. It somehow seems appropriate that Macaulay made his famous comment in the context of a review of a book about Lord Byron. The scolds didn’t like Byron either.

On most of the big issues, I was at one with Boris. The biggest of the big issues, in my view, was Brexit. I do not think that partial recovery of British sovereignty would have happened absent his support.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/shinzo-abe-and-japans-revival-economy-assassination-prime-minister-11657286880?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“But no country gets the platonic ideal of a philosopher-king for a leader. If a country is lucky, it gets an adept politician with a plan to tackle the country’s ills. Shinzo Abe was that leader for Japan, and his country and the world will miss his influence.”

Few of Japan’s postwar leaders have been as consequential as Shinzo Abe, the retired Prime Minister who was assassinated Friday at the age of 67. Many will describe his legacy as “controversial,” which is true. But Abe’s gift to his country was to deliver the kind of controversy Japan needed, when the country needed it.

When Abe came to power the second time, in late 2012, Japan seemed adrift. Its economic miracle was long past, the optimism of the Junichiro Koizumi era in the early 2000s was spent, the traumas of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami were still fresh. Abe brought energy and national confidence back to Japanese politics and government.

After a brief stint as Prime Minister amid this malaise in 2006-2007, Abe rode back into office on a promise to revive Japan’s moribund economy. Abenomics, as it came to be called, consisted of three “arrows.” At his insistence, the Bank of Japan would engage in aggressive monetary easing. Tokyo would boost fiscal spending. And Mr. Abe would spearhead an economic reform and liberalization drive.

Whatever the policy merits—some arrows were more worthwhile than others—Abe’s overarching message was that Tokyo had not given up on restoring vitality to what is still the world’s third-largest economy after the United States and China.