RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19295/tiktok-ban-us

Chinese law requires all Chinese companies to turn over information to the Communist Party upon request — and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, reportedly employs more than 130 Party members to ensure compliance, among other matters.

“Its algorithm is at once simple and sinister. Download the app on your smartphone and you have given China access to all your data… And history shows they use that data for nefarious purposes.” — Adonis Hoffman, The Hill, October 18, 2022.

“First, the app can track cellphone users’ locations and collect internet-browsing data — even when users are visiting unrelated websites… That TikTok, and by extension the CCP, has the ability to survey every keystroke teenagers enter on their phones is disturbing… it could also be used to subtly indoctrinate American citizens. TikTok has already censored references to politically sensitive topics, including the treatment of workers in Xinjiang, China, and the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.” — Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Mike Gallagher, The Washington Post, November 10, 2022.

“It’s almost like [the Chinese] recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world…. If you’re under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos and educational videos,” said Harris, adding that children in China were limited to only 40 minutes a day on the app…. There’s a survey of pre-teens in the U.S. and China asking, ‘what is the most aspirational career that you want to have?’ and in the U.S., the No. 1 was a social media influencer, and in China, the No. 1 was astronaut. You allow those two societies to play out for a few generations and I can tell you what your world is going to look like.” — Tristan Harris, former Google employee, 60 Minutes, November 24, 2022.

In December, it was revealed that ByteDance had used the app to surveil several journalists to track down the journalists’ sources.

The United States recently banned TikTok from all federal government devices over growing security concerns. That is a good start.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19319/khamenei-question

The visit to Pyongyang was Khamenei’s the Road to Damascus moment. The lesson he learned was simple: Let others idolize you and, if things turn badly, blame those who idolize you. And, if you are in a position of weakness, just appear as a nobody or play village idiot until the tide turns in your favor.

[W]hen Khamenei was forced to enter center stage last week, it was clear that his usual tactics hadn’t worked.

Worse still, most of the key figures in the regime’s support-base within the clergy, the military-security apparatus, and the Islamic academic and cultural elite seemed to be either hedging their bets or expressing some sympathy for the protesters.

[T]he strongest probability today is that the Khomeinist system could be heading for the cabinet of curiosities.

These are tough days for the “Supreme Guide” of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For the first time in more than three decades, he seems unable to do a Houdini number by getting out of a tight spot that events and his own mistakes have placed him in.

For more than three decades, whenever his rule was seriously challenged, his tactic was to go into purdah for a while letting things sort themselves out or, if action were needed, let others to do the dirty work. And when it became clear that things weren’t going to sort themselves out, he adopted the tactic he called “heroic flexibility,” a political version of the Parson’s position in reverse.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/01/how-they-count-votes-in-brazil/

Presented with an opportunity to explain the current turmoil in Brazil, Australia’s establishment media once again took the easy, lazy course by rounding up the standard cliches and memes to present as informed ‘analysis’.

To see just how bad the coverage has been, start with Augusto’s account (below) of how politics is played in Brazil. — roger franklin

____________________________

THE second round of Brazil’s presidential elections was held on Sunday, October 30. The former president, Lula da Silva, who has served prison time for corruption, apparently won 50.90% of the vote and the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, received 49.10%. In other words, Lula was declared winner with less than 1 per cent lead over Bolsonaro. This is according to judges of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority. It was an unexpected comeback for the former president, who was directly responsible for the biggest series of corruption scandals in the nation’s history.[1] Lula is “back at the scene of the crime”, according to the description made not a long time ago by his own vice-president in the presidential ticket. According to J.R. Guzzo, one of Brazil’s most accomplished journalists, the 2022 election in Brazil has been “a legal and political fraud as we have never seen in this country”.[2]  In an article entitled De Volta à Cena do Crime (Back at the Scene of the Crime), he commented:

Lula returned to the presidency via the general collapse of the Constitution and Brazilian laws throughout the electoral process – the result of an unprecedented meddling of the judiciary, which was entirely illegal in each step of the process. The basic fact is that the judiciary, with Justice Alexandre de Moraes issuing orders and Lula in the role of its sole beneficiary, did everything it could for any neutral observer to conclude this was a rigged election … Basically, Supreme Court justices and its electoral arm, the Superior Electoral Tribunal, put together piece by piece a mechanism designed to favour the leftist candidate. The first step was for these unelected judges to simply overturn the four criminal convictions against Lula and, with it, perform the “magic” of disappearing with all the dirty record which precluded him from being a candidate.[3] 

But there is a rather decisive international element in Lula’s victory as well. Just after a few outlets called the election in Brazil, U.S. President Joe Biden orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In a statement released immediately after the result was officially announced, Biden claimed that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”.[4]  In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, said Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result.[5]

In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil to issue the following warning to the Brazilian president: do not even dare even to question the reliability of your country’s electronic voting system.[6] A month earlier, in July 2021, the newly installed Biden sent his CIA director, William Burns, to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting, the U.S. delegation warned the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro “should stop casting doubt in his country’s [entirely electronic] electoral process”.[7] Next, at the June 2022  Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Biden administration notoriously repeated the same warning that the U.S. government would not tolerate Bolsonaro casting any doubt on the reliability and security of the nation’s voting machines.[8] Since these messages came before the outcome of the election, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian president contest the alleged fairness and transparency of the electoral process.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/germany-arrests-iranian-national-planning-islamist-motivated-chemical-attack/

German police have arrested an Iranian national on suspicion of planning an “Islamist-motivated” chemical attack. The alleged 32-year-old Iranian jihadi, along with a suspected accomplice, was caught near the western German city of Dortmund as he tried to precure highly-toxic cyanide and ricin for a terrorist attack, German newspaper Die Welt reported Sunday.

Police said in a statement that the Iranian national is “suspected of having prepared a serious act of violence that endangers the state by procuring cyanide and ricin to commit an Islamist-motivated attack.”

The suspected Islamist duo was literally caught with their pants down. The two men were seen being “whisked away into a police vehicle in their underpants and jackets wrapped around them in a makeshift manner,” the German daily noted.

The news reports indicate that the Iranian man might have gotten his hands on toxic chemicals required for a terror attack. “Specialists wearing anti-contamination suits were seen carrying evidence out of the man’s home,” the AP News reported.

Berlin-based Die Welt reported the details of the German counter-terrorism operation:

Anti-terror investigators have arrested a 32-year-old man in Castrop-Rauxel in the northern Ruhr region, who is said to have plotted an Islamist attack. The Iranian national is suspected of having acquired the toxins cyanide and ricin for the crime. This was confirmed by the police departments of Düsseldorf, Recklinghausen and Münster on early Sunday morning.

On Saturday night, the investigators carried [out the raid] at around midnight. The scene was cordoned off over a large area. Police, fire services and rescue workers were at the site in large numbers. “We received a serious warning that prompted the police to act that night,” said North Rhine-Westphalian [State] Interior Minister Herbert Reul (…) said.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/08/the-shameful-silence-on-the-talibans-war-on-women/

Two images of men are seared into my mind from the month of December. In the first, brave lads in Afghanistan, about to sit a university exam, get out of their seats, pick up their exam papers, and leave. They were protesting against the Taliban’s obscene ban on women attending university. It was a moving act of solidarity, a courageous display of moral conscience in a nation in which you can be severely punished for doing such a thing. The men jeopardised their education to take a stand against the vile misogyny of their government.

In the second image, a row of men in Holyrood, the Scottish parliament, applaud as Nicola Sturgeon’s gender-ID bill is passed. The men look nothing like our modestly dressed heroes in Afghanistan. Their attire is eccentric. They have long, strangely coloured hair. They don’t even think of themselves as men – they claim to be women. And their gesture was about as far from an act of solidarity with women as it is possible to get. They were cheering the passing of a bill that will make it ridiculously easy for a man to be legally recognised as a woman. Where those valiant Afghans were fighting for the right of women to enter into the sphere of education, the grinning trans activists in Holyrood were fighting for the right of men to enter into women-only spaces. The former want women’s rights expanded; the latter want them shrunk.

Nothing better captures the moral degeneracy of the modern West than the contrast between these two events last month. It was nothing short of despicable that as women were violently cast out of universities in Afghanistan, reduced to second-class citizens in the most brutal fashion, the issue that was occupying the minds of the supposedly virtuous here in the UK was the right of men to say: ‘I’m a woman!’ Valorous men in Afghanistan put their necks on the line for a woman’s right to learn alongside men. Right-on, pronoun-declaring, vegan men in the West put nothing whatsoever on the line for a man’s right to get undressed alongside women.

There’s a last days of Rome feel to all this now. Only a society that had become utterly untethered from sense and reason could devote so much energy to the navel-gazing gender ideology.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19289/europe-corruption-qatar

The stadiums for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar were built in conditions described as slave-like and hellish. For ten years, armies of Asian workers were put to work for miserable wages in wretched living conditions. According to the Guardian, since the emirate was awarded the World Cup, 6,500 workers died on Qatar’s construction sites. This carnage did not predestine Qatar for praise from the Socialist Group in the European Parliament.

“The recent backroom deal approved by the Bureau to appoint a new EP Secretary-General is emblematic of an institution that thinks that rules for ethics and integrity should only apply to others.” — Michiel van Hulten, director of Transparency International EU, December 10, 2022.

That the Socialist Group, the second-largest in the European Parliament, was so easily bribed by little Qatar, to the extent of cheering on the “labour law reforms” of a slave emirate, is yet to be confirmed by the courts. It is also possibly just the “tip of the iceberg.”

Other geopolitical actors, who are known to have an interest in the resolutions of the European Parliament, have even more considerable means at their disposal.

Belgian federal police recently found €150,000 ($157,700) in cash at the Brussels home of the Vice-President of the European Parliament, Eva Kaili (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), who was then arrested and charged with corruption. She remains in jail. Also arrested were Luca Visentini, secretary general of the International Trade Union Confederation, and former socialist MEP Pier-Antonio Panzeri. Francesco Giorgi, Kaili’s domestic partner and former parliamentary assistant to Panzeri, was also arrested. The home of MEP Marc Tarabella (Socialist Party) was searched.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19290/cyprus-turkey-crimes-against-humanity

[T]he invading Turkish forces [in 1974] murdered innocent civilians, raped women and children, and plundered northern Cyprus. They forcibly displaced around 170,000 Greek Cypriots, or a third of the total population of the Republic of Cyprus….

“The widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity as defined in applicable international law and shall attract the consequences provided for under such applicable international law.” — United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 2006.

According to the statistics, the highest number of complaints to the European Court of Human Rights, after Russia, involved Turkey…. In 2021, Turkey topped the list for the number of ECtHR judgments that found violations of freedom of expression.

“[T]here has been a collective decades-long failure to uphold the rule of law in an adequate manner befitting the post-1945 legal order.” — Dr. Klearchos A. Kyriakides, “The Search for Security via Answers to Questions on Law, Criminal Justice and Impunity,” forum.agora-dialogue.com, June 17, 2017

Dr. Kyriakides also notes the failure of Turkey to become a state party to more than 70 instruments of international law.

For criminal justice to be served in Cyprus, Kyriakides recommends that a new independent international criminal tribunal in the lines of the tribunals established by the victorious Allies in Nuremberg or by the UN Security Council in relation to the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda should be established concerning the crimes Turkey and its agents committed in Cyprus.

“[C]ontrary to international humanitarian law, the United Nations shoulders at least some of the responsibility for fostering a culture of impunity. The United Nations has never established any independent international criminal tribunal for the Republic of Cyprus along the lines of the precedents established….” — Dr. Klearchos A. Kyriakides, “The Search for Security via Answers to Questions on Law, Criminal Justice and Impunity,” published in connection with the “Conference on Cyprus” in Geneva, on June 28, 2017.

Investigations could warrant an independent Nuremberg-style or Hague-style tribunal to deal with the war crimes committed.

On August 15, 1974, Pavlos Solomi, 42, and his son, Solomis Pavlou Solomi, 17, were arrested by Turks at their home in the Cypriot village of Komi Kepir during the second phase of Turkey’s military invasion of Cyprus.

Panagiota Pavlou Solomi spent the remainder of her life trying to find her missing husband and son. Finally, 43 years after their abduction, in 2017, their remains were found in Galatia Lake by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), which exhumed what was left of them. A funeral was held for the murdered father and son in March 2018, but not in their beloved village of Komi Kepir. That village is still illegally occupied by Turkey. The family buried the corpses in the free region of the Republic of Cyprus, where they currently reside.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-iran-crowds-chant-death-to-the-irgc-death-to-the-entire-system/

In Iran, the protests against the regime have still not been suppressed, despite the regime throwing everything it has into the effort. More than 500 protesters have been murdered in the 100 days of protests that have passed since the killing of Mahsa Amini by the morality police on September 16, but instead of scaring others into submission, these killings by the regime’s enforcers have only served to bring tens of thousands of new protesters out onto the streets in more than 90 cities across the country. In Shi’a Islam, as in other traditions, the mourning period for the dead lasts for 40 days. And now, 40 days after the death of protesters, Iranian crowds make that fatidic date the occasion to appear at their gravesites to honor the martyred dead. More on these events can be found here: “Iranians mourn murdered protesters, chant ‘death to Khamenei!,’” by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, December 29, 2022:

Crowds of Iranian demonstrators gathered on Thursday [Dec. 29] at the graves of protesters murdered by Iranian security forces during the anti-government protests that continue to sweep Iran, to mark 40 days since their murder on Thursday.

A large crowd of protesters gathered at the grave of Hamidreza Rouhi at the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery in Tehran on Dec. 29 to mark the 40th anniversary since his death. Rouhi, a university student who also had a modeling career since childhood, was shot dead near his home in the Shahr-e Ziba neighborhood in the west of the capital on November 18. Thursday was the 40th day after his death, when Iranians hold a memorial.

Later, protesters began chanting against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who they believe has ordered the killing of protesters. “Down with the Dictator”was chanted, and then a new slogan was heard: “This homeland will not thrive before he [Khamenei] is wrapped in a shroud.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19274/china-tiktok-strategic-ploy

The Biden administration should terminate the seemingly endless discussions and either require TikTok to stop operations in the U.S. or force its Chinese owner to sell the app lock, stock and barrel to American parties. No other solution is acceptable from national security and First Amendment points of view.

TikTok and its owner ByteDance have repeatedly made promises about the security of personal data of Americans, but they have violated all pledges.

“Everything is seen in China,” a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety Department said in September of last year. A “Beijing-based engineer” known as “Master Admin” had “access to everything.” — BuzzFeed, June 17, 2022.

ByteDance, a private Chinese company, is under a compulsion to commit espionage. Articles 7 and 14 of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law require every Chinese national and entity to spy if authorities make a demand. More important, in China’s top-down system, every person must follow Communist Party directives.

China will almost certainly obtain U.S. user information one way or another: by taking advantage of technical loopholes in promised protections, by violating agreed protections outright, or by getting U.S.-based personnel to commit espionage

Beijing has over the years used TikTok in its various influence and propaganda campaigns, and the control of the algorithm that determines what users see would be especially important in political campaigns. In fact, the Democratic National Committee, realizing the potential of the app, joined TikTok in March. Even if the Republican National Committee joined, federal officials could conceivably help steer voters to one side or the other.

“The only acceptable deal requires ByteDance’s complete divestment of TikTok,” says Flint. “Unless there is full separation, the Communist Party will maintain influence over the platform. Unless there is full separation, the Communist Party controls the system.”

TikTok, the extremely popular video-sharing app, is in the midst of another round of negotiations with the U.S. federal government over data security.