413 private links
While most news outlets are focused on Roaring Kitty, the jobs report, or Hunter Biden, the most consequential news item of the year may be unfolding before our very eyes in our hemisphere. The Russians are coming. But so, too, are the Chinese and Iranians. In fact, they’re already here.
We’re not talking about the border so the right isn’t covering it. We’re not talking about Trump, so the mainstream media isn’t covering it. We’re talking about the war coming to South America designed to distract the United States.
To understand the significance of this, we must first recognize the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape at the expense of a distracted and weakened United States. An emboldened Russia, China, and Iran have coordinated internally to bypass international sanctions, while externally, they have provoked conflict on a growing number of fronts. //
American oil companies are actively exploring the oil-rich Essequibo region of Guyana. Venezuela is preparing to invade it. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Quds Forces are in Venezuela already, along with both Russian and Chinese military advisors. The Venezuelans have been using Iranian coast guard vessels to patrol the river border with Guyana.
Russia, China, and Iran are in Venezuela, helping them prepare an invasion of an American and British ally to seize American-backed oil fields. The only thing Joe Biden is doing is letting Venezuela sell oil to fund the invasion.
Alternative historical fiction is a popular genre in America, where readers explore possibilities such as Napoleon deciding not to invade Russia or a Confederate victory in the Civil War, pondering the hypothetical impact on world history. In honor of Maritime Day 2024, let's consider what would have happened if the United States had fought the Second World War without a strong Merchant Marine and the tens of thousands of courageous mariners who delivered crucial supplies, troops, and weapons across dangerous waters.
It's clear: we would have lost the war or failed to achieve a decisive victory.
During WWII, an estimated 250,000 mariners served, and nearly 10,000 gave their lives, resulting in a higher per capita casualty rate than any of the armed services. Over 700 Merchant Marine ships were sunk by enemy attacks, and hundreds of mariners were held as prisoners of war.
FDR recognized the indispensable role of the Merchant Marine, which he considered the "fourth arm of defense" on par with the navy, army, and air force.
As we observe current global instability and brutal Eurasian conflicts, who will be the visionary leader and advocate who ensures the readiness of our Merchant Marine for the challenges ahead? Its current state is far from adequate. //
The distinction between admirals, generals, and media commentators who freely opine on strategy and theory neglects or casually assumes away the hard reality of logistics. Lately, the strategists have not fared well in deterring conflicts, and the logistic shortcomings in Ukraine and the Middle East are glaring. While those deficiencies are apparent, they pale in comparison to a potential war in the Pacific.
Policymakers properly acknowledge China as the pacing threat, but so few seriously consider the critical importance of logistics and the availability of highly trained and militarily obligated maritime personnel. Decades of war in the Middle East have conditioned us to the luxury of uncontested sea and airspace. We enjoyed large support bases close to combat operations. Our fleet had uninterrupted access to intact and secure port facilities. //
The People's Liberation Army knows that sealift is key to our success. While many debate the vulnerability of our aircraft carriers, they gloss over that our combat power will be short-lived without robust sealift and persistent combat logistics in a war at sea.
Regrettably, we are no longer a true maritime nation; we are now a naval nation.
China, now a bona fide maritime nation, has made significant investments in its merchant fleet and can call on over 5,000 merchant vessels during war. The US has around 80. We must expand our commercial fleet to align with our strategic interests. That means acquiring more ships and enhancing our ability to build, maintain, and quickly repair them. Above all, we cannot prevail without a significant number of merchant marine officers who are ready and obligated to serve the nation when called upon.
In 2023, China really knocked the wind out of the sails (hah) of the renewable-energy crowd. In that year, China built some new coal-fired electrical generation facilities. In fact, they built a lot of coal-fired electrical plants — as in...more than twice that of the rest of the world combined.
China ramped up coal power capacity last year, according to new analysis, despite a pledge to "strictly control" the dirtiest fossil fuel.
The country added 47.4 Gigawatts (GW) of new coal power in 2023, more than double the amount added by the rest of the world combined.
Biden and Xi held their first phone since July 2020 on Monday. Within hours, dozens of Chinese warplanes and multiple naval vessels were reported around Taiwan, the largest coordinated display (implied threat) of 2024. At least 30 planes and nine ships were detected in Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) by the country's Ministry of National Defense (MND).
What Gallagher Left Undone: Temu Still Sends You a Slave-Sewn Dress for Just $15—Tax-Free – RedState
When the Wisconsin Republican congressman who chairs the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, announced March 22 his retirement from Congress effective April 19—after the April 2 primary—instead of at the end of this congressional session, he did more than ensure Republicans could not replace him before January.
He left unfinished his work exposing the Chinese e-retailers Temu and Shein - work that started with a flourish.
“These results are shocking: Temu is doing next to nothing to keep its supply chains free from slave labor," said Rep. Michael J. Gallagher in his remarks at the June 23 release of the committee's report: "Fast Fashion and the Uyghur Genocide: Interim Findings.” //
“At the same time, Temu and Shein are building empires around the de minimis loophole in our import rules—dodging import taxes and evading scrutiny on the millions of goods they sell to Americans,” the Marine captain veteran of Iraq said. “We need to take a hard look at this loophole that is being abused to tilt the playing field against American companies.”
That tax loophole, the so-called “de minimus” rule, was first enacted in 1938 to allow Americans traveling abroad to mail home knick-knacks and souvenirs outside the regular tariffs on imports.
In 2015, Congress raised the tax-free limit from $200 to $800, which did not seem consequential at the time. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic fueled the online shopping boom, suddenly, that $800 limit was child's play for Temu and Shien, where some dresses cost less than $15.
The report found:
Key Finding 1: Temu and Shein alone are likely responsible for more than 30 percent of all packages shipped to the United States daily under the de minimis provision and likely nearly half of all de minimis shipments to the U.S. from China. //
Now, there are more than 685 million packages shipped every year, tax-free, because the import tax loophole exempts packages addressed to a residence. //
Key Finding 2: Temu’s business model, which relies on the de minimis provision, is to avoid bearing responsibility for compliance with the UFLPA and other prohibitions on forced labor while relying on tens of thousands of Chinese suppliers to ship goods direct to U.S. consumers.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act directs the Homeland Security Department’s Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force to maintain a list of entities in violation. //
For a long time, I have been obsessed with how the ChiComs exploit our open society and good nature to vacuum up as much of our data as they can. //
Now, I see that Gallagher is out the door, and Temu is still avoiding import tariffs, using slave labor, and swiping data.
Now satellite overheads have been revealed by Business Insider which appear to show mock-ups in the Inner Mongolian desert of some of the important government districts in Taipei - Taiwan's capital city - along with what appear to be models of specific government buildings. It's hard to imagine any reason for this other than military training with an eye toward an eventual assault on these districts.
China knows that a weakened American society will mean an easier path for China to triumph on the international stage.
In his explosive new book “Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans,” Peter Schweizer chronicles China’s surprising ties to the Ferguson protests and the 2020 riots. “Blood Money” also exposes how China is pushing fentanyl to the United States, knowing it will devastate our country, and how a Chinese billionaire is spending significant money to promote transgenderism in the United States, even as China remains an unfriendly place for LGBTQ Chinese. Finally, China is exporting a tool to the United States that increases the likelihood of mass shootings. //
Schweizer: Well, it’s a great question. They want to defeat the United States, but they don’t want to fight a kinetic war. So they have adopted a strategy called disintegration warfare, which, as the name implies, their goal is to see the disintegration of the United States.
It’s not to say that they cause all of our internal problems, but absolutely they exacerbate them, they add accelerants to them. And so this is part of their strategy. Their hope is they can defeat the United States without actually having to fight a kinetic or fighting war.
Indiana is making deals to sell land to a gravely adversarial threat country, and hiding its actions.
Today lawmakers vote on whether to slightly limit Chinese attempts to purchase strategically located Indiana property. //
Sweitzer did not respond to a follow-up question asking, “How can there be public or national security oversight of deals with a top foreign adversary if there’s no public notice until after the deals are signed?”
Specifically, Conspirator A tasked Schultz with gathering information related to a variety of U.S. military weapons systems, including classified information, and information related to the United States’ potential plans in the event that Taiwan came under military attack. //
This arrest extends a disturbing pattern of relatively junior military personnel with access to classified information being successfully recruited by Communist China as spies. //
There is a problem somewhere. If we've busted four guys with security clearances selling low-grade information to the Chinese in six months, you can bet there are a lot more like them still operating. The counterintelligence for the motives for espionage is MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. One can't help but wonder if an educational system that focuses on the evil America has done and is doing isn't producing an army of potential traitors at government expense.
America’s largest pork producer was exporting massive quantities of pork to its Chinese “sister company” as it stockpiled food for the Chinese military, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of corporate records and Chinese state-run media reports.
Smithfield Foods, owner of roughly 150,000 acres of U.S. land and operator of dozens of feed mills and production plants, has shipped hundreds of thousands of tons of pork to its China-based parent company WH Group and sister company Shuanghui Investment and Development Co. since being acquired in 2013, according to corporate and Chinese government records as well as state-run media reports. //
Smithfield’s pork exports to China exploded from roughly 83,000 tons in 2018 to approximately 335,000 tons in 2020, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.
I’m back in that mood. Today’s AT&T cellular network meltdown was a reminder. It’s going down when we least expect it. //
tweet from Marco Rubio:
I don’t know the cause of the AT&T outage
But I do know it will be 100 times worse when #China launches a cyber attack on America on the eve of a #Taiwan invasion
And it won’t be just cell service they hit, it will be your power, your water and your bank. //
My prepping really hasn’t been for the “worst case scenario” – it’s been for the most likely bad scenario, mostly focused on energy grids on which we depend, and food. (I know, readers always tell me to focus on home defense, but that’s not something we talk about.) //
. it’s obvious that if we ever get in a hot cyber war with China they are taking down our electric grid as the first shot, and that will start everything spiraling downward. Of course our civilian infrastruture will be a prime target, and if this administration is too stupid to see that, we are in worse shape than I thought.
The US military is almost entirely dependent upon China and Russia for a metal used in many military applications, such as explosives and armor-piercing bullets. The metal is antimony, and China currently owns 53 percent of the world's supply. However, it processes over 80 percent of antimony ore through contracts with other producers. The US's last source of antimony, the Stibnite mine in Idaho, ceased operations in 1997.
It isn't just the military that relies on antimony, though it does appear insane to import the key element in manufacturing modern military munitions from your most likely adversary; the private sector is also heavily reliant on the metal.
This issue has hit the front burner of Capitol Hill. The House Armed Services Committee is investigating the status of the Defense National Stockpile, which is charged with maintaining a strategic reserve of rare minerals. Our stockpile and the infrastructure to operate it will largely cease to exist by 2025 unless urgent action is taken.
Crap like this simply validates the idea that we are ruled by fools and buffoons. Congress has nearly sold off the stockpile of to, according to Defense News, " over the past several decades to fund other programs."
The stockpile was valued at nearly $42 billion in today’s dollars at its peak during the beginning of the Cold War in 1952. That value has plummeted to $888 million as of last year following decades of congressionally authorized sell-offs to private sector customers. Lawmakers anticipate the stockpile will become insolvent by FY25.
“A lot of what happened is Congress just getting greedy and finding politically convenient ways to fund programs that they weren’t willing to raise revenue for,” said [Massachusetts Democrat Seth] Moulton.
Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.
Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019.
Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.
China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020, according to U.S. government timelines of the pandemic.
Whether the sample that leaked was “natural” or had a lab-crafted genetic sequence, it is clear that experiments involving the virus were occurring in China. The Chinese were studying the samples in a facility that lacked the proper biocontainment controls to do so safely.
And while some may bitterly cling to the “natural origin” option, I simply will note that the coronavirus has “rare” genome sequences that are hallmarks of genetic manipulation.
The U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee (E&C) has revealed that the Chinese government not only knew of the COVID-19 virus weeks before admitting its existence, but that Chinese researchers had already sequenced the virus's genome. The genome, of course, not only yields clues as to the origins of the virus but may also show genetic relationships to known viruses.
The genetic work was done in the late fall/early winter of 2019, two weeks before the Chinese government admitted the existence of the virus. //
Everything around the COVID outbreak, it seems, has been a tissue of whoppers from not only the Chinese Communist Party but from the United States government, and all over a virus that is less lethal than the 1918 flu that killed an estimated 25 million, or the Black Death, which likewise killed an estimated 25 million. //
anon-ymous99
an hour ago
Regardless how much you despise and distrust the CCP, and Chinese leadership in general: you neither despise nor distrust them enough
HAWLEY: Let's talk a little bit about who's really benefiting from this administration's climate agenda, and from these draconian electric vehicle mandates. So, Mr. Turk, you've already alluded to this. I know you know the answers to these questions. Currently, one nation accounts for 60 percent of the world's electric vehicle production. That nation is?
TURK: China
HAWLEY: One nation accounts for 76 percent of the world's lithium battery production. That nation is?
TURK: China
HAWLEY: Yet, your administration, the president's administration, the mandates that you put in place require that two-thirds of our new vehicle sales in just the next eight years be electric vehicles. Your policies are driving us and our supply chains into the hands of our greatest geo-strategic enemy, enriching them, enriching their government ....
So, Mr. Turk, why is it good for the American worker that we force our supply chains to a country that is our greatest rival and adversary, and why is it good for the American consumer? //
Meanwhile, China remains the world's largest emitter of carbon emissions, and they aren't slowing down anytime soon. Think about how insane that dynamic is. We are knee-capping Americans for "climate change" to enrich China, which is continuing to build coal-fired power plants like they are pop-up houses. If the Biden administration was purposely trying to sabotage the United States, what would it be doing differently? //
anon-608f
5 hours ago
The EV mandates have nothing to with environmental conservation and everything to do with limiting citizens freedom of travel. The globalist elites intent is to depopulate the world in accordance with their ideology and new religion.
They learned all they needed from the Soviet Union and the Holodomor- disarm a population, make them politically unsavory, restrict their ability to communicate with the outside world, restrict their ability to flee, then starve them out of existence.
Make no mistake, Whites are first in their sights but no one is safe...only temporarily useful.
Rampant corruption comes with the territory when it comes to having complete control over every aspect of your country, including the economy. //
The corruption, however, has resulted in some hilarious setbacks for Xi, according to the Bloomberg report, "including missiles filled with water instead of fuel and vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function in a way that would allow the missiles to launch effectively." //
U.S. think tanks and defense contractors believe that Xi aims to have a completely modernized military that is capable of taking on any global power by 2027. One such example is the rapid assembly of aircraft carriers and other naval vessels at a rate that far outpaces the U.S. Navy. But just because they can be rapidly assembled doesn't mean they're ready to go right away.
Given what we know now, a coronavirus pandemic that emerged out of Wuhan more than three years ago seems less like a coincidence. Yet Daszak of EcoHealth has been the most vocal lab-leak theory denier. Among his efforts to shut down any public discussion of the lab-leak theory, the most infamous one was that he organized a group of scientists to co-sign a letter published by Lancet, denouncing the lab-leak theory without disclosing his conflict of interest (his intimate collaboration with the WIV). //
The leaked Project DEFUSE documents are a reminder, according to Chan, who commented on X, “This is a pattern of dishonesty. Clearly, we cannot take the word of conflicted parties. It is urgently important that the public and investigators gain full access to all EcoHealth documents relating to WIV research.” //
Democrats and corporate media’s collective silence and the lack of curiosity about the virus’s origin are likely driven by two reasons. First, they cannot blame the origin of Covid on Trump because the NIH funding occurred under former President Obama. Any investigation of Covid’s origin will inevitably lead to the questionable conduct of Anthony Fauci, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, and his allies at the NIH, from underwriting the WIV’s gain-of-function research to suppressing the lab-leak theory since the beginning of the pandemic.
Second, the Democrats and corporate media’ conduct during the pandemic has shown that they were only interested in taking advantage of a crisis to grab more power and expand their control over the country and the American people. Public health prevention is their last concern. Therefore, it is up to concerned citizens and independent media to keep searching for truth and demanding accountability.
"All Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," Xi said in Sunday's address.
"The motherland will surely be reunified," he added. //
The speech was the second time in a matter of days that Xi addressed the Taiwan issue. Xi also vowed to reunify Taiwan on Tuesday during a symposium in Beijing commemorating the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong, the founding father of Communist China.
"The complete reunification of the motherland is an irresistible trend," Xi said at the event, adding that China would "resolutely prevent anyone from splitting" the two sides.