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Ruth King

Deterring China: U.S. Should Arm Taiwan to the Hilt – Now by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18435/us-arm-taiwan

Whether or not China plans to invade Taiwan now, it is time for the United States to ditch decades of misguided policy. Among other things, Washington should, on an emergency basis, begin arming the island with the weapons it urgently needs.
Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the extraordinarily ambitious and bold Chinese ruler, may feel encouraged by recent events in Eastern Europe. As Wang Dan, a Tiananmen Square-era student leader, wrote late last month, “We should not expect rational decision-making from dictators and totalitarian regimes.”
Moreover, the sanctions placed on Moscow after the invasion were not comprehensive, and they are, incredibly, still not comprehensive. Xi, therefore, could believe that no nation would dare impose meaningful costs on his magnificent state.
China’s leaders give the impression they have been emboldened by recent events… “It cannot win a war anymore.” — Global Times, Chinese newspaper, referring to America, August 16, 2021.
[N]owhere is deterrence now more important than in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan, after the fall of Afghanistan and invasion of Ukraine, is considered around the world as the test of American credibility.
To prevent a Chinese invasion, President Biden should publicly declare that America will defend Taiwan. In addition, the U.S. should work with allies Japan and Australia and offer a multilateral defense treaty to Taipei.
Moreover, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proposed last month while visiting Taipei, the U.S. should recognize Taiwan for what it is: a sovereign state.
To make sure the resolution of Taiwan’s status is peaceful, the Biden administration should start shipping weapons to Taiwan, especially long-range missiles that can hold China’s regime hostage.
Moreover, America and friends, to back up their words, should base forces on the island.
Deterrence is the best guarantee of peace.
The United States did not send sufficient weapons to Ukraine before the February 24 invasion, thereby failing to maintain deterrence in Eastern Europe.
By openly bolstering Taiwan’s defenses, Washington would be declaring that America was no longer afraid of offending Beijing. That is transmitting the “right signal” for Chinese leaders to ponder.

“Wrong signals.”

Dozens of Former U.S. Generals and Admirals Warn against Iran Nuclear Deal: Letter By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dozens-of-former-u-s-generals-and-admirals-warn-against-iran-nuclear-deal-letter/

Close to 50 retired military officers wrote that the new nuclear agreement the Biden administration is negotiating with Iran is likely to “instantly fuel explosive Iranian aggression,” in an open letter last week.

In the letter, coordinated with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, the group of generals and admirals said that the deal would help Iran’s nuclear program and support of terrorism, and linked the nuclear talks in Vienna to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. negotiators have worked through intermediary countries in the Austrian capital to hammer out an agreement to reverse President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord.

Although the two sides have repeatedly said that they are close to inking a final agreement, the U.S. seems to have balked at Iranian demands that the White House remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization sanctions list. The talks have remained stalled for weeks, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that he’s “not overly optimistic” that the U.S. and Iran can reach a final agreement.

Meanwhile, around 20 Democratic lawmakers have criticized the negotiations and the concessions which the administration is reportedly mulling, while Republicans have prepared a range of legislative options with which to torpedo the potential agreement.

While the administration has not ruled out the IRGC delisting, which would be an extraordinary capitulation to Tehran’s demands, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that a senior administration official told him that “President Biden doesn’t intend to concede on the terrorist designation.”

Why the experts keep getting it wrong Too many in academia and journalism are trapped by unquestioning groupthink. Wilfred Reilly

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/08/why-the-experts-keep-getting-it-wrong/

One of the most intimidating things about being a ‘heterodox’ thinker is having to constantly say that ‘the experts’ are wrong.

If, online or at a cocktail party, you point out something as obvious as the fact that very few black Americans are fatally shot by police, you can expect to be deluged with citations to articles bearing titles like ‘Know their names: black people killed by police in the US’ and ‘How unjust police killings damage the mental health of black Americans’. Best-selling and critically acclaimed books on race in America have titles like Open Season: The Legalised Genocide of Coloured People.

More broadly, if you express doubt about the idea of ‘systemic racism’ – perhaps because six or seven of the 10 most financially successful ethnic groups in present-day America are not white – you will no doubt be reminded to read famous books arguing that severe racial oppression is everywhere, like Ibram X Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist or Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

Similarly, should you criticise modern gender theory or the bizarre idea that human biological sex is complex and hard to define, you will inevitably be referred to an authoritative-sounding article, packed with data and infographics, like this one in Scientific American.

While I write from the centre-right, the same fate awaits those who ask difficult questions from the left.

This phenomenon has no doubt existed for millennia: the entire priestly class of Christendom cruelly mocked doubters of the existence of God during the Medieval and Renaissance eras – and gleefully enforced penalties against them that were far more intense than any ‘cancellation’ today. Worries about self-preservation aside, novel thinkers face a tough question whenever confronted with what the experts say: how can all of these very intelligent people be wrong? Surely it must be me who is wrong instead?

The working classes are a volcano waiting to erupt Workers across the world are being squeezed from all sides. They won’t put up with it forever. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/18/the-working-classes-are-a-volcano-waiting-to-erupt/

“What is clear is that neoliberalism, which once promised gains for all classes, now means for most people an inevitable diminishment of living standards in ways not widely seen since the 1940s. We do not know when or if the volcano will erupt, but the prospect of it erupting will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.

The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.

INTERMISSION FOR A FEW DAYS

Tackling the Iranian Regime’s Nuclear Threat by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18418/iran-nuclear-threat

[N]o deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

The only way to deter or stop Iran is to impose drastic economic sanctions on the regime again, thereby cutting the flow of funding to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and — one hopes for the sake of the repressed Iranian people as well as any stability in the region — bringing the regime financially to its knees.

If we closely examine the Iranian regime’s nuclear file, it reveals that no deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

A few years after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic appeared to make the advancement of a nuclear program a top item on its agenda after consolidating power in 1984. In the decade after, the Islamic Republic began its nuclear program with the help of some intermediaries such as Russia, China and Pakistan.

At the time, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, acknowledged that Pakistan assisted Tehran. He pointed out “I do have information that some years ago, through intermediaries, we received pieces for centrifuges”. According to the United States intelligence, A.Q. Khan, who was known as “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”, sold expertise and equipment to North Korea, Libya and Iran, and made more than $50 million.

Since then, the Iranian regime has been progressing steadily and investing in its nuclear program for more than three decades. Currently, it has reached a point near the “nuclear threshold.” The regime is perhaps weeks away from obtaining the weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon. According to a report in the New York Times:

“Iran has come within roughly a month of having enough material to fuel a single nuclear weapon, crossing a threshold that may raise pressure on the United States and its allies to improve the terms of a potential deal to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement.”

THE COLLAPSING AMERICAN FAMILY: FROM BONDING TO BONDAGE

A must read book at a time when indoctrination in schools is destroying the principles of parenting and family….rsk

The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage exposes the sinister attack on the nuclear family as the primary strategy in globalism’s asymmetric warfare on America. The family must be destroyed in order to collapse America from within and impose the Great Reset of technocracy and transhumanism. The “New Normal” replaces family bonding with feudal bondage in the global Managerial State where you will own nothing and be happy. Globalism’s war on America is psychological warfare, an information war fought without bullets. Linda’s closing line warns the nation: “Space is no longer the final frontier-reality is.”

In the 1995 manuscript for her book Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus? Linda Goudsmit wrote these prescient words: ‘It is not a race war, an economic war, or a war between states. It is a psychological battle between states of mind that will determine who has the power in our society, who is in control.’ In that book, published in 2011, she explained with clarity and precision how America was headed for an epic battle between the advocates of freedom and the believers in lifelong dependency. In her new book, The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage, Goudsmit exposes the targeted attacks on the nuclear and national American family designed to collapse America from within. She reveals the psychological mechanisms employed to frighten and manipulate the public; the role of the collaborating mainstream media; the corruption of politicians; and the billions of dollars spent by predatory globalists to finance their sinister scheme for totalitarian planetary governance. If you want to understand the orchestration of every anti-American, anti-family phenomenon that has menaced the nation since the 21st century began, this one-in-a-million treasure of a book explains it.

The warmists’ real agenda By Don Wilkie

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_warmists_real_agenda.html

In the Monty Python sketch, “The Parrot,” a customer returns a parrot he had bought just 30 minutes before. Why? Because it is dead. The shopkeeper insists that the parrot is not dead but resting. Nothing the customer says can change the shopkeeper’s mind.

Our modern-day shopkeepers, the global warmists, insist a cataclysmic doom is our future unless we throw the entire world into a state of complete chaos.

There have been a number of studies on our side that show global warming is a hoax. Will the left do what we do, have a serious discussion of those studies? Absolutely not — they are not interested. 

If the hand of God were to deliver two stone tablets with 10 reasons why there is no global warming, would our global warmists listen? Never in a hundred years. The parrot is not dead.

The warmist’s messianic devotion to global warming is completely irrational. They won’t let any fact or reason get in the way of their blind assuredness. In the shopkeeper’s case, he didn’t want to give the money back. In our global warmists case, they are hiding their real agenda, global government.

Their logic is simple enough. How do you fight a global problem without global government? What is the biggest impediment to global government? The United States of America. Therefore, America must be destroyed.

The Democrats’ big lie about puberty blockers being harmless and helpful By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_democrats_big_lie_about_puberty_blockers_being_harmless_and_helpful.html

From the moment we’re born, our bodies are constantly changing. The initial changes, from baby to toddler to child, occur when we lack the self-awareness to be taken aback by the process. Indeed, there are only two times in life when we are intensely aware of the changes—and, often, find them disturbing. The first is when we go through puberty and the second is when age finally catches up with us.

In both cases, people may fight back against those changes. We know all about Hollywood stars and the fight against aging. It’s the adolescent changes that matter. The changes can be disturbing and even dismaying. Boys’ voices can squeak embarrassingly and they like to hold a notebook in front of their crotch. Girls get boobs (which boys stare at), hips, and painful, messy, inconvenient periods.

We used to sympathize with adolescents and assure them that this was normal and they’d outgrow it. Nowadays, though, as often as not, they’re told that they’re probably transgender. And no, that’s not me saying that. It’s being said in a video from a company called AMAZE Org, which claims to provide age-appropriate sex education for children:

Averting Our Eyes The New York subway massacre has roots in mental illness, but the shooter’s delusions were likely fed by the relentless cultivation of racial resentment. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/ny-subway-shooter-delusions-likely-fed-by-relentless-cultivation-of-racial-resentment

Had a white male entered a New York subway car in a construction vest and gas mask, carrying a hatchet, a nine-millimeter handgun, extended ammo magazines, gasoline, fireworks, and two smoke grenades; had he then shot off at least 33 rounds, hitting ten people, the Biden administration and the media would have immediately raised an alarm about white nationalist violence. The shooter’s race would have led every story about such an attempted massacre; pundits would have immediately speculated about hate crime and domestic terrorism.

After all, U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland has elevated white supremacist violence to the top of Justice Department priorities. Federal law enforcement agencies regularly warn about coming white nationalist attacks. Since entering the White House, Biden has kept up a constant refrain about lethal white racism. On March 29, 2022, he declaimed that “hate never goes away,” “hate” referring, of course, to white Americans. He added: “If [hate] gets a little bit of oxygen, it comes roaring back out, screaming.” Kamala Harris chimed in: “Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account.”

If that hypothetical white subway shooter had then been discovered to have posted tirades about black people, had he called for whites to get a gun and start shooting blacks, the global media would be in nuclear meltdown about white supremacy. Protests would be breaking out across the country and corporations would be emitting an avalanche of press releases about America’s racial injustice.