RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/top-admiral-warns-of-rapid-chinese-russian-nuclear-arms-buildup/

Admiral Charles Richard: ‘We are in uncharted waters’

Admiral Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, warned that China and Russia are building up their nuclear stockpiles at an unprecedented rate.

Richard said Thursday that China’s nuclear weapons buildup and Russia’s advanced nuclear capabilities have prompted a reassessment of America’s ability to defend itself.

“We are in uncharted waters,” Richard said at a Hudson Institute event. “We are facing a class of potential adversaries that we haven’t had to deal with in 30 years.”

Richard’s remarks come amid a heated fight over the future of America’s nuclear arsenal, as national security staff in the White House and lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) push for a smaller U.S. stockpile.

A letter from Senate Democrats prompted the Biden administration to call for an independent review of ground-based nuclear weapons, which have been in service since the Vietnam War. Several powerful House and Senate Democrats have opposed nuclear modernization, an effort which experts say would give China and Russia an advantage in a growing arms race. Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.) called the attempt to “scuttle” America’s nuclear arsenal misguided in an August letter to the White House.

The admiral said that given the speed of Russia and China’s weapons buildup, policymakers should waste no time in strengthening America’s nuclear position.

“Business as usual will not work,” Richard said. “It is going to be long enough before I get any new modernized capability into the forces that I am responsible for. We can ill afford, given the threats that we’re facing, any further delays on that. … If we make the wrong decision, we can’t come back a couple years later and buy it back.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/battle-eastern-europe-energy-sector-ukraine/

The fight to power eastern Europe is heating up. As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky prepares to meet Joe Biden at the White House, competition for Ukraine’s energy market is increasingly being framed as a battle between East and West. And as western investments into renewables vie with fossil fuel imports from Russia, the struggle for the nation’s energy supply is assuming a moral dimension reminiscent of the Cold War.

Tens of thousands of panels at Ukraine’s huge Nikopol solar farm harvest the sun’s energy for nobody. In late 2019, the Canadian owners of the farm, TIU Canada, were informed that the nearby Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant, owned by the notorious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, would be disconnecting their farm from the power grid to make repairs. They were not aware that any such repairs were needed. Despite frantic protests the connection was severed — and a year and a half later, it has still not been restored.

Kolomoisky’s tentacles extend deep into Ukraine’s economy and politics. He controls a faction of MPs without which the current coalition would collapse, as well as the country’s most lucrative energy distributor and, previously, some of its biggest banks. He is a controversial figure who in March 2021 was banned entry to the US over his ‘significant corruption’.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/radical_islam_and_the_clash_of_civilizations.html

The Biden administration will go to great lengths to downplay the significance of the debacle in Afghanistan. But no amount of wishful thinking or meaningless creations like over-the-horizon capabilities will deny the reality that the loss of Afghanistan has implications for the conflict with radical Islam far beyond Afghanistan’s geographic borders.

Culture is the primary context in which statecraft takes place. It is a concept that runs through the works of the late Professor Adda Bozeman, who understood that diplomats often talk past each other because the culture and linguistic context in which they operate mean different things.

To properly understand the meaning of the current catastrophe, it is necessary to ask the most fundamental question, which is not how is this playing in Peoria, but how is this playing in throughout the Islamic world? The Biden administration can spin the collapse of Afghanistan endlessly, but no amount of press conferences will change the perception within Islam of America’s defeat.

We in the West believe in the triumph of an ineluctable future that will be a vast improvement over the past. When our progress toward that future is limited or regressive, we become impatient. In non-western societies, however, it is not the future that is looked toward, but a golden past that needs to be resurrected.

Since centuries have elapsed without that resurrection, time is perceived differently. The rebirth of a golden past is inevitable. All that is required is to have faith and patience. Twenty years might seem like an endless war to Americans, but to Muslims it is a grain of sand in the measure of time. If the Taliban had to resist another twenty years, if they had to sacrifice another generation to be rid of the infidels on their land, they would have done so.

For Islam, the choices are not the ones the Biden administration has articulated, a choice between leaving and a war without end. The choice is between resurrecting the golden age of Islam or ceding victory to the infidel. It is not a choice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-surge-in-malaysia-threatens-to-prolong-global-chip-shortage-11630234802

SINGAPORE—A surge of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia, a little-known but critical link in the semiconductor supply chain, has opened a new front in the battle to fix manufacturing woes that have rippled across industries during a global shortage of computing chips.

The Southeast Asia nation is one of the world’s top destinations for assembly and testing of the devices that control smartphones, car engines and medical equipment. Disruptions in Malaysia threaten to prolong uncertainty over chip supply well into next year, dashing hopes of relief in the second half of 2021.

The supply crunch in Malaysia, caused primarily by staff shortages linked to virus-control measures combined with a sharp surge in global demand, poses a new problem for the auto industry. For the first half of this year, shortages largely stemmed from companies miscalculating the pace of economic recoveries and not ordering enough parts. Now they can’t always get the parts they need because Covid-19 outbreaks are denting factory output.

“It’s a bit like a game of whack-a-mole,” said Ravi Vijayaraghavan, a Singapore-based partner at the consulting firm Bain & Co. specializing in semiconductors. “We think we have supply sorted out, and then a problem suddenly pops up somewhere else.”

Some of the world’s leading car makers including Toyota Motor Corp. , Ford Motor Co. , General Motors Co. and Nissan Motor Co. have disclosed major production cuts due largely to chip shortages from factories in Malaysia. Ford suspended work for about a week at an F-150 plant in the Kansas City, Mo., area and a Fiesta factory in Cologne, Germany because of missing parts, while Toyota said it would cut global production by around 40% in September. General Motors said it expects to make 100,000 fewer vehicles in North America in the second half of the year.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/north-korea-exploits-bidens-weakness-restart-nuke-daniel-greenfield/

Weakness is a pretty clear message and the message has been received. It was received in Iran, in China, and in North Korea.

Everything it’s been received our enemies have responded by pushing the limit to see how much they can get away with.

The Norks are no different.

North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, thought to have been shut down since December 2018, is apparently operating again, according to the U.N. atomic agency. “Since early July, there have been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operations of the reactor,” said a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The reactor is allegedly producing plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, according to Gary Samore of Brandeis University. 

That would put this within the window of Biden’s withdrawal announcement. Not to mention his previous kowtowing to Iran.

Under these conditions, why shouldn’t North Korea play Biden like a fiddle?

Pyongyang has also ignored overtures made by the Joe Biden administration since it took office in January, while warning Seoul and Washington of a “serious security crisis” for staging their regular joint military exercise this month.

During his Seoul visit, the special US envoy for the North said he and his South Korean counterpart had discuss possible humanitarian assistance to the North.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/china-biden-no-good-relations-unless-us-drops-daniel-greenfield/

Communist China is really desperate to stop any probes of the origins of the Wuhan Virus.

A senior Chinese diplomat called on the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to work with the Taliban government and stop pressuring Beijing over the virus origin probe in order to improve ties between the world’s biggest economies.

Wang added that China opposed the U.S. intelligence community’s inquiry into the source of Covid-19, the virus that caused the worst pandemic in more than a century. He accused the U.S. of turning the coronavirus into a political issue if the Biden administration wanted to bring bilateral relations “back on the right track,” the Xinhua report said.

The official PRC readout states, “If the U.S. side also hopes to bring bilateral relations back on the right track, it should stop blindly smearing and attacking China, and stop undermining China’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

By that, Foreign Minister Wang Yi meant apparently that, “China resolutely opposes the so-called investigation report on COVID-19 origins tracing produced by the U.S. intelligence community recently. Politicizing origins tracing is a political burden left by the former U.S. government. The sooner the U.S. side unloads this burden, the easier it will be to get out of the current predicament.”

By “former U.S. government”, Yi means the Trump administration.

The PRC has a lot of nerve trying to urge the Biden administration to abandon origin probes as a legacy of the Trump administration. It’s all but an announcement that it expects the Biden administration to choose the PRC over Republicans. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2021/08/americas-humiliation-and-its-consequences/

Many people will have seen the horrific images of the Taliban fighters’ advance in Afghanistan, an offensive accompanied by brutal repression, executions of those suspected of collaborating with the government or its American allies, and the denigration of women and girls. The whole country was overrun in just eleven days. When the Taliban arrived in Kabul, they found a city that was essentially undefended.

President Joe Biden sheepishly admitted the events occurred much more quicky than his administration anticipated.  However, rather than accepting responsibility for the carnage in, and collapse of, Afghanistan, he blamed Afghani political and military leaders for giving up and fleeing the country. In denying a role in the collapse, Biden’s response reveals the self-delusional ignorance and naïveté of his administration. It is also symptomatic of the malaise that is threatening the democratic heritage of the West. 

Undoubtedly, the Allies will now review and consider where the involvement went wrong. The spectacular collapse hides an inconvenient truth: the Americans and their allies could never have exported Western-style democratic government to Afghanistan and it was folly to even entertain the thought they might. It is like transplanting a precious tree from one part of a forest to rocky, inhospitable terrain. The tree will likely die, which this one did despite the lives and billions of dollars expended to keep it alive.

However, in an address to the media,  Biden disingenuously said that nation-building was never one of the aims of the American presence in Afghanistan. Instead, he insisted, the aim was to hunt Osama Bin Laden who had found sanctuary in Afghanistan and to degrade the Taliban. But the President’s denial of nation-building as a motive did not explain why it was necessary to stay for 20 years. During that time, the Taliban, rather than being degraded, were able (or allowed) to keep their arms., meaning that it functioned as a kind of shadow government controlling large swathes of Afghan territory.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17696/biden-kabul-travel-agency

The immediate question everyone faces is whether or not to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government.

To start with, the current international doctrine is that no government produced through war and violence should be granted de jure recognition unless and until it has submitted to some form of referendum or elections supervised by the United Nations.

Whether or not to legitimize a terrorist group determined to impose a repressive regime on a long suffering nation is the key issue. It cannot be handled without the “Great Satan,” now inspiring stand-up comedians, leading the way.

Whatever Fukuyma and others may fantasize about a “world without America” is not for today.

Twenty years ago when the United States was sucked into the Afghan cesspool, pundits were divided about the ultimate aim of intervention. President George W Bush talked of GWOT (remember the acronym?) or Global War on Terror. His critics argued that, unless it led to nation-building in Afghanistan, the intervention would make no sense.

Two decades later, the intervention has not advanced GWOT, as Islamist terrorism has spread to two dozen countries in Asia and Africa, with sleeper cells in Latin America. As for nation-building, the US has instead ended up with a travel agency based in Kabul airport under an astonishingly incompetent management.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17677/persecution-of-christians-july

A Muslim teacher raped an 8-year-old Christian in a school bathroom, and the school and police are covering it up…. “The school management is protecting the rapist, and the police are colluding with them. Who should we look to for justice?…” — Morning Star News, July 11, 2021, Pakistan.

In July 24, another Christian girl—this time only 3-years-old—was raped at a school sponsored by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF). The man who raped Anna Chand is allegedly the female principal’s own husband, Muhammad Saleem…. Since filing charges, friends of Muhammad were reportedly threatening to accuse the Christian parents with blasphemy—which would likely lead to jail or worse—unless they dropped the charges. — Pakistan Christian Post, August 5, 2021, Pakistan.

“The number of defenseless Christians hacked to death by Nigeria’s Islamic Jihadists and their collaborators in the security forces in the past 200 days… has risen to no fewer than 3,462….” — Times Live, July 8, 2021, Nigeria.

Article 500 of Iran’s [new] penal code now states that “any deviant education or propaganda that contradicts or interferes with the sacred Sharia [Islamic law] will be severely punished.” … “The amendment was signed into law by then-President Hassan Rouhani on Feb. 18 and went into effect on March 5.” — Morning Star News, July 6, 2021, Iran.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of July, 2021:

The Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion of Christian Girls in Pakistan

A Muslim teacher raped an 8-year-old Christian in a school bathroom, and the school and police are covering it up. According to the July 11 report, Shahzad Masih’s young daughter was “shaking and screaming in pain when she returned home from school that day, June 22, her uniform spotted with blood.” “She did not utter a word all afternoon and just kept crying and screaming in pain,” her father explained.