RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-danger-of-self-induced-national-security-crises-intensifies/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Open war between Israel and Iran — as distinguished from the always thrumming war Tehran has waged through its jihadist proxies for decades — is a higher likelihood in this moment than it has ever been. Despite President Biden’s reckless distancing of the United States government from Israel — while it is at war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and while Hamas is still holding American hostages — the high alert that the Israeli armed forces are on in anticipation of an Iranian onslaught, which Western intelligence services believe could be imminent (as in: as early as today), means an increased likelihood of Iranian-backed attacks on the United States — not just in the Middle East but in our own territory.

I say “Despite” advisedly. Keeping alive his streak of being wrong on every consequential foreign-policy matter in his half-century career — with the wages of his inanities now higher than ever — President Biden has bashed our Israeli ally to appease Iran (and woo the “Death to America” precincts of Dearborn, Mich.). As ever, the result will not find Iran overlooking American support for Israel (support which is still very strong in the public and much of Congress); the result will be — it already is — to embolden Iran to attack in the conceit that the Biden administration may not be fully committed to Israel’s defense. Biden’s ongoing display of weakness can only further embolden Iran to step up attacks against us.

On that score, I observed back in January that Biden’s self-created border crisis has been overlapping with the crisis caused by his mishandling of Iran policy:

For many years, Iran has had an operational alliance with the Marxist totalitarian regime in Venezuela. This gives Iran a toehold in the West and a well-trod route to infiltrate operatives across the southern border. Biden has appeared blithely indifferent to this — which is no surprise when we remember the debacle last fall: Biden agreed to a “prisoner exchange” in connection with the $6 billion ransom that he paid Iran for the release of American hostages. Then it turned out that most of the Iranian prisoners, who had been or were being prosecuted by the Justice Department for clandestine activities on behalf of Tehran, were “U.S. persons” who got to stay in the United States rather than being returned to Iran.

Biden is facilitating illegal immigration from Venezuela (among other South and Central American countries) through a lawless visa scheme. In a post earlier today, I drew on a report by Andrew Arthur (of the Center for Immigration Studies) about the staggering number of illegal immigrants (371,000) who entered the country last month. Arthur relates that, despite the fact that Biden reserves for Venezuela a healthy share of the annual (illegal) parole grants from his CHNV program (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela), tens of thousands of additional aliens from those countries are showing up illegally every month. Last month, of 61,500 such illegal aliens, 47,000 were from Venezuela. That’s bad . . . but not as bad as the 51,833 from Venezuela in September.

The mind reels. Does any rational person think Iran is not capitalizing on this scheme?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20487/iran-latin-america

The Iranian regime, which… has been calling for “Death to America,” now has ballistic missiles which it says can reach the US, and claims to have a hypersonic missile that, according to one report, “Can Destroy US In 40 sec.”

Venezuela appears to have willingly embraced Iran’s overtures.

The Iranian regime, in addition to Venezuela, has evidently also been exploring avenues for military cooperation with Nicaragua and Cuba.

It is critical to recognize now the gravity of this exponentiating national security threat.

Venezuela, near the US, emerges as a key player in Iran’s Latin American ambitions. As a potential launching pad for attacks on the U.S., Venezuela appears to have willingly embraced Iran’s overtures. Iran’s growing military capabilities, with ballistic missiles and armed drones capable of reaching Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas from Latin American soil, already pose a direct threat to the United States.

A threatening development has been brewing largely under the radar of the Biden administration and the mainstream media attention: Iran’s calculated expansion into Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico.

With alarming nonchalance, the Biden administration appears to have turned a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s concerted efforts to establish a military foothold right in America’s backyard. The ramifications of this complacency are profound. The Iranian regime, which, since it began in 1979, has been calling for “Death to America,” now has ballistic missiles which it says can reach the US, and claims to have a hypersonic missile that, according to one report, “Can Destroy US In 40 sec.”

Historically, Iran’s playbook in the Middle East involved the arming and sponsoring of proxies and terror groups such as Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, with the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel and has carried out more than 180 attacks just since October 7 on U.S. interests in the region.

https://tomklingenstein.com/leaked-air-force-memo-reveals-racial-quota-system/

Editor’s Note: While the imposition of group outcome equality in universities and corporations has begun to spark outrage among the public, there is one institution that has been imposing quotas far longer and far more comprehensively than any other, but that has largely escaped criticism: the United States military. Will Thibeau, an Army Ranger veteran and director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute, takes a deep dive into the logic of the military’s group quota system, and ponders where that logic may lead the rest of the country.

The American Military Project has uncovered an internal Air Force memo from 2022 in which General C.Q. Brown, now President Biden’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, directed the service “to develop a diversity and inclusion outreach plan aimed at achieving” set numerical quotas for the racial composition of officer applicant pools. This previously unreported memo is clear evidence that a group quota system is operating in the U.S. military, though Pentagon leadership are exceptionally careful to avoid using the term.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, establishing “that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” 

In so doing, Truman explicitly called upon the spirit of the Founding. In a democratic nation for which the equality of man counted among the highest principles, to privilege one class arbitrarily over another could not be justified — certainly not in an institution whose character and fate were so entwined with that of the regime at large. This sentiment, of course, was born of long-standing national beliefs but brought to maturity by the course of history — namely, by the American experience in the Second World War. Black Americans had served ably and honorably throughout the conflict, and many had come home to less than a hero’s welcome. Integration — the old ethos of equal opportunity — was driven in large part by a sense of justice.

Yet the war had produced pragmatic lessons, too. The battle for Europe was waged on a scale and scope the likes of which the young American nation had not yet encountered. (Even our own bloody civil war, while presenting a graver political threat, amounted to a far less substantial military challenge compared against world war.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/the_biden_administration_is_destroying_our_national_security_infrastructure.html

America has been facing a helium crisis that goes far beyond balloons and threatens our medical care and military readiness. Thankfully, a new helium reservoir has just been discovered, but the ongoing helium shortage won’t instantly go away and, combined with the Biden administration’s many anti-military policies, still leaves us vulnerable to a military strike by a foreign actor.

On Friday, news broke about the helium reservoir, along with the fact that (a) our national security depends on helium, (b) we’re dangerously low on that essential gas, and (c) a current reserve sell-out will reduce helium capacity going forward:

A potential helium reservoir was discovered in Minnesota last week after drillers bored deep beneath the forest floor of the state’s Iron Range as supplies of the noble gas dwindle in the U.S.

Pulsar Helium Inc., a Canadian-based company, announced in a news release on Thursday that its team encountered gases with concentrations of up to 12.4% helium when its drilling rig reached a total depth of 2,200 at the Topaz Project drill site. Helium concentrations above 0.3% are considered economically viable.

[snip]

Helium’s unique qualities make the gas an important and desired resource.

While known as a lightweight gas that can fill balloons and blimps, helium can also take a liquid form that acts as a coolant for superconducting magnets needed to operate MRI machines and in the manufacturing of semiconductors. The gas also has applications in the defense industry, from rocket engine testing to air-to-air missile guidance systems and more.

In January, the Compressed Gas Association warned in a letter that the U.S. government’s selling of its Federal Helium Reserve system (FHR) “could lead to severe disruptions in the U.S. helium supply chain.”

If you’re wondering what the “government’s selling of its Federal Helium Reserve” means, the answer is that the U.S. just sold off part of its stockpile.

On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fmr-navy-intel-cmdr-reveals-biden-suppressed-previous-chinese-spy-balloon-info/

Remember the Chinese spy balloon over Montana? We’ve had hints that it was only the tip of the iceberg and we know that the Biden administration attempted to cover it up until a viral civilian’s photo made it a national issue. But now there’s confirmation that the Biden administration was aware of multiple spy balloons.

Former Rear Admiral Michael Studeman had headed up the Office of Navan Intelligence. In an op-ed at the Financial Times, he reveals that “when I was director of intelligence for the Indo-Pacific Command, for example, I watched as numerous requests to publicise Chinese malign activities were disapproved by Washington, including a recommendation to publicise Beijing’s use of high-altitude surveillance balloons over the sovereign airspaces of the US, our allies and Asian partners. This was many months before the shooting down of a Chinese balloon flying over the US last year.”

Now this is important because the Biden administration claimed that it was not aware of previous spy balloons.

According to U.S. officials, Chinese balloons crossed over the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration and at least one other time earlier in the Biden administration.

However, the U.S. was not aware of the Chinese incursions at the time, according to Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of NORAD and the officer responsible for domestic air threats.

He told a news conference that the military only learned of the intrusions after they were pieced together by the intelligence community after they happened.
“At least one time earlier.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/feb/18/like-biden-our-country-is-suffering-from-memory-lo/

As long as the left controls education, Americans will have a meager grasp of history

Republicans should try to avoid feeling smug about the president’s memory problems.

So he thinks that the leaders of France and Germany are men who have been dead for decades. He confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt, and he can’t quite recall the years he was vice president.

At 81, President Biden is the oldest man to serve in the Oval Office, and it shows.

But like our president, America, too, is suffering from memory loss.

On Monday, we’ll celebrate Presidents Day, which takes two real holidays and rolls them into one that’s surreal. Once upon a time, we observed the birthdays of George Washington, the man more responsible than any other for our independence, and Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union during the Civil War.

Now we have a holiday to honor everyone who has ever held the office, including such towering figures as William Henry Harrison, James Buchanan and Jimmy Carter.

Like tearing down statues, this is part of the process of erasing our history.

A survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Fellowship showed that 37% believed Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Edison, invented the lightbulb. In a 2017 survey, 43% of college graduates did not know that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. And to think there are those who question the value of higher education.

This is the product of a relentless assault on teaching American history.

In his book “Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story,” Timothy S. Goeglein identifies the principal culprit as Marxist historian Howard Zinn, whose “People’s History of the United States” is assigned reading for millions of high school and college students.

Zinn, coincidentally one of my professors at Boston University back in the 1960s, used history to indoctrinate. He taught that the American saga is one of genocide, exploitation and aggression. His book should be subtitled “Learn How to Hate Your Country in 729 Pages.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20388/china-infiltrators-us

China’s Communist Party is at this moment putting in place the infrastructure in America to attack America.

[I]n Reedley, California, near Fresno, authorities found a secret Chinese biological weapons lab with at least 20 pathogens, including the one for Ebola, and almost a thousand mice that had been genetically engineered to spread disease.

Chinese agents, in addition to hobbling Americans with disease and gunning them down, could bomb power stations, attack military bases, start wildfires, poison reservoirs, or create terror in dozens of ways.

These tactics come straight out of Unrestricted Warfare, a 1999 book written by two Chinese air force colonels and first published by the PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House in Beijing. The colonels argued that China can and should employ any tactic in attacking a militarily superior United States. Now, Americans can see how Beijing is operationalizing the suggestions in this how-to manual.

Chinese attackers are already in America, more are arriving by the day, and they are armed.

Videos posted to X (Twitter) show Chinese migrants firing pistols. One video is of a Chinese female with a sniper rifle.

There is no Second Amendment in China, and Chinese citizens are not permitted to possess firearms. So is it possible that the shooters in the videos are merely taking advantage of a new-found freedom in their new home country ?

Unlikely.

One of the migrants videoed was in America for only three weeks and arrived in the country with no money and no identification.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/houthi-cruise-missile-came-within-seconds-of-hitting-uss-gravely/

Instead of ending Houthi capabilities to terrorize the Red Sea, Biden carried out some light air strikes and promised to impose sanctions in 30 days.

This is the result.

A cruise missile launched by the Houthis into the Red Sea on Tuesday night came within a mile of a US destroyer before it was shot down, four US officials told CNN, the closest a Houthi attack has come to a US warship.

In the past, these missiles have been intercepted by US destroyers in the area at a range of eight miles or more, the officials said. But the USS Gravely had to use its Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) for the first time since the US began intercepting the Houthi missiles late last year, which ultimately succeeded in downing the missile, officials said.

The CIWS, an automated machine gun designed for close-range intercepts, is one of the final defensive lines the ship has to shoot down an incoming missile when other layers of defense have failed to intercept it…

Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was “concerning” that the Houthi missile managed to get so close to a US warship.

“If it’s going at a pretty good clip, one mile translates to not very long in terms of time,” Karako said.

The Houthis acquire much of their weapons technology from Iran, Karako said. Even slower cruise missiles could cover a mile within a matter of seconds, and the decision time for the commanders of warships is compressed because of the narrow waterways in the Red Sea.

This is what acting defensively means, as I wrote earlier.