Iranian Guards Physically Harassed Female U.N. Nuclear Inspectors, Diplomats Say Allegations come amid rising tensions between Tehran and the U.N. atomic energy agency by Lawrence Norman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iranian-guards-physically-harassed-female-u-n-nuclear-inspectors-diplomats-say-11631626649

Iranian security guards have physically harassed several female United Nations atomic agency inspectors at a nuclear facility over the past few months, diplomats say, and the U.S. has demanded that Iran stop the behavior immediately.

The previously unreported incidents at Iran’s main nuclear facility, Natanz, allegedly included inappropriate touching of female inspectors by male security guards and orders to remove some clothing, the diplomats said.

One of the diplomats said there had been at least four separate incidents of harassment. A second diplomat said there had been five to seven.

A paper circulated by the U.S. among International Atomic Energy Agency members ahead of its member states’ board meeting this week, seen by The Wall Street Journal, demanded an end to such conduct.

“Harassment of IAEA inspectors is absolutely unacceptable, and we strongly urge you to make clear in your national statement at the Board meeting that such conduct is deplorable and must end immediately, and that the Board should take appropriate action if further incidents are reported,” the U.S. paper says.

The first incident was in early June and the most recent was in the past few weeks, the diplomats said.

James Freeman: George W. Bush, Mark Milley and Violent Extremists What are America’s domestic threats?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-w-bush-mark-milley-and-violent-extremists-11631667584?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

EXCERPT:

There are of course different types of domestic threats. Today the Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker writes about his Post colleagues’ allegation that in the final months of the Trump administration, America’s senior military officer delivered a remarkable message to China:

In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa…
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

Strategists can debate whether assuring Gen. Li should ever be a U.S. strategic priority, but if this story is true it’s hard to see how Gen. Milley could have been effective. Promising to provide warning of an attack right after one has just promised that such an attack won’t occur isn’t a good way to assure anybody.

Not reassuring at all to Americans who treasure our Constitution and the role of the duly-elected President as commander-in-chief is the following passage in which The Post claims:

Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”

Alexander Vindman, one of the country’s foremost experts in the field of undermining presidential authority, responds on Twitter to the Post claims about communications with China:

If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.

When you’ve lost Alexander Vindman . . . 

Europe’s Climate Lesson for America As wind power flags, energy prices are soaring amid fuel shortages.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-climate-lesson-for-america-energy-prices-fuel-wind-11631655375?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Energy prices are soaring in Europe, and the effects are rippling across the Atlantic. Blame anti-carbon policies of the kind that the Biden Administration wants to impose in the U.S.

Electricity prices in the U.K. this week jumped to a record £354 ($490) per megawatt hour, a 700% increase from the 2010 to 2020 average. Germany’s electricity benchmark has doubled this year. Last month’s 12.3% increase was the largest since 1974 and contributed to the highest inflation reading since 1993. Other economies are experiencing similar spikes.

Europe’s anti-carbon policies have created a fossil-fuel shortage. Governments have heavily subsidized renewables like wind and solar and shut down coal plants to meet their commitments under the Paris climate accord. But wind power this summer has flagged, so countries are scrambling to import more fossil fuels to power their grids.

European natural-gas spot prices have increased five-fold in the last year. Some energy providers are burning cheaper coal, but its prices have tripled. Rising fossil-fuel consumption has caused demand and prices for carbon permits under the Continent’s cap-and-trade scheme to surge, which has pushed electricity prices even higher.

Russia has exploited the chaos by slowing gas deliveries, ostensibly to increase pressure on Germany to finish the Nord Stream 2 pipeline certification. Vladimir Putin last week took a swipe at the “smart alecs” in the European Commission for “market-based” pricing that increased competition in gas, including from U.S. liquefied natural gas imports.

Mr. Putin can throw his weight around in Europe because the rest of the world also needs his gas. Drought has reduced hydropower in Asia, and manufacturers are using more energy to supply the West with more goods. Due to a gas and coal shortage, China has rationed power to its aluminum smelters and aluminum prices this week hit a 13-year high.

America’s Revolutionary Mind A moral history of the American Revolution and the Declaration that defined it. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/americas-revolutionary-mind-jason-d-hill/

Author’s note: In his most recent book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, C. Bradley Thompson gives us perhaps the most compelling moral interpretation of the American Revolution and the foundational principles of the Republic. In reconstructing the logic and principles of the Declaration of Independence, he establishes that which has rarely been given sufficient attention: the fact that America’s revolutionary war was primarily moral rather than economic or political.

The story of America’s victorious fight for independence and its success in achieving its exceptional status as a Republic is the story of a unique phenomenon: the creation of the American Mind.

Thompson does a brilliant job of weaving together the modes of reasoning that led to agreements in the minds of the Founders about the foundational and first principles in which the country would be rooted. In the end, we are left with a picture of the revolutionaries not just as profound political thinkers, but as moral giants—both as persons and as philosophic thinkers. Unanimously they perceived the correct nature of man as a human being who needed fundamental and indisputable resources and rights for a life of flourishing. This established them as epistemological geniuses. Out of that perception came the creation of the political system most consonant with that rational nature.

C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He received his Ph.D from Brown University, and has also been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London.

I interviewed him recently about America’s Revolutionary Mind.

On Yom Kippur God Judges Nations Too We should pray in the merit of our fathers. Wed Sep 15, 2021 Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/yom-kippur-god-judges-nations-too-don-feder/

Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, begins at sunset on Wednesday and ends at sunset on Thursday. In between is a time when Heaven and Earth meet – when the fate of every man and woman hangs in the balance. The judgement written on Rosh Hashanah is sealed on Yom Kippur. It’s the court of last resort. From its sentence there is no appeal.

The holiest day of the year begins with the Kol Nidre service and ends with Ne’ila, the closing of the gates of Heaven. Yom Kippur is solemn, yet hopeful.

Three things, we are told, will avert the harsh decree – teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah – repentance, prayer and acts of righteousness.

Nations too are judged.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three nations were poised to dominate the century – Germany, Russia and Japan. Between them, Germany and Japan were responsible for 75 million deaths in World War II. As they exited the world stage, Russia entered. It gave us the the Cold War and tens of millions of more deaths.

Each was judged.

Germany ended the war in rubble. It was divided for 45 years. Though it achieved relative prosperity, today it has a well-below replacement fertility and a growing Muslim population. It could end this century as part of the Ummah.

Russia came out of communism poor in everything but natural resources (and nuclear weapons), but without the people to exploit them. It has a population of 146 million — to hold the largest land mass of any country — expected to decline to 121 million by 2050. In the meantime, Mother Russia is being pressed by China to the east and Islam to the south.

The sun is setting on Japan, which languishes in the depths of Demographic Winter. Its population declined by almost a million in the last 5 years. One of its few growth industries is removing the remains of those who die alone at home, because they have no family. The phenomenon is so common that they have a name for it “lonely death.”

And what of America?

Impeach Secretary of State Antony Blinken The hack at the heart of the Afghanistan betrayal must go! Daniel Greenfield See note please.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/impeach-secretary-state-antony-blinken-daniel-greenfield/

I personally don’t favor impeachment. It is a waste of time and money and always devolves into a circus. However, Americans of both parties should demand voluntary resignations of all those who have imperiled national security. rsk

The Clinton administration was very surprised by the Taliban in 1996. A memo from the State Department’s Afghanistan office warning that the Taliban were going to take Kabul never reached Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Nine days later, the Taliban were in charge.

History repeated itself when 23 staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul signed a memo warning that the Taliban were about to take over Kabul and that evacuations needed to begin. The date was July 13, 2021. There was still a month left until the Taliban would enter Kabul. And that should have been plenty of time to conduct an evacuation and get American civilians safely out.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, unlike Christopher, did see the memo. But it contradicted the narrative that he and the rest of the Biden administration had been peddling to the public.

“No one, starting with the Taliban, has an interest in going back to a civil war, because I think what everyone recognizes is there’s no military resolution to the conflict,” Blinken absurdly told ABC News in April after his boss had announced the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.

The Taliban not only believed that there was a military resolution, they were winning it.

Weeks after the memo, Blinken was still insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that, “No one has an interest in a military takeover of the country by the Taliban, the restoration of an Islamic emirate.”

After China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, praised the Taliban as a “a pivotal military and political force”, and mocked the United States, Blinken responded by celebrating Communist China’s involvement. “If China and other countries are working on that interest, then it’s a positive thing,” he suggested.

Blinken’s insistence that China didn’t want a Taliban takeover was as treasonously wrongheaded as his parallel narrative that the Taliban weren’t really trying to win a war.

COVID Hysteria Could Destroy a Generation Rikki Schlott

https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-hysteria-could-destroy-a-generation_3997539.html

Initial stay-at-home orders and widespread closures were implemented in a state of panic and uncertainty as COVID-19 quickly swept through the world. Without data, these measures were initially popularly accepted. Two weeks to stop the spread of a novel disease struck most citizens as more than reasonable.

But, as the months have dragged on, the ongoing implementation of lockdowns as a long-term, blunt-force tool has been an utter failure. With more data and information coming to light, many policymakers have failed to reinvestigate and reform their precautionary measures, thus increasingly acting both in conflict with science and in violation of liberties.

This is especially true of school closures. As we accrued more and more studies and demographical data about how COVID-19 impacts children, the findings have largely been a blessing. The risk of COVID-19 to small children is astronomically low, and the risk of transmission between students and their teachers is hugely unlikely.

After months of our kids suffering ill-effects of lockdowns, this should have been a cause for celebration and impetus to cautiously but excitedly reopen our schools. And, yet, closures have continued to drag on in many areas of the country—much to the detriment of students and their families alike.

Lockdowns have robbed children of a formative year of life, imprisoning them in their homes despite their negligible health risk. Basic socialization, formative lessons, and developmental milestones have all been stolen from them.

Many working parents have been forced to double as teachers. Private schools remained open while public schools across the street were shuttered. Socioeconomic divides have been exacerbated. But, for all the logistical consequences our children have faced from lockdown policies, our more consequential failure of them may very well be an ideological one.

North Korea Fires Ballistic Missiles Into Waters Between Japan and Korean Peninsula By Katabella Roberts

https://www.theepochtimes.com/north-korea-fires-ballistic-missiles-into-waters-between-japan-and-korean-peninsula_3998321.html

North Korea launched two ballistic missiles into waters off its eastern coast on Wednesday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) has confirmed.

JCS said the missiles were launched from central North Korea and that South Korea, along with U.S. intelligence authorities, is currently analyzing more details about the launches.

Japan’s coast guard said it believes the two missiles were launched five minutes apart, at 12:38 p.m. and 12:43 p.m. local time (11:38 p.m. and 11:43 p.m. ET) and that they landed outside its exclusive economic zone in the waters between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, CNN reports.

Coast guards confirmed that no ships or aircraft were damaged by the missiles.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga called the firings “absolutely outrageous” and said they “threaten the peace and safety of Japan and the region.”

“The government of Japan is determined to further step up our vigilance and surveillance to be prepared for any contingencies,” Suga said.

The firings come just two days after North Korea claimed to have tested a newly developed missile, the first time it has resumed weapons tests in six months. In a multi-day operation, North Korea tested a long-range cruise missile capable of hitting targets 930 miles away, according to state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Officials and scientists of the Academy of National Defense Science, who took part in the testing of the cruise missiles launched Sept. 11 and Sept. 12, declared the operation a “success,” reported KCNA.

The missile, dubbed “a strategic weapon of great significance,” had been in development for two years.

U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolutions have barred North Korea from testing ballistic missiles, and the country has been heavily sanctioned over its missile and nuclear weapons programs.

The White House censors Joe Biden By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/the_white_house_censors_joe_biden.html

Last week, word emerged from the White House that Biden’s own staff can’t stand to listen to him.  It’s not that they don’t agree with his policies (heck — they probably crafted them).  Instead, it’s that he’s such a verbal loose cannon that they shudder when they hear him speak off the cuff.  Yesterday, the White House staffers paying attention to his answers about western wildfires were so worried about where his mouth was taking him that they pulled the plug on him in mid-sentence.

We, along with every political outlet in America, reported last week on a Politico story explaining that Biden’s staff constantly worry about Mr. Big Mouth in the White House.  As we summed it up then, “we still don’t know who is dictating his policies, but it appears that everyone in Biden’s orbit is begging him to keep his mouth shut and be the good little puppet they need.”

The same Politico story noted that “[Biden’s] verbal miscues have been causing headaches for him and his team.  Biden has delivered several self-inflicted wounds during freewheeling Q&A sessions that required immediate clean-up.”  That problem may explain why, on Monday, a panicked White House cut off Biden’s feed in mid-sentence:

The White House abruptly cut the feed of President Biden’s briefing on wildfires with federal and state officials.

During Monday’s visit to Boise, Idaho, Biden received a briefing about the ongoing wildfires that have plagued several states out west.

The Taliban ‘Cut Off the Heads of Two Boys Who Were Nine and Ten’ By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-taliban-cut-off-the-heads-of-two-boys-who-were-nine-and-ten/

A veteran desperately trying to get Afghan allies out of the country shares hellacious accounts.

I n normal times, Jean Marie Thrower would be running Supplier Development Systems, her Birmingham, Ala.–based automotive consulting firm. But since the fall of Kabul, and the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan, Thrower, who served in the U.S. Army’s 82 Airborne Division as a transportation officer with support of operations in Haiti and Bosnia, has put the rest of her life on hold, working with the Afghan Rescue Crew. The ARC describes itself as a private group of U.S. veterans and civilians volunteering to save as many vetted at-risk Americans and Afghan allies left behind in Afghanistan as possible.

ARC is one of several private groups attempting to get Americans, green-card holders, and Afghan allies out of the country; others include No One Left Behind, Digital Dunkirk, Allied Airlift 21, Hearts and Homes for Refugees, Samaritan’s Purse, the “Pineapple Express,” and more.

The good news for ARC is that they have so far rescued “hundreds” and transported them to third countries safely. The bad news is that the organization says that it has a list of thousands of at-risk Afghan allies still in its system. Thrower disputes the U.S. State Department’s characterization of about 100 Americans being left on the ground; she said that as of a few days ago, the figure her group had was closer to 1,000 — although she noted that every group making a rescue effort has its own list, potentially leading to overlap with one another in certain cases. The 1,000 figure may include U.S. green-card holders, too, which the State Department is putting in a separate category.

Thrower describes herself as immensely frustrated and angered by the U.S. government’s actions, or lack thereof, so far — but said that ARC remains open to working with any U.S. government efforts to get desperate Americans and Afghans out. She said that she doesn’t care who gets the credit, as long as those at risk figure out a way to escape Afghanistan.