Does the Pentagon Take China Seriously? Its leaders warn of the threat from Beijing, but their budgets suggest otherwise. By Elaine Luria (D-VA District 2)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-the-pentagon-take-china-seriously-11625503914?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

U.S. defense leaders have a problem: What they say doesn’t line up with what they do. The mismatch is apparent in the latest Pentagon budget, and a “say-do” gap undermines the trust of Congress and the American people.

Military leaders identify China as our No. 1 challenge, often calling Beijing “an increasingly capable strategic competitor,” as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley has warned, or a “pacing” threat. Yet the budget request reduces the ability of the Navy and the Air Force—the services that would have outsize roles in any conflict in the Western Pacific—to respond to threats in that region. Meanwhile, the budget promises undeveloped weapons that may take decades to enter the fleet, funded by a “divest to invest” strategy.

The Navy wants to retire 15 ships, including seven guided-missile cruisers and four littoral combat ships, while procuring only two surface combatant ships and two submarines. (Congress’ budget draft would buy another destroyer and limit the retirements.) Naval aviation procurement dropped 15.6% over 2021 even as the Navy speeds up F/A-18 retirements. The USS Ronald Reagan, based in Japan to counter a threat from China, is overseeing the Afghanistan withdrawal in the Middle East because no other aircraft carrier is available. Meanwhile, China is building warships at an astonishing rate. In 2010 the U.S. Navy had 68 more ships than the Chinese navy. Today, it has 63 fewer, a swing of 131 ships in 10 years.

The Air Force is also following the Pentagon’s “divest to invest” lead. Combat aircraft procurement is down 22% from 2021. The force wants to retire 137 aircraft, more than double the number it plans to buy. After the retirement of 17 B-1s last year, the Air Force’s bomber inventory is at a level top officers have called the bare minimum. Ammunition procurement is down more than 40%. China in recent years has focused on procuring advanced aircraft and has the world’s third-largest air force. In addition, China has an extensive ground-based conventional missile force, including the DF-26, known as the “carrier killer” which is capable of striking Guam.

Up to 1,500 businesses affected by ransomware attack, U.S. firm’s CEO says Raphael Satter

https://www.reuters.com/technology/hackers-demand-70-million-liberate-data-held-by-companies-hit-mass-cyberattack-2021-07-05/

Between 800 and 1,500 businesses around the world have been affected by a ransomware attack centered on U.S. information technology firm Kaseya, its chief executive said on Monday.

Fred Voccola, the Florida-based company’s CEO, said in an interview that it was hard to estimate the precise impact of Friday’s attack because those hit were mainly customers of Kaseya’s customers.

Kaseya is a company which provides software tools to IT outsourcing shops: companies that typically handle back-office work for companies too small or modestly resourced to have their own tech departments.

One of those tools was subverted on Friday, allowing the hackers to paralyze hundreds of businesses on all five continents. Although most of those affected have been small concerns – like dentists’ offices or accountants – the disruption has been felt more keenly in Sweden, where hundreds of supermarkets had to close because their cash registers were inoperative, or New Zealand, where schools and kindergartens were knocked offline.

The hackers who claimed responsibility for the breach have demanded $70 million to restore all the affected businesses’ data, although they have indicated a willingness to temper their demands in private conversations with a cybersecurity expert and with Reuters.

“We are always ready to negotiate,” a representative of the hackers told Reuters earlier Monday. The representative, who spoke via a chat interface on the hackers’ website, didn’t provide their name.

Voccola refused to say whether he was ready to take the hackers up on the offer.

“I can’t comment ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘maybe’,” he said when asked whether his company would talk to or pay the hackers. “No comment on anything to do with negotiating with terrorists in any way.”

The topic of ransom payments has become increasingly fraught as ransomware attacks become increasingly disruptive – and lucrative.

Voccola said he had spoken to officials at the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security about the breach but declined to say what they had told him about paying or negotiating.

Scale, details of massive ransomware attack emerge An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/04/massive-ransomware-attack-498089

BOSTON — Cybersecurity teams worked feverishly Sunday to stem the impact of the single biggest global ransomware attack on record, with some details emerging about how the Russia-linked gang responsible breached the company whose software was the conduit.

An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang, best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS after a Memorial Day attack, infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries on Friday, largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers, cybersecurity researchers said. They reported ransom demands of up to $5 million.

The FBI said in a statement Sunday that it was investigating the attack along with the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, though “the scale of this incident may make it so that we are unable to respond to each victim individually.”

President Joe Biden suggested Saturday the U.S. would respond if it was determined that the Kremlin is at all involved. He said he had asked the intelligence community for a “deep dive” on what happened.

The attack comes less than a month after Biden pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop providing safe haven to REvil and other ransomware gangs whose unrelenting extortionary attacks the U.S. deems a national security threat.

A broad array of businesses and public agencies were hit by the latest attack, apparently on all continents, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos reported. Ransomware criminals break into networks and sow malware that cripples networks on activation by scrambling all their data. Victims get a decoder key when they pay up.

The Swedish grocery chain Coop said most of its 800 stores would be closed for a second day Sunday because their cash register software supplier was crippled. A Swedish pharmacy chain, gas station chain, the state railway and public broadcaster SVT were also hit.

Divisive critical race theory spits on the Civil Rights Movement Race hustlers and media charlatans foment division by dismissing progress and rewriting history By Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL-District 190

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jul/5/divisive-critical-race-theory-spits-on-the-civil-r/

The essence of critical race theory would teach my three bi-racial children that I, their Black father, am oppressed by America’s history of White supremacy and that their mother, my wife, is my oppressor. 

But, what does that mean for my children? Does half of them qualify as oppressed, and the other half count as the oppressor? Unfortunately, the jury is still out on answering these obscure questions. 

Critical race theory is divisive at its core. This movement to indoctrinate our children is the definition of reverse racism and spits in the face of the Civil Rights Movement led by American heroes such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Those proposing this wicked curriculum would like to live in an America where every American is judged based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character, which, if I remember my history correctly, is the complete opposite of the teachings of Dr. King and decades of civil rights progress and commitment to creating a more perfect union. Today, radical leftists are upending this longstanding American virtue to push this un-American and divisive agenda. 

If the issue were that American schools aren’t teaching the complete and accurate history to our school children, then I’d agree wholeheartedly, but that is not what CRT peddlers are saying. The Marxist race hustlers and charlatans at the New York Times and in the Democrat Party aren’t in the business of pushing for equity; they are in the business of division. The truth is neither side should advocate for the cherry-picking of American history — neither for nor against our country. Instead, we need a balanced scale that accurately depicts our past, the good, bad, and ugly, that also rightly points out the tremendous progress of our nation. 

An anti-white video at a pricey private school set off a firestorm By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/an_antiwhite_video_at_a_pricey_private_school_set_off_a_firestorm.html

If there’s a silver lining to the COVID madness that swept America, savaged the economy, and allowed Democrats to put Joe Biden in the White House, it’s that a combination of distance learning and leftist hubris meant that the cultural Marxism in America’s classrooms hit home – and nowhere with greater impact than in New York, when upper-middle-class, White leftists discovered that the schools to which they’re paying huge sums annually are dedicated to teaching anti-White racism. The latest example was pricey Spence School, a staple for New York society girls. While the story broke three weeks ago, it’s heated up all over again because furious mothers have rejected the school head’s mealy-mouthed non-apology.

The story first exploded when Gabriela Baron, a first-generation American of Cuban descent, wrote a scorching letter to Spence School explaining why she was pulling her daughter out of the school. As the New York Post explained when the story first came to light,

Hispanic tech exec Gabriela Baron fired off a scorched-earth letter to the prestigious Upper East Side institution last week seething that the video — shown to her eighth-grade daughter and classmates on graduation day — “openly derides, humiliates and ridicules white women.

“They sat there in their graduation dresses while the white mothers of the white students – many of whom volunteer, donate, call, email and do whatever the school asks of them – were tarred and feathered in a video their teacher showed them. While their white female teachers were mocked,” Baron raged in the missive, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.

Wokeness in Art and Music By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/7_4_2021_23_7.html

Daily the Marxists/Leftists/Communists among us infiltrate every aspect of our society.  Consequently,  “the individual shrinks in proportion as the state grows” yet the Left continues to work towards an alleged utopia even though “this ‘ideal society’ would be the graveyard of human greatness.” 

Biden and Harris speak as if  “confused ideas and muddy ponds appear deep” when, in fact, they are empty rhetoric. As Nicolas Gomez Davila pointed out “stupidity is the mother of revolutionary atrocities; savageness is only the godmother” and  “the greatest modern error is not to proclaim that God died, but to believe that the devil has died.”

The true sadness is that “violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization.  Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.”  Hence, literature, history, statues, children’s books, humor, film, art and music are now under attack by those whose only aim is the total evisceration of America and her exceptional values.

Consequently, in the lunacy of wokeness,  how long will it be before Winslow Homer’s images of blacks during the Civil War and Reconstruction years come under attack?  After all, Winslow Homer was a white man who dared to paint black figures during this tumultuous time period.

According to the exhibition text titled Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years by Peter H. Wood and Karen C.C. Dalton, “[W]hen Winslow Homer displayed ‘The Bright Side in New York City’ in April 1865 — only days after Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s death — black persons were still not allowed to enter the galleries of the National Academy of Design.”  Clearly this was racism in full bloom and it would be a “full century before art depicting black people would appear on the walls of museums.”

Wi Spa: Ground Zero in the Gender Wars By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/wi_spa_ground_zero_in_the_gender_wars.html

The Wi Spa is an upscale Korean-style health club that proudly publicizes its recognition in 2010 as the “Best Family Fun Spa in Los Angeles.”  Just a mile from Koreatown, the facility offers hot and cold baths, “progressive” sauna rooms, massages, body scrubs, and facials in an expansive space that includes a fitness center, restaurant, and kids’ zone. No clothing is permitted — not even bathing suits — and the multilevel building has separate floors for men and women.

Last week, there was an uproar at the spa when, in all his manly glory, a biological male self-identifying as a female paraded naked in front of girls and women in the designated women’s area. Several female patrons were alarmed and offended.

A video viewed by millions on social media shows a vociferous customer confronting the front desk staff and clarifying the issue in no uncertain terms: “I just want to be clear with you,” she is heard saying. “It’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section, show his p***s around other women, young little girls, underage. Your spa, Wi Spa, condoned that.  Is that what you’re saying?” A staff member is heard responding that, despite customers’ objections, the man would be allowed to remain on the women’s floor based on his “sexual orientation.” (What was probably meant was “gender identification.”) Several customers demanded refunds and left the spa in horror and disgust. An Instagram post featuring the video encouraged people to call and complain and suggested a boycott of the Wi Spa.

In saner times — before the two preponderant biological sexes, male and female, were replaced by 72 genders — this egregious incident would have been prosecuted as indecent exposure. Not anymore. When I called the spa to make an appointment for myself and “my eight-year-old daughter,” a staffer categorically told me that even if an individual physically presents as a male with intact genitalia but states he is a woman, the spa would be required to admit him to the women’s facilities despite the presence of little girls there.

Wi Spa staff defended their decision, citing California Civil Code 51(b), which states that “All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical conditions, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.” The statute does not specifically mention “gender identity,” but court cases have led to judgments that the delineated categories are “illustrative, not restrictive” and that other classifications would be protected.

British Jews Repudiated the Labor Party. Will American Jews Do the Same with the Anti-Semitism in the Democrat Party? By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/will_american_jews_follow_their_british_cousins_in_repudiating_jewhatred.html

There was an editorial last week in The Free Beacon positing that due to anti-Semitism within its ranks, the Democrat party will mimic the electoral defeat of England’s Labor Party, which is similarly plagued by anti-Semitism.  The Ilhan Omar–Ocasio-Cortez–Tlaib trio, as well as many members of various Democrat congressional caucuses, are open enemies of Israel’s existence and redolent with anti-Semitic pejoratives.  The Beacon’s theory is that just as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party was shunned by Jews and many in the public, thereby losing the last election to the Tories, so will Democrats lose to Republicans in 2022.  Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, though themselves not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, continue to allow this anti-Semitism in their party, and Pelosi goes farther by publicly and proudly embracing the Squad and especially Omar.

The Beacon should have given its supposition a bit more scrutiny, for there is a big difference between the repudiation of the Labor Party in England and the situation here with the Democrat party.  In Britain, virtually every Jew, Jewish organization, and Jewish politician spoke against the anti-Semitism and severe anti-Israelism happening within the Labor Party.  Their disgust was across the board, and many Jewish Laborites spoke of leaving the Labor Party…and did.  The entire Jewish community was alarmed by what was happening and growing within Labor’s ranks and leadership, spotlighted it as the anti-Semitic party, and worked hard for Labor’s defeat.

In contrast, here in America, we do not hear or see the majority of Jews repudiating the Democrat party.  Not at all!  The Democrats have lost basically none of their previous 70% Jewish support.  If one removes the Orthodox support for Republicans, the Jewish Democrat support is as high as 80%.  Nor has any of the Jewish politicians threatened to leave the Democrat party.  In fact, a dozen or so Jewish congressmen have joined and led others to further tighten Joe Biden’s grip over Israel, and many Jewish Democrat politicians continue to defend Ilhan Omar and whitewash everything she says, calling her critics Islamophobes.  And while some Jewish organizations have criticized Omar herself, none of the major establishment organizations has made any condemnation of the Democrat party per se, as was done against Labor by England’s Jewish organizations.  Dismayingly, non-Orthodox American Jews continue to stand solidly behind the Democrat party today, just as they did last Nov. 3 and many years previous.

The great federal-debt Ponzi scheme David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/the-great-federal-debt-ponzi-scheme/

It’s like the pump part of a pump-and-dump scheme in the stock market – without the benefit of an exit strategy.

The discrepancy between raging inflation and soggy Treasury bond yields remains a cognitive dissonance in financial markets.

There’s a simple explanation (and “Inflation is transitory” is NOT a full credit answer): The Federal Reserve and the commercial banks that depend on the Fed are virtually the only buyers of US government debt.

As long as the Fed is willing (and the market allows it) to buy arbitrarily large amounts of government debt, the price of US government debt is whatever the Fed says it is. It’s like the pump part of a pump-and-dump scheme in the stock market, except without the benefit of an exit strategy.

This Ponzi game can continue until inflation rises to the point where investors flee the Treasury market, yields soar and the economy falls back into recession. If the Fed and Treasury are willing to stake the credit of the United States of America on this game, it can last for a while. No matter how big a player you are, though, no one will take your marker at the craps table forever.

Without exaggeration, the US federal debt market is the most manipulated market of importance in the world at this writing.

The US banking system is a captive auxiliary of the central bank. The Fed has flooded the banks with reserves and pays them 0.05% (5 basis points) to hold these reserves at the Federal Reserve’s repurchase facility.

An Ugly War Among Leftist YouTubers Shows Two Common, Toxic Pathologies Plaguing U.S. Politics Baselessly accusing people of being Russian agents and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct are reputation-destroying cancers at the heart of liberal discourse. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/an-ugly-war-among-leftist-youtubers?token=ey

An incredibly vicious and protracted war is being waged, seemingly with no end in sight, among numerous prominent liberal and left-wing commentators who work primarily on YouTube. The conflict erupted on May 26 when Cenk Uygur — the founder and long-time host of The Young Turks, the largest liberal-left YouTube platform — baselessly and falsely accused independent journalist Aaron Maté of being “paid by the Russians,” while his co-host, Ana Kasparian, spouted innuendo that Maté was “working for” unnamed dictators.

Maté is one of the very few left-wing journalists who reported skeptically on Russiagate and who questioned the U.S. Government’s narrative about the civil war in Syria, including by traveling to war-torn parts of that country to do so. He won the 2019 Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award for his work debunking Russiagate. Yet with a one-minute rant from their insulated studio, Uygur baselessly branded Maté as someone who is “paid by the Russians” while Kasparian asserted that he “seemed” to be working for Assad and other dictators — a potentially reputation-destroying smear for a journalist and one that can be quite dangerous for a reporter who, like Maté, works on the ground in war zones.

The conflict engendered by those grotesque fabrications escalated significantly when Kasparian sent a private Twitter message to one of Maté’s defenders, Jimmy Dore, in which she threatened to accuse Dore of #MeToo-type sexual harassment from when they worked together seven years earlier. Kasparian made clear that her intent to publicly vilify Dore as a sexual harasser would serve as punishment for his criticisms of The Young Turks. Dore then revealed Kasparian’s threat on his program, and days later, Kasparian made good on her threat by accusing Dore of sexual harassment back in 2014.

Twitter Direct Message from The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian to Jimmy Dore, Apr. 14, 2016 and June 11, 2021.

While I used my social media platforms to denounce the false accusations voiced by Uygur and Kasparian against Maté, none of this would merit an article or stand-alone commentary if not for the fact that the two weapons they chose — false accusations that someone is a paid Russian agent and exploited sexual harassment accusations — have become extremely commonplace in Democratic Party politics, liberal circles and U.S. politics more broadly. It is long past time — way past time — that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.