Why is US sending 3,000 Navy, Marines force to Persian Gulf? The Pentagon has not yet specified the Marines’ role in deterring Iran from interfering with commercial shipping and threatening neighboring Arab states. Jared Szuba

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/08/why-us-sending-3000-navy-marines-force-persian-gulf

A contingent of more than 3,000 US Navy personnel and Marines sailed into the Suez Canal on Sunday as the Biden administration weighs options to deter Iran from seizing commercial tanker ships in the Persian Gulf region.

The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with sailors and Marines of an Amphibious Ready Group led by the USS Bataan and accompanied by the dock landing ship USS Carter Hall, will provide “greater flexibility and maritime capability” to the United States’ Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, the Navy announced today.

What that means: The Pentagon has remained mum on specifically how it intends to employ the Marines, but their arrival is part of a wider buildup of US forces in the region which defense officials described as a response to Iran’s renewed attempts to seize commercial tankers.

The deployment brings additional aircraft, helicopters and amphibious landing craft to join a dozen US F-35s, as well as F-16 and A-10 aircraft and Navy guided-missile destroyers that have already arrived in the region in recent weeks and months to ramp up joint patrols in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has escalated its attempts to seize commercial ships in Gulf waterways in recent months following the US Justice Department’s confiscation of a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker, the Suez Rajan, carrying Iranian fuel to China in April. An Iranian navy vessel opened fire on a Chevron-chartered tanker in international waters off the coast of Oman last month after the civilian ship refused orders to stop.

Iran’s navy and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have harassed or seized control of at least 20 commercial shipping tankers in the region over the past two years, according to the US 5th Fleet’s numbers.

Iran’s moves have further driven a wedge into the United States’ strategic ties with Gulf states, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates look to reduce their dependency on Washington for defense.

“It’s drawn Gulf states closer to Iran,” one American official told Al-Monitor last week. “It sends a signal to regional partners that in the absence of US forces, the US is not serious about security.”

Al-Monitor reported last week that senior Defense Department officials have been putting the finishing touches on proposals for wider legal authorities in coordination with the White House to enable the military to intervene more directly to prevent Iran’s seizures of commercial tankers.

Welcome To Biden’s Grand Illusion Of Prosperity

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/10/welcome-to-bidens-grand-illusion-of-prosperity/

‘You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you an illusion of prosperity, too.”

That was then-Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen back in 1988 arguing that the Reagan boom was a myth because it was bought and paid for with deficit spending, then running about $200 billion a year. 

What would Bentsen say today about an economy that – instead of blasting ahead at more than 4% a year at it was in 1988 – is barely eking out gains and appears headed to a downturn … despite the fact that President Joe Biden is writing $200 billion in hot checks every two months. 

We know what Biden and his legions of sycophants in the “independent” media would say. The economy is doing great thanks to “Bidenomics.”

“The economy is growing and we’re lowering costs for families. That’s Bidenomics at work,” Biden said after the latest GDP numbers came out, which showed the economy growing 2.4% in the second quarter of this year. “This progress wasn’t inevitable or accidental — it is Bidenomics in action, growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”

One week later, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+.

The lower rating, Fitch said, “reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’-rated peers.”

Fiscal deterioration over the next three years and a high and growing debt burden? Is this “Bidenomics in action”?

Look at the numbers and you see why Fitch is worried.

Dems’ ‘Science Denier’ Accusation Is Old, Wrong, and Pathetic By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/08/08/dems-science-denier-accusation-is-old-wrong-and-pathetic-n1717244

The Democrats have long fancied themselves to be the party of science. They also fancy themselves the party of youth and diversity but are currently championing an 80-year-old white guy for a second term as president of the United States.

What Democrats are known for, to those of us who don’t lap up their propaganda, is a chronic lack of self-awareness, about both themselves as people and their ideology. Pretty much everything that they believe to be true about Republicans and Democrats bears no resemblance to reality. They repeat the lies about themselves until those lies not only become true for them, but also become part of the Democratic origin story.

One of the most enduring myths that Democrats believe — especially here in the 21st century — is that they’re all elite intellectuals, while all Republicans and conservatives are knuckle-dragging rubes. Even when Republicans like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, or Ron DeSantis present the kind of higher education bona fides that usually send them into a mindless orgiastic frenzy around one another, they find reasons to be dismissive. Mustn’t allow for the possibility of intellectuals from outside the unquestioning hive mind, after all.

Of all the lies that the Democrats tell themselves, the “party of science” nonsense ranks second only to “the government always knows best.”

We’ll get to how wrong they were about all things COVID in a moment. Even before that, Democrats had essentially abandoned biology which, I just checked, is still a science. According to them, human embryos aren’t really human, there are 42,000,000 genders, and now men can get pregnant. That’s not merely denying science, that’s rejecting it altogether.

House Committee Focuses on Chinese Efforts to Steal Agriculture IP By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/08/house-committee-focuses-on-chinese-efforts-to-steal-agriculture-ip/

The House Select Committee on China is turning its focus on efforts by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to steal intellectual property from the American agriculture industry.

According to Fox News, the ranking members of both parties – Chairman Mike Gallagher (D-Wisc.) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) – traveled to Dysart, Iowa to speak with farmers about the systematic theft of agricultural technology by the CCP, and how these plans are undermining the sovereignty of American agriculture.

“Our country is filled with invisible factories and invisible farms — those that would have been built or planted here if we’d chosen to protect American technology and resources,” said Gallagher in a statement. “Both the Trump and Biden administrations have oriented U.S. strategy around ‘competing’ with the Chinese Communist Party. But we’re not “competing” if we’re letting the CCP steal hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans–we’re throwing the game from the outset.”

One example of agricultural technology that has been sought by the Chinese is seed engineering. In 2011, a field manager in Iowa discovered and exposed a Chinese seed smuggling ring. In 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted and convicted a Chinese scientist for conspiring to steal rice seeds from a biopharmaceutical research facility in Kansas; the scientist was sentenced to 10 years and one month in prison.

In 2022, Chinese national Xiang Haitao pled guilty to conspiracy to commit economic espionage; he was sentenced to two years in prison. The technology he sought to steal was a central algorithm for a software platform that aimed to help farmers visualize and analyze field data.

In his own statement, Krishnamoorthi said that the threat must be taken “very seriously,” and that the U.S. must “show the CCP some consequences for these actions.”

The rise in attempted agricultural espionage coincides with another alarming tactic being employed by the CCP, in which Chinese-linked companies and other entities have been purchasing many acres of American farmland, often located near military bases and other strategic points of interest.

The climate witch trials Questioning the climate-change narrative is now the ultimate form of heresy. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/22/the-climate-witch-trials/

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto. You can buy it on Amazon now.

In 1590, in Scotland, an elderly woman named Agnes Sampson was arrested. She was from East Lothian. Earlier in her life she had been a midwife and a healer, but lately she had been living in poverty. She was tried, found guilty and taken to Edinburgh Castle where, on 28 January 1591, she was strangled to death by rope and then burnt at the stake. Her offence? Climate change.

Sampson was charged with stirring up ‘contrary winds’, among other things. Her persecution stemmed from the troubles of King James VI whose attempts to bring his new wife, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland were continually thwarted by hellish weather. ‘Unusual’ winds capsized ships of the royal fleets. Twice did Anne’s ship have to dock in Norway due to the ‘fierce storms’. James, inspired by reports from Denmark of witches being burnt for their supposed part in the frustration of Anne’s journey, became convinced of a witches’ plot in Scotland, too. He pushed the idea of ‘weather magic’, where witches use their demonic power to cause ‘unusual’ storms, hails and fogs to descend on Earth.

The end result was the North Berwick Witch Trials, one of the deadliest episodes of witch-hunting in the history of Great Britain. Taking place a hundred years before the better-known witch-hunts of Salem in Massachusetts, the hysteria in North Berwick involved 150 accusations, copious amounts of torture to extract confessions and 25 deaths. Mrs Sampson’s was just one of those deaths. She and many others had been accused not only of the usual witchy things – mysterious healings, issuing curses and so on – but of something else, too. That they had changed the climate. That they had whipped up destructive weather. That they had deployed their malevolence to the end of ‘conjur[ing]’ terrible storms ‘in cahoots with the devil’. For in the words of Danish admiral Peter Munch, who had been tasked with transporting Anne to Scotland, what his ships had encountered was no normal climatic event – no, ‘there must be more in [this] matter than the common perversity of winds and weather’.

The women of North Berwick can be seen as among the earliest victims of climate-change hysteria, of that urge to pin the blame for anomalous weather on wicked human beings. And they weren’t alone. In Europe between the 1500s and 1700s, climate change was often the charge made against witches.

The smear campaign against JK Rowling Now a museum in Seattle has joined in the witch hunt against the Harry Potter author. James Dreyfus

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/08/the-smear-campaign-against-jk-rowling/

Here we go again. Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history. This time it’s the turn of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington, which has removed the world-famous author’s name from its Harry Potter exhibition. Last week, the museum announced that while it will continue to display memorabilia from the Harry Potter books and films, it wants no association with their supposedly problematic creator.

Explaining the decision in a 1,400-word blog, the museum’s exhibitions project manager, Chris Moore, brands Rowling a ‘cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity’. Moore, who identifies as trans and uses ‘he / them’ pronouns, takes exception to Rowling’s ongoing interest in preserving women’s hard-won rights over the ‘right of anyone who insists they are who they say they are’. Once again, Rowling’s reasonable and rational defence of women’s sex-based rights is being presented disingenuously as ‘hateful’ or ‘harmful’ towards transgender people, and therefore deserving of cancellation.

Moore even seems to think it would be better if Rowling had never existed. ‘We would love to go with the internet’s theory that these books were actually written without an author’, he writes, ‘but this certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored’.

Strikingly, Moore goes a few steps further than most of Rowling’s critics. He doesn’t just accuse her of transphobia. He also accuses the Harry Potter books of peddling ‘racial stereotypes’, promoting ‘fat shaming’ and, perhaps most heinous of all, lacking ‘LGBTQIA+ representation’. Surely to goodness there must have been a few pansexual / nonbinary students in the imaginary, magical school of Hogwarts? Shame on JKR for not giving them a voice, eh? The headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, might have been gay, but apparently that’s not enough in our world of 764 genders.

I find myself torn about this particular non-event, to be perfectly honest. On the one hand, I realise this is simply the latest in a long line of attempts to shut Rowling up. ‘I saw Goody Rowling, in the barn, consorting with the devil!’ is the tone of every such outburst. By now, these tricks have become cheap and obvious to anyone observing closely. The smears are always baseless.

On the other hand, the attempts to erase Rowling are deadly serious. Each attempted takedown inevitably leads to her receiving the vilest, cruellest abuse. Abuse which, if you’ve ever taken the time to read it, contains some of the most horrific things one human could say to or about another. Rowling is no doubt a tower of strength and resilience, having been on the receiving end of this bile for years. But it’s probably still having an effect on her, deep down.

Perhaps there is an upside to this stunt by Moore and the MoPOP, however. Removing Rowling’s name from the museum, and condemning her as ‘super hateful’, is so infantile that most right-thinking people will likely see it for the foolishness it really is. Sunlight, on occasions such as these, has a remarkable effect of highlighting the absurd and often cruel behaviour of the gender ideologues. People are getting wise to these smear tactics now that they are so regularly churned out. The problem is it is difficult to get people to speak out against them.

‘Bidenomics’ Has Been A Disaster By: David Harsanyi

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/08/bidenomics-has-been-a-disaster/

The president helped create inflation, high energy prices, and stifling interest rates. Jobs? Not so much.

After 40 years of “trickle-down economics,” Joe Biden says, “Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream.”

It’s not often that a politician openly pledges to bring the country back to a time of crippling inflation, high energy prices, and stifling interest rates. But this president is doing his best to keep that promise.

Unsurprisingly, “Bidenomics” is failing to gain traction among voters. This has caused consternation in the media. One thing to remember, though, is that “Bidenomics” isn’t really a thing.  Unlike, say, “Reaganomics,” which helped bring about the largest expansion of the middle class in world history, the president does not subscribe to any coherent or tangible set of economic theories or principles. The White House defines its economic policy as being “rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” which is just platitudinous gibberish.

“Bidenomics” encompass anything and everything that’s convenient for Democrats. And in this moment, it’s convenient for them to take credit for merely letting people go back to work. Biden, who once claimed that the Democrats $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan cost “zero dollars,” isn’t exactly a math whiz. But when he says stuff like “13.4 million jobs have been added to our economy” under his watch, more than “any other president in a full 4-year term,” anyone with even a passing familiarity with the events of the years preceding 2023 knows it’s a lie of omission.

The notion that presidents “create” jobs is itself a fantasy. In this case, though, Biden supported efforts to shutter private businesses during the pandemic, basically closing down the entire economy, not only while running for president but after winning office. When Florida, and other states, attempted to ease some restrictions, President Biden told them to “get out of the way” so that people could “do the right thing.” The pressure exerted on states to “do the right thing” was immense.

A Never-Trump Prosecutor Threatens Free Speech What the Trump indictments are really about. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-never-trump-prosecutor-threatens-free-speech/

The indictment of Donald Trump for speaking out against the results of the 2020 election, and in the words of the indictment, fomenting “a conspiracy to defraud the United States,” has been challenged by legal commentators from both political parties. These jurists consider the prosecutor’s “novel legal theories” dubious or even preposterous, not to mention unconstitutional. If successful, this politicization of the legal system that attacks one candidate for the presidency and benefits the other, carries with it a huge moral hazard.

Democrat legal scholar Jonathan Turley has identified this risk: “The hatred for Trump is so all-encompassing that legal experts on the political left have ignored the chilling implications of this indictment. This complaint is based largely on statements that are protected under the First Amendment. It would eviscerate free speech and could allow the government to arrest those who are accused of spreading disinformation in elections.”

This corruption of First Amendment law––one already judged unconstitutional in several Supreme Court decisions–– will further empower significantly the already growing threats to free speech. “Woke” Dems for decades have been weakening this foundation of every free government and society. But if Trump’s political enemies can treat the ex-president this way with impunity, then we all will be further down the road to tyranny.

Part of sketchy federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s shambolic reasoning is the charge that Trump “lied” about the integrity of the 2020 election. That Trump is a serial liar is a NeverTrump cliché, reflecting his enemies’ inability or indifference to distinguish rhetorical hyperbole, a feature of political speech since ancient Athens, from a willful lie. As Salena Zito memorably said, when Trump uses such exaggerations, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Moreover, how does Smith determine that Trump knew he was lying?  As Kimberley Strassel writes, “But how do you prove legally that Trump truly didn’t believe his false claims? And even if you can prove that Trump lied, how do you legally distinguish his falsehoods from the lies other political leaders have told over the years?”

As Strassel explains Smith’s argument, though Trump has a First Amendment right to lie, “Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government ‘function,’ he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.”

A Gift to Putin: No Uranium Mining Near the Grand Canyon A new government land grab makes the U.S. more dependent on Russia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-to-putin-no-uranium-mining-near-the-grand-canyon-6c1916bf?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

With a stroke of his pen, President Biden on Tuesday walled off from development nearly a million acres of land that includes some of America’s richest uranium deposits. This is another monument to the Administration’s destructive energy policy.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 lets Presidents set aside federal land for national monuments to protect historic objects. Barack Obama used the law to remove millions of acres of federal land from oil and gas development. Yet even he resisted progressive calls to set aside uranium-rich land outside the Grand Canyon. Mr. Biden shows no such restraint.

On Tuesday he declared a national monument on 1,562 square miles in Arizona called Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, meaning “where tribes roam.” The monument will conserve “landscape sacred to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples and advance President Biden’s historic climate and conservation agenda,” the White House says.

The statement omits that the land also includes America’s only source of high-grade uranium ore that is economically competitive on the global market. The U.S. imports about 95% of uranium used for nuclear power reactors, mostly from Kazakhstan, Canada, Russia and Australia. Russia is the U.S.’s third biggest uranium source.

Mr. Biden banned imports of Russian fossil fuels by executive order last spring, but U.S. nuclear plants continue to rely on Russian uranium for 12% of their fuel supply. The new national monument—the fifth of the Biden Presidency—will make it that much harder for the U.S. to replace Russian uranium. Vladimir Putin sends his thanks.

The unstated purpose of the national monument appears to be to block uranium mining. Arizona Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva has proposed legislation that would permanently withdraw the Grand Canyon area from new mining claims. Democrats couldn’t pass this through Congress, so Mr. Biden is doing so by decree.

A Florida Trial and a D.C. Grand Jury for Trump A D.C. grand jury is an obvious rubber stamp. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-florida-trial-and-a-d-c-grand-jury-for-trump/

The elites may have to hold one of their show trials in Florida, but the grand jury had to be in D.C.

Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday asked the Justice Department to explain its use of an out-of-state grand jury in the Mar-a-Lago case.

While the Mar-a-Lago case is being handled out of her Fort Pierce, Fla., courtroom, much of the grand jury work ahead of the indictment was conducted through a Washington, D.C., grand jury.

A D.C. grand jury is an obvious rubber stamp for political prosecutors. A D.C. grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, as long as it was a Republican. That’s why the real show is in Washington D.C.

Going down to Florida is a bit inconvenient because it’s one of those provinces of the empire.

For many months, Justice Department prosecutors had questioned witnesses in the Florida case before a federal grand jury in Washington.

A Florida case and a D.C. grand jury. Why not just try all political cases in D.C.?

The easiest way to understand all this is to think of what’s located in Washington D.C. as the occupying force. Much like the British during the American Revolution, it’s the epicenter of the imperial regime that is out of touch with most of the country, but rules over it anyway. Colonials from the hinterlands sometimes visit and are impressed by the big grand buildings. When they come to work there as members of Congress, they’re either taught their manners by their betters until they join the elites or they wash out.

D.C. is the imperial city and they don’t like to venture too far from their base of power.

For many months, Justice Department prosecutors had questioned witnesses in the Florida case before a federal grand jury in Washington. The secret proceedings yielded much of the evidence at the crux of the case. But in May, the grand jury activity appeared to continue at a federal courthouse in Miami. Ultimately, prosecutors filed charges in a West Palm Beach courthouse — a courthouse in the same district as Miami and the area where Mar-a-Lago is located.