WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Iran’s Mullahs View the US Election by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20837/iran-mullahs-view-us-election

Since assuming office, the Biden-Harris administration, in the tradition of former President Barack Obama, released billions of dollars to Iran. In addition, there was lax enforcement of existing sanctions, waiving of other sanctions and no secondary sanctions whatsoever — meaning that any country that does business with Iran is banned from doing business with the US — placed on Iran to discourage other countries from financing it.

China therefore has become Iran’s largest customer, and Europe conducting business as usual. This financial relief has come alongside a lenient attitude towards the advancements in Iran’s nuclear program. These include more than 160 Iranian military attacks against US troops just since October; virtually shutting down the Suez Canal, thereby forcing ships, unable to buy insurance, to detour around Africa; Iran’s and its terror groups’ military actions in the region, including the war against Israel, and Iran’s military support to Russia to attack Ukraine.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, openly acknowledged that without Iran’s financial and military support, many militia and terror groups might have been unable to survive.

The Trump administration’s sanctions forced Iran’s leaders to cut funding to militias, allies, and terror groups. The regime’s militants reportedly were not receiving their salaries or benefits, preventing them from fighting. As one Iran-backed militia fighter in Syria told The New York Times, “The golden days are gone and will never return. Iran does not have enough money to give us.”

It is no wonder why Iran is apprehensive about the prospect of a Trump victory. Under Biden-Harris or Democratic leadership, the Iranian regime enjoys financial benefits and total impunity. Under Trump, the “golden days” might again come to an end.

In Iran’s latest presidential elections, the candidates revealed that they are concerned about the possibility of former President Donald J. Trump winning the upcoming US election. From their perspective, a victory for Trump would be detrimental to their interests.

Since assuming office, the Biden-Harris administration, in the tradition of former President Barack Obama, released billions of dollars to Iran. In addition, there was lax enforcement of existing sanctions, waiving of other sanctions and no secondary sanctions whatsoever — meaning that any country that does business with Iran is banned from doing business with the US — placed on Iran to discourage other countries from financing it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran: Desperately Seeking Gorbachev by Amir Taheri

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20835/iran-desperately-seeking-gorbachev

Gorbachev had a thin resume as an apparatchik who had risen in the party by doing nothing, in fact, by being nobody.

When he came to London to be promoted by Margaret Thatcher, his 10-line resume introduced him as the Central Committee’s agricultural tsar who had risen to be party boss and later president of the USSR.

He was a blank face on which one could draw one’s ideal face for a Soviet leader.

Iran’s President Pezeshkian offers that kind of blank face. His thin resume inspires a variety of fanciful images.

Could Pezeshkian be Iran’s Gorbachev?

Referring to President Masoud Pezeshkian, the question was headlined in a Tehran daily Tuesday and triggered a torrent of comments.

The paper’s commentator described Pezeshkian as a man trusted by the system and thus capable of introducing unspecified reforms to save Iran from unspecified dangers.

This is not the first time that regime insiders call for adjustments in its trajectory.

The first to do so was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, who issued an 8-point reform manifesto which, had it been implemented, would have made Iran a Scandinavian-style democracy minus the monarchy.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Instead, the nation witnessed mass executions, the pursuit of an unwinnable war against Iraq and flood-like spread of corruption.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

America’s Eroding Deterrent in the Face of PRC Aggression By James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/04/americas-eroding-deterrent-in-the-face-of-prc-aggression/

Time is running out, as the PRC’s aggression against the Philippines is certainly calculated with one eye on the U.S. election calendar and the realization of what the CCP fears—Donald Trump’s return.

n March 2015, the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Harry Harris, while giving a speech in Australia, dismissed the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) building of seven artificial islands in the South China Sea (SCS) as nothing more than a “Great Wall of Sand” that would not alter the U.S. Navy’s freedom of navigation operations or American deterrence capabilities in the region. Harris’s remark was a classic case of what we term “threat deflation.” Year after year, U.S. officials have dismissed the growth of the PRC capabilities that were right in front of their noses. Now, almost a decade later, the reality of that arrogance has come home to roost. The PRC’s seven islands are now fully operational military bases and are being used by the PLA to dominate the SCS and bully and intimidate treaty allies like the Republic of the Philippines.

In sum, the PRC’s “Great Wall of Sand” has not eroded. Rather, it has hardened to the detriment of U.S. national security and the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific region. Given the PRC’s most recent pressure campaign against the Philippines over the past four months at Second Thomas Shoal (Ayungin Shoal), it would be more accurate to say that U.S. national security credibility in the South China Sea is “eroding like a Great Wall of Sand.”

The PRC has publicized an agreement reached with the Philippine government on July 22. This asserts that the Philippine government must notify the PRC before conducting a resupply of the sailors aboard the grounded ship, Sierra Madre. Providing prior notification to the PRC and even inspection by the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) would in effect demonstrate that the Republic of the Philippines no longer maintains “sovereign control” over their maritime territory at Second Thomas Shoal. And while the Philippine government has denied the specific terms of the agreement with the PRC, the international perception is that Manila has again been forced to cede its territory to Beijing. This would now be the second major successful seizure of Philippine territory by the PRC in just over a decade, the first being at Scarborough Shoal in 2012.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kamala Harris and the Masque of Magical Thinking The Democrats have mutated into the party of nowhere, so it is not surprising that they prefer pleasing fantasy to sobering reality. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/04/kamala-harris-and-the-masque-of-magical-thinking/

Although the last few weeks have had their alarming aspects—chief among which was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, the odds-on favorite candidate for president—they have also had their amusing moments.

In the latter category, I place the sudden queen-for-a-day-like coronation of Kamala Harris.

True, that coronation was in the nature of an anti-democratic semi-soft-coup (or anti-democratic “inversion of a coup”). Biden and his handlers, right up until  the morning of July 21, were insisting that he was not dropping out, that he was “in it to win,” etc.  But someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and out he went.

Here’s the amusing bit.  Until the moment Biden was chased out of the race, Kamala Harris functioned primarily as political life insurance.  “You might not like me,” Biden communicated, “but if I go, you’re stuck with her.”

Biden’s polls were in the toilet and, following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, were circling the drain, poised for oblivion. But Kamala’s polls were even worse. She was cordially disliked by—well, by everyone. Her staff, her colleagues, but above all, by voters. In the 2020 race, she got no delegates: none, zero, zip.  She dropped out of the race for president but was then tapped to be VP only because this half Indian, half Jamaican woman was swarthy enough to pass as black and Biden had promised to select a black female as a running mate. Kamala truly is, as Biden himself acknowledged recently, a DEI vice president.

And sure enough, Kamala was every bit the disaster people predicted she would be. As a matter of clinical interest, she proved that senility is not the only cause of supreme rhetorical incoherence. Some people, and she is one, come by it naturally.  Her tenure as vice president is littered with examples, and she provided another doozy just a couple of days ago when she attempted to comment on the prisoner exchange with Russia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Everything in Moderation — Especially Government Power By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/everything_in_moderation_especially_government_power.html

Americans must force the government back into its constitutional cage.

One of the most important lessons in life is straightforward: everything in moderation.  If you eat too much, you’ll get fat.  If you drink too much, you’ll lose your wits.  If you play too much, no one will take you seriously.  Temperance is a remarkably sound philosophy for living well.

Living with an eye toward moderation is about more than restraining from vice.  Experience teaches that thoughtless excess undermines otherwise healthy activities.  Reading books without taking the time to consider the meaning of their words can make a person educated but unwise.  Almost everything in life is done best when done with earnest reflection and restraint.

You do not need to read through the correspondence of America’s Founding Fathers to appreciate their preference for moderate government.  Philosophically, of course, they were the radicals of their age.  They rejected the notion that an elite aristocracy should exercise power by divine right and fought a war for the revolutionary principle that “all men are created equal.”  They defended liberty, property rights, and speech as essential elements of what it means to live.  When it came time for them to design a government best equipped to protect these freedoms, however, moderation was the key!

The English Civil War of the previous century weighed heavily upon their minds.  The fall of the Roman Republic two millennia earlier guided their thoughts, too.  They understood the corrupting influences of power, but they also appreciated the carnage that corrupt governments wreak.  Mercurial monarchs and political repression guarantee war and forestall peace. 

The Founding Fathers’ spirit drove them to fight for freedom, but their temperance restrained their actions after achieving victory.  It has been said that General George Washington could easily have made himself king, but he was a man of humility who sought to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus — the virtuous Roman statesman who relinquished power and returned to his farm.  Similarly, had the Founding Fathers suffered from the same unchecked passions that seized Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution, America might have quickly ended in a Reign of Terror of its own.  Instead, the Founders’ commitment to moderate forms of government nurtured civic peace.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Stranglehold of Censorship By Ed Thompson

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_stranglehold_of_censorship.html

With Artificial Intelligence we have finally arrived in a world of 24/7 censorship, a place where thought itself can be molded, where whole societies can be pushed and pulled like taffy in any direction or shape desired. If you doubt that this is occurring it is only because you are unaware of the influence, not because it doesn’t exist. Much of what you see and hear through electronic devices can be and is carefully crafted to a predetermined end.

AI machine learning can control narratives online in real time by dialing viral messages up or down. AI algorithms can scan and ban tens of millions of keywords in posts, shutting down or boosting narratives. AI tools can shape thought and action.

Mike Benz so aptly calls them weapons of mass deletion. Not some happenstance of tech evolution, these tools were developed by DARPA to take on ISIS and are utilized by the CIA, DHS, DoD, and State Department in what Benz calls the censorship industrial complex. An entire malinformation cottage industry has grown into a sprawling beast woven throughout government agencies and third-party NGO ‘researchers’ like EIP, the Orwellian-named Election Integrity Partnership. Fed by government grants and donor dollars, these weapons of censorship are now trained on us. Google controls everything you are shown.

State Department officials lobbied their counterparts in Europe to pass hate speech censorship laws that would boomerang back onto the U.S. A vague 2017 German law turned private social media companies into overzealous censors, with no judicial oversight or right to appeal. In 2022 the EU censorship law called the Digital Services Act created a frenzy of self-censorship by adding steep penalties for disinformation on platforms, all adjudicated by the government.

The UK has overtly criminalized “dangerous” thoughts and speech with fines and jail time penalties. The Public Order Act of 1986 makes it an offense for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress.” You can’t get much more vague and opinion-based than that. Who judges which ideas or speech are crimes? The police who investigate, and the Crown Prosecution Service. No chance that could be politicized or abused. The debate now is whether something said privately in one’s home should be criminalized. That anyone thinks that’s a good idea is frightening.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Congress Says ENOUGH to “Schools for Radicals,” Calls for Leadership Change at Pentagon K-12 Schools

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

This Fall will mark two years since the far-left DEI programming at the Pentagon’s K-12 schools became a national controversy.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com spearheaded the oversight and detailed reporting.  

Congressional inquiries and heated public hearings ensued, followed by a claim from the Department of Defense (DoD) that they’d closed their DEI offices for good.  

Said “closure” of the DoD’s DEI offices was a lie by omission.  

Our final report on DoDEA schools, released last month, illustrated that although the DoD closed the DEI department, they replaced it with a secret steering committee to inject DEI ideology across the entire school system serving 70,000+ students.

Furthermore, the DoD secret committee was using so-called Social Emotional Learning to ask kids about their emotional state, engage in private chats with them (hidden from parents) and record the data in perpetuity using technology like Google for Education.

Finally, the secret committee’s teacher training materials made claims about “antiracism” and critiqued mainstream holidays like Thanksgiving. Teachers participated in online discussions that devolved into struggle sessions about white privilege and how-to’s on transmitting this worldview to children.  

Thankfully, leaders in Congress, especially Reps. Elise Stefanik, Jim Banks, and the House Armed Services Committee, take this matter seriously.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Energy Transition Ain’t Happening: “Green” Economy In Retreat Francis Menton

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=f26d0984d8

As mentioned in my recent post from July 20, there are many data points gradually accumulating as to the lack of progress toward the so-called “green” economy. It has long been clear to people who think about it that the energy transition to “net zero” is a fantasy that will not occur. But the question remains of exactly how the mania will come to an end. Will the net zero fantasies of the climate cultists proceed at full speed until they crash into a wall of physical reality (e.g., blackouts)? Or instead will these fantasies gradually retreat as governments respond to voter pressure over costs and convenience, and as investors pull back as it becomes clear that projects cannot succeed financially?

A July 30 piece from John Miltimore of the American Institute for Economic Research supports the second alternative. The title is “Why the ‘Green Economy’ Is Suddenly in Retreat—in EU, US, and on Wall Street.” Meanwhile New York, at least for the moment, remains hell-bent on moving toward a full-on crash.

Miltimore’s piece collects data from multiple sources — notably the recent EU elections, EU regulatory changes, and actions of major U.S. investors. The most significant item in the piece relates to the withdrawal of several of the largest U.S. fund managers from something called Climate Action 100+. Climate Action 100+ describes itself as “an investor-led initiative to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take appropriate action on climate change in order to mitigate financial risk and to maximize the long-term value of assets.” But it seems that in recent months some of the biggest investors have decided to change strategy. J.P. Morgan Chase and State Street have “pulled all funds” from Climate Action 100+ commitments, while their even larger colleague Black Rock “reduced its holdings and scaled back its ties to the group.” Miltimore cites a New York Times article from February quantifying the various withdrawals: “All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda.” $14 trillion is a big number in anybody’s book.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history By James Bovard

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/07/30/opinion/kamalaflage-dems-race-to-rewrite-harris-leftist-history/

Vice President Kamala Harris last year heartily condemned any effort “to erase and even rewrite the ugly parts of our history.”  

But she didn’t mention that the “ugly parts” of her own record would be exempt from such a rewrite ban.

Now a tidal wave of Kamalaflage has engulfed the presidential contest, as Harris’ entire career is being miraculously expunged — or at least purified — in a craven evidence-rigging stampede by media outlets and supposedly nonpartisan scorekeepers.

Democrats and the media are looking to to erase and rewrite Vice President Kamala Harris’ past hard-left policy positions.

Harris plainly ascended to the nomination thanks to a de facto coup of Democratic Party kingpins and donors.

Yet The Washington Post on Sunday hailed those machinations as “the most spectacular transformation in recent American political history, a flashbang midsummer swap at the top of the presidential ticket.”

Perhaps the paper should change its motto to “Democracy dies as a spectator sport,” given its effusive praise for the Democrats’ willingness to sideline their own primary voters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats vs. the Man Who Could Get to the Bottom of the Trump Shooting Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 4th, 2024

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/07/30/democrats_vs_the_man_who_could_get_to_the_bottom_of_the_trump_shooting_1047928.html

After the evasive House testimony of now-former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s shortlived suggestion that Donald Trump may not have been hit by a bullet, one man alone may help allay Republican fears that the Biden administration will not conduct a forthright investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump last month: Joseph Cuffari.

The Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has already opened two investigations into the U.S. Secret Service, which is under the purview of the DHS, related to the agency’s handling of the July 13 shooting.

But some Republicans are concerned because, they say, Cuffari has been stonewalled by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on other internal examinations – including one that might have revealed Secret Service lapses that might have prevented the attempt on Trump’s life. 

Specifically, congressional sources tell RCI that Cuffari’s report, “USSS Preparation for and Response to the Events of January 6, 2021,” has been on Mayorkas’ desk since at least April.

The report, according to Politico, will “cast light on a series of embarrassing security lapses for the agency.” And given some comparisons between Jan. 6 and July 13, the report might shed light on systemic issues that impacted both events.

For example, unanswered questions remain as to why the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage at The Ellipse outside the White House around noon on Jan. 6 amid reports of individuals with weapons in the vicinity – a question many Americans have about the July 13 assassination attempt. Law enforcement and spectators noted the presence of a suspicious individual, later identified as the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, at least a half hour before Trump took the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In addition, no one has explained how the Secret Service failed to notice an alleged pipe bomb found outside the Democrat National Committee DC office on Jan. 6 – while then Vice President-elect Harris was inside the building. Previous reporting by RCI shows multiple law enforcement officers, including one with a bomb-sniffing dog, walking past the bench where the device was found.