HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

“A Shrunken Arsenal: The Alarming Decline of U.S. Munitions”

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/01/03/global_conflicts_expose_dire_us_munitions_shortage_1002444.html

The United States military is severely short on high-end and artillery munitions at a crucial and strategic moment. As the calendar turns to 2024, Ukraine, using bombs and bullets from the United States, continues its slog of a war with Russia with no foreseeable end. Simultaneously, the U.S. continues sending artillery rounds to Israel amidst the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assault on Hamas in Gaza. In the Indo-Pacific, American tensions with China remain high as Taiwan prepares for a general election with fears of Chinese interference and Chinese leader Xi Jinping promises the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. In DC, alarm bells ring regarding the dearth of rounds required for these three distinct kinds of conflict. Central to this issue is an American paucity of rare earth minerals indispensable in producing these bombs, shells, and rockets. To address this shortage and ensure the long-term viability of ammo for high-end conflict, the U.S. must invest in and maintain innovative systems for processing and refinement of rare earth minerals.

An Empty Cupboard: A Paucity of Rare Earth Elements

Rare earth minerals – a set of 17 metallic elements – are the essential materials of bombs, bullets, rockets, and missiles. They are critical in manufacturing powerful magnets used in precision-guided munitions. Some rare earth elements possess temperature stability necessary for some high-tech bombs exposed to intense heat during launch toward target, such as the Javelin missiles so crucial to allowing Ukrainian forces to fend off Russian tanks. Rare earths are in the fuzes of the 155mm artillery shells used in enormous volumes by both the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the IDF. Many air-to-air missiles needed in a fight with China, including the AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, require these materials. Rare earths are used to build actuators for many surface-to-ground rockets.

The rare earth minerals are not particularly rare – these materials are bountiful in the earth’s crust. It is rather the production and refinement capability for the use of these materials – turning these elements into usable material – that is scarce within the U.S. The chemical properties of these materials are nearly identical from one another, making it difficult and costly to separate and refine each one for industrial use. The process also incurs environmental hazards that require expensive cleanup, often making large-scale production economically infeasible.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ramaswamy: Best Way to End Discrimination on the Basis of Race? Stop Discriminating on the Basis of Race

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/01/03/washington_post_reporter_to_vivek_ramaswamy_you_didnt_say_you_condemn_white_supremacy.html

Vivek Ramaswamy responded to a Washington Post reporter asking him to “condemn white supremacy” at a campaign stop Tuesday in Iowa. See more context from this exchange here.

WASHINGTON POST REPORTER: You didn’t say that you condemn white supremacy though.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I’m not going to recite some catechism for you. I’m against vicious racial discrimination in this country. I’m not pledging allegiance to your new religion of modern wokeism, which actually fits the test. I’m not going to bend the knee to your religion. I’m sorry. I’m not going to ask you to bend to mine and I’m not going to bend the knee to yours.

But do I condemn vicious racial discrimination? Yes, I do.

Am I going to play your silly game of gotcha? No, I am not.

And frankly, this is why people have lost trust, and I know you’re going to go print this headline tomorrow, I know how your game works, “Vivek Ramaswamy Won’t Condemn White Supremacy.”, Because you asked a stupid question.

The reality is, I condemn vicious racial discrimination in this country, but the kind of vicious racial discrimination we see today is discrimination on the basis of race in a very different direction.

Do you want to know what the best way is to end discrimination on the basis of race? Stop discriminating on the basis of race. Do that, and we’re going to move this country forward, and I don’t care whether you’re black or white or brown or anything in between, that’s how we’re going to unite this country.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’s Israel Problem Drew Holden

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://freebeacon.com/media/the-new-york-timess-israel-problem/

There was a time when liberal journalists said the New York Times was too nice to Israel. They can’t make that mistake anymore.

Since Hamas attacked the Jewish state on October 7, the Times has committed to running false and demeaning coverage about Israel. Hours after terrorists began the siege that left 1,200 dead, the Times rushed to humanize the terrorists with a puff piece.

“Gaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade” aimed to educate readers about why some Gazans saw Hamas’s rapes, murders, and kidnappings as a “justified response” against Israel:

The Palestinian territory of Gaza has been under a suffocating Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt, since Hamas seized control of the coastal strip in 2007. The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronic and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons and prevents most people from leaving the territory.

More than two million Palestinians live in Gaza. The tiny, crowded coastal enclave has a nearly 50 percent unemployment rate, and Gaza’s living conditions, health system and infrastructure have all deteriorated under the blockade.

Rather than feature pictures and stories about the innocents killed and taken hostage, the front pages of the Times on October 8 and 9 featured Hamas fighters bulldozing a border fence and firing rockets into Israel.

When a hospital explosion rocked Gaza City, the Times was one of several mainstream media outlets that rushed to blame Israel for the explosion. But the Gray Lady didn’t just echo the false claim: It relied on Hamas as its primary source.

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“China is Winning the Global South” David Goldman

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://compactmag.com/article/china-is-winning-the-global-south

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has transformed the economies of the Middle Kingdom and of the Global South. By 2019, China had relocated a high proportion of labor-intensive industries like textiles, apparel, toys, sporting goods, and footwear, to the benefit of Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other low-cost venues. By the following year, China had lent $1.5 trillion to developing countries across the world to finance exports and investment. Today, China exports more to the Global South than to all developed markets combined.

What’s less appreciated in the West is the profound impact of what Chinese officials call the Digital Silk Road: Beijing’s effort to penetrate the Global South’s digital ecosystems, especially via artificial intelligence, thus reshaping entire regional political economies to its preferences.

In 2015, as an investment banker working for a Hong Kong boutique, I arranged a tour of the Chinese tech conglomerate Huawei’s Shenzhen headquarters, with its sprawling exhibit hall, for the Mexican ambassador to Beijing. At the end, we sat in a small amphitheater to hear a Huawei employee lecture the Mexicans on how broadband could transform their economy. It was a well-researched pitch, and afterward, I learned that the firm has developed detailed, customized digital plans for 100 countries.

The combination of mobile broadband and AI portends an economic upheaval in parts of the Global South, starting in developing Asia. AI is a poor substitute for the higher functions of the human brain, but it works wonders in relieving drudgery for some of the world’s poorest people.

Three-fifths of global employment is informal, outside the margins of the world market, insecure, excluded from government services, and miserably poor. A cheap smartphone might cost 30 percent of the monthly income of the world’s 2.5 billion poorest people, but it connects them to the world economy. Impoverished people trapped in subsistence agriculture and the barter economy become entrepreneurs. In a recent study for American Affairs, I used World Bank data to show that once internet penetration reaches a threshold of 60 percent, business formation in the Global South jumps dramatically.

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Liz Peek: Will 2024 be the year that DEI, climate craziness and open border policies start to lose their mojo?

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2024-year-dei-climate-craziness-open-border-policies-lose-mojo

Welcome to 2024 – the year that Americans will reject the woke and dysfunctional policies of the progressive left. The year in which the pendulum, thank heavens, will continue to swing towards common sense and sanity.

How do we know? Because Joe Biden’s approval ratings are in the gutter and EVs are piling up on dealer lots. Because Taylor Swift breaks every conceivable record performing family-friendly shows while Disney’s woke confections fail to find an audience. Because Claudine Gay is forced to resign from Harvard and the country views the Democratic Party more negatively than at any time during the past three decades. 

It’s a start. The silent majority has not gone away; it has simply been asleep. 

Reflecting an overdue awakening, some of the most offensive assaults on our nation’s values and protections are being tossed overboard. DEI hiring is down and companies are abandoning race-based programs. 

Last year, DEI-related job posts dropped 44% as companies backed off their over-the-top response to the murder of George Floyd and demands from Black Lives Matter protesters. Tech companies like Google and Meta, vanguards of social activism, drastically cut DEI programs and laid off employees engaged in Black employee resource groups, according to CNBC.  Charges that DEI programs promoted illegal racial discrimination and shareholder blowback took a toll. 

President Biden, a big promoter of DEI, is defending the indefensible and possibly illegal. He recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post recalling the teachings of Martin Luther King, but equality-embracing King would be appalled – as are millions of Americans — by the racist policies of the Biden White House. The policies that Biden brags about are probably unconstitutional, like awarding “a record $69.9 billion in federal contracts to small, disadvantaged businesses in fiscal 2022,” meaning mostly Black-owned. Dr. King advocated equal opportunity and racial blindness, not stacking the deck in a cynical play for votes.  

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Bill Ackman: How to Fix Harvard

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-ackman-how-to-fix-harvard?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Claudine Gay’s ouster won’t change things. The college needs a complete overhaul, starting with a resignation of the board and the removal of DEI from every corner of the institution…

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw then-president Claudine Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. 

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran says at least 103 people killed, 141 wounded in blasts at ceremony honoring slain general

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.aol.com/irans-state-tv-reports-2-122209945.html

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Two explosions minutes apart Wednesday in Iran targeted a commemoration for a prominent general slain in a U.S. drone strike in 2020, killing at least 73 people and wounding over 170 others as the Middle East remains on edge over Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for what Iranian state media called a “terroristic” attack shortly after the blasts in Kerman, about 820 kilometers (510 miles) southeast of the capital, Tehran.

While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran over its nuclear program, it has conducted targeted assassinations, not mass-casualty bombings. Sunni extremist groups including the Islamic State group have conducted large-scale attacks in the past that killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, though not in relatively peaceful Kerman.

Iran also has seen mass protests in recent years, including those over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022. The country also has been targeted by exile groups in attacks dating back to the turmoil surrounding its 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The blasts struck an event marking the the fourth anniversary of the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force. who died in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. The explosions occurred near his grave site in Kerman,

Iranian state television quoted Babak Yektaparast, a spokesman for the country’s emergency services, for the casualty figure. Authorities said some people were injured while fleeing afterward.

Footage suggested that the second blast occurred some 15 minutes after the first. A delayed second explosion is often used by militants to target emergency personnel responding to the scene and inflict more casualties.

People could be heard screaming in state TV footage.

Kerman’s deputy governor, Rahman Jalali, called the attack “terroristic,” without elaborating. Iran has multiple foes who could be behind the assault, including exile groups, militant organizations and state actors. Iran has supported Hamas as well as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s regional military activities and is hailed as a national icon among supporters of Iran’s theocracy. He also helped secure Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government after the 2011 Arab Spring protests against him turned into a civil, and later a regional, war that still rages today.

Relatively unknown in Iran until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Soleimani’s popularity and mystique grew after American officials called for his killing over his help arming militants with penetrating roadside bombs that killed and maimed U.S. troops.

A decade and a half later, Soleimani had become Iran’s most recognizable battlefield commander, ignoring calls to enter politics but growing as powerful, if not more, than its civilian leadership.

Ultimately, a drone strike launched by the Trump administration killed the general, part of escalating incidents that followed America’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

Soleimani’s death has drawn large processions in the past. At his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out in Kerman and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession. Otherwise, Kerman largely has been untouched in the recent unrest and attacks that have struck Iran. The city and province of the same name sits in Iran’s central desert plateau.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

US Lack of Resolve Incentivizing China on Taiwan by Lawrence Franklin

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20273/us-lack-of-resolve

Bluntly put, the nations of the Free World have allowed global commerce to be held hostage by the revolutionary group of theocrat terrorists in Iran and their tribal terrorist tool in Yemen.

The primary problem seems to be that so far at least, there has been no attempt to hold the ringleader, Iran, accountable economically, militarily, hold-on-power or any way. This, incidentally, is the same Iranian regime that has lately escalated its enrichment of uranium to near-nuclear weapons capability, and has now moved a warship to the Red Sea.

That is why the Iranian regime has proxies: so that they will do the dirty work and take the hits — while the Iranians tuck into dinner.

You can be sure that Communist China’s leaders are closely evaluating the inadequate US responses to more than 100 attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq — just since October.

America’s role as guarantor of global freedom of navigation and defender of “Law of the Sea” treaties is taking a hit. The Biden administration continues to dither rather than to act decisively in liquidating the capability of Iran’s proxy, the Yemeni Houthis, who have been effectively blocking passage of commercial ships in and out of the Red Sea, decimating traffic through the Suez Canal. The December 31 counterattack by US naval helicopter gunships, which sank three Houthi attack boats, was a good start but did not solve the problem.

The US military’s Central Command reported that, since November 19, the Houthis have attacked 23 ships. This Iran-backed assault has caused several of the world’s largest shipping companies to suspend voyages through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, a route that normally enables the passage of 30% of the world’s container traffic, 9.2 billion barrels of oil a day, and 4% of the shipping of natural gas.

The shipping giants that are pausing normal operations as a result of Houthi attacks may also be illustrating serious failing confidence in US pledges to protect freedom of navigation in the region. Ships are being forced to haul cargo in a detour around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, a route that lengthens their voyage by about 6,000 nautical miles.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, the Houthis’ patron, closed out 2023 by launching its seventh drone attack on December 24 on a Japanese-owned freighter in the Indian Ocean.

Bluntly put, the nations of the Free World have allowed global commerce to be held hostage by the revolutionary group of theocrat terrorists in Iran and their tribal terrorist tool in Yemen.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Onward with Inclusiveness Claudine Gay’s resignation as president is unlikely to change much at Harvard.

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-presses-on-with-inclusiveness

In her parting shot at Harvard, newly resigned president Claudine Gay has provided a reminder of why she never should have been made president in the first place. Gay stepped down today following months of turmoil caused by her reaction to the Hamas October 7 terror attacks on Israel and by accusations of plagiarism.

Gay got her job because of her race. No white professor, even a female one, would have been elevated to the premier college presidency in the United States on so meager a research record. It is fitting, then, that Gay plays the race card to the end. She lauds her abortive presidency as giving hope to those around the world who saw in it a “vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging.” In other words, without a black president, students “of color” would not be certain of belonging at Harvard. Never mind that for decades Harvard has so enthusiastically sought out black students that it admitted many of them with academic credentials that would have been all but disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians. Now, without a black president, that vision is apparently threatened, even as Gay concedes that Harvard’s “doors remain open.”

Gay’s sense of self-worth is breathtaking. She already has a legacy in mind for her five-month long presidency, the shortest in Harvard’s history. She hopes that her tenure is remembered “as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity.” Before her presidency, in other words, Harvard was deficient in the striving-for-common-humanity department. Never mind that Gay had auditioned for the presidency with a call to infuse the hunt for racism throughout every corner of the university, an academic agenda based on the idea that America remains a perennially white supremacist country.  As president, she was true to her word, introducing what the Corporation euphemistically calls “ambitious new academic initiatives” in “inequality.” 

The mission of a university, however, is the transmission of a civilizational inheritance and the testing of new knowledge. The goal of “finding a common humanity” (or, even worse, of combatting “bias and hate,” as Gay also puts it) serves as a pretext for the therapeutic diversity infrastructure.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

None so Blind as Those who Refuse to See Peter Smith

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/12/none-so-blind-as-those-who-refuse-to-see/

Swerving, deflecting and distracting are symptomatic of our current malaise in the West. No better examples are those which come via commentaries on the plight of Israel and on the persona of Donald Trump. I’ll give a couple of illustrations from The Weekend Australian. It wouldn’t be hard to find a legion more.

Gemma Tognini (“Progressives in lockstep with Hamas ideology”) writes, “This isn’t a conversation about Islam versus Christianity, or Judaism.”

Don’t get me wrong, Tognini is one of the good guys and her article is fine for the most part. But what is this ideology of which she speaks? It isn’t owned by Hamas. It’s called Islam. And while Tognini might not be having a conversation about competing religions. Islamic clerics are, and constantly. They make no bones about it. They want the ummah to predominate in every country. They make no secret of it; apropos.

Hitler made no secret of it. He wanted German hegemony in Eastern Europe. He laid it out clearly in Mein Kampf in 1925-26. Somehow or other, most commentators manage to swerve around the obvious, which would be to take would-be conquerors at face value and instead put issues into a transactional Western Judaeo-Christian framework. It doesn’t work.

Alfred Pennyworth in the movie The Dark Knight (2008) comes to mind: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical … They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Well, one religion wants to ride roughshod over all others. It can’t be bargained with. You can’t bargain with Allah. And the problem Israel has with its neighbours is Islam. Islam can’t abide Jews and, only to a little less extent, Christians and other non-believers; as I expanded on here. Yet we pretend it isn’t so.