Month: January 2022

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

Americans want an autonomous Ukraine to survive. They hope the West can stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strangulation of both Ukraine and NATO.

Yet Americans do not want their troops to venture across the world to Europe’s backyard to fight nuclear Russia to ensure that Ukraine stays independent.

Most Americans oppose the notion that Russia can simply dictate the future of Ukraine.

Yet Americans also grudgingly accept that Ukraine was often historically part of Russia. During World War II, it was the bloody scene of joint Russian-Ukrainian sacrifices—over 5 million killed—to defeat the Nazi German invasion.

Americans publicly support NATO.

Yet most Americas privately worry that NATO has become diplomatically impotent and a military mirage—a modern League of Nations.

NATO members have a collective GDP seven times larger than Russia’s. Their aggregate population is 1 billion. Yet the majority will not spend enough on defense to deter their weaker enemies.

The second-largest NATO member, Turkey, is closer to Russia than to the United States. Its people poll anti-American.

Germany is NATO’s richest European member and the power behind the European Union. Yet Germany will soon be dependent on imported Russian natural gas for much of its energy needs.

In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of Germans voiced a desire for more cooperation with Russia. Most Americans poll the exact opposite.

Worse, 60 percent of Germans oppose going to the aid of any NATO country in time of war. Over 70 percent of Germans term their relationship with the United States as “bad.”

We can translate all these disturbing results in the following manner: The German and Turkish people like or trust Russia more than they do their own NATO patron, America.

They would not support participating in any NATO joint military effort against even an invading Russia—even, or especially, if spearheaded by an unpopular United States.

So, assume that NATO’s key two members are either indifferent to the fate of nearby Ukraine or sympathetic to Russia’s professed grievances—or both.

Indeed, most Americans fear that if Ukraine ever became a NATO member, Putin might be even more eager to test its sovereignty.

Putin assumes that not all NATO members would intervene to help an attacked Ukraine, as required by their mutual defense obligations under Article 5.

If they did not, Putin could then both absorb Ukraine and unravel the NATO alliance all at once.

There are more complications in the Ukrainian mess.

President Joe Biden, in wacky statements, has confirmed Putin’s bet that the United States is currently divided, confused, weakened, and poorly led.

Putin knows that the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appear more worried about “white privilege” and climate change than enhancing military readiness to deter enemies such as himself.

Putin sees polls that only 45 percent of Americans have confidence in their new politicized military.

The flight from Afghanistan, Putin further conjectures, has made the United States both less feared by enemies and less trusted by allies.

The prior failed American policy of Russian “reset,” the appeasement of Putin’s aggressions during the Obama years, together with the concocted hoax of “Russian collusion,” have all variously emboldened—and angered—Putin.

He knows a twice-impeached Donald Trump left office unpopular. So, he assumes with Trump gone, American deterrence against Russia also vanished.

Trump’s now rejected agenda was to increase American and NATO defenses, and pump oil and gas to crash the global price of Russia’s chief source of foreign exchange.

Putin was once furious that Trump unilaterally left an asymmetrical U.S.-Russia missile accord. Trump ordered lethal force to be used against large numbers of Russian mercenaries who attacked a U.S. installation in Syria. He sold offensive weapons to Ukraine. He acted forcibly in taking out terrorist enemies such as Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani, the Islamicist Abu al-Baghdadi, and ISIS itself.

With Putin’s nemesis, Trump, gone, Russia assumes the appeasement years of the Obama-Biden administration are back again. As in 2014, once more Putin is moving against his neighbors.

Finally, there is the unfortunate role of recent Ukrainian government officials. Some were deeply involved in greenlighting the Biden family grifting and profiteering to ensure massive American foreign aid.

Some Ukrainian expatriates and current government members worked with the American Left to ensure the first impeachment of Trump.

Now Ukrainians are exasperated that their prior intrusions into domestic American politics have backfired with the disastrous Biden presidency—and his apparent de facto acceptance of an inevitable Russian annexation.

Where does this entire mess leave America?

In trouble.

Putin is undermining a sovereign nation, fissuring NATO, and, if successful, might continue the Ukraine slow squeeze model in the Baltic states and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, China smiles, hoping the Ukraine blueprint can be used against Taiwan.

Exasperated Americans fear that Putin will be deterred neither by sanctions nor by arms sales but follows only his own sense of cost-to-benefit self-interest.

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”

– Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited

In the politically charged, polarizing tug-of-war that is the debate over COVID-19, we find ourselves buffeted by fear over a viral pandemic that continues to wreak havoc with lives and the economy, threats of vaccine mandates and financial penalties for noncompliance, and discord over how to legislate the public good without sacrificing individual liberty.

The discord is getting more discordant by the day.

Just recently, for instance, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, lock up the unvaccinated and use the military to determine who gets to be “free.”

These tactics have been used before.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

For a glimpse at what the future might look like if such a policy were to be enforced, look beyond America’s borders.

In Italy, the unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and could face suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France will ban the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who has not complied with the vaccine mandate could face fines up to $4100. Police will be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which has adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—are being forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports have surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China has constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:

“Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political prisoners—German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats—as well as Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of ‘asocial’ or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?

Connect the dots.

You don’t have to be unvaccinated or a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is not about COVID-19. Nor is it about politics, populist movements, or any particular country.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

The slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

Claudio Ronco, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew and a specialist in 18th-century music, recognizes the signs. Because of his decision to remain unvaccinated, Ronco is trapped inside his house, unable to move about in public without a digital vaccination card. He can no longer board a plane, check into a hotel, eat at a restaurant or get a coffee at a bar. He has been ostracized by friends, shut out of public life, and will soon face monthly fines for insisting on his right to bodily integrity and individual freedom.

For all intents and purposes, Ronco has become an undesirable in the eyes of the government, forced into isolation so he doesn’t risk contaminating the rest of the populace.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The world has been down this road before, too.

Others have ignored the warning signs. We cannot afford to do so.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

“Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, life was good.

Life is good in America, too, as long as you’re able to keep cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, while distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Indeed, life in America may be good for the privileged few who aren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, but it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

Which brings me back to the present crisis: COVID-19 is not the Holocaust, and those who advocate vaccine mandates, lockdowns and quarantine camps are not Hitler, but this still has the makings of a slippery slope.

The means do not justify the ends: we must find other ways of fighting a pandemic without resorting to mandates and lockdowns and concentration camps. To do otherwise is to lay the groundwork for another authoritarian monster to rise up and wreak havoc.

If we do not want to repeat the past, then we must learn from past mistakes.

January 27 marks Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a day for remembering those who died at the hands of Hitler’s henchmen and those who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Yet remembering is not enough. We can do better. We must do better.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the world is teetering on the edge of authoritarian madness.

All it will take is one solid push for tyranny to prevail.

The fact that Russia has a larger military than Ukraine will hardly come as a surprise to most, but the extent to which the smaller nation is outnumbered in virtually every area may not be immediately clear.

GlobalFirepower has assessed the military forces of both countries for 2022, and as Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the following infographic, Russia has everything in its favor on paper, and without the support of Ukraine’s allies, in practice surely, too.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Whether Russian President Putin makes the decision to invade the country, and on a far larger scale, remains to be seen.

What we are being told by western media and warmongers is that there is a new and significant military build up on the Russian side of the border (while Ukraine President Zelensky said his intelligence officials, looking at satellite images, do not see such an unusual build up); diplomatic efforts have failed; and the West seems currently focused on warmongering, projecting solidarity, and threatening dire (economic, at least) consequences should an invasion occur.

Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times,

Mike Pompeo said Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants “global domination—hegemony for the Chinese Communist Party,” warning that the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could destroy the rules-based international order in place since the end of World War II.

“It’s not about putting a Chinese tank division in Taiwan. It’s about accreting political power and influence throughout the world,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo, who served first as CIA director and later as Secretary of State under President Donald Trump, made the statement in an appearance at the Argus Americas Crude Summit 2022.

He said his tenure as CIA director came at a time when U.S. attention had to shift from terrorism to other threats, foremost among them the CCP.

He added that a “global awakening” is taking place about what he sees as the ambitions of the CCP.

“Most of the credit goes to Xi Jinping. He foisted a virus on the world, for goodness’ sake, and refuses to let anybody go figure out where it came from,” Pompeo said.

The CCP has met with international criticism for blocking access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and related facilities in Wuhan by the United Nations. Many scientists and journalists suspect the CCP virus that causes COVID-19 originated at the WIV.

Pompeo also commented on ongoing trade-related conflict between the United States and China, raising questions about the United States’ initial decision to open up to China in the context of its primary Cold War conflict with China’s then-rival, the Soviet Union.

“The trade war began maybe in 1972,” he said, referring to Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China in the context of restoring diplomatic ties.

“Maybe it was the right thing to do in 1972—but the trade war long predates the Trump administration.”

“We encouraged business together. I don’t fault the businesses who went there. Notice the past tense of this. America’s policy encouraged connectivity with the Chinese Communist Party. Today, that is an enormous liability for the world, and Xi Jinping knows that,” Pompeo said.

The Lockheed Martin Sikorsky-Boeing team completed mission profile flight tests for the Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) competition. 

The flights were conducted with the Defiant X, a co-axial helicopter that derives most of its forward thrust from a tail-mounted propeller. Earlier this month, it flew its first mission profile of low-level flight operations and confined area landings.

“We fully demonstrated Defiant’s ability to execute the FLRAA mission profile by flying 236 knots in level flight, then reducing thrust on the propulsor to rapidly decelerate as we approached the confined, and unimproved, landing zone,” said Bill Fell, Defiant chief flight test pilot at Sikorsky and a retired U.S. Army Master aviator.

“This type of level body deceleration allowed us to maintain situational awareness and view the landing zone throughout the approach and landing without the typical nose-up helicopter deceleration. This confined area was extremely tight, requiring us to delay descent until nearly over the landing spot, followed by a near-vertical drop. We landed Defiant precisely on the objective with little effort as we descended into this narrow hole while maintaining clearance on all sides,” Fell said. 

A YouTube video released by “Team Defiant,” dated Jan. 18, shows the helicopter flying at low-altitude operations in a wooded area at low-level speeds. It will fly soldiers and cargo into battle at more than double the speed of the Army’s current helicopters. 

Defiant is competing with the Bell V-280 Valor tiltrotor aircraft for the FLRAA program. By the end of the decade, one of these high-tech helicopters could replace the Army’s convention helicopters, like the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

Missile and drone attacks on the UAE have killed three people in the past two weeks. Much more importantly, they changed the way people view the UAE, long a safe, stable country in the Middle East.

Adding to that concern, the US State Department has issued a warning against travel to the UAE going forward. They warned attacks hitting US interests in the country remain a serious concern.

“The possibility of attacks affecting US citizens and interests in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula remains an ongoing, serious concern,” the travel advisory said.

It added: “Rebel groups operating in Yemen have stated an intent to attack neighboring countries, including the UAE, using missiles and drones. Recent missile and drone attacks targeted populated areas and civilian infrastructure.”

If the UAE becomes too dangerous, the country could face staggering losses. The US warnings should be another warning sign for the UAE, suggesting they should find a way to extricate themselves from the conflict in Yemen, now that the damage is no longer confined to Yemen.

UAE officials remain somewhat in denial about this, saying the threats will not be “the new normal.” Bragging about their advanced defense systems, the UAE is still convinced that with this war they can have their cake and eat it too. It’s a mistake more than a few nations have fallen into.

U.S. Issues “Highest Level” Travel Warning to Dubai, UAE, Citing Yemeni Missile, Drone Threat, COVID-19 https://t.co/hPeFb3F7b2

— Global UpFront Newspapers (@Global_Upfront) January 28, 2022

With no military solution to Yemen, spillover violence is only going to be a bigger concern going forward, with tit-for-tat escalations encouraging more strikes.

The CCP has just fired off a warning shot to anybody who even thinks about trying to undermine its “climate” agenda, while simultaneously putting on a show to the international community to try and convince them that it is serious about curbing emissions.

According to Bloomberg, 47 steel company officials are being jailed for between six and 18 months following a “crackdown” on companies breaking environmental rules that went unenforced for a long time. The officials worked at four steel mills in Tangshan, not far from Beijing. The city is known as China’s biggest steelmaking hub.

The ruling was handed down by the Tangshan Intermediate People’s Court, which said in a statement that the companies had also been fined millions of yuan and that fines had also been assessed against the defendants.

Read the full statement – written in English, a sign that the CCP wants the international community to take notice – below:

On January 27, 2022, the Tangshan Intermediate People’s Court organized four courts of Lunan, Lubei, Kaiping and Guye to pronounce judgments on 4 environmental pollution cases in our city. Courts in the four places sentenced 47 defendants in charge, directly responsible and directly involved in the four steel enterprises involved in the case, to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from 6 months to 1 year and 6 months, and fined them. The two iron and steel enterprises that committed the crime of the environmental pollution crime unit were sentenced to fines of 4 million and 7 million yuan respectively. The courts of the four places invited deputies to the National People’s Congress, members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the principals of key iron and steel enterprises in their jurisdictions to participate in this centralized sentencing event.

Tangshan Songting Iron and Steel Co., Ltd., Hebei Xinda Iron and Steel Group Co., Ltd., Tangshan City Medium and Thick Plate Co., Ltd., and Tangshan Jinma Iron and Steel Co., Ltd. are key pollutant discharge units in Tangshan City. In March 2021, in order to evade the supervision of the environmental protection department, the four companies carried out illegal production by interfering with automatic monitoring facilities and falsifying automatic detection data, and released a large amount of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. After the court trial, it was found that the four companies had falsified data, discharged pollutants in excess of the standard, seriously polluted the atmosphere, endangered the health and safety of the people, and constituted the crime of polluting the environment. Among them, Tangshan Songting Iron and Steel Co., Ltd. and Hebei Xinda Iron and Steel Group Co., Ltd. constituted the crime of environmental pollution crime units.

In recent years, the Tangshan Intermediate People’s Court has given full play to the functions of criminal trial, punishment and education of environmental resources, and severely punished criminal acts that pollute the environment and cause serious consequences and subjective viciousness in accordance with the law. Through this centralized judgment, it can effectively deter potential polluting enterprises, educate and guide enterprises to consciously protect the ecological environment, and escort the construction of clear water and blue sky and the high-quality economic and social development of our city.

All of the officials being jailed were found to be complicit in the faking of air pollution data submitted to the government.

The jail sentences “underscore Beijng’s push to clean up a major source of air pollution”, Bloomberg reported.

Over the past decade, Beijing has tried to tighten environmental controls to clean up China’s notoriously dirty air. Their goal is to have more than 530M tons of steelmaing capacity in the “ultra-low emissions” category by 2025.

The sentences mark the end of a long-running environmental crackdown on the steelmaking hub. Tangshan Jinma and another three mills were found guilty last March of not complying with production cuts put in place to reduce pollution.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

The San Francisco Chronicle has acknowledged that the city is operating a supervised drug site, but the city continues to deny it. Why?

The San Francisco Chronicle today published an article confirming that San Francisco city government is operating a supervised drug use and drug dealing site on public property and within the auspices of a “Linkage Center” ostensibly to link homeless addicts to rehab. “The revelation that people are using drugs at the site was first reported on the Substack newsletter of Michael Shellenberger,” acknowledged The Chronicle.

San Francisco city government officials are denying that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site.

A “spokesperson for the Department running the linkage center denied the city was operating a supervised consumption site,” reported The Chronicle.

“When asked by The Chronicle what happens if someone tries to use drugs in the outdoor or indoor areas of the linkage center, and whether staff will allow the practice to continue, [spokesperson] Zamora did not answer directly.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed and members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have advocated a supervised drug consumption site, and purchased two properties in the Tenderloin to serve people suffering from addiction.

There is a reasonable debate to be had about whether there should be supervised drug use sites for hard-core drug addicts. The Netherlands, which is a model nation for dealing with addiction and untreated mental illness among the homeless, has 28 drug consumption rooms.

But San Francisco city government never approved the creation of a supervised consumption site at the linkage center and is moving forward with supervised drug consumption and drug dealing in ways that are totally inconsistent with the successful approach used by Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, and Zurich.

There is no doubt that the city is operating a supervised drug site. City contractors not only confirmed it to reporters Erica Sandberg, Leighton Woodhouse, and me, we witnessed drug use, another reporter witnessed a drug deal, and the San Francisco Chronicle’s reporter witnessed drug use at the supervised site.

But rather than be open about what it is doing, the San Francisco city government is denying it.

This is curious because the operators of the supervised open drug scene claim to want to reduce stigma around drug use. And it is curious because, in addition to the coverage by my Substack and The San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Mail has published a second long article with 44 horrifying photos of the scene.

Why is that? Why is San Francisco’s city government denying that it is operating a supervised site for drug consumption and drug dealing?

The Denial Of Humanity

This is the view of the taxpayer-funded supervised drug consumption and drug dealing site in United Nations Plaza, a public space in downtown San Francisco. Around this site, which was taken over without authorization, are armed and violent drug dealers whose deadly, addictive, and intoxicating products kill two San Franciscans per day.

Read more here…