Month: April 2022

At a moment the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congressional leaders Tuesday that “significant international conflict between great powers” is now “increasing, not decreasing” – the US has announced approval of the sale of up to $95 million in new training and equipment for Taiwan.

Crucially and quite provocatively from Beijing’s perspective, this new sale is focused on supporting Taiwan’s Patriot missile defense system, seen as key to defending the island in the event of an invasion.

The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency confirmed in a statement, “The proposed sale will help to sustain (Taiwan’s) missile density and ensure readiness for air operations.”

The statement called the items important as a “deterrent to regional threats and to strengthen homeland defense,” and outlined it will include training, planning, fielding, deployment, operation, maintenance, and sustainment of the Patriot system, associated equipment, and logistics support elements, as well as ground support equipment and spare parts, according to the DSCA statement.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry thanked the Biden administration and welcomed the deal, which marks the third such approved arms package of the Biden administration. Taipei emphasized it’s needed to defend against China’s “continuing military expansion and provocation.” 

 “In the face of China’s continuing military expansion and provocation, Taiwan must fully demonstrate its strong determination to defend itself,” the foreign ministry said. “Our government will continue to strengthen our self-defense and asymmetric combat capabilities.”

Meanwhile, one top US Navy commander says China is watching the Russia-Ukraine war closely, with an eye on Taiwan:

As the Russia-Ukraine war continues, a senior US commander stated that Washington must remain vigilant on the Taiwan issue as China is increasing its capabilities and making adjustments to its plans to forcefully unite the island nation.

U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Samuel J Paparo said, “China is undoubtedly watching what’s happened in Ukraine, taking notes, and learning from it.”

“And there will be learning and there will be adjustments to the extent that they’re able to learn from it. And they will improve their capabilities based on what they learn at this time,” he told a gathering of Washington-based journalists from Indo-Pacific countries.

A whistleblower who’s fled the United States for Switzerland has vowed to drop ‘450 gigabytes of deleted material‘ from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which he says he also gave the the Washington Post, New York Times, and Sen. Chuck Grassley – all of whom he says sat on it for months.

For the past two weeks, former Steve Bannon War Room co-host Jack Maxey has been hiding in Zurich, where he told the Daily Mail he’s been working with IT experts to dig more data from Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell,’ and that he’ll post it all online in a searchable database in the coming weeks.

Maxey says the data includes 80,000 images and videos, and more than 120,000 archived emails.

“I came here so that we could do a forensic examination of Hunter’s laptop safely in a country that still respects human liberty and the ideals of liberal democratic principles,” he told the Mail. “I do not believe this would have been possible inside the United States. We had numerous attempts on us from trying to do things like this there.”

Maxey said that after contacting DailyMail.com about the laptop last year, black suburban SUVs appeared outside his house, and former US intelligence officer friends he shared copies with told him they received strange calls.

‘I showed this to a friend of mine in desperation in February [2021] because nobody would listen to me. No news organizations would take it. In fact, the very first major news organization to take it was the Daily Mail,’ he said.

‘Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.‘ -Daily Mail

One former intelligence agency senior staffer allegedly told Maxey after he received the hard drive two years ago “If you don’t release enough of this, so that they know you can release all of it, I’m telling you brother, you’re a dead man.”

After receiving this advice, he began posting caches of emails and other material from the laptop on various file sharing sites – only to find the links removed within an hour.

“There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can’t look at it,” he said, adding: “These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.”

“​​So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden’s laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released. That should terrify every single decent person in the West.”

According to Maxey, he went to Switzerland because they are home to the only file sharing site that didn’t nuke the laptop files – Swiss Transfer.

The former Bannon podcast co-host said he is livid at the FBI, who he believes slow-walked their investigation into Hunter and failed to enter the laptop they received from Mac Isaac into evidence for months.

According to the New York Times, files from the laptop are now part of the evidence in Hunter’s federal prosecution for alleged tax fraud, money laundering and illegal foreign lobbying.

Among the files on the laptop are a raft of emails and documents showing Hunter’s dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm that became the center of Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019.

The then-president was accused of pushing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into the Bidens and Burisma for alleged corruption. -Daily Mail

“The FBI had this on the ninth of December 2019,” said Maxey. “‘I suppose the first person betrayed was a sitting US president in an impeachment hearing, when the FBI had the exculpatory evidence in their hands to have that end instantly, and they did nothing.”

“The second group of people to be betrayed were all of the Democratic candidates in the spring primaries that year,” he continued. “The American people were utterly betrayed, because I guarantee you that Joe Biden couldn’t run for dog catcher if the American people knew about this laptop.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Despite Beijing’s promises to ease up on its crackdown on Chinese financial markets, Reuters recently reported that the country’s top securities regulator has launched a crackdown on brokerages using feng shui – an ancient Chinese tradition – to predict stock market trends in notes to clients.

Citing local media reports in the Chinese Securities Journal, Reuters revealed that China’s Securities Regulatory Commission recently unveiled a “zero tolerance” policy prohibiting brokers from using feng shui to justify its stock recommendations.

As part of the crackdown, it has punished some brokers who have incorporated feng shui techniques into their market forecasts and investment advice. Such techniques include ‘heavenly stems’ and ‘earthly branches,’ – also known as tiangan dizhi, Yin-Yang, and Five Elements.

The original report didn’t name any brokerages by name, and it didn’t offer much in the way of details.

Some Chinese brokerages, including Guosheng Securities and Essence Securities, have received warning letters from the CSRC over the past year after releasing reports that incorporated elements of feng shui.

But while CSRC is under tremendous pressure to enforce ‘stability’ in Chinese markets, it’s hard to imagine these techniques being much worse than whatever American analysts (like, for example, technical analysis) are using to recommend trades to clients.

By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has finalized its requirement for diversity-contribution statements from all faculty members for tenure and promotion.

As reported Friday by Inside Higher Ed, the new policy says that the departments’ evaluations of teaching, service and research and future potential “must, where appropriate, consider the candidate’s diversity, equity, and inclusion activities and their impact.” Few institutions of UIUC’s size, according to Inside Higher Ed, have considered requiring diversity statements—and, effectively, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) —from all professors who hope to be tenured or promoted. Their column goes on:

The provost’s office describes the new DEI requirement as a one-page-maximum personal statement detailing “specific individual and/or collaborative activities aimed at supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as access.” Candidates should “include a discussion of the context, importance, and impact of their contributions along with their future plans for contributions. The candidate may choose to organize the statement by topic, activity, domain (e.g., research, teaching, and service), or in another manner.”

We wrote about the absurdity of this policy last year when it was in draft form. We asked, what happens if the teacher’s specialty is, say, high energy particle theory, or Chinese history or genetic markers for cancer risk?

Sorry, all faculty are expected to make efforts toward enhancing DEI.

In announcing the new policy, Andreas C. Cangellaris, UIUC’s provost, said that in order to meet the goals of its current strategic plan, the university must “catalyze innovation and discovery, find novel and proactive ways to educate students from all walks of life, and develop ever-deeper connections with the public we serve.”

This is tyranny by a minority. Americans overwhelmingly think DEI has gone too far. The most recent polling says huge majorities don’t even think race should be considered in college admissions. But the minority includes college administrators and they make the rules.

We wrote last week about a study showing how bloated American universities are with DEI staff, with U of I being among the worst. It now turns out that was vast understatement. All faculty are now DEI enforcers. As the Inside Higher Ed headline says, U of I is now “where DEI work is faculty work.”

What a tragedy to see an otherwise exceptional university trash its reputation in this manner.

If this isn’t a violation of the “compelled speech” doctrine under the First Amendment, I don’t know what is. Under established First Amendment law, government supported institutions like U of I cannot force people to make statements embracing any particular ideology. This violation is flagrant. Somebody needs to sue the daylights out of U of I.

General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said before the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday where he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were testifying on the defense budget, that he believes the Russia-Ukraine conflict will continue for years. 

He described what the Pentagon sees as what’s to be a “very protracted conflict” to come that’s “at least measured in years.” As we reported earlier, Gen. Milley further called Russia’s military operation the “greatest threat to peace and security of Europe, perhaps the world in my 40 years of service and in uniform.”

It’s widely perceived that the thinking in Moscow was that its “special operation” in Ukraine might take a mere weeks or months – based on Russia’s overwhelming firepower, aircraft, and technology at its disposal – but that Ukrainian resistance was fiercer and more significant than expected, likely causing Russia to now limit the scope of operations to taking Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions.

Gen. Milley explained to Congressional leaders: “But I do think this is a very protracted conflict, and I think it’s at least measured in years. I don’t know about decade, but at least years, for sure.”

“This is a very extended conflict that Russia has initiated, and I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine and all of the allies and partners that are supporting Ukraine are going to be involved in this for quite some time,” he added.

He further characterized the conflict as follows: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is threatening to undermine not only European peace and stability but global peace and stability that my parents and a generation of Americans fought so hard to defend,” Milley testified. 

If you don’t want Russia to fight Ukraine over there, don’t use Ukraine to fight Russia from here.pic.twitter.com/6B4QVFSZvV

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 26, 2022

But the dangerous reality is that the longer this conflict endures, the greater the likelihood of it cascading into a direct Russia-NATO clash, which both sides have admitted would be recipe for World War 3, involving nuclear-armed powers. 

This also (as the prior archived above clip demonstrates) as the conflict is being increasingly acknowledged as a ‘proxy war’ between the US/NATO alliance and Moscow. Milley in his testimony nodded to this in his Tuesday words: “We are now facing two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities both who intend to fundamentally change the rules-based current global order,” he said, and added: “We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable. The potential for significant international conflict between great powers is increasing, not decreasing.”

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted that footage of Joe Biden wandering around the White House on his own as the rest of his handlers and Democratic underlings fawn before a visiting Barack Obama is a perfect visualisation of what the future holds.

After playing the footage, Carlson pointed out that “no one in Washington thinks the Biden presidency is glorious anymore. They think it’s a disaster. Polls show that voters strongly agree. Joe Biden is now the most unpopular person in virtually any room he enters.”

Carlson described the scene at the White House, noting that “Biden tried to horn in on the conversation swirling around Obama. Everyone involved in that conversation, including Kamala Harris, who supposedly works for Biden, ignored Biden completely.”

He continued, “Biden desperately tried to get Obama’s attention. He puts his hand on Obama’s shoulder. He even calls him “Barack” like they’re friends, but Obama blows him off. He acts like Biden is not even there. Ask yourself if you have ever in your life, seen anything sadder than that?”

The host then pointed out that Obama for years maligned Biden, kept him on the periphery and “mocked him relentlessly as an old White guy.”

Carlson compared Biden’s abandonment to a pack of dogs leaving behind an old weak member, declaring “it’s nothing personal. It’s a matter of group survival and that’s exactly how the Democratic Party operates.”

He continued, “Individuals are irrelevant to the party. The group is all that matters. No one at the DNC actually cares about Joe Biden or ever has.”

“On some level, Joe Biden knows this. He’s spent his life in the Democratic Party. He’s never worked outside of the Democratic Party, so he understands how this ends. Inevitably, after 50 years, it is his turn to be eliminated,” Carlson explained, adding “they’ve decided to replace Joe Biden, period, but how will they do it and who will they replace him with? That’s what we don’t know. “

Watch:

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