Life gives you 2 choices:
Face it or erase it.
Face it or erase it.
+++
I just received notice from Drew J. Belsky Deputy Editor of American Thinker, My Essay "There is no alternative to Victory..." will be published.
I e mailed Drew like the Marine actor, "He made my day."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Middle East ForumIRAN LAUNCHES MASSIVE MISSILE AND DRONE BARRAGE AT ISRAEL - MEF LAUNCHES WAR ROOM TO PROVIDE UPDATES LIVE
In this critical moment, I must share with you the urgent news that Israel is under attack. Iran has launched a barrage of drones and ballistic missile strikes targeting Israeli territory, escalating an already volatile situation to alarming heights. Our hearts go out to the people of Israel as they confront this grave threat to their safety and security.
To provide you with up-to-the-minute updates and insights, we are convening an online war room live on Zoom. You can join us by following this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/s/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From my Israeli friend Sherwin in response to my essay. +++ Dick thanks.....woke up to sirens here in Jerusalem at 0140.....Iran launched over 100 UAV's at us along with ballistic missiles.
We are ok here, lots of our friends (US, UK, Jordan, Iraq) shot many of them down en route, some damage in the south of Israel an army base, one youngster from the Bedouin community hurt, no one killed....thank the Lord.
Best, Sherwin +++ The world's Davos attendees and a mixture of billionaires are making more billions off Davos, WHO, and the demoniacal accomplishments of Klaus Schwab, +++ The Dep't of the Interior has decided to take 700,000 acres of Federal land in the Western US and cover it with Solar Panels, (roughly the size of Maine) they don't say how much "clean energy" this will produce but they say it will "add" to the current 11,000 megawatts already in use powering 3.5 million homes. Considering there are 820 million single family in the US, ,they've got a long way to go. Here a couple of interesting points about this project: -Solar panels have a useful life of 30 years -80% of the Solar panel production is controlled by China -at the end of the 30 year life of the panels it cost $45 to recycle them or $5 to put them in a landfill. It's estimated that by 2050 there will be 77million tons in landfills and because of some of the materials in the panels the landfills would be considered hazardous waste. -there also the possibility that the land under the panels might be hazardous due to runoff from the panels -you would also need a "backup source since the Sun doesn't shine at night. Sounds like a big price to pay for something that many experts say isn't even a problem ++++ Before I complete this memo, I have some random personal comments I would like to get off my chest: and to respond to the attached WSJ Op Ed (Tony Abbott, a Fighter in the Cold War With China The former Australian prime minister is worried by the U.S. tilt toward isolationism—though he has faith America will come through in the end. ByTunku Varadarajan) 1) The former PM of Australia has more confidence in America than Americans and he makes more sense than both Trump and Biden . I wish I had his level of confidence. 2) I submit, America's decline in self-confidence and increasing willingness to flirt with Socialism is a matter that would take an entire essay but a few thoughts are due. a) The problem is not that Capitalism has failed. It is far too many actions by greedy capitalists who are to blame. A recent article exposed Boeing executives were taking unauthorized fancy air tips on Boeing planes. These trips cost stockholders millions and were a slap in the face to Boeing workers. Then there are hundreds of instances of golden parachute deals that, though perhaps legal, are outrageous and totally undeserved based on terrible executive results as well as stock sales prior to bad earning announcements and the list of abuse is endless. Paying outrageous sums that reward mismanagement is morally offensive and an affront to hardworking American workers. b) It is now annual report season and the 10K's are bigger than the annual reports and are loaded with option like perks and cash payments that reward directors fortunes for their service. c) When corporate America widened the disparity between management/executive pay and that of workers many fold and when corporations disbanded the Common Man Rule where workers felt they were part of a corporate family, this dealt a severe blow to worker loyalty. and led to an understandable rift. d) Ignorance on the part of poorly educated Americans has made far too many opt for the bird in the bush. They have no understanding of how Socialism fails wherever embraced and are too unschooled to understand Hayek's :"Road To Serfdom." Why? Because we no longer challenge the brains of our students to reason. We serve mush both in the school cafeteria as well as in the class room. e) I cannot end without bringing up the successful efforts, on the part of our adversaries who have successfully infiltrated our institutions, with neo Marxist destructive philosophy that has harmed every facet of our society from education to physical child mutilation. Their pernicious goal has been to destroy our values and freedoms, attack our God given rights and debase our constitutional dictates. f) Finally, the damage to America's industrial might and the pain and suffering caused Middle America was probably the most dispiriting event Cooperate America could have undertaken. More recently a domestic corporation chicken food producer fired American citizen workers and replaced them with illegal immigrants. Capitalism demands profits. However, inflation caused by Biden's mismanagement and economic stupidly is largely to blame Take Walmart,. By purchasing manufactured goods from overseas producers, Walmart allegedly, lowers America's CPI by almost 2%. We allowed China to avoid duties creating a two edged sword which Trump sought to rectify. I have gotten just a few random reasons, off my chest, as to why Americans are justifiably depressed and angry. These abuses have been ignored by both party's because most Congressional members would rather feather their own nest and have totally disregarded Kennedy's: famous speech to Americans. +++ Tony Abbott, a Fighter in the Cold War With China The former Australian prime minister is worried by the U.S. tilt toward isolationism—though he has faith America will come through in the end. By Tunku Varadarajan Americans dispirited by the 2024 presidential campaign might find it bracing to listen to Tony Abbott. “The Western world has never been more materially rich,” Mr. Abbott recently told a symposium on classical education here. “But it’s rarely been more spiritually bereft.” Since winning the Cold War, he says, the West has become “economically, militarily and culturally flabby, like a retired sportsman.” His warning is dire: If we don’t shape up, China will leave us in the dust. Mr. Abbott, 66, is a politician, but not an American one. He served as prime minister of Australia from 2013 through 2015, arguably the most conservative and pro-American leader his notably pro-American country has had. He swears by Plato, Shakespeare, the New Testament and “narrative history starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans.” Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill are his political role models. But he’s a fighter as well as a thinker—every inch the pugilist he was when he won his boxing colors, called a “blue,” as a 21-year-old heavyweight at Oxford University. (He is also a director of Fox Corp., whose ownership overlaps with the Journal’s parent company, News Corp.) We meet in a corner of the Phoenix Convention Center on the morning after his speech. He’s just been to the gym at his modest downtown hotel and can’t resist boasting that he hasn’t outgrown his Oxford blue’s blazer. “I found it in the cupboard and as an experiment I tried to see if I could still fit it,” he says. “I can.” You might call Xi Jinping his personal trainer, for it’s China, he says, that “exercises” him the most. He wishes he could talk about “the China opportunity”—and a decade ago he did. “As prime minister, I concluded a free-trade deal between my country and China—the only free-trade deal at the time . . . that China has done with a G-20 economy.” He regrets it now: For China, “There is no such thing as a free market, no such thing as an independent business. The Chinese turn trade on and off like a tap to suit their strategic purposes.” Relations between Canberra and Beijing started to sour after Malcolm Turnbull succeeded Mr. Abbott as prime minister. In 2018 Australia banned Huawei from its 5G rollout over national-security concerns. “We were the first country to do that, even before the United States,” Mr. Abbott says. (The U.S. did it in 2019.) Tensions heightened in May 2020, when the Australian government called for a full, independent international investigation into the origins of “the Wuhan virus,” as Mr. Abbott calls it. “That really set the Chinese off. There was a furious reaction from Beijing, including statements from the Global Times”—a state propaganda organ—“that Australia was the ‘chewing gum’ on China’s boot.” China slapped what Mr. Abbott calls “capricious and arbitrary bans on some $20 billion worth of Australian trade,” including lobster, wine, barley and coal. In 2021 the Chinese Embassy in Canberra issued a list of 14 demands, including “essentially, that we end the American alliance, permit all Chinese investment, and cease all criticism of the Chinese government. No independent, sovereign country could accept that.” Australia didn’t. “It’s crystal clear under Xi Jinping that the role of the party-state is being massively reinforced,” Mr. Abbot says. “There’s been the rise of the ‘social credit’ system, and the increasingly genocidal tendencies in Xinjiang province. Having crushed the freedom of Hong Kong, they’re now dead set on taking Taiwan as part of their oft-declared aim to be the global hegemon by midcentury.” That means we’re “deep into a new cold war,” one that could be “every bit as difficult, as taxing, as costly, as stressful as the last one.” If not more. China is “rapidly becoming a first-rate military, but it is also undoubtedly a first-rate economy,” Mr. Abbott says. By contrast, the Soviet Union was “never more than a third-rate economy, and Russia and the other Comecon nations were more or less hermetically sealed from the economies of the wider world.” (Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, consisted of the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and the communist states of Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam.) The West, “inevitably led by the United States,” needs “to accept the reality of this new cold war and do our best to ensure that it ends as well as the last one did, with a victory for freedom and liberalism.” How? “By doing everything we can to reduce our economic vulnerability, to increase our deterrent capability, and to regain the cultural self-confidence that was an important part of winning the Cold War.” On the economic front, Mr. Abbott believes that “decoupling” from China, “at least in vital supply chains,” is necessary, “however lengthy and costly, particularly for a country like the United States, if it is to remain what it always has been—a great arsenal of democracy.” The West needs to “rebuild its manufacturing base as quickly as possible by not having free trade with China, by not sharing significant [industrial] secrets, by not giving them access to our manufacturing processes.” It also needs to halt “the widespread economic self-harm that we are inflicting upon ourselves.” By this he means “the climate cult. This notion that there is a climate emergency is, I think, completely without foundation.” “Even if the global-warming hypothesis is correct,” he says with relish, “a couple of degrees of warming over several decades wouldn’t justify the extreme steps that we’re taking—the economic revolution that we’re undertaking.” He says that “a country which thinks that the greatest economic, political and moral challenge of our times is climate change is, at the very least, going to be extremely distracted if it comes to fighting a war, or even running a cold war.” Never mind a hot one: “The Ukrainians aren’t worrying too much about climate change right now,” he says. “I don’t think the Israelis are obsessing about emissions at the moment.” Mr. Abbott says he won’t comment on the policies of an American president, then does so anyway, describing President Biden’s “so-called Inflation Reduction Act” as “basically a climate-change policy masquerading as anti-inflation policy.” That may not augur well for Mr. Biden in November. Every election in Australia where climate change has been an issue, Mr. Abbott says, has produced a thumping win for the party “which is most skeptical of the whole thing. But this is one of those transitions where the public is rarely asked. It’s an elite project which has been foisted on the public.” As for military deterrence, Mr. Abbott points to two “projects” that could discourage Beijing from using force in Taiwan and elsewhere. The first is the Quad, the four-nation “democratic partnership” between Australia, India, Japan and the U.S., set up in 2007 to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. Australia withdrew the following year when the center-left Kevin Rudd became prime minister, then rejoined in 2010 after Mr. Rudd’s party lost power. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe then “made massive efforts to reinvigorate it.” Mr. Abbott sets great store by the Quad: “It’s the first time that independent India has moved away from strategic detachment. It’s a definite tilt by India towards the West.” But the Quad will work only “if America appreciates Indian pride and self-respect and potential.” India wouldn’t have joined the grouping “if the Quad initiative had come from the Americans. The fact that it came from Abe made it acceptable to the Indians.” Mr. Abbott praises Abe, who left office in 2020 and who was assassinated in 2022, as “a great global statesman.” The second project is Aukus, the trilateral security pact set up in 2021 between “the great Anglosphere countries,” Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Mr. Abbott describes it as “a whole new level of defense and security cooperation.” The three nations are now “essentially treated as one for military procurement and strategic cooperation purposes.” Australia will acquire Virginia-class nuclear submarines—the newest class available—from the U.S. and a new-generation British sub will be built in Australia. The original Cold War was as much a duel of ideologies as it was a shadow (and often proxy) military confrontation. The West seems to have depleted the self-confidence that sustained it through the Cold War. “How and why it’s gone is a fascinating question,” Mr. Abbott says, “but gone it has, at least among vast swaths of Western elites.” Behind the loss of swagger is an enervation rooted in a sense of historical guilt. Americans agonize incessantly over slavery, Britons over imperialism, Australians over the treatment of indigenous people. Mr. Abbott wants us to acknowledge that “Project America, Project Britain and Project Australia are marvels”: “The main Anglosphere countries are as free, as fair, as prosperous as anything on earth.” People all over the world are “desperate” to come to them, testimony “that our societies are welcoming, magnanimous, decent places. And yet we don’t seem to see in ourselves what everyone else does.” As Mr. Abbott tells it, a palpable loss of domestic confidence in the U.S. is corroding America’s external projection and potency. The same is true of Australia, though in a minor key since the country’s heft is much smaller. The U.S. move toward isolationism is evident in its wavering over Ukraine. “I just think, frankly, that America is badly letting down a democracy in desperate need.” He gives President Biden “all credit for what he has done,” but wishes it had been more. “The congressional game-playing over the Ukrainian aid package is wrong. Given that everyone says they wanted to provide the aid, I just wish they would not let their disagreements on other issues jeopardize the provision of aid that Ukraine desperately needs.” Vladimir Putin and Mr. Xi regard the West as “degenerate, utterly effete. And I don’t think that’s a good image to show to the wider world, particularly to people who don’t see our self-doubt as a sign of maturity, but as a sign of weakness.” For all that, Mr. Abbott—who entered a Roman Catholic seminary at 26 but decided the priesthood wasn’t for him—professes a seemingly unshakable faith in the U.S.: “America unleashed is an amazing, creative country, with an enormous capacity if roused,” he says. “One of my little missions is to express, on behalf of myself and many of my compatriots, gratitude to the United States for everything it’s done over the last seven decades.” The modern world is a product of “American strength, American benevolence, American blood, American treasure.” It is “more free, more fair, more safe, more rich for more people than at any time in history, thanks to the Pax Americana.” This Pax America has been challenged, he says, “as never before, and yet America remains the indispensable nation, not because it should be expected to do everything, but because without America the efforts of others will be much less successful, even quite futile.” The prospect of a Pax Sinica—a Chinese world order—makes Mr. Abbott shudder. “A world under American leadership becomes more like America, and a world under Chinese leadership would inevitably become more like China. I think it would be a very oppressive pax indeed.” Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. ++++ |
|---|
No comments:
Post a Comment