Category Archives: defense policy

Arms Control

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In the current arms control negotiations, the Trump administration proposed

that a future treaty cover all Russia, Chinese, and US warheads and include more-intrusive verification

Russia, through its Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, rejected the proposal out of hand.

Since Russia has shown itself not serious about arms control, perhaps we should engage in a new bout of arms control via rapid arms development and buildup. That won’t produce prompt results, but it will result in a new and stricter arms control régime just as surely as the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative build up did with the Soviet Union.

A modification of a Reagan doctrine: we can afford it; they can’t.

Censorship

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It’s active, biased, and deliberate in social media. And Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet intend on stepping it up during the remainder of this election season.

Twitter, for instance, says on its website that it will “require people to remove Tweets” that include “statements which are intended to influence others to violate recommended COVID-19 related guidance from global or local health authorities to decrease someone’s likelihood of exposure to COVID-19.” Among the problematic statements the company lists under that category is “social distancing is not effective.”

But Twitter won’t say how its censors will reconcile the myriad local health authorities who disagree among each other on the proper steps to take.

Facebook on its website outlines a similar policy using similar language, with the company stating that it will “remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities,” including “claims that are designed to discourage treatment or taking appropriate precautions.”

Facebook also declines to say how its censor will reconcile the recommendations and instructions of those local health authorities.

Alphabet makes its bias unembarrassedly obvious:

YouTube has adopted a virtually identical policy, stating that it “does not allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19.”

Never mind that WHO, as an apologist for the People’s Republic of China has no credibility whatsoever.

That’s just the social media’s bias regarding the Wuhan Virus. Their behavior is even more dangerous in the political arena.

Last month, Facebook was reportedly developing a “contingency plan,” intended to address scenarios in which Trump or his campaign attempted to dispute or delegitimize the results of the 2020 election.

But nothing planned to respond to the Progressive-Democrats’ openly stated intention to dispute the results of the 2020 election.

Zuckerberg went on:

the company will “attach an informational label to content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of the election or discuss the legitimacy of voting methods, for example, by claiming that lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud.”
“This label will provide basic authoritative information about the integrity of the election and voting methods[.]”

All while he refuses to identify his “authorities,” much less to demonstrate their authoritativeness.

Be careful out there.

And vote, despite these Leftists’ efforts to delegitimize your vote.

Insufficient

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Recall that Oracle and ByteDance have a proposal on the table for Oracle to take a minority partnership position in ByteDance’s TikTok.  In response to objections to that, some

Trump administration officials are looking to give American investors a majority share of the company that will take over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok[.]

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL), Rick Scott (R, FL), Thom Tillis (R, NC), Roger Wicker (R, MI), Dan Sullivan (R, AK), and John Cornyn (R, TX), object to that, too.

Any deal between an American company and ByteDance must ensure that TikTok’s US operations, data, and algorithms are entirely outside the control of ByteDance or any Chinese-state directed actors, including any entity that can be compelled by Chinese law to turn over or access US consumer data.

The Senators are absolutely correct. Any fraction of ownership by a People’s Republic of China company that’s greater than zero is too much; giving, as it would, the PRC’s intelligence community access to all the data TikTok scoops up from the individuals and businesses that use it.

A TikTok Partnership

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Oracle Corp has become the frontrunner in the race to do a deal with the People’s Republic of China company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, for an acquisition of that app. That status seems solidified by ByteDance having submitted a proposal to the US government that lays out the terms of a deal in which Oracle would become the junior partner in a TikTok-Oracle(-ByteDance?)…alliance.

Recall that President Donald Trump has required that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok as a condition of TikTok’s being allowed to continue operating in the United States. Trump’s objection to TikTok is centered on the app’s scooping up of a vast range of personal and personally identifying data and the subsequent transmittal of those data to back to ByteDance inside the PRC.

Recall further that three years ago the PRC passed a law requiring every single company based or operating inside the PRC to cooperate with every single request for information that the PRC’s intelligence community might have.  That would include the personal and personally identifying data that TikTok vacuums up on each of its users, including the 100 million American users.

Critical aspects of this proposed “partnership” include these two:

  • the ByteDance proposal will involve expanding TikTok’s US offices to become the global headquarters
  • hav[e] Oracle certify the security of the app’s data….

The first is an insult to our intelligence, intended as it is solely to distract from the security problem.

The second is insufficient to the point of irrelevancy. Under the PRC law, to repeat, every PRC domiciled or headquartered company must comply with every information request from the PRC’s intelligence community. It matters not a whit how “secure” TikTok’s data might be; so long as a PRC company owns even a smidge of TikTok, that company will be bound by law to submit any and all TikTok data—those personal and personally identifiable data, for instance—to the PRC’s intelligence agency when asked, and TikTok will be bound to submit those data to that company for passing along.

And that should be a deal breaker.

Ethnic Cleansing

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It isn’t limited to the Uighurs, and it’s much more insidious and consideredly humiliating than merely killing or exterminating through forced sterilization.

The People’s Republic of China is trying to exterminate Mongol culture and force them to live mainland Chinese culture.

Thousands of students in Inner Mongolia have taken to the streets during the past week to rally against the government’s three-year plan to push Mandarin-language education across the northern region and phase out local history, literature and ethnic textbooks in favor of national coursebooks, according to rights group Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.

And

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has intensified efforts to promote Mandarin and push the country’s ethnic minorities to adopt a uniform Chinese identity.

And

On Tuesday, the first phase of the new policy in Inner Mongolia launched to coincide with the start of the fall semester. It requires all schools to teach Mandarin using national instead of local course material starting in first grade—one year earlier than under the old system.
That means ethnic Mongolian children won’t be able to master the fundamentals of their own language before starting their Mandarin studies, [clothes seller in Xilinhot] Daguulaa said.

This is part of the threat all of us face from an acquisition-minded People’s Republic of China.