Category Archives: defense policy

Progress

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…on the foreign policy and national security front.

The White House is moving forward with three sales of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, sending in recent days a notification of the deals to Congress for approval, five sources said on Monday, while China threatened retaliation.

The three weapons systems—of seven in the works—have been approved by the State Department and are these:

  • High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS)
  • SLAM-ER, a long-range air-to-ground missile system
  • external sensor pods for F-16 jets that allow the real-time transmission of imagery and data from the aircraft back to ground stations.

These aren’t just feel-good devices, either; they’ll give the Republic of China an ability to strike back hard and meaningfully against People’s Republic of China invasion forces along with recon data concerning approaching/maneuvering PRC forces.

Other weapons systems in the works include these, and their approvals and deliveries need to be moved along apace.

  • large, sophisticated aerial drones
  • land-based Harpoon anti-ship missiles
  • underwater mines to meet amphibious landings and, depending on where deployed, to meet PLA Navy combatants

Still, these sales and deliveries, sound progress that they represent, need to be coupled with more frequent Naval sailings throughout the South and East China Seas and in the immediate vicinity of the RoC, including the Taiwan Strait, and port calls at RoC ports in order to maximize the sales’ potential and concrete effect.

Because, Of Course

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Russian President-for-life-soon-to-be Vladimir Putin says Alexei Navalny secretly works (or works secretly, you pick ’em) with the CIA.

Putin’s Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov:

I can even be specific: these days, specialists from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America are working with him.

You bet. I understand Putin has a summer dacha outside Bykovskiy he’s interested in selling, too. Nice ocean front property.

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.