China has been quietly taking steps to encircle the United States by arming western hemisphere states, seeking closer military, economic, and diplomatic ties to U.S. neighbors, and sailing warships into U.S. maritime zones.
The strategy is a Chinese version of what Beijing has charged is a U.S. strategy designed to encircle and “contain” China. It is also directed at countering the Obama administration’s new strategy called the pivot to Asia. The pivot calls for closer economic, diplomatic, and military ties to Asian states that are increasingly concerned about Chinese encroachment throughout that region.
“The Chinese are deftly parrying our ‘Pivot to the Pacific’ with their own elegant countermoves,” said John Tkacik, a former State Department Asia hand.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to question President Barack Obama about the U.S. pivot during the summit meeting set to begin Friday afternoon in California. Chinese state-run media have denounced the new U.S. policy as an effort to “contain” China and limit its growing power.
The Chinese strategy is highlighted by Xi’s current visit to Trinidad, Costa Rica, and Mexico where he announced major loans of hundreds of millions of dollars that analysts say is part of buying influence in the hemisphere.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 02:08:502013-06-08 02:08:50Rising Red tide: China Encircles U.S. by Sailing Warships in American Waters, Arming Neighbors
Israel’s military fumed Monday over the discovery that the U.S. government had revealed details of a top-secret Israeli military installation in published bid requests.
The Obama administration had promised to build Israel a state-of-the-art facility to house a new ballistic-missile defense system, the Arrow 3. As with all Defense Department projects, detailed specifications were made public so that contractors could bid on the $25 million project. The specifications included more than 1,000 pages of details on the facility, ranging from the heating and cooling systems to the thickness of the walls.
“If an enemy of Israel wanted to launch an attack against a facility, this would give him an easy how-to guide. This type of information is closely guarded and its release can jeopardize the entire facility,” said an Israeli military official who commented on the publication of the proposal but declined to be named because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the facility. He declined to say whether plans for the facility have been altered as a result of the disclosure.
“This is more than worrying, it is shocking,” he said.
Imagine trying to fight a war against an enemy led by ruthless tyrants, while granting that enemy authority to train your own military. After all, you reason, sending your soldiers to the enemy’s training centers frees up your time and resources for other priorities. Moreover, the tyrants have graciously promised to train your men in good faith, so denying them this privilege might seem ungrateful.
What are your chances of winning that war? You might win a skirmish here and there, if a few of your soldiers remain independent enough to question the lessons in surrender they were taught by the enemy. But your long-term prospects are, of course, dismal, since after their rare provisional successes, your soldiers will only use their newly-gained territory to set up a tent for conciliatory peace talks with the other side, in accordance with the rules of engagement they have learned in training.
Civilization — all of it — is currently under the domination of progressive collectivism in ethics, authoritarianism in politics, irrationalism in epistemology, and nihilism in metaphysics. The architects of this calamity have paved the road to the devil’s dominion over several generations. Their recent boldness, moving in for the kill on the last, crumbling bastion of principled resistance, America, shows that they believe ultimate victory is at hand, which, in human terms, means we face a thousand years of darkness.
We who reject the progressives’ knee-jerk historicism, however, need not accept the inevitability of this result. Doom does not follow necessarily from any mechanism beyond human control. It does, however, follow necessarily from inaction and resignation. That is to say, civilization is doomed unless she begins to mount a deliberate and determined defense.
The first step to mounting an effective defense is to understand how progressivism has won so much territory, geographical and spiritual, over this multi-generational war. I mean, specifically, how they have done it in practice, for concrete results derive from concrete actions. The nations of the semi-free world have, over the course of generations, voted themselves into servitude, voted away their property rights, acquiesced in the breakdown of the family, and willingly given over their souls en masse to the rule of all the wanton and stupid desires and fears that men for millennia knew they had to control in order to remain men; they have forsaken the human heritage for the false promises of tyrants.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-05-31 02:24:472013-05-31 02:24:47The Cost of Losing: A Thousand Years of Darkness
Photo Credit: Daily StarBy The Daily Star. Massive explosions shook Damascus early Sunday and Syrian state media said Israeli missiles had hit a military research center on the outskirts of the capital.
“Initial information indicates that the explosions at the scientific research center in Jamraya near Damascus were caused by Israeli missiles,” the official SANA news agency. It gave no further details.
Damascus residents reported hearing massive blasts at 1:50 am Sunday.
“There was a large explosion. We first felt shakes like an earthquake and 30 seconds later heard gunfire,” one resident told The Daily Star by telephone from the Syrian capital.
“There was an electricity cut then a large boom.The door of my balcony opened from the after effect,” another resident said, adding that warplanes could be heard overhead.
‘Israeli officials confirm Syria airstrike that hit Hezbollah-bound weapons’
By AP and Times of Israel Staff. Israeli officials on Saturday reportedly confirmed the Israeli Air Force carried out a strike against Syria and say it targeted a shipment of advanced missiles.
The officials said the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of “game changing” weapons bound for the terror group Hezbollah. One official said the target was a shipment of advanced, long-range ground-to-ground missiles.
The officials said the attack took place early Friday. It was not immediately clear where the airstrike took place, or whether the air force carried out the strike from Lebanese or Syrian airspace.
There was no immediate comment from Syrian officials, and no word of the airstrike on Syrian state media.
According to a source quoted by Reuters in a report Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security cabinet for secret talks on Thursday night, hours before the strike. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-05-05 01:58:282016-04-11 11:22:03Syria Says Israeli Strike Hits Military Center (+video)
Photo Credit: APIranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “has become a hostage” of an elite branch of Iran’s army that has quietly consolidated its economic and political power, a top analyst said Tuesday.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appears to have supplanted Khamenei and other top clerics in a significant power shift that has left Iran a “military dictatorship,” according to Ali Alfoneh, who has spent years investigating the IRGC.
Khamenei “has become a hostage in the hands of his own praetorian guard,” Alfoneh said Tuesday during a discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
Thirty-four years since the Iranian revolution installed an extremist Islamic leader, the country has “degenerated into a military dictatorship which is disguising itself. … They want to preserve the illusion the regime” is still in power, he said.
The IRGC, Iran’s principal fighting force in its 1980 war with Iraq, has quietly seized control of Iran’s economy and political bodies and controls around $80 billion in private economic assets, according to Alfoneh.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-24 00:35:592016-04-11 11:23:01New Persian Rulers: Iran's Military has Apparently Supplanted the Clerics
On March 30, three days after North Korea severed a military hotline with the South and announced that South Korean President Park Geun-hye “will meet a miserable ruin,” the country declared a state of war. “The time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle,” an official statement said.
Meanwhile, many of South Korea’s youth were worried about something else. A 25-year-old pop star named Seo In-guk had appeared on a popular reality TV show the night before and, in a misstep that quickly dominated online conversations, had washed his strawberries incorrectly. Ilbe, a conservative Web forum — a place you might expect to find a nationalist screed — was preoccupied with a month-old debate on regional differences in how to eat sweet and sour pork.
Pop stars, bourgeois lifestyle commentary and funny videos often seem to interest young South Koreans more than Pyongyang’s latest provocation. North Korea may be trying to intimidate its neighbor, particularly on economic and cultural fronts that increasingly matter, South Korea has already won the fight.
Of course, young people are discussing the risk of a second Korean war. But, even if this week’s chest-thumping has them a bit jittery, they typically mock Kim Jong Un and dismiss his war declaration as hot air. It’s a distraction from more pressing matters — not a particularly high bar for a youth culture obsessed with the latest Korean pop girl group or Samsung gadget.
“Netizens and ordinary citizens alike are fairly fatigued with the recent stream of threats,” James Pearson, the Seoul-based editor of KoreaBang, a blog that covers Korean social media trends, told me. “People just laugh.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-07 02:32:442013-04-07 02:32:44South Korea Has Already Won
These are trying times. Never in the history of this country have we been so weakened and polarized by what many view as deliberate government policy. Now anti-gunners in the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and legislatures across the country are seeking to exploit the Newtown tragedy to promote their “gun control” agenda that envisions federal, universal background checks on gun purchases, and that could lead to gun registration and confiscation.
At the same time, the increasing militarization of law enforcement, most visibly demonstrated by the growing use of massive, SWAT-type raids on businesses and individuals, sometimes with federal involvement or authorization, is heightening concerns that this country is moving toward a police state.
Mountain Pure SWAT Raid: The Movie
Mountain Pure Water, LLC is headquartered on Interstate 30 just outside the town of Little Rock, Arkansas. The company manufactures and distributes beverage containers, spring water, fruit drinks, and teas. In January 2012, about 50 federal agents, led by Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) Special Agent Cynthia Roberts and IRS Special Agent Bobbi Spradlin, swooped in, guns drawn. Without explanation they shut down plant operations, herded employees into the cafeteria, and confined them to the room for hours. They could not so much as use the bathroom without police escort. Cell phones were confiscated and all Internet and company phones were disabled.
Plant Manager Court Stacks was at his desk when police burst through his office door, guns drawn and pointed at him—a thoroughly unprofessional violation of basic firearms discipline in this circumstance, and the cause of numerous accidental SWAT killings.
According to Mountain Pure CEO John Stacks, the search warrant was related to questions about an SBA loan he secured through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recover tornado losses to his home, warehouse, and associated equipment. Mr. Stacks says the SBA apparently doesn’t believe that assets listed as damaged in the storm were actually damaged.
The search warrant was extremely vague and some agents’ actions may have been illegal, according to company attorney, Timothy Dudley. Comptroller Jerry Miller was taken to a private room and interrogated for over three hours by SBA Special Agent Cynthia Roberts, the raid leader. He requested an attorney and was told “That ain’t gonna happen.” According to Miller, the SBA unilaterally changed the terms of Stacks’ loan. He says he asked Roberts what gave the SBA authority to do that, and she responded, “We’re the federal government, we can do what we want, when we want, and there is nothing you can do about it.” Miller said during the raid Roberts “strutted around the place like she was Napoleon.”
Stacks said the company has had three IRS audits in the past three years, including one following the raid, with no problems. The SBA has still not filed any charges, continues to stonewall about the raid’s purpose, and refuses to release most of the property seized during the raid.
Quality Assurance Director Katy Depriest, who doubles as the company crisis manager, described agents’ “Gestapo tactics.” She added that they confiscated CDs of college course work and educational materials for a class she had been taking that resulted in her flunking the course. Those materials have not yet been returned.
Attempts were made to contact Ms. Roberts for this article, but she is no longer employed by the SBA. Questions were directed to the Little Rock, Arkansas U.S. Attorney’s office. The USA’s public affairs officer had no comment; however they have convened a grand jury to evaluate the case.
Because law enforcement refused repeated requests to respond for this article, we have only Mountain Pure’s side of the story, but they make a compelling case:
•Many company employees were willing to discuss this raid on the record.
•Mountain Pure and several employees have sued Special Agents Roberts and Spradlin.
•Mr. Stacks commissioned a video about the raid, reproduced here.
The video includes testimony from Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of famed Gibson Guitar Corp., which suffered two such raids, and another raid target, Duncan Outdoors Inc. The video does not attempt to establish anyone’s guilt or innocence, but rather highlights law enforcement’s heavy-handed tactics in executing SWAT-style search warrants against legitimate businesses. Gibson has settled with the Justice Department in a case fraught with legal ambiguities, while Duncan has been indicted for violations of currency transaction reporting requirements.
Mr. Stacks claims he has gotten calls from many companies that have suffered similar raids, but they are afraid to speak out. Here are a few examples that have made national news:
•FDA officials, U.S. Marshals, and the Pennsylvania State Police raided an Amish farm in 2011 for selling raw milk.
•A Department of Education SWAT team raided a man’s home, “dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him” in front of his three young children. They were looking for evidence of his estranged wife’s financial aid fraud.
•66 year-old George Norris spent two years in jail following a USFWS raid that nailed him for filing incorrect forms on imported orchids.
•A Fairfax, Virginia optometrist being served a warrant for illegal gambling was killed by a SWAT team member whose firearm accidentally discharged. He answered the door in his bathrobe, unarmed and unaware that he was even under investigation.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-06 03:14:382013-04-06 03:14:38Police Militarization, Abuses of Power, and the Road to Impeachment
A recent official visit to Moscow brought back some new souvenirs for the Chinese military. How about a reported 24 Sukhoi SU-35 fighter jets, and four submarines from Russia.
China‘s new president Xi Jinping was in Russia this week to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Both sides agreed to two arms-sale contracts in which China will buy Russian Sukhoi made fighter jets, Xinhua and Agence France Press reported on Monday.
China has been itching to buy the planes since the 1990s and has been in hot pursuit since last March.
Russia’s Interfax confirmed the existence and date of that agreement back in February, but didn’t speculate on sales numbers. This month, official talks trimmed the order down to 24 planes from an initial discussion of 48 Sukhoi Super Flankers. The Russians are said to have more confidence that China can’t copy their engines, and are also said to need the SU-35 orders because Russia’s Defense Department is ordering follow-on buys of new upgraded Sukhoi SU-35s instead.
The deals raised concern among some regional defense players — namely India. China Central Television reported on Sunday that the purchase deals were signed before President Xi Jinping’s ever stepped foot into Russia. The military deal marks the first time in a decade that China had bought large military technological equipment from Russia, according to official television.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-26 21:02:132013-03-26 21:02:13After A Decade Long Wait, China And Russia Ink ‘Super Jet’ Military Deal (+video)
Measured in millimeters, the tiny device was designed to allow drones, missiles and rockets to hit targets without satellite guidance. An advanced version was being developed secretly for the U.S. military by a small company and L-3 Communications, a major defense contractor.
On Monday, Sixing Liu, a Chinese citizen who worked at L-3’s space and navigation division, was sentenced in federal court here to five years and 10 months for taking thousands of files about the device, called a disk resonator gyroscope, and other defense systems to China in violation of a U.S. arms embargo.
The case illustrates what the FBI calls a growing “insider threat” that hasn’t drawn as much attention as Chinese cyber operations. But U.S. authorities warned that this type of espionage can be just as damaging to national security and American business.
“The reason this technology is on the State Department munitions list, and controlled . . . is it can navigate, control and position missiles, aircraft, drones, bombs, lasers and targets very accurately,” said David Smukowski, president of Sensors in Motion, the small company in Bellvue, Wash., developing the technology with L-3. “While it saves lives, it can also be very strategic. It is rocket science.”
Smukowski estimated that the loss of this tiny piece of technology alone could ultimately cost the U.S. military hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-26 01:26:392013-03-26 01:26:39Chinese Citizen Given 5 Years for Stealing, Taking to China Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of US High-Tech Military Data
Sometime in the next week or so, Accuracy in Media will publish my research report about militarization of police forces and the proliferation of terrifying and sometimes fatal SWAT raids as a routine tool of law enforcement. While some of these raids are justified, most are simply excuses to use the vast amount of military equipment being bequeathed to federal, state and local police.
In this report I discuss the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to label tea partiers, veterans, gun owners, Christians and pretty much anyone Obama doesn’t like as “potential domestic terrorists.” You have seen the reports. You have also seen how this information percolates down to the state and local level through organizations like DHS “Fusion Centers,” which even leftwing organizations like the ACLU are up in arms about. You recall in particular the fusion center report that listed Ron Paul supporters as a profile for domestic terrorism.
DHS sees nothing wrong with this. Even more alarming is their use of the extreme leftist hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center as consultants on right wing extremism! As I exhaustively documented in my Capital Research SPLC piece, they have been associated with and dominated by communists since their inception, and utilize the communist-inspired strategy of Partisan Tolerance – i.e. intolerance of anything other than extreme left ideology.
DHS is following a time-honored communist tactic of preemptively labeling your enemies exactly what you are, to put them on the defensive. DHS, and for that matter law enforcement at all levels, is not so stupid as to believe that the rallying grandparents of the Tea Party movement, gun owners or veterans are actual or even potential “domestic terrorists”. But by labeling political enemies that way in the very high-profile manner they do, intimidates many people and makes them afraid to speak out or even associate with identified groups and individuals, lest they find their names on some government file or be erroneously lumped in targeted groups.
The whole point of this monologue is to introduce a story by Matt Bracken. Bracken has used the Left’s tactic against them magnificently in a short story called “What I Saw at the Coup.” In this tale a White House aide relates how her fellow advisors launch a plot to murder prominent conservatives in order to permanently silence the opposition.
