RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.newsmax.com/henryfcooper/cme-covid-emp-gmd/2021/06/01/id/1023479/

Ambassador Henry F. (Hank) Cooper, Chairman of High Frontier and an acknowledged expert on strategic and space national security issues, was President Ronald Reagan’s Chief Negotiator at the Geneva Defense and Space Talks with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

My recent Newsmax articles discussed natural and manmade existential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threats to the nation’s electric grid; and reported that in South Carolina we have demonstrated that protecting the grid is affordable.

Changes are required to assure our survival — and can be supported via the current infrastructure funding debate.

My March 16 article built on two previous articles emphasizing 1.) The “Cold Weather” Texas Grid Failure warning all Americans of the dangers of losing electricity for only 5-days (several times officially acknowledged 151 fatalities); and 2.) That President Biden’s proposed “American Rescue Plan” should protect all Americans against a major electric grid failure — from a major “solar storm” that for sure will one day occur.

My May 27 article discussed reports that major solar storms are likely in the next few years. A coronial mass ejection (CME) passing through the Earth’s orbit may envelop it and interact with its geomagnetic field to produce a major Geomagnetic Disturbance (GMD) not seen since the 1859 Carrington Event that today would crash electric grids leaving Americans without life support for months.

Most would die within a year due to the consequent disease, starvation and societal collapse — according to the Congressional EMP Commission.

Lower-level CME/GMDs could also seriously damage our unprotected grid.

My March 16 article referred to a March 6, 2021 Wall Street Journal report that proposed legislation then included $350-billion for state and local authorities, with $10-billion designated for infrastructure — an opportunity. Various reports indicated follow-on legislation would include additional infrastructure funding.

My April 23 discussion noted a proposal by Rep. Yvette Clark, D-N.Y., — chair of the Cybersecurity Subcommittee of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee — that an Infrastructure Bill include funds for local and state authorities to protect the grid against cyberattack.

As cochair of the Congressional EMP Caucus, she knows that the military doctrine of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran includes EMP as the most consequential cyberattack strategy — a connection that infrastructure negotiations should address.

Hopes grew as the Biden administration proposed even more spending and seemed open to improving traditional infrastructure. I hoped to see the grid (as traditional infrastructure) protected against the existential EMP threat.

But ongoing negotiations among the “powers that be” offer little encouragement.

Senator Shelly Moore Capito, R-W. Va., who is leading Republication negotiators —including with President Biden (meeting scheduled tomorrow) has insisted on “real” or “physical” infrastructure — including new “broadband” that depends on electricity.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-rising-economic-cost-of-cyberattacks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Biden administration should build on the Trump administration’s strategy to confront the increasing security and economic threat of cyberattacks.

It was recently revealed that DarkSide raked in $90 million worth of Bitcoin — including $4.4 million in ransom from the Colonial Pipeline operator — from its cyberattacks stretching back to October 2020. The ransoms paid to DarkSide and similar organizations, however, do not capture the total economic cost of cyberattacks. Targeted firms acting in their individual interests may not fully account for the economic costs that spill over to consumers and to other firms. The result is underinvestment in cybersecurity from the private sector as a whole. While the Biden administration’s “private sector decision” remark helped define its Colonial Pipeline response, the federal government has an important role in closing this cybersecurity investment gap and limiting the future cost of cyberattacks.

Cyberattacks are perpetrated by numerous types of actors and stretch far beyond ransomware attacks such as the attack on the Colonial Pipeline. In fact, ransomware is on average a less costly form of cyberattack. While ransomware attacks on large firms tend to make headlines, according to one report, 70 percent of such attacks are directed at small- and medium-sized firms with fewer than 1,000 employees with 90 percent of the losses against these firms uninsured. The widespread nature of cyberattacks, their pervasiveness across industry and firm type, the varying components that make up the total cost, and the prevalence of underreporting all contribute to the difficulty in estimating the overall economic impact of these incidents, though some studies do exist.

In 2018, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) published a report evaluating the total costs associated with malicious cyberactivity by measuring the stock-price reaction of publicly traded firms to news of cyberattacks that had been made public. After taking into account firms’ underreporting of cyberattacks, spillover effects to other firms, and private costs incurred alongside the costs to publicly traded firms, the CEA estimated that the total cost posed by malicious cyberactivity to the U.S. economy in 2016 was as high as $109 billion (roughly 0.6 percent of 2016 GDP). These estimated costs are very likely to have increased since 2016.

According to annual studies by Accenture and the Ponemon Institute based on extensive surveys of firms and cybersecurity experts, between 2016 and 2018, the average total cost incurred by firms due to malicious cyber activity increased by 58 percent in the United States. Assuming that the total cost to the U.S. economy increased at the same rate as the average cost faced by those surveyed firms, the total cost of cyberattacks in 2018 would be as high as $172 billion (roughly 0.8 percent of 2018 GDP). This assumption likely serves as a lower-bound estimate, however, as the average number of cyberattacks faced by firms globally increased over this period, making it more than likely that the frequency of attacks against U.S. firms also increased. Since 2018 — the last year the study was conducted — the number of cyberattacks, the average cost of cyberattacks, and the total economic costs are likely to have risen even further.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/18/bidens-leftism-and-woke-military-threaten-u-s-national-security/

Military officials are trained to stand silently on the sidelines of politics, saying nothing but what relates to their mission, whatever it might be. But a recent open letter signed by 124 former flag-level officers warning of the dangerous effects of our nation’s sharp sudden turn to the left overturns that tradition. What do they know that the rest of us don’t?

The letter was not couched in military jargon or bureaucratese; it was plain-spoken and blunt in its concern about America’s course. It starts with a call for protecting our free and fair elections, but then turns toward the ominous political and cultural trends of recent years. No need for a translation:

Aside from the election, the current administration has launched a full-blown assault on our constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing Congress, with more than 50 executive orders quickly signed, many reversing the previous administration’s effective policies and regulations. Moreover, population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school and business closures, and, most alarming, censorship of written and verbal expression are all direct assaults on our fundamental rights. We must support and hold accountable politicians who will act to counter socialism, Marxism, and Progressivism, support our constitutional republic, and insist on fiscally responsible governing while focusing on all Americans, especially the middle class, not special interest or extremist groups which are used to divide us into warring factions.

They warned about the negative trends in a number of areas, ranging from our increasingly open borders and social media exercising control over speech, to Joe Biden’s return to the fatally flawed Iran nuclear deal and the failure to protect the rule of law.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/553690-why-the-white-house-wont-define-darksides-pipeline-attack-as-terrorism

We’ve heard calls in recent years for an ever-widening category of “terrorists” to encompass groups from the Jan. 6 rioters to antifa to the the Ku Klux Klan. So it is surprising that the White House and the media have referred to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attackers simply as “hackers.” “DarkSide” is not just a collection of hackers — it’s a group of terrorists. And the only thing more concerning than the failure to label them correctly is the possible reason for not doing so.

From the White House to The Washington Post, the mantra has been uniform: Gas to the East Coast was cut off by hackers who demanded — and reportedly received — $5 million in ransom to give us back control of a critical pipeline. The White House not only called these individuals hackers but — when pressed about its position on paying the ransom — insisted it was just a decision for a private company. Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger said, “Colonial is a private company, and we’ll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them.” She and others in the Biden administration insisted the ransom payment was a “private sector decision” and said that “the administration has not offered further advice at this time.”

After the ransom was widely reported as having been paid and gas began to flow again, President Biden gave a “no comment” when asked if he was aware of the payment. It was a curious response since the media apparently knew. The company certainly knew, and, most importantly, DarkSide knew. Yet, the White House wanted to portray itself as a pure observer to a private decision on how to handle “hackers.”

The reason is obvious: Colonial just paid a ransom to terrorists. Moreover, gas pipelines are not just “a private company” but a highly regulated industry that closely follows the government’s directions.

The fact is that most of Washington wanted the company to pay off the terrorists because our East Coast was rapidly melting down over shortages. While The New York Times bizarrely issued (and later quietly deleted) a statement that the attack had not led to any gas station lines or higher prices, other news stories were filled with images of long lines, fights at pumps and cascading shortages.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/10/three-bystanders-shot-in-broad-daylight-in-times-square-by-a-man-named-farrakhan-muhammad-n1445762

Just before five o’clock on Saturday afternoon in Times Square, a man began firing randomly into the crowd, injuring three people, including a four-year-old girl. The “white supremacy is the biggest threat to our nation and we must have gun control” propaganda mill couldn’t even start its wheels turning before the perpetrator was identified as a 31-year-old illegal CD peddler and possible drug dealer Farrakhan Muhammad, who was still at large as of Monday afternoon.

The cops thought they had nabbed the shooter when they zeroed in on a man who matched the description of the man whose image from security cameras had been circulated, but he told them he was actually the shooter’s brother, and gave them the name of the perp. It remains unclear how the NYPD determined that they weren’t really talking with the shooter himself but instead bought his story that his brother did it.

In any case, the brother told the cops that Farrakhan Muhammad hadn’t intended to shoot random people; Farrakhan had actually been aiming at his brother, who was standing in the crowd, but he was a poor shot.

That may really be what happened, but I also can’t help but notice that Farrakhan Muhammad has a very interesting name. He appears to be named after one man who has called for 10,000 volunteers to stalk and kill white people, and after another who is generally considered to be the author of a book that three times exhorts people to “kill them wherever you find them” (Qur’an 2:191, 4:89, cf. 9:5). Might Farrakhan Muhammad’s ideology and worldview have had anything to do with these shootings, or were they all about his being angry with his brother, as has been reported?

Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe Farrakhan Muhammad is a born-again Christian or an avowed pacifist who just lost his temper. Nonetheless, his name in connection with his act does raise eyebrows. After all, the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaeda have repeatedly called for random jihad attacks on individuals in the U.S. and Europe of precisely the kind that Farrakhan Muhammad committed on Saturday.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/china-now-tops-all-nations-foreign-agent-spending-daniel-greenfield/

Some context for these numbers.

The number of unregistered foreign agents is several times greater than the number of unregistered foreign agents. These rules are generally not enforced until the government decided that they should be enforced. The Trump administration began going after China’s unregistered foreign agents resulting in a clearer picture of how much money China is spending on its activities in the United States.

But this is still the tip of the iceberg.

New foreign-agent filings are finally detailing a massive Beijing propaganda operation that’s fueled a sixfold increase in disclosed Chinese foreign influence efforts in the United States in recent years.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Chinese foreign agent spending has skyrocketed from just over $10 million in 2016 to nearly $64 million last year.

Thanks largely to its stable of propaganda operations, China is now the top spender on foreign influence operations in the U.S.

American laws designed to force disclosure of paid foreign influence are beginning to reveal the huge sums Beijing has devoted to its effort.

Don’t let Axios kid you, this is a limited percentage of the real sum. They’ve got community groups, campus associations, scientific organizations, and a whole lot less that’s not showing up anywhere. A lot of this is just state propaganda outlets having to get legal.

CRP data show Chinese entities spent more on registered foreign agent activities in 2020 than those of any other nation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17343/sonic-attacks

Unfortunately, neither the Obama nor Trump administrations imposed costs on Cuba or China. With such direct attacks on the U.S. going unpunished, how could American enemies not now be tempted to use their new weapons on American soil?

“If we do nothing, then China or Russia will deploy these devices for large-scale use on the eve of a major military conflict. Imagine microwave weapon trucks on the bluffs overlooking the Pentagon.” — Richard Fisher, leading China military expert at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, to Gatestone Institute, May 2021.

Up to now, the CIA and State Department have been especially lax in trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious cases, but no unit in the federal government has made much progress.

Washington… should know who at least some of the culprits are. The real mystery is why the U.S. still has not done anything to protect its officials and citizens.

Unidentified parties have in recent years been directing sonic attacks on U.S. officials on American soil. One such attack even occurred on the grounds of the White House.

We should not be surprised. Failure to impose costs on known sonic attackers — the Cuban and Chinese regimes — almost certainly emboldened the perpetrators to think they could harm Americans in America.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/04/27/the_air_force_is_about_to_lower_its_already_low_standards_774596.html

Air Force standards for flight training and promotions have been on a downward spiral since the Cold War ended in 1991. Incredibly, the service’s senior leaders are about to accelerate that dive. 

Before we explore these latest moves and their repercussions, let’s take a minute to revisit the journey that brought the Air Force to where it is today.  

During the 1980s, the U.S. faced a potential conflict with the Soviet Union. Soviet air-to-air capabilities and surface-to-air missile systems presented a formidable threat.  The U.S. Air Force, therefore, designed standards and a training pipeline that prepared pilots to excel in that environment. That pipeline incrementally stepped their skill levels by presenting an ever-growing number of tasks and increasingly complex systems and missions they were expected to master. 

Training is expensive, but those costs rise steeply after flight school, making it the most economical point to screen out poor performers.  Student failures at every level beyond becoming more and more burdensome; however, the costliest failures take place, not in training but in the unforgiving environment of combat. There, mission success and the lives of others rely on the faculties and the confidence of our pilots. 

To ensure mission success, screening at all levels was intense.  The washout rate for flight school in the 1980s was high—just three out of every four students got their wings. And the demand for proficiency elevated with every level of training beyond.  A few more washed out of fighter lead-in training, front-line fighter training, and even Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun).