RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21921/scarborough-shoal

The shoal is especially strategic: It guards the mouths to both Manila and Subic bays.

“The South China Sea is the key waterway that allows American naval forces to transit to and from allied nations in northeast Asia, southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. The lynchpin of control over that body of water today is Scarborough Shoal.” — James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and co-author of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure, to Gatestone Institute, September 19, 2025.

When Chinese leaders and flag officers saw Washington’s failure to protect a treaty ally in 2012 at Scarborough, they began moving against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs and islets in the South China Sea, went after Japan’s islets in the East China Sea, and began reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly chain. The Obama team unintentionally legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else that aggression worked.

“The Obama administration’s decision to allow China to take possession of Scarborough from our treaty ally Philippines emboldened China’s Communist Party to take control of the entirety of the South China Sea.” — James Fanell, to Gatestone Institute, September 19, 2025.

At Scarborough, the Chinese feel they can pick on a weak state and get an easy and casualty-free win, something Xi Jinping may feel he needs at this moment. Taiwan, on the other hand, presents a much harder target.

“If the war in Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that confronting adversaries at the first point of conflict is important, otherwise the enemy will fill the vacuum,” he noted. “If the U.S. fails to defend our national interests at Scarborough today, we can be sure that America will be facing a violent People’s Liberation Army at Guam, Hawaii, or even our West Coast in the not-too-distant future.” — James Fanell, to Gatestone Institute, September 19, 2025.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/horror-in-queens/

As if this week has not been horrible enough, a particularly dreadful crime in Bellerose, Queens, had the whole area of eastern Queens and central Nassau County in a panic the past 48 hours until the perpetrator was, mercifully, captured in Times Square late yesterday afternoon. Jamel McGriff, a 42-year-old out on parole with a long, violent rap sheet (including being required to register as a sex offender), went from door to door in leafy Bellerose in broad daylight at 10 a.m. knocking on doors until he found a target of opportunity — a couple in their late seventies whom he tormented and killed before setting their house on fire:

The suspect had earlier knocked on other doors in the neighborhood asking to charge his cell phone but was turned away before Frank Olton was seen on surveillance footage apparently allowing him in his backyard around 10:18 a.m., authorities said. The footage showed the owner apparently letting his killer in the rear door, according to cops. When the maniac left hours later, he was carrying a paper bag and one dark color bag, cops said…Once the fire was under control, police and firefighters made a grisly discovery. Frank Olton was found bound with a bungee cord in the basement and stabbed multiple times, while his wife’s body had been set on fire.

As Joe Marino, Georgett Roberts, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon of the New York Post reported, McGriff “was still on parole after being released from a 17-year state prison sentence in 2023, had been arrested for a sex attack of a worker at knifepoint inside a store in 2005 and other violent crimes. He had a criminal history dating back 30 years, including multiple robberies. The fiend had failed to register as a sex offender in November 2024 and he was wanted by the NYPD as a suspect in two recent robberies. Yet, he was not slapped with a parole violation, according to officials.” On Wednesday, the NYPD issued an alarmed warning: NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that McGriff was “armed and dangerous” and “The suspect’s MO is to go door to door, asking for some kind of assistance until he can gain entry.” The local police departments around Nassau were on heavy alert. The closest one could find to a motive for this brutality was robbery: McGriff was apprehended after “he used his victim’s charge cards at Macy’s and then to see a movie at the Regal Cinema in Times Square on Wednesday afternoon after he had pawned off two cell phones in the Bronx a day earlier.”

We have a serious under-incarceration problem when it comes to this sort of nihilistic predator. At least with his capture, multiple neighborhoods could go back to answering their doors and working in their yards.

https://www.thefp.com/p/china-is-overtaking-america-in-an-electric-car?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Chinese electric vehicles don’t just pose a market threat to Tesla. They could also be a weapon of war.

When the history of the early 21st century is written, it will surely focus on the war for global supremacy between two great nations: China and the United States.

It’s a war playing out in countless arenas, and all the signs point to America falling behind. China is hoarding rare earth minerals, building batteries, dominating drones (the ones deciding the fate of Ukraine), controlling critical supply chains, and stealing intellectual property. Oh, and it’s also coming for America’s electric cars.

Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, was once a potent symbol of America’s technological supremacy: a reminder that this country has the best ideas—and the will to make them happen. But, in a sign of the times, America’s EV pioneer now faces a growing threat from Chinese companies that have studied American inventions, replicated them, and arguably surpassed them, selling them—at scarily cheap prices—around the world.

Last year, China’s leading EV company, BYD—it claims the initials stand for Build Your Dreams—sold 4.3 million vehicles, overtaking reigning EV champion Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker. In Germany, China has over 40 percent of the EV market. In Mexico, it’s 70 percent. In Brazil, it’s an astonishing 89 percent, the vast majority of which are BYD autos.

“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson. “We are in a global competition with China,” he went on. “And if we lose this we do not have a future at Ford.”

Why? Because, as the world shifts from fossil fuels toward the cheaper electricity-powered technologies, every car company will need to sell electric vehicles. Those that don’t will fail. Indeed, just this past Monday, Ford announced a $2 billion retooling of a 70-year-old manufacturing facility in Louisville, Kentucky—to produce EVs, which the company says will be affordable and profitable. Just like BYD’s autos.

Farley has been outspoken about his fears about China’s EV industry.

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2025/08/12/can-the-us-address-its-ammunition-crisis-before-the-next-war-n4942631

While headlines focus on military modernization, a section of the Big Beautiful Bill allocates billions to ammunition production. It’s only the latest sign that defense officials have woken up to the crisis in ammunition production and are pouring money into production lines to close the gap between what’s needed and what is currently available.

It’s a readiness problem that was made worse in some respects by our massive support of ammunition to Ukraine in the early days of the war and to Israel. The U.S. was the only NATO nation with the stocks on hand to help Ukraine withstand the initial blows from Russia. 

The crisis, however, preceded Ukraine and has been part of a planned “managed decline” of military stocks that began in the early 2000s. 

Now, with China becoming more aggressive and North Korea a wild card, replenishing ammunition stocks, especially of 155mm shells, becomes a critical necessity. 

In congressional testimony, Army officials told Congress that they’ve “invested $4.9 billion to build new [munitions] production lines and add new capacity and resiliency to our supply chains across the country.” Also, the army is “expanding and modernizing existing facilities to increase speed, flexibility, and capacity.”

The end-goal is to create “21st-century production capabilities that can generate the ammunition stockpiles necessary to sustain our national defense” during a long war.

The Army reached its goal of quadrupling the production of 155mm shells this month by moving shell production to four separate sites. A new, fully automated 155mm artillery shell production factory called UNION Technologies opened in Texas a few weeks ago, and another new load, assembly, and pack factory opened in Arkansas last April.

In Indiana, a new explosive railcar holding yard is under construction, the first in decades.

Another deficiency related to the ammunition crisis is the lack of facilities and upgrades for munitions production. The U.S. has also failed to manufacture “abundant or novel energetics to power these explosives,” writes Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21794/race-against-china-ai-fusion-power

Fusion energy is not only cheap, clean and limitless, it is also the “engine” that will drive the enormous increases in artificial intelligence (AI) that will be the ultimate super-weapon of this century. AI requires power — enormous amounts of it — that only fusion energy can provide.

If there were a formula for who will dominate the 21st century, it would be: Fusion Energy + AI = World Supremacy.

Our nation, however, is now faced with a new and dangerous 21st century threat.

China has been steamrolling ahead developing cheap, clean and limitless fusion energy to fuel the great new frontier of AI. Meanwhile, America appears stuck in the technology of soon-to-be-outdated fission energy.

AI, as President Donald J. Trump has stated, is what will determine which nation is the superpower of the 21st century. The Trump administration cannot allow China to leave America in the dust for want of energy to power America’s AI.

In this century, there will be two types of nations: the ones that conquered fusion energy and those that wish they had.

As China’s proficiency in fusion energy grows — the Chinese have already exported a fusion device to Thailand — the United States dangerously still appears to prefer the soon-to-be- outdated fission energy, associated with the catastrophes of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the fission reactors in Ukraine, if a Russian missile should hit one.