RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18564/iran-nuclear-deal-purpose

Many analysts argue that the nuclear deal — original and revised — is primarily about legitimizing Iran’s nuclear program. The deal, they say, is designed to strengthen, not weaken, the Islamic Republic.

Statements by Obama and his senior foreign policy advisors, the same people who are now advising President Biden, reflect a belief — a naïve one, many say — that if Iran were stronger, and traditional American allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — were weaker, the Middle East could achieve a new balance of power that would result in more peaceful region.

“The catch to Obama’s newly inclusive ‘balancing’ framework was that upgrading relations with Iran would necessarily come at the expense of traditional partners targeted by Iran — like Saudi Arabia and, most importantly, Israel. Obama never said that part out loud, but the logic isn’t hard to follow: Elevating your enemy to the same level as your ally means that your enemy is no longer your enemy, and your ally is no longer your ally.” — Lee Smith, Middle East analyst, Tablet magazine.

“The Realignment rests on, to put it mildly, a hollow theory. It misstates the nature of the Islamic Republic and the scope of its ambitions. A regime that has led ‘Death to America’ chants for the last 40 years is an inveterately revisionist regime. The Islamic Republic sees itself as a global power, the leader of the Muslim world, and it covets hegemony over the Persian Gulf — indeed, the entire Middle East.” — Tony Badran and Michael Doran, Middle East analysts, Tablet magazine.

“After oil, the Islamic Republic’s major export item is the IRGC-commanded terrorist militia — the only export that Iran consistently produces at a peerless level. Malley and Sullivan got it exactly wrong when they argued, in effect, that allies are suckering the United States into conflict with Iran. It is not the allies but the Islamic Republic that is blanketing the Arab world with terrorist militias, arming them with precision-guided weapons, and styling the alliance it leads as ‘the Resistance Axis.’ It does so for one simple reason: It is out to destroy the American order in the Middle East.” — Tony Badran and Michael Doran.

U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley has confirmed that diplomatic efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal originally signed by U.S. President Barack Obama are at an impasse. “We do not have a deal with Iran, and prospects for reaching one are, at best, tenuous,” Malley told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing on May 25.

Malley also admitted that the Biden administration is seeking a new deal that is “shorter” and “weaker” than the original deal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his confirmation hearing in January 2021, promised that the administration would pursue a new deal that is “longer” and “stronger.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/05/25/majority-report-canadas-latest-advance-in-precognitive-legislation-n1600764

The 2002 film Minority Report was a box office success and, like the Matrix franchise, emerged as one of the most talked-about movies of recent times. The crux of the film involved a “precrime” policing unit that could act to prevent crimes before they were committed, on evidence provided by a team of comatose subjects with precognitive abilities. Of course, the plot was utterly absurd, demanding major suspension of viewer disbelief, but nonetheless provocative in its social and political implications. 

Though the story descends into complicated but typical melodrama — abducted child, failed marriage, false accusation, eventual resolution — resulting in the abandonment of the clairvoyant project, the idea of precrime prevention is the fanciful “hook” on which the narrative depends. It serves as the fiction within the fiction that has to be initially accepted if the film is to retain its unlikely coherence. Of course, what the film calls a “minority report” is an anomalous factor, different from the more comprehensive reports of predictive infallibility, but second sight remains the rule. Obviously, no such precognitive technology is even remotely conceivable — or so we might have thought.

Leave it to the Canadian prime minister, as many have noted, to translate the central premise of the movie into the realm of public policy. Bill C-261, currently pending before Parliament, proposes to deal with the newly formulated crime of online “hate propaganda” and “hate speech” before said crime has actually been contemplated, let alone occurred, assuming the plaintiff believes that he or she is the intended target of hate. An individual can thus be accused of a crime and made to pay the price — censure, compensatory damages, or even imprisonment — before the event has taken place. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/death-tehran-kenneth-r-timmerman/

The motorcycle killers who assassinated a senior Quds Force officer in Tehran on Sunday knew what they were doing.

According to Iranian media accounts, accomplices blocked the street behind the target’s car by double-parking and raising their trunk, clearing the way for the motorcycle killers who shot Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei five times as he was about to drive off in his Kia Pride.

The feat was even more brazen since the Colonel’s street led directly to the Iranian parliament, one of the most secure areas of Tehran. The assassins hit Khodaei from behind in the head and the heart, blowing out both the driver and the passenger side windows of his car, according to photos subsequently released to the Iranian media.

The Iranian regime immediately blamed Israel for the assassination, referring to Khodaei as a “defender of the shrine,” a reference to Quds Force officers engaged in the fight against ISIS in Syria.

Khodaei, whose real name was Bahram, was one of three brothers who joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the 1980s and fought in the war against Iraq. All three brothers, and four more Khodaei cousins, later became officers in the elite Quds Force, Iranian sources said.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/26/the-elites-have-every-intention-of-controlling-our-lives/

From the world’s largest gathering of hypocrites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, we have learned that a personal carbon footprint tracker is in the works. In the wrong hands, it would be the equivalent of the ankle monitors used to ensure that criminal offenders don’t escape their house arrest.

“We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their whole carbon footprint,” J. Michael Evans, president of Alibaba Group USA, said Tuesday while on a panel discussion on responsible consumption. “What does that mean? Where they are traveling. How they are traveling. What are they eating. What they are consuming on the platform.”

This will excite the virtue signalers who will be happy to post their carbon footprint scores on social media. But for the rest of us, those still wishing to live freely, who don’t want elites establishing the limits of “responsible consumption,” it’s deeply troubling.

Evans described the tracker as if it were just another way for people to keep up with their activities – like a smart watch that monitors health.

But the existence of the technology plays straight into the hands of the wrong people, which in the developed world is roughly half of all elected officials and nearly all of the regulators and bureaucrats of the administrative state. Don’t think that they will decline the opportunity to someday require, in the name of saving the climate, each of us to have a carbon footprint tracker so that our lives can be monitored, and our behavior adjusted as needed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18562/genocide-for-profits

Putin’s genocidal war on Ukraine may have less to do with empire and far more to do with profits.

Enormous profits.

There has been considerable commentary about Putin’s war motives, from a belief that Ukraine is little more than an insurgent province of Mother Russia to a fear that Ukraine is becoming a satellite of Western democracies. But those motives miss the fact that Putin rules by allowing oligarchs to enrich themselves and — by extension — himself. And like any criminal, he is going where the money is and there is much money buried in the ground of Ukraine.

While it has historically been considered a rich agricultural region, it is now considered extremely valuable. Putin understands that Ukraine is also very rich in the precious metal lithium. One source reports that for fixed contracts, the annual average lithium price in the United States was $17,000 per ton in 2021, more than double that in 2020.

Published reports reference Ukrainian experts who believe their nation’s Donbas region, now occupied by Russia, holds some 500,000 tons of lithium oxide, a source for refined lithium.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18535/russia-china-nuclear-threats

Russia has not only been modernizing its nuclear triad; it has also been developing new types of nuclear systems….

Russia, of course, is not the only nuclear threat to the United States. China has accelerated its nuclear buildup to the extent that Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, “For the first time in our history, the nation is on a trajectory to face two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently. We can no longer assume the risk of strategic deterrence failure in conflict will always remain low.”

The Minuteman III ICBMs are badly in need of modernization — they were built in the 1970s and were originally intended to last for just 10 years. The development of a next-generation ICBM, known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) has been decided, but the process has proven slow and the Air Force only expects the GBSD to begin replacing Minuteman III in 2029. According to General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the GBSD system will not achieve initial operational capability until 2030, or full operational capability until 2035.

“It’s going to take us 10 to 15 years to modernize 400 [ICBM] silos that already exist. China is basically building almost that many overnight.” — General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Defense Magazine, regarding the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, September 13, 2021.

The Minuteman III has grave structural problems stemming from the fact that “the missile itself is 51 years old,” but the launch capsules and other support facilities are “58 years old.” — Col. Erik Quigley, director of the Minuteman III systems directorate, Air Force Magazine, June 14 2021.

In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration decided that a new Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (known as the SLCM-N)…. needed to be added to the US nuclear arsenal to provide the US with “a needed non-strategic regional presence” that would address “the increasing need for flexible and low-yield options.” The Biden administration, however, removed it from the FY2023 budget, while several generals have disagreed with that decision, arguing that it is needed against Russia and China.

“The Trump Administration proposed the SLCM-N in 2018. Message to Mr. Putin: If you drop a nuke on NATO soil, the alliance has the will and ability to respond in kind. This reduces the risk Mr. Putin will use a nuke,” the WSJ wrote in April. “The Trump Administration said the U.S. might reconsider the SLCM-N if ‘Russia returns to compliance with its arms control obligations, reduces its non-strategic nuclear arsenal, and corrects its other destabilizing behaviors.’ How’s that working out? Now Mr. Biden is surrendering this leverage—probably to placate progressives who are opposed to nuclear weapons as an article of faith.” — Wall Street Journal editorial, April 20, 2022.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought renewed attention to Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the risk of nuclear war, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin placed his country’s nuclear forces on high alert shortly after invading Ukraine on February 24. Close to half of Americans are very concerned that Russia would directly target the U.S. with nuclear weapons, and an additional 3 in 10 are somewhat concerned about that, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18549/china-pacific-power-grab

All the Pacific Island nations invited to the foreign ministerial conference had already embraced Beijing’s “One China Policy.” Some of these states once had diplomatic links with Taiwan but were wooed away by Beijing’s offer of financial loans, investment and corrupt practices, such as direct interference in the domestic political affairs that threaten the sovereignty of governmental institutions in these island countries.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is accelerating its campaign to isolate Taiwan from the existing international order by offering bribes to leadership figures in some of these poor islands, in exchange for breaking with Taipei.

A Council on Foreign Relations report from May 4, 2022, “What the China-Solomon Islands Pact Means for the US,” states: “Beijing promised about $730 million in financial aid.”

[D]omination of the Pacific seems to mean to the CCP potential military control over, or vassalage of, not only to Taiwan, but also Japan, Australia, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and the US — in Guam, American Samoa, Micronesia, Northern Mariana, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Hawai’i.

Chinese Communist Party strategists would doubtless welcome agreements with any Pacific island to permit a Chinese military base or offers of a dual-use port facility for China’s growing navy. If Chinese warships could gain greater access to island state port facilities, China’s naval assets would be able to interrupt free passage in international waters of US naval vessels and others, both in major commercial sea lanes as well as military supply routes throughout the region.

The Marshall Islands provides the US with an opportunity to shut down an ongoing example of China’s accelerating effort to project power and influence and into the South Pacific.

The Communist Chinese government has offered to create artificial islands for Tuvalu…. Despite the appeal of this offer, Tuvalu rejected the proposal. Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Kausea Natano instead proposed a cooperative compact with all those Pacific island states that still maintain ties to Taiwan.

Last October, China convened, via video link, the first foreign ministerial conference with nine Pacific Island states: Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/iran-protests-over-soaring-food-prices-hit-several-vijeta-uniyal/

Rising prices and food shortages have triggered widespread protests in Iran, with video footage showing demonstrators chanting “death” to the country’s ruling duo — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi. “Protests over soaring food prices continued in several cities in Iran on Saturday, according to postings on social media,” the UK newspaper Guardian noted.

The oil-rich Shia Islamic regime, which has closely allied itself with Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, appears to be suffering the fallout from the raging conflict. The TV channel France24 noted that “in recent days, [the Iranian] people have been struggling to obtain basic necessities. Lines have stretched outside of food stores where some people have been seen fighting over cooking oil. Others have turned to looting.”

While ordinary Iranians face hardships, the regime is busy investing billions expanding its nuclear weapons program and financing terrorists groups abroad. In April, the Mullah regime signed up to join the emerging anti-U.S. military alliance led by China, and conducted war games with Chinese and Russian navies in the Indian Ocean two months ago.