[TTP: Skye asked the question, “Is this a case of DEI = DIE?” when he shared this article about our Woke Army’s relief efforts. Mike Ryan responded to his question and TTP thought his insight should be shared. His response is at the end of this article.]

Four of the U.S. Army vessels supporting the “floating pier” in Gaza broke from their moorings Saturday and ran aground, with two of the four beaching themselves on the Israeli coast.

The Navy Times reported:

Four U.S. Army vessels supporting the maritime humanitarian aid mission in Gaza broke free from their moorings due to heavy sea states Saturday, U.S. Central Command said.

Every once in a while, there is a seminal article written that elucidates political calculations not obvious on their surface.

In particular, foreign policy matters tend to be complicated to the point that most Americans focus little attention on understanding the motivations of presidents’ foreign policy decisions despite their broad national security implications.

One of the most important columns that comes to mind is Michael Doran’s brilliant essay from 2015 entitled Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy in which Doran explains Barack Obama’s motivation for empowering Iran as a regional hegemon at the expense of U.S. national security and regional alliances.

That column was followed in 2021 by another must-read essay co-written by Doran and Tony Badran entitled The Realignment in which the authors conclude that in the Middle East, “Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are on board.”

The authors discuss the influence of returning Obama advisors on a policy intended to realign the Middle Eastern order into “one that relies more on partnership with Iran.”

Bad ideas are sometimes the hardest to dethrone.

It’s probably accurate to say most people think of money as the paper currency printed by governments. And it is money in the sense that it functions as a medium of exchange, but is it sound? Is it vulnerable to inflation?

Its very existence is evidence that it is, so why are so many people reluctant to switch to a money that isn’t?

There any many myths surrounding hard money currencies, and one of them is that money, both its nature and supply, is best left to the alleged guardian of our rights, the state.

The fact that money came into existence on the market, and that its ultimate form and supply were determined by economic law, is disregarded.

Money matters belong to the state because the state, unlike the rest of us, is in a position to remove itself from market discipline. Since the state is necessary to our survival, the story goes, it cannot do its job unless it can control the growth of money.

Money, therefore, must be of such a nature that its supply can grow in accordance with the orders of a state-appointed committee.

Even the classical gold standard was under control of the state.

When that control proved too limited for those eager for war, it was abandoned.

The gold standard did not fail. States failed to keep the gold standard.

[Editor:  This falls into the “stating the obvious” category – but sometimes the obvious needs stating.]

“How big is the sun?

We just heard right this minute

A million of our earths

could all fit right in it.”

Those words can be found in Dr. Seuss children’s book There’s No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System.

About what you’re about to read, it won’t be a statistical or scientific argument supporting or disdaining the theory that is global warming. No such skills exist to make either, but even if they did exist, the view here is that statistical arguments about anything involving personal freedom are loser arguments.

Think back to the spring of 2020 and the coronavirus to see why.

Strategic sealift is an essential element of the U.S. military’s logistics system. Sealift provides weaponry, fuel, ammunition, and other support needed for warfighting on the battlefield. Roughly 90% of all needed supplies and equipment travel by sea.

There is no viable alternative to sea transport. The distances are too great and the vast tonnages of military weapons and support equipment dictate transportation by sea. What is logistics, and why is it important? Let’s hear from some historical figures on the importance of logistics:

“Logistics [is] … as vital to military success as daily food is to daily work.” —Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (USN)

“Amateurs worry about strategy. Dilettantes worry about tactics. Professionals worry about logistics.” —Unknown

“You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” —General Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I don’t know what the hell this logistics is that [Gen.] Marshall is always talking about, but I want some of it.” —Admiral E.J. King (USN)

“My logisticians are a humorless lot. … They know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.” —Alexander the Great

All humor aside, the importance of sea transport of our military assets to war cannot be overemphasized.

Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.

Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.

The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.

More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?

Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.

News broke a few hours ago that the helicopter carrying Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, has crashed in the mountainous, wooded terrain of Eastern Azerbaijan, with a search ongoing for the crash site.

Sometimes bad things happen, but when the President of Iran’s helicopter crashes, and his foreign minister was on the copter, too, one wonders if it's more than coincidence. People are already wondering whether this was an accident or something more.

It’s no secret that Iran is a worldwide state funder of terrorism. Along with Qatar, it’s the money behind both Hezbollah and Hamas, which are fighting Israel from the East and the North. Violence in the Middle East would be dramatically diminished if Iran’s bankroll were cut off. The same is true for the military support it provides in terms of weapons, training, and strategy.

But it’s not just Israel that’s a target of Iranian malevolence. Since 1979, Iran’s battle cry has been “Death to America.” The official government policy is that it is in an existential war with the United States. Israel is the “Little Satan,” while America is the “Great Satan.”

Frédéric Bastiat in his book The Law distinguishes between profit and plunder.

Profit is financial gain earned through industrious behavior. Business owners make a profit by selling products at a greater amount than what it costs to produce that product.

Plunder, by contrast, is the theft of property through nonvoluntary means, such as theft, coercion, or fraud.

Bastiat noted that while most plunder is illegal, there remains one major exception: the state.

All plunder is an act of aggression against someone else’s natural rights, hence why it is morally wrong.

Regular plunder is a tough business, even for delinquent thieves. There is risk involved in robbing or defrauding someone, leading to no return on the effort of the thief.

There is also the issue of the victim or potential victims of plunder being more aware of and resistant to future attempts at plunder.

Despite the inclinations of a few thieves toward high-risk, high-reward plunder, most thieves prey upon the vulnerable.

I was in Barbados earlier this year. During our tour, the guide proudly boasted that Barbados’s all-female government had mandated that the whole island will go completely solar by 2035 or something.

I commented to my companion that this seemed like an idiotic idea for a nation that lives in a hurricane zone.

Well, my prediction about combining wind zones and solar panels came true, although not in Barbados (yet) but in India.

The Lokmat Times has the story:  “A summer storm on Tuesday….

Do any of the Democrats engaged in lawfare against President Trump read the news about leftists south of the border who do the same things they are doing?

Maybe Panama's election a week ago would be useful for them to know.

The parallels here are quite striking. A former president who brought prosperity to his country through conservative and free market values from 2009 to 2014, Ricardo Martinelli, was running for a non-consecutive term as president.

The left, which took power after him, made a hash of the economy, and turned Panama into an illegal alien superhighway, leaving voters with only the memory of how good things were during Martinelli's administration.

The Associated Press seemed to think the voters remembered….

None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.

These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.

As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins.

It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.

The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share various embarrassments.

American colleges, known for fostering social movements, have witnessed a curious alliance in recent decades — the Leftist-Islamist coalition, an uneasy and yet significant force. This essay delves into this collaboration, raising questions about its ideological compatibility and financial transparency.

The political leanings of American faculty have been a topic of discussion since the 1930s.

Studies like those by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) consistently show a higher concentration of liberals, particularly in humanities and social sciences.

The Hamas apologists who now infest Ivy League and other campuses either do not know, or willfully choose to ignore, the fact that war is not a law enforcement activity whose purpose is to punish the guilty and spare the innocent.

If we look at the history of warfare, their complaints about civilian losses in Gaza are disinformation and dissimulation, with no other identifiable purpose than to protect Hamas from the consequences of its actions.

The same goes for the bleating from António Guterres, UNRWA, and the International Court of Justice. They are nothing more than our era’s counterparts of Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, and Lord Haw-Haw.

This does not mean that it is ever acceptable to target genuine noncombatants, and Israel bends over backward to avoid hitting them. Even enemy combatants in most wars, however, are guilty of nothing more than wearing the wrong color uniform.

The definition of a false flag is a hostile or harmful action (such as an attack) that is designed to look like it was perpetrated by someone other than the person or group responsible for it.

It was first done by pirates who would fly flags of friendly nations to allow themselves to get close enough to attack merchant ships.

The historical use of a flag isn’t the key -- it’s the deception.

Last week was full of shocks for Moscow. The United States finally approved $61 billion of aid to Ukraine, the European Parliament passed a resolution rejecting the legitimacy of Russia’s March presidential elections, and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested in Moscow on accusations of bribery.

The last event was the most astounding, as there have been practically no significant corruption cases in Russia since the war in Ukraine began (The Moscow Times, April 25). Ivanov has been a prominent figure in Moscow’s high society and has ties to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, and Sergei Kiriyenko, the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration (The Moscow Times, April 25).

More than that, Ivanov was the prime protégé of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.  That he was arrested for bribery corruption when corruption is the organizing principle of Putin’s rigid autocracy is being seen by Russia’s elites that Putin’s rule is in decline.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, recently warned about China’s “breathtakingly fast” development of space military capabilities following his trips to South Korea and Japan.

“We are seriously focused at U.S. Space Command on our pacing challenge, which is the People’s Republic of China,” Gen. Whiting told reporters during a call from Japan on April 24.

“The People’s Republic of China is moving at breathtaking speed in space, and they are rapidly developing a range of counter-space weapons to hold at risk our space capabilities.

They’re also using space to make their terrestrial forces—their army, their navy, their marine corps, their air force—more precise, more lethal, and more far-ranging.”

The number of public companies has fallen fast.

Since the late 1990s, the number of US publicly traded companies has plunged from about 8K in 1996 to about 4.6K in 2022. (It’s bounced back a bit more recently.)

How come?

There’s no shortage of theories about why this has occurred.

A favorite, among American executives, is that new regulations that followed fraud and accounting scandals of the early 2000s (best embodied by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) simply made going public too costly, especially for smaller companies.

The self-serving conclusion that such inconveniences ought to be done away with is heavily implied.

This doesn’t make much sense, as the number of public companies had been tumbling for years before those new rules came into existence, much less went into force.

In two previous essays, I have discussed popular nullification in the context of the American people rejecting the State’s propaganda and withdrawing their respect for the rule of law.

As the U.S. and other Western governments continue to engage in a cognitive war against their own citizens, an increasing share of Western populations will conclude that their own institutions have been secretly targeting them as enemies.

Because the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and other globalist bodies have chosen to spread falsehoods (first they panicked about “global cooling” before pushing the more terrifying “global boiling,” after all) in a calculated campaign to sow public fear and drive public policy, authority figures have forfeited the public’s trust.  As Western governments and their international coalitions (e.g., the World Health Organization) respond to the public’s rejection of their authority by imposing new censorship and surveillance rules on society, the fracture separating the governing from the governed will widen into an unbridgeable crevasse.

On the HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher,” guests Piers Morgan and Gillian Tett were discussing a 15-week abortion ban as an unofficial American standard and comparing it to the rest of the world. By the way, the U.S. remains one of only seven nations in the world permitting abortion all the way through pregnancy — China, Vietnam, and North Korea among the others.

Predictably, Tett went to the usual leftist tactic by asking why we even care, adding that it’s outdated and strange that people do. This is where host and comedian Bill Maher chimed in, giving a refreshingly honest — if also rather horrifying — take on the pro-choice argument. He started out by addressing Tett’s conviction that focusing on the abortion issue is strange, saying, “Not if you think it’s murder.”

If a belligerent state launched 185 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would President Joe Biden call it a “win”?

Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?

This is what Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of the Jewish state.

Common sense and the realization that trans activism is the tyranny of the few are starting to make public opinion swing back to sanity.

Science continues to prove common sense on the gender front. A new study has reaffirmed what has already been posited: that most children who struggle with gender confusion grow out of it by adulthood.

This study comes from the Netherlands. Over the span of 15 years, researchers followed 2,700 children. Starting at age 11, they asked the participants every three years whether or not they felt confused about their gender. The results are what one might expect.

Discomfort in their own bodies began to manifest at around age 11 (the onset of puberty). Girls were more prone to this feeling of gender discontent than boys. But by age 25, a significant majority of these children — 96%, in fact — no longer felt discomfort with their biological sex.

WASHINGTON—The Chinese Communist Party is “getting away with murder” as it expands its tentacles in international bodies like the United Nations to shun criticism, according to Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.).

“They are getting away with, literally, murder in plain sight, and too many countries are acquiescing or running, sadly, away from the issues that China is notoriously known for,” he told The Epoch Times, citing the regime’s repression of religious freedom and pervasive use of torture.

“Everywhere you look, it is bad and getting worse, and they are doing a full court press at the United Nations to cover it up.”

Mr. Smith, who chairs the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, on April 10 presided over a hearing examining Beijing’s decades-long effort to subvert the United Nations system.

The United States remains the largest funder to the United Nations, contributing as much as $18 billion in 2022—the latest year with full data available.

Despite its outsized payments, the United States’ generosity hasn’t translated to commensurate influence at the United Nations when compared to China.

Chinese officials headed four of 15 U.N. specialized agencies, with deputies in nine others as of 2020. Leadership roles at the U.N. system prove a handy tool for Beijing when its interests are on the line.

“Don’t.” That was Joe Biden’s one-word tough-guy warning on more than one occasion regarding whether Iran would strike Israel. It blew up in his face over the weekend as Iran launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at civilian targets in Israel — the first time Iran struck Israel from its own soil, largely skipping using proxies like Hamas. Fortunately, Israel was ready and, along with U.S., British, and Jordanian assistance, foiled nearly all of the incoming fire.

“Well, he said ‘Don’t’ multiple times,” said former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “and ‘Don’t’ isn’t a national security policy. It’s not even a deterrent.”

It’s practically an invitation from this president. In fact, the Biden administration reportedly conveyed to Iran through Turkey that its action against Israel must be “within certain limits.”

When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows.

Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking.

The same thing has happened with the woke movement and the now-huge Diversity/Equity/Inclusion conglomerate.

Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.