It’s a fool’s game to try to predict President Trump’s audacious new moves. Tommy Vietor was the latest to learn this. He posted that it was “really scary” that hostilities between India and Pakistan were escalating and that Trump was “completely asleep at the wheel.” Twelve hours later Trump announced he’d mediated a peace deal between the two countries.
In Lebanon he has acted to substantially cut off Hezb’allah’s supply and revenue sources, making it more likely that country’s civilian government will be able to reassert control and enhance the peace of the area.
BEIRUT—Lebanon’s only commercial airport sits in the heart of a densely populated area of southern Beirut largely controlled by Hezbollah. The militant group has for years used it as a smuggling channel and a lever to assert its dominance in the country.
Now the country’s new government, with U.S. support, is trying to take it back.
Dozens of airport staffers suspected of being affiliated with Hezbollah have been removed, according to senior Lebanese security and military officials. Smugglers have been arrested and existing laws are now being enforced, Lebanon’s new prime minister said. Ground crews say they are no longer directed by superiors to exempt some planes and passengers from searches, while flights from Iran have been suspended since February. And the state is installing new surveillance technologies that will incorporate artificial intelligence, a senior security official said.
The overhaul is part of a broader effort to limit Hezbollah’s influence and revenue flows that have made it such a powerful force in the country.
“You can feel the difference,” Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We’re doing better on smuggling for the first time in the contemporary history of Lebanon.”
From the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Hussain Abdul Hussain:
#Lebanon might turn out to be Prez Trump’s most remarkable achievements. “The steps to take back the airport come as Lebanon’s army is making progress dismantling Hezbollah positions and weapons stockpiles in southern Lebanon, the core requirement in a cease-fire deal the country agreed to with Israel in November.”
A free tip for readers: No one close to the President will be leaking to the media. Anything based on a report from an anonymous “insider” is total psyops designed to diminish him. A good example is the many news accounts suggesting there’s a split between the President and Netanyahu and that, i.e., he plans to recognize Palestine. Ambassador Mike Huckabee categorically denies this:
All the nonsense about @POTUS & @IsraeliPM is from “sources” who don’t put their name on it. I will put mine. The partnership is STRONG. What’s broken is credibility of fake news.
Ioannis Papayannopoulos:
“If I were a Marxist I would be inclined to argue that (with no apologies to Lenin) globalization and not imperialism is the highest state of capitalism. And like imperialism, which coopted the working classes by promoting nationalism and subverting religion, globalization has succeeded in drawing in much of the left with the promises of open borders, fluidity of social norms, and a regimented society. I guess Marxism does a much better job in explaining politics than economics. Karl must be rolling in his grave.”
The handmaiden of open borders was a make-believe international free trade system in which we were taken great advantage of. Trump dug in his heels at this and demanded new tariff negotiations, “Experts” claimed this would be a disaster, others demanded immediate proof of lowering trade barriers to U.S. goods and services. Like Vietor, they spoke too soon. We’ve already negotiated a trade deal with the UK and China, an export-driven economy which has taken the greatest advantage of the former system, is lined up to deal (as are a reported 25 other countries).
Chalk up another expert failure, if you can find room on the board to mark another tally. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Exclusive — China Sends Xi’s Security Czar to Trade Talks With U.S.” Defying expert predictions that China would easily outwait Trump’s crippling tariffs, the two countries began meeting yesterday in Switzerland to begin negotiations.
It was another narrative sea-change. Corporate media has packed its columns and airwaves with experts laughing like braying donkeys at the idea that China would ever cave on its public promises that it would never ever negotiate with Orange People unless the tariffs were first reversed. That, of course, was their second argument, after chortling experts explained (drawing with crayons so we deplorables could understand) that tariffs only hurt American consumers, a moronic claim that was instantly belied by the wails of anguish from foreign trade partners and by plummeting egg prices.
While they never mention it, reporters also never argue with the fact that China has been a poor economic partner for a very long time. The Chinese manipulate their currency to squeeze profits out of U.S. customers, brazenly steal and knock off U.S. inventions and ignore international intellectual property laws, fuel fentanyl forces, conduct corporate espionage, inject marxist nonsense into our colleges and universities, and generally swank around like they own the United States’ government and can do whatever they want.
Anyway, once again corporate media was wrong. Trump was right. The Chinese are, in fact, negotiating. And those negotiations follow the announcement of a UK-US deal that contained a massive hidden disclosure that should have been yesterday’s top headline.
[Snip]
It was more of an incremental agreement than any finalized trade deal, which is completely unsurprising given the complexities and wild varieties of issues involved in international trade.
[Snip]
The general sense is that America is winning the negotiations. According to Trump’s team, this initial deal will create $6 billion in new tariff revenue for the U.S., in addition to $5 billion in new markets for American farmers. Industry agreed. Yesterday, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association issued an enthusiastic press release titled, “President Trump Secures Win for America’s Cattle Producers.”
As usual, the media missed the real headline. Yesterday, we learned for the first time that Trump’s ten percent across-the-board minimum will remain — as a permanent new income source. Press Secretary Leavitt told skeptical reporters (1:07) that, “The president is committed to the 10% baseline tariff, not just for the United Kingdom, but for his trade negotiations with all other countries as well, permanently, even after the deals are done.”
It was an economic nuclear bomb.
An astonished reporter picked up on that explosive bit of news, the quiet declaration of a permanent tariff baseline, and pressed Leavitt, asking again, “Permanently? Even after the deals are done? Like, that is going to remain?” Secretary Leavitt doubled down a stressed, “The President is determined to continue with that baseline tariff. I just spoke with him about it earlier.”
[Snip]
That’s not just a negotiation tactic. It might be the outline of a structural re-engineering of the entire way America funds its government.
For the first time, riots on college campuses are meeting stiff resistance from law enforcement, while visas of those foreign students involved are being cancelled and these “students” deported. Other students are being arrested and face disciplinary charges.
Taking up the torch from the arrested and dispersed students who love murderous barbarians are Democratic leaders like Democrat rep. LaMonica McIver and Newark mayor Ras Baraka, who invaded an ICE detention facility holding MS 13 gangsters and illegal immigrant rapists. McIver is captured on bodycam footage assaulting DHS agents. All these Democrat officials are subject to prosecution under 18 U.S.C. Sec 111.
Because it consistently refused to follow federal civil rights law, Harvard was advised it would no longer be eligible for federal research grants. Before you are manipulated into believing you’ll die of dreadful diseases if Harvard is denied research grants, you might consider venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya’s take on this:
Maybe we need to see that the emperor has no clothes.
The most “elite” educational institutions in the US are rotten and overburdened with too many administrators, hall monitors and oppressive group think. It also turns out that concentrating research and funding creates honeypots for foreign spying. Sheesh.
A good solution to this is to start spreading the federal education and research dollars more broadly — who said Iowa St (for example) deserves less than Stanford in the first place. May have been true 30 years ago but highly unlikely anymore.
Perhaps as more research grants are distributed more broadly to more schools in the US, the professors equally spread out and we start to fix how broken high education is. Tie the dollars to low administrative burden and we may have a magic formula to jumpstart our research and scholarship capability in the critical areas of the future (AI, biology + life sciences, materials science, energy).
NIH, among others, could help start this cascade asap.
There’s no doubt in my mind we are undergoing a rapid widespread change in national culture and in the way we’ve been governed for decades. This is unsettling to many and especially to the media and the “experts” it has so long relied on to feed them copy. Nevertheless, this is the kind of revolution which is timely and necessary, and which only this president and his capable cabinet are willing and able to achieve.
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.