WELL, HE’S RIGHT: Trump Reacts to Biden 2024 Announcement: ‘Most Corrupt President’ in History.

IT’S PAST TIME: It’s time to have ‘the talk’ about Grandpa Joe as he launches re-election bid.

The president is at that advanced age when families start having hard conversations about taking away grandpa’s car keys, or whether Aunt Julie should really be using the stove unattended. Well, it’s time for America to have that talk.

There is little doubt that for a half hour or so, Old Scranton Joe can be propped up in front of a flag reading an announcement off of his IMAX-sized teleprompter. Whether he will know what he is saying is another matter, but he’ll get through it, likely with the promise of ice cream to follow.

As with every speech Biden gives, we will experience the feelings, familiar from eyeing family members who are elderly, of concern as his eyes toggle between a dim light of recognition and a visage pleading, “Where am I?”

But as the Octogenarian-in-Chief is so often wont to say, this is not a joke.

Reminder: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

THAT’S JUST NUTS: Fake Female Swimmer Lia Thomas Says Those Who Think He Shouldn’t Compete Against Women Just Hate Women.

EVEN THE TALIBAN SOMETIMES DOES A BETTER JOB THAN JOE BIDEN DOES OF DEALING WITH AMERICA’S ENEMIES: Mastermind of Kabul airport massacre killed by Taliban.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Steven Spielberg Slams Woke Edits to Hollywood Classics, Including His Own.

THANKS, JOE: Americans rush to escape before Sudan plunges into civil war.

Then there’s this from Brett Bruen: What a bloody disgrace! Biden maroons 16,000 Americans in the Sudan warzone… then blithely demands four more years. I was an Obama diplomat who rescued US citizens abroad – and this is shameful.

HAS SOROS PICKED HER REPLACEMENT? Chicago’s Thug-hugging State’s Attorney Kim Foxx Not Seeking Re-election.

How China’s Huawei spooked Germany into launching a probe.

The latest freak-out over Chinese telecommunications equipment in Germany, which led to the announcement of a probe in March, has its origins in a little-known piece of Huawei technology that is supposed to control power consumption, POLITICO can reveal.

While much of the fear around Huawei in the West has focused on espionage and the risk of data leaking to Beijing, Germany’s latest investigation — and the intelligence that triggered it — point to another risk: the potential of sabotage through critical components that could collapse telecoms networks.
…
The revelations suggest security officials feared such a component could be used to disrupt telecoms operations or — in a worst case scenario — be exploited to bring down a network.

If God forbid there’s a Third World War, it seems more and more likely to begin with a digital Pearl Harbor — except the attack would come at “everything, everywhere, all at once,” to coin a phrase.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Was That a Biden 2024 Campaign Launch or a Drunk Hostage Video? “While I dread the prospect of having Sir Sniffsalot stinking up the Oval Office past Jan. 20, 2025, I’m also overwhelmed by morbid curiosity to see how his handlers pull this campaign off.”

ANDREW LOWENTHAL: An Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation.’

Twitter emails show consistent collaboration between military and intelligence officials and elite “progressives” from NGOs and academia. “They/them” signatures mingle with .mil, @westpoint, @fbi and others. How did the FBI and the Pentagon, once the avowed enemies of progressives for their attacks on the Black Panthers and the peace movement, their war-mongering and gross over-funding, begin to fuse and collude? They join together in election tabletop exercises and share hors d’oeuvres at conferences put on by oligarch philanthropists. That cultural and political shift was once a heavy lift, but now it is as simple as cc’ing each other.

Worse still, representatives of the military-industrial complex are lauded in the digital rights field. In 2022, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken featured prominently at RightsCon, the digital rights field’s biggest conference (an event EngageMedia co-organised in 2015 in the Philippines — Blinken did not appear then). Blinken oversees the Global Engagement Center (GEC), one of the most important US Government anti-disinformation initiatives (see #TwitterFiles 17), and is now alleged to have initiated his own disinformation campaign related to the Hunter Biden laptop – that of the “Russian information operation” letter signed by 50 former US intelligence officials.

Once adversaries are brought together via a strong through-line tracing from counter-terrorism, to countering violent extremism, to Minority Report-style policing of everyday speech and political difference.

Read the whole thing.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT “GENERIC REPUBLICAN” WON’T APPEAR ON THE BALLOT: Lamest Campaign Launch Ever: Biden Loses to Generic Republican 41%–47%.

YOU’LL OWN NOTHING AND YOU’LL DO AS YOU’RE TOLD: Biden administration is quietly planning for a future where you don’t own money. “Under the various CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency] proposals floated by the Biden administration and Federal Reserve, a U.S. CBDC would be programmable, traceable and designed to promote various left-wing social goals, such as improving ‘financial inclusion’ and ‘equity.’ It would also be designed to help with ‘transitioning to a net-zero emissions economy and improving environmental justice.'”

It would be the biggest money and power grab in world history by a wide margin.

DEADBEAT DAD: Hunter Biden Ordered to Appear in Court in Paternity Case.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. We’re done with “gradually”. We’ve now reached the “suddenly” part.

Back in 2009 when I started Sovereign Man, I spoke a lot about ideas that were highly controversial at the time.

I suggested that Social Security’s trust funds would run out of money. That the US government would eventually be buried by its gargantuan national debt. That the US dollar would eventually lose its international reserve dominance. That inflation and social conflict would rise.

The main thesis, quite simply, was that the US was in decline. And whenever I spoke at events, I used to talk about logarithmic decay, saying:

“As a civilization in decline, you never really know quite where you are on the curve. You could be way over here on the horizontal line, at the very beginning of the decline… or you could be standing on the precipice about to hit the vertical slide down.”

Well, now we have a much better idea of where we are on that logarithmic decay curve. Because these ideas about the national debt, inflation, social security, social conflict, etc. are no longer theories. Nor are they even remotely controversial.

This is from Simon Black who is far from alone in warning people about all of these long-ticking time bombs, and far from alone in being completely ignored by those who should have been defusing them.

THE BIDEN FAMILY CRIME SYNDICATE: Charges Loom for Hunter Biden as His Dad Launches Presidential Bid.

JUST ANOTHER TUESDAY FOR THE BIDEN CABAL: The Biden EPA Will Drive Energy Bills Even Higher With Yet Another Legally Dubious Regulation.

IF IT AIN’T WOKE, DON’T FIX IT: Warner Bros. to Mark Its 100th Anniversary by Wokeifying Its Old Classics.

FAT, STUPID, AND DRUNK ON POWER IS NO WAY TO GROW AN ECONOMY, SON: For America To Grow, Washington’s Swampy Spending Spree Has To Shrink.

THEY CHOSE… POORLY: Fox News ‘Is Dead,’ and Tucker Carlson Is Already Living Large With a Job Offer.

I WANT TO BELIEVE: Lue Elizondo Ran the Pentagon’s UFO Unit—and Says the Government Is Withholding What It Knows.

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP: Oxford ‘Cancels’ England’s Patron Saint George to Appease Islam.

ALEX BYRNE: Philosophy’s No-Go Zone. “An MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.”

Kafka could have written this piece as fiction.

FOUR MORE YEARS? Not If We Can Help It.

YES: On Arms Delays, Learn From Ukraine or Lose to China.

The war in Ukraine has exposed a deep vulnerability: from missiles to tanks, the West at present cannot produce needed weapons at speed and scale. This has meant a desperate struggle for Ukraine, but it also portends a potential crisis for the U.S. in the seas and air should an unanticipated prolonged conflict occur in the future such as is the possible case with Taiwan.

Particularly in the INDO-PACOM, where China’s military strength has reached unprecedented levels, American defense leaders looking to deter war, the time is now to surge production of proven assets that can best position the U.S. to win a fight in the Indo-Pacific. The F-35 should top their list. Though the defense industrial base is positioned to deliver such an increase, multiple obstacles remain on the government side of the equation. These must be overcome if America is to field enough of the highly capable fighters in time to make a difference.

As I’ve written before, it’s better to learn of these deficiencies during somebody else’s shooting war than during your own. The question is whether we’ll actually do anything about it, and one Beijing will watch closely to learn the answer.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Are Drag Queens Any Different From Scary Clowns?