Free Republic

While every coastal state has contributed to the decline of fish stocks to some degree, none surpass China’s impact. The 2019 IUU Fishing Index, which ranks coastal countries worldwide based on their vulnerability to, practice of, and response to harmful fishing practices, listed China as the top global offender, scoring 40 percent worse than the worldwide average. Furthermore, the United Nations found China’s distant-water fleet to have been underreporting their global catch size by a factor of 12. Countries in the Indo-Pacific region have lost patience with these illegal practices and have begun to push back.Many Chinese-flagged fishing vessels and...

Long is among a group of retired agents who say the FBI is already both politicized and weaponized. They trace the roots of these problems to the massive reorganization undertaken by former Director Robert Mueller after 9/11. Citing an avalanche of intelligence failures leading up to the attacks, critics demanded reform. Mueller decided the answer was centralized control from Washington, D.C..For most of its history, FBI operations revolved around 56 field offices. Mueller’s predecessor, Director Louis Freeh, started his career as an FBI field agent and supported the agency’s long-standing office-of-¬origin system. In that framework, a single field office is...

George Washington was truly the “Indispensable Man”. He commanded a consistently ragged, underfed, seldom paid, often mutinous amalgam of regulars and militia through over eight years of war. Toward the end after Yorktown in October 1781, his officers were determined to confront the Continental Congress with a list of truly legitimate, morally imperative grievances this body had ignored.Washington opposed this initiative, which for him was brought into sharp focus by publication in 1775 of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He foresaw in this undertaking an outcome similar to generals leading legions marching...

The Babylon Bee Fake News You Can Trust Biden Taken to Coroner for Annual PhysicalWASHINGTON, D.C. — President Biden is being lifted in Marine One to a local coroner for his annual physical exam, sources in Washington say."The President passed the exam with flying colors. His body is so life-like and well-preserved!" said a representative from the D.C. Medical Examiner's Office. "With a fresh injection of formaldehyde and some makeup, he looks like he's still with us! Just look at him — so peaceful. It looks like he's just sleeping!"The President's Chief Medical Examiner is set to release his findings...

The recent advances in North Korea’s ballistic missile test program appear to be directed at developing capabilities to defeat or degrade the effectiveness of missile defenses deployed in the region: Patriot, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). In addition, North Korea’s progress with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) suggests an effort to counter land-based THAAD missile defenses by launching attacks from positions at sea outside the THAAD’s radar field of view, although local Aegis BMD systems could likely still track these projectiles. The Pukgugsong-3 SLBM was successfully tested beginning in late 2019. According to a...

Long is among a group of retired agents who say the FBI is already both politicized and weaponized. They trace the roots of these problems to the massive reorganization undertaken by former Director Robert Mueller after 9/11. Citing an avalanche of intelligence failures leading up to the attacks, critics demanded reform. Mueller decided the answer was centralized control from Washington, D.C..Mueller created what are called flying squads, Long says: “When there was a big case, he would fly a squad in from headquarters rather than use the boots on the ground.”Kurt Siuzdak, who retired from the FBI last year, now...

On Dec. 9, 1965, a young boy threw up his hands in despair and shouted, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”“Sure, Charlie Brown,” the boy’s friend, Linus, answered. “I can tell you what Christmas is all about.”Dragging his trademark security blanket, Linus walked to the center of the school auditorium stage, where friends were rehearsing a Christmas play.“Lights, please,” Linus said.A spotlight clicked on. Then Linus delivered one of the most memorable monologues in television history: an account of Christ’s birth, recited word for word from the Gospel of Luke. It lasted a solid minute.CBS beamed...

ALEXANDRIA, VA—In an effort to root out racism, the Salvation Army announced they will no longer be accepting any donations in the form of bills or coins that have white people on them.“Ever since we learned that racism is everywhere, all the time, ingrained in every aspect of life, we realized most U.S. currency depict the faces of white men who only did evil, racist things in their lives,” said the Commander-in-Chief of the Salvation Army, Clurvis Bellman. “We then decided the best way to feed, clothe, and comfort the poor and needy is to stop accepting money tarnished with...

The Taliban have not reached beyond their own ranks to fill government positions and are reportedly staffing ministries with military and/or religious figures with little relevant experience, exacerbating the group’s administrative challenges and some internal tensions.The Taliban’s victory may provide a morale and perhaps material boost to Pakistan- based Islamist terrorist groups, including the so-called Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-i Taliban-i Pakistan, or TTP, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization). TTP attacks against Pakistani security forces increased after August 2021, reportedly prompting the Pakistani government to seek the Afghan Taliban’s mediation of several ceasefires, which appear to have broken down in late 2022.26...

The Indo-Pacific region is the central front in the new Sino-American cold war. What started 30 years ago as a slowly evolving and comparatively low-key peacetime military competition centered on Taiwan has grown in intensity and scope and is now playing out across the vast arc that extends from the Japanese home islands, down through the narrow straits of Southeast Asia, and then west to the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa. If war comes, this is where it is likely to break out and where it will be fought. With land-based forces in supporting roles, the outcome...

On Veterans Day we remember from WWII the hazards faced by the young men who became our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. For example, the 8th Air Force suffered over 26,000 dead compared to the Marine Corps losing nearly 20,000 killed in the Pacific. Their bombers were mainly crewed by teenagers and men in their early twenties, but of all crew members the ball turret gunner confronted the most dismal fate.The emerging certainty the United States would be drawn into WW II promoted creation of an autonomous Army Air Force. Until the war in Europe began, dominate Army doctrine gave the...

“They ended up parked off the coast in areas that were near other areas where we’ve seen them do amphibious assault training before with commercial ferries,” Shugart told USNI News. “The numbers were bigger than we’ve seen before.” The roll-on roll-off (RoRo) ferry has been identified as Bo Hai Heng Tong, a 15,000-ton multipurpose cargo ship. The ferry’s internal parking ‘lane’ is 1.6 miles long and three meters wide, spread across three decks. This translates into a vehicle cargo capacity that’s almost three times that of a San Antonio-class amphibious warship (LPD-17), Shugart said. “AN LHA or LPD spends a...

First, the old values of social engagement are being overthrown. In an expressive world, where authenticity is found in performance, those things once considered virtues—modesty, reserve, respect for authority, etc.—start to look more like signs of repression. Second, given the central role of sex to modern identity, sexual exhibitionism and the destruction of traditional sexual mores becomes a central part of the modern program of cultural transformation. For the progressive, this must reach ever earlier into childhood. Children will be taught to express themselves sexually because that, according to modern cultural assumptions, is actually who they are. Anyone puzzled by...

BOSTON, MA — In light of so-called "gender affirming care" making the Hippocratic Oath silly and outdated, Harvard Medical School has officially adopted the new oath "Mutilate Kids For Money." While genital mutilation of small children was once frowned upon as barbaric and sadistic, Harvard Medical School has resumed the practice after realizing they can make a truckload of cash. "Sure, I had my doubts about performing invasive surgery on a completely healthy young girl that would render her infertile and permanently scarred," said obstetrician Dr. Francis Grimstad. "But then, I realized that I could make a lot of cash....

Since the early 2000s, Tehran’s construction of gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facilities has been the main source of proliferation concern. Gas centrifuges enrich uranium by spinning uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas at high speeds to increase the concentration of the uranium-235 (u-235) isotope. Such centrifuges can produce both low-enriched uranium (LEU), which can be used in nuclear power reactors, and highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is one of the two types of fissile material used in nuclear weapons. Tehran asserts that its enrichment program is meant to produce fuel for peaceful nuclear reactors.

President Nixon was determined to come to the aid of America’s ally and to demonstrate to the leaders of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China that even in the post-Vietnam era, the United States would be a global power to be reckoned with. For Operation Linebacker, the May-to-October interdiction campaign, he ordered the deployment to the combat theater of massive naval and air forces. By 15 May 1972, an unprecedented six aircraft carriers and 95 other warships and support vessels buttressed the naval power of the Seventh Fleet. During the same period, the B-52 strategic bomber forces...

The Navy next week will host an open-source table-top wargame to experiment with how climate change could affect a future conflict, a service official said today.The half-day exercise will feature individuals from Capitol Hill, the Defense Department, the defense industry, think tanks and academia, Navy assistant secretary for energy, installations and environment Meredith Berger told reporters during a Defense Writers Group breakfast.The purpose of the June 29 exercise is “to come together and really think about and experience what it means to operate in a climate-impacted environment,” Berger said.

Surface warfare reforms crafted to improve mariner skills and manage demand for ships are trickling into the fleet five years after two fatal collisions in the Western Pacific forced the Navy to retool how the service trains the surface fleet.Multiple investigations and criminal prosecutions found that basic failures in seamanship and ship handling led to the June 17, 2017, early morning collision between USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and ACX Crystal off the coast of Japan. Seven sailors died.Two months later, a misunderstanding of a newly installed throttle control system led to USS John McCain (DDG-56) drifting out of a ship separation...

The United States has been a leading provider of security assistance to Ukraine, both before and after Russia renewed its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. From 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, through June 1, 2022, the United States has provided more than $7.3 billion in security assistance “to help Ukraine preserve its territorial integrity, secure its borders, and improve interoperability with NATO.” Since the start of the 2022 war, the Biden Administration has committed a total of more than $4.6 billion in security assistance to “provide Ukraine the equipment it needs to defend itself.”

In late December 1941, Navy Secretary Frank Knox and FDR met and selected Chester Nimitz to command the Pacific Fleet, which at that time the public perceived as residing at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt said, “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there until the war is won”. Knox informed Nimitz by saying, “You’re going to take command of the Pacific Fleet, and I think you will be gone a long time”.On Christmas Day 1941 Admiral Chester Nimitz arrived by Catalina flying boat to take command. He did not bring any staff with him....