Brazil sank a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Ocean off its northeast coast, the Brazilian Navy said, despite warnings from environmentalists that the rusting 1960s French-built ship would pollute the sea and the marine food chain.

The 32,000-tonne carrier had been floating offshore for three months since Turkey refused it entry to be scrapped there because it was an environmental hazard and the ship was towed back to Brazil.

The carrier was scuttled in a “planned and controlled sinking” late on Friday, the Navy said in a statement, that would “avoid logistical, operational, environmental and economic losses to the Brazilian state,” it said.

The hull of the Sao Paulo was sunk in Brazilian jurisdictional waters 350 kilometers (217 miles) off the coast where the sea is 5,000 meters deep, a location chosen to mitigate the impact on fishing and ecosystems, the Navy said.

Federal public prosecutors and Greenpeace had asked the Brazilian government to stop the sinking, saying it was “toxic” due to dangerous materials, including 9 tonnes of asbestos used in paneling.

The Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier served the French Navy for four decades as the Foch, capable of carrying 40 war planes.

Defense expert and former foreign policy congressional staffer Pepe Rezende said the carrier was bought by the Brazilian Navy for just $12 million in 1998 but needed an $80 million refit that was never done.

After the carrier was decommissioned, Turkish marine recycling company Sök Denizcilik Tic Sti bought the hull for $10.5 million, but had to tow it back across the Atlantic when Turkey barred entry to its shipyard.

Brazil’s Navy said it asked the company to repair the carrier at a Brazilian shipyard, but after an inspection showed it to be taking on water and was at risk of sinking, the Navy banned the ship from entering Brazilian ports. It then decided to sink the Sao Paulo at high sea.

The company’s legal representative in Brazil, Zilan Costa e Silva, said that disposal of the carrier was the Brazilian state’s responsibility under the 1989 Basel Convention on the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes.

DOJ #DOJ:

If so, it will be the end of the #FBI. Amen.

Did late James Kallstrom of the NY FBI and his protégé Charles McGonigal fix the Election 2016 for Trump for $1.3 ml by orchestrating the Weiner-Abedin laptop – Clinton emails affair? – Google Search google.com/search?q=Did+l…

“In Germany, there is a lot of helplessness and panic among Ukrainians. In Kyiv, though, it’s clear what needs to be done to save one’s own life.”

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There has been outrage in Kyiv after the International Olympic Committee said Russian and Belarusian athletes might participate in the Paris Olympics next year as neutrals.

President Joe Biden’s weakness with China is once again on display. Earlier this week, U.S. officials tracked a Chinese reconnaissance balloon over the American mainland. A Chinese Communist Party spokesperson claimed this was nothing more than a “weather research” balloon that had simply blown off course. Sure, the CCP’s harmless weather balloon just happened to pass over multiple sensitive military sites vital to America’s national security—nobody should believe that nonsense, especially not the Biden administration.

Even if it were true, the CCP’s policy of civil-military fusion—which requires all available research and technology, from China’s private sector or otherwise, to be shared with the Chinese military—makes such an excuse an impossibility. Thus, this appears to be an intentional act of espionage, and it signals that the CCP is feeling ever more emboldened with Biden in charge. If the Biden administration does not act to change this paradigm quickly, the threat of conflict will only continue to grow. Weakness breeds aggression. America must demonstrate clear strength and resolve.

This is far from the first time the CCP has engaged in acts of espionage against the American people. China is, and has been for years, aggressively engaged in acts of espionage and propaganda against the American people at all levels of American society. The threat from the CCP is very real here at home, in places like Des Moines, Tallahassee, and Pittsburgh. Its malign activity doesn’t stay in Beijing or Wuhan; it is already inside our gates.

The CCP has targeted officials in our federal government, like congressman Eric Swalwell and Senator Dianne Feinstein, as well as our universities, local governments, media, think tanks, and more. The CCP underwrote a program of “Confucius Institutes” at American universities, ostensibly to foster cultural connections on our campuses, but in reality, to spy on students and professors and steal intellectual property. China’s economy was built on the backs of Americans not only by taking American jobs but also, crucially, by an unparalleled campaign of corporate espionage that has robbed Americans of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property. Even seemingly innocuous apps like TikTok have been revealed to be little more than tools for collecting the private information of Americans and spreading CCP propaganda.

Instead of falling back on diplomatic platitudes and White House press releases about “deep concern” in the face of these threats, the Trump administration took action. We refused to give an inch to the CCP’s malign actions against the American people. As secretary of state, when I learned that the largest spy ring in American history was operating out of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, we shut it down. For years, American officials had turned a blind eye to its operations, fearing what the CCP would do in retaliation if we put an end to it. This was nothing more than weakness, which only reinforced the CCP’s confidence that it could continue to steal from the American people and get away with it. I refused to let that continue on my watch, so I summoned the Chinese ambassador and told him he had 72 hours to get his people out of the consulate. Despite his protests that the CCP had nothing to hide there, just hours after the announcement news broke that the Houston Fire Department was responding to fires at the consulate. They were burning the evidence.

That wasn’t all. We campaigned to shut down every single Confucius Institute in the United States, and we nearly succeeded. We began the process of banning TikTok, an effort which continues across the country at state and local government, and even recently in Congress. I traveled across the United States and spoke to everyone from local governments to state governors to alert them to the dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party. I did this because the CCP’s actions threaten the United States at every level, and inaction only invites the CCP to escalate its actions.

If the Biden administration wishes to reestablish the relationship of deterrence and reciprocity we cultivated with Xi’s regime, it must take the following steps:

First, the balloon should be safely brought down in a manner that minimizes risk to American civilians and that allows its contents to be recovered. Then, the content and purpose of the balloon should be made entirely public. The American people deserve to know what they are up against.

Second, we should examine every part of the surveillance balloon, determine the manufacturer of each, and sanction them accordingly. Companies around the world need to be on watch to ensure their high-tech parts are not being used by the Chinese government.

Third, the Biden administration must take the threat posed by the CCP seriously. China has been waging economic warfare against the American people for decades, but Biden still fights to cooperate with them on issues like climate change. This must end.

Fourth, Secretary of State Antony Blinken should use planned travel to the region to consult with allies, partners, and friends on further actions that will deter any more of Xi Jinping’s adventurism and hare-brained schemes.

Lastly, America must demand reciprocity. If China doesn’t allow Americans to purchase farmland next to their military installations, we shouldn’t either. If China doesn’t allow our diplomats to move freely across China, then Chinese diplomats shouldn’t be able to either. If Americans can’t get research jobs at top installations in Beijing, then Chinese researchers shouldn’t be able to get jobs here either.

The CCP’s spy balloon is a symptom of the Biden administration’s weakness, not only in relation to the People’s Republic of China, but to America’s adversaries writ large. Xi noted Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, a complete debacle that made America look weak and indecisive. He watched Russia hack American pipelines and noted Biden’s failure to impose any real costs on Vladimir Putin. He watched Putin’s provocations prior to the invasion of Ukraine, and noted Biden’s allowance that a “minor incursion” would be permissible.

Now, he will watch Biden’s response to a CCP tool of espionage blatantly flying over sensitive American military sites. Failure to deal with the surveillance balloon sends a message of weakness, not strength, and reinforces Xi’s decision to take advantage of this administration. President Biden must reassert American resolve, not continue to peddle American weakness. If he fails to do so, he will continue to invite greater risk to the safety of the American people.

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Author’s note / Disclaimer / Trigger warning: I haven’t read The 1619 Project. Not the award-winning essay collection by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. Or the best-selling anthology from Random House. Or the award-winning, best-selling children’s book for adults. I haven’t listened to the podcast, and don’t intend to. Not when there are so many better ways to spend one’s precious time.

The same is true for the vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of black Americans. That’s obvious, right? Same goes for the vast majority of internet users with strong opinions about whether The 1619 Project should be taught in public schools, and certainly the vast majority of pundits and politicians denouncing or defending it on television. This is often what passes for public discourse in the digital age—a shouting match among the passionately uninformed, while the people who know better (or value their sanity or simply don’t care) tune out and say nothing.

What I do know is that America’s élite universities are among the most radical purveyors of anti-anti-segregationist racial sensitivity nonsense, and among the quickest to quash even the slightest dissent in the ranks. In this context, the fact that several history professors from Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Northwestern felt strongly enough to criticize The 1619 Project for its historical “errors and distortions” is profoundly damning. I’ll take their word for it. 

I also know that anyone—Nikole Hannah-Jones, for example—who charges a public library $900 per minute to tell an audience of bourgeois liberals that the United States is “one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world” might not value historical accuracy as much as other things. Ditto a cultural establishment that promotes her work on numerous platforms and showers her with awards. Perhaps we are meant to take her seriously, but not literally? 

A serious person wouldn’t say something so absurd in a public setting and claim it was “a fact.” (Or admit to believing in “the zodiac.”) But that’s just how most Democratic politicians, journalists, and other professional left-wing activists who demand to be taken seriously communicate these days. The world is ending. Democracy is dying. “Jim Crow on steroids.” No wonder so many of their kids have turned to domestic terrorism. 

They teach this bullshit in universities, applaud it at corporate-sponsored diversity summits, and it’s available now for streaming on Hulu, a jointly owned subsidiary of NBC Universal and The Walt Disney Company. Because I’m being paid to do it, I watched The 1619 Project documentary series.

Here’s what I learned in Episode 2:

The stated goal of The 1619 Project was to “reframe” American history by putting “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center” of the story. “Race,” the second episode in the Oprah Winfrey-produced Hulu docuseries, explores the unique and deeply problematic history of racial classification in America.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the award-winning journalist, describes her mixed-racing uprising as the child of a white mother and a black father. She contrasts the divergent lives of her maternal grandfather, who was “designated male and white,” with her paternal grandmother, who was “designated female and black,” and proceeds to interview a “reproductive justice scholar” about the concept of race in American and how it is “actually very silly.” Indeed.

The story begins with chattel slavery and ends with a successful lawsuit striking down a requirement that couples list their race on marriage license applications in the state of Virginia. The requirement traces back to Walter Plecker, a state bureaucrat and hardcore eugenics-era racist who probably cornered people at parties to discuss his independent phrenology research. Reports describe him as a “bone-thin” “miserly taskmaster” who ate an apple for lunch every day, a “very rigid man” who never smiled, and a “rabid racist, killed by auto.”

Plecker has a lot in common with the professional diversity consultants who adore The 1619 Project. In addition to being humorless scolds you’d never want to see at a party, they actively promote racial segregation in the name of equality equity. In 2020, Democrats in California tried to repeal the part of the state constitution that says government entities “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” Midway through the episode, I was served an ad for BLK, “the #1 dating and lifestyle app for the black community.”

Hannah-Jones suggests we bring about “healing and justice” by “liberating our society [from] these [racial] categories that harm us all.” The reproductive justice scholar agrees that we should strive to create a culture “truly based in caring, and in humanity, and in valuing human beings equally.” That sounds great, but it’s hard to reconcile with our cultural establishment’s ongoing obsession with separating human beings into categories and ranking them according to privilege, with race being the overriding factor. Black children from Baltimore get lumped in with Nigerian heirs and heiresses.

Having spent the last hour denouncing an arcane racial classification system, Episode 2 ends with a quote from the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian socialist organization that denounced the Civil Rights Movement as sexist and homophobic and is believed to have coined the term “identity politics.” They were truly ahead of their time.

REVIEW: What I Learned Watching ‘The 1619 Project’ on Hulu (Episode 1)

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