There are only a handful of nations that possess the ability to manufacture and deliver a nuclear weapon. The US, Russia, China, UK and France are all members of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which is designed to stop countries from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for using nuclear technology for peaceful ends. That hasn’t stopped countries like India, Pakistan and North Korea from developing their own weapons, and given this, its probably time to reconsider the NPT, because it might not be in the United States’ best interest to stay in this club.
The first obvious consideration is that no country that is pursuing nuclear weapons is friendly to the US. Iran continues to pursue nuclear technology despite having signed the NPT. Iran is probably receiving assistance from Russia and/or China, mainly as a way to undermine the U.S. in the Middle East. North Korea certainly hasn’t followed through on any nuclear promises. None of these are friendly to the US.
There are a number of countries that could develop nuclear as a real deterrent to real threats. Japan and Taiwan continue to be threatened by China. Both of these countries possess the people and resources to build nuclear weapons. What about South Korea? Rather than continuing to negotiate with North Korea, South Korea could easily build more nuclear weapons than North Korea ever could.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait could simply buy nuclear weapons as a defensive measure against Iran. Even better, the U.S. could develop a leasing option for weapons. Those countries could pay money for the U.S. to maintain weapons in a secure facility in the region for defensive purposes. The lease keeps the technology out of their hands while maintaining a legitimate threat of nuclear response.
Now, one might argue that this scenario is exactly what the NPT was trying to prevent. We don’t want to lower the threshold for nuclear weapon use to the point they become commonplace. But will this actually happen? India and Pakistan have still not yet exchanged nuclear weapons despite their hatred and both not having signed the NPT. I also find it hard to argue that countries like Japan and South Korea wouldn’t develop nuclear policy consistent with current U.S. policy.
The NPT worked when the countries of the world chose to follow it. Much like the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, when Russia and China continue to find ways to undermine the treaty, it doesn’t make continued sense to stay in, especially when it places our allies at risk of invasion. Dropping out of the NPT and arming our allies might be the simplest way to bring countries like Iran and North Korea to the negotiating table.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.You can purchase my new book, To Build a House, through this link at Amazon.
At Don Surber’s site in a piece titled Taliban may take down Biden he notes an interesting change in terms of the coverage of the Biden Administration:
There is no way to spin Biden’s desertion of 38 million people in Afghanistan, including 15,000 Americans. We left billions in weaponry and vehicles to terrorists.
But it is the images of helpless people trying to flee Afghanistan that sticks in the public’s mind. 640 people wall-to-wall in a C-17 shows just how awful this abandonment of Afghanistan is.
For once, the press is actually doing its job.
Emphasis mine
Noting that the press is doing it’s job is to me the key line to Surber’s piece which like all his pieces is worth reading. However the what said piece doesn’t address is the key question that is raised by it namely: Why is the press actually doing it’s job?
After all they had no problem covering for him during the steal of the election, during the border crisis, during the spike in inflation, skyrocketing gas and food prices, the move to make us more dependent on foreign energy and kowtowing to China and Russia. and from racial division. Why would Afghanistan suddenly be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
The answer comes from something at Instapundit that was sent to Glenn Reynolds from an acquaintance of his with as he puts it: “experience and connections”:
Biden’s statement that he has seen ‘no question of our credibility from our allies’ has said allies furious. Every NATO country has people trapped in Afghanistan and they tend to be trust fund babies or friends of trust fund babies. Every prime minister’s phone is blowing up with VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE asking how they’re going to get their kids or their kids’ friends out of Afghanistan and every ally is blowing up the phones of the White House and State Department and getting jack shit from them.
And they’re all blaming ‘America’ but they also know it’s on Biden.
actually it’s on whoever is actually running the show a 2nd friend of Glenn mentions the press:
Reporters are only calling BS re the airport because their own ox is being gored. I call BS on their belated, situational flailing at accountability. Now they’re indignant, how many lies later?
You see for the pols and the connected and the sons and daughters of the connected and the friends of the sons and daughters of the connected things like CRT or Inflation or gas prices or Urban Crime or Race issues in schools or mask mandates don’t affect then. They are not going to public schools, living in inner cities or needing to worry about their personal budget. They send their kids to private exclusive schools and don’t seem to have mask mandates applied to them.
This attitude includes the elite press who long ago abandoned this good advice:
The people we cover, we move in their world, but it is their world. You can’t live like them. You’ll never keep up.
The Paper 1994
Those elite press members and the younger reporters who have ambitions of being members of the elite press who are allowed entry to said world for the price of the right coverage. As for those problems of race, inflation, violence etc..all those are for lesser folk to wit:
“I — I couldn’t take a blow, sir. I suppose I’ve been too long with gentlemen”
Among gentlemen a blow could be wiped out only in blood; among the lower orders a blow was something to be received without even a word.
C. S. Forester: Hornblower and the Hotspur 1962 p 301
To all of them it’s still 1805 and we’re the lower orders who are to take these blows without complaint.
Alas Afghanistan is a different matter:
You see hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in Afghanistan and not just on the military. There have been all kinds of programs going on there, many of them very high paying and carrying a lot of prestige and those positions have been filled by elites, family of elites and friends of families of elites who saw it as a stepping stone to higher positions back home and resume enhancers.
When the Biden administration decided to let things collapse without warning suddenly it wasn’t a problem that affected the common people back home, in fact most ordinary Americans, other than the families of troops there are likely not affected by it at all except for the increased threat of terrorist down the line,
However it DID effect all of those elites in all of those nations and all of those NGO’s that have been feeding off the American Taxpayer while in Afghanistan putting in their time and it of course affects all of those reporters who are stationed there and find themselves in danger of their lives (There’s a reason why western women reporters have suddenly discovered the joy of head coverings.)
It’s sort of like this scene from the Movie Casino where Sam Rothstein (Robert DiNero) meets with Pat Webb (LQ Jones) whose brother in law he has just fired :
As long as his own were being taken care of Webb (Jones) didn’t care what was going on in the Casino, but once his own ox was being gored things changed…
Pat Webb: Has that man even filed for his license yet?
Board Investigator: I don’t know. We’ll have to check the files.
Pat Webb: Well, without gettin’ your shorts in a knot, would you do that? And kinda check closely, ’cause we may have to kick a kike’s ass out of town.
From that moment in the movie the downfall of Rothstein and company began.
As long as the Biden administration’s moves only hurt the common voter and the elites were taken care of the elites didn’t care about what was done, but now their incompetence is affecting them and theirs it can’t be allow to stand.
That’s why the Media has suddenly started doing it job and is why the plan to replace Biden with Harris might be accelerated before January of 2023.
Unexpectedly of course.
Closing note: If it happens It won’t change who is in charge, it will just change the figurehead for those who stole the last election.
Did you hear about the massive organized protest by American conservatives of the Toyko Olympics?
No?
That’s because there wasn’t one.
The 2020 Summer Olympics, delayed a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, got off to a bad start, unless you are woke.
In a women’s soccer match between Team USA and Sweden, athletes from both sides took a knee rather than stand for the Star Spangled Banner. Sweden won the match, 3-0. The US women’s soccer team was the overwhelming favorite to win a gold medal in Tokyo, it ended up with the bronze.
Earlier this year the International Olympic Committee rescinded its Rule 50, which stated “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”
The Olympics are a dying movement. More on that in a bit. But the woke protests just add accelerant to the fire.
In competitive sports success of course is achieved by winning a game, crossing the finish line first, or lifting the heaviest object, or throwing it the farthest.
The Olympics are a big business, despite being comprised of not-for-profits such as the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, or more commonly in other nations by government ministries of sport.
The big money for the Olympics comes from TV rights and revenue for the broadcasters. If you envision television ratings as a shot put, then that heavy ball appears to have been thrown by a weak child.
NBC is giving advertisers who bought airtime during the Tokyo Olympics extra commercials due to underwhelming ratings for this year’s 2020 Olympic Games, fueled by a pandemic-weary population and backlash against woke athletes protesting the U.S. flag and national anthem.
NBC Sports Chairman Pete Bevacqua insisted to the Associated Press that the network would still make money on the 2020 Olympics – but left out details about how much.
NBC’s primetime coverage of the Tokyo Olympics on July 26 averaged 14.7 million viewers — for a 49% drop compared to the equivalent night from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and 53% less than the 2012 London Olympics. The opening ceremonies saw their lowest viewership since 1988.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, there are more television offerings than ever. And some people will watch Olympics segments on NBC’s YouTube channel and those viewership numbers are not included in the network’s ratings total.
But the viewership numbers still suck.
Wokism likely contributed to the ratings rout. That may change soon as conservatives are mobilizing against Critical Race Theory and the Democrats’ hard shove to the far-left, but conservatives don’t have a boycott apparatus in place, such as the liberals do with medium-sized groups such as Media Matters and tiny Twitter armies such as Sleeping Giants. That’s because those on the American right calmly reach for the remote and watch something else when they are offended. Or they simply stop buying products, such as what I did after Gillette ran its toxic masculinity television commercial two years ago. I loved its Good News razors. But I don’t want to put money into the hands of a company that insults me. And now I use Bic razors–which I like better and I probably never would have considered purchasing until that nasty commercial. Gillette owes Bic a finder’s fee for making me a customer. [Corrrection: a commenter mentioned that it should have been written the other way around.]
People watch sports, or buy tickets to live events, for many reasons, but the drama of a competitive event is likely the primary one. Not for the politics, that’s for sure.
And conservatives don’t need a Media Matters-type group to tell us what not to watch. Again that may change soon but the American right doesn’t possess the kneejerk compulsion to regularly pressure companies to avoid a network, a website, or a television program.
NBC is in trouble because it already purchased the US rights to every Olympics through 2032. Because leftism is a quasi-religion don’t look for the IOC to reinstate its protest ban for its athletes any time soon.
And yes, the Olympic movement is dying. Only two cities bid for the 2024 summer games, Paris and Los Angeles. The French capital was the winner and LA was immediately awarded the 2028 games. There was no other bidder. And for the 2032 Summer Olympics, the “winner” was Brisbane, Australia, the only bidder.
For the 2022 and 2026 winter games there were only two bidders each.
Of course that’s because organizing the quadrennial Olympics are big money losers for host cities. Los Angeles managed to turn a profit with its last summer games–but that was in 1984. The 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro were particularly ghastly financial debacles. Allegations of corruption in the bidding process over the years makes one wonder how stupid supposedly smart people can be.
Athens is a city of many notable ruins–and now Greece’s largest city can add numerous sites from the ’04 games for tourists to marvel at.
As the expression goes, when you get woke you go broke.
But the Olympics were already arguably broke.
Next year Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics. I can think of a bunch of reasons not to watch. China is a communist dictatorship, it has a long history of doping among its athletes, there are over two-hundred concentration camps that incarcerate Uighurs in China, and what else? Oh yeah, there’s a good chance that the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory, which destroyed the international economy and killed millions.
Woke protests will seal the deal for me and many more in a few months when the Olympic flame is lit in Beijing.
Corporate CEOs need to listen to the millions of quiet conservative protesters like myself and not the dozen or so left-wing screamers who show up at their board meetings. There are more of us than them.
Oh and if you’re wondering who this guy is and if you should help pay my writers and our bandwidth costs, I’m the guy who is a room full of hostile press during press conferences actually asked Donald Trump neutral or friendly questions.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 
DaTechGuy Quick Commentary Actual Goals
Posted: August 8, 2021 by datechguy in baseball, DaTechGuy's Quick Thoughts, dynasty baseball, gaming, News/opinionTags: business, datechguy's short commentaries, dynasty baseball, pizza, vaccines
I haven’t done a livestream for a while, time hasn’t permitted it so I’ve decided to do a few quick commentaries on various issues.
Today let’s talk about goals, both perceived and actual.
Since I mentioned the Pizza at Zeda’s let me give you a peek at their wares
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