The nuclear confrontation between the US and North Korea entered a critical phase Sunday (9/03) with North Korea’s conduct of an underground test of a thermonuclear bomb.

With North Korea now a direct threat to US cities, the confrontation isn’t about US superpower status in Asia, and the credibility of US deterrence or the capabilities of US military forces in the Pacific. The confrontation is now about the US’s ability to protect the lives of its citizens.

The distinction tells us a number of important things. All of them are alarming.  Which brings us to China.

China has been the main beneficiary of North Korea’s conventional and nuclear aggression and brinksmanship.  This state of affairs was laid bare in a critical way last month.

The next head of NASA is likely to be an ex-Navy fighter pilot turned Republican congressman who believes strongly in space exploration but is skeptical about man-made climate change.

What’s not to like about about Trump’s nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) for the job of NASA’s administrator?

Everything, if you’re a liberal.

According to New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, Trump just blew the perfect chance to change his “presidency from the chaotic mess of threats, bitterness and bilious paranoia to one of rationality and reasonableness.”

It would be nice to dismiss Ms. Stasi as merely the deranged frothings of a rent-an-opinion, left-wing columnist who has bizarrely chosen to borrow her surname from that of the secret police in former Communist East Germany. Unfortunately, she’s by no means the exception.

Most liberals think as she does.  Indeed, so do quite a few establishment conservatives – like Senator Marco Rubio.

The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve are both poised to start draining liquidity from the financial system, threatening a bout of dollar scarcity and a potential shake-up of currency markets over coming months.

The twin-shift in policy is likely to tighten the availability of credit and send a strong impulse through Wall Street and global bourses, though whether it will be powerful enough to dampen frothy asset prices in the current exuberant mood is an open question.

“As we approach the fourth quarter, dollar scarcity could return as a theme. The upcoming tightening of US liquidity is not fully reflected in market pricing,” says Christin Tuxen and Jens Naervig Pedersen from Danske Bank.

What makes the US Treasury actions doubly-potent this time is that the Fed is about to pull the trigger on ‘quantitative tightening’ (QT) at exactly the same time, taking the first steps to wind down its $4.4 trillion balance sheet after almost a decade of ultra-stimulus.

"This will not be a walk in the park," says Danske Bank.

Donald Trump's appetite is whetted. He knows that American companies have stashed trillions of dollars overseas in what amounts to the greatest cash reserve in the world.

Apple has $257bn parked abroad beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. Alphabet (Google) has $126bn, Microsoft $84bn, Cisco $68bn, and Oracle $59bn. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that total retained earnings outside the country have mushroomed to $4 trillion.

The President is determined to lay his hands on this money, or at least to divert it back into the US economy. The latest briefings from Washington suggests that the White House is preparing 'mandatory' action as part of his tax reform, unlike the previous voluntary attempts to lure back money through tax holidays.

If Mr. Trump succeeds, these repatriated capital flows will have a volcanic impact on the US dollar, Wall Street, and the global financial system, with big winners and big losers.

What on earth has happened to the moral and political sensibilities of Paul Ryan, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Jeb Bush, etc.?  All of those RINOs who are attacking President Trump for pardoning Joe Arpaio are simpering, whining traitors to the party they allegedly represent.

They should declare themselves Democrats and be done with the masquerade.

Perhaps they should remind themselves of all the criminals and thugs that President Obama pardoned, or that President Clinton pardoned.

If there was ever anyone who deserved a pardon, along with Scooter Libby, it is Joe Arapio.   This was a no-brainer!  The man has enforced both federal and state laws for his entire career.

Arpaio was found in contempt of court after a Clinton-appointed judge, Susan Bolton,  ordered him to stop enforcing the law, detaining people he suspected (or knew) to be illegal immigrants.  It was the judge who broke the law, not Sheriff Joe, as so many of our activist judges have over the last decade.   They do not want laws that protect our borders enforced.   Such judges are traitors to the nation as well.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."

The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values.

The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs.

But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the Left. The Left was the least religious in the traditional sense. And the most likely to build up an ideology of secular values with which to displace traditional religious values.

The last century witnessed an extensive effort to scrub religious values out of government. But this effort was matched by an equally comprehensive project to replace them with the Left’s own values. Unlike the wall between church and state, there were few legal safeguards against writing values into legislation if they were irreligious ones. The church was deemed to be the true threat. Not the state.

But the end result looks very much like an establishment of religion. Even in the church sense.

All week some of the very worst people in climate activism have been trying to make political mileage out of Hurricane Harvey.

What all these blowhard charlatans have in common is that they are all talking drivel. They are, as the Trump EPA rightly says, attempting “to politicize an ongoing tragedy.”

For climate alarmists every major weather event – especially ones that cause millions of dollars of damage to property and claim human lives – is never really a disaster or even a crisis but a heaven-sent opportunity to promote their alarmist narrative.

This is what Al Gore has just done in his box office flop An Inconvenient Sequel. He has collected lots of dramatic footage of floods, hurricanes, typhoons and so on and tried to conflate all this photogenic weather disaster porn with man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, here’s a reality check courtesy of actual weather data recorded by proper scientists from the days when scientists did actual science.  Harvey is a natural meteorological event which has nothing whatsoever to do with man-made climate change.

There are streets, schools and parks across the country named after a violent racist who urged the KKK to murder civil rights activists and claimed that racial integration was a Jewish conspiracy.

There’s a boulevard in Brooklyn named after a racist who admired Hitler and boasted of being the first fascist. Harvard has a prominent institute named after a bigot who defended Nazi bigotry.

New York City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles all have streets named after a supremacist and nationalist who palled around with Nazis. New York City has a statue of him. Washington D.C. has an art tribute to him. If we are going to take down Confederate memorials, there’s no way he can stay up.

He must fall.

In 1961, Malcolm X introduced George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, on stage at a Nation of Islam rally. After Rockwell made a donation to the racist black nationalist hate group, Malcom X led a round of applause for the Neo-Nazi leader and called him, “Mr. Rockwell.”

There’s been a recent effort in Bethesda to rename Winston Churchill High School after Malcolm X. How can you rename a school honoring the leader who defeated Nazism after Malcolm, a Nazi collaborator?