Hypersonic technology is critically important, so it’s time to check in to see where we now stand. According to news reports, nothing much has changed.

Newsweek in March said, “China is winning the hypersonic weapons race and is moving full speed ahead with plans to expand the reach of these hard-to-target weapons.”

Jeffrey McCormick, senior analyst with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, “China’s missile programs are comparable to top-tier producers internationally, and China now has the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal.”

He added, “Russia currently has three deployed hypersonic weapon systems, including two that have been used in conflict against Ukraine.”

Furthermore, “China has an extensive and robust research-and-development infrastructure, including many wind tunnels, devoted to the development of hypersonic systems.”

What defenses do we have against such systems? The answer is essentially none.

The 2024 race is still close.

But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture.

Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls—before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.

But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.

How do we know that?

Why are Democratic pundits—from Axelrod to Carville—blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?

Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races—e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan—tightening up?

Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities.”

The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book—seemed so far to have had no effect.

I first heard it, very faintly, in 2017.

At the time, President Donald Trump was accused of spying for Russia. If true, this would have been the biggest act of treason in American history, bigger than Aldrich Ames, bigger than the Rosenbergs, bigger than Benedict Arnold.

The New York Times and Washington Post published long articles that detailed Trump’s treachery, for which they shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Adam Schiff, head of the intelligence committee, stood up night after night on cable news, claiming he had secret “bombshell” information proving that Trump was a traitor.

The charges were investigated and ultimately dismissed.

Trump was not a Russian agent. He was not working for Putin.

The greatest security threat in the history of the country was -- a hoax.

And then I heard it:  nothing.

Very few outlets reported that Trump was innocent, that the attempt to rout him from office had failed.

Schiff disappeared from view.

There were no corrections, no apologies, no firings.

The Times and the Post did not return their Pulitzer Prizes.

“Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation,” reports Christopher Rufo. “

The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia.” You might say she was “unburdened by what has been” written by other people. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, has exposed plagiarists before — most famously former Harvard University President Claudine Gay last year.

There’s little reason to doubt his reporting on Harris, especially given “the receipts,” as he calls the proof in his X thread. He further lays out the case in a Substack column [Samples shown in full article.]

Nationalism has become the great bugaboo of global talking heads today. It is discussed in the marbled halls of Western capitals as a scourge that must be eliminated just as swiftly as its equally detested cousin, populism.

Policies that are popular with the people and nation-states that reflect the self-determination of the people cannot be permitted!

Who says? Some very important people who belong to august bodies such as the European Commission, the United Nations, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization.

International groups with lofty reputations have no time to trifle with the beliefs and needs of discrete peoples. The globalists are here to save democracy by ridiculing and rejecting whatever the people might want!

Today’s “elites” have global domination on their minds. The concerns of individual nation-states are too petty for those who covet the whole planet.

We used to have a pretty good word to describe an arrangement in which many separate countries are forced to bend the knee and pay tribute to a superior power: empire.