Latest news with #MorganPhillips
Fox News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Trump accepts jet from Qatar, will refit to serve as Air Force One, DOD says
Print Close By Morgan Phillips Published May 21, 2025 President Donald Trump has officially accepted Qatar's Boeing 747 jet gift to be refitted as Air Force One, the Pentagon revealed. "The Secretary of Defense has accepted a Boeing 747 from Qatar in accordance with all federal rules and regulations," chief spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed to Fox News. "The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the President of the United States. For additional information, we refer you to the United States Air Force." News of the deal had prompted concerns from lawmakers, both over how to retrofit a foreign nation's plane to serve as a mobile Oval Office with the highest levels of security and over what Qatar might want from Trump in return for the gift. Trump ally Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had said the plane poses "significant espionage and surveillance problems" while liberals like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., declared, "Trump cannot accept a $400 million flying palace from the royal family of Qatar. Not only is this farcically corrupt, it is blatantly unconstitutional." "Qatar is not, in my opinion, a great ally. I mean, they support Hamas. So what I'm worried about is the safety of the president," Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told reporters last week. Trump had responded to the criticisms: "So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane," Trump wrote. "Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA." Trump in 2018 awarded Boeing a $3.9 billion fixed-price agreement to manufacture two new jets, after months of haggling over the price. The jets were supposed to be delivered in 2024, but the project is around five years behind schedule and already $2.5 billion over budget. Print Close URL
Fox News
19-05-2025
- Science
- Fox News
Is America's power grid ready for next attack? Experts warn EMPs, cyber threats and AI could cripple US
Print Close By Morgan Phillips Published May 19, 2025 The widespread blackouts that recently brought parts of Spain and Portugal to a standstill triggered global speculation: was it an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack? Though authorities later ruled out an EMP, the incident reignited urgent questions about America's vulnerability to similar large-scale disruptions and whether the U.S. is prepared for a modern-day "black sky" event. According to cybersecurity expert and former Army Cyber Institute board member Bryson Bort, the United States remains dangerously exposed to a range of threats: not just EMPs, but increasingly sophisticated cyber and artificial intelligence (AI) attacks. "There are a lot of other problems that are higher probability," Bort told Fox News Digital. "The EMP thing is a little bit of a distraction – but that doesn't mean it's not a threat." HOW CHINA'S CYBERESPIONAGE HAS CHANGED EMP: The catastrophic potential that looms An EMP is a sudden burst of electromagnetic energy capable of disabling electronic devices across vast areas. It can be natural – from a solar flare – or man-made, triggered by a high-altitude nuclear detonation. Unlike cyberattacks that target software, an EMP disables physical systems: from car engines and cellphone towers to hospital generators and water pumps. A major attack could throw society back to the pre-electric age, with devastating consequences. Former CIA Director James Woolsey once called EMPs "one of the greatest national vulnerabilities," and some estimates suggest an EMP could result in the deaths of up to 90% of Americans within a year due to the collapse of infrastructure. "The very first thing you've got to lose is your water supply," said Dr. William Forstchen, a longtime EMP researcher. "Within days, nursing homes, hospitals, law enforcement – they're all in deep trouble." While the Trump administration issued an executive order directing federal agencies to prepare for such an event, Bort said implementation has been inconsistent and fragmented. "We are not prepared for this at all," he warned. Forstchen expressed optimism that the administration's "Golden Dome" project, a proposed ground-and space-based defense system, could intercept EMP threats – but the project remains years from completion. NUCLEAR EMP ATTACK MOVES TO BIG SCREEN AS AUTHOR REFLECTS ON 'INVISIBLE LIFELINE' Cyber attacks: The more likely threat While EMP attacks remain the stuff of both national security nightmares and Hollywood scripts, experts say cyberattacks are far more probable and still highly destructive. "We know that the Chinese have been in the American civilian critical infrastructure since 2010," Bort said. "They haven't done anything yet, but they are absolutely in there and setting up to do something at some point." This week, Reuters reported that U.S. officials found communication modules embedded in Chinese-made power inverters – devices used to connect solar panels and wind turbines to the grid. Bort pointed to "Jack Voltaic," a multi-year cyber warfare simulation by the Army Cyber Institute, designed to test military-civilian coordination in response to attacks on critical infrastructure. "What we found is there's a great interdependence," he said. "You can't even have an electric grid if you don't have water – because you can't cool it." Bort said cyberattacks are often the product of long-term reconnaissance, with hackers quietly positioning themselves inside systems for months or years. "A cyberattack is not something where Putin says, 'Hey, hit Detroit tomorrow,'" he explained. "It's already set in place. When the political situation calls for it, that's when the trigger gets pulled." AI and AGI: A future threat growing fast Another, less understood, threat to America's infrastructure is the rise of AI. In particular, the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI systems with human-level cognitive abilities. Tyler Saltzman, a military technologist working on AI systems capable of operating in disconnected environments like an EMP aftermath, warned that AI – if used maliciously – could bring the grid down entirely. "Our infrastructure is very fragile," Saltzman said. "All you need to do is take down our power grid, and we're in complete chaos." Saltzman expressed deep concern about efforts to create AGI – systems he says could eventually surpass human control. "Once AGI comes online, it could easily take down our power grid, infiltrate our financial systems, destroy our economy," he said. "If it sees how violent humans are to each other, why would it serve us?" The balloon warning – and what comes next In 2023, a Chinese surveillance balloon drifted over U.S. territory for days before it was shot down by the military. While believed to be for spying, defense officials note that a high-altitude balloon could be used for electronic warfare – including an EMP. The Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attacks has long warned about balloon-based delivery. Others argue a missile would be more effective, since it would be harder to intercept. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Whether the next major threat comes from above or from a keyboard, experts agree: the U.S. is not ready. "We're still thinking about wars with tanks," Bort said. "Meanwhile, the real fight is already happening inside our infrastructure." Print Close URL
Telegraph
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Even Karl Marx respected the rich more than Rachel Reeves
Labour owes more to Methodism than Marxism. Or so its general secretary from 1944 to 1962, Morgan Phillips, famously postulated. The Welsh ex-miner himself was not a paragon of Wesleyan virtues. Alongside his Labour colleagues, Nye Bevan and Richard Crossman, he sued The Spectator for libel in 1957 for suggesting that the threesome exhibited an insatiable capacity for downing whisky while attending a socialist conference in Venice. The Labour men won, and the magazine only narrowly avoided closure – Crossman's posthumously published diaries revealed The Spectator's claims were true. Nevertheless, a moralising streak has long been at the vanguard of Labour thinking, and the party's attacks on the rich ever since it first came to power have been at least as much motivated by the notion that accumulating great wealth is just wrong than by socialist ideology. Today's Labour Party is far removed from the muscular Christianity of the chapel. But its attitude to wealth and the rich displays a closer affinity to the moral judgments of stern church elders than to the strictures of Karl Marx. A secularised, bastardised version of Christian morality holds sway in the party, and indeed the wider Left. It sees riches as sinful, a moral failing that requires earthly retribution, or rather redistribution. But the quest for immodest terrestrial riches has arguably been the greatest engine of progress in human history. And one does not have to be a starry eyed pro-market zealot to believe this. It is something the 19th century German sage well understood. Surprising as it may sound, Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto, published in London in 1848, contains one of the finest paeans to the achievements of the capitalist class ever penned: 'The bourgeoisie... has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals... 'The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. 'Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?' Ayn Rand, the author of the cult pro-capitalist novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, could have proudly put those words into one of her heroes speeches. Why was the very font of anti-capitalist thought championing capitalists? Marx's condemnation of the bourgeoisie was predominantly not a moral one. For our Karl, history is very much not just a tale of one damn thing after another. He had inculcated the pre-existing nostrum that history has a predestined direction and is shaped not by individual choices, but by vast impersonal forces. And capitalism is one of the essential stages, an unavoidable prerequisite, leading to the eventual communist nirvana. Marx believed that capitalism's overthrow would come about through its own success. The market – and this is where old Charlie got it spectacularly wrong – would eventually satiate all bourgeois demand. Overproduction, and counter-intuitively mechanisation (he was also quite wrong about this), would reduce the capitalists' profits. Marx's adoption of the labour theory of value – the idea that the worth of any good is determined by the amount of work put into it, a nostrum that was already losing its lustre during the lifetime of socialism's founding father – meant that the bourgeoisie would only have one option to maintain their riches. And that is scalping a larger share of what the workers' labour has produced. The eventual result of the proletariat's consequent immiseration would be world revolution. For many Marxists, the big question for the last 180 years has been, when will this crisis of capitalism come? Every downturn and every slump, the communists among us hope, may finally be corroboration of their apostle's creed. But somehow the markets always bounce back. The demise of the bourgeoisie has been endlessly foretold – and endlessly delayed. When some of those Labour figures most deeply pickled in Marxist dogma, people like Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor, state that socialism has not failed, but is yet to come, this is what they mean. It is not just a hopeful refrain that true socialism will make a comeback. It is a profound belief that Marx's grand schema is still working through its modes and history has not played its last hand yet. The Marxist Left – or at least some of them, communists as a breed are more schismatic than any Christian denomination – understand what capitalism has achieved. The most enlightened of them even appreciate that capitalists may still have a good long run left in them. But instead of this understanding, for today's Labour Party, the accumulation of wealth is a morality tale, or rather a saga of immorality. Those who become rich must somehow be perfidious and squalid. And thus wealth taxes, non-dom crackdowns, and VAT on school are the least that they deserve. The fact that such taxes make society poorer as a whole can safely be ignored as sinners must be punished. When Peter Mandelson proclaimed that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy stinking rich', he wasn't actually speaking out of turn. That sentiment has a very good Left-wing pedigree, Marx would certainly have agreed.
