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Authored by Antonio Graceffo via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Navy has released a document outlining its plans to match and exceed Beijing’s goal of modernizing its military by 2027, aiming to be prepared for a potential conflict with the Chinese regime.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has directed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be fully modernized and prepared for war by 2027, coinciding with the PLA’s 100th anniversary. This timeline has raised concerns about a possible invasion of Taiwan, as Chinese leader Xi Jinping focuses on military reforms to ensure the PLA can deter or win a conflict over the island.

The CCP’s strategy goes beyond expanding its navy. It incorporates multi-domain precision warfare, dual-use infrastructure (like airfields and maritime militias), and an expanding nuclear arsenal—and it is supported by the world’s largest shipbuilding capacity.

The U.S. Navy’s 2024 Navigation Plan, led by Adm. Lisa Franchetti, focuses on preparing for a potential conflict with communist China by 2027. Central to this strategy is Project 33, which aims at enhancing the Navy’s long-term advantage and operational readiness. The plan prioritizes modernizing equipment and improving force deployment capabilities, particularly by scaling up the use of robotic and autonomous systems for swift, decisive responses, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.

Project 33 sets two key goals: achieving 80 percent combat readiness for ships, aircraft, and submarines by 2027, and integrating advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and unmanned systems. These initiatives are designed to strengthen the Navy’s ability to respond effectively to emerging threats, specifically focusing on maintaining superiority in the Indo-Pacific.

The U.S. Navy aims to develop three key priorities: long-range fires, non-traditional sea denial, and terminal defense. Long-range fires enable the Navy to strike from a safe distance using advanced missiles and precision-guided weapons, enhancing power projection. Non-traditional sea denial employs methods like cyber warfare, drones, and electromagnetic operations to block adversary access to strategic maritime areas. Terminal defense focuses on protecting naval assets with advanced missile and anti-aircraft systems designed to intercept threats in their final phase.

The U.S. Navy is enhancing its command-and-control capabilities by developing Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs), which are critical for fleet-level warfare. These centers serve as nerve hubs, coordinating naval forces across multi-domain environments, including land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. MOCs are essential for managing real-time information, directing fleet movements, and overseeing key functions like intelligence, logistics, and communications.

Franchetti stresses the need to mirror China’s military modernization, particularly in integrating technologies like artificial intelligence. To stay competitive in an information-driven battlespace, the Navy is developing MOCs as full-fledged warfighting systems, ensuring they are resilient, adaptable, and ready for decentralized operations. By 2027, the Navy plans to certify MOCs across all fleet headquarters, starting with the Pacific Fleet. These centers will enhance command and control, intelligence, fires, and sustainment functions, boosting decision-making and operational capabilities during crises and conflicts.

The U.S. Navy is closely studying current global conflicts to shape its approach to future sea control. Ukraine’s effective use of missiles, drones, and digital tools against Russian forces has provided key insights for U.S. military strategies, particularly for potential conflicts in the Indo-Pacific. Additionally, the Navy has observed the role drones and ballistic missiles have played in battles against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, further informing how the Navy prepares for modern warfare. These lessons are crucial for adapting to evolving threats and ensuring readiness in an increasingly complex battlespace.

Unmanned vehicles and weapons systems have played a crucial role in modern warfare, as seen in both Ukraine and the 2020 Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict. Autonomous and remotely operated systems, like drones, have proven highly effective for reconnaissance, precision strikes, and disrupting enemy logistics, all without risking human lives. Recognizing this shift, Franchetti has prioritized integrating unmanned systems, including naval drones and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), into U.S. Navy operations.

UUVs are key technologies in modern naval operations. These systems come in two types: autonomous underwater vehicles, which operate independently, and remotely operated vehicles, which an operator controls. Often referred to as naval or underwater drones, UUVs perform tasks like surveillance, mine detection, and environmental monitoring. Franchetti views these robotic systems as the future of warfare, not just for their efficiency but for their ability to free up sailors for other vital tasks. By deploying autonomous systems for missions like surveillance or combat, the Navy can reallocate human personnel to areas where their expertise is most needed, enhancing operational flexibility and overall readiness.

The U.S. Navy’s plan prioritizes integrating robotic and autonomous systems into routine operations by 2027, ensuring their active use by commanders in carrier and expeditionary strike groups. The focus is on improving coordination between manned and unmanned teams, particularly in areas like surveillance, fires, logistics, and deception. This initiative is part of a broader strategy to enhance command, control, and overall operational effectiveness in complex, multi-domain environments.

In addition to preparing for a potential conflict over Taiwan, the Navy’s 2024 Navigation Plan prioritizes maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific, ensuring critical shipping lanes like the Strait of Malacca and Taiwan Strait remain accessible for global trade.

Meanwhile, China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy aims to limit the ability of the United States and its allies to operate freely in key areas such as the East and South China Seas, particularly the Taiwan Strait. Central to China’s military doctrine, A2/AD seeks to shift the strategic balance by making it difficult for external forces to intervene in what Beijing considers its sphere of influence. Despite this, the U.S. Navy is rapidly modernizing to meet these challenges and is prepared to counter the CCP’s regional dominance efforts.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”

– Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

It’s not easy being a child in the American police state.

Danger lurks around every corner and comes at you from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.

Out on the streets, you’ve got the menace posed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. In your neighborhoods, you’ve got to worry about the Nanny State and its network of busybodies turning parents in for allowing their children to walk to school alone, walk to the park alone, play at the beach alone, or even play in their own yard alone.

The tentacles of the police state even intrude on the sanctity of one’s home, with the government believing it knows better than you—the parent—what is best for your child. This criminalization of parenthood has run the gamut in recent years from parents being arrested for attempting to walk their kids home from school to parents being fined and threatened with jail time for their kids’ bad behavior or tardiness at school.

This doesn’t even touch on what happens to your kids when they’re at school—especially the public schools—where parents have little to no control over what their kids are taught, how they are taught, how and why they are disciplined, and the extent to which they are being indoctrinated into marching in lockstep with the government’s authoritarian playbook.

The message is chillingly clear: your children are not your own but are, in fact, wards of the state who have been temporarily entrusted to your care. Should you fail to carry out your duties to the government’s satisfaction, the children in your care will be re-assigned elsewhere.

This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today: where parents have to worry about school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.

Instead of being taught the three R’s of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three I’s of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation and intolerance.

Indeed, while young people today are learning first-hand what it means to be at the epicenter of politically charged culture wars, test scores indicate that students are not learning how to succeed in social studies, math and reading. Rather, government officials are churning out compliant drones who know little to nothing about their history or their freedoms.

In turn, these young people are being brainwashed into adopting a worldview in which rights are negotiable rather than inalienable; free speech is dangerous; the virtual world is preferable to the real world; and history can be extinguished when inconvenient or offensive.

What does it mean for the future of freedom at large when these young people, trained to be mindless automatons, are someday running the government?

Under the direction of government officials focused on making the schools more authoritarian (sold to parents as a bid to make the schools safer), young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

• draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,

• overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,

• school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,

• standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,

• politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,

• and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

This is how you groom young people to march in lockstep with a police state.

As Deborah Cadbury writes for The Washington Post, “Authoritarian rulers have long tried to assert control over the classroom as part of their totalitarian governments.”

In Nazi Germany, the schools became indoctrination centers, breeding grounds for intolerance and compliance.

In the American police state, the schools have become increasingly hostile to those who dare to question or challenge the status quo.

America’s young people have become casualties of a post-9/11 mindset that has transformed the country into a locked-down, militarized, crisis-fueled mockery of a representative government.

Roped into the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, disease, and weapons, America’s schools have transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

Students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water, in some cases getting them expelled from school or charged with a crime.

Not even good deeds go unpunished.

One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Having police in the schools only adds to the danger.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.

Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.

This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.

Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).

Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.

These police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.

Likewise, the harm caused by attitudes and policies that treat America’s young people as government property is not merely a short-term deprivation of individual rights. It is also a long-term effort to brainwash our young people into believing that civil liberties are luxuries that can and will be discarded at the whim and caprice of government officials if they deem doing so is for the so-called “greater good” (in other words, that which perpetuates the aims and goals of the police state).

What we’re dealing with is a draconian mindset that sees young people as wards of the state—and the source of potential income—to do with as they will in defiance of the children’s constitutional rights and those of their parents. However, this is in keeping with the government’s approach towards individual freedoms in general.

Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your emails and text messages and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugary soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: these are all outward signs of a government—i.e., a monied elite—that believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can.

This is tyranny disguised as “the better good.”

Indeed, this is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots.

This is what the world looks like when bureaucrats not only think they know better than the average citizen but are empowered to inflict their viewpoints on the rest of the populace on penalty of fines, arrest or death.

So, what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now but for the future of this country, when these same young people are someday in charge?

How do you convince someone who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, we must start by running the schools like freedom forums.

By Bernadette Giacomazzo of RetailWire

Macy’s has announced that it is closing a total of 55 stores by the end of 2024, in the faltering brand’s ongoing effort to revamp its business.

According to The Daily Mail, the company originally intended to close 50 underperforming stores by the end of the year, part of the 150 total locations it will close within three years. However, it now plans to close 55 before 2025.

The locations of the shuttering stores have not yet been announced, but speculation is abounding that the stores will include a location in Newington, New Hampshire, one in Traverse City, Michigan, and one in WestShore Plaza mall in Tampa, Florida. These stores are reportedly set to close after the winter holidays.

“The biggest things that have gone wrong at Macy’s are the quality of the stores and the product assortment,” GlobalData Retail analyst Neil Saunders said to the outlet.

“And so over the years customers have deserted it, sales have tumbled and store productivity has gone down. All the metrics have gone in the wrong direction.”

News of these closures comes shortly after Macy’s announced that it was diverting funds to its in-house brands in yet another effort to turn the proverbial ship around.

According to TheStreet, the shop has resurrected or introduced a number of other brands, including On 34th and State of Day, as part of its rehabilitation drive. It plans to launch a men’s collection before the end of the year, and a new kids’ brand will follow next.

But Macy’s significant rebrand goes beyond simply bringing back well-known brands. The mall mainstay is purportedly concentrating more on its well-known high-margin luxury products in an attempt to attract customers with a little more disposable income.

The company has said that it will focus its efforts on designer fragrances, which are more affordable than high-end handbags, for example, yet feature coveted brands like Chanel and Dior.

Some Macy’s stores already carry high-end fragrances from brands like Tom Ford, Creed, and Cartier. The company did, however, declare that it will have 42 outlets by the end of 2024 that would sell its high-end cosmetic products, with a focus on scent, as part of its aim to expand the availability of designer fragrances.

Additionally, Macy’s will soon offer store-in-store concepts that will mimic Target’s Ulta strategy and Kohl’s well-known and successful Sephora endeavor.