Monthly Archives: January 2022

Not Sure Why

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Finland and Sweden seem to be thinking about joining NATO in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s overt aggression toward and threat of invasion of Ukraine.

Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin:

We retain the option of applying for NATO membership. We should uphold this freedom of choice and make sure it remains a reality….

And

Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Anne Linde also asserted that Russia does not have a veto on whatever alliance Sweden chooses to join.

It’s hard, at this date, to see why either nation—or any other—would want to join NATO.

A successful invasion and occupation of Ukraine by Russia would only demonstrate just how impotent NATO has become. NATO is toothless with Germany unarmed and timid under Angela Merkel and now Olaf Scholz and his Social Democratic Party, and the US is just timid under Biden-Harris.

That Ukraine is not presently a NATO member is a coward’s copout. Russian occupation of Ukraine would only magnify the threat to the NATO nations. In recognition of that, very few member nations—you can count them with the fingers of one hand—out of the 30 current members have even been willing to offer Ukraine economic or political support, much less arms with which to defend itself and drive Russia out of currently occupied Ukraine.

NATO would be no protection at all for Sweden and Finland.

Virtue-Signal Success

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Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D, NY) has finally arrived. He’s made the big time.

New York Democratic Jamaal Bowman was arrested Thursday alongside more than two-dozen other protesters at the U.S. Capitol as they demanded the Senate alter its 60-vote legislative filibuster pass key tenets of the lawmaker’s political party.
A Bowman spokesperson said the first-term congressman took part in a “voting rights non-violent direct action at the North Barricade of the US Capitol Building and was arrested by the US Capitol Police.”

Got his arrest record, now. He can put a star on his calendar and his arrest Certificate of Achievement on his hero wall in his office.

Woo hoo.

Talking Past Each Other

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Or one not taking the other seriously. The disconnect between President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris and Russian President Vladimir Putin—or the fact that Putin doesn’t take the Biden-Harris administration seriously—doesn’t get much more clearly demonstrated than by this lead image from a Friday Wall Street Journal article about continuing US-Russia “negotiations” regarding Ukraine.

NBC and “Perspective”

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NBC now says they’ll provide geopolitical context along with their coverage of the upcoming olympics [sic] doings in the People’s Republic of China.

…our coverage will provide perspective on China’s place in the world and the geopolitical context in which these Games are being held.

Tellingly, that claim comes only after prodding by members of Congress.

Sure, though. NBC will provide every syllable of the perspective the PRC government tells it to. And not a syllable else.

I’ll not be watching NBC while Beijing’s olympics are going on. Not during the coverage. Not during any other part of those days and weeks.

I’ve also lost interest in the actual Olympics, summer or winter, as they’re currently run and as long as the incumbent managers remain in place. The International Olympics Committee, and the US part of that, the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, have shown where their values are. I don’t approve of the PRC’s genocide. At best, the IOC and USOPC don’t care about the PRC’s genocide.

So What if it Is?

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Great Britain, in a move toward filling the vacuum left by President Joe Biden’s (D) dangerous timidity when facing Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sent serious arms into Ukraine to help that nation prepare for the coming Russian invasion. (It’s telling that Germany, dependent as it has sold itself into, on Russian energy, forced the British supply aircraft to fly around German airspace to get to Ukraine.)

Putin reacted to that and trotted out his Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, to object to plussing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. As cited by Fox News, she said that

Ukraine perceives Western military assistance as a “carte blanche for a military operation in Donbas.”

I certainly hope Ukraine has that perception, and that the perception is grounded in fact. The Donbas is, after all, Ukrainian territory, for all that Russia currently occupies most of it.