Monthly Archives: February 2022

Mistaken

Posted on by
Reply

Tulsi Gabbard thinks Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided had President Joe Biden (D) and European politicians only recognized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security concerns vis-à-vis Ukraine membership in NATO.

This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border

Gabbard is badly mistaken in this, for a number of reasons.

  1. The Biden-Harris administration and NATO had already acknowledged Putin’s security concerns here, and rejected them. Ukraine’s membership in NATO is a matter for sovereign Ukraine and the sovereign NATO nations to accept or reject, not for Putin to dictate to them.
  2. Putin’s putative security concerns regarding Ukraine are not his aim, but merely a tool in his drive to reconstitute the 20th century Russian empire—which loss he considered the geopolitical tragedy of the century and which reconstitution he made explicitly his goal in his Monday night speech.
  3. NATO is a defensive alliance with no designs on Russia beyond defending the member nations against a demonstrably aggressively acquisitive Russia.
    1. Georgia, which Putin’s Russia has invaded, partitioned, and occupied those partitions
    2. Ukraine, which Putin’s Russia already has invaded once, partitioned, and occupied those earlier partitions
    3. The Baltic States and Poland, which Russia has already attacked, more than once each, with cyber war break-ins and hacks
    4. Russia’s repeated use of energy extortion against Ukraine, Europe through Ukraine, and lately Germany explicitly
    5. Russia’s shutdown of Colonial Pipeline, in response to which Biden-Harris meekly lifted the sanctions against Russia’s Nordstream 2
  4. Putin’s Russia has no security concerns from the West except in his own fetid imagination. Russia has nothing at all that the West wants that can’t be gotten far more cheaply through freely done and mutually beneficial trade.

Regarding that last point, if there’s a security risk, it comes from People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, who’s long had designs on Siberia, which generations of PRC governments, and China governments before them, consider Russia to have stolen from China. That risk already is in progress of realization via the economic deal that Putin and Xi signed just a couple of short years ago that enables Siberia’s rich resources to be jointly exploited by Russia and the PRC—with PRC citizens doing the vast bulk of the labor and moving into (functionally colonizing) Siberia in order to do that work.

No, what led Putin to invade Ukraine this time, with his intent to conquer and occupy the nation, was Western—including our own nation—mild acquiescence in those prior aggressions, invasions, and occupations. If Putin isn’t crushed in Ukraine, he won’t stop there. All of eastern Europe, including what used to be the German Democratic Republic will be at risk. And so will be the Republic of China, Japan, Republic of Korea, Australia, and the United States.

Ending Secret Laboratories

Posted on by
Reply

Dr Marty Makary, Islet Transplant Surgery Chief and Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wants to do away with them, and he wants to start with the CDC’s. I think he doesn’t go far enough.

Despite housing treasure troves of critical COVID data on vaccines and on natural immunity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only been releasing slivers of data that support its own scientific dogma.

And, closing his op-ed,

The CDC has a pattern of hoarding data in order to cherry-pick the findings it likes and then publish them in its own journal, called MMWR [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report].

The CDC’s—CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s—rationale for this utter dishonesty is that us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to understand the data if they were released for our perusal. Here’s Kristen Nordlund, CDC Health Communication Specialist [Aside: be sure to crook your pinky finger when you read that. Most such positions are “Press Secretary.” Nordlund’s title is an indication of just how self-importantly precious the CDC is, in addition to the agency’s fundamental dishonesty]:

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted[.]

Makary also says,

If I were advising President Joe Biden [D], I would tell him that the CDC needs to restore the public trust by making all CDC data available in real-time for researchers around the country to access and to study.

The problem in the CDC’s case is that the dishonesty extends far beyond the agency’s laboratories and personages making the editorial [sic] decisions on what information to withhold from a dull and uncomprehending populace. I often call for a broad removal of an organization’s top management, sometimes extending the call into middle management.

It isn’t possible for the CDC to have trust in it restored, even with that broad personnel turnover. All of the data in the CDC’s databases need to be released immediately, certainly. However, merely releasing the data would leave the dishonest bureaucrats managing the agency and doing the “work” in it in place. The CDC’s cancer of dishonesty has broadly metastasized far beyond Stage IV. The dishonesty is terminal, and the CDC needs to be disbanded altogether—not merely have its budget zeroed out; the Center must be completely removed from the Federal government—and all of its personnel returned to the private sector, not reassigned elsewhere in government.

If the nation truly needs a medical agency for managing the (medical) diseases extant in our nation or that enter it, such a facility must be built anew, from the ground up.

Meek

Posted on by
Reply

Not merely weak. That’s the response of the US and Europe to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The coordinated US and European actions fall short of the package of sanctions threatened by the administration if Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Never mind that there is no such thing as a less-than full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation. Either a hostile nation invades, or it does not. And Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Nor is it a surprise that the Biden-Harris administration’s threats of serious sanctions far exceeded Biden-Harris’ actions. The highly (self-)touted 40-year foreign policy expert is too timorous to act seriously in the face of a serious enemy. Former SecDef Robert Gates’ characterization of Biden’s foreign policy chops are proven still accurate eight years later. Only today, Biden-Harris’ failure is exceedingly dangerous for our nation, for our friends, for our allies.

That package of wrist-slaps and virtue-signals consists of

  • blacklisting two major banks and
  • halting the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline

That second is a misrepresentation of what’s been done. All Germany is doing is “delaying” certification of Nordstream 2.

Other parts of the package include

  • Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Japan, like the US, would ban the trade of new Russian sovereign debt
  • sanction individuals connected to the breakaway regions.
  • Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia would impose travel bans
  • [impose] targeted financial sanctions on eight members of Russia’s Security Council
  • Canada said its sanctions would target state-backed Russian lenders
  • ban Canadians from buying sovereign Russian debt.

“You can’t come here.” Yeah, that’ll show Putin and his cronies. Pretending that sanctioning a few individuals—who’ve also already moved their money—is a serious action is insulting to the rest of us. The sovereign debt bit could be serious, except that Putin has his BFF and…mentor…People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping backing him economically. The sovereign debt bit is necessary, but it’s far from sufficient.

And this risible move, planned for some time in the future:

The Biden administration plans to impose sanctions on the company constructing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline….

To what end, I have to wonder? The pipeline’s construction is completed, and the pipeline has moved into Germany’s certification stage.

No one is contemplating cutting Russia off altogether from western funds, which would push him into complete dependency on Xi’s good offices. No one contemplating even sanctioning Putin.

No one is contemplating shipping offensive weapons to Ukraine so that nation would have a chance, not of merely holding on, but actually defeating Putin’s invasion and driving the Russians back out of Ukraine altogether. No one is contemplating even sending Ukraine sufficient defensive arms that they even can hold on. Germany is, though, still actively interfering with any arms shipments at all for Ukraine.

Indeed,

A key calculation among officials on both sides of the Atlantic is how hard to hit if Russia occupies parts of eastern Ukraine beyond the separatist-held areas and to what extent to maintain some deterrence in case Moscow moves to take the rest of the country[.]

It’s a simple calculation, really, or should be. Hit Russia without limit economically and politically, and ready our respective military establishments. We should have learned from Vietnam that gradual, or graduated, response is the path to ultimate and bloody defeat. Hit Russia now, faster than Putin can respond. Putin, as noted above, has already invaded Ukraine; now he must be driven out altogether.

And: Russia has already invaded Ukraine, there is nothing left to deter.

And, and: Putin said quite clearly what his goals were in his Monday night address to his nation. Those goals include that Ukraine isn’t a nation, it’s a part of Russia, and he means to “recover” it. His larger goal is to reconstitute the 20th century Russian empire of SSRs orbiting the Russian SSR along with the client states beyond the SSRs. Why is it, also, that western managers (we don’t have any actual leaders today) continue to turn deaf ears to what our enemies say when they tell us what they’re going to do? Germany, especially, should be attending to that larger statement of Putin’s: one of the client states Putin means to recover is the German Democratic Republic—East Germany.

Instead, the goal of today’s western nation managers seems to be to ensnare Putin in a Ukrainian quagmire, to bleed Ukrainian men and women—and children as inevitable “collateral damage”—in the effort while the rest of these nations sit in the Coliseum seats, cheering.

Using the Power Ceded to Them

Posted on by
Reply

OPEC once again has rejected pleas to increase oil production in the face of rising oil prices.

Ministers of Arab oil-producing countries gathered in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, refusing pressure for OPEC+ to increase production again amid coronavirus pandemic recovery efforts and as a potential war looms in Europe.

And

On Sunday, Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told an industry conference in Riyadh how the pandemic and recovery efforts have “taught us the value of caution,” Reuters reported.

Bin Salman and his OPEC counterparts also have learned another thing: the value of supporting Russia—the major OPEC ally that adds the ‘+’ to OPEC—rather than a timid and irresolute Progressive-Democrat American administration.

Bin Salman and his OPEC counterparts also have been reminded of OPEC’s economic power as the world’s major oil producer, a power the organization also wielded against the US in the ’70s when we really were dependent on Middle East oil for our economy.

The difference today, of course, is that we have no need to be dependent on others—not OPEC, not an enemy nation oil and natural gas exporter—for our economic independence (which means our political independence, also). Our current dependency is solely the work of President Joe Biden (D) via his active war on our energy production industry and his surrender to Russia on Nordstream 2 after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s minions shut down Colonial Pipeline as a demonstration of things to come if Biden didn’t yield.

Appalling Failure

Posted on by
Reply

And it borders on deliberately done, since the principals—President Joe Biden (D), SecState Antony Blinken, NSA Director Jake Sullivan, SecDef Lloyd Austin, CJSC General Mark Milley, and everyone on those staffs—involved knew from the start that this would be the outcome of their decisions.

The failure is President Joe Biden’s (D) refusal to apply any serious counter—not even petty economic sanctions—to Russian President Vladimir Puten’s threats, now realized, to invade and conquer Ukraine.

(Sanction the Russian Army’s bank? Pssh. All the banks are Putin’s; this represents a minor irritant until the Army gets switched over to another bank. Sanction the VEB (Vnesheconombank, literally, external development bank, Russia’s major bank for foreign economic matters)? Again, Pssh. Russia has lots of foreign partners—right there in central and western Europe, given their response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—with which to do business. No more buying Russian government bonds or other debt instruments? Meh. Enter Xi Jinping, even if that creates a longer-term risk for Putin.)

Don’t apply any sanctions now, Blinken kept bleating—deterrence doesn’t deter unless it’s applied after the behavior being deterred has occurred, he kept spouting. Never mind that deterrence, even applied with proper timing, doesn’t deter when it’s only empty chit chat, idle threats of a second-grader on the recess playground of “boy, oh boy, when I get you.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky was spot on:

We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired at, or after we will have no borders and after we will have no economy or part of our country will be occupied. Why would we need those sanctions then?

Europe—the EU and NATO—are crumbling in the face of Putin’s actions? Sure. But why should the US hold ourselves hostage to the timidity of an ally that’s been reneging on its military commitments and economic agreements for decades? Where is it written that our nation cannot act on our own initiative, on our own recognizance, in service to our own security interests?

And that’s just the sanctions, which take a long time to begin to have effect, and which effects are spotty, anyway, as nations and businesses seek to operate around, or outright violate, them. There’s also the deliberate withholding from Ukraine of modern arms and training in their use—that would only provoke Putin, Biden-Harris and his weak-kneed European counterparts wept. Arms did begin to trickle in—”hundreds of millions of dollars” of ammunition from the US, for instance, will last a few days at most in an actual fight—in the last month. But even here, Germany has been a deliberate roadblock, preventing British air shipments from traversing German airspace, and blocking arms shipments from Baltic nations when those arms were of German origin.

Here are the most likely sequelae from Biden-Harris’ timorous weakness in the face of Putin’s aggressiveness and now his invasion of Ukraine.

Biden-Harris has handed the Republic of China to People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping. This will be followed by Xi acting on his control of the South China Sea to further intimidate and suborn the other nations rimming the Sea. From that, Xi’s government will actively govern the sea lines of commerce that flow through the Sea.

From that, Japan and the Republic of Korea will be increasingly economically isolated from their Western trade partners and allies, and in an echo of the years leading into WWII, Japan and today the RoK will be vulnerable to Xi’s naked economic blockade—and so have their political independence at risk. The same control puts Australia’s economy—and so political autonomy—at risk.

Some 30%-40% of our own nation’s foreign trade passes through the South China Sea to our West Coast. Xi to Biden-Harris: “Nice economy you got there…..”

The fall of Ukraine to Putin, and Biden-Harris’ and EU mild acceptance of that, puts Europe in Putin’s crosshairs, beginning with Poland, the Baltic States, and the Balkans. He’s already been attacking, through cyber war, Poland and the Baltics. Putin’s avowed goal is to reconstitute the old Russian empire of the USSR and its client states.

One of those client states is East Germany, but never mind here—he’s getting the whole of Germany, this time, with his energy extortion. Yes, yes, Germany is talking about beginning to act on delaying Nordstream 2 certification. They’ll wind up proceeding. Putin will require it.

From all of that, economic relations between Europe and the US will weaken drastically. And the isolation of our nation will proceed apace.

What hath Biden-Harris wrought?