Monthly Archives: September 2024

Realistic War Aims

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The first two paragraphs lay out the case, erroneous as it is.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s leaders have insisted that Russia needs to be driven out of all Ukrainian territory before any peace talks could begin.
Now, with Russia continuing to make slow gains on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine showing signs of fatigue, Ukraine may need to come up with a more realistic plan, at least for the next year of the war, according to European diplomats.

The first mistake is the claim that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This is false, as even the authors of this missive must know: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and occupied Crimea and two of Ukraine’s major eastern oblasts.

Leave that aside, though. The larger and more serious mistake is that Ukraine needs a more realistic plan than the one it plainly stated when Russia began the second phase of its invasion in 2022. That plan is the ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine as a precondition to peace talks.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Ukraine on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian officials in part to discuss how best to define a Ukrainian victory and what aid it will need to achieve that, according to officials.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already defined what a Ukrainian victory would be—see above. The problems that make achieving it difficult for Ukraine are Western—and mostly caused by the Biden-Harris administration, in particular. Start with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s tacit permission to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the Russian buildup in Belorussia in early 2022—Biden said that a small invasion incursion would be OK (It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…). Continue with Biden’s offer to Zelenskyy, after Putin’s barbarians went in and tried to capture Kyiv on the fly, of transport out of the country, to which he responded I don’t need a ride…. I need more ammunition, therewith demonstrating far more courage and understanding of the situation than Biden and his team.

Continue to where we are now: Biden and the rest of the West, while bleating about unshakable support for Ukraine, do not insist that Ukraine win, only that it not lose. Worse, in keeping with that timidity and immoral support for only keeping Ukraine in the fight bleeding and dying, Biden and Europe are still(!) slow walking the arms and ammunition and logistics that Ukraine needs at the rate Ukraine needs them in order to fight to win. Biden even is telling Ukraine that US weapons may not be used against targets inside Russia except those just across the border and then only to break up an attack in progress.

With Biden preserving Russia as a sanctuary nation (and the left worries about Donald Trump “collaborating with” Russia), it’s the Biden-Harris administration that needs to better identify its role in Ukraine’s efforts to achieve victory.

What She’s Committed To

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This is excerpted from the ACLU questionnaire that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris filled out the last time she ran for President (via Just the News):

6. Will you commit to ending the use of ICE detainers?
Yes X No⬜
Explanation (no more than 500 words): Throughout my career, I have made it clear that law enforcement should use their time and resources to keep communities safe, not act as federal immigration agents. It’s also important that law enforcement build trust with the communities they are sworn to protect—acting as de facto immigration officers erodes this trust. As Attorney General, I issued a bulletin on December 4, 2012 informing all California law enforcement that they did not have to comply with ICE detainers. As president I will focus enforcement on increasing public safety, not tearing apart immigrant families. This includes requiring ICE to obtain a warrant where probable cause exists as to end the use of detainers.

This is nonsense. ICE detainers in no way convert police into immigration officers. The detainers merely ask police, who have already arrested the individual(s), to notify ICE that the police have the individual, so ICE can pick him up at the jail or on release by the police. The ICE agents respond promptly; there’s no call, by the detainer, to hold the individual longer.

10. Will you work to stop states from shutting down abortion providers by urging Congress to pass and signing into law the Women’s Health Protection Act? If yes, how will you take a leadership role in advancing this legislation at the national level?
Yes X No ⬜
Explanation (no more than 500 words): I am a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act and will fight to sign it into law as president. As President, protecting the right to reproductive healthcare services will be one of my top priorities and I will fight to stop dangerous state laws restricting reproductive rights before they go into effect. That’s why I have a plan to require states with a history of unconstitutionally restricting access to abortion to pre-clear any new law or practice with the Justice Department before it can be enacted. We have to fight back against this all out assault on reproductive rights. Women have agency and they have authority to make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies. My administration won’t leave them to fight alone.

This is wrong on a number of levels. Most basic is the error embedded in the ACLU’s question and carried through by Harris’ response: there’s not a minim of concern for protection of the baby, only concern for the woman’s “right” to kill the baby for no better reason than she wants to.

Secondly the history of unconstitutionally restricting access to abortion is nonsense. There is not, and there never has been, a constitutionally based access to abortions. There has only been a Supreme Court generated access, and that has been rescinded by the Court so the matter can be returned to the States and to each State’s citizens so those citizens can decide for themselves the degree of access. And that’s where the matter should be.

Thirdly, the requirement for States to say “Mother may I” to the Federal government is an active and blatant attack on the federal structure of our nation and our nation’s governance.

There are other such…errors…in Harris’ questionnaire, many of which are variations on a theme, as well as some on separate subjects.

These, though, are Harris’ indelibly stated extreme positions, no matter her current rhetoric—which no less a light than Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has said are just words convenient to her effort to get elected, and in no way are to be taken seriously.

Russia Gets Iranian Ballistic Missiles

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So reads the headline on the Wall Street Journal editorial. Lots of them, too.

…a recent arms shipment from Tehran to Moscow included hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles.

There’s another, more important, side to this, though.

Tehran is learning from Moscow’s military experience….

Those are tactics. Even more important, Iran also is getting live-fire testing of its equipment during actual combat operations. Just on the eve of its coming attack on Israel.

There’s a Difference

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The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held a hearing concerning the crimes committed by illegal immigrants inside the US as a result of the open border maintained by the current administration.

Progressive-Democrats are trying to deny that fact.

Congressman Jerry Nadler (D, NY) said crimes were committed by illegal immigrants during the Trump administration but he [Chairman Jim Jordan (R, OH)] doesn’t blame Trump for them.

Former President Donald (R)] Trump was actively trying to close the border; one of the outcomes of that was a reduction—by a lot—in the number of illegal aliens coming across our border and the resulting vastly lower numbers of illegal alien crimes committed in the US compared with what the Biden-Harris administration is allowing today by holding our border open.

Nadler knows that full well.

What’s Not Being Discussed

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Minority, particularly black, enrollment is flat to down in many of our more selective colleges and universities since the Supreme Court ruled in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc v President And Fellows Of Harvard College that colleges and universities no longer could use race as a factor in their admission selections.

Leaders of those institutions, a group that includes Washington University in St Louis and some Ivy League schools, are now trying to figure out why their numbers shook out the way they did. … They also say previous growth didn’t come at the cost of academic talent.

That last is an especially interesting claim, since those Leaders provided no data to support their claim, or at least the article’s author did not quote their data or provide any from her own digging.

I have two questions that bear on the matter. One is what are the minority-enrolled normalized majors of black admittees before the ruling compared with the majors after the ruling? What are the majors at graduation before and after the ruling? The latter will be the more dispositive datum since students change their majors, often more than once, over the course of their studies.

My other question is what is the normalized graduation rate before the Court’s ruling compared with after the ruling.

Since this is the first academic year after the ruling, it’s too soon to answer those questions. That, by itself, demonstrates the disingenuousness of those institution leaders: they have no data with which to compare, and so they have no data on which to base their claim “no cost of academic talent.” The questions still need to be asked, and the data collected, so substantiated assessments can be substituted for vapor claims.

Also not being discussed—it is a larger topic—is what, if anything, should be done about any enrollment disparities, assuming disparity is defined as enrollment percentages not well approximating population percentages. That answer, I claim, is independent of whether racist enrollment selection criteria are allowed or not. The answer, instead, centers on making available to all children opportunities for education and entry into the world post education. That, in turn, demands those opportunity availabilities must begin before kindergarten; extend through K-12 schooling, whether home schooling, public schools, voucher schools, or charter schools according to parent choices; and on through trade schools, community colleges, and colleges/universities according to parent and student choices.

That actual equality of opportunity will make those enrollment numbers look more like our population numbers.