Tag Archives: freedom

Negotiations with Russia

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Boris Johnson, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is on the right track regarding the idea of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin an end to the barbarian’s invasion. Negotiations now would be both fruitless and pointless, Johnson writes, because they would require Ukraine to surrender Ukrainian territory and they would idiotically rely on the barbarian’s trustworthiness in keeping any agreement. Negotiations now would be ill-timed, as well: the time for negotiating can only be after the barbarian has been driven entirely from Ukrainian territory and Ukraine having won, totally and decisively, the war the barbarian began.

Johnson had this, too, though:

If Mr Putin were to use a weapon of mass destruction [one of the barbarian chieftain’s many threats], he would be tendering Russia’s resignation from the club of civilized nations….

With this characterization, Johnson is being…generous. Russia hasn’t been a civilized nation, at the least, since the mass starvation the Russians—the people as well as the government—inflicted on Ukrainians and on the Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Belarussians during the kulak collectivization atrocities of the 1930s. The barbarian has demonstrated—in rivers of blood—the continuing depths of its depravity with the atrocities inflicted by the products of Russian society on Ukrainians in the present barbarian war. Atrocities Johnson describes so genteelly:

captives tortured, women raped, schools and kindergartens deliberately targeted.

He omitted the hospitals deliberately targeted, the vast lines of refugees from besieged cities that the barbarian had agreed to allow to evacuate—and then targeted for mass murder once they were so conveniently lined up on the agreed roads leading away from the city.

Those finally arrived at post-victory negotiations? [A] peaceful, orderly and lasting relationship, and friendship, between Ukraine and Russia, as Johnson so naively described them?

Keep in mind two things as you contemplate such a negotiation. The “soldiers” inflicting those atrocities today—the rapes, the tortures, the child butcheries, the attacks on hospitals, the attacks on infrastructure necessary for civilian survival during the coming winter—are the products of Russian society. Most of these armed thugs may well be from the lower tiers of that society, but who taught them to be the way they are? The rest of that society, who either condone the atrocities or actively order them, all the way up to the chieftain sitting on his throne in the Kremlin.

The other thing is the impossibility of Ukrainian friendship with a polity—barbaric or civilized—that is bent on the utter destruction of Ukraine.

No. The only outcome for the present situation is the utter, decisive defeat of the barbarian, with his being driven entirely from Ukrainian territory. The only possibility for any future relationship between Ukraine and Russia is Ukrainian eternal vigilance against the next wave of barbarians from the east. For that wave will surely come.

National Digital ID

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The Senate’s Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (as are all Senate and House committees in this Congress so dominated) passed out of committee a plan to impose a national digital ID system for US citizens—the better for Government tracking of its subjects.

Supporters claim that such national IDs could be

the key to unlocking access to financial services, various government benefits and educational opportunities, as well as a number of other critical services.

What they ignore is that such things also could be key to freezing those same items when they’re held by those of whom Government disapprove—just as the Progressive-Democrat-run IRS targeted conservative political action entities, and as the Progressive-Democrat DoJ is (still!) targeting mothers who object to school board wokeness as domestic terrorists, and as the Progressive-Democrat-dominated FBI still is targeting Trump-supporters, and as the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is naming half of us average Americans pseudo-fascists.

Jay Stanley, a Senior Policy Analyst for the ACLU on national digital IDs:

…digital IDs could prove to be a privacy nightmare. “But digital is not always better—especially when systems are exclusively digital.”
“There’s a reason that most jurisdictions have spurned electronic voting in favor of paper ballots, for example,”

That’s the best purpose that a national ID could serve—and it’s anathema to individual liberty. But it’s part and parcel of Party’s avowed purpose of “fundamentally transforming America.”

No.

We already have a national ID. It’s our passports. The critical difference is that generation of and possession of a passport is strictly voluntary and done solely on the initiative of each individual American citizen.

What’s next from the Progressive-Democrats? Internal travel documents? They tried that, after all, in some areas at the height of the Wuhan Virus situation, barring travel unless the traveler could present suitable vaccination papers to relevant authorities.

Voter Suppression

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Early voting is under way, and Georgia’s Jim Crow 2.0 Law® is in full swing.

Georgia has seen 539,297 people cast ballots as of Tuesday, far outpacing the 182,684 by this point in the 2018 midterm primary elections, according to data compiled by Georgia Votes.
The numbers have even outpaced those posted during the 2020 presidential election by 156%….

Tuesday was Day Two for those Leftists and Progressive-Democratic Party members keeping score at home.

These numbers are for a mid-term election, which typically has a much lower voter turnout than during a Presidential election year.

But wait….

The first day of early voting in Georgia set a new midterm turnout record, with nearly 123,000 in-person voters casting their ballots.

That’s how much voters are being suppressed; that’s how hard it is for them even to get to a voting booth—they’re voting in person in record numbers.

This is voter suppression in the minds of those Wonders who style themselves so much smarter and…better…than us average Americans.

Go figure.

“Ukraine Needs More Security Guarantees”

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That’s the position of The Wall Street Journal‘s headline writer and of Andriy Yermak and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who opined as much in their Thursday op-ed. They were actually serious, too. The position is, though, to use the technical term, a bunch of bull.

They demonstrate the foolishness of their position in their lede:

When Ukraine’s army is given the weapons it needs, it defeats Russia on the battlefield. That is the lesson the world learned as it watched Ukrainian forces quickly retake the Kharkiv region this month. Since the beginning of September, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than 2,300 square miles of territory in the south and east of the country.

However.

They want to build on this success with an international “guarantee:” a Kyiv Security Compact between Ukraine and its partners. Then they muddle their position further by insisting (correctly so, here) that Ukraine should be given modern and effective air-defense and antimissile systems—in addition, I say, to much more heavy weapons of the type currently being supplied in dribs and drabs, and with the addition of tanks and other armor.

Ukraine has already been the victim of international guarantees. The Budapest Memoranda guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they gave up the nuclear weapons then held by the nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine agreed. Not too long later, Russia occupied and partitioned away Crimea and seized and occupied a significant fraction of the Ukrainian portion of the Donbas.

The guarantors’ response? Bleatings, finger-waggings, and the empty promises of the Minsk Protocols. These were followed by the barbarian’s naked invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities inflicted on Ukrainian women, children, and men, both civilian and soldier; those atrocities continue apace today. The Minsk guarantors’ response here? Russia was one of those guarantors…. The others responded by slow-walking and actively withholding weapons from Ukraine as the barbarian’s pre-invasion build-up proceeded in Belorussia and across the border in Russia near Belgorod.

When the barbarian sent in its invasion, the West’s guarantors continued to slow-walk serious weapons transfers until only lately. These worthies still won’t transfer tanks and other armor, led by Germany, which government men insist that Ukrainians—Slavs all—are just too stupid to be able learn how to operate a German tank.

No. No empty, misleading, won’t-be-enforced guarantees.

What Ukraine needs are the weapons it needs, but the full suite of them according to Ukraine’s articulation, not the Know Betters of the timid West. The barbarian’s invasion must be utterly crushed and the barbarian forced to tear up its roads and railroads some considerable distance into Russia from the Ukrainian border, with the -road beds and the flatter terrain between sown with the aptly named Russian olive. The horde must not be left able to invade again.

Rasmussen, especially, should know better. He was NATO’s Secretary General from 2009 to 2014. So should Yermak, come to that; he’s the sitting head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and he’s living through the outcome of the empty words of those prior “guarantees.”

But We Need to Take your Guns Away

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A bad guy armed with a shotgun walked into a Florida store with the intent of robbing it. And bragged about being “from Chicago” in the process.

I got a big (expletive) (expletive) gun, but I’m not from around here is what I’m saying. I’m from Chicago bro.

Then, as paraphrased by Fox News, this armed thug

 ask[ed] the employee what kind of weapon he is holding.

Which the employee showed him, whereupon the thug left.

The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, the county where the attempted armed robbery occurred, has the right of it [emphasis added]:

He then fumbles for words, resorting to meaningless babble about being from Chicago. Words seem to fail you when your felony attempt is thwarted by lawful and righteous force.

But the Progressive-Democratic Party and its (what has become) mainstream Leftist supporters want us all disarmed. The store’s employee should have been left unarmed, helpless, and possibly murdered during the course of this robbery attempt.