Tag Archives: freedom

Russia Reneges on Ukraine

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And, no, I’m not talking about the Belgrade Memorandum, in which Russia, among others, agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine turning over its then-third largest in the world nuclear weapons arsenal to Russia.

I’m talking about the just signed—by Russia, Ukraine, the EU, and the US—agreement pretending to “neutraliz[e] a crisis that has brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war.”  Among other things, that agreement called for “dissidents” to depart from the Ukraine government buildings that they had seized in eastern Ukraine.

However.

Denis Pushilin, the leader of the uprising that calls itself the People’s Republic of Donetsk, said at a news conference in the southeast city’s seized administration building that the activists won’t exit until the new leaders in Kiev leave the government he says they have been occupying….

“After that, we’ll also agree to do it,” Mr. Pushilin said.  Instead, he said he and other activists in the building are continuing to prepare for a referendum on the southeast Ukraine region’s future that he says they intend to hold by May 11.

That referendum for which Vladimir Putin’s representative in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk is pushing so hard is another of Putin’s demands: he’s threatened to deepen his invasion of Ukraine and occupy eastern and southern Ukraine, as he’s already done the Ukrainian oblast of Crimea, if those other oblasts aren’t allowed to be separate “autonomous” regions.  That threat is made manifest by his having amassed some 50,000 Russian soldiers, armor, artillery, and combat aircraft just a few short miles from the eastern Ukrainian border with Russia.  That threat is made manifest by his having infiltrated special operations forces into eastern and southern Ukraine to drive and to support these building occupations—the same tactic he used to seize Crimea.

And now his representative is refusing to honor the “agreement” his employer has signed.

Only an idiot or a naïf could sit in the White House or in Brussels and think Putin would keep his signed word.

What To Do About Ukraine

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KT McFarland has some thoughts.  After taking notice of President Barack Obama’s foolishness in worrying that supporting the victim of Russian invasion in any material way might antagonize the victim’s attacker, she suggests [emphasis hers]

First, if the Ukrainian people want to fight for their freedom, we should help them.  …with intelligence, communications, and logistics.
If it comes to a civil war, the fighting will be short and bloody, and Russia will win.

Second, we should shore up our NATO allies.  We should reverse course and build the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Finally, the US should take aim at Russia’s economy.  Russia does not have a modern economy, it’s a petro-power.  The only thing it sells that the world wants to buy is oil and natural gas.

To which I add, since I’m as unwilling as the Ukrainians to surrender their Crimea Oblast to the Russians, the following.

Arm the Ukrainian army: anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons are easily transported, and these should be rushed in—by military convoy and by military cargo aircraft.  Russia still will win a short, sharp fight, as McFarland suggests, but they should pay a hard price in soldiers and military equipment, not only in rubles.  And if the supplies are sufficient to drag out the fight, well….

Send a squadron of the US Navy into the Black Sea.  Directly challenge the Russians in occupied Crimea—but make the Russians fire first, or not at all.  Make clear to the Russians that they need to consider challenging the US as well as Ukraine.

Third, in addition to reviving the missile shield, forward deploy—in Poland and the Czech Republic, certainly, but also in the Baltics.  And run some of those forces, along with a naval flotilla, up to the Polish and Lithuanian borders and Baltic Sea boundary surrounding Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast.

Add some serious economic sanctions.

Drill, baby, drill.  And frack, baby, frack.  And sell the output to Europe and Ukraine.  This will immediately drop the price of oil and gas on the world market, severely reducing the major source of Russian income, making it difficult for Russia to maintain its armies in the field—and to continue developing, in contravention of existing arms control agreement, its medium range nuclear missiles.

We also need to deny Russia’s access to the US’ banking system, which is a major part of the international banking system, and pressure Europe to deny Russia access to the European banking system, which is most of the rest of the international banking system.  Without access to credit, dollars, or petrodollars/rubles, the Russian economy—which Senator John McCain (R, AZ) has accurately called a gas station masquerading as an economy—will be severely constrained, if it doesn’t collapse altogether.

Other than the prompt price drop, drilling/fracking won’t have an immediate effect on the Russian economy as a whole until the oil and gas actually start arriving in Europe and Ukraine, and freezing Russia out of the international banking system won’t produce an immediate effect until the Russians run out of dollar reserves.  But we need to keep both pressures on, not just until Russia pulls back from eastern and southern Ukraine, but also until Russia withdraws from Crimea.  And agrees to cancel its lease on the naval base in Sevastopol.  Russia has demonstrated these last several months that it can’t be trusted with military bases on other nations’ territory.

Finally, we have an agreement with Ukraine—as do Great Britain and Russia (which has already welched on that agreement) under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum—to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they give up what was at the time the third largest nuclear weapon inventory in the world.  They did their part; we need to do ours.  Alone, if needs be.

Whatever we decide to do, though, we can’t wait on the EU or the rest of NATO.  They’re even more timid (if you can believe it) than Obama when it comes to Russia (or to the PRC, or Iran, or Syria, or northern Korea, or… but let’s stick with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for now).

We need to move; Ukraine is out of time.  The window for idle chit-chat has closed.  Unless we’re going abjectly to surrender.

Update: According to General Wesley Clark (USA, Ret) and Phillip Karber, this administration even has refused Ukraine’s request for requests for such passive defensive equipment as body armor, night-vision goggles, and communications equipment. Such things are…provocative.

Appalling timidity from the Obama administration.

Another Blow

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…in the Progressives’ war on diversity, this one struck against the concept of free speech.

Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced Tuesday that it had withdrawn the planned awarding of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staunch critic of Islam and its treatment of women….

Their “rationale?”

She is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world.  That said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.

Apparently those core values don’t include the sanctity, or a recognition of the necessity to a free society, of freedom to express an opinion different from that of an authority figure, nor do they seem to include a respect for diversity of opinion.

Ali’s offensive speech?

Once [Islam]’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful.  It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now.  They’re not interested in peace.  I think that we are at war with Islam.  And there’s no middle ground in wars.

Even truth is offensive at Brandeis, because, according to Joseph Lumbard, Chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis

This makes Muslim students feel very uneasy.  They feel unwelcome here.

Well.  There it is.  Discomfort is a crime at this place.  When it concerns the appropriate groups.

Hotel Maryland

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You can check in, but you can’t check out.

Netflix’ show, House of Cards, is about cut-throat politics at its worst, it’s hugely successful, and it’s filmed in Maryland.  And therein lies the rub.

The show’s producers, Media Rights Capital, now want a larger set of tax credits, given that success.  If they can’t get an increase, MRC says it’ll move its filming location to another state where it can get a better deal for its proven product.  Fair enough.  The filming produces income for the state’s economy and for the state, even with the current credit structure, and that success is expected to continue.

The state demurs.  That government wants to keep the credit levels where they are.  Also fair enough.  Those credits are their cost (regardless of what we might think about whose money those credits really is), and the state would like to minimize the cost of its own business-doing.

Such matters should be the stuff of negotiation between the two parties, and if they can’t agree on terms, the two parties should be able simple to part ways.

But the State of Maryland now has gone off the rails.

The House of Delegates now is threatening to seize MRC’s production studios under government’s eminent domain powers if they attempt to go somewhere else.  Never mind that there’s no public use—or even public purpose—to such a seizure; the taking would be nothing more than government-sanctioned theft of private property.

Folks might want to think twice about moving a business to Maryland, or keeping one there.  It’s a short step to a neighboring state, none of which seems inclined to keep businesses prisoner.

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door.
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before.
“Relax,” said the Delegate,
“We are programmed to receive.
“You can check out any time you like,
“But you can never leave.”

 

With apologies to the Eagles.

Another 2nd Amendment Threat from DoJ

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All for the very best of intentions, of course.

This time Attorney General Eric Holder wants to use bracelets that must be worn by lawful gun users as a means of electronically tying the firearm to its lawful owner.

I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how guns can be made more safe.

By making them either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.

(“Common sense”—they stayed up all night memorizing that phrase a few years ago, and now they’re doing their best to wear it out, including in places where their sense plainly is lacking.)

And he wants to spend $2 million of our hard-earned tax dollars on this…idea.

Such a mechanism is just one more point of failure in an American’s exercise of his fundamental right.  Any such linkage can be hacked, either to enable a criminal to use a stolen weapon or to enable a criminal to disable a weapon in the hands of its lawful owner trying to defend himself.

More importantly, though, such a mechanism is just another tool in the hands of an intrusive government to identify who owns firearms, and thus to get sub rosa registration; to track that owner as he legally uses his firearms; and—that hack—to disable the firearm whenever a legal owner/operator becomes inconvenient to that intrusive government.

In fact, such technology would be highly useful to us legal owner/operators.  It must, however, be a voluntary addition to our weapons, with the choice made solely by us.