Tag Archives: freedom

Appalling Failure

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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?

Gun Control

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In the matter of Bianchi v Frosh, a Maryland gun control case in which the State has

designated specified firearms as assault weapons and prohibited them from being transported into the state or from being possessed, sold, transferred, or purchased in the state[]

Mountain States Legal Foundation has filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to take up the case. The article itself is worth the read, but what drew my eye is this position of the Fourth Circuit in its appellate ruling in Kolbe v Hogan, Jr. referenced in passing by JtN.

Are the banned assault weapons and large-capacity magazines “like” “M-16 rifles,” i.e., “weapons that are most useful in military service,” and thus outside the ambit of the Second Amendment?  The answer to that dispositive and relatively easy inquiry is plainly in the affirmative.

This test manufactured by the Fourth Circuit deliberately ignores our history and the actual text of our Second Amendment.

A significant fraction of the artillery—cannons—our Continental Army used in our Revolutionary War were privately owned, as were the powder and shot privately manufactured and provided. A significant fraction of our combat ships—privateering ships—in our nation’s Revolutionary War were privately owned, as were the powder and shot privately manufactured and provided.

The Fourth Circuit’s test also deliberately ignores another bit of our history: our Second Amendment was written as defense against an overreaching, abusive government like the one we fought that war to be free of. And our Declaration of Independence outlines the duty of all Americans: [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations…it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…. which requires suitable weaponry.

The Fourth Circuit’s test also deliberately ignores the text of our Second Amendment: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. There’s not a jot or a tittle in there of “except if a government official, including a judge, thinks otherwise.” Nor is there a single minim about government being authorized to specify the purpose for which an American citizen might choose to arm himself and to bear those arms.

The Fourth Circuit’s opinion can be read here.

Madness

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That’s what the Ottawa Police Chief, Peter Sloly, claims the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa is.

[a] nationwide insurrection driven by madness

Because the truckers disagree with the Canadian government’s diktats regarding individual health and individual decisions regarding health.

Now where have I heard before such characterizations of disagreement with Government being the definition of madness?

Oh, yeah—Nikita Khrushchev’s and his successor Tzar General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev’s, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (For completeness’ sake, they were only extending and expanding Josef Stalin’s use of psychiatry as a political tool of control, but that’s a separate story.) Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s USSR government would routinely decide dissenters were insane—suffering from delusions of reformism—and confine them to asylums until they were…cured. Or died from one cause or another. Major General Pyotr Grigorenko was only one of the more prominent ones “driven by madness.”

Now here is Sloly: a wrong-minded protest—his position—must perforce be an “insurrection,” and insurrections must be—again, his position—acts of insanity.

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.

Flaw?

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The People’s Republic of China government requires everyone attending the Beijing Olympics next month to load a tracking app on their cell phones:

Those who attend the Olympics, including athletes and journalists, are required to download the app and upload their health and vaccination information to track potential outbreaks of COVID-19.

The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has identified what it terms a security flaw.

It turns out that the app, MY2022, fails to validate some SSL certificates. That means it’s a trivial matter for…others…to bypass any security measures, including encryption, that the phone’s owner might have implemented. Those others then can easily intercept and otherwise gain access to the cell phone owner’s sensitive information: all the medical information the PRC government requires to be loaded into the app, ostensibly for Wuhan Virus tracking, along with wholly unrelated information like all traffic in which the phone might be or have been engaged, all passport information, all medical information whether or not related to the Virus, and all other information stored on the cell phone—images and videos, contact lists, other emails, Web sites and bookmarks, and on and on.

The Lab’s key findings are

  • MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
  • MY2022 is fairly straightforward about the types of data it collects from users in its public-facing documents. However, as the app collects a range of highly sensitive medical information, it is unclear with whom or which organization(s) it shares this information.
  • MY2022 includes features that allow users to report “politically sensitive” content. The app also includes a censorship keyword list, which, while presently inactive, targets a variety of political topics including domestic issues such as Xinjiang and Tibet as well as references to Chinese government agencies.
  • While the vendor did not respond to our security disclosure, we find that the app’s security deficits may not only violate Google’s Unwanted Software Policy and Apple’s App Store guidelines but also China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection, providing potential avenues for future redress.

It’s doubtful, at least to me, that China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection are being violated, though, given the PRC government’s already widespread surveillance of all of its citizens. The PRC’s 2017 national intelligence law, too, requires all entities to cooperate with the government’s intelligence community and provide whatever information that community requires, which means that the app’s spying is no violation of the PRC’s own laws.

And there’s this:

[The] Citizen Lab said it had notified the Chinese organizing committee for the Games in December about the potential issues but had never received a response.

The Beijing Organizing Committee’s refusal to respond is itself instructive.

No, this is no flaw; neither PRC government programmers nor Beijing Organizing Committee programmers, who are the ones who officially built the app, are that amateurish. It’s deliberate, and it’s one more reason to not only skip the Beijing Olympics (including not watching them on NBC), but to skip doing any sort of business with any sort of PRC company.

The Lab’s report can be read here.