Tag Archives: responsibilities

That’s Nice

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JPMorgan thinks the current suite of economic sanctions against Russia could shrink its economy by 20% quarter-on-quarter and by 3.5% on the year. JPM also admits that these estimates may badly overestimate the downward movement. Also,

In conjunction and cooperation with the European Union, Japan, the UK, Canada, and others, the United States has effectively frozen financial transactions of Russian central bank assets held by Americans, a senior administration official told reporters during a briefing on Monday.
The intended effect is to cripple the Russian economy and use up the country’s “rainy day fund” as its currency, the ruble, plummets in value, the official said.

However, these sanctions carefully and deliberately leave untouched the bulk of Russia’s income—its foreign sales of oil and natural gas, with Russia our second largest source of imported oil as of last August.

The European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States issued a joint statement on Saturday that “selected” Russian banks would be removed from the SWIFT financial system.

Except for the Central Bank of Russia, its central bank, and those oil and gas transactions.

Commerce Department unveiled…export controls [that] include semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, information security equipment, lasers and sensors. In addition, BIS’s [Bank of International Settlement, the bank of nations’ central banks] rule imposes stringent controls on 49 Russian military end users, which have been added to its entity list.
The European Union, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand announced that they would implement “substantially similar restrictions.”

Export controls aren’t export bans….

Some ladies from the South might say, “That’s nice,” regarding these economic moves, or even “Bless their hearts” regarding the persons making them.

However.

How many divisions, much less bullets, do those sanctions provide Ukraine in the here and now, as women and children are butchered by Putin’s barbarians as his invading horde begins increasingly to target apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods? How many divisions do those sanctions cause Putin to withdraw from Ukraine as his military prepares a Stalingrad-esque starvation siege of Kyiv or a Grozny-esque destruction of it, and begins its Grozny-esque burning of Kharkiv to the ground?

The economic sanctions actually are a good start, and they should continue in effect until Putin, his oligarch syndicate cronies, their deputies and assistants and lower down made men, and the members of the Duma are long gone from the Russian government and economy. But those sanctions are wholly inadequate alone. Ukraine will lie in ashes, its survivors existing in Russian serfdom, long before those sanctions take material effect.

Ukraine needs lethal weapons—antitank, antiaircraft, antimissile, along with anti-infantry and small arms—and those lethal weapons need to include, also, offensive weapons with which to drive Putin’s barbaric military out of Ukraine altogether. Ukraine needs tons of ammunition for those weapons and training in the use of many of them.

Ukraine needs food and medical supplies for Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Kherson, Mariupol, and on and on.

An Accurate Read of the Emasculated West

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This time, it’s not Russian President Vladimir Putin or People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping. It’s Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his very early Friday morning (our time) statement.

This morning we are defending our state alone. Like yesterday, the world’s most powerful forces are watching from afar[.]

Indeed. Safe and comfortable in their seats high in the coliseum as they watch the mayhem down on the sand.

And:

Did yesterday’s sanctions convince Russia? We hear in our sky and see on our earth that this was not enough.

And this:

Today, I have asked 27 European leaders whether Ukraine will be in NATO. I have asked directly—everyone is afraid, no one answers.

Finally,

But we are not afraid. We are not afraid of anything. We are not afraid to defend our country, we are not afraid of Russia, we are not afraid to talk to Russia, we are not afraid to talk about anything, about security guarantees for our country, we are not afraid of talking about neutrality, we are not NATO members at the moment. But what guarantees will we get? And most importantly which countries will give us those guarantees?

What will Ukraine get in the way of guarantees? What would be the value of those guarantees, were any to come? The Budapest Memorandum was a guarantee by the US, Great Britain, and Russia of Ukraine’s political, economic, and territorial integrity if they gave up their nuclear weapons. Those three signatories betrayed Ukraine when they welched on the Memorandum. The first Minsk accords? They were another early betrayal of Ukraine and codified the Budapest “guarantee’s” destruction, a betrayal perpetrated by those same three signers. Minsk II? Again, betrayal. These are the countries that will give new “guarantees.” And now Putin invades.

“No one answers.” The “sanctions” levied by Biden-Harris and his timorous fellows in Europe are insulting in their weakness. The ex-comedian who leads a nation under attack has far more courage and deserves—as does his nation—far more aid, concrete aid, than he’s getting. Aid far more constructive than cheers for his nation and tongue-clucks for Russia, safely delivered from those high up seats.

Sadly, disgustingly, I have to share Zelenskyy’s contempt for these Western…persons…but most especially for Biden-Harris; he, and they, are not leaders. Merely cheerleaders in the stands.

Ending Secret Laboratories

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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

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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.

Questions Abound

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Enfield Public Schools District, in Connecticut, posted a “health” curriculum lesson for the District’s 8th grade classes.

…a “Pizza and Consent” assignment, where eighth-grade students were given a handout stating that pizza can be used as a “metaphor for sex,” which instructed students to list their favorite and least favorite pizza toppings “in relation to sex.”
“Here are some examples: Likes: Cheese = Kissing,” the assignment states. “Dislikes: Olives = Giving Oral,” stated the assignment given to eighth graders within the Enfield Public Schools.

Now build your pizzas, boys and girls.

The lesson was discovered and objected to last Monday (7 February as I write this) by Parents Defending Education, which objection finally prompted the District Superintendent Christopher Drezek to go before the school board and address the matter.

The simple truth was it was a mistake. And I know that there are some who may not believe that. I know there are some who don’t necessarily maybe want that answer. In this particular case, I didn’t even get a chance to because the person who made the mistake jumped ahead of it before I was even notified that it had happened.

He went on to claim that there was no hidden agenda in this.

The unnamed (in the article) District Health and Physical Education Coordinator, according to Parents Defending Education, emailed parents and apologized for the error [emphasis added].

The incorrect version, as opposed to the revised version of this assignment was mistakenly posted on our grade 8 curriculum page, and was inadvertently used for instruction to grade 8 Health classes. I caught the error after our curriculum revision in June, but failed to post the intended version. I own that, and apologize for the error[.]

The incident begs a number of questions, though.

  • Why was the supposedly erroneous version created in the first place?
  • Why, then, was it “mistakenly” posted to the 8th grade curriculum page in the second place?
  • If the 8th grade curriculum page was the wrong target, for which curriculum page was it actually intended?
  • If the Coordinator caught the mistake so long ago, why didn’t he remove the “error?”
  • Why didn’t the Coordinator post the correct lesson at that time?

And this question: what is Drezek doing about his Coordinator and the person(s) who created the “lesson” and posted it? He needs to demonstrate the lack of any hidden agenda.