Daily Archives: 12 December 2016

Sanctions

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The People’s Republic of China said Saturday that it opposes unilateral sanctions against northern Korea over the latter’s nuclear weapons program.  Such things must have the auspices of the UN.  The PRC also said it opposes the Republic of Korea having the ability to defend itself against northern Korea’s nuclear weapons, insisting that the deployment of a missile defense system would be a threat to the PRC’s security.

This is risible.  The PRC wants sanctions to go through the UN where, via its Security Council veto power, the PRC can water down joint sanctions to the point of uselessness.  The PRC doesn’t want sanctions and it doesn’t want the RoK to be able to defend itself against nuclear attack because the PRC wants to damage the RoK as a means of damaging further a timid US.

Of course, we need to make the deployment—and to press upon the (likely) new RoK government the importance of missile defense—and we need to impose such unilateral sanctions as we can on northern Korea and to make them as broad as we can.

We need to do this for a couple of reasons.  One is to demonstrate to the PRC that they don’t get to dictate our foreign policy.  Another is to demonstrate to the RoK, to Japan, to the nations rimming the South China Sea, and to ourselves that we’re done being timid in the Pacific.

A Hack

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The Russians are alleged to be behind the hacks into the Democrats’ IT systems, and they’re alleged to have so engaged in order to sow distrust in our election system and procedures and especially to influence our just concluded election in favor of the ultimate winner, President-Elect Donald Trump.  Indeed, the CIA and other of our intelligence agencies have said that the hacks have all the earmarks of Russian hackers.

A couple things about that.  The NLMSM’s bold, declarative statements based on those intelligence agency statements that the Russians did it notwithstanding, “have all the earmarks” does not mean the Russians did it, only that it looks like they did it.  Of course getting actual proof in the intelligence or the hacking world is more difficult even than getting “proof”—sufficient reduction of reasonable doubt—in a criminal trial.  Nor does that difficulty, or the limitation of a statement of “all the earmarks,” mean the Russians didn’t do it, especially in the face of their history.

The other thing centers on the assumption that the Russians really did do the hacks and for the reasons named.  Now the NLMSM, whose favored Democrats were losers in the last election at all levels from the Presidential level on down, is pushing at the top of its collective lungs the idea that the Russians did it, and to favor Trump, as though these were facts.

So: assume the Russians really did do the hacks for the reasons named.  The NLMSM, in its temper tantrums over their loss and their having been ignored by American voters, is playing along with that Russian goal and with that serving, wittingly or not, to discredit Trump and the elections, and to sow doubt about the legitimacy of both.

Congress is pressing for bipartisan investigations into the matter, and it’s pushing for President Barack Obama to release all of the report that will result from the investigation he’s ordered into the matter.  He should, and so should President Trump if the Obama investigation isn’t complete before Trump takes office.

The question is valid, and it should be investigated and answered, but press hysteria contributes nothing to an objective resolution while sowing the doubts the press alleges the Russians want sown.