Monthly Archives: February 2026

Mistaken Emphasis

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A letter-writer from the Hudson Institute in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section tried to make a case for Europe’s ability to defend itself against a Russian invasion based on Ukraine’s capability.

Despite Russian air superiority and numerical advantages, Ukrainian forces and local volunteers slowed, halted, and ultimately rolled back Russia’s assault on the capital. They did so because they were fighting for national survival, and, in many cases, defending their homes and families as the Russians advanced.

They did so, also, because Ukrainians, individually and as a population, didn’t hesitate to enter a stout defense–The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride. As the letter-writer misconstrued the wargame exercise, Germany did hesitate in the wargame, with fatal effects on the attempted defense against the Russian invasion.

Furthermore, that part about fighting for national survival as well as defending individuals’ homes and families does not obtain in Germany or France. Far too many of those nations’ citizens—including their younger generations and members (of all ages) of their major political parties—would rather not fight even to defend their nation.

Next, much of the reason Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine failed, despite apparent superiority in numbers and equipment, was its mistaken assumption that the invasion would be a walkover. Russia has learned the lesson of that failure, and it won’t underestimate the level of resistance capability of its next target, whether Germany’s and France’s reluctant citizens or the Baltics’ and Poland’s willing but small populations.

And this: the runup to WWI in the aftermath of an Archduke’s assassination was one of a race to mobilize and to achieve a mobilization level conducive to successful attack vs a level conducive to deterrence or to defeat of an attack. In that race, both sides proceeded from substantially equal baselines of military capability and mobilization ability. In the realization, the race ended in a substantial tie, and the German invasion of France, after initial gains of the sort that nearly always accrue to the first aggressor, was brought to a standstill.

That substantial mobilization capability equality does not obtain in today’s Europe.

Russia already has combat-hardened (even if of uncertain quality) troops, a war materiel production capacity already in place and growing, and force buildups occurring, low-key, in Belorussia and in Kaliningrad. The Baltic States and Poland, stipulate arguendo, have similar per capita capacities, but they’re already maxed out due to their small populations and limited, even operating at maximum output, industrial capacity. Behind those front line nations, though, Germany has no serious troop establishment and it cannot even field a combat-ready brigade of armor. Its industrial capacity is not capable of producing materiel in war deterring, much less fighting, much less at mobilizing rates before 2030. Italy and France are little better off.

In a mobilization race today, Russia wins. And that, coupled with the incapacity for defense that even the most dedicated nations have, means Russia wins the war, too.

An Idiotic Move

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It turns out that Hennepin County, MN, has some 3,000 persons on its registered voter rolls that are missing key identifying data, such as birthdates, names and addresses. Many of those incomplete records suggest a registered voter age of more than 100 years including many with birth years listed as 1900. According to Alpha News, though, that bogus birth year was just a placeholder, since Minnesota law did not require a birth date before 1983.

That’s just idiotic, though. It would have been simple enough to set the “placeholder” year to 1962, so those voters, for good or ill, could be adjudged old enough to vote, and then year by year to walk that placeholder year forward until 1983 and then freeze the placeholder to that year.

Even better, when that 1983 law required birth dates and the fields (month-day-year) created in the voter registration database, it would have been simple to fill in the birth date fields associated with the year 1900 with NA and then send requests to those voters for their birth dates—and then remove altogether those voters who did not respond within some reasonable period of time, say three months.

Whether 1900 was chosen out of laziness, incompetence, or an overt effort to masquerade the ineligible as eligible is anyone’s guess.

Leftist School Districts Child Abuse

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When the Supreme Court ruled in Mahoud et al v Taylor et al, that schools may not prevent parents, via any means at all, from opting their children out of school events, including lessons, involving LGBTQ-related themes, here are Leftist-run schools and their Progressive-Democrat politicians deliberately ignoring that ruling and denying parents precisely that option.

  • Suburban Boston’s Lexington Public Schools refused to show parents curricula in advance while demanding they identify specific lessons for opting out, and claimed books that simply promote “tolerance” are exempt, according to a “Catch-22” lawsuit.
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta [D] convinced a federal appeals court [the activist judge-dominated 9th Circuit] that forcing school districts to actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity was not covered by Mahmoud at all because it doesn’t involve “curricular decisions.”
  • Colorado’s Cherry Creek School District…us[ed] an old standby—lunch with a teacher—to discuss LGBTQ themes without parental approval.

It’s true that the Supreme Court ruling is a temporary injunction pending final adjudication of the underlying case as that case makes its way through the courts; however, it remains in effect, and from that it is the law of the land.

This is the lawlessness of the Left overlying their insistent child abuse with “sex” lessons far beyond their years and deliberately outside the children’s parents’ rights and obligations.

What He Said

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR), wrote of the need for modernizing and expanding our nuclear weapons capability across three dimensions: numbers of warheads and systems to deliver them, the quality of those warheads and systems, and the range of threat—tactical, theater, and strategic—against which those warheads and systems are optimized.

He closed his piece, though, with the most important Statement of Need of his piece:

[T]o those who fear an arms race: The race has already begun. Russia and China have been running it for more than a decade while we sat on the sidelines. The question isn’t whether there will be competition in nuclear forces, but whether America will show up to compete.

To which I add: if we don’t compete, we cannot compete successfully. If we cannot compete successfully, we will find ourselves very quickly faced with nuclear blackmail or a nuclear war that we will certainly lose. In either of those cases, we will see ourselves completely subjugated to our enemies.

Trumpian Tariffs, Who Pays Them, And So What?

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The Federal Reserve now is saying that us Americans are paying 90% of the tariffs put in place by President Donald Trump (R).

In an analysis on the [Federal Reserve] bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on US firms and consumers.”
They reach that conclusion by examining import data, to see whether foreign suppliers cut their prices in response to Mr Trump’s added tariff costs. Over the first eight months of 2025, “94 percent of the tariff incidence was borne by the US,” the analysis says, meaning “a 10 percent tariff caused only a 0.6 percentage point decline in foreign export prices.”

Say that’s accurate—and, frankly, I have no reason to dispute it—it seems that the tariffs’ impact on the prices us American consumers face has been effected already, that impact is minimal inflation, and that inflation seems to be coming under control. That’s the case even as individual items—furniture, for instance—do seem to have ongoing price increases that are more closely related to tariff rates.

Overall, that leaves other causes also impacting inflation at least as much, if not more, than tariffs: supply chains dependent on distant foreign nations with the attendant shipping costs, those shipping costs themselves dependent on container rates and fuel costs, and especially our dependency on critical items like rare earth ores and refined rare earths that are controlled by an enemy nation that already is squeezing our economy with greatly reduced and heavily controlled exports to us. Even those rising furniture prices are, in addition to tariffs, strongly impacted by Canadian charges for exporting timber to the US—which costs impact house construction costs as well as costs for the furniture to put into them.