Author Archives: eehines

Misplaced Optimism

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The news writers over at The Wall Street Journal wrote this in all seriousness about the aftermath of the Israeli airstrikes on Iran; followed by the US’ MOP and cruise missile deliveries to Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; followed by a cease-fire between Iran and Israel:

The attack [by US B-2s and cruise missiles] made the US and the region safer, but did the diplomacy? The answer depends on how Mr Trump plays it from here.

No, it does not. The “answer” depends entirely on Iran’s Ayatollah and his mullah cronies in the Iranian government. Those persons still hate Israel and Jews in general, and they still hate the US. They still adhere to a prior Iranian President’s statement as those current Iranian government persons now resume their efforts to put together nuclear bombs with which to destroy Israel and pass on to later-reviving terrorist proxies for their use. Rafsanjani’s statement—brag, really, and threat—about which I’ve written before, l repeat here:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

On top of that, this war is not over because those Iranian government persons have not accepted defeat, and never will, much like Rome in an earlier period:

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the [Punic] war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

Iran, or at least the current crop of Iranian government persons, have not yet been annihilated. All that’s happened is that those persons have agreed to a cease-fire of uncertain durability and duration, during which they will rest their forces, refit them, rearm them, and then resume, possibly using alternative means, their murderous assaults on Israel, Europe, and the US.

It’s unfortunate that so many in the news writing business seriously think the Iranian government personnel think like Westerners do, have the same moral imperatives Westerners do, have the same value sets and respect for human life Westerners do.

These Iranian government persons are not interested in victory, per se. They’re interested in the destruction of Israel, and they do not care at all about the cost in lives to the Iranian people or to the lives of Muslims generally.

What Trump does, or does not do, diplomatically is wholly irrelevant.

Artificial Hysteria

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The Supreme Court earlier this week stayed a district court’s order blocking the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens to countries that are not the home countries of those illegal aliens. The activist Justices on the Court demurred. The Court’s stay does not address the underlying case; it merely allows the administration to proceed while that case makes its way through our court system. It’s the nature of their demurral that’s instructive here, though.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the dissenters,

Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled[.]

This over-the-top manufactured hysteria by the activist Justices does the Court no good at all. In an environment where many begin to question the legitimacy of the Court, Sotomayor’s excessive hype is the sort of thing fueling that question.

Lose the Claptrap

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Bank management teams are trekking to Conservative States in an effort to get back in the good graces of State governments whose governors and legislatures disdain woke and otherwise bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies like redlining whole industries such as gun manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction. These bank management teams are trying to convince the States that they’ve left off those policies and now only lend, or not, for financial, legal, and reputational reasons.

Therein lies these bank managers’ disingenuousness and cynicism. Refusing to do business over “reputational reasons” is just a weasel-worded excuse for discriminating against industries and individual companies about which someone might object. Or even about which a whole political party might object. In either of those cases, “reputational risk” would be wholly manufactured rather than something intrinsically extant in the market.

The only lending criteria for a bank, or any other financial institution lending money, should be the borrower’s likelihood of repaying and the legality of the borrower’s activity. Bank management teams must exclude the chimerical “reputational risk” and do so in a publicly provable manner. Petty political considerations must never be allowed into what is at bottom a purely market and finance question. Banks that do not achieve this should join the growing list of banks already barred from doing business with State governments over their bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies.

More Progressive-Democrat Disingenuosity

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Brad Lander, Progressive-Democratic Party Comptroller for New York City and Party candidate for Mayor, wrote to The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section to brag about his arrest by ICE agents as those agents attempted to take into custody (ultimately successfully so) an illegal alien. Lander wrote

…Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aggressively arrested me for the heinous act of…walking alongside a frightened asylum seeker and asking to see the warrant law enforcement was using to justify his arrest.

Lander did far more than that. Lander had his hand holding onto the illegal alien’s shoulder, impeding the ICE agents’ ability to move their charge along, and Lander actively and directly moved to block the agents themselves. He wasn’t just verbally demanding to see a warrant. Then, when the agents moved to arrest him for his obstruction, Lander strongly physically resisted his arrest.

Lander’s broad distortion of the facts of his obstruction and subsequent arrest is one more demonstration that we cannot trust the current crop of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

A Thought

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I had another one. This one was brought to my forebrain by a Wall Street Journal article that discussed the lack of Russian military assistance to Iran during the latter’s attacks on Israel and Israel’s nearly two week response in and over Iran.

Israel’s responses to the Iranian war over those dozen days included the virtual elimination of Iran’s air defense capability; reduction of Iran’s ballistic missile capability, both missile production and launchers and launcher production; and Iran’s drone inventory and drone production capability.

It’s that last that interests me. I’ve already seen an apparent reduction in Russian missile attacks on Ukraine since the UA’s successful attacks on Russia’s LRA, at least compared to the number of drone attacks on Ukraine. Iran has been a major source of Russia’s longer-ranged and bigger payload capable drones, the Shaheds. Iran’s ability to produce these were particular targets of Israel’s anti-drone sorties. I wonder what effect the seemingly inevitable drop in exports to Russia will have on Russia’s aerial assaults on Ukraine. It’s true enough that Russia has a growing domestic capability to produce drones roughly equivalent to the Shahed, but that capability isn’t all that yet.