Author Archives: eehines

Biden would be Encouraged

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That’s what’s in the REPO Act, or Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act, which is included in the latest Ukrainian aid package.

It encourages Mr Biden to transfer frozen Russian reserves to a trust fund for Ukraine.

Those frozen assets amount to some $300 billion, globally. Count on Biden, though, to decline to be encouraged.

He won’t touch those frozen assets. He’s already been…encouraged…by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to slow-walk delivery of the weapons Ukraine needs actually to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine. He’s already been…encouraged…by Putin to deny altogether other weapons that would facilitate a Ukrainian outright victory.

Biden has—supposedly—been working on lending money to Ukraine that’s based on the interest accruing on all those frozen Russian assets. As Robert Zoellick put it in his op-ed at the link above, though,

Washington, London, and Ottawa should instead transfer all the frozen Russian assets in their currencies worldwide to a trust fund for Ukraine while urging Europeans to act when they can agree. If Europeans won’t use Russian assets, they can’t expect others to keep paying. After all, the war is in Europe.

Indeed.

Berlin and Paris have been the principal obstacles. Washington can assuage their anxieties.

Don’t bother. If Germany and France wish to render themselves irrelevant to the barbarian’s annihilative war, honor their desire. Move on without them, and move on with those eastern Europe nations still fresh from under the barbarian’s jackboots, Poland and the Baltic States especially, along with newly alert Finland and Sweden.

Turn as much of those $300 billion as are in the direct or indirect jurisdiction of the US and others at least nominally interested in crushing the barbarian’s invasion (if not the barbarian himself) into that trust fund, or better, into a fund on which Ukraine can draw directly, at need. And make the weapons Ukraine might wish to buy or lend/lease available for immediate sale/borrow/lease and delivery in the numbers Ukraine needs.

Israel and Genocide

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In a WSJ article regarding the present explosion of Hamas terrorist pro-Palestinian protests and the demands of disruptors perpetrating these “protests” that the colleges and universities divest from Israel-related investments, there is the disruptors’ claims that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (and, presumably in the West Bank). This claim is risible on its face.

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. Even if we take the terrorists’ own claims of casualties in Gaza as accurate—30,000 casualties—this hardly constitutes genocide: those casualties are only a bit over 1% of the Gaza Strip population. If Israel is committing genocide, the nation is atrociously bad at it. At most, that casualty figure would constitute nothing more than Israeli carelessness in protecting civilians as Israel moves to defend itself against the terrorists who inflicted the rapes and child butcheries of October 7 (more on this below).

Regarding actual genocide, Nazi Germany attempted extermination of Jews.

The Hutus attempted, and nearly succeeded at, genocide against the Tutsis in the Rwandan “civil” war.

The People’s Republic of China is attempting genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Regarding Israeli responsibility vis-à-vis those Gazan casualties: what the disruptors carefully ignore is that Hamas uses Gaza Strip civilian residents as shields behind which the terrorists hide during firefights, and they use those civilian residents’ residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques(!) as weapon storage sites, housing for their command centers, and as places from which to launch their weapons against Israel and against IDF forces in Gaza.

Further, the IDF is so careless in its handling of civilians in target zones that it’s at pains to warn those civilians of impending attacks so that the civilians can leave before the attack goes in—which gives the terrorists the same warnings and opportunities to leave, when the terrorists aren’t staying and forcing the warned civilians to stay also as shields for their terrorist captors, and to run up the civilian casualty count purely for terrorist propaganda.

No, the state of Israel is the victim of an ongoing genocide attempt, including the series of wars of extermination inflicted on the nation in the latter half of the 20th century, and as most recently and plainly announced by major Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, who promised serial October 7s until Israel is destroyed.

Of course these disruptors—who insist they are so much better informed and so much smarter than us average Americans—know these things. Their genocide claim is nothing but an illustration of their dishonesty and of their support for the terrorists bent on exterminating Israel.

Just as despicable, though, is the cowardice of the schools’ managers who refuse even to address the lie of Israeli genocide. They’d rather bow down to the disruptors.

Nuclear Missile Defense

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In their Thursday missive to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Laura Grego and Lisbeth Gronlund, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote correctly that defending against relatively low-flying and short-range rockets that Israel’s Iron Dome does so well is different from defending against long-range, fast, exoatmospheric missiles.

But then they segued to their strawman argument.

…potential adversaries will develop systems to counter a potential buildup or improvement in defenses.

Missiles and missile defense are in an arms race. Who knew?

Instructively, these two scientists offered no alternative solution to the national security problem of defending against nuclear attack.

Apparently, their position—implied by their careful silence on how actually to defend against nuclear attack—is that we should stop trying to defend ourselves; we should instead merely surrender when an enemy mentions its own nuclear capability.

Australian Regulators’ Mistake

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Australian regulators are pressuring X to take down—to delete—a video posted to X showing the real-time terrorist attack in a western Sydney suburb on a Bishop of the Christ the Good Shepherd Church. X has blocked access to the video from locations within Australia per the regulators’ request, but is balking from going further. The regulators, though, are demanding the video be deleted altogether. Musk has responded that that would set the dangerous precedent of allowing one nation’s regulators to control the content of the Internet everywhere in the world, not just within the regulators’ own nation.

That’s a valid beef, but it misses entirely the much larger problem.

Deleting a posting altogether is nothing more than rewriting history and pretending the event posted about, and the post itself, never happened.

History is how we know where we were—geographically, economically, politically, socially, genetically, and on and on—how we know where we are (itself at immediate risk due to demands for real-time excision of current events), how we know how we got from then to now, and how we can learn how to get from now to a desired future. Rewriting history as every bit as dangerous to us as is any war and far more dangerous to our civilization.

X needs to stand tall against the Australians’ demand for revisionist history, and its fellow social platforms, vis., Meta, who so meekly complied with the regulators’ demand to rewrite history, need to find some courage, and some understanding of what they’re doing, and stop deleting postings, however repugnant, or merely government-disapproved, they may be.

Our Minds Are Made Up

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The House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs held a hearing in Plano, Texas, Tuesday on energy from the perspective of a number of oil and gas industry leaders.

The 15 Progressive-Democrat members of the subcommittee were invited to the hearing—as all members of a (sub)committee must be when that body meets in its official capacity—and all 15 chose not to attend. That refusal is within House rules, but it’s no less unethical or downright chickens** for that.

Congressional hearings often are puppet theater presentations, with the Congressmen often occupying their time allocations for questioning witnesses with speeches rather than with efficiently asked questions that leave the bulk of the time for witness answers. Too, witnesses often are chosen for their ability to support a political narrative.

All of that, though, is easily enough refuted by Congressmen proceeding from their own lines of questioning. Actual questions, mind you, not self-aggrandizing speech-ifying.

Instead regarding the Plano field hearing, the Progressive-Democratic Party subcommittee members said, “Don’t confuse us with facts,” with their decision to absent themselves.

 

The hearing itself can be viewed via C-SPAN here.