Category Archives: morality

What To Do About Ukraine

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KT McFarland has some thoughts.  After taking notice of President Barack Obama’s foolishness in worrying that supporting the victim of Russian invasion in any material way might antagonize the victim’s attacker, she suggests [emphasis hers]

First, if the Ukrainian people want to fight for their freedom, we should help them.  …with intelligence, communications, and logistics.
If it comes to a civil war, the fighting will be short and bloody, and Russia will win.

Second, we should shore up our NATO allies.  We should reverse course and build the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Finally, the US should take aim at Russia’s economy.  Russia does not have a modern economy, it’s a petro-power.  The only thing it sells that the world wants to buy is oil and natural gas.

To which I add, since I’m as unwilling as the Ukrainians to surrender their Crimea Oblast to the Russians, the following.

Arm the Ukrainian army: anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons are easily transported, and these should be rushed in—by military convoy and by military cargo aircraft.  Russia still will win a short, sharp fight, as McFarland suggests, but they should pay a hard price in soldiers and military equipment, not only in rubles.  And if the supplies are sufficient to drag out the fight, well….

Send a squadron of the US Navy into the Black Sea.  Directly challenge the Russians in occupied Crimea—but make the Russians fire first, or not at all.  Make clear to the Russians that they need to consider challenging the US as well as Ukraine.

Third, in addition to reviving the missile shield, forward deploy—in Poland and the Czech Republic, certainly, but also in the Baltics.  And run some of those forces, along with a naval flotilla, up to the Polish and Lithuanian borders and Baltic Sea boundary surrounding Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast.

Add some serious economic sanctions.

Drill, baby, drill.  And frack, baby, frack.  And sell the output to Europe and Ukraine.  This will immediately drop the price of oil and gas on the world market, severely reducing the major source of Russian income, making it difficult for Russia to maintain its armies in the field—and to continue developing, in contravention of existing arms control agreement, its medium range nuclear missiles.

We also need to deny Russia’s access to the US’ banking system, which is a major part of the international banking system, and pressure Europe to deny Russia access to the European banking system, which is most of the rest of the international banking system.  Without access to credit, dollars, or petrodollars/rubles, the Russian economy—which Senator John McCain (R, AZ) has accurately called a gas station masquerading as an economy—will be severely constrained, if it doesn’t collapse altogether.

Other than the prompt price drop, drilling/fracking won’t have an immediate effect on the Russian economy as a whole until the oil and gas actually start arriving in Europe and Ukraine, and freezing Russia out of the international banking system won’t produce an immediate effect until the Russians run out of dollar reserves.  But we need to keep both pressures on, not just until Russia pulls back from eastern and southern Ukraine, but also until Russia withdraws from Crimea.  And agrees to cancel its lease on the naval base in Sevastopol.  Russia has demonstrated these last several months that it can’t be trusted with military bases on other nations’ territory.

Finally, we have an agreement with Ukraine—as do Great Britain and Russia (which has already welched on that agreement) under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum—to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they give up what was at the time the third largest nuclear weapon inventory in the world.  They did their part; we need to do ours.  Alone, if needs be.

Whatever we decide to do, though, we can’t wait on the EU or the rest of NATO.  They’re even more timid (if you can believe it) than Obama when it comes to Russia (or to the PRC, or Iran, or Syria, or northern Korea, or… but let’s stick with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for now).

We need to move; Ukraine is out of time.  The window for idle chit-chat has closed.  Unless we’re going abjectly to surrender.

Update: According to General Wesley Clark (USA, Ret) and Phillip Karber, this administration even has refused Ukraine’s request for requests for such passive defensive equipment as body armor, night-vision goggles, and communications equipment. Such things are…provocative.

Appalling timidity from the Obama administration.

What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Might Have Said

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…at Brandeis University, had the school’s…management (I hesitate to say leadership)…not been so cowardly.  Following is excerpted from her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (RTWT).

So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration?  Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era?  Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform.  I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.

Is such an argument inadmissible?  It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.

The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.”  That is my motto too.  For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom, and equality of the sexes.

But she couldn’t say that, in that venue.  Other venues will be similarly abject at their peril.  And at ours.

Another Blow

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…in the Progressives’ war on diversity, this one struck against the concept of free speech.

Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced Tuesday that it had withdrawn the planned awarding of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staunch critic of Islam and its treatment of women….

Their “rationale?”

She is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world.  That said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.

Apparently those core values don’t include the sanctity, or a recognition of the necessity to a free society, of freedom to express an opinion different from that of an authority figure, nor do they seem to include a respect for diversity of opinion.

Ali’s offensive speech?

Once [Islam]’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful.  It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now.  They’re not interested in peace.  I think that we are at war with Islam.  And there’s no middle ground in wars.

Even truth is offensive at Brandeis, because, according to Joseph Lumbard, Chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis

This makes Muslim students feel very uneasy.  They feel unwelcome here.

Well.  There it is.  Discomfort is a crime at this place.  When it concerns the appropriate groups.

Another 2nd Amendment Threat from DoJ

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All for the very best of intentions, of course.

This time Attorney General Eric Holder wants to use bracelets that must be worn by lawful gun users as a means of electronically tying the firearm to its lawful owner.

I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how guns can be made more safe.

By making them either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.

(“Common sense”—they stayed up all night memorizing that phrase a few years ago, and now they’re doing their best to wear it out, including in places where their sense plainly is lacking.)

And he wants to spend $2 million of our hard-earned tax dollars on this…idea.

Such a mechanism is just one more point of failure in an American’s exercise of his fundamental right.  Any such linkage can be hacked, either to enable a criminal to use a stolen weapon or to enable a criminal to disable a weapon in the hands of its lawful owner trying to defend himself.

More importantly, though, such a mechanism is just another tool in the hands of an intrusive government to identify who owns firearms, and thus to get sub rosa registration; to track that owner as he legally uses his firearms; and—that hack—to disable the firearm whenever a legal owner/operator becomes inconvenient to that intrusive government.

In fact, such technology would be highly useful to us legal owner/operators.  It must, however, be a voluntary addition to our weapons, with the choice made solely by us.

The Progressives’ War on Freedom and Diversity

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The forced resignation of (ex-)Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over a viewpoint he held of which Progressives disapproved—in the name of diversity of opinion, yet.

(Ex-)Harvard President Larry Summers, forced out because he disapproved of a rap album that was liked by Progressives, and because he suggested the under-representation of women in science and engineering might be due to differences in aptitude—Progressives insist that equality includes identical capacity.

Mark Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute sued for defamation by Michael Mann for ridiculing Mann’s hockey stick and for disparaging the anthropogenic “aspect” of Global Warming—Progressives consider this settled science so much they even tout the efficacy of lying in support of it.

The Gannet newspapers—in particular, the Lower Hudson Journal News—published a map of names and addresses of registered New York gun owners and tried to sue for more such data—knowing as they did so that they were identifying those honest Americans (Conservatives, though, so not so honest, after all, eh?) as targets.

The Los Angeles Times closing off and refusing to accept further commentary disputing anthropogenic global warning—see above.

Chik-fil-A threatened with boycott because its owners held a view of marriage that is disapproved by Progressives.

The IRS targeting and actively suppressing the free speech of organizations of which our Progressive government disapproves—and which now is finalizing a set of rules that would formalize the abuse.

Conservative women routinely smeared for not toeing the Progressive womanhood line—with one Progressive “commentator” insisting that Governor Sara Palin should be tied down and defecated into her mouth.  Progressive approval of this behavior is demonstrated by their silence on the despicable nature of this insistence.

Conservative blacks routinely smeared as Uncle Toms, or worse, for not toeing the Progressive Black-American line (and notice that—not “Progressive black line:” that hyphen matters to Progressives).

The steady drumbeat of slurs against Tea Partiers as racists, tea baggers, and so on—because they hold opinions of which Progressives disapprove.

The routine smearing of those with tales of damage, even ruination, due to Obamacare as liars, as tellers only of “horror stories, all of them untrue”—solely because Progressives find these truths uncomfortable.

Vice President Joe Biden openly agreeing with Congressman Mike Doyle (D, PA) as the latter called Republicans terrorists for disagreeing with Progressive views of the Federal debt ceiling.

The list goes on, without end.  It’s time we Conservatives—and Independents, and middle-of-the-roaders, and anyone else—with an opinion, or a fact, we wish to speak without murderous assault responded.  With facts and logic, because most Americans aren’t as droolingly imbecilic as Progressives make us out to be.

 

h/t Belmont Club