Category Archives: politics

Trump is Wrong

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Former President Donald Trump (R) wants Ukraine and Russia to negotiate an agreement in their war before it is too late.

He warned that if the countries fail to soon reach a peace agreement, “there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage.”

On this, Trump couldn’t be more wrong. There already is death, destruction, and carnage, all inflicted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbarian army wherever it has occupied parts of Ukraine—it’s only necessary to see the butchery of civilians and civilian hospitals, residential neighborhoods, the bodies left lying in the streets of Russian occupied towns around Kyiv, like Bucha, and the occupied parts of Mariupol; and the ongoing carnage as the barbarian continues to target civilians, particularly including women and children, in cities like Kharkhiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol (still), and on and on in southern Ukraine and in the Donbas; and the barbarian’s explicit efforts to raze to the ground major Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Chernihiv and Kharkhiv; and the barbarian’s agreeing to civilian evacuation corridors and train runs, only to then specifically attack those corridors and trains as soon as they are filled with evacuating civilians.

Trump went on:

The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be DEAD!

On this, Trump is correct, but not in the way he envisions. With only a little exaggeration about the “everyone,” many more Ukrainians will die if Putin succeeds in his effort to conquer Ukraine—see, for instance, his capture and exile into the Russian interior of some 40,000 civilians in what’s left of the barbarian-occupied parts of Mariupol.

There is, indeed, a solution, and it would be, in many ways, better than before the shooting started, even if in other ways, it would not be—cannot be—as good.

That solution is to apply the only negotiation possible between Ukraine and Russia: Putin’s agreement to remove his barbarian army from all of Ukraine, along with Putin’s payment of (not merely agreement to pay) reparations for the death and destruction he’s inflicted.

The former would be an improvement, since it would be a restoration of Ukrainian territory to Ukraine and an acknowledgment of Ukraine’s existence as a separate, independent nation and of its associated national sovereignty. The latter would be a necessary item but the deaths can never be restored, and the destruction will take years to rebuild—years that are lost to the status quo ante bellum Ukraine forever.

Corporate Tax Rate Cuts

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…must lead to Federal government tax revenue reductions. Or so Progressive-Democrats claim. Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden (D) won’t say it, though, so I will. It ain’t so, as this table from The Wall Street Journal illustrates.

When you leave money in the hands of private economy operators—individual or corporate—they do productive things with their money. That productivity leads to more R&D, more innovation, more physical capital improvement, physical capital expansion, wage increases, more jobs (which represent the mothers of all wage increases, for many, from zero wage to an actual paycheck), the latter two leading to human capital improvement, which leads to greater private economy demand for goods and services, which leads to greater production of those goods and services, expanding the economic virtuous circle.

In comparison, Government merely redistributes from one operator—individual or corporate—to another its collected revenues, producing very little. Even the redistributions to noneconomic operators—individuals on welfare, for instance—the resulting production has less value than the transferred funds. The recipients of those redistributions have very small demand increases from the redistributions since they start out with small demands: they’re unemployed or employed only in low-wage, low-value jobs, and all those redistribution payments do is trap those folks in those two statuses.

All of that is even before any discussion of any need for the tax revenues Big Government Progressive-Democrats claim exists.

Border Removal

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The latest example of President Joe Biden’s (D) move to erase our nation’s borders is this: exemptions to Title 42 health restrictions, which Biden plans to implement in the next few days, and which will largely make elimination of the Title 42 restrictions themselves, or their retention, irrelevant. The exemptions apply, in particular, to illegal aliens; legal immigrants remain held to different standards.

The exemptions certainly sound pretty:

…a physical or mental illness, disability; pregnancy; lack of access to safe housing or shelter in Mexico (under 21 years old or younger or over 70, including families); and an indication that an individual has been threatened or harmed in Mexico.

All of these, though, with the exception of the pregnancy, are easily claimed by the illegal aliens, knowing our border agents are in no position to verify the claims.

Nor is any of this relevant to Title 42’s health restrictions or to the state of the Wuhan Virus in the US. Those restrictions are to protect the US from entry by immigrants who are coming from countries with serious outbreaks of infectious disease(s), not just a Wuhan Virus outbreak. Biden and his Progressive-Democrats (and too many Republicans who argue against Title 42 restriction lifting from a different perspective) know this full well.

This is a move to not bother stopping anyone from entering our nation from anywhere, for any reason, no matter who they are or what diseases they might bring with them—if any.

There no longer are any meaningful health checks under Biden-Harris, so we won’t know how healthy or unhealthy these illegal aliens are.

Skinflints

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President Joe Biden (D) and wife donated all of 2.8% of their income to charity in 2021. Average Americans in their income level donated 3.1% of their income to charity. Average Americans in the next lower income level donated 2.9% of their income—still more than the Bidens, despite their greater income.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and husband were just as tight. They donated 1.3% of their (higher than the Bidens’ by a factor greater than two) 2021 income to charity.

Just to emphasize how cheap these Progressive-Democrats are, average Americans with income under $50,000 and who still managed to itemize donated 8.4% of their income.

Keep in mind, too, the Bidens and the Harrises don’t have the expenses that us average Americans have. They get all expenses paid houses to live in, free transportation, and not only are their meals entirely free*, they’re catered by top drawer chefs.

But the Bidens, anyway, always have been chintzy with their charity. In 2007, while Joe was sitting in the Senate, he and Jill donated all of 0.3% of their income to charity.

*Free in this context means us American taxpayers are paying their expenses. And they’re still that chintzy.

Cyber Wargames

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NATO is running its annual cyber wargame, Locked Shields, hosted in Tallinn, Estonia. The wargame centers on cyberattack exercises that test teams have to fend off under time pressure. The players include

cyber defenders from different NATO bodies and member countries with specializations such as communications, digital forensics, legal expertise, and recovering systems damaged from an attack[.]

And

This year’s exercise will focus on the “interdependencies between national IT systems….”

These are extremely useful, but especially in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an additional element should be added, or an additional set of games developed, hopefully by the time of next year’s games. There must be a military element, or separate wargames set up that include the military, in order to emphasize and exercise the close integration of cyber and modern military systems.

That tight intertwining puts a premium on exercising the timing of a cyber attack with a military attack and the criticality of protecting the defending military’s cyber systems from being disrupted or knocked off line, as well as getting any of the defenders’ off-line cyber systems back on line. All of that must be achieved without serious disruption of the defenders’ ability to detect, respond to, and defeat the military attack. That’s the time pressure that matters.