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.

NATO’s Promises

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A NATO pledge. President Donald Trump (R) appears close to getting NATO nations to pledge to raise their NATO-related defense spending to 5% of each nation’s GDP, which would be a marked increase in those nations’ spending.

I question the value of those nations’ promises. Fully a third of NATO’s member nations already have, and are, welching on prior commitments to spend money on NATO-related expenses, for all that Trump’s open questioning of the value of the alliance over its freeloading on American treasure and blood has contributed to an increase in the number of nations that spend adequate amounts on NATO (from five or six!) to the current roughly two-thirds.

The value of a new, and replacement, arrangement centered on the US and the Three Seas Initiative nations is looking better and better.

Leadership Here Isn’t Important

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Folks are getting worried about the Trump administration’s moves to roll back hydrogen, carbon capture, and green energy initiatives, claiming such moves give leadership in those areas to the People’s Republic of China and to Europe.

Lost in the discussions—or simply ignored—is any discussion, any concern at all, of why we should care about leading the world in those technologies. The Left’s concern is centered on the premise of an impending climate disaster for the planet.

That premise, though, is far from established. The date of no return, past which that claimed disaster becomes unavoidable, keeps receding into the future. Climate models still can’t predict simultaneously the past and the present, and they have been shown over the last 25+ years to have badly overstated their predictions of global warming in each of those 25+ years. And, there’s the usual litany of ignored climate data regarding geologically historical atmospheric CO2 concentrations, how we’re still cooler than the geological planetary warming trend these 11,000 years after the last glaciation period, and on and on.

To the contrary, it might be useful to let the PRC waste its resources leading the way down that road to nowhere important. We don’t need to waste our resources racing to keep up with, much less stay in front of, the PRC.

Close the Strait of Hormuz?

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Iran’s government now is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz if the US joins its war on Israel on Israel’s side, among other things by bombing Fordow and Natanz with MOPs.

Iran certainly could, but for how long? My prediction is for a few hours to a few days, at the end of which Iran would have left no navy worthy of the name and no Arabian Gulf or Arabian Sea ports of any use to the remnants of its navy or to its commercial shipping—including is ghost tanker fleet with which it ships embargoed oil.

The reasons center on Iran’s own incapacity. It has no air assets with which to close or to keep closed the strait; it has only a supply of cruise missiles which it would have to divert from its attacks on Israel to close and keep closed the Strait, and its small navy with which to sail the strait.

That navy and the ports from which it would sally are nothing more than targets for the US Navy, which has been expanding in the region, and it would be a campaign of a matter of hours or a few days to sink the Iranian navy and destroy those ports. A few destroyers would serve to protect commercial shipping in the strait, and in the Gulf, come to that, against those cruise missiles, just as those destroyers and cruisers have done in the Gulf of Aden.

There would be sequelae to an Iranian attempt to close the strait. At the end of the campaign to reopen the strait, Iran would have limited capability to get its oil onto tankers (it would be useful for the reopening campaign also to sink such ghost tankers as happen to be in the Gulf or the nearby Arabian Sea, which would further restrict Iran’s ability to ship its embargoed oil). That would hurt the People’s Republic of China’s economy, which has been importing lots of price-discounted Iranian oil (discounts the PRC can demand since it takes 90% of Iran’s oil exports and so can demand the discounts).

Another consequence would be further reductions in Iranian (re)supplies to the Houthis.

There would be a spike in oil prices from a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but that would be temporary, and the closure would lead, nearly inevitably, to those follow-on sequelae, which would be to the net good of the larger world.