“Ukraine Needs More Security Guarantees”

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That’s the position of The Wall Street Journal‘s headline writer and of Andriy Yermak and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who opined as much in their Thursday op-ed. They were actually serious, too. The position is, though, to use the technical term, a bunch of bull.

They demonstrate the foolishness of their position in their lede:

When Ukraine’s army is given the weapons it needs, it defeats Russia on the battlefield. That is the lesson the world learned as it watched Ukrainian forces quickly retake the Kharkiv region this month. Since the beginning of September, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than 2,300 square miles of territory in the south and east of the country.

However.

They want to build on this success with an international “guarantee:” a Kyiv Security Compact between Ukraine and its partners. Then they muddle their position further by insisting (correctly so, here) that Ukraine should be given modern and effective air-defense and antimissile systems—in addition, I say, to much more heavy weapons of the type currently being supplied in dribs and drabs, and with the addition of tanks and other armor.

Ukraine has already been the victim of international guarantees. The Budapest Memoranda guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they gave up the nuclear weapons then held by the nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine agreed. Not too long later, Russia occupied and partitioned away Crimea and seized and occupied a significant fraction of the Ukrainian portion of the Donbas.

The guarantors’ response? Bleatings, finger-waggings, and the empty promises of the Minsk Protocols. These were followed by the barbarian’s naked invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities inflicted on Ukrainian women, children, and men, both civilian and soldier; those atrocities continue apace today. The Minsk guarantors’ response here? Russia was one of those guarantors…. The others responded by slow-walking and actively withholding weapons from Ukraine as the barbarian’s pre-invasion build-up proceeded in Belorussia and across the border in Russia near Belgorod.

When the barbarian sent in its invasion, the West’s guarantors continued to slow-walk serious weapons transfers until only lately. These worthies still won’t transfer tanks and other armor, led by Germany, which government men insist that Ukrainians—Slavs all—are just too stupid to be able learn how to operate a German tank.

No. No empty, misleading, won’t-be-enforced guarantees.

What Ukraine needs are the weapons it needs, but the full suite of them according to Ukraine’s articulation, not the Know Betters of the timid West. The barbarian’s invasion must be utterly crushed and the barbarian forced to tear up its roads and railroads some considerable distance into Russia from the Ukrainian border, with the -road beds and the flatter terrain between sown with the aptly named Russian olive. The horde must not be left able to invade again.

Rasmussen, especially, should know better. He was NATO’s Secretary General from 2009 to 2014. So should Yermak, come to that; he’s the sitting head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and he’s living through the outcome of the empty words of those prior “guarantees.”

A Good Move

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Finally.

The Biden administration has granted a waiver to the Jones Act so American shippers can ship diesel fuel directly from American refiners to Puerto Rico, which desperately needs the fuel—still—after Fiona ran over it.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that the administration granted the “temporary and targeted” waiver to “ensure that the people of Puerto Rico have sufficient diesel to run generators needed for electricity and the functioning critical facilities as they recover from Hurricane Fiona.”

Finally, because the Biden administration should have granted this waiver preemptively a month ago, if not sooner: they knew the hurricane was going to do serious damage to the territory—which still hasn’t fully recovered from the prior hurricane—whether or not this hurricane ran over the island. Worse, this administration had been sitting on a request for the waiver since 20 September, when BP asked for it for just this reason.

It would be even better if President Joe Biden (D) granted a broader and longer-lasting waiver so New England States could get the natural gas, oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, and so on that they so desperately need and for which they must pay especially exorbitant prices to foreign entities to get.

New England also could get these energies overland, but for the Progressive-Democratic regimes running New York. Those regimes have blocked development of a natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania into New England that must transit New York, and they have block development of that part of the Marcellus Formation that lies under New York—which obstruction inflates energy costs not only for New England’s citizens, but for all the rest of us citizens, as well.

Well, Of Course

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Given the vasty numbers of mail-in ballots expected in the Progressive-Democratic Party stronghold of Illinois, State officials are predicting delays of as much as two-weeks post-election before results from the current mid-terms will be known.

The bulk of these mail-ins will be coming from Chicago and Cook County—Party fortresses within that stronghold.

Of course it’ll take those two weeks to get the mail-ins counted. Party will need the time to get the numbers from downstate (i.e., from outside Cook County) and so the numbers from Cook County and Chicago that are needed, and so how those mail-in ballots should be counted.

Party’s machine politics in action.

An Energy Crisis

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New England may face one this winter. Too many who should know better are laying this prospect off to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There are more proximate origins of the risk. One is the Biden administration’s naked war on our nation’s overall domestic energy production industry, including canceling pipeline projects in progress and denying permits for other pipelines—including one from Canada down into New England—canceling drilling leases and slow-walking permits (or outright denying them) to drill on other leases, withdrawing Federal lands from any sort of fossil fuel exploration or development, and on and on.

But that is only backdrop, and corrections to those failures would have no immediate effect on New England’s risk.

A more immediate origin is the domestic blockade of energy to New England, which consists of two barriers. One is ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s (D) decision to block a natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to New England, a pipeline that would have transited New York, coupled with Cuomo’s decision to deny development from within New York of the Marcellus Formation, a shale formation rich in, among other things, natural gas. These decisions have been upheld, and enthusiastically so, by current New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D). New England’s energy needs be damned.

The other barrier from the blockade is the Jones Act, a century-old law that in pertinent part mandates that goods (for instance, oil and natural gas) carried from one American port (vis., a Gulf Coast refinery) to another American port (vis., Portsmouth, NH, or Portland, ME) must be via an American freighter.

These barriers already have combined to force New England to buy its natural gas from…Russia. Which is the only way the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine enters into the problem at all.

Immediate and mid-term solutions should be obvious: waive the Jones Act restrictions on energy shipments into New England, something well within the authority of President Joe Biden (D). Given the state of American ship building capacity, this cabotage aspect of the Act should be rescinded altogether, but that would require Congress to do.

Another, more mid-term, solution would be for New York to get out of the way of exploitation of Marcellus and to allow pipeline shipments of natural gas into New England from Pennsylvania. That, though, will require replacement of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run State government with a more balanced and Conservative and Republican Party-run government.

CDC Fail

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Again.

The CDC’s latest “guidance” directly contradicts and rescinds its immediately latest “guidance,” issued just weeks ago.

CDC’s latest guess is this:

[c]larified that healthcare facilities, including nursing homes, have discretion on whether to screen-test asymptomatic personnel. It also now says asymptomatic patients “in general” do not require “empiric use of Transmission-Based Precautions”

Because the vaccines aren’t all that. British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, Visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Brazil’s Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health:

By reanalyzing the randomized controlled trials used for emergency authorization and other medical reviews, Malhotra concluded it takes thousands of vaccinations in the non-elderly population “to prevent a single death” from COVID and that severe adverse events are more likely than prevented hospitalizations.

CDC is only just getting around to doing the relevant research that would have identified this apparent ineffectiveness or objectively refuted it. Instead, we just get another rotation of the CDC Guidance Weather Vane.

It’s time for a general elimination, and replacement, of CDC managers from mid-level on up to the Sobbing Doomsayer herself, Director Rochelle Walensky. The agency as currently manned is useless.