Tag Archives: freedom

Ukraine and Russia, Again

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on this earlier, but they’re selling the Ukraine situation short along with several others.

The [Russian] attack violated a 2003 treaty that designated the Azov Sea as shared territory between Russia and Ukraine.

Sadly, this accepts as fait accompli the existing invasion, partition, and occupation of Ukraine by Russia.

The attack, and that invasion, partition, and occupation, also violated, and violate, the Budapest Memorandum, which the Western signers (the US and UK) appear too timid to enforce—even though we’d be confronting a country whose economy is roughly akin to that of the Black P-Stone Nation, and whose morals are those of MS-13.

Another Betrayal

Posted on by
Reply

Recall Russia’s latest provocation (which amounts to an act of war), consisting of ships of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ramming a Ukrainian tugboat and firing on and seizing the Ukrainian three-ship flotilla of which that tug was a part along with the “detention” of the crews of the three ships.

Germany—Chancellor Angela Merkel—has magnanimously offered to mediate the matter.

The German chancellor phoned [Russian President] Vladimir Putin on Monday evening to emphasize the “necessity for de-escalation and dialog,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement. For his part, the Russian president condemned Ukraine’s “provocative behavior” and said he hoped Berlin could “influence” Ukraine into refraining from such actions in the future.
…
The tentative solution hashed out by Merkel and Putin, Seibert reported, was “an analysis of the incident with the participation of Russian and Ukrainian border-security experts.”

The “provocative behavior” was the flotilla’s sailing past Ukraine’s Russian-partitioned and -occupied Crimea oblast on its way from Odesa to Mariupol—or its intent to do so at the time it was attacked and captured.  Russia claims that the flotilla violated Russian territorial waters during the sailing and that the “provocation” was compounded by the presence of Ukrainian intelligence officers aboard the flotilla.

Merkel has meekly cynically accepted that premise, even though she knows it to be false.  It isn’t possible for Ukrainian shipping—military or civilian—to violate Ukraine’s territorial waters.  The only Russian waters in the Black Sea are well east of the Kerch Strait, roughly between Anapa and Sochi; that would be a ludicrous route for this flotilla to have taken.

This amounts to another German betrayal of Ukraine, following as it does Germany’s walk-away from the Budapest Memorandum (which Germany, a non-nuclear nation, avoided signing in the first place), wherein Russia (among others) guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and national independence if it gave up its nuclear arsenal (which it did), in favor of the Minsk II “accord,” wherein France and Germany (remember this EU axis?) urged Russia and Ukraine to play nice, accepting the fact of Russian occupation, along with pro-Russia rebels, of two of Ukraine’s eastern oblasts and that Russian seizure of Crimea.

Some friend.

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has got to be having second thoughts about the benefits of joining the European Union or NATO.  He plainly can’t count on either later with the EU axis (and key NATO members) selling his country out now.  Ukraine would be better off in free-trade zone consisting of eastern European nations, the UK, and the US, and membership in a similarly constituted mutual defense arrangement.  It’s never too late to negotiate such arrangements.

Guns and Killings

Posted on by
Reply

This, from no less a Liberal outlet than the Chicago Tribune.  John Lott, Jr, Crime Prevention Research Center President, provided some gun-related killings statistics for the Tribune.  He began by defining what constitutes mass killings, a term too often bandied about without definition.  The FBI’s definition is what he used.

  • shootings must claim four or more lives in a public place
  • shootings must be carried out simply with the intention of killing
    • excluded are gang fight killings because they tend to be motivated by battles for drug turf
    • excluded are murders incidental to other crimes
    • excluded are politically motivated attacks, such as assassinations or killings pursuant to guerrilla conflicts

The he came to the actual data.

Of the 97 countries where we identified mass public shootings,

  • the US ranks 64th per capita in its rate of attacks of the 97 countries with mass public shootings
  • the US ranks 65th in fatalities.
  • Tightly gun-controlled European countries, such as Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia, each have 25%+ higher per capita murder rates than the US

In the interval from 1998 to 2015, there were

  • 2,354 attacks and at least 4,880 shooters outside the US
  • 53 attacks and 57 shooters in the US

The US has 4.6% of the world’s population but only 1.49% of the murders, 2.20% of the attacks, and less than 1.15% of the mass public shooters worldwide.

And: of all the mass public shootings that have occurred since 1950 98% have occurred in places where citizens are banned from having guns.

What’s missing from the research is all the mass shooting attempts that have been short-circuited or stopped altogether by citizens on scene when the incidents began—the true first responders—who had firearms on their person and so could respond inside the two-five minutes that even a talented, trained, and motivated policeman and police force will need to arrive—after the call, with its intendent delay, goes out.  Occurrences illustrated by these anecdotes.

  • a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an alleged killer who was shooting blacks at a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, KY
  • armed off duty policemen stopped a mass killer wannabe before he could get started at a Draw Mohammed contest in Dallas, TX
  • two gunmen in College Park, who herded party-goers into separate male-female groups and then compared the number of bullets they had with human targets were stopped by one partier who was able to reach his pistol, engaged the two, killing one

Mexico Says It’s Not a Safe Country?

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump has said that the US and Mexico have reached an agreement—at least in principle (although Trump is his usual more definitive self)—that those seeking asylum in the US will remain in Mexico until their asylum cases have been heard and acted on by the US.  The Washington Post has claimed to quote incoming Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero as saying so, too.

However, Sanchez Cordero says that she said no such thing to WaPo.  In fact, she says that no such deal, no Remain in Mexico program—”of any sort”—exists.  Given that newspaper’s record of honest reporting, I believe Sanchez Cordero.

What interests me about her statement, though, is this:

The future government does not consider […] that Mexico assumes the status of “safe third country” for Central American migrants, or from other countries, who are on Mexican territory or for those who will reach it in the future[.]

There are a few interpretations for this statement.  One is that Mexico doesn’t consider itself to be a “safe” country of any sort—a recognition that would be consistent with the corruption rampant in the Mexican police at all jurisdictional levels and with the broad power held by the several drug cartels that operate freely throughout Mexico.

Another is simply that Mexico doesn’t want the legal liability that would accrue from accepting that status.

A third is that rejecting the status is not the same as declining to make an exception for the current “caravan” of persons claiming to seek asylum in the US after having explicitly rejected Mexico’s offer of asylum.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Unfair Elections

Posted on by
Reply

At least they’re unfair if a Progressive-Democrat doesn’t win, if a Republican wins instead.

Progressive-Democratic Party ex-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton:

If she [Georgia Progressive-Democrat candidate for Governor Stacy Abrams] had a fair election, she already would have won[.]

Never mind that, according to Abrams and her team, all the votes haven’t been counted.  Just declare the Progressive-Democrat the winner and skip all the time wasted on petty counting of votes.

Progressive-Democratic Senator from Ohio Sherrod Brown:

If Stacey Abrams doesn’t win in Georgia, they stole it.  It’s clear, I say that publicly.

Because the only way a Progressive-Democrat could lose is by the other side stealing.  Why, no one should even bother running against Progressive-Democrats.  It’s all theirs, by right of…they say so.

New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Senator Cory Booker:

I think that Stacey Abrams’s election is being stolen from her, using what I think are insidious measures to disenfranchise certain groups of people[.]

There it is, again.  The Progressive-Democrat should be declared the winner because she exists.  If too few people voted for her, it can’t be because too few people wanted her; it can only because too many people weren’t allowed to vote.  People who weren’t residents, who weren’t citizens, who couldn’t identify themselves….

In Florida, Broward County, after completing a State law required machine recount of the Senate race votes cast, withheld reporting the results of its recount until after the reporting deadline.  That means that the county’s count as of the prior Saturday will be the official count, an outcome that strongly favors the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate Bill Nelson.  That recount, the one Broward chose not to report on time, added nearly 800 votes to the Republican Rick Scott’s total.  But Nelson is the proper winner; he’s the Progressive-Democrat.

That, from the Party that pretends to decry voter disenfranchisement while disenfranchising nearly 800 voters.

Keep this in mind in 2020.  They’ll be at it again, in spades.