Tag Archives: politics

Negotiations with Russia

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Boris Johnson, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is on the right track regarding the idea of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin an end to the barbarian’s invasion. Negotiations now would be both fruitless and pointless, Johnson writes, because they would require Ukraine to surrender Ukrainian territory and they would idiotically rely on the barbarian’s trustworthiness in keeping any agreement. Negotiations now would be ill-timed, as well: the time for negotiating can only be after the barbarian has been driven entirely from Ukrainian territory and Ukraine having won, totally and decisively, the war the barbarian began.

Johnson had this, too, though:

If Mr Putin were to use a weapon of mass destruction [one of the barbarian chieftain’s many threats], he would be tendering Russia’s resignation from the club of civilized nations….

With this characterization, Johnson is being…generous. Russia hasn’t been a civilized nation, at the least, since the mass starvation the Russians—the people as well as the government—inflicted on Ukrainians and on the Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Belarussians during the kulak collectivization atrocities of the 1930s. The barbarian has demonstrated—in rivers of blood—the continuing depths of its depravity with the atrocities inflicted by the products of Russian society on Ukrainians in the present barbarian war. Atrocities Johnson describes so genteelly:

captives tortured, women raped, schools and kindergartens deliberately targeted.

He omitted the hospitals deliberately targeted, the vast lines of refugees from besieged cities that the barbarian had agreed to allow to evacuate—and then targeted for mass murder once they were so conveniently lined up on the agreed roads leading away from the city.

Those finally arrived at post-victory negotiations? [A] peaceful, orderly and lasting relationship, and friendship, between Ukraine and Russia, as Johnson so naively described them?

Keep in mind two things as you contemplate such a negotiation. The “soldiers” inflicting those atrocities today—the rapes, the tortures, the child butcheries, the attacks on hospitals, the attacks on infrastructure necessary for civilian survival during the coming winter—are the products of Russian society. Most of these armed thugs may well be from the lower tiers of that society, but who taught them to be the way they are? The rest of that society, who either condone the atrocities or actively order them, all the way up to the chieftain sitting on his throne in the Kremlin.

The other thing is the impossibility of Ukrainian friendship with a polity—barbaric or civilized—that is bent on the utter destruction of Ukraine.

No. The only outcome for the present situation is the utter, decisive defeat of the barbarian, with his being driven entirely from Ukrainian territory. The only possibility for any future relationship between Ukraine and Russia is Ukrainian eternal vigilance against the next wave of barbarians from the east. For that wave will surely come.

Hush Money Grants and Consequences

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It turns out that quite a number persons with medical or other science-related degrees took Federal grant money as a quid pro quo for either remaining silent about the origins of the Wuhan Virus or actively denying its Wuhan lab origin.

Congressman James Comer (R, KY), the likely chairman of the House Oversight Committee if the GOP wins control of the House, told Just the News on Monday night that his investigators have evidence showing that even though Dr Anthony Fauci was warned the virus likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, he constructed, with the aid of federally funded private scientists, a counternarrative that COVID-19 evolved naturally from animals.
“Everyone in the medical community backed up Dr Fauci, and what we now know is they were receiving a lot of grant dollars[.]”

And

“What we learned is how much slush money the NIH had to award in the form of grants to these advisers.”

If the allegations prove true, then these persons who happen to have medical degrees of one sort or another plainly put their desire for money ahead their obligation to tell the truth—a Critical Item in their Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm.

If the allegations prove true, then others of these persons, who style themselves other scientists than medical doctors, plainly put their desire for money ahead of their obligation to tell the truth—a Critical Item in doing credible research.

Consequences. These persons need to be publicly identified and then cut off from any further Federal (and State, although the States will have to act for themselves) grants of any sort. These persons will have shown that they cannot be trusted with our tax money.

Too Bad, So Sad

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It seems that Philadelphia is going to be the latest recipient of illegal aliens bused from Texas.

Cue the whining, this time from Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s spokesman.

This information was relayed to us from a community partner organization as Texas officials have not coordinated with the city. We do not have an exact location of where the bus will disembark, nor do we have any specific information about those on board, nor do we know if other buses are planned.

Neither do any of the cities getting the illegal aliens Biden flies in in the dark of night get any warning of arrival or of when they’re departing.

Neither do any of the cities in the border States get any warning of the illegal aliens streaming across our open southern border—other than the fact of that steady flow; 2.3 million illegal aliens in Fiscal 2022 alone.

Neither do any of us get any indication of when the Biden administration will start taking this border and illegal alien disaster seriously.

Virtue Signaling

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Recall the climatistas who have been running around (sort of) gluing themselves to museum art, throwing messy food at the art, and one group, pleased to call themselves scientists, even glued themselves to the floor of a luxury sports car dealership showroom floor. All that in the name of saving the planet from overheating. (In that last case, dealership management just left them there, refusing to feed them or give them bowls into which to empty their bladders and bowels. Management just closed up and turned out the lights. Good for dealership management).

Now other climatistas are calling out these self-gluers. Danielle Butcher, American Conservation Coalition Executive Vice President:

Activists are trying to deface property and artwork specifically because it is shocking. The tactics, they’re focused on sparking conversation, whatever that means, but they’re not actually helping the environment tangibly.

Whatever that means, indeed.

Addressing only the self-gluers, I note Mason Cooley’s remark: Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

Butcher went on:

You cannot annoy people into agreeing with you.
And certainly throwing mashed potatoes or glue or soup or dumping milk on a grocery store floor, those are not ways that you convince people you are in the right position[.]

On the other hand, “you” cannot always convince folks to agree with you when you cynically omit key facts, here related to Earth’s evolving climate. Facts like we’ve been hotter with lush life, and we’ve had higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations with lush life, and those periods do not correlate with each other.

Oh, and we’re still cooler than the geologic planetary warming trend line 11,000 years after the end of the last Ice Age.

Maybe Cooley’s remark applies here, too.

Two Things

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Former President Donald Trump’s candidates won their primaries—and they lost in the general election. The Republican Party needs to move on from Trump: he was an effective President, and for the most part, his policies were sound. However, his post-2020 election behavior and rhetoric have been nakedly divisive, and his attacks have been directed more at Republicans than at Progressive-Democrats. Trump has made himself counterproductive to Republican and to national interests, and the Republican Party needs to render him irrelevant.

The other thing is that the Progressive-Democratic Party heavily influenced the Republican Party’s primary nominees, getting Progressive-Democrat-favored Republicans nominated on seven occasions. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s general election candidates then defeated all seven.

Republicans need to do two things about this, one of which has a broader, necessarily critical, application. The one is that Republicans need to call out the Progressive-Democratic Party’s interference, identify the campaign ads, and then emphasize their intrinsically (if strictly legal) dishonest nature and the desperate ploys that they are.

The other, broader thing is Republican messaging. Every Republican candidate individually, needs to talk heavily about what his policies—concrete, measurable policies—will be if he’s elected. It’s not enough to speak only about the other guy’s failures, though that does need to be a part of the messaging. It’s watery gruel, indeed, too, to speak only in glittering generalities about the Republican candidate’s own policies and goals. More than that: all of the individual candidate policies need to come from a wholly unified party set of policies so that each of the candidates is fighting for the same thing at a national scale, as well as a local one, rather than irrelevantly of each other or outright at cross purposes with each other.

Bonus thing: as long as early voting is going to be a thing in our general elections, Republicans need to work to get their voters out early, also, if only to mitigate the traditional advantage Progressive-Democrats have in early voting numbers and late counting of in-person voting. This would mitigate the opportunities for shenanigans regarding those early voting and late counting numbers.

This brings up an additional bonus thing: our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, says this:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

That ability of Congress to change or alter States’ election prescriptions is key here. States have, in my not so humble opinion, early voting periods that are far too long and mail-in balloting rules that are too loose. The former encourages voting to occur before candidates have developed their campaigns very much, even before the candidates have debated each other at all. It also gets too many voters committed before any late- or moderately late-breaking events that otherwise would affect a candidate’s viability. The latter is too vulnerable to ballot harvesting, misplaced/misbehaved-on ballots, ballots pushed to voters whether they ask for them or not, and other failures, both honest mistakes and nefariously done ones.

Congress—more likely, We the People—need to consider a Congressional alteration that limits early voting period to a much shorter period, say, one week. Congress—more likely, We the People—need also to consider limiting mail-in ballots to absentee ballots positively requested by a voter and with those ballots requested only with a reasonable excuse for not voting in person (e.g., a military member stationed outside his voting precinct).