Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation

At Amazon, Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941.  

China Accelerates Nuclear Buildup

Well that's just great. *Eye-roll.*

At the Wall Street Journal, "China Is Accelerating Its Nuclear Buildup Over Rising Fears of U.S. Conflict":

China has accelerated an expansion of its nuclear arsenal because of a change in its assessment of the threat posed by the U.S., people with knowledge of the Chinese leadership’s thinking say, shedding new light on a buildup that is raising tension between the two countries.

The Chinese nuclear effort long predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the U.S.’s wariness about getting directly involved in the war there has likely reinforced Beijing’s decision to put greater emphasis on developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent, some of these people say. Chinese leaders see a stronger nuclear arsenal as a way to deter the U.S. from getting directly involved in a potential conflict over Taiwan.

Among recent developments, work has accelerated this year on more than 100 suspected missile silos in China’s remote western region that could be used to house nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the U.S., according to analysts that study satellite images of the area.

American leaders have said the thinking behind China’s nuclear advance is unclear. Independent security analysts who study nuclear proliferation say they are also in the dark about what is driving Beijing after exchanges between Chinese officials and analysts mostly dried up in the past few years.

The people close to the Chinese leadership said China’s increased focus on nuclear weapons is also driven by fears Washington might seek to topple Beijing’s Communist government following a more hawkish turn in U.S. policy toward China under the Trump and Biden administrations.

American military officials and security analysts are concerned China’s nuclear acceleration could mean it would be willing to make a surprise nuclear strike. The people close to the Chinese leadership said Beijing is committed to not using nuclear weapons first.

China plans to maintain an arsenal no larger than necessary to ensure China’s security interests, they said, adding that the Chinese military believes its nuclear weapons are too outdated to present an effective deterrent against a potential U.S. nuclear strike.

“China’s inferior nuclear capability could only lead to growing U.S. pressure on China,” one person close to the leadership said.

Nervous international reaction to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s call for his nuclear forces to be put on alert following his invasion of Ukraine has offered Chinese officials a real-world lesson about the strategic value of nuclear weapons. So did Ukraine’s decision in 1994 to turn over the nuclear weapons left in the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union in return for security assurances from the U.S. and Russia.

“Ukraine lost its nuclear deterrence in the past and that’s why it got into a situation like this,” said a retired Chinese military officer with ties to the country’s nuclear program.

The people familiar with the Chinese leadership’s thinking said Beijing hasn’t conveyed any adjustments to the country’s nuclear policy as a result of developments in Ukraine. China’s Ministry of Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The people have knowledge of Beijing’s thinking about nuclear policy through their work with various agencies involved in security issues. None are directly involved in the setting of nuclear policy. They didn’t preclude that future developments might change Beijing’s approach and said other factors may also be influencing the leadership’s approach to nuclear weapons.

Their observations nevertheless bring greater clarity to a shift in Beijing’s thinking that has far-reaching consequences globally. Rising tension between the U.S. and China over nuclear weapons could throw the world back into a Cold War-style nuclear standoff similar to that seen in the decades following World War II between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

The risk of miscalculations this time could be higher, however, because while the U.S. and Soviet Union communicated about their nuclear weapons during arms control talks from the late 1980s, the Chinese program and Beijing’s thinking on the role of nuclear weapons has been shrouded in secrecy. China has declined to engage in nuclear arms control talks with the U.S., saying Washington should first reduce its nuclear inventory.

U.S. government and private sector estimates put China’s nuclear arsenal in the low hundreds of warheads, far below the roughly 4,000 warheads held by both Russia and the U.S. The Pentagon says it now expects China to have 1,000 warheads by the end of this decade.

Satellite images taken during January show the last 45 of the temporary covers over each of 120 suspected missile silos near the city of Yumen have been removed, suggesting the most sensitive work at all of the silos has been completed, said Matt Korda, a senior research associate for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. At two other smaller silo fields in western China, work is at earlier stages.

The silos at each of the sites are large enough for a new long-range Chinese missile known as the DF-41 that was put into service in 2020 and is capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, analysts say. Tests of missiles that are launched from aircraft and can carry nuclear warheads also give Beijing a stronger chance of being able to retaliate if it is hit first in a nuclear attack.

In public, China has played down its nuclear pursuits.

“On the assertions made by U.S. officials that China is expanding dramatically its nuclear capabilities, first, let me say that this is untrue,” Fu Cong, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s arms control department, said earlier this year. He said that China is working to ensure its nuclear deterrent meets the minimum level necessary for national defense.

Chinese leaders had seen nuclear weapons as being of limited value because they don’t offer realistic options for fighting most wars. A major shift occurred in early 2020, according to the people familiar with the leadership’s thinking, as the U.S. government hardened its stance toward Beijing in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Strong criticism of the Communist Party from senior Trump administration officials spurred a consensus among Chinese leaders that Washington was willing to take greater risks to stop China’s rise, some of the people said.

A May 2020 speech in Mandarin by former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger was particularly alarming, they said. Speaking on the anniversary of a pivotal 1919 student protest in China, Mr. Pottinger said: “Wasn’t the goal to achieve citizen-centric government in China, and not replace one regime-centric model with another one? The world will wait for the Chinese people to furnish the answers.”

“The speech was obviously calling the Chinese to topple the Communist Party,” one person familiar with the Chinese leadership’s thinking said.

In response to a request for comment, Mr. Pottinger said that such an interpretation was “a profound admission that the Communist Party knows it has failed to deliver citizen-centric governance, and it confirms what everyone already suspected: What Beijing fears above all is its own people.”

At the same time, increased support from the U.S. for Taiwan, a democratically self-ruled island that Beijing views as a part of China and has vowed to put under its control, prompted Chinese leaders to debate the prospect that the U.S. might be willing to use nuclear weapons in a conflict over the island, according to the people close to the leadership...

 

Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, Eds., The Golden Horde

Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, Eds., The Golden Horde: Revolutionary Italy, 1960–1977. 

Carolyn Chen, Work Pray Code

At Amazon, Carolyn Chen, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley.

Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder

At Amazon, Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court.

9-Year-Old Ohio Boy Denied Kidney Transplant Because Father Is Unvaccinated

At Instapundit, "EXTORTION:

“They tried explaining to the clinic that Dane Donaldson had recovered from COVID-19 and therefore has natural immunity—even presenting results from a T Detect test, which measures the T cell immune response to SARS-CoV-2—but their rationale fell on deaf ears.”

 

'Double Vision'

Foreigner, absolutely rockin'. 

Milou Tamara Roes

On Instagram.

Paige for Masters Week.

And Corinna Kopf.

Leftwing Journos, Including the Very Fat and Unhealthy Jonah Goldberg, Defend the Media's Decision to Suppress the True and Newsworthy Hunter Biden Emails -- At a Conference About Fighting Disinformation, No Less!

At AoSHQ, "'All the earmarks of Russian disinformation', they said, and colluded with the social media monopolies to impose a Soviet silence on the issue."

Red States Drop Rape Exceptions Ahead of Supreme Court Ruling Threatening Roe v. Wade

June is coming.

The Court's got some big decisions coming down the pipeline.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Rape exceptions to abortion bans were once widely accepted. No more":

WASHINGTON — As conservative states enacted stringent abortion bans in recent decades, there was one threshold they were loath to cross: Abortion was nearly always allowed in cases of rape or incest.

It was a veneer of acceptance embraced by every GOP president from Reagan to Trump, and even the strongest abortion foes, that a woman should not be required to carry a rapist’s child.

Not anymore.

Just as states may be on the verge of regaining expansive authority to outlaw abortion, eliminating rape and incest exceptions has moved from the fringe to the center of the antiabortion movement.

In 2019, Alabama gained national attention by passing a state law banning all abortions with exceptions only for lethal abnormalities and serious health risks to the patient.

There was a brief backlash to Alabama’s law, but over the last four years, 10 states have enacted abortion bans in early pregnancy without rape or incest exceptions: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas. All were blocked by the court, except Texas’ law, which is in effect.

In recent weeks, several other legislatures have been racing to put abortion bans on the books. Arizona’s governor recently signed a 15-week abortion ban without rape or incest exceptions, although it is not yet in effect.

Similar 15-week bans without these exceptions are awaiting the governor’s signature in Florida and Kentucky. Oklahoma’s Legislature this week approved an almost total ban on abortion except for medical emergencies. It has not yet been signed by the governor.

The Supreme Court this summer will consider the constitutionality of one of those laws — Mississippi’s 15-week ban that excludes exceptions for rape and incest. In doing so, the court will decide whether to undo its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

If Mississippi’s law is upheld and the court rewrites Roe, the lack of rape and incest exceptions could be replicated in many other conservative states.

That carries grave physical and psychological implications for sexual abuse survivors who become pregnant, according to Michele Goodwin, a UC Irvine professor who studies law and health and is the founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy.

“When there are no exceptions for a person who survived rape or incest, it means the state is coercing that person into a pregnancy they don’t want,” she said. Women and girls who have survived rape or incest have already been through one harm, “but here’s the state rubber-stamping a second harm.”

Her concern is deeply personal. Goodwin says she became pregnant by her father when she was 12 years old after two years of abuse. Her father took her to a healthcare provider in New York, lied about her age, and got her an abortion. She didn’t need an exception. But as she watches states enact early abortion bans without exceptions, including Texas’ six-week abortion ban, she worries about girls who would have to somehow find abortion access in another state or carry a pregnancy if impregnated by an abuser.

“I tried to put myself in the deepest corners of closets as a child,” she said, recounting one of the ways she tried to escape her abuse as a child. Now she says she is grateful she had the opportunity to get an abortion and pursue an education and career, rather than being forced to carry a child when she was still one herself.

“One of the key steps of being a survivor is to be able to get your freedom back, to be able to get your autonomy back, to be able to get your decision-making back” Goodwin said.

Abortion opponents describe eliminating long-standing rape and incest exceptions as driven by their faith-based belief that life begins at the moment an egg is fertilized by sperm. They say they oppose all abortion, regardless of the circumstances...

Still more.

 

Old Instagram Live Video of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Goes Viral

The video is available here.

Now viral, of course. 

At Newsweek, "Will Smith Pleads With Jada to Stop Discussing Marriage in Old IG Live Clip."

At Least 50 Killed in Russian Strike on Kramatorsk Station (VIDEO)

Complete horror.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Russian Missile Attack Kills Dozens at Railway Station in Eastern Ukraine":

Moscow pressed its offensive in the Donbas area as Kyiv assessed the scale of damage around the capital A Russian missile attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed 50 people and injured nearly 100 trying to flee the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian authorities said Friday, in one of the largest single attacks on evacuees since the conflict began.

Around 4,000 people from across eastern Ukraine had gathered at the train station, a railroad hub for the region, waiting for evacuation days after Ukrainian officials told residents to leave ahead of a renewed Russian offensive in Donbas. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a ballistic Tochka-U missile had struck the station. Photographs posted on social media by Mr. Zelensky showed bodies strewn on the ground and dozens of suitcases, strollers and bags left behind.

Five children were among the dead, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the administration in the eastern region of Donetsk. Another 16 children were wounded, he said.

“They are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Mr. Zelensky wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is an evil that has no limits.”

Mr. Zelensky posted a video of a missile fragment lying on the ground near the station that had the words “for the children” painted on it. A person narrating the video identified it as the missile used in the attack.

“They clearly saw that they were hitting civilians early in the morning, that at the station at this time there were thousands of people trying to evacuate, families, children, elderly,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, wrote on his Facebook page.

Russia denied the strike but said it had been targeting train stations in the nearby Donbas towns and cities of Pokrovsk, Slovyansk and Barvinkove to destroy Ukrainian military hardware arriving into the region. Ukrainian officials have blamed Russia for thwarting evacuation attempts across the country, including outside the southern Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Berdyansk, with artillery attacks.

The strikes herald a news focus on eastern Ukraine following Moscow’s decision to give up on capturing the capital, Kyiv. Ukraine, which has asked for heavier weapons in the face of a possibly more consolidated attack by the Russians, received a Soviet-era S-300 air-defense system from Slovakia, the Slovak government said Friday.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is scheduled to meet Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv on Friday, condemned the attack, calling it despicable.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she was appalled by the strike. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime,” she wrote on Twitter. “We will hold Russia and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to account.”

Humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said the station attack was imperiling the evacuation efforts in the region.

“We were there yesterday, and we saw hundreds of people crowding the station, trying to leave,” said Christopher Stokes, emergency coordinator at Doctors Without Borders. “The hospitals had been urgently calling us to evacuate their patients by train. It is a big question whether we will be able to evacuate more people.”

Murat Sahin, the Ukraine representative at Unicef, the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, condemned the harming of children in the attack.

“Civilians, particularly children, must be protected from harm,” Mr. Sahin said. “The killing of children must stop now.”

Kramatorsk, a city of more than 100,000, has been the base for Ukraine’s joint-forces operation, which has been fighting Russian-controlled separatists that took over swaths of Ukraine’s industrial east in 2014. The city and those around it that suffered through the separatist conflict are once again becoming a war zone now that Moscow aborted its multipronged effort to capture Kyiv. Russia has said it is in the second phase of what it calls a special military operation and that the conflict is going according to plan, but analysts say Russia is being forced to reconsider its capabilities after weeks of setbacks.

The Kremlin said Friday that the military operation could end in the “foreseeable future” since its goals were being achieved and negotiations between the two sides were under way.

Renewed fighting in the east will draw more of Kyiv’s resources away from cities and towns near the capital, where Ukrainian authorities are still trying to assess the extent of damage left after Russian troops withdrew. Ukrainian authorities on Friday were sifting through the remains of apartment blocks in the town of Borodyanka, north of the capital, after Kyiv said Russian planes bombed civilian targets, killing dozens and trapping countless more under the rubble.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said Russian forces attacked at least two apartment buildings with bombs and rockets to cause maximum civilian deaths. She said 26 bodies had been recovered but that there could be many more.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians in its military assault on Ukraine and has called the video and photographic images of Russia’s alleged targeting of civilians in Bucha and elsewhere staged...

Juan Zarate, Treasury War

Juan Zarate, Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, Spin Dictators

At Amazon, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century.

Putin's American Apologists

From Joshua Muravchik, at Commentary, "A collection of voices on the left, right, and center have found a way to blame the United States and the West...,":

from the international consensus to vote with Russia at the UN, so here at home, a miscellany of voices demurred, pointing fingers of blame in other directions, expressing sympathy for Russia’s position, or warning against any strong reaction from Washington.

Almost none offered words of worship to Vladimir Putin, as many had to Joseph Stalin in Soviet days, and none declared outright support for his actions. But still, a number of writers, political groups, and politicians offered a counterpoint to the broad chorus of indignation at Putin’s action. They came from both political poles, as well as from the camp of isolationist ideologues difficult to locate on a left-to-right spectrum. Some registered their disapproval of Russia’s attack before proceeding to their main point: warning against a U.S. response stronger than admitting refugees. Others offered up outright apologetics for Putin’s actions.

On the left, the Democratic Socialists of America—once a fringe group but that now boasts in its ranks four members of the U.S. House of Representatives (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman) as well as dozens of state legislators and many local officials—issued a statement on January 31 in response to Russia’s massing its army on Ukraine’s borders. It began:

Following months of increased tensions and a sensationalist Western media blitz drumming up conflict in the Donbas, the US government is responding to the situation in Ukraine through the familiar guise of threats of sweeping sanctions, provision of military aid, and increased military deployment to the region. [DSA] opposes this ongoing US brinkmanship, which only further escalates the crisis, and reaffirms our previous statement saying no to NATO and its imperialist expansionism and disastrous interventions across the world.

Nowhere did the document attempt to explain what had caused the sudden “increased tensions,” or so much as mention the Russian forces. It called instead on the U.S. “to reverse its ongoing militarization of the region.”

When the Russians attacked, DSA issued a new statement, which did indeed condemn the invasion while opposing any “coercive measures… economic or military” to counter it. In contrast to the UN General Assembly, which voted almost unanimously to “demand” the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces, DSA merely “urge[d]” this. It went on to “reaffirm our call for the USA to withdraw from NATO, and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” and it declared “solidarity with…antiwar protestors in both countries [Russia and Ukraine],” although it did not explain where the latter had been sighted.

Others on the left were less flagrant but also assigned more blame to Washington than Moscow. Noam Chomsky, in a lengthy interview in the online journal Truthout, explained:

The crisis has been brewing for 25 years as the US contemptuously rejected Russian security concerns, in particular their clear red lines: Georgia and especially Ukraine. There is good reason to believe that this tragedy could have been avoided.

Now, he said, focus must turn to the future. He warned, “repeatedly, [America’s] reaction has been to reach for the six-gun rather than the olive branch.” But the superior wisdom of a gentler approach, he explained, had been taught to him personally during his wartime travels to North Vietnam by representatives of the Viet Cong, a group whose penchant for gentleness was lost on less acute observers than Chomsky. Moreover, he added, “like it or not, the choices are now reduced to an ugly outcome that rewards rather than punishes Putin for the act of aggression—or the strong possibility of terminal war.” In short, our only sure path to avoid nuclear Armageddon is one that “rewards” Putin.

Writing in the Nation, Rajan Menon described the original sin that led to today’s crisis. As always in that journal, America was the sinner:

Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly toward that country’s borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.

That magazine’s publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, has recently been awarded a weekly column in the Washington Post. There, at the end of January, she warned of the danger of war and of “screeching hawks.”

In Russia, Putin is already under fire for not having taken Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in 2014.…In Washington, Biden is under fire for not being tough enough…For all its hysteria about imminent war, it’s clear that the Biden administration believes Putin is bluffing….the danger is that Putin will face escalating pressure from more hawkish factions within Russia.

When the Russians attacked, she spoke for the Nation, “condemn[ing]” the invasion in somewhat roundabout words, before resuming her theme that equal or greater blame lay with the West:

Putin’s actions are indefensible, but responsibility for this crisis is widely shared. This magazine has warned repeatedly that the extension of NATO to Russia’s borders would inevitably produce a fierce reaction. We have criticized NATO’s wholesale rejection of Russia’s security proposals. We decry the arrogance that leads U.S. officials to assert that we have the right to do what we wish across the world, even in areas, like Ukraine, that are far more important to others than they are to us.

A week later, in her Washington Post column, she advised against countering Russia. “By invading Ukraine,” she opined, “Putin demands a return to [an] archaic and obsolete Cold War order. The world would be wise not to accede.” In other words, Putin is trying to start a fight; we could frustrate him by turning the other cheek. She counseled out-of-the-box thinking:

What’s needed above all is a courageous and transnational citizens’ movement demanding not simply the end of the war on Ukraine but also an end to perpetual wars. We need political leaders who will speak out about our real security needs and resist the reflex to fall into old patterns that distract from the threats we can no longer afford to ignore [i.e., “pandemics and climate change”].

The Nation’s competitor among left-wing journals, Jacobin, took a similar tack. Staff writer Branko Marcetic asserted that Putin’s invasion was “reckless and illegal,” before going on to argue that it might have been averted by “a different set of US policies over the past few months.” He explained:

Already, the army of war-hawk pundits that has been predicting—salivating over, may be more accurate—a Russian invasion has seized on this latest move as vindication of their usual talking points: Putin is Hitler, he seeks to revive the glory of the Soviet Union, he can’t be reasoned with, and only a show of force, not further “appeasement” or negotiations that “reward” his behavior, can make him stop. This is…exactly the approach Washington and its allies…have taken to get us to this point.

If readers wondered whether it wasn’t Moscow, rather than Washington and its allies, who had gotten us to this point, Marcetic offered an example of “the most over-the-top of Western predictions” that had inflamed the situation, namely, the image of Russian soldiers “marching to Kiev and toppling the Ukrainian government.”

Elected officials on the left tended to be more forthright in denouncing the Russian invasion, while often adding caveats. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, called it “premeditated aggression,” but he did not retract his previously expressed sympathy for Russia’s adamancy about Washington’s refusal to rule out NATO membership for Ukraine. “Does anyone really believe,” he asked, “that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?”

Sanders is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Its chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal, together with the chair of its Peace and Security Taskforce, Representative Barbara Lee, spoke for the caucus during this crisis. As Russian forces poised on Ukraine’s borders, they issued a statement voicing “alarm,” although this seemed to be mostly about possible American reactions. “We have significant concerns that new troop deployments, sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions, and a flood of hundreds of millions of dollars in lethal weapons will only raise tensions and increase the chance of miscalculation,” they said.

They offered an interpretation of the mobilization on Ukraine’s borders akin to vanden Heuvel’s: “Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy.” Apparently, the way to stymie Putin would be to go about our business of reforming America or saving the planet and to ignore his belligerent actions entirely.

Their colleague Rashida Tlaib seconded this, adding: “Enough of rushing to war…  . Diplomacy and de-escalation must be the focus, not ‘lethal’ aid. My constituents are tired of war and are demanding we use everything in our toolbox to prevent conflict.”

When the Biden administration began warning of an imminent Russian invasion, and Congress rushed to enact emergency legislation to shore up Ukraine and deter Russia, caucus member Ilhan Omar voiced her opposition:

The proposed legislative solution to this crisis, escalates the conflict without deterring it effectively….The consequences of flooding Ukraine with half a billion dollars in American weapons, likely not limited to just military-specific equipment but also including small arms and ammo, are unpredictable and likely disastrous. It also threatens unbelievably broad and draconian sanctions that will utterly devastate the Russian economy, likely doing very little to deter Putin’s aggression while causing immense suffering among ordinary Russian civilians who did not choose this.

After the Russian forces rolled across the border, caucus members were clearer in “condemning the violent invasion of Ukraine,” while still focusing most of their appeals on the need to restrain the U.S. response. In their new statement, the caucus said:

We urge the Biden administration to be guided by two goals: to avoid dangerous escalation that is all too easy in the chaos of war, and to ensure we are minimizing harm to civilians. We applaud President Biden for rightly saying there can be no military solution to this conflict, and wisely committing to not deploying U.S. troops… . The president must seek congressional authorization…before any U.S. troops deploy into areas or situations where there is a risk of imminent hostilities.

Since deploying U.S. forces to Ukraine had already been ruled out, the latter sentence seemed to aim at the movement of several thousand troops into frontline NATO states. In addition to objecting to these deployments designed to deter the Russians from moving against the Baltic states, the progressives also were chary of economic sanctions. They said: “The goal of any U.S. sanctions should be to stop the fighting and hold those responsible for this invasion to account, while avoiding indiscriminate harm to civilians or inflexibility as circumstances change.”

These attitudes on the left, if in some ways shocking, are not surprising. And the same might be said about the camp of ideological isolationists. It is centered today in the Quincy Institute, a D.C. think tank of relatively recent vintage, lavishly funded from the two extremes, George Soros on the left and Charles Koch on the right.

In the run-up to the Russian invasion, Quincy’s website was replete with items diverting blame from Russia, casting aspersions on Ukraine and its sympathizers, and warning against U.S. involvement. Research fellow Ben Freeman posted an exposé, claiming to reveal that “lobbyists from Ukraine are working feverishly to shape the U.S. response.” It went on: “Firms working for Ukrainian interests have inundated congressional offices, think tanks and journalists with more than 10,000 message and meetings in 2021.” Freeman added, “With U.S. weapons manufacturers making billions in arms sales to Ukraine, their CEOs see the turmoil there as a good business opportunity,” citing another Quincy exposé by another staff member.

In addition to the various writings of vanden Heuvel, a Quincy board member, that are posted on its site, its other principal commentators on this issue were Andrew Bacevich, the institute’s president, and senior fellow Anatol Lieven.

As the Biden administration issued warnings in February, citing intelligence that Putin was intent on war, Bacevich published an op-ed debunking it, warning that “a full-fledged war scare is upon us.” He likened the administration’s revelation of Russian plans for staging a false-flag attack to the Bush administration’s erroneous 2003 warnings about Iraqi nuclear weapons. And he vented anger at news organizations for reporting the Russia story. “The incessant warmongering of the American media [is] disturbing and repugnant,” he lamented, protesting reports that 130,000 Russian troops had massed on Ukraine’s borders. He didn’t dispute this number but rather the verb, “massed,” which he called “a favored media mischaracterization.” He suggested no preferable term, but reporters might have said more neutrally that Russian soldiers “convened” or “congregated” or “flocked” or “disembarked” at Ukraine’s border.

Two weeks later, as the crisis intensified, Bacevich took to print again, adding to his indictment of the media and of America more broadly. “Some members of the American commentariat will cheer” war, he said, owing to “the depth of their animus toward Putin.” This in part reflected “the unvarnished Russophobia pervading the ranks of the America political elite” and “disdain for Russia” that has “roots going at least as far back as the Bolshevik Revolution.” However, the “deeper” source of “our present-day antipathy toward Russia [lies in] a desperate need to refurbish the concept of American exceptionalism.” In “our collective identity [w]e Americans…are the Chosen People.” It would be more accurate, he went on, to characterize ourselves as “reckless,” “incompetent,” “alienated,” “extravagantly wasteful,” and “deeply confused.” Rather than “flinging macho-man insults,” Bacevich concluded, the U.S. should “acknowledge the possibility that Russia possesses legitimate security interests” in Ukraine.

The day after Russia’s assault began, Bacevich published yet another op-ed. “The eruption of war creates an urgent need to affix blame and identify villains,” he began, with gentle sarcasm that then grew stronger. “Russia is the aggressor and President Vladimir Putin a bad guy straight out of central casting: on that point, opinion in the United States and Europe is nearly unanimous. Even in a secular age, we know whose side God is on.” It would be better, he said, to avoid a “rush to judgment.”

Yes, Russian aggression deserves widespread condemnation. Yet the United States cannot absolve itself of responsibility for this catastrophe… . By casually meddling in Ukrainian politics in recent years, the United States has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion.

Quincy’s most prolific commentator on the Ukraine crisis was senior research fellow Anatol Lieven. He, too, sounded a note of contempt for Americans. “A mythological monster is haunting the fevered imagination of the West,” a cartoon image of a creature whose name Americans ignorantly mispronounce “Put’n.” In contrast,

the real Putin is cautious and levelheaded—too much so, in the view of more ambitious and hotheaded members of the Russian elite. …This should give confidence that we can emerge from the present crisis without disaster… . Only the mythological Putin would March into Kiev and central Ukraine, let alone attack Poland or the Baltic states. These are ridiculous Western fantasies generated partly by genuine paranoia, partly by members of the US and European blobs who need to demonize Russia in order to cover up their own appalling mistakes and lies over the past 30 years and to parade heroic resistance to a threat that does not in fact exist.

The recurrent theme of Lieven’s many articles was that Western anxieties were unwarranted. In early February, he wrote:

One Western line about Russia’s demands has already been proved false, namely that they were never intended as a serious basis for negotiations; and that Russia always planned to use their rejection as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Clearly if that were the case, Russia would have invaded by now.

Then, when their intelligence prompted Western governments to withdraw diplomatic personnel, Lieven wrote mockingly that Russia therefore had no need to invade. “Western policy towards Ukraine is evolving from the ridiculous to the positively surreal… . Putin can enjoy a quiet cup of coffee while Western governments run around squawking hysterically and NATO’s credibility collapses along with the Ukrainian economy.” And a week after that, he forecasted: “If by the time of the Blinken-Lavrov meeting, Russia has not in fact invaded Ukraine except for the Donbas, then all these Western warnings about an imminent Russian invasion will start to look a bit silly.”

When the invasion finally came, Lieven did not stop to acknowledge who it was that now looked silly, but he did condemn it in clear terms before proceeding to suggest the outline of a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine would cede substantial territory and a bit of sovereignty.

Finally, once the war was underway, two other Quincy authors, Matthew Burrows and Christopher Preble, chimed in airily that “one way or another, the Russian war in Ukraine will wind down” and the really important thing was to avert “a new Cold War between Russia and the West.” In other words, Ukraine’s cities could end up resembling Grozny after Putin finished suppressing the Chechen uprising, but then we could move on.

If the stance of the isolationist Quincy Institute as well as that of the left was to be expected, the response on the right was less predictable, but here, too, Putin found apologists. Foremost among them was Donald Trump. In the first two days after Putin announced diplomatic recognition of the two breakaway “people’s republics” in Donbas, Trump several times called it “smart” and “genius” that Russian troops were going in as “peacekeepers.” He gushed that Putin is “very savvy,” although his words of admiration stopped short of directly endorsing or defending Putin’s action.

Indeed, characteristically, he added that the invasion wouldn’t have happened if he were president. He didn’t explain why that would have been so, beyond sneering that Biden “has no concept of what he’s doing.” Would he have mollified Putin? After all, he had recently recalled aloud that he “got along great with President Putin,” and said, “I liked him. He liked me.” Or would Putin have been afraid of him? He had once boasted of having a bigger “nuclear button” than Kim Jong Un (before he and Kim “fell in love”). Credulous admirers were left to fill in their own scenarios.

Within a week, however, as, at home and abroad, a near-consensus of indignation at Russian actions crystallized, and Ukrainians heroically stalled Russia’s advance, Trump switched the script. He branded the Russian rampage a “holocaust” and demanded that it stop. Then he claimed that the Ukrainians were able to hold off the invaders because of weapons that he had provided them.

General Mike Flynn, Trump’s first appointed national security adviser, spoke more coherently than Trump and defended Putin entirely:

Russia has…one core concern… . If Ukraine were admitted into NATO…the Russians understand that would likely result in nuclear weapons being placed at its doorstep—closer to Russia than Cuba is to the United States.…If president John Kennedy was justified in risking war to prevent nuclear missiles from being installed in Cuba in 1961, then why exactly is Russian president Vladimir Putin being reckless in risking war to prevent NATO weapons from being installed in Ukraine in 2022? Would any great nation allow the development of such a threat on its border?

Another former Trump aide, now a social-media figure with a large following, Candace Owens, took a similar stance...

Still more.

 

 

Grace Andrews

Very beautiful woman, on Instagram.

Plus, my favorite bottom.

And Gal Gadot.

'Open Your Eyes'

From the Lords of the New Church:

Video games train the kids for war.

Army chic in high-fashion stores.

Law and order's done their job.

Prisons filled while the rich still rob.

Assassination politics.

Violence rules within' our nation's midst.

Well ignorance is their power tool.

You'll only know what they want you to know.

The television cannot lie.

Controlling media with smokescreen eyes.

Nuclear politicians picture show.

The acting's lousy but the blind don't know.

They scare us all with threats of war.

So we forget just how bad things are.

You taste the fear when you're all alone.

They gonna git'cha when you're on your own.

The silence of conspiracy.

Slaughtered on the altar of apathy.

You gotta wake up from your sleep.

'Cause meek inherits earth...six feet deep.

Open your eyes see the lies right in front of ya.

Open your eyes...

With New Punishments, West Escalates Pressure on Russia

The latest on Ukraine.

At the NewYork Times, "West Moves to Curb Russian Coal and Trade Over Ukraine War":

BRUSSELS — Western nations on Thursday escalated their pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, with the European Union approving a ban on Russian coal and the United States moving to strip Russia’s trading privileges and prohibit its energy sales in the American market.

The new punishments came as the United Nations General Assembly took a symbolically important vote to penalize Russia by suspending it from the Human Rights Council, the 47-member U.N. body that can investigate rights abuses. Western diplomats called the suspension a barometer of global outrage over the war and the growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian forces.

That evidence includes newly revealed radio transmissions intercepted by German intelligence in which Russian forces discussed carrying out indiscriminate killings north of Kyiv, the capital, according to two officials briefed on an intelligence report. Russia has denied any responsibility for atrocities.

Together, the steps announced Thursday represented a significant increase in efforts led by Western nations to isolate and inflict greater economic pain on Russia as its troops regroup for a wave of attacks in eastern Ukraine, prompting urgent calls by Ukrainian officials for civilians there to flee.

“These next few days may be your last chance to leave!” the regional governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, declared in a video on Facebook. “The enemy is trying to cut off all possible ways to leave. Do not delay — evacuate.”

But the Western penalties were unlikely to persuade Russia to stop the war, and they revealed how the allies were trying to minimize their own economic pain and prevent themselves from becoming entangled in a direct armed conflict with Moscow.

In some ways, the efforts underscored internal tensions among Russia’s critics over how best to manage the next stage of the conflict, which has created the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. The war is also indirectly worsening humanitarian and economic problems far from Ukraine, including rising food and energy prices that are exacerbating hunger and inflation, particularly in developing nations.

It took two days of protracted talks in Brussels for the European Union to approve a fifth round of sanctions against Russia that included its first ban on a Russian energy source, coal. But the measures were softened by several caveats, highlighting Europe’s diminishing appetite to absorb further economic fallout from the war.

The ban would be phased in over four months, instead of three as originally proposed, according to E.U. diplomats. Germany had been pushing for a longer transition period to wind down existing contracts, even though Russian coal is easier to replace with purchases from other suppliers, compared with oil and gas.

European diplomats also agreed to ban Russian-flagged vessels from E.U. ports, block trucks from Russia and its ally, Belarus, from E.U. roads, and stop the import of Russian seafood, cement, wood and liquor and the export to Russia of quantum computers and advanced semiconductors.

Ukrainian officials had urged Western nations to go further and completely cut off purchases of Russian oil and gas, contending that existing sanctions would not cripple Russia’s economy quickly or severely enough to affect President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to subjugate Ukraine by force.

“As long as the West continues buying Russian gas and oil, it is supporting Ukraine with one hand while supporting the Russian war machine with the other hand,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Thursday at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he urged members of the alliance to accelerate promised help to Ukraine’s outgunned military.

The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said the alliance would “further strengthen and sustain our support to Ukraine, so that Ukraine prevails in the face of Russia’s invasion.” But he did not offer details...

 

Arizona State's Power Play for California's College Students

A very interesting piece, at the Los Angeles Times, "UC and CSU deliver thousands of rejection letters. Arizona State wants to fill the void":

Kiana Tovar was all set to attend Sacramento State. Kara Smith had firm plans: enroll at Santa Monica College, then apply to transfer to UCLA. Israel Cortave had been accepted to UC Merced and UC Riverside, which both offer the computer science and engineering majors he wants to explore.

All three students are now attending college in California, mixing state-of-the-art online classes with small in-person gatherings. They’ve been able to forge friendships, stay on track with “success coaches” and learn about career opportunities from industry professionals. But the name inscribed at the entrance of the university they decided to attend is not a California public institution.

It’s ASU — Arizona State University. And its newest campus is in Los Angeles.

After years of steadily targeting California, the No. 1 source of ASU’s out-of-state students, the university has planted its first flag in the heart of downtown with a high-profile, multimillion-dollar takeover of the landmark Herald Examiner Building. The upstart program is too tiny to measure now. But California public university leaders have taken note — and are watching whether ASU President Michael Crow’s alternative vision for higher education will be a trendsetting incubator launched in Los Angeles or a failed incursion into a neighboring state.

Crow sees California gold in the tens of thousands of students each year who are delivered rejection letters from the University of California’s and California State University’s most popular campuses — the annual heartbreak happening now. He gives both systems due respect, but says they’re stuck in old models of enrollment tied to availability of physical space and are failing to embrace technology to deliver education. And UC campuses have responded to surging demand mostly by becoming more selective, rather than more inclusive.

“They’ve bought into the logic of exclusion as a part of the measure of success,” Crow said of UC. “I don’t think a public university can do that. Our mission as a public university is to serve the public wherever they are and whatever they need.”

At UCLA — the most sought-after university in the nation — the average GPA of admitted first-year students last year rose to 4.5 and its admission rate dropped to 10%. In 1990, UCLA’s admission rate was 43%.

Crow lays out a different vision at ASU: broad access over selectivity, with an 88.2% admission rate for first-year students entering in fall 2021 and guaranteed acceptance to those with a minimum 3.0 GPA and completion of required college prep courses. ASU has vastly expanded its capacity to become one of the nation’s largest universities today — doubling its total enrollment in the last dozen years to 136,000 in fall 2021. The biggest growth has come in online enrollment, which now accounts for 43% of ASU students, with a growing share at several satellite sites outside the main Tempe campus in Phoenix, Mesa, Lake Havasu and elsewhere.

Californians made up 14% of ASU’s total enrollment of 129,000 in fall 2020 — two-thirds of them enrolled in online programs. They represented more than 10% of the 14,350 first-year, on-campus students in Arizona in fall 2021 — a record — and nearly one-third of those from out-of-state. Overall, that first-year class grew 12% over fall 2020, as ASU bucked national trends of declining enrollment at community colleges and some Cal State campuses.

UC officials say they don’t see ASU’s latest entry into the state as a competitive threat as much as an opportunity to learn. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ says she regards Crow as “one of the most interesting thinkers in higher education today” and last year invited him to address her top advisors to spark ideas about how to expand capacity, which she views as one of the university’s most pressing needs.

In a recent interview, Christ lamented a 2013 study by two UC researchers that found that California enrolled a lower proportion of its college students at four-year campuses than any other state.

ASU has used online instruction, technology tools and satellite campuses to increase enrollment, all measures Christ is considering for Berkeley. The UC system is vowing to add at least 20,000 more students by 2030.

Christ describes Crow as “not being so much of a gatekeeper in selective admissions, but really trying to find ways of serving more students. The time has come for some very creative rethinking” at UC.

Cal State leaders, however, are acutely aware of Crow’s moves and wonder what they will mean for their own enrollment — which declined systemwide by 13,000 students last year — since the two universities draw applicants from similar academic profiles versus the more selective UC.

Cal State isn’t so concerned that ASU will siphon off students who want a full college experience — one leader called the ASU Los Angeles center a “stripped down version of a college education” without sports, clubs and other popular on-campus attractions. San Diego State, for instance, drew a record 77,000 first-year applicants for about 5,500 seats for fall 2022 — and those students want an on-campus, residential experience, said Stefan Hyman, associate vice president for enrollment management.

UC Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley recently told fellow board members that UC needed to up its game in expanding online learning and access to nontraditional students because “we have our friends at Arizona State University chomping at the bit to take California students.” Oakley later told The Times that he doesn’t “begrudge” ASU for targeting Californians.

“But I also think it’s a lost opportunity for our own institutions because these are California students that are ready and willing to get into higher education and we’re just not providing them enough access,” said Oakley, chancellor of the 116-campus California Community Colleges system...

Still more.

David Horowitz, I Can't Breathe

At Amazon, David Horowitz, I Can't Breathe.