At Amazon, Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Color-Blind Equality in an Age of Identity Politics.
Friday, June 3, 2022
The Moral Idiocy of Gun Control
It's Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "Is it more moral to own a gun or to pay someone else to do it for you?":
I was chatting with a horrified Swedish visitor who described a visit to Nevada. “There was this grandmother, an elderly lady, and she took out a gun from her purse,” he told me, shaking his head. We were having this conversation in a city which had racked up 77 shootings in just one month. Few New Yorkers legally own guns. The NYPD has issued around 40,000 handgun permits in a city of over 8 million. That’s around one handgun for every two-hundred New Yorkers. Don’t assume that the parts of the city with the most guns are the most dangerous. The vast majority of handgun permits are in Staten Island, which has the lowest crime rate in the city, as opposed to the Bronx, with the highest. Manhattan has few legal guns relative to its population while the white working class areas of Brooklyn have some of the most legal guns. The Daily News, which interviewed a criminologist as part of its anti-gun crusade, found that he was "puzzled". “Some people see a mugging in the Bronx, and they want to get a gun on Staten Island,” he argued. “That’s not rational, but some people really want guns.” Perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer muggings in Staten Island is that more of the folks there can prevent them. Muggers, like most predators, prefer victims who don’t fight back. Big city progressives find guns indefinably ‘icky’. It’s not only foreigners who marvel at a country where guns, even ‘big scary black ones’, are available everywhere. The propaganda of Michael Moore’s “Bowling in Columbine” and countless network news shows is that people who live surrounded by guns have created the conditions for mass shootings. And they have it coming. But New Yorkers, like most big city dwellers, live surrounded by guns. These aren’t the guns that ride on trucks or sit in sporting goods store displays. They’re the guns flashed by a mugger under his heavy down winter coat, or shot by rival gang members exchanging fire in the 73rd precinct in Brooklyn which accounted for around 100 shootings in just one year alone. And there are the guns worn more openly by the army of police officers, security guards, bodyguards, and others, many of whom live on Staten Island, who are hired to keep New Yorkers safe. Two years ago, Bond, an app that some have called 'Uber for Bodyguards' debuted, allowing New Yorkers to order their own security personnel. New Yorkers, who disdain guns, instead tap an app for bodyguards to escort them from their train stop to their office. Most urbanites hate living in this kind of world, but they hate the alternative even more. Gun control isn’t policy, it’s culture. And while the media often goes on about “gun culture”, there’s little thought given to “gun control culture” for the same reason that fish rarely film documentaries on what it’s like to have gills and swim underwater. Gun control culture means paying men with guns between $50,000 to $85,000 a year in the hopes that they’ll show up in under 10 minutes and do something useful when you call 911. That strategy didn’t work very well in Uvalde. It doesn’t work all that well most of the time. Before Uvalde, in the recent Buffalo mass shooting, a 911 operator hung up on a store employee calling for help. The cops arrived in 5 minutes: in time to talk the shooter out of killing himself in front of the store so that taxpayers can pay for his trial and a 50-year prison term. And that’s what a fantastic response time looks like. But by then, 10 people were dead. Gun control culture pathologically hates guns, but also hates the men it hires to wield them. Urban lefties threw an anti-police tantrum that was so successful that their cities are frantically trying to hire more police officers to keep up with the resulting crime wave on their streets. Police defunding is deader than the thousands of additional murder victims in the Year of BLM. Gun control is a fantasy that somehow making guns as illegal in the rest of the country as they are in New York will put a stop to all the violence so that urban and suburban elites won’t have to choose between being victims or paying the armed men they disapprove of to protect them. Eliminating guns isn’t actually on the table. This is a choice between an empowered public of gun owners and an endless running battle between cops and thugs in a society where only criminals and governments have guns. A nationwide New York or Chicago. Most Americans don’t want to live in this kind of world. Neither does anyone else. That’s why the wealthy hipsters who poured into New York City after Giuliani cleaned it up are leaving. Those who can afford it, go to the suburbs or to wealthy enclaves in other parts of the city. While crime hasn’t entirely depopulated the city, it has put a stop to gentrification. A slow motion white flight is happening all over again even though its participants are too ashamed to admit it. The sharp division between gun culture and gun control culture is the border of an affected distancing from life’s realities. Gun controllers aren’t necessarily physical cowards, but they are moral cowards. The same sorts of people who think guns are ‘icky’ also don’t want to know where their meat comes from or to see the soldiers who come back from the wars. These are things that they pay other people to do because it preserves their illusions about the world and about themselves. America is becoming a nation split between those hard workers who take responsibility for dealing with life’s realities and the managerial elites who only issue meaningless orders. Faced with shootings, managerial elites apply rule-based abstractions to messy realities that they are incapable of grappling with. The Left is always good for easy solutions that take away agency from individuals and invest it in a central authority in order to solve the unsolvable problems of human nature. And the managerial elites are always suckers for the myth that getting everyone to follow the rules in line with some grand theory will solve everything. The people who, as the champion of managerial elites, once claimed, “cling bitterly” to their guns, understand that life is messy and that there’s no grand fix, only a series of choices. Gun ownership is an act of personal responsibility. By buying and owning a firearm, a man is saying that he also intends to take ownership of his personal safety and his choices. That doesn’t always end happily, but there’s far more moral self-awareness in that choice than there is in urban elites who hate guns paying the gun owners they despise to keep them safe. The one thing we absolutely own in this world are our choices. Gun control isn’t about stopping gun violence, but disavowing moral responsibility for preventing it, passing the buck to the cops, to society, and to some force outside our control. Gun control rallies are the virtue signaling of moral cowards seeking to blame someone else for horrors that they cannot cope with and that they do not intend to take any personal action to prevent. Disarmament, national or personal, is not a moral stance, but the abandonment of morality. Gun controllers have had a field day with the inaction of the Uvalde cops, but it never occurs to them that’s who they are, standing around, wringing their hands and waiting for someone to tell them what the plan is, so they don’t have to make any difficult choices in the face of a crisis. Gun control is the moral idiocy of the irresponsible blaming those who have taken responsibility.
Russia’s War on Ukraine at 100 Days Has No End in Sight, Threatening Global Costs
Putin sure has some staying power, because this cluster must be causing some inside assessments of his leadership and power. Somebody's gotta cross the Rubicon, breach the Kremlin, and get him out of there.
At the Wall Street Journal, "A war of attrition for Ukraine’s survival—and Putin’s vision of Russia—devours both countries’ resources while hurting the world economy":
After 100 days, Russia’s war on Ukraine is turning into a bloody slog with no end in sight, causing mounting devastation in Ukraine and prolonged costs world-wide. The biggest conflict between European states since World War II has undergone swings of fortune that offer a reminder of war’s unpredictability. The failure of Russia’s early blitzkrieg fueled Ukrainian confidence that is ebbing as Russia concentrates its firepower on a narrower, grinding advance. On Friday, Russian forces advanced behind heavy artillery barrages in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where they have slowly but steadily gained ground, sending tens of thousands of civilians fleeing westward. Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky marked 100 days of war with a somber but defiant video message. “The armed forces of Ukraine are here,” he said. “Most importantly, our people–the people of our nation– are here. We have been defending our country for 100 days already. Victory will be ours! Glory to Ukraine!” Many Western governments fear a destructive stalemate looms, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s defenders locked in a struggle that is viewed as existential by both. Around 6.9 million Ukrainians have left the country since the war began, according to the United Nations, with Poland alone receiving 3.7 million, although some are returning home. Millions more Ukrainians have been displaced internally by the Russian onslaught. The invasion has devastated cities in Ukraine’s east, including Mariupol, where at least 22,000 residents were killed during the weekslong Russian siege, according to local officials. Ukrainian and international investigators are gathering evidence of possible war crimes in areas where Russian troops killed and mistreated civilians. Kyiv has accused Moscow of forcibly deporting large numbers of Ukrainians to Russia, including many children. Mr. Zelensky said Thursday that Russia now controls 20% of his country’s territory. The problem for Kyiv—and for Western European governments proposing a cease-fire—is that Russia has seized much of the industrial heartlands of Ukraine’s east and vast tracts of its fertile agricultural land, while blocking Ukraine’s access to the sea, needed for exports. That threatens to leave Ukraine as a barely viable state surviving on Western giving. Ukraine needs roughly $5 billion every month to cover essential government services and keep its battered economy functioning, officials in Kyiv have said, in addition to humanitarian aid and armaments. Russia, meanwhile, faces a deep recession this year from Western sanctions and a long-term erosion of its economic potential. Absent an unexpected collapse by one side, a war of attrition looms that could steadily devour the resources of both countries. The stakes are too high for Ukraine or Russia to back down. The war also threatens two long-accepted pillars of global order: The principle that territory can’t be annexed by force, and that the seas are free to all nations’ ships. The war has made the world poorer. By driving up food and energy prices, it has complicated the troubled global recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The disruption of long-established energy and food supply relationships leaves much of the world facing a protracted and costly economic adaptation. “The time of cheap fossil-fuel energy is over,” German economy minister Robert Habeck said recently. Russia’s expansionism has brought the world’s advanced countries closer politically. But it has also exposed gaps in interests and outlooks between the West and the poorer global South, which has remained largely neutral, and where Russia’s narrative of anti-Western grievances—echoed by China—has many sympathizers. With no outright Ukrainian victory in sight, the Biden administration has begun to emphasize that its goal is to increase Kyiv’s leverage for potential negotiations with Moscow...
Still more.
Why Sheryl Sandberg Quit Facebook's Meta
She's sketchy.
Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. FB -3.68%▼ came as a surprise even to many people close to the tech giant. In reality, it was the culmination of a yearslong process in which one of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business that she was instrumental in building. More recently, there was a fresh irritation: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him. The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said. The couple has been engaged since 2020. As of May, that review was continuing, the people said. “None of this has anything to do with her personal decision to leave,” said Caroline Nolan, a Meta spokeswoman. She earlier said that the Kotick matter had been resolved. Earlier, on the Activision issue, a spokeswoman said at the time Ms. Sandberg had never made a threat in her communications with the Daily Mail, the U.K. tabloid. Mr. Kotick said it was his understanding that the Daily Mail didn’t run the story because it was untrue. The broad company review added to a difficult period for Ms. Sandberg, which included the personal challenges of blending two families as part of her coming marriage and dealing with multiple family members with Covid-19, according to people close to her. A long-planned sabbatical, as part of the company’s program to offer 30 days of paid leave every five years, was postponed multiple times this year, first when her fiancé came down with Covid and then, a few months later, when she and her children did. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Ms. Sandberg was notably absent among the confab of global business leaders. Instead, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox and head of global affairs Nick Clegg, who was elevated to president in February, were the top executives present. Ms. Sandberg, 52 years old, stayed in the U.S. to attend the bat mitzvah of her daughter, according to people familiar with the matter. She told people close to her that she was relieved not to have to go to Davos, an event that for years was a highlight of her annual calendar, the people said. Burned out Ms. Sandberg has been telling people that she feels burned out and that she has become a punching bag for the company’s problems, the people said. “She sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she’s sick of it,” said one person who worked alongside Ms. Sandberg for many years. Ms. Sandberg hasn’t been closely involved with the company’s high-stakes plan to execute Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to the development of virtual worlds in the so-called metaverse, the people said. That vision, which Mr. Zuckerberg has said will require billions of dollars in investment and take more than a decade to implement, is less dependent on advertising, which has long been Ms. Sandberg’s fief. She didn’t attend many of the leadership meetings related to the strategic shift, and people close to her said she felt the effort didn’t play to her strengths. Ms. Sandberg, who will remain on Meta’s board, informed Mr. Zuckerberg on Saturday of her intention to resign. While her relationship with some other board members, including Mr. Zuckerberg, had become strained at times, Ms. Sandberg’s decision to step down was voluntary, according to people familiar with her decision.... Ms. Sandberg, a former chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, was already a rising star when Facebook snatched her away from rival Google. Her mandate was to take a free social network, and build a business around it in large part by using the vast swaths of data it collects on its users—and allowing Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on the engineering side of the company. Advertisers loved it, with Ms. Sandberg as the primary liaison between the company and Madison Avenue. Her profile rose alongside that of the social-media company’s. After Facebook went public in 2012, Ms. Sandberg became an icon for women in business following the release of her 2013 book “Lean In.” She wrote about how ambitious women in the workplace are often misconstrued as aggressive. She encouraged women to “sit at the table,” speak up, vie for important assignments and not talk themselves out of certain positions or projects for fear of not being able to manage work and life commitments. A second book, “Option B,” chronicled her grief and recovery from the death of her husband, who died in 2015 while they were on vacation in Mexico. As her reputation grew, so too did whispers of her political aspirations. There were enough rumors in 2016 that she could leave Facebook for a cabinet role for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that Ms. Sandberg felt the need to shoot the rumors down. “I really am staying at Facebook. I’m very happy,” Ms. Sandberg said in October 2016 at a conference. But Ms. Sandberg’s standing within Facebook began to change after that election. The company was mired in allegations that it didn’t do enough to circumvent Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Controversy surrounding the election grew for the company in March 2018 when the Guardian and the New York Times reported that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed the data of 50 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target voters on Facebook to get them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to the reports. The number of affected users was later revised to 87 million. Cambridge fallout After the fallout of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg that he blamed her and her teams for the scandal, the Journal previously reported. Ms. Sandberg confided in friends that the exchange with Mr. Zuckerberg had rattled her and she wondered if she should be worried about her job. The two scandals resulted in Ms. Sandberg being called by Washington to testify on foreign influence on American social networks. Ms. Sandberg was further embattled by a 2018 New York Times report alleging that she had overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, including hiring a Washington-based opposition research firm. In the wake of those events, Ms. Sandberg became a less visible presence around Washington and ceded many policy issues to other executives, said former employees who worked with her. At times, Ms. Sandberg expressed frustration that she was being blamed for issues that arose in parts of the business she didn’t control, the former employees said. Her overall influence also waned, in part because Mr. Zuckerberg in recent years asserted tighter control over all aspects of the company’s operations. Last year, when the Journal published a series of investigative articles called The Facebook Files based on thousands of internal documents, Ms. Sandberg stayed largely silent. She is a strong advocate for women, and her muted public response was noted inside and outside the company in part because one of the revelations was that the company researchers had repeatedly found that Instagram was harmful to a sizable percentage of its young users, most notably teenage girls. Data from the internal documents also showed that Ms. Sandberg’s share of employees had shrunk in recent years. At the start of 2014, 43% of the company’s staff reported to her, but that amount fell to 31% by 2021. Ms. Sandberg also has been anxious about how coming film and television projects on Facebook will depict her tenure as one of the top women in tech. “There’s no scenario in which a successful businesswoman is not portrayed as a raging bitch,” she told one adviser. In recent years, there was persistent speculation about her leaving, though some speculated that the controversies surrounding Facebook left Ms. Sandberg with fewer opportunities...
Actually, no. Since the news broke she's leaving the company she's been approached with an offer of a board seat and a CEO position.
Such privilege. *Eye-roll.*
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation
At Amazon, Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement.
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
The Western Citizen is Dying? (VIDEO)
At the Friedman Center in Israel, Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, with Caroline Glick:
The First Wave Hits Omaha Beach
On Twitter:
Some units in the first wave that hit Omaha Beach on D-Day suffered a casualty rate north of 90%. We asked young men with their whole lives ahead of them to pay the ultimate price.
— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) May 30, 2022
Next time you want to complain about how tough you have it, read a history book. #MemorialDay pic.twitter.com/2O5oNPNtZo
A Jury Has Awarded Johnny Depp $15 Million in Defamation Lawsuit Against Amber Heard (VIDEO)
I watched about an hour of Depp's testimony a couple of weeks ago, and he looked pained, an abused and harried man with a dangerous, unstable wife.
There's been a lot of piling on, especially on Ms. Amber, who was probably abused herself. It's a matter degrees. She actually won her case two, but was award $2 million to Depp's $15 million.
I find it actually sad, a horrible statement not just on the couple, but on society.
At WSJ, "Jury Rules in Favor of Johnny Depp in Defamation Lawsuit Against Amber Heard":
Jury awards Mr. Depp $15 million in damages; Ms. Heard receives $2 million in damages. A Virginia jury ruled in favor of actor Johnny Depp in his case against Amber Heard, closing a widely watched and emotional trial centered on defamation and abuse accusations between the former couple. The seven-member jury found Mr. Depp proved all three counts of defamation against his former spouse in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2018, awarding him $15 million. The jury also found Ms. Heard was able to prove one of three counts of defamation against Mr. Depp, based on statements made by one of his attorneys. The jury awarded her $2 million in compensatory damages. The trial, which started in April, drew massive attention on social media, where viewers attempted to analyze details of the proceedings. Fans of Mr. Depp gathered outside of the court Wednesday cheered in response to each of the verdicts coming down, according to a live stream of the scene. The case began in 2019 when Mr. Depp filed a $50 million defamation suit against Ms. Heard over the 2018 op-ed she wrote. In the piece, Ms. Heard referred to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” Mr. Depp alleged that, while Ms. Heard’s op-ed didn’t specifically mention him by name, the actress falsely implied he was a domestic abuser and wrote the piece “with actual malice.” He claimed the accusations of abuse damaged his reputation and career. The lawsuit also alleges Ms. Heard abused Mr. Depp. Ms. Heard has denied his abuse accusations and accused Mr. Depp of defamation for claiming she fabricated injuries related to alleged abuse. Ms. Heard countersued Mr. Depp for $100 million for defamation in August 2020. She has said the op-ed is accurate and that the actor emotionally and physically abused her throughout their relationship and marriage, often when he was drunk or high. The counterclaim also accused Mr. Depp of orchestrating efforts to destroy her career. Mr. Depp has denied accusations of abuse, her claims that he made defamatory statements and sought to “destroy her career.” Mr. Depp didn’t appear in court for the verdict due to “previously scheduled work commitments made before the trial” and would watch from the U.K., a person familiar with the matter said before the verdict was read. Videos posted on social media over the weekend showed the actor performing alongside singer Jeff Beck at a concert in England. Ms. Heard sat between her lawyers in the courtroom as the verdict was read Wednesday. Judge Penney Azcarate ordered the names of the jurors to be sealed for one year after the trial, according to court documents. Mr. Depp previously lost a libel case in the U.K. in 2020 against a British tabloid that referred to him as a “wife beater” over his alleged treatment of Ms. Heard...
Democrats' Gun Control Agenda Not About Protecting Children
Here's the expert, Dana Loesch, "It's Not About Protecting Kids, It's About Banning Guns: Their response is to render you incapable of protecting them, took":
The Biden administration contradicted two separate commissions comprised of educators and security experts and reiterated that they have no intention of improving school security to protect students... The Uvalde killer accessed the school through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School. There was no outside force multiplier against unlawful entry, no known security system, and no SRO on campus. The commissions recommended numerous security measures, including controlled ingress/egress, locking doors, SROs, and more. Democrats oppose improving security and instead stated that they were also focusing on basic 9mm handguns while again falsely proclaiming that people were disallowed cannon ownership during the Revolution. He made this remark to the press pool yesterday. Last week Senator Chuck Schumer tanked a school safety proposal instead choosing to advance only gun control measures. Authorities admitted during Friday’s presser with Texas DPS that they were hesitant to enter the school for fear they’d be shot. Meanwhile, more details about the Uvalde killer’s violent behavior are spilling into public. The killer tortured animals. He was known to cops, he drove around randomly shooting people with a bb gun and tried to fight random people in the park. He threatened online women with rape and murder. He stopped coming for work and dropped out of school. Through his job at Wendy’s he was able to save $4k for two rifles and ammunition (should we also boycott Wendy’s?). No one in his family seemed engaged enough to see the obvious troubling signs. No one said anything, just like in Buffalo. Just like in Parkland. TWO REASONS WHY AGE RESTRICTIONS AND UBCs FAIL The Uvalde killer had murderous intent. As his violent behavior escalated, are we really to believe that a proposal like an age increase would have removed his murderous intent? The killer in Las Vegas’s 2017 tragedy was 64 years-old. The Virginia Tech killer was 23 years old. Where is the guarantee that the Uvalde killer would simply wait — instead of going to the black market where the majority of criminals get their guns?Our respondents (adult offenders living in Chicago or nearby) obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft. *Only about 60% of guns in the possession of respondents were obtained by purchase or trade. Other common arrangements include sharing guns and holding guns for others. Gangs continue to play some role in Chicago in organizing gun buys and in distributing guns to members as needed.More: Washington Post: Four out of five criminals obtain their guns illegally More: Chicago Tribune: Survey: Crooks get guns from pals, don’t keep them long 70 percent said they got their guns from family, fellow gang members or through other social connections. Only two said they bought a gun at a store. A study from the DOJ — Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016:About 1.3% of prisoners obtained a gun from a retail source and used it during their offense. Handguns were the most common type of firearm possessed by state and federal prisoners (18% each); 11% of all prisoners used a handgun. Among prisoners who possessed a gun during their offense, 90% did not obtain it from a retail source.More from DOJ: Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms — the vast majority of felons obtain their weapons on the black market. “ASSAULT WEAPONS” BANS Are we to believe that a ban on a commonly-owned rifle responsible for the fewest number of homicides (even when compared to hands feet and fists?) would work? ... Yet still Democrats propose another “Assault Weapons” ban when the first one didn’t work. RAND:We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.Propublica: “The senator says ‘the evidence is clear: the ban worked.’ Except there's no evidence it saved lives – and the researcher behind the key statistic Feinstein cites says it's an outdated figure that was based on a false assumption.” LA Times: No, the assault weapons ban didn’t work: Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994 The New York Times: “The Assault Weapon Myth” School shootings are, thankfully, rare tragedies. Defensive gun use — when guns are used to protect and save lives — outnumbers criminal usage even by the most conservative estimates. GUN-FREE ZONES Schools have been gun-free zones since the 1990 passage of the Gun Free School Zones Act. The video of parents howling after they were blocked from going and saving their children is gutting. I read one mom broke free and hopped the fence to get into the school, totally unarmed, with nothing but her fierce nature as a mother to protect. The people allowed to have the guns stood outside. If the government is going to demand a gun free zone anywhere they need to guarantee the safety of the people being disarmed — if at a school they should protect those kids with the same ferocity as that desperate mother and have the ability to do it — especially considering police have no legal obligation to protect your life...
Megan Parry's Wednesday Weather
The weather's been nice in the O.C., warming up in the early afternoon but cool and cloudy in the evenings.
Here's the lovely Ms. Megan, for ABC News 10 San Diego:
More Cracks in the Western Front
Following-up, "Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine."
Bojan Pancevski: Hi there. Luke Vargas: Okay, so tell us about this split that is beginning to emerge now within NATO and how significant a split it is? Bojan Pancevski: Well, three months after the start of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, cracks are beginning to appear in the Western front against Russia and in the NATO support of Ukraine. Essentially, there are two blocks, two school of thoughts, if you will. On one hand, you have the United States, the UK, and a group of Central and Northern European nations, such as Poland and the Baltic countries who believe that Ukraine can and should win the war. They believe all stops should be pulled in order to provide military assistance to Kiev in order to be able to win. On the other hand, you have a group of Western European nations, which are led by Paris and Berlin, who are not actually outright saying that Ukraine must win the war. They're saying Russia should not be allowed to win, and they're supporting Ukraine financially and militarily, but there have not been sending the kind of quantity and quality of military supply that we've seen coming from this other block. So to put things into a context, if you see Germany is the biggest economy of Europe, it has a population of well over 83 million people, and it has so far sent, according to government estimates, military aid worth of something around 200 million Euros. Whereas Estonia, a tiny little country in the north of Europe that actually borders Russia and it has a population of just over one million, has sent military aid worth well over 220 million Euros, including heavy artillery. That discrepancy just shows that there's different level of commitment. Equally so, that this is true for France. France has only sent, I think, 12 pieces of military equipment, whereas Poland, for example, which is a much poorer country, economically speaking, has sent 240 tanks to Ukraine. Luke Vargas: And, Bojan, what has brought about this divergence in approach? Bojan Pancevski: Well, I think when the war started, pretty much everyone was taken aback. There was ample Western, and especially, U.S. and British intelligence about what was going to happen. When it finally happened, governments were taken aback. It was a watershed moment. So I don't think they had preconceived policy for this war of attrition, which we are now seeing. I don't think they had a pre-fabricated policy for this, and I think the policy is kind of crystallizing as we speak. I think policy makers in Berlin and in Paris and elsewhere that I've spoken to seem to think that we are in for the long haul. It's a very challenging situation. There is a looming recession all across Europe. Energy prices are soaring. They're fueling the already existing inflation, and they have huge concerns about the political backlash of that. I think they would like to see the crisis resolve sooner rather than later. The war is comparatively distant from them physically. If you sit in Paris or Berlin, you're not seeing millions and millions of Ukrainian refugees like Poland is seeing. I think every seventh person in Poland now is Ukrainian. Also, historically speaking, Poland and (inaudible) countries and the Czech Republic have been the dominion of the Soviet Union. And they have, historically speaking, a much more tense relationship to Russia. They're not thinking about trade when they think about Moscow. They don't think about gas and oil, they're mainly thinking about a potential aggressor. They see the invasion of Ukraine as a prelude to a possible wider front against the European Union, against NATO, against themselves. I think that is the fundamental difference. There's a difference in perception for someone sitting in Berlin or Paris, this is not an existential threat. For someone sitting in Warsaw or Tallinn in Estonia, this is a war against Europe itself. Luke Vargas: How is this French and German stance being received within Ukraine, and within NATO, can the Alliance actually reconcile this split that seems to be emerging within its ranks? Bojan Pancevski: Well, I think Kiev has been on the record without perhaps singling out Germany or France has been quite critical of these type of efforts. I think the noises here from Kiev and from Kiev's diplomats across Europe and the Western world, is that what they need is weapons. They need more and more and more weapons. Now, how will that play out in the coming months? It's very difficult to tell. Of course, it must be said that the reluctance of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, perhaps, or the Netherlands or any other Western European country to send their own weapons to Ukraine doesn't obviously stop the United States or Great Britain or Poland, for that matter, from doing so. The bulk of the Western support has been coming from those countries, and I think it continues to flow into Ukraine. With the caveat that Eastern European nations such as Poland will surely soon reach the limit of what they can actually send to Ukraine without jeopardizing their own security. And, basically, the only country that pretty much has a limitless capacity to support Ukraine at this stage is the United States, and possibly to an extent, Great Britain...
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Kali Fontanilla: 'The Schools Have Changed' (VIDEO)
A lovely and very patriotic lady. We need more like her.
At Prager University:
Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine
Yeah, I'll bet.
Problem is Ukraine won't make it without Western help, so if "the West" wants to preserve Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, it'll be the United States that makes it happen.
Congress just approved $40 billion, against the wishes of just about everyone on Twitter, if that matters. I can't disagree with them. We have so many needs at home, and here we are sending tens of billions of dollars across the pond. For what? How U.S. national security is tied to Western Europe's is not very well defined these days, and I can't for the life of me see how the country will support more "endless wars" via the national checkbook when we just bailed out of Afghanistan most disgracefully and at great risk not only to those we left behind --- Americans and our Afghani allies --- but to international security on the whole.
Biden's doing extremely poorly, not just in the polls, but among people in his own party and administration. And to think, we've still got to bear two and a half more years of him. *Grunts.*
At the Wall Street Journal, "Allies are increasingly divided on further heavy-weapons shipments to Kyiv":
Cracks are appearing in the Western front against Moscow, with America’s European allies increasingly split over whether to keep shipping more powerful weapons to Ukraine, which some of them fear could prolong the conflict and increase its economic fallout. At the center of the disagreement—which is splitting a group of Western European powers from the U.S., U.K. and a group of mostly central and northern European nations—are diverging perceptions of the long-term threat posed by Russia and whether Ukraine can actually prevail on the battlefield. The first bloc, led by France and Germany, is growing reluctant to provide Ukraine the kinds of offensive, long-range weapons it would need to reclaim ground lost to Russia’s armies in the country’s south and east. They doubt Russia would directly threaten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On the other side, Washington, London and a group of mainly central and northern European nations, some of them former Soviet bloc members, see the Russian offensive as a harbinger of further expansion by Moscow, making Ukraine the front line in a broader war pitching Russia against the West. The differences between the two groups—which European officials said have been building in recent weeks, as Ukraine lost ground in its Donbas area—are getting aired more loudly in public this week, as the European Union’s heads of government hold a summit on Ukraine. Collectively, European governments have been able to agree on measures to isolate Russia’s economy that once would have been unthinkable, including an embargo on most of the crude oil Russia sells to Europe. But opinion is sharply divided on the stakes of the war and Ukraine’s chances. Public statements by the leaders of France and Germany and comments by those countries’ officials suggest they are skeptical Kyiv can expel the invaders and they have called for a negotiated cease-fire, triggering complaints from Ukraine that it is being pushed to make territorial concessions. Leaders in the Baltic States, Poland and elsewhere argue instead that supplying Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated heavy weapons is critical to not just hold the line, but reverse Russian advances and deal Moscow the kind of blow that would deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from any further military action in the future. “This is an unprecedented attack on Ukraine,” said Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks. “Our understanding, which is based on a long history of interactions with Russia, is that we cannot rely on Russian mercy and we see the Russian attack on Ukraine as simply the prelude for further Russian imperial expansionism.” Some Western European nations are losing appetite for sustaining a war they think is unwinnable and has reached a bloody stalemate that is draining European resources and exacerbating a looming recession. By contrast, Poland and the Baltic countries, who once lived under the Kremlin’s boot, see themselves as next in line for Russian imperialist expansion. The flow of millions of Ukrainian refugees into those countries has brought the war much closer to citizens’ ordinary lives, while for Germany, Austria and Italy, the conflict is primarily felt through higher energy costs. “Every phone call, ministers from the north of Europe and central Europe are getting more and more angry,” said a senior Czech official. “This is destroying the unity. It’s precisely what Putin wants and what the French and Germans are giving him.” Unlike the leaders of Britain, Poland, the Baltic nations and several central European countries, French and German leaders have yet to visit Kyiv. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly warned that the conflict could lead to a third World War and nuclear annihilation. The goal of Western engagement, Mr. Scholz has said, was to keep Russia from winning. Germany hasn’t sent tanks to Ukraine and agreed to ship seven pieces of heavy artillery. So far, Europe’s largest economy, with a population exceeding 83 million, has sent military aid worth about €200 million, according to government estimates—less than Estonia, with a population of just over one million. France has sent 12 howitzer-type cannons to Kyiv and no tanks or aerial defenses. Poland has delivered more than 240 Soviet-designed T72 tanks to Ukraine, alongside drones, rocket launchers, dozens of infantry fighting vehicles and truckloads of ammunition. The Czech Republic has shipped helicopter gunships, tanks, and parts needed to keep Ukraine’s air force flying. Ordinary citizens in Lithuania and the Czech Republic have donated tens of millions of euros to crowdsourcing campaigns to buy Turkish drones and Soviet-era weapons for Ukraine. “We’re sending whatever we can, whatever we have, and whenever we’re able to,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky twice and speaks to him most days. “Why? Because we believe that this is a war on civilization. This is about a war for the defense of Europe.” Germany also has yet to replace the Polish and Czech tanks that had been sent to Ukraine with German-made hardware, as it agreed to do as part of a swap. A spokesman for the German government said this was due to lengthy procedures including maintenance, while some Defense Ministry officials decried a lack of political will to act with greater expedience. “It is very disappointing that neither the federal government nor the Chancellor personally have the courage to speak about a victory for Ukraine and act accordingly in supporting Ukraine with modern, heavy weapons,” said Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin...
Bill Maher: 'We Will All Be Gay in 2054' (VIDEO)
Bill Maher at his finest.
Donna Brazile, one of Friday's guests, was not pleased. Nor was Glaad, for that matter.
WATCH:
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