One answer to the question of whether the Ukraine war is a quagmire

The New Neo Posted on by

Stephen Green writes:

The Russo-Ukraine War might very well end up a quagmire, but neither Russia nor Ukraine is there yet…

The Russo-Ukraine War just turned one year old. That is not by any measure even a long war…

Absent a swift Russian victory — which by April of last year was no longer in the cards — there was never going to be a rapid conclusion to this war. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin imagines there are existential stakes involved. He believes, in true paranoiac Russian fashion, that the West is out to destroy Russia. For him, this war isn’t merely about subjugating Ukraine, although that is certainly part of his maximalist goals. Just as importantly, however, Putin desires to destroy the postwar system that the US helped implement after 1945 to maintain the global peace…

If Putin imagines existential stakes, for Ukraine the stakes are existential. After the horrors of the Holodomor and other, lesser attempts at erasing Ukrainian national identity, Ukrainians understand precisely what Russian domination means…

There are two endgames for the Russo-Ukraine War.

In the first, the West grows bored and impatient and denies Ukraine the weapons it needs to continue the fight. In that case, Ukraine is once again an oppressed subject of the Russian Empire, and Czar Vlad goes to work using his enhanced position to split NATO.

In the second, Ukraine maintains its territorial integrity — although perhaps only to its post-2014 extent rather than 1991 — and Russian losses are punishing enough to keep the bear caged for another 20 years. In that case, we’ll have bought, on the cheap, a generational handicapping of our number two geopolitical rival.

There is a third possibility but it’s no endgame. The West provides just enough assistance to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not enough to force Russia to agree to a peace.

Now that would be a quagmire.

I think the problem is that option three is the most likely. Almost from the start – once it became clear that Russia was not getting the quick victory it wanted and expected – option three seemed the most likely. That’s where the “quagmire” talk comes from.

Tunning red states blue

The New Neo Posted on by

This is how it’s going in Kansas:

The left believes that mass voter registration campaigns increase election turnout and that high turnout leads to Democratic victories. The trick is getting millions of disengaged eligible voters on the voter rolls in key states, a feat requiring an army of activists and an ocean of money. The left has both. The top 24 leftist voter registration nonprofits spent an estimated $434 million in 2020 alone, much of which came from foundations of “progressive” mega donors sharing the last name “foundation.”

Between July and August 2021, the Kansas Health Foundation pumped $2.9 million into its voter engagement campaign. Recipients were required to report on which “populations” with “health disparities” they planned to engage and how they would incorporate “advocacy and/or grassroots organizing to affect [sic] change on health equity.”…

At the top of the list is the Kansas Appleseed Center, which uses nutrition and public health as cover to push voter turnout campaigns and election “reforms.” The group demands expanded use of absentee ballots and drop boxes to collect them, and it rails against allegations of election fraud.

The left has money, the left has dedicated workers, and the left is patient. This particular strategy is brilliant and completely legal. A state such as Kansas is large geographically, but its population is relatively small. In 2020, for example, the total presidential vote there was 1,341,729.

Will this sort of effort succeed in a red state like Kansas? I don’t know. But I do know that the right had better have some sort of plan to counter it and/or to match it.

Biden and asylum

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s going on with Biden’s latest announcement on the border and asylum? As this CNN article points out, it does appear to “mirror Trump.” That’s certainly rare in the annals of Biden’s executive orders, so what gives?:

The Biden administration released a new rule Tuesday that largely bars migrants who traveled through other countries on their way to the US-Mexico border from applying for asylum in the United States, marking a departure from decadeslong protocol.

The new 153-page proposed regulation, which could affect tens of thousands of people, is the most restrictive of a patchwork of policies put in place by the Biden administration to try and manage the US-Mexico border and is reminiscent of a Trump-era policy.

The proposed rule would presume asylum ineligibility and “encourage migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in countries through which they travel, thereby reducing reliance on human smuggling networks that exploit migrants for financial gain,” according to the text of the regulation.

Your guess is as good as mine about this, maybe better. Remember the outraged hue and cry when Trump instituted what seemed to be something similar?

So here are some hypotheses on Biden:

(1) It won’t be enforced and it won’t change anything. It’s just a way to take some talking points away from the right prior to the next election.

(2) It will be enforced – at least temporarily – and is just a way to take some talking points away from the right prior to the next election.

(3) Biden woke up from a deep deep sleep and believes he’s the Biden of forty years ago.

(4) The Biden administration and the Democrats have become aware that Hispanics are not quite as firmly in the Democratic pocket as previously thought, so maybe it’s time to have a mild and temporary slowdown of illegal immigration from that area.

(5) It’s a temporary response to the expiration of Title 42:

Administration officials on Tuesday rejected the comparison to the Trump administration, saying that it’s not a categorical ban on asylum and emphasizing efforts to expand access to legal pathways to the US, including a recently launched parole program for certain nationalities.

The proposed rule will be posted in the Federal Register for a 30-day public comment period and likely take effect in May, when a pandemic-era border restriction, known as Title 42, is set to expire. The rule is also expected to last for two years.

Israel’s left and its war against Netanyahu

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not quite the same as our left’s war against Trump, but it has harmonic vibrations.

The left in Israel has a more powerful court system to do its bidding. In the following excerpt from an article by Caroline Glick, “MQG” stands for the “Movement for Quality Government.” Love those Orwellian titles:

…[L]ate last month MQG submitted a new petition asking the justices to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As in the case of Deri, MQG’s petition is based on a political rather than a legal argument. MQG argues that as a criminal defendant, Netanyahu is unfit to serve. The premier, MQG insists, is acting with a conflict of interest by overseeing judicial reforms while on trial. And as a result, the justices should declare him unfit and remove him from office.

Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government’s proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court.

MQG saw with the Deri ruling that the justices feel no inclination to respect either the law or the will of the voters when their personal interests are at stake. And indeed, last week, Justice Daphne Barak-Erez gave the attorney general and the government a month to explain why the court shouldn’t overturn the votes of 2.4 million Israelis who voted for Likud and its coalition partners to return Netanyahu to the Prime Minister’s Office.

In a withering response to Bark-Erez’s order, Justice Minister Yariv Levin described MQG as “a gang of lawyers who do not respect the outcome of the election, working to carry out a coup and remove the prime minister from office.”

Levin continued, “It’s not surprising that the partners in this effort are the same ones leading the opposition to judicial reform: the leftist group which refers to itself as the Movement for Quality Government, the attorney general and the Supreme Court. This effort to oust the prime minister in contravention of the law, while trampling on the democratic election, is no different from a coup that is carried out with tanks.”

Ah, but it’s not a coup or an insurrection when the left does it. When the left does it, it’s a fortification.

Glick adds that the Israeli media is fully complicit in this endeavor. Sound familiar? Also, on the education front, the Israeli left has spearheaded a post-Zionist curriculum in the public schools:

…“[D]emocracy” curricula like those promoted by MQG are disguised efforts to subvert Israeli democracy. In the case of its school programs, the subversion comes in the form of post-Zionist indoctrination.

While claiming to oppose religious coercion, the actual goal of the “democracy curricula” is twofold. First, it seeks to bar Jewish Israeli schoolchildren in nonreligious public schools from learning about the Bible, Jewish history, religious traditions and holidays. Second, it strives to replace Judaism with post-Zionist curricula. To the extent Judaism is taught, it is taught from a critical perspective.

Similar to Critical Race Theory curricula in the United States, which indoctrinates American schoolchildren to believe their country was born in the sin of racism and has no moral claim to justice, groups like MQG advance “democracy” as a means of gutting Israel’s Jewish character and indoctrinating Israeli children to believe that there is something inherently wrong with Jewish nationalism and national self-determination. The “democracy” programs in the schools indoctrinate children to believe that the only moral way for Israel to organize itself is as a post-Jewish “state for all its citizens.”

The Glick article goes on to describe the Biden administration’s support for the MQG’s efforts against Netanyahu. No surprise there.

The January 6th footage…

The New Neo Posted on by

…should be interesting, at the very least. The authorities have certainly been secretive about the video evidence for two full years, releasing only what they think will advance the all-important insurrection narrative.

Tucker Carlson has said that some of the footage already reviewed “contradicts the narrative” we’ve been presented so far. I look forward to hearing more and deciding for myself.

One of the many many outrages connected with the political use made of January 6th are the lies that were told – for example, saying that demonstrators killed Officer Sicknick. Those lies have already served their propaganda purpose, and many people still don’t know they were lies. Most of those people, of course, will dismiss whatever Carlson may say and whatever the new footage may reveal, unless it is a perpetuation of the insurrection narrative.

Julie Kelly writes:

Releasing the video never should have been a political fight; after all, the footage was recorded on a taxpayer-paid closed circuit television system installed on public property to monitor public employees. Contrary to arguments by Capitol Police and the Justice Department, the video belongs to the public, not federal agencies.

But both entities, with the help of D.C. District Court judges, have successfully kept the trove largely under wraps for more than two years…

In a sworn statement filed in March 2021, Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for the Capitol Police, insisted the footage constituted “security information” that required very limited access. “Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again,” DiBiase warned.

The Justice Department subsequently designated the tapes as “highly sensitive” government material subject to protective orders in January 6 prosecutions. It’s been a major battle for defendants and their attorneys to properly access all of the video tied to their cases; defendants cannot watch any clips without the presence of a legal authority and none of the footage can be shared or downloaded.

Of course, there have been some exceptions. Capitol Police shared cherry-picked clips with h the House Democrats on the second impeachment committee as well as the January 6 select committee. For example, the brief clip of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running through a hallway that afternoon presumably after the breach was produced from surveillance video. HBO also accessed surveillance footage for its slanted documentary on January 6. “Security” concerns, my foot.

I wonder whether there will be a court battle to stop Carlson from reporting on the footage. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were.

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The New Neo Posted on by

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Heather Mac Donald on the death of Tyre Nichols, racism, and the police

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an important article, and I suggest you read it in its entirety. Heather Mac Donald has been writing about race and police work for many years, and she’s among the best at the topic. Her article makes for very depressing reading.

Excerpts:

Did these cops possess the tactical skill and psychological disposition to conduct any high-risk car stop according to professional standards? Given what is shown in the videos, the answer, even more self-evidently, is no.

The officers ignored protocol for car stops, whereby a driver is told to stay in his car and show his hands; instead, for no apparent reason, they dragged Nichols out of the car and manhandled him to the ground. They failed to tell him the reason for the stop. They failed to follow a chain of command, whereby the officer who initiated the stop usually takes the tactical lead; instead, they operated without coordination and at cross purposes. They issued contradictory commands that could not be simultaneously obeyed. They escalated their use of force without provocation. They increased everyone’s stress by screaming profanities at a cowering Nichols; it is Nichols, not the officers, who poignantly tries to deescalate the situation by pointing out his compliance. Having unjustifiably resorted to a taser and pepper spray, the cops botched their deployment of those devices. They were unable to handcuff Nichols, despite his low level of resistance and the officers’ superior numbers.

And so forth.

Why? What was wrong? Here’s Mac Donald’s assessment:

The Nichols beating is not the product of racism; it is the tragic culmination of the very narrative being offered to explain that beating. The idea that policing is racist, both in its treatment of black suspects and in its hiring of black officers, has led to manpower loss, a lowering of standards, and a drop in proactive enforcement. The resulting increase in crime then puts more downward pressure on hiring standards in order to try to replenish the depleted ranks. Unable to compensate for officer attrition, police departments are left without enough well-trained sergeants and lieutenants to supervise officers who maybe should never have been hired in the first place.

That’s the summary, but Mac Donald goes into some detail on just how it played out in Memphis and Philadelphia. Standards were lowered so much that a significant number of officers who had prior arrests (their own, that is) were hired. That seems to be the only way, in the current anti-police climate, to get the number of police officers up.

More:

In 2018, the MPD eliminated the requirement of a college degree. The department regularly requested permission from the police licensing board to hire rookies with felony and misdemeanor convictions. A former lieutenant in charge of recruiting complained to the Associated Press that the department let “just pretty much anybody” become a police officer. The most brutal officer in the Nichols beating, Emmitt Martin III, joined the force in 2018. He had at least one arrest on his record, whose details have been redacted. The criminal history of another officer in the beating, Demetrius Haley, was also redacted from state records. Haley joined the force in January 2021.

Meantime, Memphis crime soared.

This is exactly what might be expected. And there’s no end in sight. Everyone suffers, but black communities probably suffer the most. The people who implemented and promoted the anti-police movement could not care less.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Minitrue comes for Willy Wonka. This ex-post-facto woke bowdlerization is a travesty. If you want to write a bland book for children, write your own and leave someone else’s alone.

(2) Biden goes to Ukraine. Why? After all, it’s not as though anyone doubts he’s supporting Zelensky. It’s a photo-op, of course, and a distraction from other issues. I suppose it’s also meant to show Biden as strong and vigorous. I don’t think it moves any needles for anyone.

(3) This piece about the current grocery store checkout experience is spot on. It’s not quite as bad as that where I live, but it’s bad enough. I refuse to use those self-checkout lanes. If that’s all there is – as sometimes happens late at night – I get someone to do it for me. The gray hair helps.

(4) Republicans in the House give Tucker Carlson the January 6th videos. Good. The left had its chance, now it’s the right’s turn.

(5) Biden puts Susan Rice in charge of implementing “equity” outcomes throughout the federal government:

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are now the policy of the federal government.

Even if you buy that diversity, for diversity’s sake, is a good policy (you’ll love living in Yugoslavia — wait, it doesn’t exist anymore — or Rwanda) and that inclusivity as an end makes sense, the notion of equity, which is that unequal outcomes are caused by systemic racism, should strike you as bizarre. Life isn’t equal…The bald-faced assertion that a lack of equal outcomes is due to “communities” (whatever the hell that means anymore) being “underserved” by the government is balderdash. “Communities” have different outcomes because they are different. The intellectual bankruptcy of the DIE stupidity lies in the fact that it sees 100% of all problems as racial.

I partly disagree. It’s not actual stupidity. It’s the triumph of ideology over reality. They no longer even pretend that meritocracy is a goal. If it conflicts with equality of outcome, merit must go out the window as another white supremacist plot.