The New York Times has released a major report on Hunter Biden detailing the authenticity of his now-infamous laptop and confirming details about the ongoing criminal investigation into Joe Biden’s son.
As for the question “why now?”, I think the answer might be found in that phrase “ongoing criminal investigation into Joe Biden’s son.” That investigation certainly doesn’t seem to have been fast-tracked, does it? But my guess is that the Times is now trying to get ahead of the story.
Back in October of 2020 the MSM and social media outlets insisted that the Hunter laptop was bogus and not worth any attention. All of those who relied on that and shrugged it off – and their numbers are legion – or never even heard about it at the time because the blackout was so pervasive, should be outraged now. Absolutely outraged and questioning so much of what they hold dear in the political sense.
I predict that will not happen, except for a few isolated people.
Here’s what the NY Post has to say about it today, in an editorial with the bitter title “Now that Joe Biden’s president, the Times finally admits: Hunter’s laptop is real” [emphasis mine]:
In the heat of the presidential race of 2020, the Times never missed a chance to cast doubt on the laptop, saying the information was “purported” and quoting a letter from former Democratic officials who claimed — with no evidence — that it was Russian disinformation.
Why was it unsubstantiated? Because of willful ignorance and the Times’ curious lack of curiosity…
Now we’re 16 months away from the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s safely in the White House, and the Times finally decides to report on the news rather than carry the Biden campaign’s water. And they find that hey, Hunter Biden’s business interests benefited from Joe Biden’s political status to a suspicious degree. Perhaps this is a topic worthy of examination.
How did the Times “authenticate” the laptop? It doesn’t say. Unlike The Post’s reporting, which detailed exactly how we got the files and where they came from, the Times does a hand wave to anonymous sources. No facts have changed since fall 2020. They knew the laptop was real from the start. They just didn’t want to say so.
You may recall that the NY Post was the paper that took the revelations seriously and published stories about the laptop. For its pains it was banned for a while from Twitter, and its reporting was discounted and squelched. The Post gets the last laugh, but I’m afraid it’s a hollow one, because Biden came to power anyway – and the rest, as they say, is history.
I’m happy to say that I’m now able to identify which Bach piece I learned after that Chopin waltz, as described in this previous post.
Actually, it was two Bach pieces, two minuets. Easy ones but very lovely. If your piano skills are rudimentary and your sight-reading is poor – like mine – you should still be able to learn these.
First we have the Minuet in G minor:
And next the Minuet in D Minor, which was my favorite:
In a desperate attempt to save the nuclear deal, President Joe Biden appears to have surrendered to last-minute Russian demands, allowing Moscow to trade with Iran despite sanctions imposed in wake of Ukraine invasion.
“We received written guarantees. They are included in the text of the agreement itself on the resumption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters at a press briefing on Tuesday.
It wouldn’t surprise me, but I hope it’s not true. Actually, nothing this administration does would surprise me – except perhaps if it does something that isn’t destructive.
‘The first lady’s husband contacted COVID,’ President Biden said during an Equal Pay Day celebration for Women’s history month.
Someone off to the side quickly corrected Biden, pointing out that his statement would mean he was the one with COVID.
It’s actually Kamala Harris’ husband who’s been diagnosed with COVID.
A troubling statement on Biden’s part, but it’s nothing new for Biden to refer to Kamala Harris in ways that sound as though she’s the president. I hate to report on this sort of lapse, because it evokes that feeling of dismay and even sympathy. Other countries must think it very odd and very dangerous that we tolerate a president in such obvious decline, and I can’t say I disagree.
I will add that this sort of thing is still episodic for Biden, and that he can sometimes sound quite coherent. But a president needs to be coherent more than now and then. Also, even a coherent Biden would be a disaster in terms of policy.
Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, I’ve noticed certain assertions made by some commenters here and around the blogosphere. They are often stated as though they are self-evident truths, unnecessary to document.
Most people in the US – and that includes me – have not previously obsessively followed the history of Ukraine or of NATO and Russia. So it’s easy to just accept as fact that which is repetitively and authoritatively stated as such. But are such things actually true?
I’m going to try to deal with just one of them today. There are others I hope to tackle at another time.
Russia keeps saying – and many US commenters keep repeating – that NATO promised not to expand eastward – but was there ever such a promise? Let’s look at this article from 2014:
The West’s supposed violation of a pledge not to enlarge NATO has long figured as a key element in Putin’s narrative about (and against) the Alliance. In his bombastic February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, he said:
“And we have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? … I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”
The Russian president returned to the subject in his March 18, 2014, Kremlin speech justifying Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea: “… they [Western leaders] have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.” Although it has been clear for several years that the Alliance has no appetite for putting Ukraine on a membership track, Putin went on to express horror at the prospect of NATO forces in Crimea: Russian inaction “would have meant that NATO’s navy would be right there in this city of Russia’s military glory [Sevastopol], and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia.”
[But] Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO, a point that several analysts have demonstrated. Mark Kramer explored the question in detail in a 2009 article in The Washington Quarterly. He drew on declassified American, German and Soviet records to make his case and noted that, in discussions on German reunification in the two-plus-four format (the two Germanys plus the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France), the Soviets never raised the question of NATO enlargement other than how it might apply in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR)…
We now have a very authoritative voice from Moscow confirming this understanding. Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”…
To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.
Make of that what you will. I know what I make of it is that there was no such promise.
What’s more [emphasis mine]:
Several years after German reunification, in 1997, NATO said that in the “current and foreseeable security environment” there would be no permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new NATO members. Up until the Russian military occupation of Crimea in March [2014], there was virtually no stationing of any NATO combat forces on the territory of new members. Since March, NATO has increased the presence of its military forces in the Baltic region and Central Europe.
So it appears that Russian soldiers in Crimea constituted the writing on the wall for NATO. It was Russian military action in Crimea that signaled a change in the previous “security environment,” and that in turn triggered changes in NATO.
The article ends like this. Remember, it was written in 2014 [emphasis mine]:
Putin is not stupid, and his aides surely have access to the former Soviet records from the time and understand the history of the commitments made by Western leaders and NATO. But the West’s alleged promise not to enlarge the Alliance will undoubtedly remain a standard element of his anti-NATO spin. That is because it fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated—not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West.
It also fits in very well with various narratives from the US left and sections of the US right on how the US double crosses everyone (which it sometimes does do, particularly during the Obama and Biden administrations). The line is picked up by many politicians, pundits, bloggers, and commenters all around the blogosphere and the media as well as social media.
It’s interesting that Putin’s claim of such a promise, and such a promise violated, is taken at face value by so many Americans. I’m certainly not one to automatically trust what the US says, but I’m even less likely to trust Putin and in this case I believe the facts run mostly against the tale Putin tells.
Both Ukraine and Russia are majority Russian Orthodox countries, and this is relevant because the church is very politically involved and politically influential to a much greater degree than in a country such as the US or in western Europe. The details are outside my field of expertise, but in this post I’m offering some links and a video for you to contemplate.
Here are some of the links: this (from 2018), this more recent one, and also this recent one.
Then there is this video. It’s long, but one trick I use when dealing with lengthy videos involving talking heads is to change the settings to a faster speed:
Yesterday my attention was called to this article, the translation of which (thanks, Google translate) is as follows:
Russian journalist and well-known propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said that the Russian Federation will not stop at the war in Ukraine. He said this during his show.
“If you think that we will stop at Ukraine, think 300 times. Let me remind you that Ukraine is just an intermediate stage in ensuring the strategic security of the Russian Federation,” Solovyov said.
You are not you when they found and squeezed out two more of your villas in Italy
So, who is Solovyov, whom I’d never heard of before yesterday? “Propagandist” is the word used, and as far as I can tell he’s the Russian version of a talk show personality and is extremely pro-Putin:
The media often describe Solovyov as a propagandist. Solovyov regularly talks about his patriotism, the rapid development of Russia under Putin and the decline of the West.
He’s not an official government spokesperson, but he seems highly in tune with the government and is instrumental in spreading its message:
Regarding the armed conflict in east Ukraine, Solovyov position mirrored that of president Putin and the Russian government: that the conflict was between the fascists of the Ukrainian maidan and the anti-fascists of the rebel eastern territories.
Solovyov has changed his opinion on different questions numerous times; for example, the Crimean problem. Solovyov on Crimea:
“Any person who tries to start a war between Russia and Ukraine is a criminal, moreover, I can’t even imagine the extent of such criminality. In Ukraine live people fraternal to us in spirit, in blood, in common history. Do not shout “Sevastopol is ours!” Do not shout “Crimea is ours!” (2008).
And why do you need Crimea?… It was, without a doubt, legitimately transferred (to Ukraine) by Kruschev. If we suddenly say (we’re taking it back) – it means war. Do you want a war with Ukraine? How many Ukrainian and Russian lives are you ready to lay down in order to take Crimea, which (by the way) has long become a Tatar territory?… Crimeans are against (rejoining Russia). (2013).
“We brought this day as best we could. Crimea and Sevastopol are again a part of Russia. Historical justice has triumphed!” (March 18, 2014).
Ready to change on a dime to reflect whatever winds might blow.
He seems to be a Putin shill, although not a press secretary:
Since September 2, 2018 — host of the “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin” on the channel “Russia-1”, in which for 1 hour he talks about the deeds done by the president over the past week. The intonation of the program, the selection of guests (in the premiere, they turned out to be only persons connected with the power: the president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov and the State Duma deputy from United Russia Andrei Makarov), the co-host (VGTRK journalist Pavel Zarubin), and thus prompted a number of media outlets to think about this as an attempt to raise the rating of the current head of state, which has fallen due to the pension reform [ru], and the emergence of a personality cult different from the Soviet era.
The article I initially posted in translation had a sentence about villas in Italy, which was apparently a reference to this:
On 23 February 2022, a day before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Solovyov was sanctioned by the European Union. He is barred from entering the EU countries, and his assets there, if exist, are frozen. His villa on Lake Como, Italy, was seized. Total number of seized properties with a value of 8 million euros is unknown.
In sum, it’s my impression that what Solovyov says is a good window into the minds of much of the Putin wing of Russian political thought, and should not be ignored.
With the election of Joe Biden it seems that the time has arrived for all tyrannies to try to accomplish what they’d been putting off for just the right moment.
And so we have the looming specter of China actually doing something about its long-held dream to take over Taiwan:
Mainland China has been preparing for this attack for generations; and the Republic of China has been preparing to defend itself for just as long. On top of that, most analysts anticipate that Japan and other Pacific seaboard allies will rush to Taiwan’s aid immediately as well, not to mention the United States. Unlike the (so far) narrow Russia-Ukraine conflict, a rapidly expanding arena is likely.
If, Heaven forbid, this dark day comes, the bombed-out cities, factories, and cargo terminals on your television screen will be the ones that produced and shipped your television, the ones that produced the tires on your car, the ones that produced the appliances in your kitchen and the furniture in your living room.
This war will therefore have a much greater effect on North America, and in particular, on our economy….
As a result, the United States (and too many other Western nations as well) became incredibly dependent on China, Taiwan, and the many other “low-cost countries” of Asia, for everything from small parts to finished goods, from luxuries to necessities.
Not satisfied to buy “the low-end lines” from Asia while making “the high-end lines” here, we integrated our economies through “strategic vendor partnerships” (how often have you heard that phrase at company meetings?).
American businesses select a respected Chinese vendor and give him our tooling, our plans, our designs. From this partner, we buy not only the finished goods we resell, but also the custom components that we need to make our “USA-made” products too…
One of the reasons that China isn’t as afraid of American action if they attack Taiwan is that they have thousands of American-owned (well, to the extent you can own something in a communist country… but we think of them as American-owned, anyway) manufacturing plants and distribution centers, full of our machinery and assembly lines, our injection molds and stamping dies, all up and down the coast of China.
That certainly was a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
If Trump had had a second term, he might have had a chance to further tackle the problem – a problem of which he was well aware. But he didn’t have that extra time. And Biden not only has no interest in doing so, he arguably has an interest in the exact opposite.
It’s been claimed that Lenin said “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Whether that’s a bona fide quote of his or not, it’s a great quote and no less true now, a century later.
We can criticize Europe all we want for having become dependent on Russian fossil fuels. But we’ve arguably done worse regarding the intertwining of our economy with China’s.
I have to say I never understood the argument for doing it, even back when I voted as a liberal Democrat. Oh, I understood it in the sense that I realized it seemed cost-effective and gave us access to cheaper goods. But I didn’t think it made any sense long-term. I also realized that one of the theories was that as China became more capitalist itself it would become a liberal democracy with more Western values. But that seemed a surface mirage, and meanwhile the dependency was worrisome. It has become more so.
The author advises readers that there’s no time like the present for businesses to start undoing this state of affairs. But I don’t think it will happen, because the incentives and leadership aren’t there. A war would change that, of course, but there would be a lot of suffering in the meantime.
Forty-nine Senate Republicans are threatening to derail the Biden administration’s efforts to secure a new Iran nuclear agreement within the coming days.
Any new agreement that “does not have strong bipartisan support in Congress will not survive,” the senators said in a statement issued Monday and provided to the White House. The lawmakers warned the administration that if it bypasses Congress and agrees to a deal without first allowing a vote in the Senate—as is required under a 2015 law—they will do “everything in our power to reverse it.”
“The administration has thus far refused to commit to submit a new Iran deal to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, as per its constitutional obligation, or for review under statutory requirements that passed on a bipartisan basis in response to the 2015 deal,” the senators said, according to a copy of the statement obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “Additionally, despite earlier promises to the contrary, the administration has failed to adequately consult with Congress.” Every Republican senator except Rand Paul (Ky.) signed on to the statement, signaling widespread unity in opposition to a new deal.
The statement is the latest warning to the White House that a new Iran deal has little chance of surviving into the future.
What’s up with Rand Paul?
More:
“Unless Iran ceases its support for terrorism, we will oppose removing and seek to reimpose any terrorism-related sanctions,” they said. “And we will force the Senate to vote on any administration effort to do so.”
The statement comes just weeks after nearly 200 Republican House lawmakers signed on to a similar letter expressing opposition to a new deal and promising to block sanctions relief for Iran.
…Republican leaders are now urging their Democratic colleagues to join them in opposing any deal that does not sufficiently restrict Iran’s contested nuclear program.
They need Democrats to join them in order to accomplish this, and it’s possible they’ll get them – if only because some Democrats are worried about the midterms. The following is at least somewhat encouraging:
Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has signaled concerns about the Biden administration’s negotiations and has called for increased pressure to counter Iran’s nuclear program.
A similar effort was tried by the GOP with Obama’s Iran deal; I wrote several posts on the subject, in particular this about how the bill failed to overcome the 60-vote threshold for invoking cloture (see also this). I see the same possible roadblocks now, except for one thing: the Republicans may have more Democrat senators joining them and therefore there’s a small chance that this more recent effort will be successful. I certainly don’t count on it, though.
One of the reasons for the urgency of the Manhattan Project during World War II was the fear that if the US didn’t develop a nuclear weapon, Germany would. However close or however far Germany may actually have been from obtaining one, the idea that Germany and Hitler might have done so, and accomplished it first, was terrifying. The fear was that a power-mad tyrant bent on conquering much of the world – and killing or enslaving many of the people in it – would have had little to no reluctance to use such weapons.
The United States used the atomic bomb to force Japan into surrendering. The rationale was that this prevented far more deaths than an invasion would have caused, not just on the Allies’ side but for the Japanese as well. After the war ended, there was a short time when the US held a monopoly on atomic weapons, but in 1949 that ended when the USSR detonated its own atomic weapon in a test.
Since then, of course, many nations have acquired such weapons, and during the Cold War we had MAD (mutual assured destruction) as a supposed deterrent, with one especially nerve-wrecking albeit very short confrontation known as the Cuban Missile Crisis [*see NOTE below].
However, as far as I can tell, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the first time that a major nuclear power (in this case Russia) has invaded another sovereign country and engaged it in a hot war of aggression with conventional weapons, while explicitly stating at the outset that if anyone tries to fight them in order to protect the invaded nation, then the invading country (Russia again) will be using nuclear weapons. The Ukraine action therefore amounts to not so much an invasion as a kind of hostage-taking (of another country, rather than a person) with the threat that if the hostage is freed the hostage-taker could retaliate by blowing up the world or at least a goodly part of it.
We have long been worried about nuclear weapons falling into the hand of a group that is either irrational or that does not care about the amount of destruction it causes, but that has focused on rogue terrorist groups having a small arsenal, or leaders such as the Iranian mullahs or North Korea’s. Russia had supposedly joined that group of nations – or at least was on its way to joining it – who were not using nuclear weapons as aggressive threats nor did they have any intention to militarily invade each other. NATO’s weapons were meant to be defensive or to perhaps be used as a last resort in response to chemical or biological warfare waged on its members.
One of the many casualties of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been the notion that Putin would not initiate a first nuclear strike on Europe or the US. However, he has threatened as much if his more conventional war on Ukraine is directly interfered with by those forces. (He has also declared that arms shipments from those powers are fair game for retaliation by his conventional weapons, but that’s a different issue.)
Thus Putin has put the West in a bind. They could send non-nuclear military forces to Ukraine that would probably defeat him easily, but his nuclear threats have tied their hands to a certain extent and they are trying to carefully thread the needle in order to help the Ukrainians but not too much. And although this is about Russia and Ukraine and NATO and Europe, it’s not just about that. It’s about the precedent it sets, which is that any nuclear power can take whatever it wants by threatening to nuke the world. We already knew that, I suppose, but here’s a good demonstration of it. It’s like something out of a James Bond movie, but Bond is nowhere to be seen.
So we are reduced to guessing the answer to questions such as: How crazy is Putin? How self-destructive, if he doesn’t get his way? Is he one of those people described here?:
I don’t think that’s Putin. I don’t even think he is acting irrationally by merely threatening to go nuclear. However, it’s not as though I can read Putin’s mind. Also, I think that if Putin actually believed that Ukraine wanted to be part of Russia again, he was fooling himself,
If Putin wants Ukraine – and there is every indication that he wants it very very badly – then an invasion plus a nuclear threat is a perfectly rational (although terrible) way to go about it. However, if Putin is actually willing to begin a nuclear war if he doesn’t get his way, that would be irrational. But tyrants who have their expansionist dreams thwarted or their aggressive actions challenged often turn their destructive impulses in different directions. It is known, for example, that in the final months of World War II, when all was lost for Germany and Hitler was realizing it, that he considered that the German people should suffer maximally for letting him down.
With Putin, the other very important question is, “How crazy are those around him? Are they in agreement with him?” And no one knows the answer.
We fear challenging him; the stakes of finding out the answers seem very high. And “we” is the entire Western world.
[*NOTE: It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain the huge differences between the Cuban missile crisis and the invasion of Ukraine, but suffice to say that in Cuba missiles had already been placed by the USSR, and placed in a country almost 7,000 miles from Russia and very close to the US. Clearly, those missiles could only have offensive purposes for Russia. What’s more, neither the US nor the USSR was engaging in a related hot war at the time. The situation was resolved diplomatically.]
[NOTE II: No one knows what’s in Putin’s head or the heads of those around him, but there’s plenty of speculation – for example, this:
I asked Martynov if he thinks anyone in Putin’s inner circle is watching the images of Ukraine being broadcast by channels that do not belong to the Russian state. And if so, do they feel badly about the damage, deaths and refugee crisis?
“I feel like there are smart people around President Putin, and I believe that they understand pretty well what happens in Ukraine,” Martynov said. “They can see the same as we are, as we still have some, some independent source of information left — YouTube, Telegram and some other social media — which was not completely blocked in Russia for now. But I feel like they have decided that they are war criminals, so they can’t break this ties with Mr. Putin.”]
