FROM A FRIEND: “Ukraine government asked citizens to turn in captured Russian tanks. Citizens replied the tanks were lost in a boating accident.”
Archive for 2022
February 28, 2022
ICYMI: Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignore. Influence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son.
CHRIS QUEEN: The Amazing Black History I Learned at CPAC. “A couple of items dedicated to decorated Olympian Jesse Owens — who was a Republican, by the way — were fun to see, but I was drawn to the artifacts related to black patriots who fought in the American Revolution.”
CANADA: It’s okay if our citizens want to volunteer to fight for Ukraine.. “Let me be clear: we are all very supportive of any form of support to Ukrainians right now.”
If only Trudeau’s government were more supportive of Canadians.
BREAKING: US locks down Russian central bank, sovereign fund assets. Russia is in danger of becoming a pariah state like North Korea. That’s bad for Russia, though of course we lose leverage in those circumstances, too. But will the oligarchs and generals let Putin turn Russia into North Korea?
Related: Putin finds himself isolated, out of touch as invasion sputters. “Putin’s nuclear threat came as much of the world declared him an international pariah. He is among a small number of leaders to be hit by personal sanctions. That club includes Mr. al-Assad of Syria, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Now evidence is mounting that even some allies may be moving away from him. Turkey is weighing a request from Ukraine to block Russian warships from entering the Black Sea through a strategic chokepoint. Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman and top aide to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, tweeted Sunday that his country would ‘continue our efforts to help the people of Ukraine and end bloodshed in this unjust and unlawful war.’ Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic and ally of Russia, has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine.”
Also: The ruble crashes, the stock market closes, and Russia’s economy staggers. “As the day began, Russia’s currency lost as much as a quarter of its value within hours. Scrambling to stem the decline, the Russian Central Bank more than doubled its key interest rate, banned foreigners from selling Russian securities and ordered exporters to convert into rubles most of their foreign-currency revenues. It closed the Moscow stock exchange for the day because of the ‘developing situation.'”
UPDATE: Speculation: Everyone is thinking about how this affects China and Taiwan. But what if Putin’s show of weakness encourages China to seize land in Siberia? As a pariah state, Russia will attract less sympathy (well, none counts as “less,” right?) and what’s Putin going to do about it?
IT’S COME TO THIS: Federal Government Warns Americans to Mask, Social Distance While Sheltering From Nuclear Explosions.
With US-Russia tensions rapidly rising amid Vladimir Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, the prospect of large-scale nuclear war has reentered the public consciousness for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, Putin just put additional nuclear forces on “special combat readiness,” although this is almost certainly just saber-rattling and not indicative of any imminent action.
After this significant, if probably mostly symbolic, escalation, nuclear explosion advisory materials from FEMA’s emergency preparedness website, Ready.gov, circulated online over the weekend because of their… erm, interesting priorities.
The FEMA website contains some useful information about nuclear explosions and how Americans should shelter if warned one may be imminent. However, it then goes on to chide us about remembering to social distance and mask while hiding from pending oblivion or radioactive fallout.
Yes, seriously.
Here’s one choice passage:
“Get inside the nearest building to avoid radiation. Brick or concrete are best. Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household.”
As Stanley Kubrick told an interviewer about his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, “I started work on the screenplay with every intention of making the film a serious treatment of the problem of accidental nuclear war. As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’ But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful.”
No need to imagine Dr. Strangelove set in the era of COVID — FEMA did it for us.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: The Unexpected Return of Duck and Cover.
THERE’S PLENTY OF GOOD AMERICAN VODKA. OR BUY POLISH. LUKUSOWA IS PRETTY GOOD. Virginia ABC bans Russian vodka.
MARK JUDGE: Hope, Defiance at a Ukrainian Church in Washington.
Ukraine is a majority Christian nation, with nearly 80 percent identifying as Orthodox Christians. There is also a significant Catholic minority.
While many at the service on Sunday expressed concern with the attack Russia has launched against Ukraine, the more prevalent mood was belief that the Russians have underestimated Ukrainians. Several worshippers said they thought President Putin could lose the conflict.
Andrew Tsintsiruk, Veronica’s father, said that “it has been very special to see all the support from Americans. There are a lot of people here who are not regular parishioners who are here to offer prayers.” Mr. Tsinsiruk, 40, works in IT and came to America when he was in college.
On his phone Mr. Tsinsiruk has a picture of his sister, Irina, who is still in Ukraine. In the photograph, she is seen looking up from inside a bomb shelter.
“The media is putting up a view of something that I don’t think is happening,” adds Zenon Chalupa, 56, a salesman who was born in Ukraine and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. “When this thing started I was sad, but now I don’t think the media is giving a full picture. People are fighting back and the whole world has come to our side. I heard someone say that this will be over in nine days with Russia winning. I think it will end with Putin withdrawing.”
All week the National Shrine has been holding multiple prayer services for Ukraine.
From your lips to God’s ear.
Plus: “We just did not imagine everything we read about in the history books, everything our parents told us about their experiences, every tear they had shed. We thought that was over, a thing of the past. Yet today it’s being revisited upon us again.”
CHANGE: Multinational special forces team answering Ukraine’s call for foreign legion.
Related: How to join International Legion to defend Ukraine.
Also: Biden mocked gun-rights advocates who say they need assault weapons to fight the government: ‘You need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.’ Well, Slow Joe. . . .
THE HOTTEST OF HOT TAKES, COURTESY OF A NEW YORK TIMES PULITZER WINNER: Nikole Hannah-Jones: ‘What if I told you Europe is not a continent by definition…’
SOME FOLKS JUST DON’T GET IT: New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hokul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat, addressed the recent meeting of the China General Chamber of Commerce. Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross reports a bunch of the firms participating in the group are under sanction by the U.S. for a variety of misdeeds.
MATT MARGOLIS: The Most Important Thing I Learned at CPAC. “The point is, PJ Media is more than just a news site or a blog with a slate of writers and regular readers. It’s a community.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Maryland’s Anti-Semitism Task Force Chief Has History of Anti-Semitic Statements.
MICHAEL WALSH: ‘Events, Dear Boy, Events.’
And so, just like that, Covid hysteria has suddenly receded, the manifest limitations of “green energy” have revealed themselves, and “gun control” suddenly doesn’t seem so urgent in light of plucky little Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers. Inflation is soaring, pocketbook issues are back on the table, and the outbreak of a real shooting war in the Ukraine , in which people are fighting and dying, has suddenly yanked the word “catastrophic” back from the realm of mental illness and into reality. As the late British prime minister Harold Macmillan is supposed to have replied when asked what was his greatest challenge: “Events, dear boy, events.”
Amazing what happens when reality bites. The small stuff, the transient concerns, the self-indulgence in lunacy and cultural suicide suddenly slips away, revealing bedrock truths beneath. The prolonged propaganda assault by the national media, led by the unabashedly racialist New York Times, on the traditions and institutions of this country has screeched to a halt as people stare in disbelief at supermarket receipts and gas pump prices and watch the shelling of Kiev on their televisions. Perhaps now words like “assault” and “hostile environment” won’t be thrown around with such gay abandon:
So much for the dreaded “assault” rifles, which now seem to have some usefulness after all. Note as well that these “assault” rifles aren’t firing themselves, but are instead wielded by responsible adults in an actual hostile environment in defense of their lives, their families, and their homelands—exactly the conditions under which the Congress and the several states ratified the second amendment.
Exit quote: “‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,’ observed Adam Smith in the 18th century. But how much ruin, exactly? Russia is testing that proposition now, and the United States under Biden is not far behind. Events, dear boy, events.”
HEH. I ACTUALLY HEAR THIS FROM STUDENTS.
PLEASE BE COCKY, SENATOR BENNET: Election forecaster nudges Colorado’s US Senate seat from ‘solid’ to ‘likely’ Democrat.
ICYMI, MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: How today’s elites war against the working class. “In the old days, Russia would send communist agitators to rile up the working class. Nowadays, they don’t have to. The West’s ruling class is happy to do the agitating.”
A PROFOUND AND LEGITIMATE OBJECTION: “Today’s nomination of Judge Jackson makes me wonder if any future Justice will be selected without having previously clerked on the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor was the last Justice nominated without such a clerkship, though Justice Thomas and Justice Alito also did not clerk for a Justice.”
THE #RESISTANCE IS EVERYWHERE: Seen in Hillsborough, NC:
And in Thousand Oaks, California:
From a reader who writes: “Gas is more than 5.00 a gallon out here. Love your I did that campaign.” Well, it’s not actually my campaign. I’m just reporting on it.
LEE SMITH: Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble.
Just as Russiagate seemed to be coming to a close in July 2019, U.S. national security officials injected yet another Ukraine-related narrative into the public sphere to target the American president. This one appears to have been initiated by Ukrainian American White House official Alexander Vindman and his colleague Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst who had served as Vice President Biden’s point man on Ukraine during the Obama administration. When Vindman told Ciaramella about a phone call in which Trump had asked the Ukrainian president for information regarding allegations about the Biden family’s corrupt activities in Kyiv, they called on help from U.S. intelligence services, the State Department, the Pentagon, Democratic Party officials, and the press. Quick, scramble Team Ukraine—Trump is asking questions!
In order to cover up for what the Bidens and perhaps other senior Obama officials had done in Ukraine, a Democratic Congress impeached Trump for trying to figure out what American policymakers had been doing in Ukraine over the past decade. As for the Ukrainians, they again put themselves in the middle of it, when they should have stayed home.
The end result was that the Ukrainians had helped weaken an American president who, unlike Obama, gave them arms to defend themselves against the Russians. More seriously, they reinforced Putin’s view that, especially in partnership with the Democrats, Ukraine did not understand its true place in the world as a buffer state—and would continue to allow themselves to be used as an instrument by policymakers whose combination of narcissism and fecklessness made them particularly prone to dangerous miscalculations. The 2020 election victory of Joe Biden, a man whose family had been paid by the Ukrainians to protect them, can have done little to quiet Putin’s sense that Ukraine needed to be put in its place before it was used yet again as a weapon against him.
Earlier: Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignore. Influence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ — but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son.
GOOD: Law & Contemporary Problems Symposium on “Sex in Law” Publishes Disputed Article. “Some student editors had resigned from the journal due to the inclusion of an ‘anti-trans’ article by philosopher Kathleen Stock.”