Catching Up From Yesterday: Ukraine, US Politics, Covid
First an administrative note. People have asked, so—my wife is doing very well. This morning all the bandages came off. She’s walking with just a cane part time and has been doing the stairs to the second floor since last week. Home therapy is finished and we’ll be starting outside therapy tomorrow. I say “we” in the sense that I’ll be doing the driving. So we’ll be busy, but things are going absolutely as hoped. Thanks to everybody for well wishes.
Yesterday (and earlier today) there were a number of articles, posts, tweets, that I wanted to bring to the attention of readers—but reading is one thing and writing another. Here’s a selection.
Will Schryver has two interesting items. For anyone who thinks Russia is in any way fazed by the latest belligerent rhetoric from the collective West—Patriots, UK Marines, etc. …
Putin promised that the longer this conflict continues, the tougher a negotiated settlement will become:
Russia has also promised that Patriot batteries—at $1 billion a crack—will be targeted. And Russia is well equipped to do that. On the bigger issue of escalation …
For a more technical look at Patriot in Ukraine—its limitations and vulnerabilities:
Now, on the US political front, for anyone concerned about election integrity and the future of our democracy, this article yesterday at American Conservative is a must read. The depth and breadth of the problems we face is dismaying:
Are States Leaking Voters’ Data?
A new lawsuit alleges the Electronic Registration Information Center is sharing sensitive voter data with a partisan nonprofit.
The Thomas More Society has long been doing yeoman work in electoral matters. Here’s the basic idea behind this initiative, which is covered in great detail in the article:
The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is under fire for illegally sharing sensitive voter data with at least one partisan nonprofit, according to lawsuits filed by the Thomas More Society against elections departments in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
While the lawsuits vary in their details, they all allege violations of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), legislation from 2002 requiring states to maintain accurate statewide lists of registered and unregistered voters. HAVA does not authorize states to share this registration data with third-party organizations such as ERIC—effectively outsourcing its responsibilities to a private organization—since it is protected by federal law. Thomas More Society’s lawsuits aim to end the practice.
ERIC’s main selling point to states is voter roll maintenance, identifying voters who move out of state or die to prevent unlawful voting. But it also requires member states to identify and register eligible-but-unregistered voters—effectively making ERIC the nation’s most influential voter registration machine.
Documents exhibited in the lawsuit show that states furnish ERIC with voters’ names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four Social Security digits, citizenship statuses, and phone numbers.
More disturbing still is its practice of sharing voter registration data acquired through these agreements with the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), infamous for distributing $70 million from Mark Zuckerberg in 2020 to pump up Democratic turnout in that year’s election. CEIR pumped over $13 million into Pennsylvania alone in 2020, according to a grant agreement included in the Pennsylvania lawsuit.
Speaker-in-waiting Kev McCarthy is doing his best to gaslight conservatives, but that’s going to be a tough act to maintain with any degree of success. The difficulties are illustrated by this item from CTH last night:
Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard had an interesting discussion on her podcast today [LINK] which included Carlson retelling the story of the NSA conducting surveillance on him during a prior attempt to gain an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After recounting the NSA story, Tucker then went on to outline a conversation with representative Mike McCaul after the Texas republican and incoming Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee described Carlson as an agent of Russia. When Carlson got into an argument with McCaul over the accusation, McCaul went on to tell Carlson his intelligence community briefers were the ones who provided the information.
McCaul is a walking, talking disaster. Since the election he has placed himself in the same category as Zhou himself—as this incident amply demonstrates. But it’s far from the first such incident. He’s also an outspoken war monger and anti-Russia hysteria enthusiast, at a time when conservative skepticism of the Zhou regime’s disastrous war is rising. McCarthy—if he really wants to maintain credibility—needs to dump this corrupt nitwit. It seems that for McCarthy fooling some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, is good enough. That amounts to doing all right, and avoiding the slippery slope that seems so familiar.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Minister, …, you might create a dangerous precedent.
James Hacker : You mean that if we do the right thing this time, we might have to do the right thing again next time.
We’ll end with Covid, and a very sensible article from the Off-Guardian. As always, the underlying theme is the implicit rejection of the very idea of human nature—because, so goes the Woke fantasy, we can wish into existence our own meaning, our own ever mutable self understanding:
You're Gonna Get Sick, Get Used To It
Authored by Todd Hayen via Off-Guardian.org,
Zero Covid, zero disease, zero suffering, zero death. Unrealistic goals? You bet - although many countries (particularly China) have seemingly adopted a “Zero Covid” stance and have made a rather destructive effort to eliminate any occurrence of Covid-19 from their citizenry - boarding people up in their apartments, attacking people trying to escape, all those fun things fascists like to do.
This effort to maintain a “Zero Covid” environment is yet another piece of the agenda intended to brainwash and thus control the populace. The powers that be know that, but most of the people they are controlling do not.
The people might think “Zero Covid” sounds like a good idea, but it is fantasy, and typically you can’t count too much on fantasy in a nitty-gritty real world.
Now, I’m not knocking fantasy. Sometimes it is just what we need to get through the day. But this isn’t our own personal fantasy, this is fantasy put upon us by an authority that has a nefarious agenda. It is a slight of hand card trick, it is an intentional deception—a deception premeditated to cause harm to some (most) and benefit others (a few).
What is the card trick regarding “Zero Covid?” Well, it is once again an effort to convince us that being human is a problem. Isn’t all that is going on in the world right now have the same intention?—the “Woke Culture,” the “Cancel Culture,” the “transgender/identity” issue? Need I list more examples?
…
We have reached a point in human development where it has been made clear that the development of the mRNA vaccine to treat another human engineered invention, the SARSCoV2 “virus,” does not have a humanitarian intention.
…
People have been brainwashed to believe that only man-made medication and medical intervention can cure us. Most people give no credit to the human immune system and its miraculous ability to confront nearly any pathogen and give it a run for its money. Of course part of the agenda is to create an environment so toxic and contrary to the natural way of things that we are indeed faced with more formidable pathogens for our immune systems to deal with. Again, it is a complicated issue.
But the Covid hoax, to be successful, had to be released on people who believed a limited belief: humans are not capable of withstanding a natural phenomenon (a virus). This is what the people were told, which was always an illusion, yet still created as a fantasy bogeyman, and that the only way to face it and dispel it was to rely on man-made preventions (masks, social distancing and lockdowns) and cures (bogus vaccines).
Couple this with our insane insistence that we continue moving toward transhumanism (which at this time is still primarily a fantasy) and are above pain, suffering, illness, and particularly death, and you have the formula for madness.
Lots more at the link.
I think the decision to send Patriots to Ukraine is dubious for a number of reasons. I will say that the commentary I'm seeing about this bothers me. Patriot is a vastly more capable system than anything the Ukrainians have had in the past, whether or not it's a "game changer" for any given definition of that term. The Russians certainly have weapons they can use for going after these things. These include antiradiation missiles and artillery/SSM systems with ranges greater than Patriot has. That said, I have no idea what's going to happen because electronic warfare capabilities are never known until they are demonstrated in combat. To quote the old saying, "Those who know don't tell. Those who tell don't know." A lot of commentators are pretending to knowledge that they couldn't possibly have.
The Russians have some of their high end air defense systems protecting their bases in Syria but are fairly reluctant about actually using them because to do so gives useful information about them away to potential enemies, and if it turns out that the Israelis really do have their number when it comes to ECM then that's going to be embarrassing and bad for potential export sales. There's something to be said for keeping your aces up your sleeve. This is a decision we may well end up regretting. If Ukraine goes down hard, for example, I don't see having a bunch of our Patriots ending up as Russian war prizes being a benefit to national security
Congressman Mike McCaul is one of the swampiest creatures of the Lone Star State delegation, was a Deputy AG under then Texas AG John Cornyn[holio]. Too bad the swamp was immediately refilled after the waters were lowered sufficiently for the residents to be exposed!