Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581
[Иван Грозный и сын его Иван 16 ноября 1581 года], 1883-1885, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
There are very good reasons that neighboring countries are opposed to being governed by the political tradition of Muscovy, a political tradition consisting essentially of Despotism, Corruption, and Brutality.
Professor Mearsheimer is a Russian apologist who blames the United States for “provoking” Russia into invading Ukraine. Mearsheimer’s sophistries have found an enthusiastic audience in the Nouveau-Paleocon Isolationist Buchananite wing of the Right.
In numerous essays and articles, Mearsheimer focuses his fire on U.S. and NATO policies for causing the Ukraine war and for its continuation. His speech, “Why Is Ukraine the West’s Fault?” has been viewed more than 27 million times. These views are echoed by many on the far left and the libertarian right, as well as the center. This makes it all the more vital to understand the gaps in his analysis that produce such a flawed result. His security equation is missing key variables.
The three most important are the security imperatives of Russia’s neighbors, the increasing authoritarianism of the Russian state and the true horror of Russia’s brutal war and occupation. By not adequately weighing these factors, Mearsheimer can explain Putin’s invasion of a peaceful, independent nation as a predictable reaction to Western provocations. He blasts the U.S. and NATO response as an overreaction to a limited conflict. Analyzing only parts of the equation, he arrives at a deeply flawed solution: In my understanding, he essentially calls on the West to militarily abandon Ukraine and to cede it to Russia’s sphere of influence.
Mearsheimer’s specific arguments are well known. (As one colleague told me, Mearsheimer’s writings are like Vivaldi’s concertos: beautiful, but they all sound alike.) He holds that “the United States is principally responsible for causing the Ukraine crisis.” That “Putin is not bent on conquering and absorbing Ukraine.” That the West has little to fear from Russia and only “began describing Putin as a dangerous leader with imperial ambitions” after the invasion and is doing so now only “to make sure he alone is blamed” for the war. He concludes that “the United States is not seriously interested in finding a diplomatic solution to the war,” bears primary responsibility for prolonging and escalating the war and is the principal obstacle to peace.
One can accept key points in Mearsheimer’s argument, as I do, without accepting his conclusions. NATO enlargement was problematic; I warned against it at the time and have criticized it more recently, preferring that the newly liberated states of Eastern Europe be brought into the European Union, not a military alliance created to counter the Soviet Union. Some U.S. policies have not taken into account legitimate Russian security concerns, particularly the deployment of missile interceptors in Poland and Romania that serve no useful purpose but, in Moscow’s view, do present a credible military threat, as I have long argued.
But NATO’s policies were not driven by “America’s obsession with bringing Ukraine into NATO and making it a Western bulwark on Russia’s border.” Rather—while some policymakers and experts have, indeed, proposed grander, hegemonic schemes, particularly during the run-up to and early years of the Iraq war—NATO policies since the end of the Cold War can largely be explained by the usual, mundane drivers: bureaucratic inertia and self-perpetuation; the politics of state-to-state relations; pursuit of new, profitable defense contracts; domestic politics; and the desire of U.S. and European politicians to demonstrate resolve, particularly against Iran.
The key driver of NATO expansion was one that I underestimated and that Mearsheimer specifically ignores: Eastern Europeans wanted protection from a historic foe. They pushed to join NATO; America did not pull them into an anti-Russian pact. Centuries of invasions instilled a genuine fear of Russia into their collective memories. Putin’s numerous nuclear threats since the beginning of the war remind all that however weakened Russia’s army may be by its battles in Ukraine, its nuclear weapons can destroy any nation it targets.
This is true of Sweden and Finland today. The U.S. is not manipulating them into joining a crusade to conquer Russia. These nations fear that Putin’s goals go far beyond those Mearsheimer describes. That is why they are abandoning decades (in Sweden’s case, three centuries) of neutrality. If they followed Mearsheimer’s logic, surely these countries would see that their national interests would be best served by assuaging Russia’s security concerns and continuing to remain free of military alliances. …
Mearsheimer’s assurances today that Putin has only “limited aims” and that his February blitzkrieg failed not because of fierce Ukrainian resistance but because the “Russian military did not attempt to conquer all of Ukraine” are as wrong now as they were in 2014. Then, too, he predicted that after seizing Crimea, Putin had no further territorial ambitions and even if he did he would be “unable to successfully occupy Ukraine.” He counseled that “Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine” and argued that Putin’s “response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.”
But Russia itself provides the rebuttal. In late July, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said outright that Moscow’s goal was to free Ukraine’s people from the “unacceptable regime” in Kyiv. He was following Putin’s lead. On June 9, Putin gave a speech on the war where he did not say one word about NATO or NATO enlargement but did wax eloquent about his similarity to Tsar Peter the Great, whose war with Sweden, he said, was justly “returning” land to Russia. “Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well,” he said. Hardly a defensive goal. Already, in occupied parts of Ukraine, Russian-backed administrators are introducing rubles as a new currency, handing out Russian passports, hoisting the Russian flag, taking over cell phone service and media and trying to re-educate teachers and children with new, pro-Russian versions of reality.
This focus on controlling the people and narratives in Ukraine hints at the second variable Mearsheimer ignores in his construct: Putin has long feared that popular resistance to his increasingly authoritarian rule at home would spread if Ukraine and other ex-Soviet republics grew too close to the West. Former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul pointed this out (correctly, in my view) when he faulted Mearsheimer in 2014 for not looking at the whole picture. “Russian foreign policy did not grow more aggressive in response to U.S. policies,” McFaul wrote. “It changed as a result of Russian internal political dynamics.
Mearsheimer accepts the traditional insolent Muscovite claim of a supposed “right” to dominate and reduce to puppet state status unwilling neighbors. He additionally accepts the nonsensical argument that the “security” of Muscovy necessitates a wide cordon sanitaire of satellite regimes and imperial possessions. The obvious consideration that no aggressive European rival states exist and the United States and its allies make no claims or pretensions to ownership of any square foot of Russian soil.
The rivalry between America and Russia exists only to the extent of differing regime preferences concerning, and different client relationships with, a few Third World countries.
Unless Russia proceeds to start WWIII, nobody is going to raise a Grande Armée and march East.
But Russia has already flagrantly violated the implicit convention, that you do not attack other European states and you do not revise sovereign borders by force, that underlays the entire peaceful Post-WWII Order.
Russia is behaving today in the precise same vicious, aggressive, and mendacious manner that Germany and Japan did in the 1930s. Attempting to appease German aggression back then was a mistake and inevitably failed. We must either stand up to Russia now and stop the cycle of aggression and conquest before it goes any farther, or we will surely find ourselves not far down the road, unprepared and facing inevitable War.
Hunter Biden is an interesting character because he combines the Millennial Dream (still doing drugs and fucking around in your 50s) with the Millennial Nightmare (your parents still being alive and you still having to beg them for money in your 50s)
I, for one, never thought he would do it. I never thought Joe Manchin, who was elected in West Virginia after running an ad in which he literally shot the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, would sign on to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better climate agenda.
Yet sign on he has. Last night, Manchin announced that after over a year of logjamming Biden’s spending plans, he’d struck a deal. The legislation he agreed to weighs in at a ballpark of $700 billion, a sharp climbdown from the $6 trillion Democrats had initially asked for. But it’s still a lot of money, and even more importantly, it’s a major psychological boost for the left. Now, barring some let-the-world-burn chaos from goth kid Kyrsten Sinema or revolt from House Dems, Build Back Better will be signed into law.
Before we get to the green stuff, let’s pause for a moment and consider the clinical insanity of dumping hundreds of billions into the economy at a time of massive inflation. The Democrats audaciously claim that the package will somehow reduce inflation. They even went back and renamed it the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a bit of Orwellian chicanery. They cite the bill’s tax hikes on big corporations as proof it will slice the deficit and help control rising prices.
But then they make similar claims about every spending package and the deficit only ever seems to widen. Irrespective of what you think of the tax hikes — and raising taxes amid recession fears and rising interest rates is a serious gambit — the fact remains that they’re still dumping hundreds of billions of new spending into the economy. Inflation simply means too many dollars chasing too few goods; can anyone seriously argue this won’t exacerbate the problem?
Jeffrey Carter, at Points and Figures, is justifiably outraged.
Finally, Senator Joe Manchin got what he wanted and rolled over. At least, that’s what we are hearing. Hence, a new spending bill will make its way through Congress.
Increases in government spending are INflationary. They don’t take inflation down.
Government has input into the costs of goods and services but it doesn’t set the price. The “scorecard” I saw showed how all of this spending is revenue neutral. That’s always a joke.
Details are sketchy but supposedly:
15% minimum tax on corporations
Eliminating Carried Interest tax rates on Investment
First, raising taxes during a recession is not a good idea. Second, the way to spur GDP growth is to decrease corporate taxes and taxes on investment.
Corporations do not pay taxes, they aggregate them. They pass them along to their customers. If they pay higher rates of tax, they don’t increase salaries for employees nor do they invest in property, plants, and equipment.
Interestingly, Democrats want Biden to stop sending refined oil products overseas to try and decrease gas prices in the US. You’d think that would work because it would increase the available indigenous supply. Except, there is not enough storage for those products so it would all be wasted.
This bill kills an incentive for any company to invest in storage facilities to make the Democratic scheme work.
One of the smart things Reagan did to kill the inflation beast was to cut taxes on investment. For those that don’t know, carried interest is the money that people receive when they successfully operate private equity, real estate, hedge, or venture fund. If you are a general partner at one of those funds and cover the costs of operating the fund, 20% of what’s left of the profits accrue to you.
There are various tax codes for different funds. But, you generally pay the long-term capital gains rate on gains. That’s a big incentive to invest.
A new sculpture honoring the ancient female serpent deity Mami Wata has replaced the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on the public square in New Orleans. The governing leaders of New Orleans felt that a new direction for the city was necessary, as has been reported:
“Ultimately, the artist felt, as we did, that because the original placement of the Robert E. Lee atop the pedestal was one of power and domination—the statue had loomed over the city, symbolizing the tyranny of white supremacy—that this new work should be closer to the level of the individual…”
(*Originally an African deity, and still worshipped there by various names, Mami Wata worship in the West is primarily found among Voodoo practitioners across the Caribbean).
The Mami Wata sculpture was only a temporary exhibit, to be removed in August. I haven’t yet heard what replaced it.
On paper, it looked like a fantastic deal. In 2017, the Chinese government was offering to spend $100 million to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70-foot white pagoda, the project thrilled local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists every year.
But when US counterintelligence officials began digging into the details, they found numerous red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington DC, just two miles from the US Capitol, a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection, multiple sources familiar with the episode told CNN.
Also alarming was that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said.
Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction was underway.
The canceled garden is part of a frenzy of counterintelligence activity by the FBI and other federal agencies focused on what career US security officials say has been a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade.
Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities.
F.E. Warren Air Force Base, a strategic missile base, is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, an area near a host of cell towers using Huawei equipment. – From F.E. Warren Air Force Base/Facebook
US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Richard P. Donoghue announcing indictments against China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, several of its subsidiaries and its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on January 28, 2019.
A 15-year-old Brooklyn boy shot himself in the penis Sunday after fumbling with a gun that had slid from his waistband, authorities said yesterday.
Khamir Grant was then arrested for reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon — the same charges levied against Burress, who shot himself at a Manhattan nightclub in 2008, law-enforcement sources said.
Grant told cops that he was walking home from Amersfort Park at East 39th Street and Avenue J in East Flatbush around 1:30 a.m., when the gun began to fall into his pants, sources said.
When Grant grabbed for it, he accidentally pulled the trigger, firing a bullet right through his penis.
Grant staggered home and told his mom what had happened, sources said.
They took a livery car to Kings County Hospital, where Grant was released after treatment and then arrested by police.
1880 Frederick Burr Opper Cartoon from Puck, titled: The Bankrupt Outrage Mill (showing bloody shirts, lynchings, and other forms of racial violence).
* “Waving the Bloody Shirt” was a phrase used by their opponents to mock efforts by post-Civil-War left-wing radicals to sow national division and stir up animosity against the defeated South by invoking memories of the war, and particularly through painting emotional images of black victimhood.
Coleman Hughes quite brilliantly analyses the bizarre role of metaphor as identity underlying the contemporary psychodrama participated in by complaining blacks and pious white liberals.
Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t. The progressive response to this question invariably contains some reference to history: blacks were taken from their homeland in chains, forced to work as chattel for 250 years, and then subjected to redlining, segregation, and lynchings for another century. In the face of such a brutal past, many would argue, it is simply ignorant to complain about what modern-day blacks can get away with.
Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?
We often speak and think in metaphors. For instance, life can have ups and downs and highs and lows, despite the fact that our joys and sorrows do not literally pull our bodies along a vertical axis. Similarly, modern-day black intellectuals often say things like, “We were brought here against our will,” despite the fact that they have never seen a slave ship in their lives, let alone been on one. When metaphors are made explicit—i.e., emotions are vertical, groups are individuals—it’s easy to see that they are just metaphors. Yet many black intellectuals carry on as if they were literal truths.
One such intellectual is Michael Eric Dyson, who recently shared the stage with Michelle Goldberg in a debate against Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry. Though the debate was ostensibly about political correctness, it ranged everywhere from Marxism to ‘white privilege.’ Around halfway through the debate, Dyson said:
If you have benefitted from 300 years of holding people in servitude, thinking that you did it all on your own…”Why can’t these people work harder?” Let me see…for 300 years you ain’t had no job! So the reality is for 300 years you hold people in the bands…you refuse to give them rights. Then all of a sudden, you ‘free’ them and say, “You’re now individuals.”
Taken literally, Dyson’s claims make no sense. No person has ever suffered 300 years of joblessness because no person has ever lived for 300 years. Of course, Dyson wasn’t speaking literally. His ‘you’ refers not to identifiable, living humans, but to groups of long-deceased individuals with whom he shares nothing in common except a location on the color wheel. But by appropriating a grievance whose rightful owners died long ago, and by slipping between the metaphorical and the literal, Dyson was able to portray himself as a member of an abstract oppressed class and Peterson as a member of an abstract oppressor class. In his reply, barely audible over Dyson’s sanctimonious harangue, Peterson put his finger on this rhetorical sleight-of-hand: “Who is this ‘you’ that you’re referring to?”
Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse.
We need to help our communist bakeries: Another week and another funny investigative report from Libs of TikTok, this time about a Portland lesbian bar, Doc Marie’s, that closed a week after opening. Why? The employees canceled the owners of course! Doc Marie’s staff “felt misled about the space being safe and welcoming,” and demanded that the bar be turned over to them within 24 hours.
Earlier this month, it was Mina’s World in Philadelphia, now this. Perhaps Libs of TikTok thinks this is all good riddance. For me, this is yet another tragedy! It is simply the truth in Blue states that socialists make the best baked goods and open the best gay bars, and I desperately need those socialists to be getting along among themselves. It’s a delicate balance: They do need to be crazy enough to nurture and name sourdough starters, but then we have to stop them right before they collapse into self-hate and Instagram posts declaring harm has been done. Please send a thought to their god (tarot cards) for balance to return.
Protestors gathered to express their rage that police shot Andrew “Tekle” Sundberg, a black man who was shooting into his neighbors apartment where Arabella Yarbrough and her children live, leaving bullet holes in their kitchen. As Yarbrough stands outside trying to get the crowd to disperse, protestors scream at her: “You’re alive, shut up!” When she says, “there’s bullet holes in my kitchen,” a protester shouts back: “Not in you, though!”
Things boiled over during Saturday’s rally and march for Tekle Sundberg, when the 24 year old woman who says he was shooting into her apt. showed up voicing her frustration with those gathering in front of her building on Sundberg’s behalf. @kare11 * video contains profanity * pic.twitter.com/qdi1vbgO7k
People my age are old enough to remember the Disney hour that ran on Sunday nights on ABC starting in 1954. The weekly programs were generally introduced by the warm, avuncular Walt Disney himself. Walt Disney deliberately presented himself as a living embodiment of the totality of wholesome family values and American patriotism. Americans enjoyed his animated cartoons, movies, and television productions for most of the first half of the century, and the whole country was saddened when he was carried off by cancer at a relatively premature age.
The Disney Company, in recent years, has embraced Leftism and Wokery and turned it back decisively on the values of its founder. The New York Post reports on the public indignation over their latest outrage.
The celebration of Disneyland’s 67th anniversary turned sour over the weekend as some fans noticed that the Mouse House left out a nod to its controversial founder, Walt Disney.
Fans took to social media to call out the company for omitting Walt’s iconic opening day speech, which has featured every year since 1955 at the Anaheim, Calif., theme park.
“Why did Disneyland cut Walt Disney’s opening day speech from today’s anniversary celebration?,” asked one fan on Twitter.
Walt Disney, the man behind Mickey Mouse, has been both celebrated for his genius and condemned for alleged anti-Semitic and racist views. Although there is some debate over those claims, in recent years, the Mouse House has made sure to distance itself.
Alex Parker, at Red State, chronicles the different reaction from our two confliicting cultures to the actions of the young man who stopped a mass shooting in an Indiana mall by shooting down the killer.
At the Greenwood Park Mall in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Area, a man opened fire. As reported by Deseret News, 20-year-old Johnathan Sapirman got off 24 rifle rounds.
Tragically, three were murdered: Victor Gomez, 30; and couple Rosa Rivera de Pineda, 37, and Pedro Pineda, 56. Two more were injured: a 20-year-old female shot in the leg; and a 12-year minorly wounded by a deflected bullet.
After entering the mall, Sapirman headed straight to the bathroom and was there for over an hour before exiting the bathroom and opening fire.
“The most puzzling piece…was the amount of time that he was in the bathroom,” [Chief James Ison] said. “We believe he was getting ready.”
But the man’s plans were thwarted because more than bad guys carry guns. Elisjsha Dicken, 22, stopped the mass shooter’s spree.
Footage…showed that Dicken shot 10 rounds from his handgun, while motioning for citizens at the mall to exit behind him.
Chief James has praised Elisjsha’s intervention:
“Many more people would have died last night if a responsible, armed citizen hadn’t been present…”
On Sunday evening, the chief compared Elisjsha to a biblical character. He did so again Monday:
“The shooter was confronted by our Good Samaritan. … The Good Samaritan was armed with a pistol and engaged the shooter as he stood outside the restroom area firing into the food court. [Elisjsha] fired several rounds, striking the suspect. The suspect attempted to retreat back into the restroom [but] fell to the ground after being shot.”
Does that sound like a hero to you? It doesn’t to a Bloomington traffic anchor. Murrow Award-winning journalist Justin Kollar was flabbergasted by the chief’s framing. He expressed his dismay in a tweet:
“The term ‘Good Samaritan’ came from a Bible passage of a man from Samaria who stopped on the side of the road to help a man… I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone *killing* someone… my God.”
The term, “Good Samaritan” came from a Bible passage of a man from Samaria who stopped on the side of the road to help a man who was injured and ignored.
I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone *killing* someone… my God. https://t.co/0a3sgzejzD
— Justin Kollar (@kollarjustin) July 18, 2022
And he was none too impressed with Elisjsha packing heat.
“It’s against the @simonmalls code of conduct for anyone to carry a weapon inside the mall. However, Greenwood Police are thankful the…man was.” …
It’s against the @simonmalls code of conduct for anyone to carry a weapon inside the mall, however Greenwood Police are thankful the 22 year old Bartholomew Co. man was @FOX59 https://t.co/BV1lOnZOgM pic.twitter.com/XuWSR26ipF
— Justin Kollar (@kollarjustin) July 18, 2022
Some online were in agreement. One user offered, “What you have is two gunmen — one of whom obeyed the law for a little longer than the mass shooter.”
