Tag: war

Starlink to Ukraine

Twitter’s policy of spasmodically censoring tweets and banning accounts, often without pausing to ponder what they are doing, has had at least one baleful effect in Ukraine.

Last Wednesday, Twitter said it had “erred when it deleted about a dozen accounts that were posting information about Russian troop movements.” Obviously, the Russian invaders already know about their own troop movements. Losing this info could only hurt the people in Ukraine trying to defend themselves or run for their lives.

Innocent error? Anyway, Twitter said, in effect, “Our bad” and that it was now “proactively reinstating” affected accounts.

On the plus side, though, Ukraine official Mykhailo Federov was able to use Twitter to ask Elon Musk for help when the Russian assault knocked out the Internet in parts of the country.

“@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars,” Federov tweeted, “Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations. . . .”

That’s one way to get around the secretary barrier. And it worked.

“Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” was Musk’s tweet-response last Saturday.

Starlink satellites provides Internet access from space. No cables or optic fiber needed. Nothing for saboteurs to snip.

Good thinking, Mr. Federov. Thank you for the unreliably available platform, Twitter. Thank you, Elon Musk, for answering Ukraine’s cry for help and doing so as swiftly as possible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Elon Musk, Internet, Starlink, Ukraine, war

general freedom ideological culture

The Pivotal Issue

A recent video about vaccination passports brought to mind an old parlor game: “If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Hitler?”

Most civilized people realize the moral problems of this thought experiment. Sure, Baby Hitler grew up to be Nazi Führer Hitler, a mass-murderer worthy of assassination. But young Adolf wasn’t a monster. Yet.

Moreover, every step on the way to becoming a monster was accompanied by situations in which civilized people could have stopped the coming horrors without murdering a child:

World War I was a choice (or set of choices).
The Versailles Treaty was a choice.
The Weimar Republic hyperinflation was the result of bad decisions.

More interesting than Killing Baby Hitler would be a parlor game about who could have stopped each horrific event that went into the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. What decisions could they have made that would have changed history?

The point of these counterfactual exercises? To learn how to make better policy.

Such as in a pandemic, when governments are expanding their power over citizens with lockdowns and business shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. While in America many such mandates are being struck down as unconstitutional, beyond the authority of officials, in Germany and Austria vaccine passports are going into tyrannical effect.

We need to take seriously the warning in the video mentioned at top, This Pivotal Moment. Stop vaccine mandates. Reverse the mandates in effect. Abolish internal passports. Resist this tyrannical notion of a two-tier society.

In Europe, masses of people have taken to the streets in defiance.

Open defiance is also necessary here . . . in “the land of the free.”

That’s how you stop Baby Hitler.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, Hitler, totalitarian, vaccines, war

international affairs

Lack of Intelligence?

Afghanistan, US, United States, nation building

The quick collapse of the Afghan government and the takeover of the entire country by the vicious and barbaric Taliban was no intelligence failure, as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) ridiculously charged Sunday.

U.S. intelligence officials had informed the Biden Administration, as well as previous ones, of the inevitable consequences.

Nor is this mess in any way a failure of the US military.

It is a political failure, through-and-through.

While the withdrawal* could have been handled far better, the big mistake was thinking — for even a nanosecond — that we could remake Afghanistan into a pillar of freedom and democracy.

Or anything remotely close.

The U.S. has been there for two decades, our longest war, and could have stayed another hundred years . . . and still, when we left, this would be the result.

As this commentary warned repeatedly.**

I have come to support U.S. alliances with free peoples, within limits . . . the key limit being the American people’s degree of commitment. Such alliances would be more sustainable than our current role as world policeman, better protecting freedom from the admittedly serious danger presented by China and Russia, two exceedingly bad actors.

We can occupy unfree peoples — for example, the Afghans — perhaps forever if we are willing to expend the blood (our sons and daughters) and treasure, but neither the U.S. nor any other country has shown the capability to remake peoples or nations.

Liberation is beautiful. But if forced, it won’t take.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The U.S. Government bears some responsibility not to get people who work with it killed. We all seem to agree on that, even if we don’t agree on other issues regarding such interventions. So why does our government facilitate the placing of a price on many people’s heads and then cut and run without taking care to protect them? This is not a demand for perfection. But how about some quick visa paperwork and the offer of flights out of Afghanistan? In fact, fill out the stupid paperwork on the flight over here.

** In 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, etc.

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Tags Afghanistan, foreign policy, United States, war

The Draft

Slaves to “Equality”

“This will light up the right.”

So Rollcall, the Capitol Hill newspaper, quoted an unnamed Republican aide.

At issue? Last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee vote to force young women to register for the military draft. That provision is contained in the gargantuan National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Only five senators voted against mandating draft registration for women — all Republicans.

Two hawks, Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), so opposed the change that they joined the beer-swilling Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in voting against the overall NDAA.

“Our military has welcomed women for decades and are stronger for it,” Cotton explained on Friday. “But America’s daughters shouldn’t be drafted against their will.”

“It’s one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it’s quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives,” said Sen. Hawley, adding “compelling women to fight our wars is wrong.”

As is conscripting men.

This Wednesday, the issue will come before the House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). “I actually think if we want equality in this country . . .” Speier has argued, “we should be willing to support a universal conscription.”

Speier’s empty homage to “equality” does nothing for women, of course . . . or national defense.

“It’s time to end military draft registration altogether,” tweeted Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), “not extend it.” He joined a bipartisan group — Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — in a letter calling draft registration “expensive, wasteful, outdated, punitive, and unnecessary” and urging support for their legislation to end it.

Finally, some common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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Memorial Day

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international affairs

Afghan Angst

Declaring a coming end to “the forever war,” President Joe Biden announced last week that U.S. military forces will be leaving Afghanistan by September 11th* — a four-month-and-ten-day delay from the May 1 deadline that was set for troop withdrawal by the Trump Administration last year.

“Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” chided Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the Senate floor.

But wait a second . . . McConnell knows that negotiating for the enemy Taliban, the horrific human rights violator and sponsor of terrorism, to put down arms and join the government to share power has been the U.S. policy objective from the Obama Administration’s embrace in 2013 to the Trump Administration actually inking the agreement.

Dealing the Taliban back into the political mix, after having gone to war to dislodge them, never made sense. But neither does an ad infinitum military occupation seem rational . . . chewing up generations of soldiers until Afghanistan miraculously metamorphoses into a sustainable democracy. Two decades of U.S. nation-building offer no serious promise that the mission could be accomplished in another decade.

Or two.

Or ever.

Plus, plugging the problem in Afghanistan has not worked more broadly. “The terrorist threat has changed dramatically since we went to war in Afghanistan 20 years ago,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained. “Al-Qaeda is in Yemen and Syria and Somalia. ISIS is across that border region in Iraq and Syria and in multiple countries in Africa.”

Policy futility is a bad thing. Recognizing it is good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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