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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Tags foreign policy, Memorial Day, veterans, war

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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Tags Afghanistan, foreign policy, war

government transparency

Why We Still Live

The year was 1983. One man, trusting his instincts and his knowledge of how technology can fail, averted catastrophe by not “pushing the button” to launch Soviet missiles at the United States.

It was September 26, and we celebrate it here, at Common Sense with Paul Jacob, as Petrov Day, after the day’s hero — indeed, the world’s hero — Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. Though tensions were running high in the early Eighties, Petrov suspected a false alarm. Events proved him right.

Petrov is not alone on this specific heroes’ list. There’s also Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who averted disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But the oddest list candidates might not be human.

A week ago or so, when I reported that a former head of the Israel space programs, Professor Haim Eshed, had talked, in an interview, about Israeli and American diplomatic relations with a “Galactic Federation” — yes, of extra-terrestrial aliens — I failed to mention that he had also claimed aliens had averted nuclear war.

Is he crazy? Lying?

Well, ufology lore and de-classifed military documents tell of repeated — and unnerving — UFO incursions into the operations of both Russian and American military nuclear missile installations. We could easily dismiss these claims when the U.S. military was denying any mysterious UFO reality out there — after all, people like to tell tall tales — but that’s not the case now, when the Pentagon has confessed that something very real and really weird is indeed going on in our oceans and atmosphere.*

But the Pentagon is not admitting to treaties with alien civilizations. The “official position” of the U.S. military, despite increasing numbers of disclosures, is that the UFO phenomenon “appears to remain a mystery,” as Tim McMillan concludes his recent extensive survey of official congressional briefings for The Debrief.

Still, the official, accepted reason we have not experienced massive thermonuclear war is merely game-theoretic: no winners being possible, as we learned in a popular movie a few months before Stanislav Petrov had to make his big decision, rational players wouldn’t start one.

Yet, Mutually Assured Destruction is initialized MAD, and those with limited faith in human reasonableness not unreasonably consider, at least, other explanations for our continued survival.

So, hail Petrov; honor Arkihipov; and . . . consider . . . aliens?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As we have learned in the reporting, “Flying Saucers” aren’t the only form seemingly inexplicable UFOs take. The latest is “triangle.”

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Tags aliens, MAD, nuclear war, UFO, war, War Games

international affairs national politics & policies

The Return of the Imperialists

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 2, 2020
1 Comment on The Return of the Imperialists

We don’t live in a Star Wars universe. Not yet. But certain themes crop up: republic gives way to empire, and elite corps of . . . magic fighters? . . . seek to run a technocratic state.

Donald Trump was cast by Democrats as an evil emperor sort of figure, but he didn’t quite fit that script — being the only president in two decades not to engage in a regime-change war.

So, with President-not-quite-Elect Joe Biden publicly announcing his new cabinet heads, we can see the old script followed closely, with the imperial guard piling up outside the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania, panting for power.

Though there are reams of news stories about this to pore over — the picks are big news — I’ll focus on Reason’s round-up. Of course, Biden is offering up Big Spenders (for whom deficits and debts just don’t matter*) as well as gung-ho interventionists. Take the Secretary of State candidate, Antony Blinken, profiled by Bonnie Kristian. While the proposed Secretary pro forma admitted that America cannot “solve all the world’s problems alone,” he then suggested that “our government can solve all the world’s problems if only it partners with other governments,” Ms. Kristian relates. She notes that Blinken has supported “U.S. military action in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

“And though he has since regretted the Yemen call, he believes the mistake in Syria was a failure to escalate.”

President Donald John Trump has followed the bomber love of his advisors, but has never quite bought into the need to escalate every conflict. And for that audacity, the foreign policy establishment has loathed him.

When Biden does hobble into the White House, we can unfortunately expect fewer ‘failures to escalate.’

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* While Republicans do almost nothing to hold back deficit spending, and consequent debt accumulation, Democrats increasingly demonstrate a special zealotry in confessing their lack of concern.

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Tags foreign policy, Joe Biden, war

international affairs national politics & policies

In Deep with Biden

On Election Day, “the Empire hopes to strike back,” writes Daniel McCarthy for The Spectator. “Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

McCarthy argues that “Biden’s overall record is one of foreign policy interventionism,” but Biden’s Senate voting record is iffy-fifty: Biden “voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge.” He voted for the 1999 Serbian war, which destabilized relations with Russia, allowing the rise of Putin. But Biden voted against 1991’s Persian Gulf adventure which set the stage for post-Cold War American megalomania.

Nevertheless, McCarthy argues that “Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.”

Such a plausible case. War is certainly government “activism.”

McCarthy has spotted a real problem in “progressive liberalism,” and understands the “peer pressure” that so oppressively rules in the corridors of power. But he misses — perhaps merely for reasons of space — the sheer institutional power of the Deep State. It holds the secrets, it controls vast amounts of money, its immensity overpowers rational thought.

It is the government we cannot get to; it is the government that tried to “get” Trump.

Perhaps our “right to petition the government” can skip Congress and go right to the source, the Deep State.

Which really wants Biden to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags deep state, foreign policy, Joe Biden, war

ideological culture The Draft too much government

How Un-Warlike

It’s war!

A common refrain regarding the coronavirus. “This is our World War II,” say media mavens and politicians . . . who have never had to endure anything like World War II.

The utter vapidity of the “war” response was explained very well by Peter Schiff on a recent episode of The Tom Woods Show. Schiff is famously bearish on the American economy, which he has argued for years is addicted to debt and consumption but not production and responsibility. He notes how different this new “war” is.

Folks today, he argues, have no more idea how World War II was won than how the economy works.

Politicians increased taxes during the war.
Americans were not bailed out: they had to struggle to survive, even on the home front, as
they had to do without creature comforts. Taxes on goods and services sky-rocketed, to pay for the war . . .
in which many young men died.
Middle-class wealth was tapped like never before, to win the two-front war, and one mechanism to aid the effort was the withholding tax . . .

which now we are talking about suspending.

What is widely being proposed today is not the “socialism” of war, where lives and wealth are conscripted.* What is being proposed is the “socialism” of bailouts and sugar-plum fairies, where consumers are coddled.

And unlike in World War II, Schiff contends, there is no vast private wealth to tax to pay for what is deemed necessary. Instead, we have debt.

It is indeed a strange war where we fight the threat of any harm coming to us, or any sacrifice required.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* We should oppose the conscription of individuals, as was done in the First and Second World War as well as Korea and Vietnam. Not only does it violate the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude, it was not needed then, nor is it now. More on this later in the week.

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From a photo by Nick M

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Tags corona virus, coronavirus, Do something, pandemic, suicide, war

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.

More on the Draft and Registration: