Following The Conflict in Ukraine

Many people were surprised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to the point of apologizing for discounting the idea, including the Secretary General of the UN.  I am not surprised they actually did it, and can't figure out why so many people didn't see it coming.  But I, and most of the rest of the world, have been surprised at how strong and effective Ukraine's resistance has been against a much better armed Russian military.  Supposedly they have destroyed hundreds of armored vehicles, shot down planes full of paratroopers, and killed hundreds or thousands of the invaders.  They have clearly not only slowed the advance, but even taken back ground in certain areas.  It certainly bodes well for the 2nd Amendment supporters here at home, making their case for the value of an armed populace.  Because this is nearly all being done with handheld weapons, against modern tanks, fighter jets, and attack helicopters.

While I would love for this to be a humiliating defeat for the Russians, I fear that it may provoke them to use stronger weapons to destroy Ukrainian cities instead of capture them, killing thousands of civilians.  I think the use of nuclear weapons is unlikely, but should require a Nuclear response from the US.  (The Budapest Memorandum in pretty clear on that point, even Russia agrees.)  But there are lots of non-nuclear weapons that can cause significant damage, carpet bombing cities, or burning them to the ground.  Hopefully that would elicit a response from the rest of the world, even from China, distancing itself from that travesty which would be broadcast in real-time as Russians repeated it in different locations.  And it might even generate a response within Russia, turning the tides of power against Putin, as many of his allies in Moscow would not stand for it.  But even if it let to a change in power in Russia, it would be an unspeakable tragedy for the Ukrainians.  And while cities were bombed in WWII, weapons are so much more powerful now, that much more damage could be done in a shorter period of time, and with less risk to the aggressor.

I do wonder what the US would do if it detected that Russia was launching nuclear missiles at Ukrainian cities.  Would we attempt to shoot down the missiles?  If not, why?  What would there be to lose at that point?  I also think it would be interesting to use submarines to engage ships in the Black Sea, as there should be some level of deniability there.  If Putin turned around and his Black Sea fleet was gone, that would be fitting.  We don't know what happened, sorry, war is hell.

It will be interesting to see what happens.  I am impressed by, and rooting for, the Ukrainians, but they definitely need our prayers.  And our support in any way we can help them.

Ukraine

I once again find myself writing about major international events as they are unfolding.  This time it is Russia's attack on Ukraine that appears to be in the opening stages tonight, with airstrikes of some sort taking place in large cities there early Thursday.  After that amount of buildup, it seemed unlikely to me that Russia wouldn't follow through.  I can't envision even the intended endgame, but I suppose a new "independent" government loyal to the Kremlin is the most likely outcome Russia is looking for, although they may try to just absorb Ukraine entirely, after Putin's "Ukraine isn't even a real country" quotes over the years.

While it seems likely Ukraine will fall quickly in the face of a full scale assault, I believe that it is possible that Ukrainians could mount a a reasonable level of resistance in the form of an insurgency, but Russia may have counters to that.  In Afghanistan, the helicopters were Soviets strength against the locals, and once they were neutralized, the fight went the other direction.  We need to determine what that factor is in this conflict, and figure out how to counter it.  I expect that factor will be electronic in some form, but I am not sure exactly what, either information warfare, or cyber attacks to infrastructure, or disrupting communications.  The Russians will probably fair better than Americans have against an insurgency, because they are less concerned about the collateral damage they cause.

Obviously one of the main concerns, is that the violence would escalate beyond the borders of Ukraine, and spill into the surrounding countries.  I don't think this is the beginning or WW3, but it is possible.  If the Russians inflict casualties on US forces in the region, even is inadvertently, it could lead to a larger conflict.  I also don't think it is the beginning of another 50 year Cold War, like people were proposing this morning, but I think those misconceptions will have been put to bed in the next 48 hours.

This seems pretty clearly an issue that there is nothing I can personally do about, so I am less stressed about it than some of the other current events, like Australia and Canada's slide into authoritarianism, the general Covid craziness, and the rest of the US government's debacle of everything it undertakes, under its own incredible weight.  But it is disturbing none less, and having a great deal more impact on a large number of people, and nearly none of that impact will be positive.  Clearly something to be praying about.

Afghanistan

While I have loosely followed the Afghanistan conflict for the last twenty years, most of the details usually came out in books years after the specific events transpired.  But as that American intervention comes to an end, it is getting more attention than it ever got while it was happening.  It is hard to imagine a worse outcome after all of the time, money, and blood that has been invested in that process.  It is now apparent that we should have left a long time ago, or never left.  Either would have been preferable to the current mess.  Probably a combination, drawing down to smaller numbers long ago, and leaving a persistent force to stabilize the area in the long term, and give us options in the future.  We have been in Korea for over 70 years, and we don't see any pressure to bring soldiers home from there.  And having an airbase between Iran and China would be a significant strategic benefit in any future conflict.

Hindsight is 20/20, but some of these things should have been foreseeable.  If we were set on leaving, the biggest single mistake, as I see it, was giving up Bagram Air Base a couple weeks ago.  That should have been the final point to withdraw from, as the last soldiers left the country.  That way if something unexpected happened, like the Taliban taking over the country over a weekend, we would still have some level of control over the situation, and some options available to us.  That would have avoided the stampedes at the civilian airport, and allowed evacuations to be conducted in a dignified fashion.  It is close enough to the capital to allow extractions by vehicle or helicopter, and outside the city far enough to allow extractions from other areas.  It would also have given us the option to delay the withdrawal when things went south.  We can't stay in the airport forever, but we could have held Bagram for months.  We could supply it by air if needed, like the Berlin Airlift, and use it as a base for whatever operations the situation dictated.

As it is, I have no idea how it will play out.  Either we will leave anyone who hasn't made it out by the 31st behind, which seems the most likely outcome, or any number of other things could happen, depending on how extreme the Taliban's response is to the situation.  We also need to destroy as much of the gear and weapons we left there as we can.  But I don't envision that happening anytime soon.  It will be interesting to see the political fallout of this fiasco.  It is obviously the crisis of the moment, but the big question is, will it blow over in a week, or will it linger long enough to motivate actual changes?  If there are a lot of people left when the military pulls out, and the Taliban takes a violent approach, it could have a significant impact.  And will those changes be enacted by Republicans, or Democrats?  Or the media could move onto something else, and all of this will be forgotten about by mid September.  Only time will tell.

Forcing People to get Vaccinated

I am in the middle of producing an episode about vaccinations for my online web series.  I wrote the script over a year ago, before COVID or a potential vaccine for it were even on the horizon.  Fortunately the principles I convey in the script are universal enough that they are just as applicable to a pandemic as they are to longstanding childhood diseases.  But there is no getting around the fact that the current situation have upped the stakes of the ongoing conflict over vaccinations.

I personally feel that this is a cut and dry issue, that has little do with science or the quantifiable effectiveness of vaccines.  It is either ethical to forcibly inject people with chemicals against their will, for the potential benefit of others, or its not.  If we want more people to get vaccinated, we need to have a strong case for why they should do so, which is not always true.  By my measure, you are more likely to die from the measles vaccine than you are to die of measles.  MMR vaccine that was given to my son listed a 1/450K chance of death as a side effect, (among other risks) so with 3.6Million births in the US, that would lead to about 8 deaths annually from the vaccine, before we even factor in that 2 doses are recommended.  The last person to die of measles in the US was in 2015, and I believe the total measles deaths since 2000 is in the single digits.  So it appears that statistically my son is more likely to die from the MMR vaccine than from measles, but neither is a likely outcome.  Now if there was a significant decrease in the number of people being vaccinated for measles, it is likely that eventually more people would start dying from measles, increasing the risk of not being vaccinated.  And this would motivate more people to get vaccinated, until an equilibrium was found.

COVID is a little different, due to the extreme variations in peoples reactions to the illness, and the unknown long term effects of both the disease and the potential vaccines.  Both sides can make all sorts of claims that can't yet be verified, and the stakes are much higher based on what has been sacrificed to combat the disease so far.  And because it has been so long since a disease of this severity has come around, that most people have nothing to compare it to, and have no reasonable sense of risk tolerance.

And since people also have trouble comprehending large numbers, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have died from it can't be properly put into the context of hundreds of millions of people in your sample set.  All of this leads to a highly emotionally charge environment where we will soon have a debate between two already polarized factions, about whether or not to force people to get vaccinated.  While forcing people to get vaccinated is completely antithetical to the idea of being a free country, if the battle over masks is any indication, the media will be pushing it "for the greater good" because "it is not just about you."

Is it the end of the world to be forced to get a vaccine?  Hopefully not, although currently the side effects appear worse than the virus symptoms in younger people.  But it is a terrible precedent to set, against the principles of personal liberty, and according to those who fought the Revolutionary War, the principles of personal liberty are worth dying for.  So we shouldn't abandon them for a slight possibility that it might decrease our changes of getting a disease that has only the remotest chance of killing us.

Election Night

 I am deliberately writing this post before looking into the results of today's election.  I dropped off my absentee ballot yesterday, so I don't have any direct involvement in "election day."  I have been working outside all day and have heard nothing of the news.  All elections are times of uncertainty, but this one more than most.  It seems likely that the outcome will be contested, probably more-so than the issues in Florida in 2000, so it one sense, it seems preferable that one side wins decisively.  But after polling failures in the 2016 race, not predicting the winner with any degree of accuracy, it is even harder than usual to know what to expect.

I would prefer Trump winning, as I see nothing overwhelmingly bad resulting from that, especially if the Democrats control the House, and possibly the Senate.  If Biden wins, it is likely that the Democrats will control Congress as well, leading to few restraints on their publicly promised abuses of Federal power, to attempt to control the pandemic, the climate, the economy, and the culture.  I for one, do not want to see America "transformed."  It is possible that nothing terrible would happen under Biden, but it is also possible that Harris would end up in power, which is not a pretty picture.  The Democrats could pack the court, ignore or overturn the 2nd amendment, control people's healthcare, surrender sovereignty to the UN, and a host of other terrible things for American freedom.  Trump may be far from perfect, but he has limited government growth in the face of the biggest crisis of a generation, which is more than can be said of George W Bush's department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

At the present, both sides appear to expect their candidate to win, and fully expect the other party to riot in the streets when they lose.  I suppose it is possible, and we will only discover the truth of one side of those claims.  If Trump is declared the winner, we will never fine out how his supporters would have reacted to his loss.  Same goes for Antifa, BLM, and others if Biden wins.  I don't really want to find out either way.  But it is is sign of the unstableness of our society.  I haven't been stocking up on food and ammo like some people I know, but I will be less anxious once the result is settled.  Even if the result doesn't go my way, then we can deal with those potentially stressful repercussions as they come.

When is it Justifiable to Shoot Someone?

The shooting in Kenosha Wisconsin is the latest in a series of controversial violent events in the upper Midwest this summer.  This is the first one not to directly involve a police officer, meaning that the rules which govern who is responsible are different.  Just a quick recap, 17 year old Illinois resident Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha with an AR-15 to protect businesses from rioters.  He was allegedly guarding a gas station when he was attacked by a group of rioters, some armed with guns.  He showed enough restraint to allow one close enough to knock him over and club him with a skateboard.  In an impressive recovery, we was able to shoot three of the rioters, two of whom died from their injuries, and make his escape.  One of the victims was clearly armed with a pistol, but it is not clear who started shooting first.  Kyle is currently charged with first degree murder, presumably to placate rioters.  It appears that the DA should have the latitude to rule this as self defense with no charges, or charge anything up to murder one, but what charge is justified?

While we don't know the exact circumstances, nor the details of what happened, it is still worth examining the principles we would use to determine who is at fault, once the facts of the matter are established.  I can't speak to what is legal, only to what I believe is right or wrong, and therefore I believe "should be" legal.

First off, he is a minor, and apparently not legally allowed to openly carry a gun.  I think that is a reasonable guideline that should rarely be enforced for its own sake.  Minor's have a right to self defense, but one could argue it is their parent's responsibility to protect them, not their own responsibility, and therefore they shouldn't need a gun.  Regardless, I think the fairest way to handle the issue, is that if anyone over 14 or 16 is openly carrying a firearm, they automatically be treated by the justice system as an adult.  If you want to run with the big dogs, you have to play be the same rules.  On the other hand, if you want to charge him as an adult, you can't reasonably charge him with possessing a firearm that is otherwise legal for him to have.

Now that the age 17 issue is set aside, they are all out after curfew, meaning that they are shouldn't be on public property.  I don't know what the legal rules around curfews are, but they shouldn't apply to people on private property with the owner's permission.  This conflict started at a gas station, which is private property.  If Kyle had the owner's permission to be there to defend the location from rioters, the curfew should not apply to him.  The curfew would apply to the rioters, as they were either on public property, or trespassing on private property without permission.  If Kyle didn't have permission to be there, this becomes a non-issue that cancels out, but if he did have permission, this should weight heavily in his favor.  If the conflict started on private property (the gas station), even if he was pursued onto public property (running down the street), that should be in his favor.

Then there is the issue that someone was clubbing him with a skateboard.  We don't know for sure who threw the first punch, or initiated the violent contact, but it seems unlikely that it would be the guy holding the rifle.  What we do know is that Kyle is not afraid to shoot someone if he feels it is justified.  Knowing that to be the case, and that he was clearly outnumbered, it doesn't seem reasonable that he would set aside his rifle and initiate a hand to hand confrontation.  We know that he showed enough trigger discipline to let the guy who knocked him over get within reach.  At some point after that, the shooting started, and one of the people he shot was holding a pistol.  If he didn't shoot first, I can't see how this wouldn't be a clear cut case of self defense.  If someone is shooting at you, I can't imagine a case where it wouldn't be totally justified to shoot back.  This was the premise of dueling back in the day, if I understand correctly.

If Kyle shot first, how do we determine if this was a case of legitimate self defense, or murder?  I am sure that there are some established legal thresholds for this, that vary between states, and some of which are probably ridiculous, based on the 80 year old charged with killing a home invader who had already beat him and left him for dead.  He was outnumbered by violent attackers, some of whom were armed with guns as well, and they were actively assaulting him.  And on top of that, other people have been killed by rioters in other locations recently, further making that a realistic possibility.  So it appears to me that his life was clearly in danger.

So unless there is some major revelation that changes the basic facts that have been shared with the public, I see no reason that this shouldn't be considered a case of self defense.  He would have to have been there without permission, and been the aggressor, threatening those who were not threatening him, and have fired first, for it to be reasonable to charge him with murder.  If any of those three things aren't true, I think he is justified in his actions, primarily because he was outnumbered and on the ground, regardless of the fact that his attackers were armed.

It takes true courage, or true stupidity, to attack someone who is holding an AR-15.  So the person who was beating on him with a skateboard is either a hero for attempting to subdue a homicidal maniac with his bare hands, or deserving of death for beating on a kid who got the best of him.  The DA clearly sees it as the former, but I don't think that is likely, unless a lot of new information comes out.  Other people seem to agree with him in demonizing Kyle without that other information, so I doubt anything like that will be forthcoming.  The reaction against him is all based on feelings, not on the actual events as they have been reported, similar to a number of other recent incidents that have set people off.

States Rights

The tension between the individual states and the federal government, over who has authority over what aspects of society, has existed since the constitution was ratified.  The short version is that the states have constantly losing ground to the expanding federal government, ever since states rights reached their peak at the signing of the tenth amendment.  Traditionally Republicans have favored maintaining as much authority at the state level as possible, while Democrats have been in favor of shifting as much of that authority to the federal government as possible.

Now that there is a Republican president, we hear less about states rights, because neither side of the aisle benefits as much from advancing their traditional position.  But this week, we have seen a big shift in how the Democrats are approaching that issue, with two separate compacts being agreed to by multiple states, to work together outside of the federal government, to coordinate the re-opening of America as the corona virus lock-down restrictions get lifted.  This is in direct defiance of the President's assertion that he has the authority to determine when the lock-downs get lifted.  I was originally encouraged by this conflict between the states and the federal government, as it weakens the overall power of government (think checks and balances) and would lead to getting things open sooner.

I favor easing the restrictions progressively over time, but starting immediately, since the peak has passed.  And two entities competing over who has authority creates a race for one of them to pick a date that the other has to respond to.  If someone throws out May 31st, it will be hard for the other to extend past that, putting them in a weak position, but they could push it forward, so that it will be visible that they were the one responsible for re-opening the economy.  This probably leads to an earlier release than otherwise would have happened.  I still think that is possible, but most of the talk is still about things over a month out, which I think is ridiculous.  It is unnecessary and unsustainable, both economically, and politically.  There will be a rebellion before then, and rightfully so.  And the economic damage increases at an exponential rate over time, just like the virus did.

The longer the lock-downs are in place, the more force will be required to maintain them, especially as it becomes more obvious that they are not necessary.  That application of force is the main problem, both it its implementation, and in the precedents that is sets.  We are already seeing all sorts of abuses of power that escalate as the situation deteriorates, and those are more concerning to me than the virus ever was.  I would prefer to risk losing 2% of our population, to losing a higher percentage of our freedom.  There are all sorts of ways to illustrate that freedom is more valuable than life, but in this context, the best one might be to point out that even the most oppressed beggar in Asia has life, but very few of earth's inhabitants have freedom.  And scarcity is one measure of value.  That scarcity will only increase, based on the direction we are headed, further increasing the value of the freedoms we have.