Anyone but me notice the number of “progressives” that positively celebrated the Ukrainian government giving out selective-fire AKMs to literally everyone who showed up in the parking lot to get one? Including left-of-center members of the Ukrainian Parliament, who were positively lauded for excercising (what NPR would never, ever refer to as) their God-given right to defend their lives, their families, their community and their freedom itself?

Note to fellow amateurs: the Javelin or NLAW missile, or even the Molotov Cocktail, are only useful against the tank if you can get your people into position to shoot, or drop, them on the enemy. And that takes the lowly rifle.

An analysis – amateur, but factually solid – on the role of “irregulars”, the type of people the late and unlamented “Dog Gone” used to refer to as “fat white guys with guns”, on the war in Ukraine.

It’s long, but it’s worth a watch.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, when gold and silver were currency, there was only so much metal so there could only be so much money. The government couldn’t create more money out of thin air, it had to tax citizens to obtain the money to run the government.

Lesko Brandon reminds us Milton Friedman no longer rules the world. The government can create as much money as it wants, simply by adding ones and zeros to bank accounts.

Fine. But then why am I paying taxes?

Joe Doakes

To show everyone who’s boss?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, almost nobody could read the Bible but they could
listen to the preacher draw lessons from Bible stories. Stained glass
church windows helped illiterate people remember the lessons from the
stories.

Modern churches have stained glass windows like this one from a
magazine. The designer says the colors represent liturgical seasons in
the Christian calendar (Christmas is red, Lent is purple, Advent is
green, God is the bright white center of all, etc.). Okay, if you say so.

I don’t like abstract art (I see no meaning in a mess).  I don’t like
jazz music – I can never find “the line” to follow the melody.  I don’t
like blank verse poetry:  if it doesn’t rhyme, don’t waste my time.

Wikipedia says: Philistines favor forms of art that have a cheap and
easy appeal.  Yep, that’s me and pretty much everybody in Christendom up
until about 100 years ago, when ‘artists’ stopped making art to be
enjoyed by adults and started making ‘art’ for their own
self-indulgence.   And they call US pig-ignorant savages?  I don’t think
so.  Time for a new renaissance in the art world.

Joe Doakes (but you can call me Phil)

I try – pinky swear – to see people as people, and not to be constantly petty and venal. We as people aren’d defined by our externalities – our jobs, politics, whatever – any more than we are by our social, ethnic or class identity.

Even less, in the great scheme of things, are they defined by the ways in which I, Mitch Berg, disagree with them.

With that out of the way?

Steve Sack is retiring from the Star Tribune.

I’m not going to say Sack is the worst editorial cartoonist in the business. It’s entirely possible there’s someone more facile, less informed, more generally blinkered by their agenda.

But among the ones I’m familiar with? I’ve almost never been a fan.

I’ll be honest – I came not to praise him, but to bury him.

Clearly, Sack’s “view of the world” is the one most DFLers are issued at graduation, and Sack’s work was more “birdcage” than fridge material. Truth be told, I often considered buying a bird specifically for Sack’s work.

And mine wasn’t the only opinion; I’m told Sack won a Pulitzer or two, which at one point not too long ago wasn’t purely self-parodic.

Anyway, Mr. Sack; all the best in your future endeavors – something I say knowing that anyone the Strib hires these days is going to make us miss your “glory days” in comparison.

The real danger to our society is “right wing terror”.

As the gone-but-not-forgotten, perma-blocked Dog Gone used to say, the danger is a wave or conservative violence that will “dwarf 9/11”.

While we wait,and wait, and wait, we saw this from a “journalist” for “Rewire News Group” re the firebombing in Madison we talked about earlier this week:

I’ve heard people on both sides of this issue say that abortion would be the spark for the next hot civil war in this country.

I disagree. The left’s response to being forced to share power, via shared powers, checks and balances and due process, with those they hate is going to be what the civil war is about.

Abortion will be one of the issues that will exercise the shared powers, checks, balances and process against which Big Left will revolt.

Government is the things we do together, stupidly and incompetenty.

Case in point – the formula shortage.

Which is – you guessed it – the fault of big government.

SCENE: Long after dark, in a ratty but not necessarily malevolent commercial and office district, in an unnamed “blue” city. A Hyundai crossover pulls up to the curb, in front of a relatively pristine, whitewashed brick wall on the side of a church.

Stacey HINTON, Executive Director of “Keep All Racists Eternally Nonplussed”, a white progressive support group, steps out of the vehicle. She furtively looks around, pulls a can of spray paint out of a bag, and starts to spray paint something on the white wall.

Gradually, it resolves into:

“If abortion isn’t safe, either are you”.

HINTON hurriedly climbs back into the Hyundai, and drives away.

Minutes pass.

Another car – a 1990 Dodge Ram – pulls up to the same spot. After a moment, Mitch BERG climbs out, and reads the graffiti. He shakes his head, mildly disgusted.

He looks around and, improbably and incredibly, notes a “Planned Parenthood” clinic which, oddly enough, is right across the parking lot from the now-vandalized church. It has a pristine, if dingy, yellow wall facing the parking lot. BERG saunters across the lot, checks his six, and pulls a can of spray paint from his cargo pocket. Slowly and vaguely legibly, he sprays the wall.

“If you threaten me and mine with political violence, finding an abortion is going to be the least of your problems”.

BERG walks back to his truck, and drives away.

And SCENE.

Pro-“choice” activists firebomb pro-life office:

Madison police and fire departments were called to the office of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA) around 6 a.m. on Sunday after a passer-by reported smoke coming from the building. The flames were extinguished and thankfully, no one was injured. Investigators found a smashed window and at least one molotov cocktail that had failed to ignite. A fire inside the office burned books and damaged furnishings. Additionally, the building exterior was covered with spray-painted graffiti, including the anarchy symbol (an A inside a circle, also used by Antifa), the anti-police tag “1312” (which stands for ACAB — All Cops Are Bastards), and the threatening phrase, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”

As I noted earlier, it seemed that the most likely likely of the (likely) expungement of Roe v. Wade would be that they’d have to start trying to convince voters, one at a time, of the rightness of their cause.

As we saw in Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the George Floyd riots, violence is certainly one of the ways Big Left “convinces” people.

There was no Christmas cheer among the soldiers marching to the Reichskanzlei (Chancellery) in Berlin on December 23rd, 1918.  The men were from the Volksmarinedivision, the revolutionary paramilitary unit created, in theory, to defend the newly established Council of the People’s Deputies and the burgeoning German leftist revolution.  In reality, the Volksmarinedivision was closer to the Independent Social Democrats and the so-called “Spartacists”; the more militant wings of the new government that preached a political gospel similar to that of Russia’s Bolsheviks.  The Volksmarinedivision had ransacked the Kaiser’s old Berlin residence, the Stadtschloss, and encamped themselves there after looting or destroying much of the historic artwork of the building.  The Council of the People’s Deputies had protested the division’s actions, seeing them increasingly more as hooligans than soldiers.  In response, the Council ordered the Volksmarinedivision out of Berlin and to dismiss all but 600 of their men.  When the paramilitary group refused, the Council stopped their paychecks.

Lieutenant Heinrich Dorrenbach, the group’s commander and close ally to Karl Liebknecht of the Spartacus League, marched on the Reichskanzlei ostensibly to follow orders – he had the keys to the Stadtschloss in hand and was prepared to reduce his forces and leave the city, provided the government issue their backpay.  But no German politician would claim that they were authorized to pay Dorrenbach and his men, deferring the decision to Berlin’s Chancellor and the Chairman of the Council, Friedrich Ebert.  Ebert had no patience for the Volksmarinedivision, whom he considered thuggish radicals led by a “rootless adventurer.”  The issue of the Volksmarinedivision had been one of many that was quickly dividing the new government, and Ebert was vainly trying to mollify both the political left and right in his ad hoc administration.  Whether Ebert intended to pay the Volksmarinedivision eventually or not, he wasn’t going to be threatened into a decision.

Dorrenbach had his answer.  His men swarmed the Reichskanzlei, blocking the doors and access roads.  Another contingent marched to the Kommandantenhaus, the military headquarters for the city, looking to capture the city’s military commander, the politician Otto Wels.  The building’s guard, regular army troops, resisted and shots were fired.  It didn’t matter.  The superior numbers of the Volksmarinedivision had overwhelmed the government, taking Wels and other key political figures hostage.  The moment that Ebert and many members of the Council of the People’s Deputies had tried to avoid had arrived – the German revolution was about to turn bloody.

Karl Liebknecht – Germany’s Lenin, at least in the eyes of many.  He lacked Lenin’s ruthlessness or political savvy, having often to be dragged along into decisions affecting the revolution

From the very beginning of the chaotic German end to the war, there was a fear in Berlin (and indeed, across Europe) that Germany was quickly staging their own rendition of the Russian revolution.  (more…)

SCENE: The set of a tony TV talk show; black background, two chairs, end table with two glasses of water. Mitch BERG is interviewing George ORWELL, back from the great beyond.

BERG: Mr. Orwell, one of your great quotes from 1984 was “He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the past, controls the present”.

ORWELL: Quite.

BERG: So when you see today’s American Left saying things like this – a woman who specifically called for shutting down schools, even as the science piled up that children and their teachers were safer from a public health perspective in school than at home, that most of Europe recognized this well over a year ago, and that fought hard to stay shut down long after most of society had re-opened, but then went out in public to say…:

ORWELL: Oh, I see things like that, and so much more, and I say to myself “George, you were such an impish young pollyanna back in 1948”.

And SCENE

Last year Vladimir Putin authored this paper arguing that “that Russians and Ukrainians were one people.” The paper looks back at the historical commonalities between Russia and present-day Ukraine, starting with the Kievan Rus, a federation formed in the 9th century of Slavic people but ruled by the Varangian, people of Norse (Viking) descent.

Putin emphasizes that the people of the Kievan Rus shared a common language and, with the baptism of Vladimir in the 10th century, which Putin mentions, a common religion in the Orthodox Church. With this conversion, the Kievan Rus developed strong ties with the Byzantine Empire. Many Varangians served Byzantine emperors. (One of them, Harald Sigurdsson, was defeated by Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, just a few weeks before Harold was defeated by the Normans at Hastings.)

The unity of Kievan Rus began to unravel in the 11th century, related in part to the decline of the Byzantine Empire, which in turn was related to the rise of the Turks. Putin specifically points to the Mongols, though, which devastated the region in the 13th century. Putin does not mention the 4th Crusade in 1204 which greatly weakened the Byzantine Empire even further.

From there, Putin traces the rise of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the pressure that put on what is now Ukraine, sandwiched between the Catholics and the descendants of the Rus now centered farther to the east.

The 17th century saw the rise of the Cossacks who carved out a state by rebelling against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the century saw considerable conflict between Poland, the Cossacks, the Russians and the Ottomans. Putin describes this conflict as a desire to maintain the Orthodox Church in the face of Polish opposition. Putin even uses the phrase “war of liberation.”

Ukrainians refer to this time as “The Ruin,” which is an indication of what they think of instability the conflict brought to the region. The conflict came to an end with the Truce of Andrusovo of 1667 and later the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1686. The result was Kiev and the “left bank” (which was actually the lands east of the Dnieper) were transferred to Moscow. On the “right bank”, ie west of the Dnieper, still held by Poland, Putin says “social and religious oppression intensified.”

Over the next two centuries, Putin says Polish influences fomented the stirrings of Ukrainian nationalism, and this in turn was used by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the World War I era. The chaos brought about by the Russian Civil War (see First Ringer’s recent post too) led to a declaration of independence in Ukraine. Putin says this “decision proved fatal for the ruling regime in Kiev.” Putin is not sympathetic.

Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia. To make sure of that, it is enough to look at the boundaries of the lands reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and the territory of the Ukrainian SSR when it left the Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.

Putin’s argument throughout his paper is to emphasize the close ties in language, culture and religion between the people of Russia and Ukraine. He indicates that where there was separation between the two, the people who valued these close ties were not given a choice in the matter.

He goes on for a few paragraphs decrying this lack of choice, and he ends with this.

I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.

Today, these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ”anti-Ukraine“. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.

I don’t doubt that Putin does not think of Ukraine as a separate nation, with its own history and heritage apart from Russia’s own. But, Putin’s paper is conspicuous in its lack of acknowledgement that the Ukrainian independence movement in 1990 was a choice, as was the Orange Revolution of 2004. He instead continues to focus on how “the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy.” He also reiterates that “Our spiritual unity has also been attacked,” as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church maintains a separation from the Russian Orthodox Church.

And yet, even if Putin truly believes that by invading Ukraine he is merely standing up for these Russians who want to maintain their historical ties to Russia, Putin is ignoring the fact that many people in Ukraine have looked to the wealth to the west, the oppression and poverty to the east, and have made their choice. Bombing them is only hardening them against Russia.

An anonymous lawyer friend (who is not Joe Doakes) writes:

I’d get in so much trouble if I posted this, but when I see people say that 70% opposethe overtruning of Roe v. Wade, my first thought is that no more than 2% even know what it says, much less what overturning it would mean.

And they also have no idea what the Mississippi law, challenged in the current case, says.

In terms of what it means?

I’m looking forward to explainingi this to pro-choicers: it means you’re going to have to do what we Second Amendment people have been doing for about the past fifty years; convincing people, one at a time, nationwide, of the rightness of your cause and case.

35 years ago, the same polls of uninformed and largely disinterested people said that 85% supported gun control, including a majority that supported banning handguns completely. That number is under 50% for the first time in a couple of generations.

And that’s because 2-3 generations of people have spent a lot of time, treasure and shoe leather convincing their fellow Americans that a constitutional right of the people is, in fact, a constitutional right of the people.

The terror the pro-choicers seem to feel about that concept tells us that while 70% of the people may respond to “Do you support women’s ‘reproductive rfights'” with “yes”, when you change it to “how are you with the thought of killing a gestating human?” it’s going to drop way off.

Americans want change, dammit!

I suspect modern Americans, if asked “should we install a single executive, with unlimited power over government, to get things done and solve the current crisis?“, it’d show something like 52% positive.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Congress has given Lesko Brandon the authority he requested, to enter into Lend Lease Agreements with Ukraine giving them any military weapons, supplies, materials and systems up to (but not including) weapons of mass destruction. Remind me – how’d we get sucked into World War II?

Joe Doakes

Joe is right.

But lend lease is also part of how we ended World War II, as well; giving someone else the material wherewithal to fight the part of the war we couldn’t.

I say this neither to agree nor disagree with the administrations action.

from Lynn Stuart Parramore, “cultural historian”…

Should conservatives on the Supreme Court strike down Roe v. Wade, they still won’t be able to blot out human nature and human history. They will just make life more dangerous and precarious for women in America today. Some refer to GOP politics as “medieval.” That’s an insult to medieval people — many of whom understood women’s reproductive and family planning needs far better than Justice Alito.

Click.

(ok, I cheated, I did make it to the end of the column to get to that paragraph, but only to save you from having to do it…)

“Everyone did what was right in their own eyes…” -Book of Judges

Remember when Bill Clinton bemoaned the “politics of personal destruction?” Good times. The snarling Left long ago declared conservatives in their private lives were fair game. And they’re at it again.

A leftist group posted on its website apparent home addresses of six conservative Supreme Court justices and is planning “walk-by” protests next week at their residences in the wake of the leaked draft from the high court that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

The group is called [not linking to them] — named after late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and announced a “Walk-By Wednesday” protest set for May 11 “at the homes of the six extremist justices, three in Virginia and three in Maryland. If you’d like to join or lead a peaceful protest, let us know.”

In connection to the planned protest, the site includes a map naming the six justices — John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — as well as links to what it says are the home addresses of the “Christian fundamentalist” jurists.

CatholicVote called on Biden to speak out against this sort of tactic.

President Biden must immediately and forcibly condemn these domestic terrorist threats. Anti-Catholic zealots are plotting to intimidate and harass Catholics across the country, along with justices and their families. This country was built on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The President of the United States must stand up for both.

The organization also pointed to this incident reported by the CNA in Colorado.

A Catholic parish church in Boulder, Colorado was defaced with pro-abortion slogans the evening of May 3, marking the second time in less than a year that the parish has been targeted with pro-abortion graffiti.

Photos shared with CNA by the Archdiocese of Denver show vulgar slogans spray painted on the church, such as “F* You,” “F the Church, F** the State,” as well as numerous inscriptions of “My Body My Choice,” “You don’t speak 4 God,” and a symbol that appears to be an “A” signifying “anarchy.” Red paint was also used to deface a statue on the parish grounds.

The graffiti covers the church doors, several outer walls, and a white pickup truck in the parking lot. At least one of the outer windows of the church appears to be shattered.

Why is abortion, of all things, the highest priority for at least the activist Left? Why is it the one issue where absolutely no separation from the herd is permissible? Why does this issue fill people with so much hate that they erupt in vandalism and profanity against a church? Nobody takes to the streets and breaks windows over the Build Back Better bill saying “Bleep you, I want my bridge!”

I have my theory that I’ll expand on in time, but what’s yours?

If you listen to the pro-infanticide crowd, you might think the Unted States “lagged” behind the heathens on the Continent when it came to “reproductive rights”.

Which is why listening to the pro-infanticide crowd is such a terrible idea:

Most of Europe is more restrictive than Mississippi or Texas.

Hold that thought.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Poll says Americans would welcome 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. Sounds generous, not?

But why so few? Experts estimate 4 million Ukrainian refugees have fled the country since Russia invaded. Why aren’t we taking more?

As I pointed out here, we take in 200,000 illegal aliens across the Southern Border EVERY MONTH and nobody says a word about it.

I wonder what the polls would say if Americans understood the numbers?

Joe Doakes

Another question: I wonder what it would take to make Americans understand the numbers?

So how to stop Dobbs? Declare a sex strike:

Some on the left have come up with creative ways they think will encourage people to save Roe v. Wade.

Earlier this week on The View, co-host Joy Behar floated the idea of a sex strike.

“Women in the world have conducted sex strikes in history,” Behar explained. “In 2003, a sex strike helped to end Liberia’s brutal civil war and the woman who started it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2009, Kenyan women enforced a sex ban until police political infighting ceased. Within one week, there was a stable government.”

“We have more power than we think we do and some of it could be in the bedroom,” Behar insisted.

As a general rule, restricting the supply of something that generates little to no demand doesn’t change much. And for Behar and her colleagues, their greatest output is not sex appeal, but rather self-regard. So go ahead, get on the picket line!  And rest assured, we won’t cross picket lines on this one.

Russia is spending a fortune in Ukraine, perhaps as much as $20 billion a day. In turn though, Europe is sending hundreds of millions of euros a day to Russia for hydrocarbons. Putting sanctions on Russia while funding Russia is not a comfortable position. So, the EU is contemplating phasing out its dependence on Russian, and that might have enormous implications for Russia’s economy.

Maximilian Hess of the Foreign Policy Research Institute looks at some of those implications:

On April 29, Russia’s finance ministry announced that it would pay some $650m to foreign creditors on two overdue Eurobonds. And by making the payments before the bonds’ grace period expired on May 4, the Kremlin has avoided falling into sovereign default.

Ahead of the bond’s formal maturity on April 4, the Kremlin announced that it would buy back the bonds in roubles – and pay those who refused to accept the rouble buy-back as well. Nearly 75 percent of bondholders (almost certainly all domestic) agreed to the new terms .

Russia’s recent decision to pay the bonds in foreign currency enabled it to avoid the all-but-guaranteed acceleration of other debts and lawsuits that would have followed a default and further impoverished the Russian people.

However, the move also left the Kremlin in a position of extreme hypocrisy and embarrassment. In the end, what Putin did was to repay domestic bondholders with roubles, which they cannot convert freely into hard currency to spend abroad. And pay foreign holders in full, in dollars – hardly a feat worthy of praise.
…
In case there is any doubt just how exposed the shipping sector is to Western sanctions, one just needs to look to the actions of Russian state-owned shipping company Sovcomflot. On May 3 specialist maritime industry publication Lloyd’s List revealed that Sovcomflot was looking to sell at least 40 ships from its 121 ship fleet before wind-down authorisations expire and it becomes fully sanctioned on May 15.

If Sovcomflot fails to raise enough cash to honour its debts before then, it will fall into default and creditors will go after its ships. Just like the Russian state, Russian businesses are still fearful of defaulting on Western creditors – even amid a war.

This podcast from the ICG takes a look at something that’s not often on the front pages, and that is Russia’s aims in Africa.

Over recent years, Moscow has bolstered ties with countries all over the continent, particularly those plagued by internal violence and disillusioned with Western powers. Russia remains a leading arms supplier and Russian private military contractors continue to expand their presence, most recently in Mali. Whether Russia is successfully pursuing a broader strategy, or merely engaging in tactical power plays, remains a matter of debate. Russia has long sought a naval base on the Red Sea and wields its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for influence on the continent.

This week on The Horn, Alan is joined by Samuel Ramani, author of an upcoming book on Russia in Africa. They talk about Russia’s historic goals and current strategy on the continent, differing reactions to the invasion of Ukraine, and why some African leaders pursue closer relations with Russia. They also discuss the new significance of African relations for Moscow today and how the war in Ukraine is already changing power dynamics on the continent.

In the late hours of November 17th, 1918, the southern Siberian city of Omsk was suddenly abuzz with activity.  A key junction along the Trans-Siberian Railway and the meeting point between the railway’s northern and southern branches, Omsk had seen it’s fair amount of political activity for months as the Provisional All-Russian Government, informally known as The Directory, had established the city as it’s seat of governance.  Uniting many Socialist Revolutionary members (SRs) who had held power in the original Soviets and the elected Constituent Assembly, along with former Tsarist officers, the Directory appeared as the potential precursor for a unified White Russian political movement. 

The Directory even appeared on the verge of gaining international recognition as Vice-Admiral Alexander Kolchak, recently returned to Russia from various overseas diplomatic tours, had decided to join The Directory’s Council of Ministers as the Ministers of both War and the Navy.  Kolchak had originally returned to Russia via Japan with the intention of traveling to the other side of the empire to join the former Tsarist officer-led Volunteer Army.  Instead, the Vice-Admiral had cast his lot with militarily inferior, but politically more diverse Directory.  Kolchak was held in high esteem by the Allies, and the British in particular, with British Military Attaché General Alfred Knox saying of Kolchak that he had “more grit, pluck and honest patriotism than any Russian in Siberia.”

Omsk’s commotion this evening however wasn’t more would-be politicians but Cossack soldiers.  Moving throughout the city, one by one, many of the 14 ministers of the Directory were swooped up by the Cossacks and placed under arrest.  By the following morning, the few Directory members who were left understood what had occurred in the wee hours – Kolchak and his supporters had staged a coup, arresting most of the SR-aligned ministers and executives.  By a private vote, the remaining Ministers gave their consent to elect Kolchak the “Verkhovnyi Pravitel” or “Supreme Ruler” of Russia, consolidating all political and military authority under his office.

From the Caspian to the Pacific, the newly formed “Russian Republic” held one of the largest territorial empires on the globe.  And for better and for worse, the White Russian movement now had a singular leader.

Admiral Alexander Kolchak – he would be viewed as the defacto leader of the entire White Russian resistance, but in reality Kolchak was barely in charge of his own Siberian government and held little practical influence over the rest of the White armies or leaders

The end of the war in Europe meant nothing towards ending the growing Civil War in Russia.  Despite invoking fear across the former Russian Empire and in many capitals around the world, the ruling Bolsheviks controlled precious little territory.  In the west, Ukraine, Finland and the Baltic States had split away.  In the northern port cities, the Allies held sway, occupying large swathes of land that would be directly or in-directly governed by White Russian collaborators.  The Caucasus were losing some ground back to the Bolsheviks, but chunks of the region were still led by a loose confederation of ethnic governments, leftist Menshevik politicians and thuggish Cossack warlords.  And in the East, thanks to the Czechoslovak Legion and Allied intervention, the entire country from Azerbaijan to Vladivostok had been in the hands of the newly formed Provisional All-Russian Government.  The regions that lay in the hands of the Bolsheviks’ opponents were large – well more than half of the original Russian Empire – but the industrial base of the country and large population centers were mostly under Red control.  (more…)

Big Left has been chanting about “reforming” the Senate again.

Rep Phillips summed up a chanting point we’ve heard from the likes of Tina Smith and Nancy Pelosi:

Let me spell this out for the benefit of Democrats: the US is not – or is not supposed to be – a government with all significant power centralized at the national level, like the UK or France. It’s a federation of states – the United States, a group of independent and interdependent mini-nations joined in a federation with limited, enumerated powers.

Among the primary reason to enumerate and limit those powers? To prevent the most populous states from dictating national policy to smaller states.

It’s why we have a House of Representatives to directly represent The People, and a Senate that represents the interests of States; to check and balance the interests of both sides.

This enumeration of powers, and limits on those powers, is called the Constitution. The Constitution is very closely analogous to a contract.

And when you breach a contract, the law – well, a just legal system – offers relief to the parties to the contract. Including the dissolution of the contract.

Abrogating the Senate’s ability to check and balance the majority and act in states interest is a breach of contract, and grounds for dissolving the Union.

Prove me wrong.

NOTE: If your answer is “the question ‘can we secede’ was settled in 1965”? No. Two reasons:

• It was settled in 1776.
• If the contract is null and void – and it will be – then there’s no union to secede from.

F*** around and find out.

To: Gavin Newsom, Governor, the Peoples Republic of California
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Fact

Governor Newsom,

You tweeted:

I am reliably informed by people not only aligned with your party, but teaching in several of your state universities, that “men can get pregnant”.

That is all.

At the Met Gala, yet again:

Celebrities, showing their faces.

Hired help, still muzzled.

I’m not going to say that the upper crust feel that they are immune to Covid.

I am going to say that their version of “science” has convinced them that the invasion of Ukraine and the imminent repeal of Roe V. Wade has given them immunity.

Glad I could clear that up.