Robots for the cause

“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.” – Kat Katczinsky's character in All Quiet on the Western Front

The Friday Letter / No. 483 / March 11, 2022
Second Sunday of Lent (Sunday) Purim begins at sundown Wednesday

The closest I got to knowing anything about military combat came while crawling in the mud at night past exploding fake bombs in Army basic training and in learning how to dissuade rioting peace creeps with a bayonet at the end of an M-14 rifle. Fortunately, I never had to stab one of my fellow citizens.

And so I find it unimaginable what it must feel like to find oneself in a kill-or-be-killed situation, faced with having to shoot dead a teenage boy who doesn't know why he is there, whose inconsolable mother will grieve the rest of her days. This I do understand: A soldier's first mission is to stay alive.

I must kill this faceless enemy to keep him from killing me. He doesn't stop to wonder if this guy who is trying to kill him has a girlfriend or a pet dog, or an anxious mother waiting at home.

“The object of war,” Gen. Patton said, “is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

The civilized world recoils in horror today, most of it taken by surprise at Vladimir Putin's Hitler impersonation. Never mind that Putin advertised his intentions openly, even as the more naive didn't see the war crimes coming, the bombing of apartment buildings, the murder of women and children and other innocent civilians, and just Wednesday, the shelling of a maternity hospital.

Vladimir Putin and his inner circle of thugs should be tried for war crimes and hanged in public. The entire civilized world must demand it. Anything less would make a mockery of justice.

And even as we grieve for the Ukrainian soldiers and citizens, we can't help but feel sympathy for the young Russian conscripts who were lied to, told they were on a training mission, and sent on a mission of evil, many to their deaths in a cause for which they had no understanding or role in creating. Once the shooting began, they would learn they were supposed to hate innocent people they had never met.

Perhaps you have seen clips of captured Russians soldiers who are surprised at the humane treatment shown by their Ukrainian captors. It must have confused them to be given food and cigarettes. We saw other acts of human decency as well, the Poles who welcome Ukrainian refugees at the border, people from everywhere delivering food, supplies, ammunition, and cash – stranger to stranger, human to human whose common trait is the love of liberty.

And now the world gets a three-dimensional view of the difference between good and evil – the Russian strongman who bombs apartment buildings and incinerates civilians, posed against the peace-loving citizens with a sovereign, duly elected if imperfect government who treat kindly the ignorant dupes who were sent to kill them.

Short takes on the news

Nebraska becomes the 17th state to call for a convention to consider amendments to the Constitution under Article V. Says Jim Kallinger, president of the National Association of former State Legislators, the proposed amendments “would rein in the power and jurisdiction of the national government, impose fiscal restraints, and place term limits on federal officials.” Thirty-four states are required to convene the convention. Alaska, Florida, and Georgia were the first to make application, in 2014. . .

We want to follow up on Kamala “Kammy” Harris' appearance on a podcast last week that prompted one wag to announce that his 9-year-old daughter has been hired as a Harris speechwriter. “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country,” she helpfully pointed out to listeners who might not be aware.

To add context to this brilliant display of statecraft, we will add that the vice president is like the president's helper who becomes president if the president can't do the job. The president lives in a big white house called the White House (Get it?). . .

Kammy took time from her busy schedule of fighting laws that abuse homosexuals and prevent blacks from voting to fly over to Ukraine to stop the war. To “fly” means to take a trip in an airplane. Before she left, she sent out a tweet: “Let’s send the Equality Act to President Biden’s desk. We must increase protections for LGBTQ+ Americans across the country. The onslaught of state bills targeting transgender Americans and their families is wrong.” A transgender is a boy who pretends to be a girl. Bombing a children's hospital is also wrong, but we aren't sure Kammy agrees. . .

Great moments in solving problems that don't exist. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is feverishly trying to erase its work backlog. Just this week it approved a permit to release millions of genetically engineered mosquitoes to combat Dengue fever, Yellow fever, and the Zika virus in the Florida keys. The scheme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, isn't going over particularly well with locals. The last Yellow Fever epidemic in North America occurred in New Orleans – in 1905. --from a story at Just the News. .

Duck Duck Go falls in line with the wok generation. The search engine that touts itself as the uncensoring alternative to Google announces that it will begin “downranking” websites “associated with Russian disinformation.” The company will be the sole arbiter of what constitutes disinformation. . .

Nancy Pelosi's hand-picked kangaroo court of Democrats and Democrat sympathizers is trying to criminalize Republican efforts to raise money to safeguard elections, Mollie Hemingway writes at The Federalist. She notes that Democrats raised millions from the Russian collusion hoax.

More good news for Democrats. A top Biden pollster says Russia's invasion of Ukraine is good news because now Putin can be blamed for skyrocketing fuel prices, Just the News reports. Never mind that on average, gasoline had jumped more than a dollar before Putin invaded. “The good news is we now have a very specific reason for rising gas prices and a specific villain,” pollster Celinda Lake told the Washingtn Post. We are confused only because we understand that Putin had nothing to do with shutting down the Keystone pipeline or banning drilling and fracking on federal lands. . .

Election fraud update. Wisconsin joins Pennsylvania as a state most likely to have illegally declared Biden the 2020 winner. Months after the election, federal prosecutors said two Iranian nationals “stole the identities of 100,000 voters in an effort to influence the election.” Wisconsin reported Biden the winner by about 20,000 votes. For a current summary of 2020 voting fraud, see this report by Just the News editor John Solomon.