I don’t think people understand peace-making. We understand war. We understand a cease fire, but we don’t understand peace. This is because there hasn’t been much actual peace-making in a long while. I’m thinking about it and there is the Israeli-Egyptian peace of 1979, the Israeli-Jordanian peace of 1994 and that’s about it since World War Two. We don’t count the peace treaties between, say, the USA and Japan post-WWII because that wasn’t a real negotiation to end fighting – the war was long over and it was just to regulate relations between the two powers. Every other conflict ended in a ceasefire or complete subjugation of one side to another. The process of actually sitting around a table and negotiating the permanent end to a war is rather alien these days, we’re not used to it. I suspect we don’t really know how to do it.
Peace making isn’t easy. The really grand peace treaties – Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War, Utrecht-Rastatt ending the War of the Spanish Succession, Aix-la-Chapelle ending the War of the Austrian Succession – could take months or sometimes years to get done. This is because when you make peace, you have to get people to agree to a permanent solution. Even though you know the parties to the treaty might want to try again at a later date, you still have to work on the assumption that this is it – all claims are to be settled in one document that everyone agrees to. And the kicker is that both the victors and the defeated have to take some hits in the process. The defeated for obvious reasons, but the victors daren’t press the matter too far or the defeated will just keep on fighting…part of the reason the War of the Spanish Succession went on so long even after France was effectively defeated in 1709 was because the terms offered for peace were too humiliating for France…so, the French just dug in their heels and kept fighting until they were offered better terms. You have to give to get – and that is another thing people just aren’t used to these days. Everyone wants it all.
Trump is trying to arrange a peace between Russia and Ukraine and he’s pretty much getting no help from anyone. Our “allies” are undermining, the Ukrainians are trying to sabotage and the Russians are trying to extract every ounce of advantage. This is tough, as Trump would say. And it is made doubly so because I don’t think any of the principals involved – except Trump and his team – understand that the goal is peace. You know: peace. End of the war. Armies are demobilized. Troops go home. People get on with their lives. What the world is expecting is another cease fire…which keeps the armies in place taking pot-shots at each other until some time in the future when it all blows up again. Trump doesn’t want that. And the whole world shouldn’t want that…but they simply don’t understand the basic concept of peace…of being done with it all.
The Russians have won the war – they invaded, took large amounts of territory and absent a NATO army intervening, Ukraine lacks the power to expel them from Ukraine’s territory. But for there to be peace, Russia is going to have to give back a bit of what they stole. And the Ukrainians are going to have to ratify most of the Russian theft. Is this ideal? No. But this is how wars sometimes go…there has been a winner and a loser, but there hasn’t been a total destruction of one side like there was in WWII. This means Ukrainians and Russians have to meet and talk it out until they come to a resolution…and a resolution that neither side is going to be totally happy with (the Ukrainians less happy than the Russians). And once an agreement is struck, sign the treaty – have it ratified by both nations (and anyone else who wished to be a party to it), demobilize the armies, resume normal diplomatic relations and get on with life. If Ukraine won’t accept a deal then it becomes a matter of just how long the West will be willing to sustain their war effort. If Russia won’t offer a deal where they give back at least some of what they gained, then Putin will have to decide how long Russian can sustain it’s war effort. That will be as it will – but the first step to peace is to get the two sides talking. Trump is trying to get that rolling…but I think that the Ukrainian leadership is hoping they can outlast Trump…maybe make it to 2029 still alive and then the no-questions-asked aid will resume…for Putin, his worry would be similar…that once Trump is gone the Western powers will start to stir the pot and encourage a Ukrainian war of revenge.
I hope Trump succeeds. This would be a huge part of his effort to restore norms (all of Trump’s policies are just that – an attempt to get us back to the sane way we used to be). The world isn’t perfect and the arrangements the world makes will also not be perfect. But a bit of good will – and even the least recognition that war involves killing people – and we can get to an agreement which even if not perfect, at least stops the shooting and allows people to live in peace.
And, heck, its got to be better than just grinding ahead. As nobody will ever actually agree to send a NATO army to Ukraine, the hope of the pro-war people is that we can just keep the killing up long enough until Russia suffers and internal collapse. This is not totally insane because Putin’s regime is not totally secure. But Putin has also been in power for quite a long while and the Russians soldiers continue to obey orders so the chances of an internal upheaval defeating Russia as it did in WWI are small…and meanwhile day in and day out, kids are being killed in battle. How many more dead before its ok to talk peace? I think quite enough blood has been shed.
I understand that Ukrainians might feel very different about it…if your house was under Russian occupation you’d much rather keep fighting. I understand the Russians also might feel differently… they’ve expended a lot of blood and maybe figure a much larger slice of Ukraine is their due? I can’t speak directly to that – I’m neither Russian nor Ukrainian. I can only say that I understand it…and I still say that it is better to talk peace. Sure, maybe at some point Putin will tumble from power…and sure, maybe the Russians will finally figure out how to break the Ukrainian line…but, how long? How many dead before either of these events happen? What if they never do?
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God…I’m hopeful that Trump will manage to get them to peace.
Blogs For Victory 
There is an interesting article on Substack this morning.
I understand the frustration of knowing what has to be done and not seeing visible progress, but I think some of this has to be toned down a little. For example, the author complains
My response is, to quote Curly from City Slickers, “day ain’t over”. This administration is trying to drink from a firehose, and I see these early days as identification of problems preparatory to working on solving them. What I do like about this article is that, once the griping is out of the way, there are actual recommendations, with some detail, of how to approach some serious problem solving, which is a nice change.
Keep in mind that these are the fractal computing people who have been able to do deep dives into voter registration rolls to see registrations with addresses that turn out to be vacant lots or Wal Marts, so this is their focus. But they have good ideas that can be implemented.
This is a great idea, but to implement it the FBI has to become functional again. He has other recommendations that call for citizen activism: I don’t know how this could be done. Spook was (and is) part of what was probably the best TEA Party group in the country and his people might have some ideas. It seems to me that the ideas in the article should be enacted by every state GOP, which theoretically already has some sort of organization in place.
I understand his frustration. These people have built an amazing system that allows for constant, in-depth, analysis of voter registration rolls and it is being ignored. One of his points really resonated with me, because I am less than impressed with dependence on “government issued photo IDs” as adequate to halt voter fraud.
It’s a thought-provoking article with some good information. As for me, I would much rather spread my volunteer work out over months, working on the ideas he provides, than just spend part of Election Day monitoring ballot counting. His ideas are based on the novel concept of proactively stopping ballots from being sent/returned, if we can’t stop mail ballots altogether.
That would be an excellent approach to take. But as for “day isn’t over”…sure isn’t. This morning the FBI arrested a Milwaukee County circuit judge on charges of helping illegals evade arrest.
We’re still very early into Trump II…
We have to accept the fact that any effort to have clean elections—that is, elections in which only citizens can vote, can vote only one time, and have every vote counted and counted only one time—is going to be blocked by activist judges if at all possible. And it is clear to me that establishing election integrity is going to call for a multi-directional approach.
Yes, demanding the production of a government-issued photo ID to vote is a good idea, but we also have to make sure that only citizens have government-issued photo IDs that qualify as adequate identification to vote. Right now we have an activist judge ruling that there can’t be a requirement of proof of citizenship to vote.
There is an argument about how much the federal government can dictate regarding voting, as the Constitution lets states decide how they will handle elections. Some federal control has been accepted with the passing of the National Voter Registration Act (“Motor Voter”) which dictates to every state that it is required to offer voter registration to every person who applies for a drivers license or government ID. That got pushed through with Dem support, for obvious reasons, although it is an intrusion on state sovereignty regarding the authority for each state to control its own electoral process. It would only be an incremental addition to this intrusion by requiring each state to demand proof of citizenship to get a photo ID clearly identifying this status. That would leave a very small subset of people with no government issued photo ID who wanted to register to vote but without proof of citizenship.
I have been harping for years on the blatant disregard for the legal definition of “certification” when it comes to accepting vote counts that are obviously inaccurate, and I wonder if, once the elections are held according to individual state laws and electors are sent to the Electoral College, the federal government might have the authority to reject the electoral votes from a state where a vote count proved to be inaccurate has been improperly “certified”. A perfect example is Arizona, which very promptly identified something like 40,000 ineligible votes due to the voters no longer living in the state and approximately the same number disqualified for other reasons. Yet the state “certified” a vote count proved to be false, and then sent electors to the Electoral College to cast their votes based on the false certification.
I wonder if a multi-pronged approach based on certification might be effective. That is, at the state level have a process to either challenge certification if proof is present that the alleged vote count is materially inaccurate or file suit against whoever does the certification if this is the case, coupled with a federal ability to reject an electoral vote on the same basis.
So if the fractal computing people can produce proof that a certain number of ballots had been sent to or returned from illegitimate addresses, this number would have to be taken into consideration, along with other data on non-residence, multiple voting, non-citizen voting, etc. And a determination would have to be made regarding the ratio of illegitimate votes needed to disqualify the election from certification.
This would shift a huge responsibility onto those in charge of the elections. Suddenly, instead of being invisible and unaccountable background administrators they would be held personally responsible for damages due to improper or lax election standards, and so would the legislatures or secretaries of state who do the official “certification”.
“Certification” is an important concept—except when it comes to electing the President of the United States, when it is a mere formality that blatantly violates the usual, legal, use of the word. Legally, it means, according to three sources:
(1) a writing by which an officer or other person bears testimony that a fact has or has not taken place.
(2) Black’s Law Dictionary gives as a definition of certify “To attest as being true or as meeting certain criteria.”
(3) If something is certified, it means it has been proven to be true.
Every definition of the word includes the element of testimony to the truth or accuracy of the subject of the certification. By applying this standard to registering of vote counts in elections we would be putting legal pressure on election officials to do everything possible to avoid having proof that illegitimate votes were counted, because false certification and/or inability to certify would disenfranchise approximately half of the voters in a state by eliminating its electoral college representation.
Today two terms which imply seriousness—“certification” and “oath of office”—- are reduced to mere performative theater with no real substance, just an illusion of significance.
I’ve always thought of Indiana as one of the more squared away states when it comes to elections, but Our Secretary of state and Attorney General requested information in October, 2024 from the Biden Administration on nearly 600,000 Indiana voters who registered without providing any proof of U.S. citizenship. Of course they received no response, so they’re trying again with the Trump Administration.
Indiana is one of the states whose ID requirement for voting has been upheld by the Supreme Court, so, as a law-abiding citizen, I’d like to know how 12.5% of Indiana register voters were allowed to register without fulfilling that requirement.
That Substack site has all sorts of in-depth information. For example, they have cross-referenced voter registration with an address data base, learned that the address is really a park or a WalMart, and then expanded their search to matching the names of actual voters to the information on the rolls and then the addresses.
There is literally no excuse for a state to have people registered to vote who have given bogus addresses, just a determination in any state to cling to these illegitimate voters.
This is where citizen activism comes in—this site will provide the data but citizen groups need to flood local TV stations with charts and videos and post them all to social media, in huge numbers.
Yes, by all means, KEEP DIGGING!
The Mrs was asking me why the Democrats are doing this – all the flat out for illegals, corruption and boys playing in girls sports – and I can only explain it in 1984 terms…the Democrats have all become Goodthinkers. Whatever the Party says is the truth, regardless of what your eyes see. It is very much that scene where Winston is arguing that two plus two must always equal four but O’Brien is asserting it can equal three or five or all of them at once if the Party needs it to.
Orwell was prescient.
I would also factor in a large dose of sheer oppositional reaction to anything “The Right” seems to like or advocate. If Trump were to admire gravity it wouldn’t be long before we saw anti-grav movements and claims that gravity is racist because it seems to affect black people more than white people.
Certainly the all-out wars on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were to push newly patented drugs but I think the real motive was to deny Trump any credit at all for suggesting anything beneficial. People died, but to the Left all it meant was that they kept Trump from putting points on the board.
But your 1984 reference is spot on. “Whatever the Party says is the truth, regardless of what your eyes see.”
Yep – and the evil part comes in because they believe they are good. It is seen in the reaction to that Milwaukee judge getting arrested…two seconds ago “nobody is above the law” and now its “arresting judges is fascist!”…they say this, knowing what they said before, and believe they aren’t lying.
I’ve posted this before but it can’t be pointed out too often.
8 U.S. Code § 1324
(A) Any person who—
(iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation;
(v)
(I) engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or
(II) aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts,
shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).
(B) A person who violates subparagraph (A) shall, for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs
(ii) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), (iv), or (v)(II), be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both;
Remember, in law “shall” is an imperative. It does not say “might” or any other word that allows modification of the penalty.
Now let’s start seeing the same thing happen to “sanctuary” states and cities, with governors and mayors and sheriffs and attorneys general being arrested and charged with the same crimes. Federal crimes, BTW. Felonies. Disbarment, for starters, for all the attorneys, and as we see that includes judges.
Homan cited 8 U.S. Code § 1324 at least once to my knowledge, warning people they are risking arrest and imprisonment, but they are so arrogant and convinced they are above the law (often while screeching “no one is above the law”) that there is always stunned disbelief and outrage when the consequences start to show up.
And Homan is being super nice and gentle about it – “knowing or in reckless disregard“…Homan has said he won’t prosecute people who don’t help catch the illegals…but “reckless disregard” means that if you don’t help catch someone you pretty much know is illegal, then you have broken that law.
As I keep pointing out, all those immigration reform laws we’ve passed since Reagan all promised massive enforcement so that we won’t have the problem any longer…and, sure enough, they put gigantic, sharp teeth into the laws against being illegally in the USA…it is just that nobody has enforced the law save during Trump’s first term and now.
The attitude that “arresting judges is fascist!” shines light on a couple of Leftist belief systems.
One is that there is really no definition of “fascist” other than “something that pisses me off” so the term is a general and therefore meaningless pejorative.
Another is the acceptance of an elite class which is somehow entitled to govern and also decide which rules to follow and which can be ignored. This is part of the Leftist passion for consolidation of power in the hands of elites, rather than keeping it with the states or the people. It’s why the Left wants our government to be a massively powerful, top-down, Central Authority. It’s why they gravitate toward dictatorial government–they not only did not object to one man (or someone running his AutoPen) dictating that everyone in the country be forced to inject an experimental drug, many wanted those of us who refused to be arrested, jailed or put in camps. It’s why they were furious at the overturning of Roe v Wade, because it rejected federal or central control and put authority to legislate back in the states.
This attitude was touched on by Thomas Sowell in “Conflict of Visions” in which he stated an observation that people tend to fall into one of two basic belief systems: One is that human beings, simply because they are human, are all subject to weakness and corruption, and therefore systems must include processes to mitigate control by individuals, while the other believes that people can be perfected and so puts its faith in individuals it believes to be worthy of great power over others. That is a gross simplification of his analysis, but basically correct. When these worldviews are applied to politics, we find that the first group is likely to support, in the United States, its Constitutional form of government because of its dependence on process to spread power among many and dilute individual authority, while the Left is on the side of wanting power to be consolidated and turned over to an elite class which is not constrained by process.
Wisconsin Judge Threatens To Halt County Hearings Over FBI Arrest Of Milwaukee Judge
Judge Monica Isham checks so many boxes in her indignant virtue signaling temper tantrum.
(1) the first minority woman to serve on the Sawyer County bench
(2) Stupidity on steroids. ““Enough is enough. I have no intention of allowing anyone to be taken out of my courtroom by ICE and sent to a concentration camp, especially without due process as BOTH of the constitutions we swore to support requires,” Isham wrote.” Aside from the ignorance shown in the comment about “a concentration camp” one would think a judge would understand that an arrest precedes due process. She might go back and re-read both of those constitutions she preens about honoring.
(3) Arrogance and hubris, combined: “If this costs me my job or gets me arrested, then at least I know I did the right thing.” Again, smug virtue signaling but seeming unawareness of the stupidity in claiming that violating federal law is “the right thing”, even though it victimizes people who have hearings scheduled on things that are important to them. She is grandstanding to try to establish herself as a hero, and has succeeded only in identifying herself as a moron.
(4) Narcissism and entitlement. Her email is a litany of complaints about the alleged racism she had seen in her courtroom and had directed at her, which she seems to think entitles her to make up her own rules.
Yes, she could—and should—lose her job. As for being arrested, once again a judge seems to have a remarkable lack of understanding of the legal system., as well as of the facts surrounding the arrest of Judge Dugan.