Playing the Long Game

One of the saddest election stories I’ve seen recently came out of France. The PBS Newshour aired an interview with a tall, attractive waitress, Mariama Sadio, at a sidewalk cafe [set the timer at 4:40]. She wasn’t going to vote for Emmanuel Macron, she said. In this Sunday’s two-candidate runoff for President of France, that implied she didn’t plan to vote at all.

What made the story sad was that Ms. Sadio is Black. Her failure to vote is, in effect, at least half a vote for Marine Le Pen, France’s female Donald Trump light. If Le Pen wins, Ms. Sadio and everyone else in France who is not white and Christian will suffer increased discrimination, decreased stature and loss of rights. French people who hate them just because of who they are will gain power and political legitimacy. It’s even possible that France—which played the midwife at our own nation’s birth—could fall to the right wing and make “liberté, égalité, fraternité” little more than an advertising slogan.

Whether in France or here at home, the battle for equal, progressive government is a long game. It never ends.

Black American leaders know this well. It was, after all, Jim Clyburn who raised Joe Biden’s primary campaign from the dead. Ultimately, he and Black voters helped give us an experienced, competent, decent president at a critical time in our history.

Black leaders know the long game because they and their ancestors have been at it for four centuries. With biblical patience, persistence and perseverance, they just got the first-ever Black female confirmed to the Supreme Court. It only took 403 years from their ancestors’ arrival as slaves on this continent.

So how can all of us progressives play the long game now? We can keep our eyes on the ball.

Many of us are wasting time wringing our hands, bemoaning the probable loss of the House in the upcoming midterm elections. Republicans are framing a midterm loss by the ruling party as an absolute Law of Nature. They are gloating long before the first vote is cast.

But the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. She won’t until November, over half a year away. And half a year is a lifetime in politics.

Even more important, there’s the Senate. For several reasons, Democrats have a good chance in this midterm election to gain a real working majority in the Senate. Not a hang-by-your-fingernails majority with Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote as VP. Not a precarious majority with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema acting on things like voting rights and climate change as if they were Republicans. This time, the Dems have a chance to gain a real, working majority of progressive or progressive-leaning senators.

So what’s the point, you say? Without the House, the Dems can’t pass any legislation. Our government will be dead in the water, even more than it’s been so far.

But there’s a long-sought prize that a truly Democratic Senate can give progressives. It can kill the filibuster stone cold dead. Once and for all.

That would be no minor prize. The filibuster appears nowhere in our Constitution. For centuries, it has been a tool of slaveholders, racists, segregationists, corporatists, monopolists, oligarchs, authoritarians and other bullies who benefit from minority rule, especially rule by the rich. Time and again, the bad guys have used the filibuster to stop a clear popular majority in its tracks.

The filibuster is an insidious creation of those who don’t really believe in democracy. In recent years, so-called “conservatives” have exploded its use by orders of magnitude, turning our Congress into little more than a political theater. Now, in less than a year, this cancer on our democracy can be gone.

If that’s not a good reason for voting in this spring’s primaries and again in the general elections in November, I don’t know what is. If you’ve any doubt about voting, or about the necessity for picking the lesser of two evils, just ask Stacey Abrams or Jim Clyburn. Hear them out, and then ask “Where and how do I register?”

The long game doesn’t end with excising the tumor on our legislature. The pendulum can swing back again. Our Founders themselves said so: they saw the House as the body most vulnerable to popular “passions” of the moment.

Republicans (and some misguided progressives) have been able to blame President Biden’s inability to complete his entire agenda on Democrats, conveniently ignoring the reality of Manchin’s and Sinema’s perfidy. But if the Republicans take the House this year and the Dems increase their majority in the Senate, there will be no doubt who will take the blame for the resulting inaction of Congress. Nothing will get done but performative politics, i.e., political theater, as moron-blowhards like Marjorie Taylor Greene and David Madison Cawthorn do their thing. (Why do some buffoons use three names: do they feel inadequate with only two?)

If the Dems and GOP split the House and Senate this year, we might as well relocate the Capitol Building to Broadway. Maybe then the NYPD under Mayor Eric Adams can protect it.

But in 2024, the pendulum just might swing back. The Dems will have a real chance to win because the finger for inaction would point straight at the GOP. The lie that Dems now have a true majority and are responsible for inaction would lose credibility. Dems could take Congress for real, keep the presidency, and install a government to make FDR proud.

All it would take is keeping the faith, keeping our eyes on the prize, never failing to pick the lesser of two evils and never, ever failing to vote. If we don’t do all of these things, the greater evil could prevail, risking the loss of our Republic, forever.

We should all watch Sunday to see whether something like that happens in France. Lafayette, we are holding our breath.


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A “Not Qualified” Judge Plays Doctor

By now, everyone knows that Florida Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the CDC’s mask mandate from her judicial bench.

She had been rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association, for lack of trial and lawyering experience. Former President Trump appointed her, and the still-Republican Senate confirmed her appointment, during the 2.5 month interval between Trump’s losing the 2020 election and leaving office.

Talk about a “lame-duck” appointment! This “not qualified” appointee served a mere two years on the bench before overturning one of the most important federal public-health directives in a still-raging pandemic. What’s wrong with this picture?

To know what’s wrong legally, read how Ruth Marcus debunked Judge Mizelle’s opinion. As a Washington Post columnist and graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Marcus ought to know. But the judge’s specious and ideology-driven reasoning is far from the whole story.

The gist is a federal judge—and an inexperienced, “not qualified” one at that—substituting her political ideology for the CDC’s medical expertise. The key point is the specialization and division of labor that make our modern scientific-technological society possible.

No matter how right-wing you may be, would you want Donald Trump taking out your inflamed appendix or replacing a valve in your heart? Would you want him piloting your airplane or programming your computer? Would you want him running your local nuclear power plant? No matter how left-wing you may be, would you want Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez doing these things? No, you probably want experts doing them, because it takes half a lifetime of education and training to get to be good at them.

In government, experts reside in our so-called “bureaucracy.” For forty years, Republicans have made “bureaucracy” a dirty word. But our dirty little American secret is that the we have the world’s best bureaucracy. It makes our lives longer, safer, healthier, richer and better than they would be without it.

Our bureaucracy does a whole bunch of things that we take for granted every day. NOAA funds and runs the weather predictions that private websites make available, with hourly and daily forecasts. The FAA, TSA and NTSB ensure the safety and safe operation of our aircraft and our car and truck traffic. The FDA makes sure that the drugs we take are safe and effective, not useless or harmful “snake oil.” OSHA, USDA and the EPA make our workplaces and food safe, and our environment less unhealthy. Our bureaucracy sends us seniors social-security checks (or direct deposits) reliably every month. Through Medicare and Obamacare, it makes sure that seniors and others have medical insurance, who otherwise might not. Various Advanced Research Projects Agencies created the basic software protocols for the Internet and the medical technology for the mRNA Covid vaccines. And NASA got Americans into space and sent men to the Moon.

Things are different in Russia today, just as they were in the old Soviet Union. A Russian named Tupolev, like Andropov, was one of history’s greatest aircraft designers. But unlike his counterparts in the West, he and his team of engineers designed and built aircraft in a big prison, supervised by Soviet Commissars. The commissars, with no engineering expertise, tweaked the engineers’ budgets and supervised their day-to-day work, looking for any sign of treachery or disloyalty and telling them what to do. Can you imagine designing something as complex as aircraft under these circumstances?

Am I making this up? Unfortunately, no. The whole sordid history appears in a little Samizdat (Soviet-era self-publishing) book entitled “Туполевская Шарага” (“Tupolev’s Forced Labor Camp”). I read it to keep up my Russian proficiency after my Fulbright Fellowship in Moscow, where I taught law, in Russian, at the same institute (MGIMO) that had trained Putin years earlier.

The dismal little book had a happy ending. Toward the end of World War II, Tupolev’s Forced Labor Camp managed a successful test flight of a new bomber to fight the Nazis with. After a brief celebration on the test runway, and after a few rounds of vodka, Tupolev and his workers went back to their Stalinist prison.

On learning of Judge Mizelle’s decision, I thought of Tupolev and this history. How different, I asked myself, is Soviet Commissars supervising aircraft design from an untrained and “not qualified” judge countermanding medical and public-health experts’ decisions on how to fight a pandemic?

Until Judge Mizelle’s decision—and maybe again on appeal—a 1984 Supreme-Court decision called Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. set the rules for American bureaucracy. If a federal agency’s interpretation of a law is “permissible” (NOT necessarily the best), and if its regulation is reasonable, the courts are to defer to the agency, not to question it.

In other words, our courts are to let the experts do their thing, not to play ideological commissars in the old Soviet Union. Our bureaucracy must have a wide range for reasonable judgment because it’s where our experts reside, and, in our specialized society, we can’t get along without them.

In her decision, Judge Mizelle played the commissar. She “balanced” the values of “personal liberty,” which masks restrict, against the pandemic’s threat to public health, without any expertise on medicine or public health. In other words, she let her own personal opinion—as a “not qualified” lame-duck appointee with no relevant expertise—prevail over of judgment of the dozens of CDC experts and expert consultants who made the mask mandate.

How far is that kind of decision from Tupolev’s Forced Labor Camp, or from public health decisions being based on the personal opinions of someone like Donald Trump? (Recall his recommendations for drinking chloroquine and using intravenous sunlight and bleach to kill the Covid virus.) You decide.


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Justice (to be) Ketanji Brown Jackson

Lately Putin’s cruel war in Ukraine seems to be sucking the oxygen out of the news and monopolizing our national focus. But it would be wrong—and psychologically unhealthy—not to celebrate the now-assured ascent of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to our Supreme Court. In this dismal age, her confirmation is a beacon of light. It’s like a “hand of God” sunbeam that shines through briefly parting clouds in a darkening storm.

As a lawyer for eight years and a law professor and legal consultant for over twenty-five more, I have a special perspective on Judge Jackson’s confirmation. Of course I celebrate the symbolism of her Blackness and female gender. It’s long past due.

But to me, Judge Jackson is much more than a symbol of agonizingly slow national progress in race and gender equality. She could lead our legal system back from misguided abstractions, which often border on the delusional, to our roots as a practical people with feet planted firmly on the ground of daily life.

In the last dozen years or so, our Supreme Court has made three of the worst decisions in its 231-year history. Perhaps the very worst was Shelby County v. Holder, decided in 2013. The Court saw no continuing need to pre-clear states' voter suppression, because it found they had stopped doing it. With that blind decision, it opened the floodgates for the rampant and flagrant voter suppression that we see in red states today. That suppression could destroy our democracy still. It could help ignite a second civil war.

In Citizens United v. FEC, the Court opened the spigot of anonymous “dark” money in politics. It did so just in time for the cryptocurrency revolution to corrupt and subvert our democracy with unseen billions from unseen hands. And so we now have a system in which private propaganda organs like Fox and Sinclair—privately (and often secretly!) funded by billionaires in the most unequal economy since Genghis Khan’s—compete with “us, the people” reaching into our shallow pockets for a few bucks to level the media playing field.

Last but not least is McDonald v. Chicago, decided in 2010. There the Court held gun possession a personal right, intended in part to protect citizens against our own government, despite the Second Amendment's explicit mention of “a well-regulated Militia.” And so we Americans now have the largest collection of unregulated firearms in civilians’ hands in human history, both per capita and in hard numbers. Consequently, we also have human history’s most catastrophic rate of random and totally unnecessary massacres of innocents, including schoolchildren.

The direct cause-and-effect relationship between these monstrous decisions and the crumbling of our democracy and our civility is apparent to anyone who can reason without ideological prejudice. What is less apparent is how and why our Supreme Court got them so wrong. The reason, I think, is that most of our Supreme Court Justices lack experience in the realities of human life that the rules they make govern.

Take the late Justice Antonin Scalia, for example. After six years at a high-end corporate law firm, he held a series of academic posts, interspersed with appointed policy-making legal positions in Republican administrations. He spent not a single day as a trial judge, a public defender, or (insofar as his biography reveals) a trial lawyer. His entire judicial experience before ascending to the Supreme Court was four years as judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where he ruled on appellate abstractions as appellate judges do.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s biography is similar. Her experience as a practicing lawyer consisted of three years with a boutique law firm that got acquired (while she was there) by one of the nation’s biggest corporate law firms. The rest of her career, before her elevation to the Supreme Court, involved teaching in law schools, serving on a federal advisory committee, and a mere three years as an appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

These and other Justices had distinguished legal careers. But they lack the practical experience of human reality that comes from seeing witnesses testify personally in a courtroom. They have little basis on which to judge how the law and our legal system affect the rest of us. They have their heads in a cloud of legal abstractions and their feet nowhere near the ground.

The now-retired PBS news commentator Mark Shields had a more practical view. He was appalled by the Court’s decision in Citizens United and decried it shortly after it came down. He said that he wished the Justices who had decided it each had experienced just one run for an elective office, whether as sheriff or county commissioner. Then they would understand how money corrupts politics, and how powerfully and often it does so.

When you look at our legal system from the bottom up, you see something quite different from the what appellate judges and Justices see in their ivory towers. You see a criminal-justice system in which only one out of twenty defendants ever sees the inside of a courtroom. The rest plead out in hard bargaining with prosecutors and police, who use every psychological trick to get them to give up their rights under our Sixth Amendment “to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury[.]”

On the civil side, “contracts” that you sign on a form or with the click of a mouse now extinguish your rights under English and American common law developed over the 807 years since Magna Carta. In their place—and in the place of our Seventh-Amendment right to a trial by a jury at common law—you now get secret arbitration, with nondisclosure requirements and gag orders. You also give up your right to participate in a class action, which is the only practical way that we, the people, can get recompense for minor errors and swindles that, in the aggregate, make corporations billions. Secrecy of outcomes may be the worst of these effects: how can you know your own “rights” if you never hear of a neighbor who got a big judgment in arbitration in a case just like yours?

Untethered from the sordid details of reality, abstractions can become delusions. Take the GOP mantra of “limited government,” for example. So far does it control today’s right-wing mind that people ignore how much government does for us every day.

With its dedicated scientists and supercomputers, NOAA gives us our (mostly accurate) weather predictions when we wake up before we go on outings. The EPA keeps the air we breathe and the water we drink from being even dirtier. The NTSA makes sure our cars are safe and investigates airplane crashes, including the recent disaster in China. The FDA gives us safe and effective drugs. The TSA keeps guns and terrorists off our planes. The Coast Guard patrols our coasts. The rest of the military protects us from monsters like Putin and Kim. The Army Corps of Engineers designs a lot of our highways, harbors, national parks, dams, levees, waterways, and bridges. For geezers like me, the SSA deposits my social-security check into my bank account reliably and seamlessly, every month. Medicare lets me go to doctors and hospitals without fearing bankruptcy. And, unbeknownst to most youth today, the federal government, through DARPA, invented the Internet and funded its initial, non-commercial development. Oh, and did I mention that NASA sent men to the Moon?

Every day, things that expert, dedicated government scientists, officials and bureaucrats do make our lives incomparably easier, richer, and safer. Like Mark Twain’s premature death, the notion that government is a bumbler and useless compared to private business is greatly exaggerated. Yet the abstract right-wing myth, repeated endlessly, has taken control of our collective minds and made us zombies. Recently, I had to remind an old colleague of all that our government does for us, even though he had spent most of his career working in a government-run and government-funded physics laboratory.

Thus my hopes for and confidence in Justice Jackson derive from far more than her race and gender. With her four years of legal practice, ten years as a trial judge, and two years as a public defender (unique on the high court), she has a lot more in her head than seductive abstractions. She has the vicarious experiences of all the real people—plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses—whom she represented or who testified in person before her in her courtroom. She has her relationships with the clients whom she defended in criminal trials and vicariously their experiences, good and bad, with our criminal justice system.

So Justice Jackson’s opinions are sure to be based on justice tempered with realism, practicality and mercy. At least that was so with her Solomonic decision in the child-porn case of Wesley Hawkins.

Yes, this is the same case that her rude Senate detractors demagogued against her. The teenage defendant had no criminal record and had expressed contrition. He had only viewed child porn on his computer. He hadn’t produced or created it. With his ambiguous sexuality (he later came out as gay), he would have been a prime candidate for rape and abuse in prison if given a long sentence. So Judge Jackson gave him three months: long enough to scare the hell out of him but short enough to prevent repeated in-prison abuse from ruining his young life and possibly making him a hardened criminal. Isn’t that the kind of justice that each of us would want for ourselves if in a similar situation?

My fantasy for Justice Jackson is seeing her preside, some day, over a trial of Vladimir Putin for war crimes, just as Chief Justice Robert H. Jackson (no relation) did in the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals 77 years ago. She’s that smart and that good. She has a personality that everyone who’s worked with her seems to have adored. So she just might bring our Supreme Court out of the clouds of disembodied abstractions in which it has been living, and back to practical reality, before those abstractions-become-delusions destroy us.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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How to Help Ukraine Now

Five weeks ago, I wrote a hopeful post about Ukraine entitled “A War to End War?” It analyzed two modern phenomena—(1) plenary economic sanctions in a globalized economy and (2) high-tech accurate weapons—that might make Putin’s Atrocity the last unprovoked invasion by a major power. It also analyzed the low risk of nuclear escalation and found it an acceptable cost to end this kind of atrocity.

Subsequent events have proved the analysis accurate. Plenary sanctions have indeed stalled Russia’s economy. They’ve caused thousands of its best and brightest (and youngest!) to flee the pariah state. After a brief resurgence of the ruble’s official exchange rate, the West is learning how to freeze more of Russia’s assets and bank accounts held abroad. The noose will only tighten as Europe absorbs yet one more good reason to accelerate its transformation away from fossil energy, including Russia’s.

Everyone knew from the outset that sanctions work slowly. They are too slow to make a difference on the battlefield. But as long as the West perseveres in applying them, their pressure on Russia will increase relentlessly. They will chasten its rogue leader and especially the military industries that support his vile war. If this is to be the last war of its kind, the West must be prepared to crush Russia’s economy as long as it takes to drive the lesson home.

As for modern accurate weapons, they are making a military miracle. Ukraine was supposed to succumb to quick decapitation, much as Poland did to Nazi blitzkrieg in 1939. (Funny, isn’t it, that Russian leaders are adopting Hitler’s war and battle tactics precisely, while decrying non-existent “Nazis” in Ukraine?) But after six weeks, not only is Ukraine still standing strong. It has stopped the decapitation and has driven some Russia forces into retreat.

Although Putin’s true goals are ever uncertain, Russian forces appear to be regrouping, in order to consolidate their hold on the Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk) and in Crimea, which Russia already controls, perhaps plus a land corridor between them. These were goals that, had Russia had good leadership, might have been by careful diplomacy, at least on a temporary basis, without bloodshed.

But the wars of defense and offense could not be more different. Ukraine is using a stiletto of Javelins and Stingers, shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, respectively. They hit the mark, with minimal “collateral damage.” In contrast, the Russians are using a bludgeon of cluster bombs and Katyusha rockets. They are annihilating city squares, hospitals, theaters, and apartment blocks, turning Eurasia’s breadbasket into a replica of Syria. While Putin and his lackeys decry “Nazis” in Ukraine, Ukrainians suffer torture, murder and mass displacement in ways not seen since the Nazis conquered Europe.

The message here should be writ large in every military manual worldwide: small but accurate weapons work. Already they are turning the tide in what many observers once thought to be an unwinnable war. Unfortunately, they are also pushing Russia toward desperately brutal measures, including mass slaughter of civilians and what appears to be deliberate ethnic cleansing, displacing 11 million Ukrainians at home and abroad.

So how can we help Ukraine right now, without risking nuclear escalation? We can do what most doctors would do with a recovering patient: if the medicine appears to be working, try a little more. Give Ukraine more accurate weapons.

The Russian assault on the ground has stalled. But the brutality continues from the air. The reason is simple: Javelins and Stingers are accurate but short-range weapons. They don’t work well against high-altitude bombing or missiles, including cruise missiles. But we have missiles that do. So give Ukraine the missiles to protect themselves from bombers and offensive missiles. Get these defensive and accurate weapons in the hands of Ukraine’s defenders now.

What’s at stake is far more than just Ukraine’s sovereignty and freedom and the lives of its people—although they of course ought to be motivation enough. What’s at stake is the future of war itself.

If high-tech accurate weapons can take down enough tools of invasion to stall and reverse this brutal, unprovoked attack on Ukraine, maybe they can make invasions like this one obsolete. If every farmhouse on NATO’s border had a locked steel chest with a few Javelins and Stingers, and farmers trained to use them, Nazi- and Russian-style blitzkrieg might become a thing of the past. Then, someday, we might look back on this war as we do on Rome pulling down the city walls of Carthage and sowing its fields with salt.

That’s a consummation devoutly to be wished, a celebration of humanity and individual will. If a single man or woman can take down tools that rain death from the sky, what brutal invasion can succeed?

To realize this promise of human freedom from brutality, President Biden should use the Defense Production Act to proliferate these accurate weapons of freedom as if they were Teslas. Maybe he should put Elon Musk in charge of their crash-program production in giga-factories. But whatever the means or cost, we should get these weapons into Ukrainian hands ASAP, while we still have time to make this atrocity an utter rout for the Russians and thus, perhaps, the last war of this kind ever.

Supplying Ukraine with accurate anti-bombardment weapons has three advantages over using US or NATO planes to establish a “no-fly zone” over all or part of Ukraine. First, the defense would be manned entirely by Ukrainians; no American or NATO planes or pilots would be involved. Second, unlike planes, the defensive missiles would have limited range and so would not tempt Ukrainian pilots to bring the war into Russian territory, thereby providing a pretext for further Russian escalation. Third, at least at first, the weapons’ chief and perhaps exclusive use would be preventing mass civilian casualties—an endeavor evoking universal support and sympathy everywhere except perhaps inside the Kremlin.

The second big thing we should do is change our approach to cyber-warfare. Of course it’s smart to harden our own systems against penetration and cyber-invasion. It’s also good to have offensive cyber tools on tap, so we can, if need be, stall Russian aggression by non-lethal means, putting cyber-sand in the gears of Russia’s economy.

But in some ways our current approach to cyber-warfare is as misguided as were the 50-megaton hydrogen bombs that both we and the Soviets developed at the height of the Cold War. For those who want peace, the goal of war is not to make the biggest bang and wreak the widest destruction. It’s to stop the invader.

To that end, accurate information is one of the most powerful weapons we can wield. If just half the Russian people, including the oligarchs, could see clearly what Putin is doing in Ukraine in their names, this war would likely have a short end, just as did the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan that ended two decades before we started our own.

So we should multiply our efforts to get concise and accurate information (including video) about the war to anyone in Russia with curiosity and a modicum of technical skill. We should create a partnership between our government and our top private Internet media companies, with the mission of giving every Russian who wants one a private, unbreakable, untraceable link to accurate information about the war. We should also make Internet “Samizdat” (Soviet-era self-publishing) easy, so that those in Russia who are so inclined can spread the information among themselves. We should create something like a personal Virtual Private Network (VPN) that can appear, disappear and morph itself on command, or whenever probed by unknown persons.

In spring of 1993, I was a Fulbright Fellow teaching patent and licensing law at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (“MGIMO” in the Russian acronym), the same institution where Putin had trained years earlier. To improve my Russian language skills, I took every opportunity to read Russian newspapers and to listen to Russian radio news. To my surprise, I found that our own Voice of America radio (which the Russians had just recently stopped jamming) had by far the best news on Moscow’s airwaves. Not only was it the best source of comprehensive and accurate news; it was also the best technically. One Russian news program, for example, aired an interview of three people simultaneously, but I could hear only one of them clearly.

What we need today is a Voice of America on the Internet. We need an accurate, propaganda-free source of news to which any Russian (or anyone else) can turn with privacy, secrecy and security. We need clever technology by which to defeat any attempt by any state or private actor, including their or our oligarchs, to monitor, censor or block the news feed.

If we can build that, they will come. They will watch and listen, and the truth will set them free.

One of our chief human weaknesses is what I call the “megalo-mind.” We adore big things, the bigger the better. That’s why Edward Teller developed the hydrogen bomb. As if the A-bomb weren’t enough, he wanted a weapon capable of destroying whole counties, or small states like Rhode Island, not just cities.

Human life is more subtle than that. What promotes human welfare and happiness is littler things. Give a single individual the power to destroy a tank, a helicopter, or a fighter jet, bomber or cruise missile, and you can thwart a modern invasion force. Give that same individual the knowledge of what is actually happening in Ukraine, and you can motivate defenders and sap the invader’s will.

These things—accurate weapons and unstoppable accurate news—are a good plan for making wars like Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine obsolete. For us as supporters of human rights, individual freedom, and national sovereignty, there should be no higher military priority.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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