Conversations with Mom

Based on last night's talk with my mother, who has been a pretty good barometer for American politics, she is terrified of my criticism of America's government. I'm not sure if she fears I will be arrested or killed because of it, but she is clearly afraid and certain I should stop speaking out against the current government.

If you went back over the course of the last twenty years, her support went to every winning campaign except Trump's in 2016. She gets her ideas from what is popular, I think, and as such is almost always on the winning side.

She's been a pretty good judge of where the country was going before now. On the other hand, a government like the one she apparently fears we have is one that deserves replacement. It's bad enough that an ordinary woman like herself should have internalized the idea that such criticism -- constitutionally protected free speech -- is gravely dangerous. 

Adieu Afghanistan

Reportedly, all American forces have left Afghanistan at this time. Perhaps that isn't strictly true; it would be ordinary for some highly classified forces to remain behind on special reconnaissance or similar duties. However, this time it may really be true; the Biden administration and its subservient military leadership has done everything wrong so far, so why not one last thing?

We have left behind at least hundreds of American citizens, and untold numbers of friends and allies. Apparently we incinerated one family of friends and allies with that drone strike against 'ISIS-K planners' the other day, perhaps having taken Taliban instructions on whom to hit.

Horrible things will happen to those left behind, whose names we apparently gave to the Taliban to make sure they knew whom to look for in their searches. Whole busloads of American citizen females were apparently turned away at the airport; translators are reportedly having their tongues cut out; I've seen video of a hanging using one of our Blackhawks as a public demonstration.

All that said, I am relieved that we managed to extract our battalions of paratroopers and Marines, who were put in a deadly situation by incompetent leadership. We could have lost all of them. Thank God they are safe, assuming the statements from the White House and leadership are not lies, which in fact we can no longer safely assume.

Stoicism

This time of year, pretty much every Sunday morning there is a call arising from the adventurous spirit that people come up to these mountains to exercise. Today's was a young man who had decided to take charge of his slide into obesity and, having already lost forty pounds, to hike down into a gorge to see some famous local waterfalls. Unfortunately for him, he stepped on a yellow jacket nest and -- while trying to escape them -- gruesomely broke his ankle, fell, tumbled, and struck his head. 

Fortunately, another pair of hikers were on the trail one of whom happened to be a nurse. He stayed with the injured guy while his girlfriend (or wife, I'm not sure) went for help. Now there's no cell-phone service in these mountains most places, but there is a church nearby. Most of the week it's just an empty building, but this was Sunday morning. As a result she found it full of people, one of whom was an older man who had formerly been an active firefighter, and who was still in the habit of carrying his radio. Thus she was able to summon aid very quickly. 

The young man in the gorge was badly hurt, but he showed significant character. In addition to having internally recognized his slide and taken charge of it, he had developed the understanding that he could also be in charge of his emotional reaction even to very bad things. He was polite, tried to laugh and joke in spite of his injuries and shock, and refused to get more upset than he could help. His fate was not in his hands, but his attitude was, and his recognition of that helped him and it helped everyone else who was trying to help him. 

We got him out of the gorge with a basket and a rope system, and thence to a helicopter called in to get him to a hospital. I hope they'll save his foot. I later met his brother because I had to return their dog, who was hiking with him at the time of his injury. For whatever reason she decided I was the one there she would trust, so I ended up taking her and his Buick and driving them over to where his family could collect them. 

By coincidence, shortly after turning over the dog and car I met again with the nurse and lady. They were up on vacation, and were eager to hear how the whole thing had turned out. Nice folks, although I was amused at how perfectly their discussion matched up with the description given by the White Fragility author of bad ways white people allegedly talk to minorities -- in their case, however, they were of foreign extraction, and talking about Southerners. 'Everyone thinks you're all prejudiced up here, and still think it's 1956,' they said, 'But we know you're not all like that. We wanted to meet real people, not all these folks with the Audis and Mercedes in the parking lot here in this town. We could meet them anywhere. We wanted to get out where the real people are.' Well, thanks. (And cf. the descriptions also here and here, which I was looking at again last night following the discussion on Tex's post.)

Nice folks anyway, the kind of people who'd stop to help you on a trail if you needed it. That's what really counts. 

Prissy betters

AVI drew our attention to the Orthosphere site, where I found an article from a month or so ago about the attempt to induce conformity (mimesis) by force when one's ability to lead a coherent dance by charm has withered. He quotes Arnold Toynbee's 1939 "A Study of History: The Breakdown of Civilizations":

“Where there is no creation, there is no mimesis. The piper who has lost his cunning can no longer conjure the feet of the multitude into a dance; and if, in a rage and panic, he now attempts to convert himself into a drill-sergeant or a slave-driver, and to coerce by physical force a people that he can no longer lead by his old magnetic charm, then all the more surely and swiftly he defeats his own intention; for the followers who had merely flagged and fallen out of step as the heavenly music died away will be stung by a touch of the whip into active rebellion.”

He goes on to cite David Brooks's recent piece in The Atlantic, attempting to explain why the "creative elites" Brooks so desperately wants to belong to have become objects of scorn. Brooks calls the elites "bobos," for bourgeois-bohemians, and blames their fall on "hogging profits," that is, not throwing enough tax money out of helicopters. I think Orthosphere has a better grasp:

Brooks does not understand that the unruly plebian masses do not envy his bobo lifestyle. They are not yearning to mimic, even in a vulgar and provincial way, the manners of David Brooks and his friends. He does not understand that the unruly plebian masses, whose allegiance the bobo elite has lost, are repelled by the bobos’ pencil-necked unmanliness, their officious scolding, their sexual weirdness, and their everlasting, apple-polishing striving to attract the teacher’s eye and move to the head of the class. They are embarrassed by the bobos’ juvenile spirituality, revolted by their parvenu gourmandizing, and sick to death of their half-wit moral lectures and their infantile ideals.

Well, yes

S.E. Cupp has angst, but Ace isn't feeling it.

It's less a mental condition than a carefully-curated identity.

As a corrective I'm about to go pull weeds and listen to the audio version of "Overcome," by Jason Redman. The challenges in my life are tiny compared to the ones he describes, but the principle is the same: Cringe or thrive.

Everything isn't awful

This is from Kruiser's "Everything Isn't Awful" daily sidebar, and something I needed this morning. I appreciate Grim's two stories of successful rescues as well.

Volunteers in Afghanistan

There have been so many bleak and terrible stories out of Afghanistan, it is nice to see some genuine good news. Unsurprisingly, it is not about the efforts of the professional bureaucracy. It is about American volunteers.

With the Taliban growing more violent and adding checkpoints near Kabul's airport, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night dubbed the "Pineapple Express" to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News....

As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.

That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who had been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters since the capital fell to the extremists on Aug. 16 by Task Force Pineapple, an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan who banded together to save as many Afghan allies as they could.

There's a lot more at the link.

UPDATE: A parallel story involving CIA paramilitaries, also usually former special operators. 

Jim Hanson on Tucker Carlson

I don't watch television, and therefore I don't generally watch cable news. However, tonight my old friend and former Green Beret Jim Hanson was on to explain what ISIS-K is to those who may not have heard of them before. 

For those of you more in the mood for a rant, former Marine Jesse Kelly was on earlier in the program -- you can scroll back and catch him. Actually the whole program was pretty angry tonight. 

Great Day for this Article

"The MAGA Movement’s a Bigger Threat to America Than the Taliban"

The biggest threat to America is its own government, if you ask me. It's hard to see how this thing doesn't run off the rails, even if every MAGA voter decides to stop caring about politics and take up a hobby like basket-weaving instead. 

I suppose you could argue that it was ISIS and not the Taliban at work in today's attack, but you can't really be sure they didn't coordinate. They're different sects, and they've clashed at times, but the Taliban set their leadership free from the prison at Bagram just this month. 

Lowering the Bar Through the Floor

I keep thinking that I am done talking about Afghanistan. We've surely covered all the idiocy possible, right? No, we have not. 

How bad was this evacuation? The CENTCOM commander just said we were relying on the Taliban to search for suicide bombers in the crowd. Granted, they are subject matter experts on suicide bombers; especially their Haqqani allies probably know more about that than anyone else in the world. Still, how much would you trust the Taliban to keep suicide bombers away from your people after twenty years of them sending suicide bombers in to your people? 

Apparently we trusted them a lot. In order to help get Americans and Afghans safely out of the country -- fleeing the threat of the Taliban, remember -- we gave the Taliban a complete list of the names of the ones they were looking for. So that the Taliban could help them the Taliban's enemies get through Taliban security, you see.

Well, hopefully the Taliban were serious about that amnesty they said they were offering. 

After today's suicide bombing and complex attack, which killed dozens of Afghans and a dozen American servicemembers, the evacuation is pretty much over. The new layers of security they'd have to put up to prevent this from becoming a daily occurrence would slow the trickle of passengers to a halt anyway. If we are still going to meet that 31 August deadline, we'll need to be pulling out tomorrow -- and there are reports that we started pulling out paratroopers today.

Maybe the Russians can help us get the remaining Americans out afterwards. Maybe the Taliban will let them go in return for ransom money, although I imagine the Chinese might pay more to get to visit and interrogate them in Afghan prisons. 

Never Again

The Daily Telegraph (UK) says that allies can never trust this president again. 

They’re a conservative paper so they don’t say “America.” But in fact that is the lesson; our politics will sometimes swing this way, and our institutions align to it. Indeed if you’d asked them, the Europeans would have said that the Democratic Party was the more trustworthy. (It’s not, though, not since Vietnam.)

There’s a good chance that this is the beginning of the end of the Republic. European states are turning to Russia and China to get their people out once the US Hegemony ends. Our government is spending like they don’t care about being a reserve currency. Lose both and what holds it together? Love among our political factions?

The world will be worse without America. For a while, anyway. Perhaps a new beginning may in time bring better things; and in the final word, God is supposed to rule the world. 

Here We Are, in New South Wales

They are shooting rescue dogs in Australia, to keep people from rescuing them because the people might meet for a few seconds in the process of turning the dogs over.

They're also building a mandatory quarantine camp near an airport in Queensland that is expected to hold thousands. Perhaps it's wrong to call it a "concentration camp." That's emotive language. But they are definitely going to put people in there with guns, and hold them with guns. Perhaps they'll later let them go, so that the fully-vaccinated ones can enjoy an hour of recreation time -- on top of their exercise hour!

This is the danger of giving an inch.

But hey, here's the Clancy Brothers.

An Iraq War Vet Visits Afghanistan

Also a Congressman, but at the moment we won't hold that against him. Hear what he has to say.

    

The answer to 'What about the Secretary of Defense and the Congressional leadership who don't approve of your visit?" is "We don't work for them." 

Chicago Boyz: Following Orders

This piece caught my eye on AVI's sidebar, and it's exactly how I feel about it. 

The debacle in Afghanistan is so complete, so total – that I honestly can’t believe that the abandonment of Bagram AFB, the withdrawal from Kabul – is due to incompetence. Sorry, the military that I knew and remember just did not swing that way. Orders to destroy or remove essential gear, orders to set up a system to evacuate American, Allied and Afghan employees – should have been given, should have been given weeks or months ago. Anyone of any degree of authority ought to have seen the hazards in the road to an orderly, efficient, and complete withdrawal – and so the logical mind has to fall back upon calculated malice. Which is it, people? Did the Biden administration calculate to give in to the Taliban for purposes of their own, and at the bidding of whoever has bought them? And why have not any of the military officers involved not resigned their commissions over receiving orders to kark up the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Have they all been bought and paid for with comfortable sinecures at various corporate and media establishments?

It's astounding. This should never have happened, and it happened without a hiccup. 

Another FBI Fronted "White Supremacist" Group

This time the FBI actually paid the owner of a publishing company that produces and distributes white supremacist literature. This is exactly the wrong thing to do if your concern is trying to combat the spread of a troubling ideology. 

The publishing house is Martinet Press, fine purveyors of Atomwaffen Division-approved books such as Iron Gates and Liber 333. The former is a book about a Satanic cult roaming a post-apocalyptic America, which opens with a scene of a child being murdered. The apparent informant is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a man with longstanding ties to white supremacist organizations. 

If the real problem is that there isn't as much white supremacy as you'd like to justify your bureau's power and budget, I suppose it makes more sense.  

Slipsliding away

Just say no.

Codevilla on the Troubles

If you're not familiar with the good professor's history, you might not realize that he's one of the most qualified to discuss Afghanistan.

Between 1979 and 1985, when I took the lead on Afghan matters for the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had no sources in Afghanistan, and had assigned all of one-and-a-half full-time persons at its station in Islamabad to Afghan matters. None had direct contact with Afghans. When I took two CIA officers to meet with the Mujahedeen, along with a staff delegation, they were the first to have any contact. But the Agency’s ignorance of the place did not prevent it from being a major player in U.S. policy.

This piece is very much worth reading. 

Aggressive Liars

The White House is demanding the media join them in praising the evacuation of Afghanistan. Some particularly dishonorable people are doing so. 

[White House Chief of Staff] Ron Klain... retweeted Murphy’s comment as well as MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell calling it “the best run evacuation from a war America lost.” He’s spotlighted lesser known figures too, including RT-ing a retired IBM executive who compared the current mission to the Berlin airlift, the post-WWII era operation that was one of the largest humanitarian aid missions in history.

"...from a war America lost" narrows the field substantially, but if you consider the Iraq War one that we lost -- I would argue that it was the withdrawal that lost it, the war being won before that -- this claim is untrue by orders of magnitude. Remember how many Americans we left behind enemy lines without support when we withdrew from Iraq? Remember the rushed evacuation of the embassy? 

Of course you don't, because that didn't happen. I was at US Central Command in 2011 during the planning for the withdrawal, and it was done correctly in a disciplined and military manner. Even though I thought the decision was a mistake, as did many others, the execution of the order was proper. Joe Biden was the Vice President then, and allegedly had the Iraq profile delegated to him by the President. 

Even Vietnam doesn't qualify. The United States withdrew forces by March of 1973, and Saigon didn't fall until 1975. What people remember was the evacuation of the Embassy in 1975, which until now was the measure of a humiliating retreat from a falling foreign ally. Yet even then, how many American citizens were left to fall into Communist hands? 

By the way, the reason Saigon fell in 1975 was that Congress voted to deny any President money to support the Republic of Vietnam in any way. Joe Biden was in Congress then and voted in favor of cutting off support for our allies. He's been at the back of all three of these 'wars America lost.'

UPDATE: Here is a piece by one of our allies Joe Biden cut off this time. "We were betrayed."

"The final days of fighting were surreal. We engaged in intense firefights on the ground against the Taliban as U.S. fighter jets circled overhead, effectively spectators. Our sense of abandonment and betrayal was equaled only by the frustration U.S. pilots felt and relayed to us — being forced to witness the ground war, apparently unable to help us. Overwhelmed by Taliban fire, my soldiers would hear the planes and ask why they were not providing air support. Morale was devastated. Across Afghanistan, soldiers stopped fighting."

Yes, you were. You were betrayed by the same man who betrayed our Vietnamese allies, and our Iraqi ones. 

UPDATE: 

"Our Brothers the Taliban"

I suppose there is some sense in which all men are brothers, and even Ministers of Gender Equality.

Monsef, an Afghan Canadian, said: "I want to take this opportunity to speak to our brothers the Taliban; we call on you to ensure the safe and secure passage of any individual in Afghanistan out of the country. We call on you to immediately stop the violence, the genocide, the femicide, the destruction of infrastructure, including heritage buildings."

She continued: "We call on your to return immediately to the peacekeeping table, to the peace deal that was negotiated, and to ensure women and minorities voices are a part of that discussion in a meaningful way."

Nothing to worry about, sister Monsef! The Taliban will be on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. What higher claim to authority could they have to decent treatment for women than a seat on the global body overseeing such matters? 

What's A Tragedy Without A Bit Of Laughter?

Biden To Make Sure No Americans Are Stranded In Afghanistan By Stripping Citizenship Of Everyone Stranded There

Biden Says We May Need To Reinvade Afghanistan As They Have Weapons Of Mass Destruction Which We Gave Them

Trump Sneaks Back On Twitter By Disguising Self As Taliban Spokesperson

AOC Goes To Afghanistan To Warn Refugees Not To Come To Oppressive Racist America

Exclusive: We Have Obtained A Copy Of The Taliban's First Draft Of Their New Women's Bill Of Rights