NOW OUT FROM LARRY CORREIA: Monster Hunter Bloodlines.
Archive for 2021
August 17, 2021
A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban. Over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the world that “Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban.” Whew. That gave the team at our Kabul embassy time to shred or otherwise render inoperative all the sensitive information they were sitting on – that stash of Pride flags, for example, which the new masters will not have much use for, unless it is to drape over the shoulders of the gays they execute by pushing them off roofs.
Well, it turns out the embassy workers did not have quite enough time. If we still used ink, the bit used to record Kirby’s words would not have been dry before his words were replaced by headlines that Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, who now occupied the presidential palace, the president himself having fled the country, and that the country as whole was in a state of crisis.
President Biden – or, as I like to denominate him these days, due to the deference shown him by all those eager-beaver members of the press, President Ice Cream – was hors de combat when this important news came over what counts as the wire these days. He had left the White House for Camp David. Monday, I think, is when Ben and Jerry’s makes its deliveries, and all we could glean was that he would be addressing the nation “in a few days.”
The outcry over that bit of impertinence was loud, sustained, and widespread, even among the housebroken poodles of the Fourth Estate. So just a few hours before I sat down to write this, the President of the United States shuffled before the cameras, blinked, and told us two things. One, he felt really badly about what just happened. Really, his heart goes out to the thousands Afghans who are about to be raped, mutilated, or slaughtered. Two, it was all Donald Trump’s fault. Really. “I inherited a deal that president Trump negotiated with the Taliban.” I’m the president and the “buck stops with me,” but still, it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.
Quick question: does anybody, anybody believe that if Donald Trump were still president Afghanistan would have been consumed in this humiliating maelstrom?
No.
OPEN THREAD: Certainly someone who is frozen is not alive.
BUILDING BACK BETTER: Stocks Dump, Dollar Jumps As Self-Sustaining Recovery Narrative Collapses.
KESSLER EFFECT, HERE WE COME: Space collision: Chinese satellite got whacked by hunk of Russian rocket in March. “The nightmare scenario that satellite operators and exploration advocates want to avoid is the Kessler syndrome — a cascading series of collisions that could clutter Earth orbit with so much debris that our use of, and travel through, the final frontier is significantly hampered.”
Heres’s a piece on space debris that Rob Merges and I wrote some years back.
EVEN THE BBC IS PITILESS: Three ways this Afghanistan crisis really hurts Biden. “The shambolic unravelling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook of ‘how to lose at everything’. Warnings hadn’t been heeded, intelligence was clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful. . . . The withdrawal came during the ‘fighting season’ — a phrase I have to say I have always found rather odd. But in Afghanistan there is a fighting season which starts in spring — and then in winter, when the country freezes over, there is a time when the Taliban go home to their tribal homelands. Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren’t there, poised to fill the vacuum?”
NO, THIS ISN’T A BABYLON BEE HEADLINE: Twitter Says Taliban Spokesman Will be Allowed to Remain if He Doesn’t Get Too Violent.
This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.
Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves. The Taliban will have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory and the problem of ‘white rage’. They will have clocked the British army’s recruitment drive that was aimed at ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’ – for real – on the basis that such people have the ‘compassion’ necessary for the touchy-feely wars of the 21st century. They will know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as being the opposite to all of this. They know this was a cultural clash as well as a military fight, and that they were by far the stronger side on this front.
This photo has to be the ultimate troll job by the Taliban:
Earlier:
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Study: Viral load is not a true indicator of SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: More ‘green time,’ less screen time boosts kids’ mental health.
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY CAVES TO NCLA VACCINATION LAWSUIT: From the NCLA press release:
Washington, DC (August 17, 2021) – The New Civil Liberties Alliance is pleased to announce today that George Mason University (GMU) has granted a medical exemption from its mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policy to NCLA client Todd Zywicki, George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School. NCLA is delighted with Prof. Zywicki’s victory for freedom. His brave determination to fight the university’s misguided and scientifically unsound vaccination mandate has garnered nationwide attention. GMU and other universities must stop ignoring science and cease forcing mandatory vaccines on even those with naturally acquired immunity (especially if only approved under a federal Emergency Use Authorization statute).
Strangely, despite solid scientific evidence, GMU continues to refuse to recognize that Covid-19 vaccination is medically unnecessary for ALL students, faculty, and staff with naturally acquired immunity demonstrated with antibody testing. At times GMU officials have appeared to deny that such a thing as naturally acquired immunity exists. This refusal is particularly odd, as the efficacy of the very vaccines GMU wishes to mandate are measured against levels of natural immunity acquired by those who have recovered from Covid-19. For this reason, NCLA continues to explore litigation against GMU. We also welcome hearing from others on public-university campuses in Virginia—particularly tenured faculty—who have naturally acquired immunity backed by antibody testing and whose schools are similarly disregarding the scientific facts surrounding naturally acquired immunity.
NCLA filed Professor Zywicki’s complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia on August 3, 2021, challenging GMU’s “reopening policy.” The policy, announced June 28, requires all faculty and staff members, including those who can demonstrate natural immunity through recovery from a prior Covid-19 infection, to disclose their vaccination status as “a prerequisite for eligibility for any merit pay increases,” unless they obtain a religious or medical exemption. On July 22, GMU emailed the policy to students and employees and threatened disciplinary action—including termination of employment—against any who do not comply with the vaccine mandate. The university’s website describing its vaccination policy reiterated this threat.
Prof. Zywicki has already contracted and fully recovered from Covid-19. As a result, he has acquired robust natural immunity, confirmed unequivocally by multiple positive SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests conducted over the past year. In fact, Prof. Zywicki’s immunologist, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, has advised him that, based on his personal health and immunity status, it is medically unnecessary to get a Covid-19 vaccine—and that it violates medical ethics to order unnecessary procedures.
Good. FYI, I’m on the board of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public-interest legal group opposing intrusive bureaucratic pecksniffery.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills (Back to Basics Guides).
GREAT MOMENTS IN DOUBLE STANDARDS: Ayanna Pressley’s ‘Cancel Rent’ Hypocrisy, Exposed.
“WE PULLED THE PLUG, AND THEY COLLAPSED.” So says Ret. Army General Jack Keane, a retired American four-star general, former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. (Look him up: He’s a genuine badass).
The statement was made in a column published today by Judith Miller, a veteran correspondent with highly specialized expertise and experience in the Middle East. The takeaway from that column? “President Joe Biden spent much of his speech Monday blaming everyone else but himself and his administration for the foreign policy catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan” says Miller:
“Biden blamed the debacle on Barack Obama for having surged U.S. forces in Afghanistan to fend off the Taliban, Donald Trump for having negotiated a terrible deal with the Taliban committing American forces to leave precipitously by May 1—and, most egregiously, Afghans themselves for supposedly being unwilling to fend off the Taliban’s horrifying advance. Only a month ago, Biden justified his decision to abandon the Afghanistan effort by arguing that two decades of American military training and over $1 trillion in economic and military support had left the Afghan government and its military more than capable of defending their country; yesterday, he castigated Afghans for not being able to do so.”
Miller seems to be saying, like the rest of the nation except for a few sycophants, that Biden should have seen this coming. Using strategic analysis as a basis for her view, Miller continued:
“[T]he Afghan forces did not collapse on their own. Prior to President Trump’s strategically flawed deal with the Taliban, Afghan security forces and the Taliban had fought to a virtual military stalemate […] Neither could defeat the other. But the withdrawal of American air support and intelligence information regarding the disposition and strength of Taliban forces had severely affected the Afghan military, depressing Afghan capabilities and morale. So, too, did Biden’s closure of seven military bases in the height of the fighting season. “We pulled the plug and they collapsed,” said General Keane.”
It’s also worth noting that the sycophants trying to sell the “Trump’s fault” line glibly elide the fact that Biden has reversed dozens of Trump policies, from abortion to education to policing to oil pipelines. Yet this one just kind of slipped by him. And his defenders.
#UNEXPECTEDLY: The vindication of #NeverBiden conservatives.
JOSH BLACKMAN ON A FAMOUS AND MISREPRESENTED VACCINE CASE: The Irrepressible Myth of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. “During the COVID-19 outbreak, Jacobson v. Massachusetts became the fountainhead for pandemic jurisprudence. Courts relied on this 1905 precedent to resolve disputes about religious freedom, abortion, gun rights, voting rights, the right to travel, and many other contexts. But Justice John Marshall Harlan’s decision was very narrow. It upheld the state’s power to impose a nominal fine on an unvaccinated person. No more, no less. Yet, judges now follow a variant of Jacobson that is far removed from the Lochner era decision.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: New York City’s Kristallnacht.
Ed Koch called it “a pogrom.” So did Rudy Giuliani. The Reverend Al Sharpton—the chubby, agitating, last-century version—led a march along the streets as rioting young blacks rampaged through the neighborhood looking for Jews and Jewish businesses to attack. Hasidim cowered behind their mezuzah-trimmed doors while the sluggish police ducked rocks and bottles. New York’s first African-American mayor, the courtly David Dinkins, showed up, hoisted a bullhorn, and tried to pacify the mob.
“Will you listen to me for just a minute?” he pleaded.
“No!” they responded, trying to stone him.
“I care about you. I care about you desperately,” he shouted.
“Arrest the Jews!” they demanded.
That was the raw scene 30 years ago, in August 1991, when the worst race rioting in modern New York memory engulfed Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Caribbean immigrants, American blacks, and Hispanics shared the neighborhood with a heavily outnumbered community of Jews, most of them Lubavitcher Hasidim. The convulsive episode drove Dinkins’s handpicked black police commissioner back to Houston and helped doom his mayoralty, but not before that commissioner’s successor, Ray Kelly, began to reenergize the police force. This, in turn, gave momentum to Rudy Guiliani’s more muscular regime once he had defeated Dinkins in the mayoral election two years later.
That’s one way to put your political and media career into overdrive:
● ‘Happy Anniversary’ Al Sharpton: 25 Years Since He Incited Freddy’s Massacre.
● Massacre at Freddy’s In Harlem: Fire Fueled by Anti-Semitism Kills 8.
As Jim Treacher previously asked: What’s Up with All the Anti-Semitism at NBC?
DISPATCHES FROM THE CRYBULLY WOKE-SCOLD LEFT: Teammate of soccer star Megan Rapinoe accuses her of ‘bullying’ team into kneeling for anthem. “I’ve seen Megan Rapinoe almost bully players into kneeling because she really wants to stand up for something in her particular way,” said former U.S. Women’s National Team goalkeeper Hope Solo.
“Standing up” — you’re really doing it wrong.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: What I Learned About the United States After Ten Years in Ireland.
HOW BADLY DID JOE BIDEN SCREW UP? BAD ENOUGH THAT EVEN THE DNC-MSM NOTICED: Biden’s Failure on Afghanistan Has Been So Bad That Even a Friendly Press Corps Has Bailed on Him.