SO HOW’S THAT WORKIN’ OUT?

UGH: ‘They are going to kill us’: Afghans terrorized as Kabul embassy tells Americans shelter in place.

UPDATE:

Another Saigon moment: chaotic scenes at Kabul International Airport. No security. None. pic.twitter.com/6BuXqBTHWk

— Saad Mohseni (@saadmohseni) August 15, 2021

Double Ugh:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clown show, but not a funny one.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH TODAY’S “EXPERTS” IS THAT THEY AREN’T: The Tyranny of Experts: Understanding the origins of the administrative state goes a long way towards grasping how policy is really made today in American government.

THERE ONCE WAS A NOTE, PURE AND EASY: Who’s Next Celebrates 50 With Little Fanfare. Fifty years on, The Who’s most popular album seems more relevant than ever, despite the troubled fortunes of ‘Lifehouse,’ the rock opera from which it was born.

As originally developed, “Lifehouse” took place in a world where the ecosystem had collapsed, hibernation was mandated, and rock and live music were banned. The tedium of sheltering in place was made bearable by government-mandated entertainment pumped into “experience suits” that made people feel they were part of what they saw.

Enter a group of revolutionaries, who recalled the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. They stage an illegal live concert at a venue called the “Lifehouse.” Their goal is to have concertgoers produce a collective harmony that Mr. Townshend called “the one perfect note.”

By the end of 1970, Mr. Townshend completed 19 “Lifehouse” songs, though he said the project had left him “overworked, paranoid, short of ready money and lonely.” Demos were recorded in January and February 1971, with Mr. Townshend playing all the musical parts. But when he pitched his “Lifehouse” idea to the band and their manager, Mr. Townshend recalled in his 2012 memoir, they felt the concept was muddled.

The music was a different matter. The band tried workshopping “Lifehouse” at London’s Young Vic Theatre, but the reception was lukewarm. As the deadline for the Who’s next studio album loomed, Mr. Townshend agreed to put “Lifehouse” on hold. Instead, the band enlisted the help of engineer Glyn Johns, who in April 1971 began assembling “Who’s Next” from what Mr. Townshend called “the ‘Lifehouse’ rubble.”

Eight of the album’s nine songs were from “Lifehouse,” with “My Wife” contributed by the band’s bassist, John Entwistle. The discarded “Lifehouse” tracks eventually made their way onto future Who albums.

Over the years, “Lifehouse” has had many lives. In 1978, Mr. Townshend tried again, resetting “Lifehouse” 200 years after the “Who’s Next” events. In 1999, there was a radio-play version.

As Townshend confidant Richard Barnes famously said, “There were two groups: people that understood Lifehouse, and people who didn’t. The people who understood Lifehouse included one, Pete Townshend. The people who didn’t was everybody else he ever tried to explain it to, and the whole rest of the human race, which was about four billion at the time.” In all of his rock operas and concept albums, plotting an easy-to-understand story has always been Townshend’s weak point. But oh, what brilliant songs emerged from those stories.

(Via Newsalert.)

BREAKING: Taliban Take the Presidential Palace.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Combat Mindset for the Defensive Shooter.

THERE’S ENOUGH FAILURE HERE FOR EVERYONE IN THE ADMINISTRATION TO TAKE CREDIT: Harris says she had key role in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal decision.

FASTER, PLEASE: General Fusion Takes Aim at Practical Fusion Power: The company plans to demonstrate its compact nuclear fusion technology in the UK by 2025.

ROGER SIMON: Larry Elder Ignores Mainstream Media in First Online Press Conference.

Neither the Los Angeles Times nor Politico (both of whom had multiple reporters) and a host of other mainstream media suspects, including the Associated Press, got to ask a single question Friday at Larry Elder’s first online Zoom press conference for the California gubernatorial recall.

The likes of the Bay Area Yu Channel, the Sing Tao Daily and Lynn Ku of KTSF did.

If you enjoy seeing MSM stuffed shirts being upended, it was quite a hoot. A reporter from the LAT—I won’t name him out of a courtesy he didn’t seem to have himself—was throwing a tantrum in the Zoom chat room due to his receiving a lack of attention.

And if you sense a pro-Asian bias in all this, you are obviously correct and it was obviously deliberate on the part of the Elder campaign. These seemingly small Asian outlets—considering the size of California’s Asian community, they could be quite big in actuality—were given the only opportunities to ask questions.

And their questions were quite substantive.

It was rather like the reverse of a White House press conference, particularly during the Trump era, when question after question from CNN et al was of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” nature.

Normally I abhor identity politics, but if a major population group in California—Asians are 14.7 percent of the state, while blacks are but 5.8 percent, according to the 2018 census— has been getting the short end of the proverbial stick, it is those Asian-Americans.

This factor also no doubt played into Elder’s choice of who to call on: The LA Times begs Californians not to boot Newsom.

OUCH:

COMMENT FROM A FRIEND: “I hope the Taliban is at least addressing our people by their preferred pronouns.”

BIDEN’S FOLLY:  “Given events and the likely consequences, the fact that the Administration ‘derives comfort’ from anything regarding its decision to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban is nauseous. That they’re ‘betting’ they will escape political punishment is perhaps more so. What we’re witnessing, in real time, on the BBC and CNN and on the websites of the world’s great news organizations is the Taliban’s reimagining of The Killing Fields. Mullah Pol Pot comes to Kabul in a Toyota pick-up truck. Prepare your 13-year-old daughters for ‘marriage’…If you’re President Xi, you see Afghanistan, clearly, for what it is: a humiliating defeat for the United States. He might call it ‘flexible humiliation.’ And what he knows from history is that defeated nations have little appetite for war in the immediate aftermath of losing one. Taiwan is there for the taking. How and when it happens are variables.”

AFGHAN PRESIDENT FLEES THE COUNTRY AS TALIBAN MOVE ON KABUL: “The Taliban entered the capital early Sunday and an official in the militant group said it would soon announce the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace — a return rich in symbolism to the name of the country under the Taliban government ousted by U.S.-led forces after the 9/11 attacks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.”

Related:

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Boeing’s Spaceship Problems Show Just How Amazing Musk’s SpaceX Is.

Boeing continues to work on valve problems that delayed the launch of its Starliner space capsule. No new date for the launch, originally scheduled for July 30, has been set, and The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday evening the delays could last months.

Everyone knows that getting to space is hard, and the delays aren’t really affecting Boeing ‘s (ticker BA) stock. Boeing, of course, has a much bigger business selling commercial airliners. What’s more, the delays aren’t all caused by Boeing. There has to be space to launch and everything has to be in the right orbit. Instead, the Starliner story shows just how impressive SpaceX is.

The Starliner is a reusable crew capsule designed to take astronauts to the International Space Station, or ISS, and back. The program is part of NASA plans to bring crewed launch capabilities back to the U.S. After the Space Shuttle was retired about a decade ago, America relied on foreign countries to take astronauts into space.

But America can now launch astronauts into space again, thanks to SpaceX. Elon Musk’s space company has ferried astronauts to the ISS a few times—first in May 2020 on a certification flight and most recently in April.

The SpaceX success seems even more impressive considering that SpaceX’s Dragon capsule sits atop SpaceX rockets with engines built by SpaceX. The Boeing Starliner capsule sits atop a United Launch Alliance, or ULA, rocket. Some of the engines are made in Russia, while others come from suppliers such as Aerojet Rocketdyne (AJRD).

ULA—a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin (LMT)—and Aerojet are established space players. SpaceX was founded in 2002. It’s a teenager.

Now SpaceX has contracts with NASA and the Defense Department. Its products will eventually end up on the moon and Mars. The next test flight space investors get to see might just be an orbital flight for SpaceX’s huge Starship.

Space is hard for anyone. But the contrast is real, between management focused on results, and one that seems more focused on process.

‘THIS IS NOT SAIGON:’ “Said Reuters foreign correspondent Idrees Ali: ‘Secretary Blinken is correct. The airlift from Saigon did not happen until two years after a peace deal was signed. The evacuation from Kabul is happening with two weeks still left under Biden’s own timeline for an end to the mission.’”

Related: Biden’s stain: U.S. flees Kabul.

Rarely has an American president’s predictions been so wrong, so fast, so convincingly as President Biden on Afghanistan. Usually military operations and diplomacy are long; the outcomes, foggy. Not here.

Flashback: Just five weeks ago, President Biden assured Americans: “[T]he likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

When you’re a Dem who’s lost Axios…

BIDEN PROVEN WRONG AGAIN, AS HELICOPTERS LAND ON US EMBASSY ROOF:

So, what you will have now is an Islamic-controlled state which will terrorize its own people especially the women and the young girls, and who will also kill everyone who helped us. But more problematic going forward, the very reason that we were there will come back — they will have an Islamic state from which they will launch further terroristic actions with impunity.

Was it inevitable that it had to end up this way? Having this happen in this disastrously humiliating way was not inevitable. That’s completely all on Joe Biden, the guy who has been wrong about everything for the past forty years.

Early in July, when Joe Biden still had the opportunity to do things but was sitting on his hands acting as though he had all the time in the world, he claimed it wasn’t inevitable that the Taliban would take over again, despite the fact the U.S. intelligence was predicting it would happen.

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” Biden said when asked about the possibility of an airlift off as happened in 1975 during the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

More here: All Biden Had to Do Was…Nothing.

All Joe Biden had to do was nothing. Had Joe Biden done nothing, Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban today. Had he just let the status quo continue, the status quo would have continued. Afghanistan would have plodded along and we would have kept the Taliban from power with a small force of American military personnel among whose ranks there had not been a single fatality since March 2020—17 months without a death. Keep that in mind as you listen to and watch people try to analyze away the horror that has befallen the Afghan people. The idea being retailed by the increasingly defeatist left and the increasingly isolationist right is that what has happened was inevitable. It was the opposite of inevitable. It wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t acted.

In so acting, Biden has cast the future of American foreign policy into the worst state of disrepair since the last helicopter-carries-people-to-the-airport-to-flee-the-country scene 46 years ago. I am not saying we haven’t been in parlous condition during that time. Obviously the meltdown in Iraq in 2005-2006 was a disastrous period; the revelation that weapons of mass destruction we believed had been made by Iraq in the years between the end of the first war there and the beginning of the second likely didn’t exist was a body blow.

But here we have an American president announcing in April that we were pulling out of a country to end a war in which we haven’t been engaging in conventional old-time combat for years because, apparently, we just had to. Biden wanted to be the one to end the war, and he did so with tough love: The Afghan army was going to have to stand on its own. The time had come for the teenager to leave home, get his own apartment, get a job, and start paying rent.

Smart talk. But Biden also assured Americans in July that they would not see a second Saigon 1975. Asked on July 7 about a possible parallel to the moment when U.S. helicopters evacuated embassy personnel on April 30, 1975, the president said, “None whatsoever. Zero….The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army. They’re not—they�