Archive for 2021
September 3, 2021
AFGHANISTAN WAS NOT READY FOR GENDER STUDIES: “Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan.”
The American political/academic/managerial class is made up largely of buffoons. It’s hilarious, except for it being so toxic and deadly.
Flashback: Trump And The Crisis Of The Meritocracy.
A lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
Well, one end of the horse, anyway. Things have, of course, gotten much worse since this was written. And there’s every evidence that our ruling class intends to continue that trend as long as it is allowed to.
September 2, 2021
PAUSE, HUMILIATING DEFEAT, WHATEVER:
LEFTY “CHELSEA” MANNING GOES AFTER GLENN GREENWALD BECAUSE HE’S NO LONGER TOEING THE LEFTY LINE, GREENWALD RESPONDS: All Communications Between Myself and Chelsea Manning Since 2016: to Debunk Her Innuendo. “Despite my not having said a single word to her since 2018, the whistleblower today claimed she’s ‘terrified’ of me, implying serious personal abuse. See for yourself.”
This is the last, saddest, effort to launch a #MeToo campaign — a transwoman against a gay man, with no more evidence than Christine Blasey Ford. But then both she and “Chelsea” are just leftist tools.
UPDATE: From the comments:
“Gee what a time to reemerge from oblivion
– just in time to take attention away from joe’s fiasco
– and try to take down someone
– who is making some news that harms your leftism.”
How about that? Also, if you’re an army vet, even if you’ve changed genders, the damsel-in-distress act rings especially hollow. “Terrified” of Glenn Greenwald? I mean, you’ve seen Glenn Greenwald. If you’re “terrified,” it’s because he’s not only seen you, but seen through you.
HURRAY FOR ENGINEERS! AND IT’S GOOD THAT THE LAWYERS DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ENGINEERING, I GUESS: U.S. Civil Engineers Bent the Rules to Give New Orleans Extra Protection from Hurricanes. Those Adjustments Might Have Saved the City During Ida.
SALENA ZITO: For these Marines, a constant rush to zero hour to rescue stranded Americans.
For the last few weeks, Lt. Col. Jonathon Myers, a retired Marine intelligence officer, conducted a sleepless and exhaustive effort to get American citizens and green card holders connected with Marines in Afghanistan out of the country before the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.
On Monday afternoon, that mission went from dire and dangerous to clandestine for the hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of green card holders and journalists left stranded when the last military plane exited the airport in Kabul. . . .
Myers has been working with two other retired Marines, Katy Garroway of Maryland and Rico Reyes of Texas. In the final grim 12 hours in Kabul, no matter what anyone in military leadership or President Joe Biden said, no Americans who reached the airport were able to get out, Myers said.
“Within that last 12 hours, I had four buses of American citizens outside the gate,” he said. “They were mostly pregnant women and babies, including a child with spina bifida, just all packed together waiting at the gate.”
Myers said his team paid off the Taliban with a big bribe to allow their buses to go through. “They got to the gate, and there was an aid organization that was supposed to meet us with representatives, with the rosters, and to tell the Taliban to expect them.”
The aid organization didn’t show up.
“I, in panic mode, called, and called, and called all my Marine networks, I got the number for one of the top commanders down there explained the situation and we got in a big argument when he told me the Taliban makes the calls down here,” said Myers.
They never got out.
No Americans were able to get out on the last five jets to leave Afghanistan, as Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, confirmed on Tuesday. He said that Americans tried desperately to get to the Kabul airport for the final evacuations but could not.
Myers spoke to the Washington Examiner from Germany after Biden proclaimed the withdrawal “an extraordinary success.”
He says what happened in the closing days in Afghanistan is not what any type of success looks like. Based on what he saw, he disbelieves Biden’s claim that 90% of the people who wanted to leave did so.
I disbelieve it too.
LEARN FROM FAILURE: Firefly’s Alpha rocket lifts off but explodes shortly into first launch.
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: They promised we could control hurricanes, but instead we got Twitter.
If you were a naval strategist in the 1960s who found yourself musing about the tactical implications of weather control — such as the ability to whip up a hurricane and hurl it at an enemy fleet — scientists offered encouraging news. The 1968 book Toward the Year 2018 was a compilation of expert forecasts, published by the Foreign Policy Association. It included an entire chapter on weather, written by Thomas F. Malone, director of research at Travelers Insurance and chair of the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences of the National Academy of Science. Malone believed “the next fifty years will be crucial for controlling, to a significant extent, this particularly sensitive part of our physical environment.”
Regional weather modification and control — increase rainfall, reduce hail, suppress lighting — seemed quite possible, with even wide-scale weather control, including hurricanes, given a 50-50 chance over the next half century. (That RAND survey found a median prediction of 1990 as to when we would be capable of enough weather control to destroy an enemy’s crops or flood its territory.) Malone seemed more concerned about international agreements to coordinate weather inventions than the potential success of those interventions. Little wonder, given such high confidence, that the immediate postwar decades were a boom time for experimentation. One of the most well known US government projects was Project Stormfury, an attempt to weaken hurricanes by having aircraft seed them with silver iodide.
Hey, the Rothschilds don’t share their weather control and space laser secrets with just anybody, you know.
SPACE: Firefly Aerospace aims to launch 1st orbital test flight tonight. Here’s how to watch it live. The launch window opens now.
OLD AND BUSTED: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Assume Anyone’s Sexuality Or Gender Identity.
The New Hotness? Psaki Snaps When Asked Why Biden Supports Abortion If He’s Catholic: You’ve Never ‘Been Pregnant.’
Exit question: “Look at all this gendered language. What happened to ‘birthing people?’”
Biden was hawkish on Bosnia after a trip there in 1993, co-sponsoring a bill that ultimately forced President Bill Clinton to take action in 1995 to stem the bloodshed of the Yugoslav Wars. And he supported Clinton’s bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999 that helped give birth to the Albanian-majority nation. But he was skittish on George H.W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq, while supporting George W. Bush’s decision to invade a bit more than a decade later. By 2006, Biden had properly soured on that decision and was advocating an ill-conceived “Bosnia plan” for Iraq, a kind of federalist soft partition along ethnic lines.
He was arguing, like most Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2008, that Afghanistan was the good and winnable war, before he turned on it, too, as Obama’s vice president. This clearly made him some enemies in the Obama administration, many of whom are still sniping at him today. Some never forgave his early naivete. “I wish I could say Biden was a student of history and understood how problematic nation-building would be in Afghanistan,” an unidentified former top Obama Pentagon official told the Washington Post earlier this year. “That’s not Biden. He has gut instincts.” Others, such as the late Richard Holbrooke, were dismayed by Biden’s apparent callousness — especially when contrasted with his interventionist instincts in Bosnia. There’s a gripping exchange recorded in Holbrooke’s diaries that’s worth quoting at length:
When I mentioned the women’s issue, Biden erupted. Almost rising from his chair, he said, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights, it just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.” [. . .] He said it ain’t going to happen, he said I don’t understand politics, he said we’re facing a debacle politically, he said we’re going to lose the presidency in 2012 if unemployment remains high, and Afghanistan was the other issue that could pull us down and we have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam. This shocked me and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us. He said, “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Was it over when Richard Nixon bombed Pearl Harbor? Forget it — Joe’s rolling.
Earlier: Joe Biden comes full circle.
There’s something about seeing helicopters taking off from the rooftops of soon-to-be abandoned US embassies that Joe absolutely loves.
THE SEVENTIES REALLY ARE BACK. BUT WHEN DID THEY EVER GO AWAY? ABBA to drop first studio album in 40 years.
One man has finally reached his breaking point:
FORGET IT, CHARLES, IT’S DAVID FRUM:
Now if we could get rid of smoking on airplanes, can we get rid of shallow leftism and casual grifting among public intellectuals?
NEO: The message of “move on” from the Biden administration.
I’ve also noticed a very distinct trend: it’s the person being accused of wrongdoing, and perhaps guilty of it, who is the one who insists that everyone “move on” and that such moving on is a virtue. Isn’t it interesting how that reverses things, how it allows the accused wrongdoer to cast off any guilt or any need for redress and to claim a virtue – the superior ability to move on – that the accuser lacks?
Biden and the Democrats would like nothing better than to have Americans move on from Afghanistan in this way. And it’s certainly happened before that the public at large has a short attention span. I don’t know whether it will happen this time, though. Of course, it also depends on how cooperative the MSM will be in covering the story with a pillow, till it stops moving. My guess is that members of the MSM will be very cooperative from now on, because they’ve “moved on,” too. After all, they are implicated as well in whatever happens in Afghanistan, because they were instrumental in getting Biden into the White House.
The Journolist (or its 2021 equivalent) was hopping today:
And:
● CBS Moves on from Afghanistan Debacle, ABC Forgets Americans Left Behind.
● CNN Meltdown Over Supreme Court’s ‘End-Run Around Roe.’
Speaking of which:
Related: CNN’s Stelter: Shouldn’t Press Cover Climate Change More Than Afghanistan?
WHEN HE’S RIGHT, HE’S RIGHT: China orders broadcasters to ban ‘sissy men’ it says aren’t masculine enough for TV.
China’s government banned effeminate men on TV and told broadcasters Thursday to promote “revolutionary culture,” broadening a campaign to tighten control over business* and society and enforce official morality.
President Xi Jinping has called for a “national rejuvenation*,” with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China and healthier society.
The party has reduced children’s access to online games and is trying to discourage what it sees as unhealthy attention to celebrities.
Broadcasters must “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,” the TV regulator said, using an insulting slang term for effeminate men — “niang pao,” or literally, “girlie guns.”
That reflects official concern that Chinese pop stars, influenced by the sleek, girlish look of some South Korean and Japanese singers and actors, are failing to encourage China’s young men to be masculine enough.
Broadcasters should avoid promoting “vulgar internet celebrities” and admiration of wealth and celebrity, the regulator said. Instead, programs should “vigorously promote excellent Chinese traditional culture, revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture.”
Meanwhile, in America, as Steve posted this morning: Study promotes ‘princess culture’ for boys as way to combat society’s idea of ‘masculinity.’
FASTER, PLEASE: DOCTORS CLAIM TO HAVE DISCOVERED HOW TO REVERSE CELL AGING.
MALARKEY: Tree of Life synagogue disputes Biden’s claim he visited after massacre.
President Biden on Thursday told Jewish leaders that he spent time at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the October 2018 mass murder of 11 people there — but the synagogue told The Post he never visited.
“I remember spending time at the, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue, speaking with them,” Biden said in a 16-minute virtual address ahead of the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Barb Feige, executive director of the Tree of Life, said that Biden did not visit the synagogue in the nearly three years since the anti-Semitic attack.
In a phone interview, Feige, executive director since July 2019, said firmly that “no” Biden didn’t visit, even before taking office when he had a lower public profile as a former vice president and then-Democratic presidential candidate.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Then-President Donald Trump visited the Tree of Life three days after the worst anti-Jewish hate crime in US history. Trump was joined by prominent Jewish members of his administration, including his daughter Ivanka Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
Related: Here’s The Full List Of Every Lie Joe Biden Has Told As President: Part 60.
You’re gonna need a much bigger blog.
MARK JUDGE: Drunk: The Vital Pleasure of Getting Hammered.
This is a review of Edward Slingerland’s Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. I wrote about that book here.
CANADIAN CULTURE ON THE ROPES: How much longer will we fund our grifting clerisy?