RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/24/taliban-under-the-bed/

After the fall on Kabul, our elitists raced to Twitter and other forums to equate the Taliban to conservatives and Republicans in the U.S. What kind of country are we becoming, in which a significant part of it cannot, or will not, distinguish the difference between terrorism and political differences?

Duplici-mentarian Michael Moore, as he often is, was an early arrival at the buffet table of buffoonery. While so many of us were wondering just how things could have gone so wrong, even under Joe Biden, he tweeted “their Taliban, our Taliban, everybody’s got a Taliban,” complete with a photo of a few of the Jan. 6 Capitol intruders. Of course it was met with great approval.

Actress Rosanna Arquette, who has declared she will never again stand for the American flag and will kneel when she hears the national anthem, apparently couldn’t help herself, either. She tweeted that “the Taliban extremists” in the U.S. go by “a different name.” She wants the world to know that “the GOP right wing extremists who support destroying democracy are the terrorists in America and will continue to terrorize America until they are  stopped and pay for their crimes against Americans Jan 6.”

“Late Show” host Steven Colbert, dance partner of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, used his national forum to wonder “why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan” since “we’ve got our own on Capitol Hill.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid called the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul a “true cautionary tale for the U.S., which has our own far religious right dreaming of a theocracy.” 

And then there’s Ahmed Tharwat, host and producer of some Arab-American television show who “writes for local and international publications.” Last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune allowed him to rant about “the American Taliban,” which “stormed the Capitol to reinstall their cult leader to office after he lost the election and launched the stop the steal movement.” It was, he said, a “hillbilly coup.”

Much of the effort to link America’s political right to the Taliban is nothing more than pathetic virtue signaling. It’s the screeching of attention-hungry media personalities and celebrities who desperately need to show the world they’re on the right side of history, and are morally and intellectually superior than most of their fellow Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/police-thin-blue-line-shootings-black-homicide-crime-proactive-policing-blm-defund-11629750911?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The village of Mount Prospect, Ill., prohibited its police officers earlier this month from wearing a “thin blue line” patch on their uniforms. The patch consists of a black-and-white U.S. flag with one blue stripe. It honors fallen cops and recognizes the role police play in protecting society from anarchy. Detractors insist the symbol makes people of color feel unsafe. Police chiefs and elected officials in San Francisco, Middletown and Manchester, Conn., and elsewhere have banned it.

While Mount Prospect was grappling with threatening police patches, in nearby Chicago the police were dealing with actual violence—against officers and civilians. Three days before the anti-patch vote, Officer Ella French was killed by a bullet to her head during a traffic stop. French and her two partners had pulled over an SUV for expired registration tags. One of the SUV’s occupants, 21-year-old Emonte Morgan, allegedly fought with the officers and opened fire, killing French and critically wounding one of her partners with bullets to the brain, eye and shoulder. Mr. Morgan was on probation for a recent robbery conviction, which a Chicago Tribune story characterizes as not a “serious” crime. His brother Eric, who was driving the SUV, was on probation for a theft conviction.

French and her partner were among the 78 people shot in Chicago over the Aug. 7-8 weekend, 11 of them fatally. Typical of the post- George Floyd urban mayhem, a child—this time a 4-year-old girl—was among the victims. Over Fourth of July weekend in Chicago, a 5-year-old girl, a 6-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were shot, along with 104 others. On July 1, a 1-month-old infant was critically wounded in a mass shooting. Three young men emerged from a Jeep Cherokee spraying bullets in several directions. A 15-year-old and six other victims were also shot, along with the baby. Hours earlier, a 9-year-old girl was shot in the head.

Chicago is no outlier. In Minneapolis, six children 10 and younger have been shot since late April, including two girls, 6 and 9, who were killed; two boys, 10 and 3, both critically wounded; and an infant. None of these Minneapolis children were shot by a cop; they were killed by criminals who, like them, are black.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-agony-of-the-centrist-democrats-nancy-pelosi-infrastructure-house-spending-11629754803?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

With the House back in town, the debate for Democrats is which colossal plan they should pass first: President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package? Or Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget outline? The media is covering it as a real showdown but, if history holds, this will turn out to be Kabuki theater.

Nine Democrats, including several from swing districts, say the infrastructure bill should be passed before any budget vote is taken, and so far they have held their ground. “We are firmly opposed,” they wrote recently, “to holding the president’s infrastructure legislation hostage to reconciliation, risking its passage and the bipartisan support behind it.”

The left is demanding the opposite. Do the $3.5 trillion spending binge first, the argument goes, and then reward the Democratic centrists with the infrastructure goody bag. Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to lose either faction, and her narrow majority means she has only three votes to spare. She’s trying to accommodate both sides with a rule that lets her claim the two proposals are moving forward more or less simultaneously.

This is mainly about process, not substance. The nine Democratic holdouts want to vote on infrastructure now, but tomorrow they’re prepared to roll over for $3.5 trillion in spending and new entitlements, which is what really matters. “I’ve literally said to my colleagues, ‘Let’s vote on the infrastructure bill, and then, like, 15 minutes later we can start debate on the budget resolution and vote on it the next day,’” Rep. Josh Gottheimer told a reporter.

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/08/23/lets_stop_pretending_about_the_covid-19_vaccines_791050.html

As a family physician, I spend my days dispensing advice. I mean, there’s the occasional cast, skin biopsy, or shot, but most of my patients are seeing me for medical counsel. Never have I been asked about one subject so much as the Covid-19 vaccines, and never have I seen so much doubt and confusion among a group of smart, well-educated people. Interpreting the reality of the effectiveness of these vaccines is complicated: it is waning with time, weakened against delta, unknown when coupled with prior infection, and may not be improved with a booster – but there is new, often murky, data emerging every day. Speaking the truth about the vaccines, however, should not be that hard. We have to be willing to adapt to new data, even when it does not fit neatly into prior messaging.

That’s where our institutions went astray. I understand the desire of our public health officials, spearheaded by the CDC, to instill confidence in the Covid-19 vaccines; they remain the most expedient path to minimize the suffering inflicted by this pandemic. However, by taking on the role of no-nuance vaccine cheerleaders, they left everyone in a worse situation.

Patients and doctors looking to the CDC for guidance in decision-making receive low quality or dated information. The mainstream media is stuck between reporting public health dictates as valid, while being unable to resist doom-and-gloom reports of vaccine “failures” that sell ad space. The obvious gap between “what the CDC says” and “what we see, hear and read” has left a large space for grifters, self-styled experts, and conspiracy theorists to thrive, especially among the large group of vaccine-hesitant (often vaccine-terrified) Americans. The whole thing might have gone better had we stuck to telling the truth as we knew it.

What follows is the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines, as I see it, from the data in hand right now. It is often inconvenient, especially for someone like me, who preferred the easy days of being a vaccine cheerleader when the initial trial data emerged. Do I still recommend a Covid-19 vaccine for the vast majority of my patients? Yes. It just takes a couple extra minutes to discuss now. Most importantly, if I speak the truth now, my patients will be more inclined to trust me later. So let’s see where we really stand:

Let’s stop pretending the vaccines are 90% effective and breakthrough cases are “uncommon.”

The real world effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer (mRNA) vaccines appears to be sinking like a stone. We started at 94+% within 2 months of vaccination and against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain. The Israel Pfizer data roughly confirmed this degree of effectiveness in initial real world studies. But, then… waning happened, and delta happened.

 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/after-the-fall?token=

When the Impossible War ended, I was in a cabin in the woods in Oregon. Towering pines, unpaved roads, canyons, creeks, a crystalline moonlight that stretched across the hamlets and orchards and interstates and the farm dogs roaming around outside low-lying barns.

It was called the Forever War, but that was misleading. The problem wasn’t just that it had dragged on for so long. It was that it had attempted to do something that could not be done. 

It was late. My wife was sleeping. So were our children, ages six and three. I was watching the already infamous video of the Afghans falling from the sky. They had chased a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane about to take off on the tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. They’d climbed aboard the wings and into the wheel wells. After the plane had taken off they tumbled to the Earth below.

The first thing I could think of — I wasn’t alone — was the image, nearly two decades old, of the couple jumping from the World Trade Center. Bookends of calamity.

In the beginning, on September 11, 2001, there was grief and rage and fear of what lay ahead. But we never doubted that a great deal lay ahead. We were still the indispensable country. We had been wronged, gravely, and we were armed with a gargantuan moral authority and an unstoppable killing machine. 

And there was — just beneath the tears and disbelief, the plumes of dust, the candlelight vigils, the images of the missing — a strange anticipation. When George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, declared, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!,” I was in a newsroom in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the reporters and editors and the old ladies who laid out the pages and the old men who ran the press, with their faded Marine Corps tattoos and their packs of Marlboro Reds tucked into their shirt pockets, started to clap. One of them said, “Fuck yeah,” and I remember feeling a little fuck-yeah-ish, too.  We looked forward to tuning into the war we were about to launch. 

Then, we failed. We failed over and over and over. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. But also — and this was harder at first to see — at home. 

We kept electing commanders-in-chief who had never served, who had credentials but had never built anything, whose success resided atop the more substantive success of more serious people. The post-Cold-War president could make you feel all kinds of things, but he was always a little out of his depth because he had very little to begin with. He made promises he did not really understand. We won’t just pummel Afghanistan into glass. We’ll turn it into a Jeffersonian republic. We’ll make these people into a people they have never been, even though no one — the Brits, the Soviets, the Persians — has ever attempted as much, let alone achieved it. We will do it because we’re Americans. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/

“It is unconscionable that high-tech military equipment paid for by U.S. taxpayers has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and their terrorist allies,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “Securing U.S. assets should have been among the top priorities for the U.S. Department of Defense prior to announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

The U.S. provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001. This year, alone, the U.S. military aid to Afghan forces was $3 billion.

Putting price tags on American military equipment still in Afghanistan isn’t an easy task. In the fog of war – or withdrawal – Afghanistan has always been a black box with little sunshine.

Not helping transparency, the Biden Administration is now hiding key audits on Afghan military equipment. This week, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reposted two key reports on the U.S. war chest of military gear in Afghanistan that had disappeared from federal websites.

#1. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of U.S. provided military gear in Afghanistan (August 2017): reposted report (dead link: report).

#2. Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) audit of $174 million in lost ScanEagle drones (July 2020): reposted report (dead link: report).

U.S. taxpayers paid for these audits and the U.S.-provided equipment and should be able to follow the money.

After publication, the GAO spokesman responded to our request for comment, “the State Department requested we temporarily remove and review reports on Afghanistan to protect recipients of US assistance that may be identified through our reports and thus subject to retribution.” However, these reports only have numbers and no recipient information. 

Furthermore, unless noted, when estimating “acquisition value,” our source is the Department Logistics Agency (DLA) and their comprehensive databases of military equipment.

Vehicles and airplanes

Between 2003 and 2016, the U.S. purchased and provided 75,898 vehicles and 208 aircraft, to the Afghan army and security forces, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Quantities and examples of key U.S.-funded Military Vehicles for Afghanistan.

Here is a breakdown of estimated vehicle costs:

Armored personnel carriers such as the M113A2 cost $170,000 each and recent purchases of the M577A2 post carrier cost $333,333 each. 
Mine resistant vehicles ranges from $412,000 to $767,000. The total cost could range between $382 million to $711 million.
Recovery vehicles such as the ‘truck, wrecker’ cost between for the base model $168,960 and $880,674 for super strength versions.
Medium range tactical vehicles include 5-ton cargo and general transport trucks were priced at $67,139. However, the family of MTV heavy vehicles had prices ranging from $235,500 to $724,820 each. Cargo trucks to transport airplanes cost $800,865.
Humvees – ambulance type (range from $37,943 to $142,918 with most at $96,466); cargo type, priced at $104,682. Utility Humvees were typically priced at $91,429. However, the 12,000 lb. troop transport version cost up to $329,000.
Light tactical vehicles: Fast attack combat vehicles ($69,400); and passenger motor vehicles ($65,500). All terrain 4-wheel vehicles go up to $42,273 in the military databases.

U.S.-Funded Aircraft For the Afghan Forces

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-only-way-back-to-deterrence-is-firing-bidens-entire-national-security-team/

America needs experts who can reverse the damage Biden is doing to our national security and will stand up to future unsound and dangerous decisions.

The Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan — emboldened by President Joe Biden’s senseless decision to rush U.S troops out of the country without a plan — blindsided the Afghan government, the Afghan military, and America’s allies. This reckless decision has led to bipartisan criticism in the United States and from our global allies, and ridicule by America’s adversaries.

Biden’s attempts to blame everyone but himself for this fiasco, his refusal to take press questions for nearly a week (except from sycophantic George Stephanopoulos), and his decision to hide at Camp David while these events unfolded have only intensified criticism.

As commander-in-chief, Biden is at fault for this disaster. But his senior national security advisers also bear responsibility for implementing his irresponsible Afghanistan policies instead of resigning and reporting them to Congress.

It’s important to stress that Biden had bad instincts on national security when he was a younger man. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Now that Biden appears to be suffering from mental decline, he is making national security decisions that are irrational and dangerous. This extends beyond Afghanistan, to nuclear talks with Iran and failing to secure our southern border.

If Biden Can’t Be Replaced Now, Replace His Yes-Men

In a perfect world, Biden would immediately resign, be impeached, or be removed from office under the 25th Amendment for this unprecedented incompetence and dereliction of duty.