RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-taliban-just-received-the-largest-weapons-transfer-in-50-years/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second

As a percentage of GDP, the arms left in Afghanistan represent the largest international weapons transfer in decades.

Economic statistics rarely deepen the sense of drama behind headlines. The Taliban’s new cache of American arms may be an exception. Each of the Taliban’s new American-made M4 assault rifles costs more than a year of per capita output in Afghanistan. The Taliban now cruise in some of the 4,700 Humvees transferred by the U.S. to Afghanistan between 2017 and 2019. Twenty thousand Humvees would cost the whole country’s annual GDP. The arms transfer that occurred as the U.S. withdrew and American-aligned Afghan forces surrendered in a haste really is as enormous as it seems. Relative to the size of the local economy, as the chart below shows, it’s the largest transfer of weapons the world has witnessed in decades.

The chart shows the world’s largest annual weapons transfers as a share of the receiving country’s GDP since 1960. The underlying data on weapons transfers come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Their data document weapons transfers to governments as well as other armed groups. In the 1980s, for instance, the data for Afghanistan document weapons transfers to the Mujahadeen, the Taliban’s predecessor, as well as to the Northern Alliance (the anti-Taliban opposition the U.S. aligned with in 2001) along with the central Afghan government. For each country in a given year, the value all arms transferred to any group operating within its borders is added up, creating a single value for arms transferred to armed groups in that country. This value of all weapons received in a given year is then divided by the annual GDP of that country, available from the World Bank. For this metric of weapons received as a share of GDP, the chart displays the largest value registered by any one country for every year since 1960, the first year for which these data are available. World War II and its aftermath almost certainly would have registered higher values than anything observed since 1960. The inferences permitted by the chart, then, are only about history since 1960.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/ron-desantis-was-right-about-monoclonal-antibody-therapy/

Florida’s governor was blasted by progressives for promoting Regeneron’s COVID treatment. Now, demand is so great the Biden administration is rationing it.

T wo months ago, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was being roundly castigated for promoting the use of Regeneron’s monoclonal-antibody treatment as part of his state’s efforts to fight COVID-19. Desperate to find something sinister in the push, DeSantis’s critics threw out every charge they could dream up. At first, the line was that Regeneron’s treatment didn’t work. Then, it was that Regeneron’s treatment worked fine, but represented a dangerous distraction from the vaccine. And, finally, it was that Regeneron’s treatment was part of a corrupt plot to enrich DeSantis’s donors.

Today, we learn from the Washington Post that, actually, none of that was the problem. Instead, DeSantis’s sin is that he has been relying upon monoclonal-antibody treatment too much, and that this is unfair to other states that now need it.

What a difference eight weeks make.

The Post informs us that the Biden administration has been so impressed by the impact that Regeneron’s treatment has made that it is now seeking to “stave off shortages” of the drug by “purchasing 1.4 million additional doses” and tasking the Department of Health and Human Services with setting “the rules for distribution . . . instead of allowing states, medical facilities and doctors to order them directly.” In explaining this move, the Post submits that “soaring demand for the therapy represents a sharp turn from just two months ago, when monoclonal antibodies were widely available and awareness of them was low” — which . . . is certainly one way of admitting that the same people who relentlessly condemned DeSantis for trying to raise that “awareness” “just two months ago” are today coming around to his point of view.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/milley-checkered-history-china-afghan-withdrawal-crt

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley faces intense scrutiny for phone calls he made to his Chinese counterparts about then-President Donald Trump. But it’s far from the first time Milley’s actions have sparked accusations of politicizing his role.

The pair of phone calls between Milley and Chinese defense officials emerged from a forthcoming book about the end of the Trump presidency. According to the book, Milley called the Chinese once in October 2020 to assure them the United States would not attack them and again in January 2021 to offer the same assurances. He also promised to give them a secret heads-up if Trump planned to launch an attack.

A spokesperson for Milley said Wednesday the phone calls, which the Pentagon did not deny, were part of the chairman’s regular “duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”

Amid the demands for Milley’s termination, President Joe Biden said Wednesday he has “great confidence” in his top military adviser.

Republicans have demanded answers whether Milley circumvented the chain of command by communicating Pentagon plans to the Chinese without the president’s knowledge.

Critical race theory defense

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/15/the_deep_politics_of_vaccine_mandates_146408.html

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others. That tradeoff is unavoidable. It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is. It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom. It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

Experts, not elected politicians,
Rational bureaucratic procedures,
Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).