RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/stream/?topic=wasteoftheday

CHECK OUT THE DAILY LINE-UP HERE: WASTE OF THE DAY BY OUR AUDITORS AT OPENTHEBOOKS.COM.

Each day at Real Clear Policy, we are shining a white-hot spotlight on government gone wild — a daily example of how taxpayers are literally getting ripped off.

Institutionalized incompetence at all levels of federal, state, and local government. 

This week, our “Waste of the Week” aired on The National Desk with host Jan Jeffcoat on the Sinclair Broadcast platform of 190 ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox local affiliates across America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-state-department-we-cant-process-special-immigrant-visas-right-now/

My reader who’s trying to get his company’s former employees out of Afghanistan learned that the U.S. State Department has temporarily stopped processing Special Immigrant Visas for the government’s Afghan allies. (For background on this reader and his efforts, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)

My reader’s latest automated e-mail reply from the State Department arrived Thursday:

 You are receiving this message in reply to the email you sent to the AfghanistanACS@state.gov email address. Please review the information below. You will not receive a response if the answer to your question is covered in this message.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul suspended operations on August 31, 2021. While the U.S. government has withdrawn its personnel from Kabul, we will continue to assist U.S. citizens and their families in Afghanistan from Doha, Qatar.

While we are currently unable to provide consular services for immigrant visas, including Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), in Afghanistan, we are developing processing alternatives so that we can continue to deliver this important service for the people of Afghanistan.

The message gives no sense of when or how the State Department will be able to provide consular service for immigrant visas and SIVs.

The message also urges Afghans in danger to see if the United Nations can help them:

Asylum/Humanitarian Assistance:  If you have concerns about your safety, you may contact the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) protection office, which can be reached via their Protection Hotline numbers or email address:  0790691746 and 0704996168 (available on all working days), and afgkaprt@unhcr.org.  UNHCR’s website provides information on asylum procedures abroad: https://help.unhcr.org/.

Dear Mr. Trump, I wish you well, but I hope you do not choose to run for President in 2024.
https://swtotd.blogspot.com/
I write this with all due respect for you and your Presidency. Democrats are in disarray, with a President who is more puppet than leader, and with far-left extremists having seized control of the Party. So, my caution may seem odd. Moderate Democrats recognize they are at risk in the 2022 mid-term elections, barring a miraculous or unforeseen event. But you are a unifying factor for Democrats and independent “Never Trumpers.” Your candidacy, I believe, would unite the opposition and hurt Republican prospects.

Taking a supporting role is against your nature. Nevertheless, my hope is that you will campaign for Republicans in the mid-terms and back their choice for President in 2024. Twice I voted for you. Your disruptive technique was welcome, as I wrote in an essay in January 2019. In my opinion, your Presidency was a great success in every way but one. Deregulation, along with personal tax cuts, unleashed an economy that had been mired in sub-three percent growth. Your corporate tax cuts repatriated an estimated $1.5 trillion, which was reinvested back in the U.S. Unemployment declined and employment increased, especially for minorities. According to the Institute for Energy Research, the U.S. achieved energy independence in 2019 for the first time since 1957. With help of the “Wall,” illegal immigration through our southern border was reduced. At your insistence, our NATO Partners increased their share of spending on defense. China was called out for its aggression in the South China Sea and for its Belt and Road initiative, which creates dependency on China on the part of participating nations. Moving our Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, along with the Abraham Accords, did more for Middle East peace prospects than any other proposals since Israel’s founding in 1948.

You appointed nearly as many appeals court judges in four years as your predecessor did in eight. You added three conservative Justices to the nation’s highest court. You took us out of the toothless Paris Agreement, a sop to climate self-interests, and you vacated the ill-conceived Iran nuclear deal. Despite all the media hype and disinformation to the contrary, you handled COVID-19 as well as could be expected. The dramatic economic slowdown in 2020s second quarter was nearly offset in 2020s third quarter rebound. Regarding the pandemic, you were forced to navigate between myriad (and often conflicting) medical recommendations, all claiming to be based on the latest scientific evidence. Your Operation Warp Speed delivered a vaccine far sooner than medical experts expected.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/11/a-failure-of-memory-and-nerve/

“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”

—Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics

I write on the 20th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, D.C. No matter where you turn, it seems, the message is the same, a combination of injunction and protestation: “Never forget,” “We remember,” the sentiment invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism. 

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered, and no amount of barking by the president of the United States about what an “extraordinary success” his shameful scuttle out of Afghanistan was can change that. 

If we truly remembered, we would not have allowed four top Taliban terrorists, released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the traitorous Bowe Bergdahl, to assume top positions in the newly formed Taliban government. If we truly remembered, we would not have left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan, ready-made hostages for the new regime.

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the enlightened, “woke” perspective that has laid waste to the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military? 

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity.” Writing in The Spectator, the columnist known as “Cockburn” captures the fatuousness of the program. “Do-gooders,” he notes, “established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance,’ so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’” I wonder if among the “attitudes” discussed were the penchant of certain Afghan men to stone women to death for adultery? “Under the U.S.’s guidance,” Cockburn continues, “Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house—higher than the actual figure in America!” 

Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for. . . . Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. 

The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost, as Cockburn notes, was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17737/cyberwar-flipping-switches

President Thomas Jefferson’s decision to fight the Barbary pirates was not without its detractors. Many Americans, including John Adams, believed it was better policy to pay the tribute. It was cheaper than the loss of trade.

Sanctions and other punitive measures should address Russia’s refusal to sign onto the so-called Budapest Convention, a pact that obliges signatories to prevent cyber-crimes that are conducted within their borders. European Union nations and the United States are all signatories. Russia has resisted doing so, even as cyber-crime traced to the Russian mafia and other “advanced persistent threat” actors is repeatedly traced to its soil.

An article from the February 2015 issue of Brigham Young University Law Review argues persuasively that “Russia has an obligation to monitor and prevent trans-boundary cybercrime under the standard of due diligence.” But Russia will not, because the cyber-hackers advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of creating havoc and depressing the morale of the countries he targets.

The cat-and-mouse games played every day between cyber-crooks and cyber-cops cannot be ended by one daring raid. But as the stakes of the crimes rise with the world’s reliance on connected systems to operate more and more physical infrastructure, the urgent need to shove the pirates off the deck before they can burn the ship grows more pressing.

Discussing Russian hacking capabilities in a video discussion for the Heritage Foundation recently, Prof. Scott Jasper of the Naval Postgraduate School recalled a hack in 2018 in which the attackers succeeded in penetrating electrical power companies in the U.S., as they did in Ukraine

“We had evidence from CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) that Russian actors had penetrated up to 20 to 24 utilities by compromising vendors that had trusted relationships,” Jasper said. “They had taken control to the point where they could have thrown switches. They did this in Ukraine and flipped the switches of substations. So, this is a real threat.”