250, 1,000 Or 5,000, What's The Big Deal?

Who cares how many Americans were abandoned in Afghanistan? Seriously, what's the big deal?

We just spent over a year fighting for racial justice by chasing the cops out of black neighborhoods and the result there was well over 5,000 extra black lives lost to murder. That didn't seem to bother anyone enough to paint slogans on city streets in 2000 font.

Isn't this what we wanted when we ditched objective morality? Didn't we want to skip the whole passing judgment thing?

That's the only thing I can think of as I watch administration officials blow off the people that got left behind. As for the "official" figure of 250, I don't believe that at all. As far as I can tell, we had no idea how many were there to begin with, so we can't have much of an idea how many are still remaining. Then again, that's just an objective truth and who cares about those?

Whatever. People get left behind all the time.

It's All Manipulation

It's time for a sordid confession.

For most of my life, probably up until the last 15 years or so, I tried to manipulate everyone around me. Parents, siblings, friends, girlfriends, wives, kids, everyone was subject to it. When I talked to people, I would color the facts, omit details and use language designed to get you to do what I wanted.

It never occurred to me that your free will mattered. My unspoken, foundational assumption was that I knew best for everyone. Bending your will to mine was just what I did. It was as natural as breathing. I'm a strongly-typed ENFJ. The Personality Page site gives a great summary with this warning.

ENFJs are people-focused individuals. They live in the world of people possibilities. More so than any other type, they have excellent people skills. They understand and care about people, and have a special talent for bringing out the best in others. ENFJ's main interest in life is giving love, support, and a good time to other people. They are focused on understanding, supporting, and encouraging others. They make things happen for people, and get their best personal satisfaction from this.

Because ENFJ's people skills are so extraordinary, they have the ability to make people do exactly what they want them to do. They get under people's skins and get the reactions that they are seeking. ENFJ's motives are usually unselfish, but ENFJs who have developed less than ideally have been known to use their power over people to manipulate them.

Last night, we had dinner with friends who are family without the blood connection. We were talking about how none of us trust the experts and authorities any more. Two of us were on the political right and two on the left. Each had stories of catching members of the Elite in lies and how they despaired of what the rampant dishonesty implied. It wasn't until this morning that it occurred to me what's been happening.

At the dinner table last night, the other three all came from the skilled worker class. One of them had a college degree, but he got it later in life and spent most of his career as a mechanic. I represented the professional class. I have an advanced degree and have been paid quite well to Think Big Thoughts.

We, the professional class, have grown to see ourselves as above the common folk. Skilled workers are unfit to make their own decisions. We must make sure that they choose the things we want them to choose. We know better. It's my past life of manipulation writ large upon the American culture.

That's why we only get one side of racial issues. It's why the CDC mixes gender theory with practical, medical advice. It's why Wuhan Flu statistics are never put in context with other risks in life or age groups.

Superiority-born manipulation also explains why heretics from within the professional class are silenced online and driven out of any positions of influence. It can be lethal to a manipulation to have a reasonable, opposing view presented. Hence this kind of madness.

I'm not discussing the motives behind the manipulation, only that it's happening. When I reflexively practiced it, my own motives were usually benign. I never was out to get something from you, I was there to help you, you ignorant peasant.

I posit that the collapse in trust is happening because the manipulation has become so all-consuming and so pathological that it's turned clumsy. We can see the mistakes and the contradictions in it. Finding those contradictions and trying to suss out what they mean has been an obsession of this blog for years.

There's nothing more damaging to a manipulator than to be revealed as a charlatan and have your victims discover that you're doing your best to drive them to a particular decision or point of view. When they realize that you see them as inferiors, they grow to despise you. You lose their trust and, for all practical purposes, you can never get it back.

Perhaps just as bad is to be revealed as an incompetent. Not many people are willing to be led around by an imbecile. Well, our professional class has run up a $30T debt, lost wars, turned the dying embers of racial grievance into a conflagration, poisoned our children with gender madness and on and on and on. They're clearly imbeciles, but they keep trying to manipulate us.

That's where I think we are right now - the collapse of the manipulations.

General Milley is a clumsy and incompetent manipulator. He has led the charge in extremism stand-downs and Modern Nazi Race Theory pitches, informing all of his straight, white male soldiers that he hates them because they're racists. Meanwhile, under his command, the military left Bagram in favor of Kabul airport. No amount of scorn and mockery is sufficient.

The Empire Never Sleeps

I saw this yesterday and was going to post about it, but couldn't work up the courage to go at it. With a day to ponder it, I'll share that link and two images with a few thoughts.

This is an article from The New Republic, a venerable and respected publication.

This is the author. He is a Director of Prostasia, an organization that is pushing for the normalization of pedophilia.

Here's a snippet from the essay.

The danger for minors engaged in survival sex isn’t just from a few (or many) corrupt officers.

Message: The children selling their bodies are the victims of the police. The police are given power over these poor kids as a result of enforcing a moral code. Stop enforcing the moral code and everything will be better.

The Lizard Empire never sleeps.

Cheezburger Of The Day

I just don't have a blog post in me today. I had a rant all queued up, but I thought the better of it this morning. I'm glad I did. Instead, here's a smile.

I hope you're having a great Saturday.

Deaf

In some ways, Twitter is a great tool for determining if your marketing strategy is working or not. People who don't like what you're doing will tell you in no uncertain terms. It's like having an instant feedback survey.

Right now, I would hope that the CDC's primary mission is to get as many people to take the Wuhan Flu vaccine as possible. Looking through the commentary on Twitter, a recurring theme from the anti-vaccine crowd is a suspicion of the experts and authorities. Recently, the head of the CDC came out and implied that men could get pregnant.

That went rather poorly for her and did nothing to convince people to get the shot. Instead, for many, it was proof that the CDC was run by lunatics.

The lesson a professional would take from the replies would be that you needed to focus on your mission and ditch all the social justice rubbish. Today, the CDC took a different tack.

Staggering.

That's the kind of thing you'd post when there wasn't all that much going on and you had the luxury of experimenting with woke language tics.

The DoD did the same thing. Our very expensive military just lost a major war and is stumbling through a full-scale, panic retreat. On the same day that 13 12 of our men and 1 woman were blown up, that would be 12 men and 1 woman getting killed, many commands posted something about Women's Equality Day. Maybe they could focus on, oh, I don't know, combat medicine, sniper training or repairing gear while on deployment. Something martial.

Update: Here is a list of the men who were killed.

Update 2: Nicole Gee, USMC was among the dead. Semper Fi, Nicole.

Nope, they went with Women's Equality Day. Some of them told us how diversity made us stronger. They shared this as the Taliban, an organization devoted to ending all diversity, everywhere, was dictating the terms of our rather disastrous evacuation. 

The replies were what you'd expect. Absolutely blistering. It's a good bet that there were no after-action reports or lessons learned from this. Expect the same thing to happen then next time there's some kind of Social Justice Holy Day of Obligation.

They're deliberately deaf.

I Listen To The Experts

 ... and when the experts tell me to hand the Taliban a complete list of their enemies, by George, I do it! Because they're experts!

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport...

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

Unclean? How can they be unclean? I assure you, those officials are not a part of the filthy deplorables. Oh no, you can be certain they all have degrees from Important Universities.

Harvard's Gonna Harvard

Speaking of Important Universities, dig this.

Well, OK then.

They Know How Things Work

From abandoning Bagram before the pullout to chasing cops out of black neighborhoods to handing a kill list to the Taliban to naming an atheist the chief chaplain, the competence of our Elites has been demonstrated time and time again.

Yes. Competence. Demonstrated. Time and time again.

A Fat Plant

 ... I has one.

One of my cayenne plants has begun to turn out fat peppers. A normal cayenne pepper is slender and bumpy as if it was wearing tights over its seeds. In the last month, however, one of them has begun to produce peppers shaped more like jalapenos, sleek and chubby. Dig this photo.

These two are off the same plant. The one on the left is normal. The one on the right needs to go on a diet.

I'm actually quite happy about this turn of events. I figure the plump ones will yield more juice and make better Louisiana hot sauce. In any case, it's pretty weird.

The plants in this bed are now 18 months old. They were in with the cotton last year and I just let them stay after I pulled that crop. Their stems are thick and woody and the plants are very happy. I fertilized them about 6 weeks ago and that's when they started producing these gigantic peppers.

Way cool, no?

How To Solve America's Racial Problems

1. Be nicer to people of other races.
2. Not a whole lot nicer, just a little nicer.
3. Don't talk about race.

The other day, there was a young, black man outside of the hardware store asking for donations for DARE, a well-known anti-drug charity. Is it still legit? Beats me. When he went into his spiel, I dismissed him with a wave of my hand. "No, I'm good." He stopped and I kept walking towards the grocery store. Then I thought about what a jerk I had been. The kid was working a tough job, cold sales in a parking lot.

I went to the grocery store and got some cash back. I also got a cold bottle of water. I walked back to the kid and said with a grin, "How about $40 and a bottle of water?" That made him really happy and we talked about selling things and other odds and ends. I told him that I understood he had a tough job and as an old salesman how his energy impressed me.

I wasn't lying, patronizing or making a big freaking deal out of skin.

Yesterday, I was in line at the grocery store getting some pork chops, buttermilk, mushrooms and a bomber of craft beer. The young man in front of me was in his Navy uniform and as black as the ace of spades. I asked if I could pay for his groceries. They weren't much. Whenever I do this, I make sure it's not a massive cart load as that would be over the top. He wanted to turn me down, but I wouldn't hear of it.

"My father was a West Point grad," I said. "He always felt pity for guys in the Navy." We both laughed and I paid for the kid's food. It wasn't a big deal, I don't even remember what the total was. We chatted about this and that and he went on his way.

Also yesterday, at work, a black man did this same trick for me. He clearly went out of his way to praise what I had done and make conversation with me. We soon found common interests and were laughing together by the time the meeting was over. It felt great, not because of race, but because he was showing genuine affection and that's always a good thing.

Critical Race Theory and all the people going on about racism have it all wrong. Racial animosity will be overcome by individual acts of love, not some big "Difficult Conversation" about melanin. The ones advocating that never mean it as a conversation. In their minds, no white person would ever bring up families, crime and lousy study habits. Instead, we're expected to sit there and listen to whining.

Well, forget that. Let's have a party instead. Let's give and laugh and smile and chat about fun things. I think Mike said it best.

Masking Reality

... with VR goggles that only show you things that fit into your very, very narrow view of the world.

This essay, We Are No Longer A Serious People, by Antonio Garcia Martinez, is terrific. Here are the key tidbits if you don't want to click over to it.

(I)n the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?...

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape. If you’re overwhelmed by what you see, even if you work at places called ‘the Institute for the Study of War’, you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images because reality is purely optional at this stage of the game...

(T)he irony highlights the real civilizational difference here: one where combat is via prissy morality and pure spectacle, and one where the battles are literal and deadly. One where elites contest power via spiraling purity and virality contests waged online, and where defeat means ‘cancelation’ or livestreamed ‘struggle sessions’ around often imaginary or minor offenses. And another place where the price of defeat is death, exile, rape, destitution, and fates so grim people die dangling from airplanes in order to escape.

Tim has asked me why I'm so hung up on the masks. It finally dawned on me that it's not the masks, per se, that drive me bananas, it's what they represent. It's a flight from reality showing a preference for moral pornography. A mask isn't a medical device, it's a simple filter. It's a mechanical thing. Are the impurities you are trying to filter out larger or smaller than the gaps in the filter? If they are significantly smaller, then the filter is a waste of time, particularly if the impurities are more or less evenly distributed. That's before you consider the massive gaps in the filter's seal through which 95% of the fluid flows.

At my church, masks are optional, but right before Mass, the head of the choir gets on the mic and harangues us to wear them. She always says, "If you've already been vaccinated, we ask you to wear a mask as an act of charity." That drives me right up the wall. An act of charity to who? How? Vaccinated, I'm an inert node in the network and the mask is useless in any case. Why not call it an act of Egg McMuffin? That would make as much sense. I hate it.

And yet, here we are, with the head of the CDC saying that men can have babies and we should all employ utterly useless filtration systems. The American Lactation Society, or some such group, is using the term, "milk-giving humans." Climate scientists are howling about the end of the world as if we can do something about it when China and India dominate CO2 production. We are changing the name of our local high school from Junipero Serra High to something anodyne because it's said Serra was a racist and exploiter when instead he was, like so much of the world, from a culture our Elites can't comprehend.

The idiocy goes on and on and on.

I'd change one line in the excerpt above. It would read, "The cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of their own neuroses."

A serious country's executive leadership would not produce something like this.

Where Dogs Roam Free

 ... are places like industrial parks on the weekend.

The Catican Guards without the big man, Bodie, are a bit skittish. They're a pair of chihuahua mixes and they really miss their big brother. They still love to romp off the leash, but any place that might have other dogs is out of the question, particularly for our neurotic fashion model, Leah.

So where do you take the kids when you don't have 3+ hours to go to the mountains and you can't go to the school or dog park? How about a local industrial park or office park? I've also tried little-used parking structures. Those are OK, but the girls really want the sunshine and some plants.

During the Wuhan Flu insanity, there was this terrific office complex in Poway that had a bamboo forest and was fenced off from any streets. The parking lot was surrounded by the bamboo which made it perfect for chihuahuas to run and play. Once things here in Insaneifornia became a bit more normal, out came the security guards on the weekends to give us the bum's rush because ... who knows? In a more genteel, read: Southern, world, they'd look the other way while little dogs got their ya yas out, but they come from a world of rule-followers so what are you gonna do?

That left me with an industrial park that was fenced off from traffic and populated by truckers when there was anyone at all. That means they were cool and loved dogs, even little, goofy ones.

These are my people, man. 

So now the girls romp around the industrial park and any employees that might be there on the weekend smile, wave and sometimes stop to pet the kids.

It's a beautiful thing.

What fun! You never know where you might find some bits of old sandwich or maybe the end of a burrito.

There's a hillside with shrubs and some dilatory ground cover. You never know, there could be crows to chase or even a squirrel!

I hope you had a great weekend.

Zombie Shock

Watching events unfold in Afghanistan through a variety of Twitter feeds is almost too much to bear. There were two items in particular that were worth repeating here. First was this transcript of some comments by David Ignatius, a WaPo lefty, talking on MSNBC. Here were the quotes of note.

My sense, as I talk to people in the White House, watch these folks on TV, is that they are really shell-shocked. This is a kind of defeat, a level of reversal that these folks have never known in their lives. These are people who’ve never gotten a bad grade in school and suddenly they find the world collapsing around them. And I think it’s been really, really difficult for them to deal with this...

And now, I think there’s this crushing sense of having let the country down, having let these Afghan people who depended on us down. They know how this plays. They see the whole world is watching the same images. And again, for a White House that prized itself on being smart, being competent, getting things done, this isn’t Trump anymore, this is the good guys have come in, this has been a crushing week I think.

"They know how this plays." No, they really, really don't. They have no idea what's coming next. We are nowhere near the bottom.

Afghanistan is playing out yet another scenario where the American left reveals that they don't know how anything works. When planning a withdrawal from a dangerous territory, removing your military units before your civilian ones is something only an Ivy League genius would contemplate. That's what we did and now we're facing a World War Z ending.

I don't know how these WW-Z sized masses of people get smaller over time.

Nevermind getting civilians out; how do we get our last military out when there's no one to keep the masses back because they're trying to get on the CH-47 w/o shooting your way out?

This ends ugly. https://t.co/VxfR5izTRx

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) August 21, 2021

Who says we'll get to the CH-47 stage at all? When it's clear that the last 3 C-17s at the airport are the last 3 C-17s that will ever come, what will be the point of queueing up in an orderly manner and obeying the guards?

This is what a crash scene looks like when you have all the emergency vehicles you need and the place isn't swarming with 30,000 desperate refugees, some of them armed. Even under these relatively placid conditions, it takes many hours to clear the wreckage.

They didn't teach this kind of thing in the Diversity and Inclusion Management course.

The Best Possible Outcome

The best outcome is that our "best and brightest" learn about humility.

There probably isn't a best possible outcome for the 10-15,000 Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan nor the 50,000+ who are seen as collaborators by the Taliban.

Cheezburger Of The Day

I have no lists today*, so I'm going with a Cheezburger.

I hope you're having a great Friday!

* - I am listless.

The Community Of Nations For Allah

In keeping with yesterday's theme of how the Elites have become a monoculture incapable of comprehending true, philosophical diversity, I just wanted to share a short thought that keeps hitting me as I see various Important People talk about how the Taliban will want to be a part of the Community of Nations, whatever that is.

What if they don't? What if their goal is to spread Islam to all corners of the world and kill those who won't submit? I mean, that's in the Koran and all. It might be important to them. When our Secretary of State, that dude who looks like he only recently graduated from high school, comes to them and says, "You must accept gays and treat women as equals if you are to be a part of the Community of Nations!" They might say, "Allah says otherwise. Also, what is the Community of Nations?"

I can understand why politicians might use this kind of gibberish to spin a terrible military defeat, but it happens so often with them that I don't think it's spin. Further, the media, credentialed Elites all, never think to ask if the politicians mightn't have missed something important about the Taliban's motives.

It's like none of them have read the Koran.

You can find it on Audible if you don't have time to read it in book form.

The Diversity Crowd Fails

 ... to understand both "diversity" and "defeat."

How many of the people insisting on diversity and respect for women can verbally derive the Islamic position on sex roles from Koranic first principles? My bet would be that it's substantially less than 1%. My experience with the LGBT crowd's ability to derive the Catholic view of marriage, derived from our theological first principles, suggests that less than 0.01% can do so.

To the Ivy League diversity and justice folks, diversity is skin color and nummy-nums at their favorite ethnic restaurant. They have no appreciation for the substantive differences in cultures.

They also don't appreciate power relationships. Here in the US, they can silence you on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You can be kicked out of school or shouted down. Your speakers can be disinvited. They don't have to hear you if they don't want because they have all the power.

We were just defeated in detail in Afghanistan. We don't have any power there any more. We are an artillery barrage and a wrecked C-17 from having all of our ground troops annihilated. They live because the Taliban wants them to live. If the Taliban change their minds, those guys are dead.

I used to wonder what it felt like to be a Japanese citizen and see IJN ships limp or be towed into harbor with terrible battle damage.

A Japanese watercolor showing rice farmers overlooking the wreckage of the IJN Ise.

"Torn and seared she seemed a part of the rugged upheaved terrain -- and the handy rice workers would gaze out over her -- perhaps toward distant Hiroshima. Then they would turn again to their task, night soil had to be spread, the crops reaped."

That's where we are right now, but our social justice warriors still think they wield some kind of power in Afghanistan. Yesterday, I heard a quote from Nancy Pelosi about how the Taliban needed to respect the rights of women and girls. Nancy doesn't understand either diversity or defeat. Listening to her is like listening to a recording of a Nazi propaganda broadcast from 1945 where they're still making demands as if everything is going swimmingly. 

Nancy and the others aren't simply in denial now, they've been in denial all along. Now they deny defeat, but before they denied that unbridgeable cultural differences existed. Our academies are populated by people who have become deliberately ignorant about such things. They're turning out a professional class that cannot grasp them. To them, any deviation from the orthodoxy is hate, not a logical position which comes from a different set of basic assumptions about the world.

But that leads me finally to the delusional pundits, both red and blue, who demand, DEMAND that we rescue every single American in the country. Get over it, people. You aren't going to rescue any of them who can't make their way to Kabul airport on their own and do that before we pick up and leave. There will be thousands left behind. 

Our only operational forces in the country are trapped in the equivalent of very small, regional airport. The only way they will leave that airport is when the C-17s fly them away or when they get killed and thrown into mass graves by the Taliban.

That's what it means to be utterly defeated.

Carpe Knee Diem

I've whined from time to time on this blog about my knee giving me fits. I was finally able to get in to see the doctor and found out that it's just arthritis. It's good that it's nothing worse, but it's bad because it's going to get worse. Oh well. Beats pushing up the daisies.

It's another reminder to seize the moments I've got right now. I've been wanting to return to weightlifting now that the gym is open again, so I'm at it 7 days a week. Since the diagnosis, I've increased my reps and weights, trying to really push my body.

It doesn't make the knee feel any better, but it's fun to be doing something in the face of the problem. Ha! Take that, problem!

Afghanistan Finger Pointing

Biden's speech and some opinions by pundits both blue and red really infuriated me yesterday. I started channeling my late father who, as a West Point grad, always had a soft spot for ground pounders. A Korean and Vietnam War vet, he respected all nationalities of soldier. When I heard people slamming the Afghan army for not fighting, I wanted to hit something.

The Afghanis have lost about 55,000 troops in the last five years. One tenth our size, those are casualty rates on the order of what we lost in WW II. That means every family in Afghanistan knows someone who was killed fighting the Taliban.

Listening to Biden slander those brave young men made me think of my dad's old saying, "I'm reduced to four-letter words."

What a venal scumbag that guy is.

General Miley Cyrus

Or is it Milley Cyrus? Whatever.

For me, the biggest villain of the piece is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley. What a piece of work. He's making sure people know that he warned Biden not to abandon Bagram, but did he really? The dude is an O-10 with about 30 years of service. If he really disagreed with that staggeringly stupid idea, he could have resigned in protest and then shouted it from the rooftops. A cushy job on the board of Lockheed Martin would no doubt have followed.

Meanwhile, General Milley has led the charge in extremism stand-downs and Modern Nazi Race Theory pitches, informing all of his straight, white male soldiers that he hates them because they're racists.

No amount of scorn and mockery is sufficient.

In any case, he didn't resign, Biden committed the biggest military blunder in a decade and now we've got 7,000 guys standing around on a runway in the middle of Kabul, surrounded by the bad guys. I'm sure the Taliban are moving in artillery and snipers all around the place. Take out a C-17 as it tries to take off and you could see the entire force wiped out. It's all good fun having high-tech weapons, but once you lose the ability to resupply, as the Afghani soldiers can tell you, the game is over.

Our guys are totally surrounded with only a single runway as a way out. It takes a special kind of idiot to put your men in that position. General Milley is that kind of idiot.

Commander Salamander, a Navy vet, put it this way on Twitter.

We are only able to use the Kabul airport because the Taliban are letting us. They could close the airport at any moment and there is nothing we could do about it.

The conditions are set right now for the Kabul airport to be a 2021 replay the last stand of Gandamak, but with the USMC & 82nd Airborne playing the role of 44th (East Essex) Regiment of Foot.

It's the Taliban's call.

In case you're wondering about the Gandamak Scoreboard...

The entire force of 690 British soldiers, 2,840 Indian soldiers and 12,000 followers were killed, or, in a few cases, taken prisoner.

Gobsmacked

Check out this, an AP story from 6 weeks ago.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.

Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America.

The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.

If you want to know why the military has been sent back to Kabul airport to be sitting ducks on the runway, that's why. I can't get over the enormity of that blunder. If we'd stayed at Bagram, we'd have been able to run an orderly evacuation. We'd have had air support, defensible positions and, best of all, no civilians running on the runway while our planes are trying to take off. Dig this.

Kabul Airport runway today. No words needed. pic.twitter.com/8SfzEOprUZ

— Shiv Aroor (@ShivAroor) August 16, 2021

Everyone is pointing fingers about all kinds of things, but the poor decisions of the past at least had some kind of rational thought behind them. Leaving Bagram has me gobsmacked.

Bonus Photo

They can't leave the airport because the city is in chaos. They can't take cover because they're standing on a runway. Knock out a C-17 as it's trying to take off and these guys will be trapped, sitting ducks.

This must be the worst military decision in the last decade.

Chaos

 I'm late today, but I've been reading the live Twitter feeds of various Afghan vets and news reports. It's a massive failure on the part of the Administration, a disaster of the first water, but there's one thing that keeps bugging me.

Why weren't the troops kept in the country until any required evacuations occurred? Why did we remove them, abandon Bagram and then send them back in where their only supplies would have to come in and out of Kabul airport? Dig these images.

US military forces attempt to create order at Kabul airport as all commercial flights to Afghanistan are canceled. pic.twitter.com/jvQYSW9nOz

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) August 15, 2021

Fresh US troops are Arriving at kabul airport #BREAKING. pic.twitter.com/ibsH4pJo9b

— Times Fact check (@MalikRoxk) August 15, 2021

#Kabul Airport right now @Natsecjeff @TahirImran

From Snapchat pic.twitter.com/oP1oSXgaEB

— Jibran (@kjibi98) August 15, 2021

Thousands are amassed in Kabul airport unable to get in or out. There is no security. Anything could happen and there would be no way to deal with it. The evacuation is a disaster. pic.twitter.com/qjwTpwtL49

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) August 15, 2021

Unreal. Here are just a few of my questions.

1. Do they (our newly re-inserted troops) have vehicles? How will they be refueled?
2. Where will our guys get water?
3. Where will they dig latrines?
4. The city is in total chaos and the videos I've seen of the city streets are at the zombie-apocalypse-gridlock stage. That makes these dudes straight-up infantry. How long does it take to walk from the airport to the embassy or other rally points?
5. Does anyone have a list of Americans in the city?
6. Did anyone set up rally points?
7. What happens when the runway gets hit with mortar rounds? Did we fly in any engineering teams to repair the runways?
8. What happens when some of the Taliban boys get a little excited and start sniping into the crowd?
9. What kind of modern formation is that with all the guys standing shoulder-to-shoulder? Is that just vehicle-borne IED bait or something?

I could go on and on. I've got a different post in my head discussing how this is another failure of the Ivy League twits that run so much of this country, but I'll stop here with this very telling tweet from Nancy Pelosi. It's like she's living on a different planet.

The U.S., the international community and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban. As we strive to assist them, we must recognize that their voices are important and respect their culture.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 15, 2021

You Keep Using That Word

"Empowerment." I don't think it means what you think it means.

Dig this.

So they weren't really "empowered," were they? It looks like all those woke action movies where some chick whups up on a lot of big, bad men were just a load of hooey. Anyone who has lived through domestic violence could have told you that.

One thing you realize when your woman becomes violent is that you can crush her any time you want. Her hardest punches didn't do anything. My hardest would have sent her to the hospital. One time, just out of reflex, I did a sweeping block when she tried to punch me. I nearly broke her forearm against a door frame...

In a brutal and physical world, say, the world before 1900, women were subordinate to men. They had to rely on a man for protection. If their man decided to physically dominate them, there was nothing they could do. Those girls beating up men in the movies? Please. Back in the day, a woman was part of a man's household because he took responsibility for her body. They're not strong enough to plow fields all day, either, so he was responsible for her food. Dittos for the kids. He was in control because there wasn't anyone else who could do it.

Get into a violent relationship and that becomes crystal clear.

It might help empower women to have a man around who is willing to give his life to and for her.

True empowerment.

Sadly, our Afghanistan strategy was designed by people from Ivy League faculty lounges who live far, far away from such things. Thus, they emphasized the decorations of modern life, not the methods of achieving it. Above all, Afghani women needed strong, tough men willing to aggressively pursue their enemies and kill them to preserve their new freedoms.

Instead, they got programs designed by people who thought this was a good idea.

Kooper the Gen Z (@WhiteHouse) intern 😋🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/zFItHhqJqp

— Benito Skinner (@BennyDRAMA7) August 9, 2021

Eventually, The Lizards Will Get Through

As a part of their Pride festivities, the city of Bloomington, MN invited Martina Marraccino to read to children at the public library.

You can see more at this tweet.

Hey, man, love is love.

When it was discovered that Martina was also known as Adam Divine and was an incest fetish pornographer, the invitation was rescinded.

Yay. We won. The Lizard Empire was driven off. Sort of.

Hunter Biden

There are videos available on the Interweb Tubes of Hunter Biden with a Russian hooker in a hotel room saying various unsavory things. All the stuff that Trump was supposed to have done in the non-existent Russian hooker pee tape were actually done by Hunter Biden. Some have suggested that this will be a scandal for the president because he could be subject to blackmail.

Why? In a country that was perfectly willing to have Martina Marraccino read to children at the library until it turned out he was a Satanist pedophile, who's going to blink an eye at the president's son smoking crack with a Russian hooker?

On The Border

Dig this video from someone living on the border in Texas. Given what's going on with pedophilia normalization, the only thing I can think of is that these kids were going to be sold as sex slaves here in America. Because love is love, man.

It's inconceivable that any members of their families would do this to them. They had to be part of a larger set of human cargo and the cartel members dragging them across the border dumped them to make better speed.

Note that they are all girls. They look too young to be able to give any reliable identification of their captors to authorities. That's just the sort you'd jettison if you needed to shed some weight and keep the rest of the herd moving.

I blame White Rage.

Pregnant People

If you want to know why many people aren't getting vaccinated, here's part of the reason why.

The director of the CDC is using the term "pregnant people."

I'm sorry, but you can't talk like a flat-earth lunatic and still expect people to trust you on matters of health and science.

The replies on the thread are telling. The sale isn't being made. Once you've ruined your credibility, it's almost impossible to get it back.

Sales prospects stop listening to you after you tell them something they know to be a lie. You cannot make the sale after that. You just can't.

Super Happy Lucky Fun #1 Bonus TikTok Video

When the CDC director lets loose with a "pregnant people," Normals see it as an endorsement of this sort of thing.

The rules are getting more complicated. pic.twitter.com/AbFQ3xA5NX

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) August 12, 2021

Oh yeah, you can make the SCIENCE! sale after that, no problem.

When Leprechauns Teach High School

 ... anything can happen.

Today's topic is so deep that I'm actually intimidated by this blog post. Instead of letting it rip, in the interest of time, I'll summarize what's happening.

To fight racism, Oregon has ditched proficiency requirements for graduation.

“SECTION 3. Notwithstanding any rules adopted by the State Board of Education, a student may not be required to show proficiency in Essential Learning Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022, 2022-2023 or 2023-2024 school year.”

Information Theory Analysis - A high school diploma from Oregon now conveys almost zero bytes of data. That is, it only tells you that the student was enrolled for four years. That's it.

Racial Justice And White Supremacy Shake Hands - I don't remember where I saw it, but in a comment on one of these articles, a compassionate soul said that it was time we all just admitted that blacks have substantially lower IQs. We can't expect them to pass these tests. That white supremacist take is simply a restatement of the racial justice crowd in Oregon's proficiency policies. #Winning!

Contained in the essay linked above are further links showing how children in other cities are failing in staggering numbers.

Many of us have long objected to the chronic failure of public schools in major cities like New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore to achieve bare proficiency for many students in reading, writing, and math. The response in many districts is for some to declare standardized testing or meritocracy as racist while other district eliminate special programs or schools for gifted students. Oregon has found a simpler approach. Gov. Kate Brown (D) just signed a bill last month that drops any proficiency requirement in reading, writing or math, before graduation. Problem solved.

I clicked through to the links and read through the articles. They look like all the other ones I've seen. The explanations fall into one of two groups - red ones and blue ones. The reds say the public schools are the problem. The blues say that funding and racism are at fault. No one says the families are the issue. I may have missed it, but not once did I see family structure mentioned.

Everyone, red and blue alike, are hunting leprechauns.

I'm going to blame the academy. It's the job of our researchers to assemble a list of candidate hypotheses and test them. When the simplest hypothesis is not even mentioned, the only thing I can conclude is that our scientists are indeed charlatans and poltroons.

Bonus Tidbit

Dig this.

“I never really went to school, but you know what I'm saying? I was always getting passed. You know what I'm saying?” a former Augusta Fells student told Project Baltimore.

The former student is now a 22-year-old man, who we are not naming. For two years after dropping out, his name remained on the rolls of the school, likely increasing the tax dollars it received, even though he was not attending. But that’s not the only reason his story is important.

“I never really went for the whole school year. I was hooking school and stuff like that. So, every time I did go, like in the beginning of the school year, I was always in a higher grade than what I was last time,” the former student told Project Baltimore.

That's not the best part. The best part is that he had a GPA of 0.97. How in the world do you get a non-zero GPA when you don't even go to school?

The dude must be some sort of genius to have gotten more than a zero on tests he didn't even take.

Judged From All Sides

Way back in junior high and my first two years of high school, I ran with a seriously geeky crowd. Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons*, we were into the whole nine yards. There were four of us and we spent most of our free time together. What we said and did remained within the group because there weren't any mechanisms for others to discover it. Some of us drew comic books, others wrote fiction, but none of it saw the light of day beyond us.

What happens to you when everything you do is public? What happens when your freshman crush can see every part of your life as can everyone else in the school? Dig this.

Well it’s simply cause I’m genuinely scared of driving so it just takes me longer to actually try and learn to drive, nothing to do with wanting independence and communication is anxiety inducing because I get judged on literally anything I say or do :/

— Keith ‧₊✜˚. semi ia (@taegyuflirt) August 10, 2021

"(C)ommunication is anxiety inducing because I get judged on literally anything I say or do."

Indeed you do, Keith. Since our lives are online and the kids are posting all kinds of information on their social media accounts, every part of you is available for critique.

Confession: My fiction was horrible. Some of my cartooning was funny, but only in bits and pieces.

Had we lived in the fishbowl of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and what have you, we'd have quickly become conformist and risk-averse. We'd have also agitated for a non-judgmental world. Any standards would have been a threat because we couldn't have lived up to them, at least not in all the parts of our lives that would have been visible.

It's no wonder some of the kids want safe spaces. We had our safe space, it was wherever the four of us happened to be. We were hidden in plain sight from people who might have judged us. Social media has ripped our lives open.

Speaking Of Judgment

A few days ago, a fan sitting behind home plate at a Rockies game, called out to the Colorado mascot, Dinger the Dinosaur. The dude in the goofy costume was a few aisles away and the fan wanted to get a family picture with Dinger. His yells got picked up on the home plate mike. With sensitivity that would make a moth's antennae jealous, the racial justice crew misheard "Dinger!" as the N-word. They leapt into action and howled out their cries of "RACISM! RACISM! RACISM!" Here's one.

Old Mike wasn't surprised that the fans around the dude didn't react to the N-word. He knows our type. We're perfectly comfortable with someone shouting racial epithets at the top of their lungs. It's who we are and Mike hates us.

This is Mike.

The WaPo hates you so thoroughly that they keep this guy on the payroll to write about how horrible we are and, from time to time, pen something or other about sports business.

That's something to keep in mind.

Bonus Bit: If you want to see how the rest of the folks in the media reacted, check out this thread. They hate you. They all really, really hate you.

* - We used the original three books, of course.

Growing Watermelon Is Easy

... but killing it is even easier!

I've massacred all but one of my watermelon. I'm down to a single Nancy, planted in one of our raised beds.

The sole survivor of about 40 seedlings.

Failure seems to be the recurring theme of my annual Dixie projects. My tobacco molded at the end of the fermentation process. My cotton was harvested, but I couldn't manage to make a cotton gin to process it. Now, I'm taking the easy way out and simply slaughtering almost everything before I have to do the real work of turning the watermelons into wine.

In all seriousness, I have high hopes for this final plant as the bed has been rejuvenated and the little Nancy seems to have taken root within it.

In each of my failures, I've managed to learn something and am hoping to try all three next year. Our remodel will result in two new raised beds, so I'm hoping to devote one to tobacco, one to watermelons and the third to cayenne. Just how all of those will end up in flaming wreckage remains to be seen.

Your Body Will Break Down And Fail, Be Of Good Cheer

I'm at the point in my life where things are starting to fail. I have to use one of those CPAP machines in order to get any kind of sleep at all. I took first place in a sleep apnea test a few years back. I had the highest number of wakings of anyone in my group with 61 per hour. That meant I was sleeping for less than a minute at a time before I stopped breathing. My autonomous nervous system decided that if everyone else in my body got to sleep, it did, too.

There are times where you just look at some part of your body and say, "Well, that's broken. Hmm."

My right knee has decided to pitch a fit lately. I went to my GP and he told me it wasn't a torn ligament. Hurray! I asked him how he knew. "Well, if it was a torn ligament, it would have healed by now."

Rats.

So I'm back to weightlifting. I figure this is the last chance I'll have in my life to really go hard, so I'm taking advantage of it, grumpy knee or no grumpy knee.

I had to bathe the Catican Guards this weekend and discovered that kneeling in the shower with them was very difficult. I missed the days when I could kneel with impunity. Now I have punity and I wish I didn't.

It made me realize I need to be grateful for all the things that still work. As I wondered how I might go about doing that, it occurred to me that it's not possible for each part. You don't know what's going to fail next. If you go around thinking to yourself, "Oh, pancreas, how I love you so!" your spleen might get jealous and say, "So what am I, chopped liver?" to which your liver will say, "Hey, I heard that!" and your spleen will have to apologize.

Where was I? Oh yes, gratitude. Since you can't be grateful for every individual, properly functioning body part, the next best thing is to be of good cheer as much as possible.

After all, things will get worse.

"Oh, little plant, I will appreciate you because by December, you'll be dead."

Just call me Mr. Hope.

Note: I'm actually trying to make a serious point here. The best way to deal with bodily degeneration is to be happy with what you have right now.

It's The Mail-in Voting Of Bathroom Scales!

My position on the validity of the 2020 election is that, due to the unreliability of mail-in ballots, the outcome of the election will never be known. Since, for mail-in ballots, you don't know who cast the vote in any given person's name, you have no idea what that person wanted. The data is so tainted as to be worthless.

Our bathroom scale has gone mad. It may give me different numbers from day to day, but always the same ones. Its readout says it's accurate to 0.2 pounds, but there have been times where it says I weigh the exact same thing three days in a row. Further, in the last two weeks, there have been only 4 different numbers it has reported. I know enough probability and statistics to know this is practically impossible.

And so The Great Scale Safari of 2021 began this morning. Healthline gave me their recommendations for the 8 best bathroom scales and I stopped at the first one and bought it. And so The Great Scale Safari of 2021 ended later this morning. It really wasn't all that great of a safari when you think about it, but the 'Post's marketing department insisted on the title, so what are you going to do?

Anyway, here are the details on the scale I chose.

All that matters is accuracy. If there's another with all kinds of features, but it's less accurate, what's the point? The thing only measures one piece of data, your weight. If that data is tainted, then all the ease of use and calculational features are pointless. I dismissed all of the other "best bathroom scales" because they offered nothing of value. They're the mail-in voting of bathroom scales.

What can you do with untrustworthy data?

Wuhan Rt

 ... is just one interesting data point you can find at the CovidStim site cooperatively produced by Yale, Harvard and Stanford, proving that someone, somewhere, is still doing good STEM work. Rt is the effective reproduction rate of the WuFlu. If Rt is 1, it means each infected person will infect one more. If it's 2, then each infects 2 more and so on.

As Delta hysteria goes on, I've been clicking around a few data sites and discovered this one. It doesn't give fatality rates, but it does describe the spread. If you go there and mouse over the map, it will give you Rt as a function of county. Here's my own SoCal right now.

For those unfamiliar with our geography, I circled, from bottom to top, San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties.

What's interesting to me is something I saw as I looked at the map in general. It looks like rural counties have a higher Rt than urban ones. In the map above, San Diego, Anaheim and Los Angeles are all pretty benign while Imperial County to the east is getting clobbered.

Why would infection rates be worse where the population is sparse? Further, if I remember right, LA doesn't have a particularly good vaccine rate. If that's the case, why isn't it getting crushed? Does Rt go down as density goes up because there are so many infected people nearby, competing to infect a new host?

Beats me. Hmmm.

Who's At The Door?

Well, it's a bit late for that question. How about, "Who's in the dining room?" Dig this.

Cartels & human smugglers are very tactical. They will send large family groups across the border to suck up Border Patrol resources. Then, when they’re being processed, they send the runners across elsewhere. Here’s a grade A example we previously shot here in La Joya. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/4rPsImfk5e

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 1, 2021

The "refugees" and "migrants" are as much diversions as anything else. Just who were those chaps getting across the border while the Border Patrol was busy with the families?

Dig this.

Uvalde Station agents encountered five undocumented migrants wearing camo, attempting to evade arrest. They possessed clothing, binoculars, and knives they had stolen from a nearby ranch house. All subjects were taken into custody by local law enforcement. pic.twitter.com/w7h9xOStVg

— Chief Patrol Agent Del Rio Texas (@USBPChiefDRT) August 2, 2021

They must be migrant refugees looking for a better life, right?

The City of McAllen is sounding the alarm. Catholic Charities is providing a safety valve for them in the form of their Respite Center. It's overwhelmed.

McAllen, Texas alone is at 1900 per day and those are just the ones that go through Catholic Charities. I doubt the dudes in camo and the ones sprinting in behind the families are represented in that number.

These are sophisticated fire-and-maneuver tactics deftly executed by combat veterans in the cartels. The Border Patrol is pinned down, not by gunfire, but by illegals while the cartel strike teams bypass them and go after more lucrative targets. The execution is military, but the goals are financial.

Note: Beyond the border, which is defended by our overmatched Border Patrol, is... wide open space. It's like the French countryside past the Meuse River in May 1940 where Guderian's and Rommel's Panzer divisions could run in any direction they chose, completely unimpeded. All we've got past the border are police and sheriff units. Their actions are restricted by our civil rights laws and are designed to apprehend criminals, not deal with enemy infantry squads.

Backing up to the strategic level, our leaders are concerned with White Rage and Systemic Racism while theirs are interested in drug running and human trafficking. We're emotionally and mentally unequipped for what's unfolding at the border.

If you want a look at who we're facing, check out the State Department's travel advisories for Mexico.

How About The Kids?

I've seen a few things behind the scenes in child and sex trafficking interdiction. Human smuggling for the purposes of sex slavery and child porn is big business. How big? Well, it's big enough to have recruited the BBC for grooming operations in the hopes of normalizing pedophilia.

The Lizard Empire is on the march. Some of it is coming right across our undefended border.

Invasion

Operation Barbarossa was the 1941 invasion of International Socialist Russia by National Socialist Germany. I'd recommend it as a baseline for massive campaigns. I'm not sure if there have ever been any bigger ones, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that Barbarossa was in the top 3 of all time. At the start of hostilities in 1941, the Germans had 3,800,000 men under arms and the Russians 2,700,000.

This year, it looks like we will see between 2 and 3 million illegals come across our southern border. July alone saw 210,000 apprehensions by the Border Patrol, up from 189,000 in June. That's apprehensions, not crossings. Just as a rough guess, let's assume that another 50% weren't even apprehended, bringing July's totals to around 300,000. Carried out for a year, that's 3,600,000, or roughly the size of the Wehrmacht as it marched into the Soviet Union.

Dig this drone shot from Texas.

NEW: This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/AsAygsO966

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 1, 2021

Texas officials are screaming bloody murder, but since they're not their own, sovereign country, they can't enforce their border laws.

If they became their own nation, they'd be able to do that.

A House Republican from Texas called for the state to consider shutting down ports of entry until the crisis at the Mexican border has been resolved.

Chip Roy, who represents a central Texas district, called for Texas to prohibit even legal travel between the United States and Mexico, a move that would halt millions, if not billions, of dollars in trade.

"We're getting to a point right now where we ought to consider just shutting down the ports of entry, to send a loud signal to the United States that we're not going to deal with this anymore," Roy told Newsmax TV Tuesday morning. "I want the attorney general of the United States to come down to Texas, look me in the face, and tell me he's going to do something to stop Texans from securing our border. It's time. We need to do it ourselves."

Meanwhile, my Church, whose prelates have grown up in a world of printed money paying for their political "compassion," is flipping the bird to their fellow citizens.

NEW: All morning long we’ve watched Border Patrol drop off multiple bus loads of migrants at a Catholic charity in downtown McAllen, where they are given food & shelter before they take buses and flights across the United States. Buses arriving every 30 minutes so far. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/Yon4rpN3VZ

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 2, 2021

For the first time in my life, I've found myself wanting to remove the tax exemption for religious institutions. If you don't care about other Americans, why should we care about you?

Add the Church to the list of institutions I no longer trust. Many in our leadership have gone just as woke bonkers as all the rest of the cocooned Elites.

Not to worry. All of this will come to a head soon enough.

Why All The Fear Porn?

I've seen several excellent threads recently discussing, among other things, the Delta variant of the Wuhan Flu. While cases are indeed rising, fatalities are not going up proportionately. Dig these charts.

It's the Delta variant! We're doomed!

Err, maybe not.

If you want to read an excellent fisking of some of the most recent panic porn, you can find one here. The author of that post is a statistician who goes off on an ABC News piece designed to terrify you. What you find is almost no actionable information and stats carefully chosen to be both alarming and inconsistent with each other.

Dittos for the Global Warming Climate Change hysteria. It may or may not be happening, but if it is and it's driven by CO2, China is the culprit by a significant margin. The US has done plenty to reduce our footprint, but the rational response now is to learn to cope with whatever is coming. That, of course is not what we're being fed. Instead, all we get is fear, fear, fear.

And so on and so forth. White supremacists, voting laws, blah blah blah, it's all fear porn all the time.

Why?

Well, if you don't have a crisis you can't have heroes. Going back to the WuFlu, what if we were told more about who is really at risk? If we discovered what the comorbidities were and the death rates for people without those problems, we'd be able to gauge the danger to our own lives and act accordingly.

Of course, if we did that, we wouldn't need all those heroes.

Recalling a portion of KT's Theory of Everything, there's a strong demand for self-esteem pornography.

The diversity crowd feels a frisson of pleasure when someone like Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian, wins an election. They're silent when Macy's leaves a 170,000 square foot hole in the Magnificent Mile and when Chicago murders skyrocket, almost all of which are black-on-black.

It's not that they don't know, it's that they are solving a totally different equation than what they claim.

They are not fighting inequality, they're morally masturbating. Diversity, trans, racial justice, all of it is just pornography. It feels so good, but nothing gets done. Further, they risk nothing, since it's the mania du jour. No one will be canceled if they encourage a young girl to take lethal doses of testosterone. Instead, they might be elected President...

BLM is porn. The trans movement is porn. The Green New Deal and associated trillion-dollar programs are porn. It all makes us feel so, so, so gooooood, but in nine months we'll have ... nothing.

The Wuhan Flu response is porn as well. For example, there's no reason to mask children, vaccinate them or keep them out of schools. If we had a decent handle on the risk demographics, most of us could live normal lives.

So why the fear? What do all of those things have in common? Fear creates a need, a need that you can fill. When you fill an important need, you're a hero.

• Black people need you otherwise they'll be attacked by white supremacists.
• Transmen and transwomen need you otherwise they'll suffer pain from being misgendered.
• The planet needs you otherwise we'll all die of heat stroke.
• Everyone around you, regardless of healthiness, is at risk from the Wuhan Flu. They need you to get vaccinated and wear a mask.

You are so very, very important! 

It's all self-esteem pornography.