Whose Fault Is It?

 

It's August 31st, 2021.  The last USAF plane has left Kabul — that is, the last USAF plane that wasn't abandoned in our rush to be gone by Biden's deadline.  There also seems to have been a fair few American civilians left behind.  Whether they chose to remain behind or were simply unable to get to the airport in time is as yet insufficiently clear.  Also left behind, apparently, are a large number of Afghans who served as interpreters during the occupation, even though they are at serious risk of Taliban retaliation.

There are rumors that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unvetted refugees made it onto airplanes to be whisked away to centers of Afghan immigration like Wisconsin.  One YouTube video claims that the U.S. State Department emailed blank visas, presumably to vetted addressees, with instructions to "fill them out and bring them with you to the airport".  A blank form such as that can be replicated easily and filled out by others who (presumably) have not yet been vetted.  Beyond that, the roads leading to the airport were by then under the control of the Taliban, and it is not guaranteed that everyone who ought to have been admitted to the airport actually got close enough for that to happen.  It also appears that something like $83 billion (with a 'b') worth of planes, helicopters, armored vehicles, and other weapons (including over 350,000 M-16s and ammunition) were left behind at Bagram airbase.

Clearly, this pull-out was bungled in a way that has no immediately-comparable example in our experience.  Why?

People of all stripes are asking piercing questions like:  "What level of military expertise is required for a leader to understand that the order of evacuation has to be (a) civilians first, (b) expensive and/or militarily-sensitive equipment next, and (c) military last ?"  And if the leader doesn't have that kind of military expertise, isn't there someone close by who does have it?

FOX News and Republicans in general are blaming this incredible series of fuck-ups (sorry, there's just no pleasant way to say it) on Biden, and Democrats while CNN and MSNBC are pointing their fingers at Donald Trump.

Well, whose fault is it?

The Democrats shrug and say "that's the evacuation plan Trump left us with!" and expect everyone to shrug along with them.  But Biden, on his first half-day in office, signed 40 Executive Orders undoing many acts of the previous President.  Is it possible that in the seven months since, no one at the Pentagon pointed out the error in Trump's horrible plan?  No, it's not possible.  If that were Trump's plan, it would have been changed as easily as those 40 EOs.  Therefore, the plan we witnessed being executed in the last two weeks was not Trump's plan; it was Biden's plan, either because he changed Trump's plan or because he didn't.

This was Biden's fault.  The buck stops there.

 

How To Drain A Swamp

 

There has been considerable blather since... oh, around mid-2016 or so... about when Donald Trump announced he was interested in becoming President of the United States... about how he would 'drain the swamp'.  That didn't happen to anything like the extent most of his supporters expected it would, and it might be instructive to ask why those exalted expectations never seemed to come to pass.

 

A new President coming into office typically receives the resignations of all political appointees of the prior administration.  Often, this includes the Directors of FBI, NSA, and CIA, but not always.  A newly-elected President who really wants to drain the DC swamp will signal that resolve by immediately accepting those proffered resignations — and summarily dismissing any who do not resign — and then cancelling the security clearances for all those persons.  Given the atrocious condition of the military currently, several high-ranking flag officers should likewise be relieved of command and separated from the service.

All such persons, military and civilian, should be relieved of their passports.  Why their passports?  Because a President, the head of the Executive Branch, also heads the Justice Department that would be potentially prosecuting other heads-of-departments (possibly including the DoJ itself), and it is necessary that those high-ranking (and therefore wealthy) defendants not be able to flee the jurisdiction.  The President also heads the Department of State that owns those passports.  The President is thus entitled to recover State Department property. 

That's insufficient, unfortunately.  The next three (at least) management levels below those Directors need to be furloughed.  They may not be able to be fired outright if they are 'civil service', but they can be placed on administrative leave, minus their security clearances, pending an investigation to determine if they are safe to have in sensitive positions.  The personnel remaining will be charged with operating their functions without the encumbrance of the upper echelons.  It strains credulity to wonder if those organizations cannot function effectively when run by the people who actually run them day-to-day.

Such actions following hot on the heels of Inauguration would send tremors through the halls of Congress.  There are — I have not the slightest doubt — many Congressional staffers who, seeing U.S.Marshals and State Department functionaries stripping the highest ranks of DC Officialdom of their badges of office, would begin to consider 'turning state's evidence' before it was too late.  A President truly set on draining the DC swamp would only need one or two such turncoats, and even the New York Times could not decline to publish the news of the forthcoming indictments.

All that is needed is a President who doesn't care that somebody who hasn't yet been sufficiently neutralized is going to leak pictures 'in bed with a dead girl or a live boy', as one unfortunately forgotten wag once predicted.

Does such a person exist?

 

Underground Houston

 

In 1981, I accepted a position with Aramco Services Company (ASC) in Houston TX.  'Aramco' is derived from ARabian AMerican Oil COmpany.  Aramco and its sister companies are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the House of Saud.  During the interview process leading up to ASC offering me a job, the recruiter had me follow him from one ASC office to another a few blocks away in downtown Houston.  To do this, we took the elevator to the lobby and an escalator to the basement.  From there, we walked through what was effectively an underground strip mall, corridors leading from one downtown building to another, and lined with shops and restaurants.  It was a surprise because I had never seen anything like this before in my life.

The story I was told was that sometime in the recent past (pre-1981), the owner of one building opened his basement as rental space for retail establishments.  The owner of the building across the street took notice of the action and did likewise.  At some point, one of them proposed cutting a path beneath the city street to join the two spaces, and workers in building A could then get to the shops and offices in building B without subjecting themselves to 100°F temperatures and 98% humidity.  As building owners one by one converted their basements to retail/rental space, new tunnels were added until today, the Houston tunnel system connects 95 separate buildings, is 6 miles long, and it is a piece of cake to get so lost that your only hope of rescue is to get to street level and find out where (exactly) you are.

It almost qualifies as 'a tourist attraction'.  It was stunningly extensive when I left the area in 1985.  It was more elaborate when I worked on contract for EXXON/Mobil in 1998, and it has certainly gotten longer since then.  It was and is literally possible to walk crosstown without ever risking being rained on.  In fact, when I worked for Aramco in the 80s, I often went to lunch with the local Mensa group by walking (underground) from One Allen Center at Dallas and Smith to The Shops at Houston Center, San Jacinto at McKinney.  It was a longer walk than it would have been at street-level, but it was air conditioned all the way.

 

Pot Legalization Looms

 

Congressional Democrats are responding positively to a call from the Biden White House to legalize and reschedule marijuana and to expunge all non-violent federal pot-possession convictions.

It's about time.  This has been a plank of the Libertarian Party Platform for 49 years — a tad shorter than the lifespan of the actual 'War On Drugs'.  How nice that someone in D.C. seems to still have a shred of common sense.

This, of course, is bad news for the Republican Party.  Most legacy Republicans still think of pot as 'the Devil's lettuce' or 'demon weed'.  Well, they better get religion pretty fast or they're going to be left in the dust of the Democrats when all those former felons suddenly discover that they can now vote.  And who, pray tell, do you think those former felons will vote for?  Hmm...?  Will it be, do you think, the party of Richard Nixon who started the brutal and ill-fated War On Drugs and began shipping Hippies off to the Graybar Hotel?  Will it be, do you think, the party of George W. Bush who ramped up that war (along with a few others)?  The GOP might save themselves — somewhat — if they're able to successfully get out the word that William Jefferson Clinton (who didn't inhale, let us recall) put more pot smokers in federal slam than any other President before or since.

No, the GOP's single chance will be to publicly congratulate Senator Charles ("Chuck is also a verb") Schumer on a courageous position and then get foursquare behind the effort such that Pot Legalization and Rescheduling passes the Senate 100-0 and the House 435-0.  Anything short of that is going to label the GOP as 'stuck in the past' (which is true, but they don't have to prove it every day, do they?)

 

MartyrMade Twitter Feed

 

The following is a copy of the Twitter feed from user MartyrMade which may be gone by the time you read this.  The viewpoint appears to be from one who is neutral regarding left-right politics.  It contains several observations that are important for people on both sides of that divide to be aware of.

—==+++==—

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective.  It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

• Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.
  


• Here are the facts — actual, confirmed facts — that shape their perspective:  1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign.  We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).
  


• These are Tea Party people.  The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios.  The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.
  


• Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could.  We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order.  Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.
  


• This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff — who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t — all the way down the line.  In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.
  


• At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing.  When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen.
  


• We know as fact:  a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign,  b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op,  c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious,  d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.
  


• Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back.  They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution — agencies, the press, Congress, academia — gaslit them for another year.
  


• Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration.  They knew their entire lives would be investigated.  Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees.  The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.
  


• This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naïve belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries.  Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.
  


• GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan.  They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.
  


• It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.
  


• They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government.  But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them.  They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.
  


• The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable.  If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story.  The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline.  Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
  


• This is profoundly disorienting.  Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was.  They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.
  


• They watched the press behave like animals for four years.  Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN.  And CNN seems proud of that.  They led a lynch mob against a high school kid.  They cheered on a summer of riots.
  


• They always claimed the media had liberal bias: fine, whatever.  They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered.  Now they don’t.  It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories [out of] whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.
  


• Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect.  In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.
  


• Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures.  It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc).  After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.
  


• Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.
  


• Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal.  Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate.  Period.  Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” — but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares?
  


• Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned.
  


• Think back:  Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source.  The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.
  


• The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!”  That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012.  This is different.  Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.
  


• And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote.  He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got!  As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope.  But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.
  


• Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories.  They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.
  


• Media & Tech did everything to make things worse.  Everything about the election was strange — the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc — but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).
  


• Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously.  See 2016 for proof.
  


• Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence.  They’ll say, w/good reason:  What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?
  


• It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won.  Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant.  Judges have families, too.
  


• Forget the ballot conspiracies.  It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.
  


• They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English.  But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election.  And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules?  The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.
  


• • a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, 
  • b) The press is part of the operation, 
  • c) Election rules were changed, 
  • d) Big Tech censors opposition, 
  • e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, 
  • f) Trump is banned from social media.


• They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.  Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

 

End Times

 

I recently had a set-to with my cardiologist.  While sitting in the examining room, I remarked out loud that it seemed silly that I, fully vaccinated, still needed to wear a mask, especially considering the size of the CoVid-19 particle compared to the limits of an N95 mask.  Specifically, the particle is about 1/4 the size of the smallest particle the mask will filter out.  It goes through the mask material like sand through a cyclone fence.

My cardiologist basically 'flew off the handle', accusing me of being a moron who didn't understand why masks were so important.  Then he walked out of the room, my examination still unfinished, telling me "Call me when you've changed your mind."

I came very close to leaving, demanding that the clinic not charge me for the visit since the doctor had refused to treat me as a patient.  Before I did, he wandered back into the room to finish the exam.

Those who reject the notion that a cloth mask can do much to defend against an aerosolized virus are called 'science deniers' by those who hold the opposing view, but I think the situation is exactly reversed.  There are several peer-reviewed studies that suggest masks are essentially useless against CoVid-19, and none that suggest otherwise.

Likewise, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was touted early on (primarily by 'the right') as an effective prophylactic when applied before the onset of serious respiratory symptoms.  The mainstream media (MSM) pooh-poohed this idea, largely, it seems, because Trump was for it.  It didn't matter that HCQ was a 70-year-old formulation on which the patent had expired, and that could be manufactured by any reasonably-well-equipped pharmacology lab for peanuts.  Or perhaps that did matter.  If HCQ had taken hold, there would not have been the opportunity for Big Pharma to make billions (with a 'b') producing vaccines whose effectiveness is suspect and whose long-term consequences are unknown.  (HCQ has even been banned for use against CoVid-19 because of a series of 'studies' where it was shown conclusively that it had no value 'curing' the virus in patients where the virus had already gained a foothold.  This was not a surprise to those clinics where it had been studied by applying it in the early stages of the disease.  Nobody had ever claimed it was a cure; it merely blocked disease progression during onset.  Most Americans didn't understand the difference.)

The Ivermectin (IVM) story replicates the HCQ story above save only that IVM is somewhat more expensive to buy than HCQ.

To make it economically feasible for Big Pharma to produce vaccines for Operation Warp Speed, vaccine producers have been, themselves, immunized from lawsuits that might arise should those vaccines produce unpleasant side-effects.  You can't sue them if something goes wrong.

It occurs to me that anyone who doesn't have to take the vaccine, shouldn't.  What will happen if one of the as-yet-unknown side-effects of the vaccine is a shortening of the human life span by 5 or 10 or 15 years?  (That might go a long way toward helping Social Security weather the coming economic downturn(s).)  What will happen if the as-yet-unknown side-effect of the vaccine is a reduction in human fertility by 10% or 15%?  What will happen if the as-yet-unknown side-effect of the vaccine is an increase in stillbirths?  These are all possibilities because there has not been time to study any long-term effects.  What will certainly not happen is that any court will allow a civil suit for damages for any of these potential calamities.  We are just now hearing of an increased incidence of myocarditis among young people who have taken the vaccines, and at least one case of a 14-year-old who suffered a heart attack within two days of getting vaccinated.

All of this for a disease with a 99.7% chance of survival.  Have we become a nation of cowards?  I think it's clear that we have become a nation of idiots.

 

California AWCA Struck Down

 

I'm just going to drop this here and let any interested reader draw their own conclusions.

https://thepriceofliberty.org/2021/06/14/californian-lies-so-blatant-even-a-judge-recognizes-them/

 

UPDATE:  6-22-2021

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals has extended the judge's original 30-day stay indefinitely, but didn't, apparently, reverse the ruling, although it's difficult to imagine a different reason than that the panel disagrees with the ruling's holding that the law was unconstitutional.