Tuesday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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‘This is Not Saigon’: Afghanistan Crumbles Under Biden in the Most Humiliating U.S. Defeat Since Vietnam

By Kyle Becker/Becker News

President Biden is on ‘vacation‘ as Afghanistan crumbles. The Commander-in-Chief is staying as far away from any cameras as humanly possible. It is probably all for the best.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have poured past the floodgates at the Afghan capitol of Kabul. Despite promising to give Americans time to evacuate diplomats and interpreters, the murderous group has overrun the city. Hamid Karzai International Airport is the only way out, and the Taliban are closing in.

The War in Afghanistan’s epitaph will come down to the old Santayana adage, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Ever since Alexander the Great led his hardened army of Macedonians into this crossroads of the world, it has been the destiny of great powers to be denied lasting victory.

“May God keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans,” Alexander bitterly remarked.

The U.S. ignored the lesson provided by the Soviet Union, who also tasted humility after fighting a nine-year war against the Mujahideen. The rag-tag guerilla fighters were backed by an unlikely coalition of America, Iran, and China. It was a young extremist named Osama bin Laden who would cut his teeth in the sprawling conflict, learning how to fight the collapsing Soviet empire while exploiting the Americans’ blindness. When the Soviet army left in a stinging defeat that ushered in the futher collapse of Russian morale, it presaged ensuing systemwide collapse; bin Laden would then turn from the vanquished reds to the red, white, and blue. The dagger in America’s back would come in the form of 9/11.

The resulting quest for vengeance against bin Laden would become the lure for America to expend two decades worth of blood, sweat, and treasure trying to root out a determined enemy from the mountain shadows. Osama bin Laden was not even in Afghanistan when he was finally hunted down, but in neighboring Pakistan. History is full of tragic irony.

The cost to the nation comes down to nearly 2,500 military troops killed, along with almost 4,000 U.S. military contractors. The Afghan national military and police lost 66,000 of their own before the recent Taliban resurgence. The U.S. spent over $88 billion training an army of 350,000 to stand up to the brunt of the Taliban’s reprisals, which was a decisive factor in President Biden’s announcement in April to withdraw U.S. troops.

“They’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of Afghans, at great cost,” Biden said at the time. They folded like a cheap camouflaged tent.

“Everyone just surrendered their guns and ran away,” a 25-year soldier named Rahimullah, who joined the army a year ago, told the Wall Street Journal.

Thus is the ignominious closing of a final chapter in a war eerily comparable to the last days of the Vietnam Conflict. The southeast Asian country itself has been the nemesis for Chinese expansionist aims for over a thousand years. The nation’s history of stubborn resistance goes back to the Battle of Bach Dang River in 938. The defeat put an end to the Southern Han dynasty’s 300-year reign of imperialist domination.

Vietnam would become the battleground for an ideologically driven proxy war pitting the United States against communist China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Vietnamese civil war had begun in 1959, but the U.S. was drawn in after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. Lyndon Johnson would escalate American troop presence to nearly half a million troops overseas by the end of the 1960s.

But American fatigue with the war propelled massive civil protests. It was the villainized Richard Nixon who would begin the wind down in Vietnam, which was closed out by the forgettable Gerald Ford. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but if often rhymes. MORE.

Liberalism Drops Its Mask

Via The American Spectator

The past year’s devastation reveals elite special interest groups as liberalism’s master.

Since the turn of the 20th century, progressivism and liberalism have been pushed for an increasingly massive state and burdensome government restrictions on personal conduct (outside the bedroom, at least) on a simple premise: It’s for the good of the people. Listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) today, one hears the same claims, with the socialist Left arguing that government should run health care to serve those who cannot afford it, or that the Postal Service should provide banking to serve those whom commercial banks do not.

But the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the truth behind this mask: modern liberalism, progressivism, democratic socialism, whatever else one wishes to call it, does not serve the people. Instead, It serves a set of defined special interest groups that often bear little resemblance to “the people” Sen. Sanders, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, and their allies invoke.

Since March 2020, Americans have seen liberals shutter schools and run the ones they allow to open as prison camps to placate teachers’ unions; they’ve seen their right to travel held hostage to the comfortable idleness of federal civil servants; they’ve seen well-heeled champagne socialists push the election of prosecutors who explicitly fail to do their jobs, unleashing a crime wave unseen since the 1990s.

The level of suffering government school systems have inflicted on children since March 2020 was unwarranted by the danger. Across most of the northeast and Pacific coast, teachers’ union industrial action (or the threat of it) led to school closures that lasted for most of the 2020-2021 period as “Apple ballot”-endorsed school board members did the bidding of the teachers’ unions who funded their campaigns and let “educators” pretend to work from home. The consequences to students were devastating; the year of “remote learning” put students at a massive disadvantage to those whose schools were open.

As the political winds shifted, even Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, conceded that perhaps schools needed to reopen. But the teachers’ unions’ ideal of “open” is not the liberal ideal of a school operated at public expense to teach classrooms of students in reading, writing, and arithmetic that many parents remember from their youths. Instead, classrooms have three-foot isolation, drinks of water taken facing a wall in the schoolroom corner, mandatory muzzles, and “critical race theory” indoctrination. Meanwhile, in the largely conservative states that have resisted teachers’ unions’ demands, schoolrooms have been open five days a week since fall.

Unionized teachers aren’t the only “public servants” denying rights to citizens by their pandemic-excused idleness. Applying for or renewing a U.S. passport has become a Kafkaesque nightmare because passport agencies and processing centers have not reopened at full capacity despite employees being prioritized for vaccination. Citibank, the contractor that operates document lockboxes that prepare applications for processing, is also operating below capacity, ostensibly due to COVID reasons.

Does “for the people” liberalism care that its inability to operate a bureaucracy denies Americans’ right to travel? Nah, not really. A Biden administration State Department official told the press: “U.S. citizens who wish to travel overseas this summer and do not currently have a passport may need to make alternate travel plans.” The liberal State Department, like the liberalism in school systems, operates not for the benefit of the people, but for its own elite class. MORE.

The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama

By Matt Taibbi

On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,” by which he might have meant Obama reportedly dancing as Trap Beckham, performing live, substituted “Prez” for “Bitch” in this classic:

It’s all about you
Girl tonight it’s about you…
Fuck it up if it’s your birthday bitch!

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.

Obama did that. He sold us out, and it’s time to start talking about the role he played in bringing about the hopeless cynical mess that is modern America. MORE.

NIH Director Francis Collins calls for more vaccine mandates

Via Yahoo News

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins urged the United States to adopt more vaccine mandates on Sunday, and he said he celebrates businesses requiring the shots.

When asked on a segment of ABC’s This Week if it is time for more compulsory COVID-19 dose policies, the medical expert said, “Yeah, I think we ought to use every public health tool we can when people are dying. Death rates are starting up again.”

“Well, that’s [an] obviously hot topic for me as a nonpolitical person, as a physician, as a scientist,” Collins added. “The compelling case for vaccines for everybody is right there in front of you. Just look at the data. Certainly, I celebrate when I see businesses decide that they’re going to mandate that for their employees.”

Collins praised the July 29 order from President Joe Biden, which stipulated that all federal employees must be fully vaccinated or be subject to frequent testing. The directive applies to the Department of Defense and all active-duty military personnel, among others.

“I am glad to see the president insisting that we go forward requiring vaccinations or, if people are unwilling to do that, then regular testing at least once or twice a week, which will be very inconvenient,” he said.

Earlier in the week, Collins raised eyebrows when he suggested that fully inoculated parents should wear masks inside their homes among nonvaccinated children under the age of 12. He later walked back his comments and insisted parents should be donning face coverings in “public indoor settings” in certain areas. MORE.

Thanksgiving turkeys may be harder to come by this year

Via The New York Post

What’s Thanksgiving without a juicy, fresh turkey? More Americans may soon find out.

Meat producers and distributors are sounding the alarm over a turkey shortage that has supermarkets and other food retailers scrambling to get ready for the holiday, The Post has learned.

The shortfall is expected to mainly affect fresh turkeys and birds under 16 pounds, which tend to be the most popular, sources said.

Extra large, frozen birds will be easier to find, sources explained. But they’re labor intensive for cooks, and therefore less desirable. To properly defrost a 20 pound bird, for example, can take up to six days.

“The news is not promising,” a broker for Shady Brook Farms, one of the nation’s largest turkey suppliers, warned in a July 26 letter about the “status of fresh, whole turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

What’s Thanksgiving without a juicy, fresh turkey? More Americans may soon find out.

Meat producers and distributors are sounding the alarm over a turkey shortage that has supermarkets and other food retailers scrambling to get ready for the holiday, The Post has learned.

The shortfall is expected to mainly affect fresh turkeys and birds under 16 pounds, which tend to be the most popular, sources said.

Extra large, frozen birds will be easier to find, sources explained. But they’re labor intensive for cooks, and therefore less desirable. To properly defrost a 20 pound bird, for example, can take up to six days.

“The news is not promising,” a broker for Shady Brook Farms, one of the nation’s largest turkey suppliers, warned in a July 26 letter about the “status of fresh, whole turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas.” MORE.

Be sure to stop by at Def-Con News to get the morning started off right.