Monday, August 16, 2021

Biden had no other choice

Excellent updates from Josh Marshall about Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal:
  The more I see the more I’m convinced this was the right decision – both what I see on the ground in Afghanistan and perhaps even more the reaction here in the United States. 
 It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the consequences of the reality of the situation. ... 
 The perpetual effort to stand up an Afghan government that could exist on its own did not work. That doesn’t mean the decision to topple the Taliban government in 2001 was a mistake. But that was twenty years ago. We are living in a dramatically different world today. 
We have been in a perpetual occupation in pursuit of no clear national security interest of the United States. At a certain point you have to realize that and act accordingly. 
 Someone had to make the decision that Bush, Obama and Trump did not and apparently could not. Biden did. 
   As a matter of strategy, and as one of keeping faith with Afghans who depended on us, this withdrawal is suboptimal. Biden is fully responsible for it. 
 But from his point of view it probably looks like the best option available — the others being, respectively, no withdrawal at all and a protracted, semi-public tug-of-war with senior military officers deeply invested in putting off unpleasant decisions about an Afghan project that has defined so many military careers. Biden looks determined not to let the military leadership do to him what it did to Obama a decade ago. 

 And this:


Sunday, August 15, 2021

"THIS time it will be different!"

My tweet isn't precisely true, of course, but it feels truthy all the same. 
The War on Terror began in Afghanistan 20 years ago, and it was one that I always had thought was justified by the World Trade Centre attack and the Taliban harbouring of Osama Bin Laden. 
But Bush never made it clear exactly what NATO and the Americans intended to accomplish in Afghanistan -- a lot of talk about going on patrols and building schools and negotiating with war lords, but that all went on year after year after year and nothing ever changed. 
In retrospect, of course, they should have pushed the Taliban out of power, declared victory, and left in 2005. But Bush didn't have the stones to do that over Cheney and Rumsfeld's warmongering. 
Then Obama got out of Iraq but the growth of ISIS left him without the credibility for another battle with the military over Afghanistan. 
Trump vowed to get out but of course he never did it because he didn't know how --except for sending Pompeo to make things worse by releasing thousands of Taliban prisoners. 
And so, finally, in the end, it all came down to Biden - he is determined to get America disentangled from the first and last of its Middle Eastern wars and he does what he says he will do.
So it wasn't pretty, but finally, today, it is done.

What frustrated me about the coverage of the fall of Kabul and the end of the Afghanistan War was the media compulsion to try to make it echo the ignominious American exit from Saigon in 1975 -- they wanted another "helicopter on the roof" photo so badly they could taste it.
The best they could manage is the photo above, showing a helicopter flying somewhere over Kabul yesterday.  This photo was all over social media.  
What they really wanted was something like this:

The fall of Saigon was a nightmare for the American army, the Vietnamese army, and the Vietnamese civilians. We have yet to see whether the fall of Kabul will also be a nightmare -- the videos of people on the airport tarmac are showing a shit show, but apparently the US military is now in charge at the control tower, and I still have hope that the Taliban will just let the airport operate to get people out.
Apparently other countries have now offered asylum to refugees, too.
Maybe it really WILL be different this time.

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Frog Stuff

Over at Balloon Juice, John Cole is posting his "find Mr. Frog" photos, and suddenly I was reminded of this great Brothers Four version of Froggy Went A Courtin' - best line: "You ain't no frog, you're a horny toad!"
Enjoy!
 

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Funny stuff again

Seen on Twitter:

Friday, July 02, 2021

Here's some stuff to cheer about!

Well, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to celebrate the Habs winning the Cup, so here's some stuff we CAN enjoy! 
First, some very good boys: And some other funny stuff: We loved The Sopranos and particularly James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. So we were thrilled to find out that they are doing a "pre-quel" movie with James' son Michael Gandolfini playing the teenage Tony - and he is going to have a great acting career, I think. Here's the trailer for the HBO movie coming in the fall -- I just hope we will be able to watch it in Canada:  
And Shapo got past Andy Murray today at Wimbledon so that's something else to cheer for!

Monday, May 31, 2021

This sad week

I was going to put up another funny post, but not tonight. 
This week I read the books Nomadland and Snakes in Suits so I was a little bummed out to begin with. 
 And then we got the terrible news about the Kamloops Residential School graveyard, with the certainty that there will be more graves found across Canada. 
A few years ago, when the Truth and Reconciliation Report was released, their use of the term "genocide" was disputed -- I do hope now that that type of  self-righteous and hurtful residential school denialism will not happen again.
I have a Twitter list, Indigenous Twitter, which I set up so I can more easily follow Canada's most prominent Indigenous voices and important news. Here is some of the most useful commentary from today:

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Seven tweets in May

And read the whole thread for this one: Does anyone still remember "Seven Days in May - which was a 1962 novel and then a film with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster -- when the US government was threatened by a military takeover? 
 Seems sorta quaint now, doesn't it.

   
And I had not realized Rod Serling wrote the screenplay!

Friday, April 30, 2021

Happy Friday

I'm back - turned out my keyboard had somehow disconnected itself from my laptop operating system and they needed to find each other again. Sorta like this: So now I've got my laptop back and I'm feeling like this:

Monday, April 19, 2021

Laptop woes

Sorry my laptop is being looked at-all of a sudden the keyboard wouldn't work. Not sure how long I will be without it. So - later, dude!

Friday, April 02, 2021

We don't deserve dogs, do we?

Monday, March 29, 2021

The Boat as Metaphor


So now the world is following the tale of the boat stuck in the Suez Canal, there's even a website Is The Ship Still Stuck?
And all the pundits are engaging in their favorite indoor activity - coming up with "takes" on how the situation illustrates the ridiculous and profound nature of life in these pandemic days, etc etc. 
At the Atlantic, Amanda Mull writes about how we're going to need a smaller boat:
For people who don’t work in shipping, these problems have reared their heads over the past year in an endless and seemingly random series of consumer-goods shortages, affecting products as varied as sofas and spandex bike shorts. Now, though, these problems—and the persistent frailty of the global system on which corporations have built our physical world—have a singular visual metaphor in the Ever Given. She is huge, and she is stuck, like I am when I wake up with a hangover. Right now, there’s not enough ibuprofen and red Gatorade in the world.
The most interesting takes, however, aren't the metaphysical ones, but the economic ones. 
Here's Matt Stoller talking about what the stuck boat is telling us about the constructed fragility of our economic supply chains:
What is new isn’t the vulnerability of the Suez Canal as a chokepoint, it’s that we’ve intentionally created lots of other artificial chokepoints. And since our production systems have little fat, these systems are tightly coupled, meaning a shortage in one area cascades throughout the global economy, costing us time, money, and lives. 
It’s a dumb way to organize a global supply chain system, just as it was dumb to build ships that are too big to fit into canals. And that’s why the "big boat stuck in canal" is such a great illustration of the problem, it shows our policymakers and corporate leaders couldn’t even think through what would happen if Really Big Thing Got Stuck In Important Canal.
Yes, the stuck boat has definitely revealed some problems in world commerce, just as the pandemic revealed problems in public health.
Once again, in spite of all our society's attempts to anticipate and prepare, we just don't seem to be able to really get a grip on an issue until something actually goes wrong.  
But never fear, then its Canada to the rescue! UPDATE: Fascinating article today in The Guardian about how they got that boat free.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Funny stuff

 







And one more - its hilarious: