Author Archives: Hue White

If you’re outraged that SCOTUS chose not to take a pre-enforcement appeal of the Texas abortion law, like this dude here, this opinion from Professor Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy might be a bit of a cool-off:

I think the civil liability scheme imposed by Texas’s SB 8 is likely unconstitutional: It’s inconsistent with the abortion rights recognized in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and the “undue burden” defense in the statute is likely too narrow to save it. Moreover, I think such state “private attorney general” laws that basically allow any person to sue over alleged illegal conduct are unfair to defendants. …

But when it comes to the procedure for challenging state civil liability schemes (focusing here on schemes where lawsuits are brought by nongovernmental plaintiffs), the legal rule seems to me to be quite well-settled. If you think that some civil liability rule is unconstitutional, you can challenge it—but only as a defense when you’re sued, not through a preenforcement challenge.

In other words, while the liberal wing + Chief Justice Roberts may have wanted to take the case now, the five justice majority that refused to may simply be following procedural rules.

If the first defense against this so-called law does make it to SCOTUS, is accepted, and finds the law unconstitutional, the liberals who are currently exhibiting pulsing veins in the forehead will have some explaining to do.

And it does suggest some guilt to the liberals when it comes to the polarization wars.

A reader responds to my commentary vis a vis getting out of Afghanistan:

I’ve been having similar thoughts Hue. Patience is antithetical to our culture, we want things resolved by the end of the hour. But if we think of it more as a long series with hour-long episodes, we might be able to take a longer view. I think by getting out of the way the Afghans and other influencers may have to actually deal with each other. China, Russia, Pakistan, India and others need to figure out where things go.

And if I’m really Pollyannaish maybe we can hope for the Taliban to actually govern millions of people, including women and girls, who have been educated, worked in society, etc. over the last 20 plus years.

We can hope. In the end, we may see the Taliban “ruling” an Afghanistan which mutates into a form more to our liking. I doubt they’ll ever become a democratic republic, but their incarnation of twenty-plus years ago didn’t work out so well, either. Between the people and ISIS-K they may have to change and improve, or die.

In case you thought a fetal heartbeat means, ya know, a heart beat:

“At six weeks, the embryo is forming what will eventually develop into mature systems. There’s an immature neurological system, and there’s a very immature cardiovascular system,” says Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at UC San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. The rhythm specified in the six-week abortion bans, she says, “is a group of cells with electrical activity. That’s what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system.” [Wired]

So it turns out fetal heartbeat is a misnomer, as nothing at all is being pumped, and yet it’s used throughout America to sow confusion and doubt concerning abortion.

Next time you’re accosted by someone blustering about fetal heartbeats, remember the above.

Save us from these roles! Or give us cinnamon rolls!

Gamera: Super Monster (1980) is a really terrible collage of material from previous entries in the franchise, into which has been added a clumsy plot involving good and evil space women, and a little boy in whose dreams Gamera appears and fights monsters brought by the evil space woman and her commander. For reasons known only to them, they want to destroy Earth, and apparently use a star cruiser rented from the Star Wars franchise to get around.

Incidentally, judging from Gamera’s eyeballs, the great friend to children is off the booze – they’re not bloodshot! I have to wonder if he’s a member of AA or just has tremendous will power.

In any case, if you need to see this for your film class, make sure your platform can fast forward through the bits from other films. It cut my view time by nearly half.

And probably saved my sanity.

The editors of the Journal of Free Black Thought have a nice summary of Critical Race Theory (CRT) within the realm of law schools – at least, it clarifies things for me:

… a review of the legal studies literature suggests that when CRT “questions the very foundations of the liberal order,” this is no grad-school intellectual exercise, but rather a strategy for transforming our entire legal system into one that privileges group rights over individual rights. If you want to transform the foundations of American society (without using rifles), you need a theory of the law, and you need a farm system for training federal judges. (Just ask the Federalist Society.) This, in a nutshell, is why CRT emerged from legal studies. In this essay, we’ll examine what that theory of the law looks like as well as a dissent in a recent federal circuit court case that reflects its spirit.

Liberalism in the civil rights tradition seeks to minimize racial gaps (e.g., in homeownership, education, employment, representation in corporate leadership, and income) with narrowly-tailored affirmative action and broadly-applied (colorblind) social welfare policy—what Delgado and Stefancic disparage as “incrementalism and step-by-step progress.” CRT, by contrast, wants to use the law to force-close all racial gaps: “The critique of color blindness may, one day, persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to accept race-conscious measures in employment and education, leveling the playing field for those [racially defined groups] who have long been excluded from society’s bounty” (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 134).

They go on to examine the recent decision Antonio Vitolo, et al v. Isabella Guzman, which has to do with how money distributed by the Small Business Administration for restaurants impacted by Covid-19. The majority of the panel found its bias towards restaurants owned by “socially disadvantaged” individuals, defined as Black, Hispanic, Native, Asian Pacific, and Asian “subcontinent” Americans, to be unconstitutional; a dissent is examined in detail as being representative of CRT thought.

The results of their examination?

This CRT vision has an intuitive appeal: Whatever its wonders and triumphs, history, including American history, is also a gaping abyss of evil and inhumanity. There is no one alive, from the lowliest to the most exalted, who does not owe her position to injustices visited upon or by her ancestors, however near or distant. The urge to redress history itself is understandable and deceptively simple. All one must do is establish classes of citizens that have illegitimately benefitted from history and classes that have unjustly suffered due to history, and use the instrument of the law to balance the scales between them.

But this unconstrained vision of justice suffers from practical limitations. It’s hard to imagine that even the most ambitious new legal paradigm can “fix” human history, undoing endless centuries of individual and collective decisions and their consequences in the present. Moreover, given that disparity is the rule, not the exception, in every society that has ever existed, it is hard to imagine that disparities, even those manifestly owing to centuries of oppression, can ever be erased.

Perhaps most importantly, any paradigm that privileges essentialist groups over individual human beings, in all their messy particularity, is bound to produce as many injustices as it redresses.

Indeed, members of groups that are not on the list of socially disadvantaged, which is to say those that haven’t gained favor with the elite, will be permanently nettled and dissatisfied. After all, one does not change one’s skin color at will, at least not in a manner convincing to said elites.

And that dissatisfaction may not be permanent, but may easily transform into an even worse condition, a hatred that leads to violence, death, and societal disorder.

Which may translate to revolution. The goal of society is not permanent revolution, regardless of the philosophy of the Cuban government. The goal is figuring out how to live peacefully, and justly, together. It may be one of the most difficult challenges humanity has ever faced.

Not unexpectedly, the Texas anti-abortion law has attracted corporate attention:

Ridehail companies Lyft and Uber said Friday they would cover legal fees for their drivers who are sued as a result of the new legislation. Citizens can sue abortion providers for alleged violations, and plaintiffs will receive $10,000 from the accused if successful. The law also impacts anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, which could potentially include a driver who unknowingly drove a woman to an abortion clinic. Lyft also said it would donate $1 million to Planned Parenthood.

Dating apps Bumble and Match said Friday they would create a relief fund for people affected by the law. Both are based in Texas.

“Bumble is women-founded and women-led, and from day one we’ve stood up for the most vulnerable. We’ll keep fighting against regressive laws,” Bumble tweeted. [CNN/Business]

And the host of a site dedicated to collecting tips concerning abortions, GoDaddy, has dumped the web site for violating host rules.

Obviously, these are companies with a direct stake in the controversy. Phase 2 of a rejection effort would see companies lacking that obvious exposure joining with Lyft and Uber. Will that happen? I hope so – after all, anyone who can give advice is theoretically vulnerable. And while simple abuse of the law and its supporters may be enough to see its retraction, I’d prefer to see corporate political donors picking up the phone and letting their reps know about their displeasure.

It’d simply be cleaner that way.

Source: Gallup

But we can also expect certain companies, such as Hobby Lobby, pitch a fit when the retraction effort becomes obvious and threatening. The question is whether the vast majority of Americans who do not want laws like these will stand up and be counted – or stick their heads in the ground.

Something was looking for dinner in the backyard this morning:

And from a different angle:

Getting back to this thread, the next picture from the subject email is this:

No, dear Boromir^[1], you don’t have it straight. The first guy stole the money from our defense fund in order to build a wall to satisfy his xenophobic followers, using at least one corrupt contractor. They built walls that fell over in, well, I wish I could say “high winds”, but it was a 30 MPH wind, a wall that could be taken down by people with simple power tools.

A wall that really was a waste of time and money because most illegal immigrants come in using tourist visas and then don’t leave when the visa expires.

The first guy did all this without trying to fix the problem at its source. It’s rather like putting a bandage on a weeping wound without curing the cancer beneath it.

Then along comes the second guy, who has to fix the mess left by the first guy.

Again.

The danger is simple enough to see, isn’t it? It’s the relentless pounding on the Distrust government! button. In this case, it’s a partisan distrust; other mails pursue a more secular distrust. But the fact remains: driving wedges into society as a way to destroy it is the intent of this picture.

Incidentally, Boromir’s role in The Lord Of The Rings had to do with stopping invading hordes from destroying his homeland. Presented with the chance to hold ultimate power, he betrays his group as he’s driven mad by power. Recovering, he repents and dies defending the remnants of the group.

¹ For those readers who don’t recognize the picture, this is the character Boromir from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

At the heart of The Book of Life (2014) lies a simple question: what are the consequences of a simple breakage of the rules of fairness?

And how do these differ from the rules of convention?

This tale of two men vying for the hand of their childhood friend, who has little patience for the patriarchal ways of ancient Spanish culture, explores those consequences. One man becomes physically invulnerable – and thus careless of his prize.

Who hates being a prize.

The other loves his music, and while he adores his family’s vocation of bullfighting, cannot stomach the final plunge of steel into the bull’s vulnerable back. He earns his father’s sad disdain for that.

All around them lies the danger of bandits, looking for loot – and a special someone’s medal.

And above? Why, it’s the players of the Divine, laying bets on the winner of the lady’s hand – and breaking rules when it’ll help them win that all-important bet.

Add in some lovely artwork in this animated feature, some excellent voice work, and I can say that, if you’re a fan of a simple, organic story that pushes to its limits, then this is Recommended.

And, in the Land of the Dead, I can say that the twins are my favorites.

Paleolake:

A paleolake is a lake that has existed in the past. Its origin can be dated back to an era when the climate and hydrological conditions of its area were different than today. These types of lakes may have already dried up or may be in the process of drying up, or have become filled with sediment, and are now significantly smaller in size than they were in the past. These paleolakes are known as former lakes and shrunken lakes. Depending on the manner of water loss, a shrunken lake may actually have divided into two or more smaller lakes. [WorldAtlas]

Or, as used below, palaeolake. Noted in “The other cradle of humanity: How Arabia shaped human evolution,” Michael Marshall, NewScientist (21 August 2021):

Since then, [Michael] Petraglia’s team and others have published many similar findings. “We now know there are about 10,000 palaeolakes of Arabia,” he says. “We’ve only been to a couple of hundred. On 70 per cent of those we found fossils or archaeology.” Hominins even lived in what is now the Rub’ al-Khali desert. At Mundafan Al-Buhayrah, a flat region that was once a lake, the team found stone tools dating from between 100,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Especially heliophysics:

Sunspots located near the sun’s western limb are magnetically connected to Earth. The sun’s magnetic field spirals around like a lawn sprinker–a shape known as the “Parker spiral.” Look at this diagram. Lines of magnetic force coming out of the western limb curve around and touch our planet.

If there is an eruption today while AR2860 is passing through this danger zone, the debris will be funneled back to Earth. The resulting radiation storm could pepper satellites with high-energy protons, fogging cameras and causing reboots of onboard electronics. At such times, shortwave radio propagation can become difficult to impossible. During extreme storms, passengers and crew in commercial aircraft may be exposed to radiation. [SpaceWeather.com]

We have a stable star as the Sun, but it still has its shrieks and outrages.

BTW, this is a cool pic.

I see Erick Erickson is mighty proud of being a radio host:

Six months in and I’m the only 12-3 national host to make number one in a top ten radio market across formats — music and talk — both overall and in the ever precious 25-54 “demo.” (July ratings)

Now I’m number 26 on this list. Thanks very much. As always, where ever you are, you can listen live right here 12pm to 3pm ET every weekday and you can even call in at 1-877-973-7425.

I have to wonder how much he’ll regret what he’s having to do – consciously or unconsciously – in a decade or two.

As I’ve already noted, he’s charged into the Afghanistan withdrawal as if were an uber-angel, calling for the resignations of President Biden and VP Harris, suggesting the 25th Amendment should be invoked on Biden, while claiming Harris has disappeared in the wake of self-made disasters (Jennifer Rubin has a far more positive assessment), all supported with supposed facts.

Me? I’m waiting for facts to be verified. A fair assessment requires “facts” of a stable nature, a clear eyed view of what has happened and what appears to be happening, lots of study, and a self-awareness of fallibility and ignorance. My experience is that initial facts are often wrong, either made up of whole cloth or lacking important context. A number of conservative sources, for instance, cited a report that the Taliban used a helicopter to hang someone. It didn’t take long for the truth to come out: the guy was in a harness and was very much alive.

I don’t know if Erickson cited that particular incident, as I’m having trouble reading his columns – I shake my head so much I get dizzy.

But I do cite these two indisputable points in support of my concern about his future: On August 19th he demanded President Biden resign. This is hardly into the withdrawal itself, even before the deaths of the thirteen heroes by suicide bomber; it’s a hurried call, an attempt to get out ahead of other conservative voices. The pursuit of ratings, if you will.

The second point? This deeply shattered, hate-filled screed motivated by the recently passed Texas anti-abortion law. Based on broken logic and calculated to stir the emotions of its readers, it doesn’t read like the meditations of an intelligent, stable citizen, but the calculated phraseology of an expert at rage communications^[1], with baby-killer this and that. He’s pretending – or perhaps in earnest – to be so blinded by rage that half the post is “baby-killer.”

It’s a great way to keep your audience addicted to those rage hormones. It does nothing to advance the conversation.

But as he lets his pursuit of ratings, rather than truth, shape his messaging, it distorts his image more and more. Not that he was angelic before, but now it’s becoming more and more disturbing.

How long before he calls some poor college freshman a slut?

And will he realize he should be ashamed?

¹ See The Persuaders.

I took this a month or so ago and promptly forgot about it. Now I’m sneaking it by my Arts Editor:

I sure hope that little guy is proud.

Every time I read this headline it made me jumpy, but it took four reads before I finally figured it out. From NewScientist (21 August 2021):

Insect-killing plant found by Australian highway is new to science

Damn, they’re making everything sentient these days!

The anti-abortion law in Texas that permits private citizens to sue anyone who is not the woman but considered involved in the abortion, or apparently even just thinking about it, has gone into effect. Professor Richardson has an interesting, if accurate, summary point:

S.B. 8 puts ordinary people in charge of law enforcement. Anyone—at all—can sue any individual who “aids or abets,” or even intends to abet, an abortion in Texas after six weeks. Women seeking abortion themselves are exempt, but anyone who advises them (including a spouse), gives them a ride, provides counseling, staffs a clinic, and so on, can be sued by any random stranger. If the plaintiff wins, they pocket $10,000 plus court costs, and the clinic that provided the procedure is closed down. If the defendant doesn’t defend themselves, the court must find them guilty. And if the defendant wins, they get…nothing. Not even attorney’s fees.

This is – not literally – a lawyer’s dream, because now everyone in Texas is a potential defendant. All it takes is an allegation that, say, Governor Abbott is considering suggesting a friend get abortion. Proof?

Who cares?

Someone else already sued?

Who cares? Everyone – but the pregnant woman – is a big ol’ piggy bank. You need $10,000, and you know someone who already lost? Sue them again.

All it takes is someone willing to make an allegation. Lawyer costs will ruin defendants, if nothing else.

The first person leaving Texas due to this law may be a pro-choicer, but the second person may be an anti-abortionist burnt by a lawsuit, and pursued by a dozen others.

Jennifer Rubin wants to drag many American voters into, well, adulthood:

But mostly, voters need to elect mature adults, not rage performance artists who use military casualties to demand the president’s impeachment. Voters need to grasp the concept of “no good choices” and “opportunity cost.” In other words, we must be better citizens who insist on better leaders — and then not punish them when they take principled action. [WaPo]

I like the phrase, which I bolded, but I think we first have to give up our addiction to rage performance artists who are simply there to make money off us audiences by telling their audiences what they want to hear, rather than known truths. Once we learn that rage artists are not authentic, are not often rational, and very often are using emotion to manipulate audiences for fun and profit, then we’ll learn to recognize politicians, in both parties, who do not appeal to intellect, but rather brazenly manipulate their audiences.

And discard them.

Getting back to my “daily” entry – stop laughing back there! – of a critique of pictures from a toxic email from a conservative friend – he only passed it on – here’s the next entry:

Unfortunately for the good Senator, the world is full of idiots and – I fall into this category – clumsies.

But it’s the missing context that’s important here, for Senator Kennedy recently opined as to the legislation he’s most proud of … being the 2017 Tax Reform bill that has greatly inflated the Federal deficit. (If I find a link, I’ll update this email. It’s escaping me at the moment.)

He may have attended Oxford in England, but it’s not at all clear he understands what makes for good legislation, or good reasoning.

So this part of the toxic email is dangerous because it promotes dangerous illusions concerning gun control with a cute little slogan.

And in our current spate of murders, enabled by our failure to implement gun control, as well as the deflation of police morale, this is not an acceptable message to be sending.

A week or so ago I pointed out, in relation to the Afghanistan withdrawal, that there’s a rush to judgment going on that’s quite unjustified, and suggested that Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan might actually turn out to be a plus. Steve Benen on Maddowblog, as well as others, is beginning to think this may be true:

[David] Rothkopf’s argument is worth considering in detail, though there was one point of particular interest.

If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame. … Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement.

It’s an important observation that has gone largely overlooked. The incumbent American president had a profoundly difficult call to make and dangerous circumstances in which to make it. But Biden had the courage to make the decision anyway.

Meanwhile, Erick Erickson, who I noted had already gotten into the swamp here, has elected to plunge in as deeply as he can go:

In 1990, after George H. W. Bush broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge, House Republicans, guided by Ed Rollins, walked away from President Bush. They criticized him and distanced themselves from him. The ones who stayed with Bush lost. The ones who criticized him survived. A bloodbath is coming in the midterms for the Democrats even without redistricting. The ones who want to save themselves can and should now work with the GOP to hold Biden accountable for his broken promises.

I’m proud to be an American. But I’m ashamed of my government and demand Congress do its job instead of serving as chief apologist for the second branch.

There’s a lot wrong with Erickson’s reasoning, but propagandists’ reasoning does not have to be correct, it just has to appeal to the audience. But, just for fun: The Republican adherence to the religious tenet that there’s no such thing as a good tax has proven to be a false view of reality; additionally, it cost the Republicans the White House for eight years, and led to the prominence of Newt Gingrich, who has turned out to be a canker sore on the neck of the Republicans.

And only now he wants Congress to do its job. Before, it was Trump Derangement Syndrome this and that. He couldn’t shrug off the January 6th Insurrection, but give him time: he may yet come around to the viewpoint that those under arrest are, bizarrely, political prisoners rather than a pack of five-year olds petulantly demanding an election be reversed … because. Just because.

If post-analysis of the withdrawal doesn’t reveal any gaping mistakes, it’ll be no skin off Erickson’s nose, because he’ll just ignore it or denounce it as more evidence of the left’s degradation. But it may rescue the Democrats from disaster in 2022.

databob on Daily Kos is pissed off at the government of Florida:

As has been explained in other diaries, Florida has been engaging in a horribly duplicative duplicitous practice of reporting Covid-19 deaths based on date of death, not date of report. This has led to the kind of totally misleading chart such as the one today on the CDC Covid tracking site [omitted.] …

So the 6 deaths reported on 8/23 morphed into 53, and even the 126 deaths reported on 8/1 is STILL going up more than 3 weeks later, from 126 to 130.

It’s impossible to get a good estimate of how many people are actually dying from Covid-19 because of the way deaths are being reported, but the (current) total for the week beginning 8/5 is really scary: 1,400 Floridians died of Covid-19 during that week which is 200 per day.

And that total of 1,400 is going to go up even more, for several more weeks, as the DeathSantis administration here in Florida continues its deadly game of misdirection by pretending that death totals are going down precipitously, when in fact, they are nearly as high as they were a year ago, and trending higher.

There’s no great mystery here: DeSantis is desperate to make his chosen strategy of pretending no emergency exists appear to work.

In the television world of GOP politics, appearances is all. The most primitive GOP politicians simply parade about shouting lies about their performance, much like Governor Noem (R-SD). Governor DeSantis understands that plain-speaking data can sink him, but manipulated data, particularly that which he can argue is still in some way true-if-not-useful, combined with the public short-attention span theatre of the American public, can still save his ass.

But appearances are not reality. If you’re thinking of visiting Florida, take precautions. DeSantis may be shouting that all is well, but looking at revised numbers suggests Florida is in the grip of a pandemic, and that it’s not going well.

Evolutionary biologists often talk about selection pressures:

Any cause that reduces or increases reproductive success in a portion of a population potentially exerts evolutionary pressure, selective pressure or selection pressure, driving natural selection.^[1] It is a quantitative description of the amount of change occurring in processes investigated by evolutionary biology, but the formal concept is often extended to other areas of research.

Think of it this way: in a mixed population, genetically speaking, if a new environmental pressure is brought to bear on a portion of the population vulnerable to it, other less vulnerable portions of the population will flourish, relative to the oppressed, and this may lead to evolution of the sub-population to become less and less vulnerable to that environmental pressure.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is what we’re seeing with the delta variant of Covid-19:

“The mask was off only momentarily, not an entire day or hours. We want to make the point that this is not the teacher’s fault — everyone lets their guard down — but the thing is delta takes advantage of slippage from any kind of protective measures,” Tracy Lam-Hine, an epidemiologist for the county, said in an interview.

The case study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and highlighted by CDC director Rochelle Walensky during a briefing on Friday, highlights the potential danger for children under the age of 12 — the only group in the United States ineligible for coronavirus vaccines as a hyper-infectious variant tears across the country. [WaPo]

The tendency for bacteria to become immune to targeted antibiotics is an example of the problems associated with evolutionary pressures. The antibiotic destroys most of the bacteria, but if some are resistant, but not otherwise superior to their brethren, they remain hidden until the antibiotic strips away their cousins. Once they are no longer suppressed by those cousins, they can run rampant in the patient. A lack of antibiotic specific to them, or a lack of recognition of the problem, can lead to long-term damage or death.

The evolutionary pressure may be the masks, which have kept a lot of people from being infected. Until now. Now the delta variant may have changed to make it through masks, or it’s simply more efficient at infection so that a single mistake is more expensive.

It’s a real medical conundrum that infectious disease docs must face quite often.

Flexitarian:

Flexitarian is a term coined to describe individuals who mainly eat a plant-based diet with the occasional meat or dairy added in. The word flexitarian has been around for a while but hit the mainstream in 2008 with the publication of the book “The Flexitarian Diet” by nutritionist Dawn Jackson Blatner. [The Spruce Eats]

Noted in “Real milk, no cows needed: Lab-made dairy products are now a reality,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (14 August 2021, paywall):

Formo ferments caseins and whey and then uses standard cheese-making to turn them into mozzarella and ricotta. Like many in the industry, its founders are driven by a desire to replace ethically and environmentally troubling animal products with guilt-free replicas. “In the Western world, the demand for dairy products is kinda limitless,” says CEO Raffael Wohlgensinger. Demand is rising in Asia too. All this is putting unsustainable pressure on the environment, but many consumers are loath to give up cheese. “The biggest consumer pain point for flexitarians who want to get rid of animal products is cheese because plant-based products are not performing well,” says Wohlgensinger.

Without reference to what other folks have to say when it comes to Afghanistan – I’m too busy to go read them – it occurs to me to observe that the media does tend to prefer to observe the moss on the trees rather than the forest. Not exclusively, of course, but what I’m leading up to is this:

Within the greater picture of American foreign relations, what does the Afghanistan withdrawal do for us?

Let’s break it down.

• How important is Afghanistan? Despite the accurate old aphorism that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, it’s not a strategic plum. It has mineral resources, but nothing exclusive or overly important. The mountains are not as important as mountains used to be, now that we have air power. It’s another country, particularly backward from the American point of view, which shed the Western values overcoat which we attempted to dress it in.
• Is Afghanistan the home of terrorist organizations? Not for the last twenty years, as liberal Jonathan Rauch observed. The particular goal of neutering the Taliban and al Quaeda in Afghanistan has been robustly accomplished.
• But doesn’t the previous point no longer apply with our withdrawal? Well, that’s an interesting question that can only be answered by the passage of time. But consider the emergence of ISIS-K, the group responsible for the terror bombing that killed thirteen Americans and 160 (last I heard) Afghans. From what I’m reading, ISIS-K has emerged because there’s a species of Afghanistan zealot who believes the Taliban is too soft, too weak. Think about that, that being said about the organization which fought and essentially won a twenty year war with America (although it was a close thing), rooked President Trump, and thoroughly fooled American intelligence agencies. And add in the soft reports that the Taliban is trying to reassure its newly “conquered” citizens that, no, widespread violence will not be spread by the Taliban, or that the Taliban is attempting to reassure foreign investment sources that various citizens’ rights will be guaranteed. They’re desperate for cash to run the country. While we’ll never like the Taliban, we may find that a Taliban desperate to retain authority and international respect will be willing to suppress terrorist organizations trying to make a home in the hinterlands – especially if it’s destroy or be destroyed.
• So was, and should, Afghanistan be a top concern in American foreign relations? In my amateurish and simple estimation, no, except because we were an occupying foreign force. Without that, the only reason they might crack the top 100 is because they’re a neighbor to Iran.
• So as the withdrawal winds down, how does leaving Afghanistan advantage us? Now we can concentrate on more important national adversaries, such as #1 China and #2 Russia. This is extremely important. Yes, we employ thousands of diplomats and support personnel, so you wouldn’t think that it matters if we were in Afghanistan, but the fact is that the President often lends a hand to the State Dept for prestige reasons, and Afghanistan sucking down resources tends to distract the President – regardless of their name. And then there’s the hits on prestige, leaks of military technology, and the whole concept of soft power. We’re a big, rich country, but China is 3-4 times larger and hungry. By closing down the Afghanistan operation, we can better focus on the much harder problems of China and Russia.

Don’t get distracted by the insta-opinions of the partisan pundit core on either side. If one must read them, don’t let personal preference win the day, but rather prefer those pundits who express opinions out of sync with their side. Like Rauch, above.

Me? Patience and more patience. Yes, we have thirteen dead. It’s a tragedy. But it could have been far, far worse. If we had decided to stick around, we would have lost more than thirteen over the following months and years.

I’m looking to see most or all the Americans get out, and as many Afghans who have helped us also get out. With no more dead. If that happens, Biden wins the moral victory and possibly the messaging victory. If the Taliban make a determined effort to keep terrorist organizations out of Afghanistan, then Biden wins hands down.

But there’s still a long ways to go.

I rather like this new take on steganography:

Secret underwater messages could be camouflaged as the clicks and whistles of whale or dolphin calls, fooling eavesdroppers by making them believe they are hearing marine animals.

Marine mammal sounds can affect military sonar systems, so they are usually deemed ocean noise and filtered out. This makes these animal signals a stealthy solution for communicating secretly underwater. …

Mimicking marine mammals to communicate underwater isn’t a new idea. But previous approaches mainly used artificial sounds that imitate animals and focused on just one type of call – either clicks or whistles – limiting their camouflage potential. Since many whales and dolphins live in groups, their calls naturally overlap. If someone heard only one kind of call in isolation it would raise suspicions. [NewScientist (7 August 2021)]

Artificial Intelligence is used to filter whale song from underwater noises, so if you can fool it you’re safe.

It’s cool.