The Frankish Reich
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Posts posted by The Frankish Reich
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17 hours ago, Big Blitz said:
China wins:
“Nobody under 30 (35?) can even remember a U.S. foreign policy engagement that could be described as positive besides one off assassinations,” Tim Miller wrote this morning. “This is going to have cultural implications as we further retrench and decline.”
I can't believe I'm saying this, but ... very strong comment. (I mean, other than the gratuitous reference to "China Wins" but I'll set that aside for now.)
I'm thinking about Tim Miller's comment. He has a point. Foreign policy (mixing in military actions) successes in this century, other than the one-off assassinations?
- the post-9/11 action in Afghanistan, deposing the Taliban from de facto rule in large swaths of Afghanistan and it's role in providing a safe haven for al Qaeda. But this is now overcome in our collective consciousness by the undisputable fact that the Taliban has just won a 20-year war.
And ... that's it. As far as active foreign policy/military initiatives:
- Iraq: disastrous
- reining in North Korea and its nuclear programs: failure
- guiding problematic Latin American states toward democratization: there appeared to be some early successes (Colombia), but it is beyond humiliating that minor states like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras occupy so much of our attention with their failed states spurring uncontrolled migration north, and maybe even worse that we can't seem to nudge Venezuela into toppling its corrupt communist dictatorship. This would have been easy historically. We are now two years into the USA recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as the "real" president of Venezuela. And on the ground, he controls absolutely nothing.
- the whole "Abraham Accords" business: we've sucked up to dictatorships in the Middle East who see their own self-interest served by making peace overtures toward Israel. And on the ground, well, just watch the news.
- Climate change, etc. Wherever one stands on this, the fact is we are making progress in the Western World toward a new energy future, while this happens:
Success stories of the 1990s turn into long-term failures (collapse of the Soviet Union, emergence of a new hybrid Hong Kong model) or, at best, works in progress (South Africa).
Not to be too pessimistic: the drop in extreme poverty around the world is real and a stunningly good development, but it's hard to find a reason to ascribe this to U.S. leadership.
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Kabul has fallen.
Every U.S. President, former and current, should be hanging his head in shame.
- George W. Bush: for deciding that the attacks on terrorist training camps and the neutralization of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan wasn't the sole limited purpose of the operation. That had succeeded by early 2002. The war went on two more decades. And for distracting the U.S. military from the mission by engaging in a pointless war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
- Barack Obama: for vacillating between withdrawal talk and surge talk. But in retrospect, probably the most successful (well, let's say "least unsuccessful") of out post 9-11 presidencies.
- Donald Trump: for brokering a joke of a peace agreement with the Taliban (the Doha agreement) and insisting on departure on a date certain, allowing the Taliban to cynically wait out the American departure
- Joe Biden: for finally carrying out that departure, either knowingly allowing the descent into chaos and retribution, or naively believing that the Afghan government/army could hold off the assault.
My take on it: Trump kept our troops in not so much to avoid chaos, but to postpone chaos until after the election. Biden allowed this to happen right away, hoping the debacle will be largely forgotten by the time 2024 rolls around.
What a mess.
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On 8/11/2021 at 6:25 PM, dpberr said:
Kabul will be in Taliban control by 9/11.
That's their push.
This makes sense to me. And for the USA: it looks like another fall of Saigon moment is coming. And this is very troubling. At least the military and foreign policy gurus were able to talk Trump down when he was agitating for full withdrawal. Since those people - the so-called Deep Staters - are presumably still around, it appears that Biden either:
- stupidly ignored their advice, and really meant it when he said that the Afghan army was strong enough and motivated enough to withstand the obvious Taliban offensive lying in wait for our departure, or
- heartlessly sacrificed our Afghan supporters and all women and girls of Afghanistan so that the USA can concentrate on his “foreign policy” agenda, namely, climate change initiatives, etc.
Whichever one it is, it doesn’t reflect well on this administration. And yes, I am kind of the old school neocon (old enough to remember when “new” really meant “new”) when it comes to these matters.
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1 hour ago, Chef Jim said:
No lawyer speak there but very layman. Thank you. And I agree that he may be guilty of firing up the crowd however nothing illegal.
You’re welcome.
35 minutes ago, Doc said:Dem pols fired-up insurrectionists last year. Nothing happened to them.
Yes, some did. And they too should be called out for it as it was grossly irresponsible.
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23 hours ago, Chef Jim said:
So if I tell you to go to the bar for a drink and you get drunk and kill someone I'm liable?
This is the number one reason I'm a conservative. Stop being dumbasses and take responsibility for your own actions.
EDIT: And BTW Trump didn't even tell them to go to the bar. He told them to go to the street the bar was on.
A little lawyer talk here: the general category is what’s known as “crime facilitating speech.” It is a recognized exception to the 1st Amendment. But it’s a pretty high standard to prove something meets that standard, particularly when it
comes to political speech. So my take is this: what Trump said on 1/6 to fire up the crowd was irresponsible, but probably not criminal. But: Morally responsible for the death of one of his none-to-bright minions? Works for me.
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7 hours ago, Buffalo Timmy said:
So now you want to ban someone for disagreeing with you? At least you are open about it.
Ban? Who said that? If people got banned for posting stupid stuff there’d be nobody left here, including me.
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On 8/5/2021 at 11:17 AM, B-Man said:
JUST ANOTHER DC MONEY & POWER GRAB:
The ‘Infrastructure’ Bill: The Deeper You Get, The Worse It Gets.
“It has just $110 billion, or less than 10%, for what’s historically been considered infrastructure—roads and bridges.
The other 90% is to fund mass transit waste, green energy nonsense, and more items that the states or the private sector could do.”
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=48841
I had no idea “mass transit” was not infrastructure. Some guy decides he’ll redefine infrastructure to include only roads, auto bridges,
and tunnels, and then does a little arithmetic. This is what (for some people) passes as “insightful” in today’s world.
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1 hour ago, B-Man said:
So now we’re quoting anonymous posters on some forum who are trying to evade getting banned by doing cute things like writing [VX] to frustrate the anti-vax search algorithms.
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In the first big test of Covid- 19 vaccines during a Covid-19 surge, places with higher vaccination rates are dodging the worst outcomes so far, while cases and hospitalizations surge in less-vaccinated areas.
There are more tests yet to come, including when cold weather forces people in the well-vaccinated Northeast back indoors. But as the highly contagious Delta strain tears through the country, the trends thus far suggest vaccines can turn Covid-19 into a less dangerous, more manageable disease.
“Vaccines definitely make a difference,” said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows sharp geographic divides in vaccination and hospitalization levels, with every state that has an above-average vaccine rate showing below-average hospitalizations, including in well-vaccinated New England. In the South, meanwhile, fewer people are vaccinated on average and hospitalization rates are climbing faster.
49 minutes ago, Doc Brown said:Sign of things to come for the travel industry?
Thanks, Judge Williams. Common sense prevails over idiotic grandstanding DeSantis law.
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38 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:
Frankish, you’re a good poster but I have to take issue with your defense of “outdoor” partying.
First, as @Chef Jim astutely noted, hundreds of people milling about in a structure designed to keep the elements out hardly qualifies as “outdoors”. That’s, in fact, the whole idea of the tent. On the level the elites play on, they tend to be exceptionally sturdy, well lit, secure and heated/air conditioned as necessary.
That issue aside, on this level, you have people traveling from all across the country (and likely internationally), from yellow zones, red zones, hot zones with exposure to everything that entails. Additionally, while traveling, much of the interaction would be of an indoor nature—airports, rest rooms, restaurants, limos all along the way. While absolutely possible there was 100% compliance with CDC mask and distancing guidance, given what we see from the photos here and the generally tendency for power brokers to ignore their own directives, it’s seems unlikely.
Finally, the question comes up about the optics of this sick rager. According to the experts, we’re dealing with COVID and the delta schmelt variety, we’re at mission critical status and one of the leading liberals in the world opts to have a maskless, distantless, climate &$@&ing hoedown at his massive palatial estate, exposing Vineyard residents to COVID and Delta schmelt infections just because he had a birthday?
The reality to me is it’s another reason to question the National narrative on Covid and Delta schmelt my. See, I don’t think Barrack, Kerry, JZ and Beyoncé, and the remorseful bully Chrissy Tiegen have any desire to become infected or infect their loved ones. I assume Barrack and his event coordinators have access to state of the art intel and decided to push forward secure in the knowledge that all is well.
Fair point. It was bad optics (particularly in it's initial version), but I'll give him a pass on HAVING the party. That's because I want to see full outdoor stadiums for the World Series, for NFL Sundays, for outdoor music festivals, etc. I am perhaps not as doctrinaire as you thought. There's always risk balancing; to me, the science doesn't support banning outdoor events or requiring masks outside. Tents are "leaky" and air turnover rates are high, even for those posh garden party things. Plus as I understand it, everyone was required to be vaccinated.
As for travel to mass events: this doesn't strike me as that different from a big wedding, which I don't want to see banned. There's a cost-benefit calculation, which is why I support businesses and to some extent governments mandating vaccines.
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10 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:
Well good for them. Politics pays off. Good “work” if you can get it.If they were planning to run for any kind of office again, or get appointed to the Supreme Court, etc., I would have lots and lots of questions about this kind of deal. I also think it's unseemly in general. Serving in public office shouldn't come with the expectation of great wealth when your done. That means $500,000 speaking engagements, exorbitant book deals (but remember, the total compensation isn't known until the books sold are counted; that's why huge advances are suspect), lobbying contracts, etc., etc.
What appropriately post-Presidential things should you do to make a living beyond that very nice pension? Well, Barack could have returned to teaching at U. Chicago. Written those boring book on foreign policy that Nixon and Carter kept pushing out. Lots of ways to have a very, very comfortable living without the bloated book and speaking fees. I'd love to see the USA return to that dignified idea of the post-presidency; ain't gonna happen.
Unfortunately there's not much we can do about these post-Presidency deals except that ineffectual stuff like asking questions in a debate: "do you pledge not to engage in lobbying after your term ends?"
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8 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:
You may have misses the tent? And speaking of the tent. I’ve read it was 500 people or so invited. Why have a tent to hold a few thousand? And can we get a real source of funds for the purchase of that property? 🤔I dunno, but geez, could it be this?
EDIT: and this - https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/elite-street/ct-re-1205-elite-street-obamas-20191205-tpd3s54jenffrjyc7ucr3ef53a-story.html
I recommend this new thing they call the google. You can find out a lot of answers! Like a couple that just got $65 million can afford a $12 million house.
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A little historical perspective - while this is a Wash Post opinion, the writer, Megan McArdle, is their resident libertarian, and more of a right-libertarian. So this is no wild "liberal" perspective. Example: her opinion piece today is in opposition to the unlawful expansion of the eviction moratorium. So please address the argument, not the publisher.
Back when this country was founded, our population was routinely ravaged by disease: waterborne illnesses such as typhoid, polio and cholera; mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and yellow fever; bacterial infections including staph, strep and tuberculosis; and airborne viral infections such as measles and mumps. Our ancestors used the power of the law to contain those threats, at least partially.
One by one, however, those diseases were neutralized through great public works projects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then through medical advances in vaccines and antibiotics. Thanks to them, almost no living Americans worry as much about infectious disease as their ancestors. Yet even so, we haven’t entirely given up on restrictive interventions: Tuberculosis patients who don’t comply with treatment can be, and are, forcibly isolated until they complete a lengthy and unpleasant drug regimen. In 20 years around the libertarian and conservative movements, I cannot recall ever hearing anyone denounce this practice.
A vaccine passport would of course affect more people, which makes it feel more intrusive, even though in principle it is less so: You don’t have to get a vaccine in New York; you just can’t dine indoors without one. And it’s understandable that conservatives tend to think of their old existence as the natural state of affairs. But it’s actually highly abnormal — and since the outbreak of covid-19 has pushed us a little closer toward the historical “normal,” arguably our willingness to infringe on personal liberty should get more “normal” too.
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10 minutes ago, Unforgiven said:
The biggest group of dopes are the leftist useful idiots.
The rest of us know everything happening is all a big lie.
I'm not an expert like some guy named Jack Posobiec, but those sure look like OUTDOOR photos to me ...
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2 hours ago, dneveu said:
I'd say of the list Tyrod was probably my favorite. Fitz had his moments but the 4th quarter INTs were always an issue here. Tyrod was boring, it was a lot of punting but he made that shady rushing offense better. He got sacked a lot, but he usually limited the lost yards and balanced it with more rushing yards (almost all through scrambles) and helping as a rz rushing threat.
Tyrods 2016 game against miami when buffalo was... barely breathing playoff wise was a fantastic effort too. Looking at the box score too - Go for the win on 4th and 2 with 4 minutes left in OT, you need the W.
Tyrod was my favorite. Bledsoe was objectively the best.
Tyrod is back with David Culley as his head coach. Who knows what happens with Deshaun Watson? And Davis Mills certainly isn't ready to start. It's very possible Tyrod plays and leads that tanking team to a 7-9 record or something like that. Hey, his strangely adequate play didn't destroy the Bills' rebuild after all. Maybe he'll do the same in Houston. Just not on Week 4 at Buffalo please.
(But I'm hoping he trots out on the field to a huge ovation!)
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I notice our pal Tucker now has a big ol' man crush on Victor Orban.
Yeah, why not model our nation on Orban's Hungary.
https://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/forecasts/2020/summer/ecfin_forecast_summer_2020_hu_en.pdf
Remember how America's economy was going wild before COVID? (Trump could hardly say two sentences without saying it.) Hungary's? Not so much.
Ahh, if only we could be more like Hungary ....
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5 hours ago, Big Blitz said:
Trump must have made that up. All by himself. His only mistake was listening to the experts:
Trump described the decision to issue the guidelines as "one of the most difficult decisions I've ever made" and said he was skeptical when his medical experts came to him with the plan.
"I wasn't happy about it," he said on Fox News last week. "They came in — experts — and they said, 'We are going to have to close the country.' I said, 'We have never closed the country before. This has never happened before.' I said, 'Are you serious about this?' "
From the start, there were questions of what would happen after 15 days, whether the push for what public health officials call social distancing would become the new normal. "People are talking about July, August, something like that," Trump said.
Trump knows what happened - he can't say it. The fact he can't say it means it's probably going to start WWIII. The secrecy and lying from China and the WHO from the beginning remains the biggest tell - but we're all in this together!
The whole response was preposterous.
Still is to this day.
There is one truth definitely at the core of a lot of it. People would rather live as isolated and desolate and controlled a life as possible because they are scared of a virus with 0.2 IFR.
Skewed heavily to a population everyone but Andrew Cuomo has been protecting since day 1.
Deranged Rhino, err, Blitzo, is that you? The Man Who Knew Too Little.
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On 7/26/2021 at 9:17 AM, Big Blitz said:
We're about to enter year 3 of 15 days....
We're also about to hit "pretty soon" ... remember "pretty soon" we'll have zero cases?
The "15 days to slow the spread" was a disastrous TRUMP idea that failed miserably. So stop referring to it as if it's some kind of CDC failure. 15 days was stupid, and it was all Trump.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-coronavirus-cases-will-go-down-to-zero-ultimately.html
"On February 26 [that is, February 26, 2020], President Trump boasted that the coronavirus was about to disappear altogether from the United States. “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he insisted.
A reporter asked him today how that prediction is holding up, given that the United States now has surpassed 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases. Trump insisted he had been right all along.
“Well, it will go down to zero, ultimately,” he said.
The original promise of cases going down to zero has basically been fulfilled, just that the timeline for going down to zero has been slightly extended from a couple days to “sometime before all life on Earth ceases to exist.” Oh, and on the way to zero, we’re going to have trillions of dollars in economic damages and more deaths than a major war, details Trump didn’t get around to mentioning originally. Other than that, mission accomplished!"
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"The kid's elite ..."
You gotta have a few years on a guy to use that term. I thought Kumerow was about 26 (Josh is 25). So that's a no-no. But then I looked ... Kumerow is 29 years old. I guess that's what happens when you don't get on the field until your 3rd year out of college.
So go ahead Jake, you have my permission to call Josh and all those other kids "kid" all you like.
EDIT: Also from his wiki page -
"He is also the great-grandson of Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo."
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1 minute ago, Over 29 years of fanhood said:
It’s incredible how scummy they all are. Why people want to give these people more control over their lives is beyond me.
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Gotta love how his old nemesis De Blasio jumped on the pile immediately, even suggesting Cuomo should be criminally prosecuted.
It was all fun and games until I came to the horrible realization: De Blasio thinks he'll take Cuomo's job in the next election.
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15 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:
Holy crap, no wonder the virus spreads like a mofo.
It’s treated politically any way you slice it.
What I’m hearing from deblasio is it’s ok to become infected and die so long it’s not related to nibblin on chicken wings or hitting the squat rack.
What a fascinating time to be alive.
I usually expect informed, intelligent comments from you - ones I often don't agree with - but come one, you can do better than this.
It is a question of taking reasonable steps.
Mask mandates for people outdoors? Stupid, based on what we know now. (I'll give some advocates of it a pass with respect to the situation in March/April 2020, but we've learned a lot and we shouldn't ignore what we've learned).
Limiting certain types of indoor high risk of transmission activities to the vaccinated? Perfectly reasonable.
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2 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:
The guy presided over the epicenter of Covid infection in the country, a precursor to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the country.
He’s finishing up strong by arbitrarily targeting two business types and allowing the Vid to run wild everywhere else?
Are people going to be happier that they were infected with COVID at the Apple store or Ace Hardware?
I thought you were pro-mandate?
Yes I am.
Baby steps: indoor dining and gyms are classic locations where other measures to mitigate the risk of spread are impracticable. Gyms involve people respirating (by design) at unusually high rates. Restaurants involve an activity incompatible with masking, they're often loud and involve people shouting/speaking at high volume, etc. All of these things increase transmission risk. Starting there makes sense.
The Apple store and Ace Hardware don't typically involve the same risks unless they allow themselves to get ridiculously crowded.
As for better measures: it really makes sense to read where the science is going here. This FAQ hasn't been updated for a while (and yes, the Delta variant may call some of it into question), but I have long believed that a focus on air turnover rates is where we should be headed, and yes, governments already have the ability to measure/monitor such things as part of their general mandates relating to public health and air quality. Of course, one of the big problems is seemingly simple, but intractable in practice: throw open a window, which you basically cannot do in any large building constructed post-1965 or so.
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1 hour ago, Big Blitz said:
Going to be years before kids eat in a restaurant again in NYC
Yep. Systemic racism. But they don't care this about making sure the racist Whites in Manhattan are fully segregated....I mean vaccinated
Kids enjoy eating in those igloos/stables/tents/Lego cubes that sprung up all over the place last winter. Don't ruin their fun!
Actually, I can't believe I'm saying this, but ... De Blasio has kind of hit on a reasonable policy here. There's not a hell of a lot people can do to mitigate risk of spread in gyms or indoor restaurants. Masking, social distancing, all of that - it doesn't really work in those settings. I would prefer something a step beyond, allowing for some kind of certification based on super effective ventilation systems/air turnover rates (that's really the key), but this is better than the alternatives of Absolutely Anything Goes vs. Let's Require Masks While Eating/Working Out. And don't kid yourselves - that's really the only other policy responses out there now. There are better ones, but we're not there yet as a society (and neither is the reset of the world)
Afghanistan
in Politics, Polls, and Pundits
Posted
I always come back to the aphorism coined by Megan McArdle and known as "Jane's Law" --
"The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant; the devotees of the party out of power are insane."
We are clearly in peak smug/arrogant stage of Bidenism: no social welfare policy, no government spending, no sucking up to lefty interest groups is too extreme. (And the insanity of the opposition, well, that goes without saying.) Maybe a colossal failure like this will recenter this Administration. It happened with Bill Clinton, who started out acting as though his 43% of the popular vote gave him a mandate to shift the country leftward. After the 1994 midterms he was (policy wise, if not personal affairs-wise) pretty centrist. And I liked that shift ....