1. How Trump Would Have Handled Afghanistan Withdrawal
While this is of necessity a speculative thread, it is based on Trump's actual track record in office, and consistent with what everyone knows about how Trump did everything in office, not some hypothetical wishful thinking.
2. Trump would have made the same kind of deal with Taliban as he essentially offered North Korea. Play nice with us and we will enable all kinds of economic opportunities for you. Make trouble for us and we will be your worst nightmare.
3. I think the Taliban would have complied, considering they did not mess with Trump at any time during his presidency. They had seen how Trump had eviscerated ISIS in a few short months.
4. Unfortunately for us, the Taliban had also seen what had happened to ISIS during Obama/Biden years. Taliban are savages, but they are no fools. Same with ISIS-K. We are now witnessing another JV team rearing to become world champions in terror, under Obama's sidekick.
The End
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1. The Fearsome Tabulator
The ballot tabulator in mail-in vote processing centers in America is the most fearsome machine invented by man, as it determines the winner of the highest office in the most powerful nation in the world. Allow me to explain.
2. Imagine what happens to a mail-in ballot in a vote processing center. Allow me to illustrate the journey of a mail-in ballot envelope inside a vote processing center. The first key step is to open the envelope and log it.
3. On the outer envelope there is name and address of the voter who mailed the ballot. So the log will indicate that a ballot was received from an identifiable voter (identified by a name and address).
Closing of American Mind
The university has made intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs are race, gender, victimhood and whose only outputs are grievance & division. bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-universit…
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions.
Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions.
For the vaccinated, Covid resembles the flu and usually a mild one. Society does not ground to a halt over the flu. nytimes.com/2021/09/07/bri…
2. One in 5,000
How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.
3. Or maybe one in 10,000
The chances are surely higher in places with the worst Covid outbreaks (e.g. Southeast). But in places with fewer cases — like the Northeast, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco areas — the chances are even lower, probably less than 1 in 10,000.
Putin and his cartel reject a White House request.
Despite very favorable policies from the White House, Russian President Vladimir Putin still doesn’t feel like doing U.S. President Joe Biden a solid. 1/
You may recall the bizarre episode last month when Mr. Biden, who is pushing expensive taxpayer-funded policies to reduce oil production, suddenly urged Russia and its allies in the international energy cartel to increase oil production. 2/
The news then was that Biden didn’t believe in forecasts of climate doom enough to run the political risk of high gasoline prices. The news now is that cartel members don’t seem that eager to collude with him. 3/
WSJ: President ‘Perception’
Sometimes survival requires more than PR.
Historians may spend years trying to understand how President Biden could have so mismanaged the exit from Afghanistan. A new report suggests Biden was focused on appearances rather than reality. 1/
Reuters has published what it calls excerpts from a July phone call between President Joe Biden and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani. According to the Reuters transcript, Mr. Biden said: 2/
What good did it do to present a false picture of success? Mr. Biden was publicly presenting such a false picture in July and it seems to have served only to deceive American civilians and our Afghan allies into thinking they had more time before they had to flee. 3/
1. Covid's Mysterious Two Month Cycle
Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall.
2. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has also followed this two-month pattern.
After Delta took hold last winter in India, caseloads there rose sharply for slightly more than two months before plummeting at a nearly identical rate.
3. In Britain, caseloads rose for almost exactly two months before peaking in July. In Indonesia, Thailand, France, Spain and several other countries, the Delta surge also lasted somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 months.