tenderfoot
tenderfoot's Journalfrom Peter Galbraith: I watch the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan with disbelief and horror.
I watch the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan with disbelief and horror. I first visited the country with the mujaheddin on February 14, 1989--the day the Soviets withdrew --and served there as Deputy Head of the UN mission in 2009. So much went wrong but here is my very partial list of those most responsible for the fiasco.
1. The Afghan political and military leaders who were more interested in staying in power than doing anything while in office except for stealing as much as they could.
2. The US government which pumped so much money into Afghanistan that there was a lot to steal and it was easily stolen.
3. Hamid Karzai--Afghanistan's first president was corrupt, ineffective, weird, and--after the massive fraud that accompanied his reelection, illegitimate. In 2009, he organized the fraud that got him a second term. That enabled him and his cronies to steal everything else.
4. Ban ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General who tolerated the massive fraud in the UN sponsored (and paid for) Afghanistan 2009 presidential elections. This undermined Obama's surge which may have been the last chance to get it right.
5. David Petraeus, the other US military commanders and the so called strategic thinkers who all declared the Afghanistan War to be a counter-insurgency and also stated that successful counter-insurgencies require a local partner. They then pretended the corrupt Afghan government was a real partner when they knew it wasn't.
6. USAID which built roads intended to raise rural incomes by getting farm products to market but actually enabled corrupt police to shakedown farmers. This won the Taliban new supporters and the new roads gave the Taliban speedy access to previously defensible areas like the Pansjir Valley (which neither the Soviets or the pre 2001 Taliban ever took).
7. Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan second president, who was a victim of Karzai's fraud in the 2009 presidential elections and willingly took office--twice--thanks to massive electoral fraud. Ashraf is personally honest but when you come into office thanks to a stolen election, it is hard to crack down on the corrupt power brokers who got you there.
8. The US and UN architects of Afghanistan's highly centralized constitution that was utterly inappropriate for a country that is as ethnically and geographically diverse as Afghanistan. Not only did the Constitution concentrate all power in Kabul at the expense of the provinces and districts but it also gave all power within Kabul to a Pashtun president as opposed to sharing power with an ethnically diverse parliament.
The rapid collapse follows a surrender agreement negotiated by Donald Trump and implemented by the Biden Administration. There is no reason to think the outcome would be any different if the US took another ten years to withdraw.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.galbraith.522/posts/4514778401912498
Canada to resettle 20,000 vulnerable Afghans threatened by the Taliban and forced to flee
https://twitter.com/CitImmCanada/status/1426291941503819777https://twitter.com/CitImmCanada/status/1426291946440515584
https://twitter.com/CitImmCanada/status/1426291951851249664
The US went into Afghanistan to steal all their shit and used 9/11 as an excuse. Plain and simple.
Spare me this bullshit about fighting terrorism, caring about the rights of women or spreading Democracy.
Didn't work out. And it won't for Iran or China or Pakistan either.
An interesting take on Afghanistan
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1425608335726940166https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1425608339258490888
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1425608343842873344
thread 1:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1415961706577207299.html
thread 2:
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1413410461094141952
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1413410476986359810
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1413410493285425153
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1413410493285425153
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1413410522326654977
The Trial of Chesa Boudin Can a young progressive prosecutor survive a political backlash in SF
It doesnt matter that crime is down, Chesa Boudin has said. People feel less safe. They want to feel safe.
The San Francisco surveillance videos that have gone most viral are those that emphasize brazenness and impunity. In June, a reporter at the local ABC affiliate posted on Twitter a cell-phone video taken at a Walgreens in Hayes Valley. A man on a bicycle stands in the middle of an aisle, calmly loading cosmetics into a black garbage bag. He begins with the top shelf, and works his way down to the bottom one, until his bag is full. A few feet away is a Walgreens security guard, who makes no effort to stop the cyclist, choosing instead to film him with his phone. Eventually, the cyclist mounts his bike and rides out, ducking to avoid a half-hearted lunge from the guard. The video crystallizes the subversive, Banksy-ish quality of the San Francisco theft wave. It also supplied a political contextin her post, the reporter, Lyanne Melendez, tagged Boudin.
In his office, Boudin considered, for what must have been the thousandth time, the implications of the Walgreens video, a task to which he brought a yeshiva intensity. When I watch that video, I think about five questions that people are not asking that I think they should, he said. Is he drug addicted, mentally ill, desperate? Is he part of a major retail fencing operation? Whats driving this behavior and is it in any way representative, because it was presented as something symptomatic? The way the video had been presented suggested that shoplifting had become a raging problem in San Francisco, but, he pointed out, the official data showed that over-all theft was down from the previous year.
Boudin turned to the matter of the security guard: Why, Boudin asked, had he reacted so passively? Boudin said, If Walgreens has insurance for certain goods or they expect a certain amount of loss, if they would rather not risk lawsuits or escalation to violencethen maybe thats something we should know about. He mentioned a fact he often cites when confronted about property crimethat the police make arrests in just two-and-a-half per cent of reported thefts. Maybe thats a good thingmaybe that means theyre prioritizing murders, Boudin said. But when this particular individual was arrested, and we got the full police history, it turned out that he had been detained by the police previously after another Walgreens incident, and they didnt arrest him because Walgreens had said they did not want to press charges in that prior case. The police had known who he was for months.
Boudin paused, seeming to recognize that he was offering an essentially structural explanation for an emotional problem, which was that people thought criminals werent being punished and that freaked them out. He said, From a public political standpoint, what matters more is the ups and downs and if people feel less safe. It doesnt matter that crime is down. People feel less safe. They want to feel safe.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-trial-of-chesa-boudin
from 2016: 1984 Olympians Mary Decker and Zola Budd discuss 'The Fall'
Turns out the media made them out to be bitter rivals when they weren't...
Will conservative media ever be held responsible for killing off their audience?
https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1421093736478609412I don't have any data but it seems like there's a rash of COVID hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the bullshit they hear/read on right wing media outlets.
Will there be a point when they finally figure out that they've been lied to all along?
Shoplifting Is Big News; Stealing Millions From Workers Is Not
An alleged crime surge at Walgreens drugstores in San Francisco was a hot topic for Bay Area news outlets in the early months of 2021. When Lyanne Melendez, a reporter for the ABC-owned KGO-TV in San Francisco, tweeted out a cellphone video of a brazen shoplifter, it elevated this narrative into a nationwide story. The video purports to show a man apparently filling a garbage bag with items before riding a bicycle out of the store, as two people, one of whom seems to be a store security guard, record him.
FAIR identified 309 published pieces on the 21-second video, using a combination of Nexis and Google advanced search to find every article published by a news outlet, from the videos publication on June 14 to July 12a 28-day timeframe.
[snip]
Compare this to another Walgreens-related theft story: the November settlement of a wage theft and labor law violation class-action lawsuit against Walgreens, filed by employees in California for $4.5 million.
A multimillion-dollar settlement coming after a two-year legal struggle, this should have been a national news story, not to mention a major topic in local California outlets. But FAIR was unable to find a single general news outlet that covered the settlement, looking from November 2020 to July 2021, using the same search parameters as the aforementioned shoplifting video.
[snip]
Obviously, the shoplifting video is supposed to represent multiple examples of retail theft, to boost awareness about shoplifting as a larger issue. But the wage theft settlement is also one example of a widespread issue: Employers stealing from their workers is a $15 billion a year problem that gets little attention.
San Francisco is a city that falls far short in caring for the homeless population, with pervasive poverty, particularly among people of color. In that context, to treat an individual stealing a few hundred dollars from a corporation worth $150 billion as infinitely more newsworthy than that same company stealing millions from its employees is to enlist the media on the well-funded side of the class war.
https://fair.org/home/shoplifting-is-big-news-stealing-millions-from-workers-is-not/
Jeff Bezos Is Not My Astronaut
I felt more disdain than wonder watching Richard Bransons joyride and Jeff Bezoss soulless flight to the Kámán Line.
Everybody Gets a For All Mankind Trophy
There was no ground broken here. In 1903, the Wright Brothers completed the first powered flight. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. In 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first human on the moon. Those are milestones worthy of celebration. In 2004, Burt Rutans Scaled Composites carried the first people into space on a privately built spacecraft a milestone of sorts.
[snip]
Egonauts
In addition to vanity projects for billionaires, these pseudo-events were advertisements, promotions for the brands prominently displayed throughout the breathless television coverage.
[snip]
The Right Stuff
Its unlikely these projects will attract any venture capital money or support a SPAC. Private space projects might be dressed up as achievements for humanity, but their aim is to return capital to shareholders. And when thats the criteria, the astronauts and their efforts become limited in scope.
[snip]
Mach-3 Train Wreck or Galactic ATM
Whatever you think of space travel as a human endeavor, space tourism is an awful business. Even assuming all goes well, it makes no sense. These are vanity projects, and the only people that will make money from them will be the early investors
who bail out before impact.
more
https://www.profgalloway.com/jeff-bezos-is-not-my-astronaut/
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Member since: Tue Sep 3, 2013, 01:59 PM
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