The latest dispatch from my alma mater.
And they wonder why I don’t donate.
Our Whole National-Security Apparatus
[Update a while later]
Fire the military and intelligence higher ups now. And yes, Biden should be fired, too, but that’s the job of either the Congress now, or the voters later.
What China Wants
…and why. An excellent description of their history and motivations.
Farewell To The Bourgeois Kings
A long, but worthwhile essay on the current state of affairs after the ghastly fall of Afghanistan.
[Update mid-afternoon]
The Afghanistan debacle was the end of the liberal world order.
The 25th Amendment
The Democrats can’t even use it to get Biden out of office. The latest polling has Biden’s numbers sinking, and they haven’t even polled since the debacle in Afghanistan.
Seventeen Years later
It’s interesting to read this essay that I wrote on space policy just after the first flight of SpaceShipOne and see how it’s held up. Things haven’t happened as quickly as I had hoped, and the government policy has remained awful with respect to NASA human spaceflight, but I think we’re finally on the verge of seeing things happen.
Fusion Power
Is it finally less than thirty years away? It doesn’t say what the fuel is, but I assume it’s deuterium. I wonder if the concept can be adapted for space propulsion?
The Vanishing Legacy Of Barack Obama
Matt Taibi’s post-mortem is withering:
Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.
Well, actually Matt, he didn’t fool us all. He never fooled me.
Biden
He never does. He never will.
“‘That’s it. It’s over,’ a U.S. official said.
The official is wrong. The fall of Kabul is just the beginning of the horrific fallout from Biden’s decisions.”
[Update a while later]
All Biden had to do was…nothing:
…the really awful part is, this was entirely predictable—because everybody I know predicted it. We didn’t know when exactly. But we knew it was coming. If we knew it, they knew it. If they didn’t know it, it’s because they chose not to know it. Or decided to let the chips fall where they may. Now the chips have fallen with one of the most evil political forces the world has ever seen back in charge of the government from which we rousted them 20 years ago.
We stand exposed today not as a country that finally exited a war we could no longer even imagine a victory in, as had been the case in 1975. Rather, we are revealed as a country led by a feckless president who chose to refuse to grapple with the obvious potential consequences of a decision he wanted to make so he could be declared a war-ender and a peace-maker. History will declare him something else, something worse, something darker. The real horror for Afghanis is that history will begin to make its declaration about Joe Biden this week, as the Taliban begin working their depravity on them and the nation from which we once rightly took great national pride in having liberated.
It didn’t even take a year for him to be the worst president in recent memory.
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Steyn: The scale of a humiliation.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban is Biden’s folly, not Trump’s.
[Update early afternoon]
Joe Biden’s garbage foreign-policy instincts.
[Monday-afternoon update]
Yes, Joe Biden should resign, but so should Lloyd Austin.
Neither of them will, of course. And if the president were to do so, we’d have the wonderful prospect of a President Harris, and the s**tshow would continue.
Haiti
Man, the place can’t catch a break.
On the up side, it’s another opportunity for the Clintons to do well by “doing good.”