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Home » Open thread 9/14/21

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Open thread 9/14/21 — 23 Comments

  1. Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great?” series is a treasure – I’ve been following it since it was in the single digits. Hearing the songs broken down into their original parts gives you insights into the performances you can’t get anywhere else. He’s talking about ‘going pro’ with the channel and doing long-form documentaries and in-person interviews (Brian May has already invited him to come visit in the UK), which will be a lot of fun…

  3. I walked into a public park a couple days ago and someone had hired a live band to play for their party. I recognized the song as “To Love Somebody.” Now the singer didn’t sound anything like Barry Gibb, but in my mind’s first attempts to recognize the song from a distance, I could hear Barry Gibb’s voice in my head. Ah, a Bee Gee’s classic.

  6. I wonder if the Chinese were able to slip a couple of million into Milley’s Swiss account for the privilege of acquiring that information.

  7. I wonder if the Chinese were able to slip a couple of million into Milley’s Swiss account for the privilege of acquiring that information. The commies have been active at West Point for a while. Remember Spenser Rapone and his stupid graduation stunt touting that “Communism will win” written on the inside of his hat. Supposedly he got the boot after that came to light. I imagine he is back in good standing by now.

  8. And yet Milley had no objections to the Afghan pullout plan or any other action by the “Biden” administration. I wonder if he alerted his Chinese counterpart about the pullout plans?

  11. geoffb –

    Someone has been spilling the proverbial beans to the Chinese, the Taliban, and the Iranians since this administration took office in January. Maybe Spencer Rapone at West Point WAS right . . the commies DID win. They just haven’t told us yet.

  12. IF you know law, history, etc…
    THIS one boggles and buggers the mind at the same time

    The Pentagon’s top general was so worried in early January that president Donald Trump was out of control that he took secret action to prevent Trump from sparking a war with China, according to a new book.

    [That is a violation… he has NO RIGHT, NO POWER, Etc. to undermine the elected commander in chief]

    Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley ordered aides to not act immediately on any move by the then-president to use US nuclear forces, and he called a Chinese general to reassure Beijing, presidential chronicler Bob Woodward and co-author Robert Costa wrote in their soon-to-be-released book.

    [That is a violation (possible actual treason)… he has NO RIGHT, NO POWER, Etc. to undermine the elected commander in chief and conspire with the military of a foreign government!!!]

    Milley called Chinese counterpart General Li Zuocheng twice, on October 30 just before Trump’s election defeat, and on January 8, two days after Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol, to reassure him that Trump’s anti-China rhetoric could not translate into military action.

    [What? This man should be discharged dishonorably]

    “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told Li in the October call, Woodward and Costa write.

    “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you,” Milley said.

    Two months later, Milley used the secret back-channel with Li again after the US Capitol riot, amid concerns both in Beijing and Washington that Trump was unstable.

    “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes,” Milley told Li, according to the book.

    To reassure the Chinese, Milley went so far as to have the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command postpone military exercises that Beijing might have viewed as a possible threat.

    Separately, Milley told his top staff that if Trump sought to exercise his power to order a nuclear strike, that they had to inform him first.

    And Milley discussed with other top officials, including CIA director Gina Haspel and National Security Agency head Paul Nakasone, the need to be vigilant amid concerns Trump could act irrationally.

    “Some might contend that Milley had overstepped his authority and taken extraordinary power for himself,” the authors wrote.

    But he believed he was acting correctly “to ensure there was no historic rupture in the international order, no accidental war with China or others, and no use of nuclear weapons,” they said.

    The Pentagon declined to comment on the book’s claims.

  14. Artfldgr:

    I just this minute read your comment about Milley, just a few moments after I had already posted this piece on the subject.

    I didn’t deal with the Chinese part, but you are correct that that’s very important, too.

    I also think a dishonorable discharge would be too mild for what Milley did. Then again, it’s all academic, because nothing is going to happen to him.

  15. I thought this item about Facebook in the business news today was interesting. Elite users have their content “whitelisted” and at least temporarily exempted from automated censorship.

    Facebook is using a program that whitelists millions of VIP users from the company’s standard content moderation practices, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    The program is known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” and it creates special rules for content moderation when it comes to millions of VIP accounts on Facebook and Instagram, according to internal documents obtained by the Journal.

    Every day Facebook users can have their content taken down immediately if the company’s artificial intelligence technologies or contracted content moderators find their posts to be in violation of the company’s rules. Users in the XCheck program, however, may have their content stay live on Facebook’s services before being routed into a separate moderation system. That process is also staffed by better-trained content moderators who are full-time employees, according to the report.

    The report, which cites internal Facebook documents, said there were at least 5.8 million VIP Facebook users in 2020.

    I dropped my WSJ subscription, so I don’t have access to the original source.

    This XCheck system is also referred to as “the whitelist” internally at Facebook. The part I found interesting was the Facebook response, but I wasn’t able to find some the things discussed elsewhere. This the Facebook twitter response.

    They laughably claim that they are treating everyone the same, when in fact, you will not get a second or third consideration from a human censor, but 5.8 million “elites” will get that. And who are these Facebook employees who are evaluating this special whitelisted content? What are their political motivations?

    The part I heard on TV news, and cannot corroborate online, is the claim that Facebook employees (internally or externally?) have said that part of the motivation for XCheck is to avoid having the stature or revenue of Facebook damaged by an angry VIP, or more precisely by a Very Powerful Person. Think about the fallout from angering all the Kardashian sisters or Nancy Pelosi.

    Peter Schweizer had written some years ago that the Democrat party has driven campaign funding drives in the past by explicitly threatening corporations with onerous legislation, only to drop the bills when the bucks roll in.

  17. I’m sure the Leonard Cohen fans here agree to the genius of his song, “Hallelujah,” but as I recall, that song didn’t become a Cultural Treasure until after Mike Meyers used John Cale’s version in the first “Shrek.”

    (Mike Meyers also created “Wayne’s World.”)

  19. Accelerating Growth in Afghan Migration Pre Recent Untergang:

    https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/085/017/862/original/15bbc63296f34503.png

    Invade the World. Invite the World.

    What’s not to like?

    NB: Try not to overdose on Cope-ium here. This is not just ‘Obama’ or ‘State’…. This importation of Subject Peoples and Barbarians is a Feature, not a bug of late stage Empires.

    I wonder if anyone can cite chapter and verse where NR and other prominent Neocons suggested that this might be a Bad Idea?

    At least the Chinese have the brains not to let their country fill up with Africans (although they do have too many in one neighbourhood in Guangzhou and doubtless a problem in several other big cities.)

  20. Zaphod:

    I don’t know who you’re addressing here; I haven’t noticed anyone discussing that on this thread. Perhaps you’re just speaking in general? Because I also don’t think there’s a single person here who has been advocating taking in any Afghans except the very specific ones who assisted us as translators or the like, especially if they have worked loyally for many years. No one here has advocated what actually happened, the wholesale taking on of many unknown Afghans – a sort of madness by our leftist government (of course, the left doesn’t think it mad at all – they are doing this by design, for their own purposes).

    In addition, by “NR” and “neocons,” are you speaking of National Review? Again, I don’t think there are many (if any) fans of that particular publication here, certainly not the editorial board. Maybe a certain piece here and there, but generally not. However, it didn’t take me but a moment to find a couple of articles from National Review (if indeed that’s what you’re referring to) that deal with the Afghan refugee question, and even they don’t seem at all keen on the wholesale importation of Afghans into this country. They are in favor of only interpreters. Here’s one article entitled “The Kabuki Vetting of Afghans”:

    …[T]hose Afghans (though not necessarily their family members) who were previously employed by our military or embassy were vetted before employment, and periodically during employment, too. Even this isn’t foolproof; former Army platoon leader (and current Senate candidate) Sean Parnell told Tucker Carlson of his unit’s extensively vetted Afghan interpreter who ended up betraying his American comrades. But to the degree it’s possible to vet someone in Afghanistan, these former U.S. government employees have been vetted.

    But the evacuation from Kabul was so haphazard and rushed that many, perhaps most, of those extracted were not such previously screened people. Representative Tom Tiffany (R., Wis.) told the Washington Times that of the 2,000 Afghans housed at a base in his state, not one had the Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans employed by, or on behalf of, the U.S. government. And at least one previously deported convicted rapist appears to have landed at Dulles already.

    So, how to screen those Afghans who’ve never been screened? Given Afghanistan’s low level of development, it’s not like the record-keeping there was ever comprehensive and efficient, if it existed at all. And worse, as 30-year INS/ICE veteran Dan Cadman pointed out on my “Parsing Immigration Policy” podcast last week, while we occupied Afghanistan, we at least had a chance of verifying claims that people made. Now that we have left and a hostile force is in charge, what are supposed to do, call up the Kabul DMV to verify someone’s identity? Even under the best of circumstances, vetting can never be perfect; to borrow from Queen Elizabeth I, we can’t open windows into men’s souls. But under today’s conditions, meaningful vetting of Afghans is literally impossible.

    The second problem is perhaps worse. Suppose we do somehow stumble upon incriminating information in the process of vetting, information that suggests an Afghan evacuee is a security threat or inadmissible for some other reason – what then?

    We can’t deport them back to Afghanistan. We can’t release them in Qatar or Bahrain or wherever we’re holding them; those countries only agreed to temporarily host the Afghans we flew in and certainly would not agree to take a potential threat off our hands.

    Conclusion: We’re just going to resettle them in the U.S. regardless of the results of vetting.

    The whole notion of holding Afghans offshore until they’re vetted is a charade. Those who don’t have a Special Immigrant Visa are simply being “paroled” into the U.S. Immigration parole is a work-around whereby the executive can temporarily let in visa-less foreigners for humanitarian reasons. But like so much else in our dishonest immigration system, “temporary” in this case means permanent. Every Afghan we extracted from Kabul will be able to live here for the rest of his life.

    This is true even if the Afghan refugee commits crimes after his arrival.

    It goes on for some time in this vein. Needless to say, not pro-Afghan-immigrant.

    Then there’s this:

    This specific process of visa-creep started years ago. Congress created a second Special Immigrant Visa category for Afghans that’s both larger and less compelling than the one for military translators: Afghans who were employed by, or on behalf of, the U.S. government. That means clerks, receptionists, drivers, construction workers, food servers, et al., including those working for private companies providing contract services to the government. This program is much larger than the translators program, with about 21,000 principals having been given SIV visas since 2008, plus more than twice that for family members, for a total of about 74,000 people. That’s 35 times more than the military translators who are so often held up as representative of SIV beneficiaries.

    While such workers certainly helped support the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, they should be considered separately from the “willing to take a bullet” category that Congressman Waltz referred to. In fact, most Afghans who qualify for this larger SIV program took the jobs in the first place not out of any commitment to help America build a new Afghanistan but because the jobs offered good pay in real money. Moreover, the prospect of scoring a visa to get out of Afghanistan was itself a major appeal of working for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. The State Department’s Office of Inspector General found that the Kabul embassy had high turnover of Afghan staff because the local hires applied for Special Immigrant Visas as soon as they qualified (after one year, later two years, of employment) and then left for the U.S. as soon as they could.

    Earlier this month, the State Department created a third avenue for an even larger, and even less compelling, group of Afghans to move to the U.S. It’s called the Priority 2 Direct Access refugee program, and it could be as large as the president wants it to be when he sets the overall refugee-resettlement ceiling for a given fiscal year. A Priority 2 designation means that an entire group has been deemed to be refugees, so that no individual fear of persecution has to be demonstrated. The Afghans eligible for this further expansion of access to the United States include those who worked for the U.S. government or private contractors, but not long enough to qualify for an SIV; those who worked on projects funded by U.S. government grants; and those who worked for U.S.-based media companies or nongovernmental organizations. This is an unwarranted expansion of the category of true need. Yet the impulse to equate employment for, say, private media corporations to military service is widespread.

    It’s very possible, even likely, that the Taliban will also fail to make that distinction, and will target people eligible for the P-2 program. That’s a strong argument for helping such people get out of Afghanistan; it is not an argument for bringing them into the United States.

    Basically, the same attitude: just let in the small number of translators. The rest should not be coming to the US.

  21. Australian Totalitarianism:

    Academic Agent: The State of Australia

    https://youtu.be/AditWsqSyHc

    It’s a nearly 4 hour panel chat, so perhaps unlikely to make Huxley’s Top 10 Easy Listening List. But has a bunch of Australian panelists, so might be of interest to some.

  22. @Neo:

    Was not speaking directly to anyone present here.

    Thinking out loud this time just trying to get people to ingest the ‘Invade the World / Invite the World’ meme. It’s something to keep in mind.

    What I’m hoping (forlornly, I suspect) is that your Ruling Class learns some lessons. Inevitably when the USA invades Country X, a whole bunch of non-‘Translators’ end up arriving in the USA and adding their not so lovely Diverse Sauce to the over-stuffed Melting Pot.

    Intentions and Imprecations don’t count. Results count. NR and Friends could advocate at 150dB day and night against importing non-‘Translators’ (whilst never seeming to advocate NOT invading other countries)… but invariably they end up arriving anyway. We know this. They know this. It’s a Feature of the system, not a Bug. It cannot help but fail in this mode. No amount of tweaking of the present dispensation seems able to do anything about this. Therefore… in Immodest Proposal Mode, Just. Stop. Already.

    I’m not averse to some Nuking from Orbit, etc.

  23. Zaphod:

    My preference is not for Easy Listening, but something Damned Interesting in my terms.

    I figure if someone can’t be bothered to type in a few sentences hyping the specific how and the what of that Interest, I can’t be bothered to spend 30-240(!) minutes listening.

    I only have so much time on this blue spinning globe and in comparison there is a near-infinite amount of stuff on the web vying for my attention. Not to mention the books, audio and video in my house or on my computer.

    I’ve also noticed that the Really Good Stuff rises to the top in multiple places, so I don’t worry overmuch about missing it.

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