Kabul: where to run, where to hide?

The New Neo Posted on by

I went to bed last night feeling very agitated and having my own small version of Vietnam PTSD. I can only imagine what it’s like for so many of those who served there, or in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or who lost loved ones in those countries – as well, of course, as refugees from Afghanistan, or those who know people who have helped us and cannot get out in time.

Afghanistan is a land-locked country. So we won’t be reading about boat people. And Afghanistan’s neighboring countries aren’t exactly the sort that might be seen as sanctuaries. For example [emphasis mine]:

Iran said it will provide temporary refuge to Afghans arriving at its borders as the Taliban advance on Kabul, prompting thousands of people to flee the city.

Accommodation will be built in Razavi Khorasan, South Khorasan and Sistan-Baluchestan provinces along Iran’s eastern border with Afghanistan, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said Sunday, citing Hossein Ghassemi, deputy for border affairs at the Interior Ministry.

Fleeing Afghans are expected “to return when the situation improves,” Ghassemi said, adding that some of them, including members of the military as well as government and customs officials, had already been sent back.

And this [emphasis mine]:

Uzbekistan has detained 84 Afghan soldiers who crossed the border, the government said on August 15, adding that another group of soldiers had amassed near a border checkpoint on the Afghan side.

Uzbekistan provided the detained Afghan soldiers with food, temporary accommodation, and medical treatment, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The government is also providing humanitarian aid to a group of Afghan soldiers who have amassed on the Afghan side of the of the bridge at the Termez-Hairatan border crossing, the Foreign Ministry added. The bridge is a car and railway link between the two countries…

Uzbekistan is in talks with Kabul on returning the troops home and resolving the situation at the bridge, it said.

And Pakistan seems to be allied with the Taliban.

Some western European countries (Germany, for example) are also having their own problems with this. Were they even warned ahead of time how abruptly the withdrawal was about to happen? I have no idea, but my guess is that the answer is no:

“We need to make sure that the many people who have big worries and concerns, even though they have not worked with German institutions, have a secure stay in countries neighbouring Afghanistan,” Merkel said.

“We should not repeat the mistake of the past when we did not give enough funds to UNHCR and other aid programmes and people left Jordan and Lebanon towards Europe.”…

Merkel had earlier told a closed meeting of the CDU that those needing evacuation included 2,500 Afghan support staff as well as human rights activists, lawyers and others whom the government sees as being at risk if they remained in the country, up to 10,000 altogether.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany was seeking to evacuate as many people at risk as it could, adding that NATO allies had misjudged the situation when they thought Afghan government forces could hold back the Taliban unaided.

That story is datelined today.

Many news outlets and bloggers have covered the horrific events occurring in Kabul. This one from Ace has compiled quite a few reports and videos. Prepare yourself; it’s profoundly disturbing. The title of the post is “Kabul ’75: Video Shows Terrified Afghan Civilians Clinging Desperately to Departing US Jets, Then Plunging To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out.”

Biden to address nation

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently Joe Biden will be emerging from his hiding place to address the nation at 3:45 Eastern Time. I predict that his message will be some combination of “it’s not that bad” and “Bush and Trump made me do it.”

The spin must be dizzying for those writing his speech. And it’s almost possible to feel sorry for those trying to prepare him – almost, but not quite.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that this approach to the Afghanistan exit is one decision that Joe really did make himself. It has that quality of attempted self-aggrandizement – the timing being motivated by the vision of himself celebrating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 by being able to brag that he finally got us out of there when no one else could. It also apparently encompasses self-delusion, because all reports are that his military advisors said that this way of withdrawing from that country was ill-advised. They may not have known exactly how they should have done it, but this extremely precipitous and abrupt departure, leaving so many vulnerable people (and their families) to be tortured and murdered, was especially bad and it was especially obvious. But Biden knew better, right?

And the idea that our “intelligence” had no idea about Afghan surrender to the Taliban being likely is preposterous:

The Biden administration seems implacably determined to gravely damage this country and so many others in record time – except for our enemies, who are sitting pretty. It’s a good example of how hard it is to build and how easy to destroy.

Amateur hour

The New Neo Posted on by

What a difference 5 weeks [see NOTE below] makes:

Notice that, among other things, he did not answer the question. The question wasn’t, “How did the Taliban overrun the country so fast?” It was essentially, “Why did you fail to predict it?”

[NOTE: That first clip is dated with two different dates in that tweet, July 7th and June 7th. So it either was said 5 weeks ago or 9 weeks ago. I think the earlier date may have been correct, but he may have repeated it on July 7th. Hard to tell.]

Afghanistan leave-taking

The New Neo Posted on by

Sunday is usually my day off, but there’s so much Afghanistan news I thought I’d do a very short post on the subject. I expect to have more to say later, and at any rate the fog of war is operating right now and it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening there.

Maybe it’s always hard to know exactly what’s happening there.

But there is no question that we’re abandoning the country precipitously, and that the sanguine predictions of Joe Biden and some of the generals were a travesty. Just to take one small example (there are plenty others), here is a statement Biden made on July 8. That’s about five weeks ago:

But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.

In addition, he said, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” But that has apparently occurred, as well.

Biden wanted out, and fast. There doesn’t appear to have been much of a plan for doing so – or, alternatively, the generals had been planning for something slower and that wasn’t allowed to happen. I believe that it would have been a debacle any way it had been done – that’s why three previous presidents didn’t do it – but Biden may just have maximized the confusion and carnage.

I usually write “Biden or whoever is in charge,” but in this case I believe that Biden actually was taking the lead and giving the order, and no one was successful in overruling him. We don’t know, of course.

There’s a lot we don’t know.

There’s plenty of coverage of what is apparently happening. Go to any news outlet or blog and you can find it.

I’ll skip the Vietnam analogies for now, but they’re there. There are differences, but for those of us who were around during the pullout from Vietnam, there are strong similarities. Here’s a post I wrote in 2007 on the fall of Saigon.

On pop music fame, families, fashion, and too much fame: the Bee Gees

The New Neo Posted on by

Regular readers here know about my recent rediscovery of the Bee Gees, and my new fascination with them. Many of you find this quite boring; others are interested. I am so surprised myself by the experience that I keep trying to analyze it – their music, what the special attraction is for me – and I find I have so much to say I could write a book.

That’s – strange. But that’s the way it is. So if you think I’ve written too much lately on this topic, just know that I’m actually holding back.

Another thing is that this interest has opened up a more general interest in the creative process in music. In the past, I’ve thought a great deal about that topic in connection with writing and in dance, two fields where I have some experience. But although I’ve always appreciated and loved music, I’ve never shown a particle of skill at singing, playing an instrument, or composing. I suppose I might be able to write lyrics – a form of poetry – but otherwise I am strictly a consumer. But now I’ve become quite fascinated by why some people are gifted in music and drawn to performing and writing it, and one thing I’ve definitely noted is that it often seems to run in families.

Just to take one example, there’s Cissy Houston:

Emily “Cissy” Houston (née Drinkard; born September 30, 1933) is an American soul and gospel singer. After a successful career singing backup for such artists as Roy Hamilton, Dionne Warwick, Elvis Presley, and Aretha Franklin, Houston embarked on a solo career, winning two Grammy Awards for her work.

Houston is the mother of singer Whitney Houston…aunt of singers Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick, and cousin of opera singer Leontyne Price.

Quite a family, isn’t it? My guess (a pretty safe guess, I might add) is it’s both nature and nurture that’s responsible. But nature definitely plays a huge role.

All of this is a segue into this video interview of the Bee Gees, who are brothers and who talk about certain aspects of the music business, post-disco. This video was from 1987, after they had taken six years off from performing and releasing their own records, and instead had been engaged in writing huge hits for others (Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Kenny Rogers’ and Dolly Parton’s “Islands In the Stream,” and Dionne Warwick’s – Cissy Houston’s niece’s, that is – “Heartbreaker,” for example). Even to this day, most people have no idea that the Bee Gees wrote those songs and wrote and produced the albums on which they appeared.

The video starts out with a TV performance that I think may be lip-synced (that was often the case for TV shows at the time), but I’ve cued it up for the interview portion, which is fairly short:

Is the Biden administration worse than you expected?

The New Neo Posted on by

I was reading a set of comments somewhere at a blog on the right where a lot of people were saying this administration is worse than they had expected. The topic at hand was the incompetence of the withdrawal from Afghanistan – in particular, the reports that one of the first rules of the military, that one destroys the weaponry one leaves behind rather than have it fall into enemy hands – was being violated and no one seems to quite know why. Then the discussion segued into a general discussion of the administration as a whole, not just Biden but whatever person or persons are in charge.

My opinion? I didn’t anticipate every detail. But I expected every single thing they did to be absolutely terrible and very destructive. And it has pretty much worked out that way so far. It’s a distressing thing to watch, assimilate, and chronicle. I wrote a post on February 3, 2021 about the phenomenon of what the administration is doing, which I called “The Unraveling.”

And a lot has been unraveled since then.

A couple of further points about the Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper confrontation in Central Park last year

The New Neo Posted on by

I already wrote about the topic yesterday – and strongly suggested that you listen to this podcast about it. The discussion in the ensuing thread raised a bunch of interesting questions that I wanted to address, so here’s one more post about the deeper story of what happened that day in Central Park, and in particular its aftermath.

Commenter “huxley” notes that Bari Weiss, the interviewer in the podcast and former Times writer, writes in a Substack article that she only recently learned that Christian Cooper had written a Facebook account shortly after the incident, indicating that he threatened Cooper (“look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it”), and tried to lure the dog with a dog treat that he carried for “such intransigence.” [Correction: although the URL of the substack article says “bariweiss.substack.com, it was actually written by someone named Megan Phelps-Roper, so for the rest of this post I’ve substituted Roper’s name for Weiss’s when referring to the author of the substack piece, and eliminated a reference to the author of it being a reporter. Weiss is still the person in the podcast interview about the incident.] Phelps-Roper writes:

He threatened her, I thought, stunned. He says himself that he approached her — a woman alone in a wooded area. He tried to lure away her dog. How was this the first time I was reading these details? Had I just missed them in the other stories I’d read?

How had she missed them? I think it’s quite simple: first of all, they weren’t heavily covered even on the right. Although I didn’t write about the Cooper vs. Cooper incident – I was busy with the death of Floyd, which was contemporaneous, plus I felt from the start that there was something fishy about the Central Park story – I read early on (unfortunately, I no longer remember where) about that Facebook post of Christian Cooper’s. Thing is, a person had to read a lot to find it, and also had to read not just the MSM or blogs on the left, but had to dig into blogs on the right as well. The information was available, but it wasn’t easy to find.

But what’s more interesting to me is why (at least, if I’m remembering correctly) relatively few outlets on the right covered Christian Cooper’s Facebook admissions either. I recall that I didn’t cover the story because, as I said, I was thinking the facts were murky and so I would wait, and then I got distracted by the extreme furor around the death of George Floyd and pretty much forgot about the Coopers. But plenty of other bloggers wrote about it and didn’t really get into the details that might have explained Amy Cooper’s behavior.

I tried to search old articles about this in order to test whether my memory about the nature and content of the contemporaneous coverage on the right is correct, but it proved surprisingly difficult to locate and I didn’t have time to spend many hours in that quest right now. So at this point I’ll just say that’s the way I recall it, and if I’m correct about the avoidance of discussion of Christian Cooper’s Facebook admissions at the time, I think the general avoidance was because defending Amy Cooper seemed very risky and the video seemed to implicate her so strongly. And especially in the wake of the Floyd furor, not many people – even on the right – wanted to touch it.

Another point I’d like to make is that, according to Amy Cooper in that podcast, it was only when Soledad O’Brien tweeted about the Central Park video featuring Amy – a video that had been posted by Christian Cooper’s sister – that the story went truly viral and Amy Cooper began to get multiple and serious death threats. It happened quickly because O’Brien picked up on it very quickly and had “a million” followers (she has 1.3 million now).

O’Brien is a long-time and well-known journalist. Why did she think this story was one she should spread far and wide? I would guess she recognized at once that it had viral potential. Guilt by video has become a big journalistic approach, especially with incidents that involve supposedly racist actions or speech. So in my opinion it was really O’Brien, a newscaster, who was most responsible for the video getting such wide coverage.

O’Brien is of mixed racial background: her father is white (from Australia) and her mother is of what’s called “Afro-Cuban” descent, meaning that her mother is of mixed race including black. According to Wiki, when O’Brien’s parents wanted to be married, Maryland still had laws against miscegenation (an interesting map can be found here), and so her parents had to move to DC to marry. That’s certainly a searing history for O’Brien, and it wouldn’t be surprising if O’Brien became especially sensitive to racial issues in part as a result of that.

Even now, as I go to O’Brien’s Twitter page, I see this at the very top:

And so my guess is that O’Brien felt the need to “call out” Amy Cooper by posting that video, even though Cooper’s behavior was as a private citizen rather than a public official in the course of his or her work duties. Whether or not O’Brien knew Amy Cooper’s name at that time, O’Brien had to know that her identity would be discovered and revealed in short order.

But O’Brien didn’t stop with that initial tweet. She kept up the pressure on Amy, stoking more anger and ridicule on her with a tweet such as this one.

If I’m not mistaken, this is O’Brien’s first tweet on the subject (Melody Cooper is apparently Christian Cooper’s brother, who had posted the video on social media of the confrontation):

So Amy Cooper was immediately described by O’Brien as a woman desiring to risk Christian Cooper’s life and essentially framing him (by “lying about the threat”), and being brazen enough to do it knowing she was being recorded. O’Brien doesn’t appear to have been the least bit curious (even though she’s a reporter) to know the whole story. She was apparently content to let the video fragment speak for itself and assumed she could interpret it to the world.

Which she did – and O’Brien’s truth about the incident, and about Amy Cooper herself, became The Truth for most of the world.

[NOTE: One relatively minor issue is whether Amy Cooper was at fault for letting her dog go unleashed in a part of the park that requires leashes. Yes, she was – but that hardly is an offense that should destroy a person’s life. In addition, if I’m recalling Amy Cooper’s story on the podcast correctly (I haven’t listened to it again to make sure, because I don’t know at what point she addresses the issue), she says that she had been in a part of the park that does allow unleashed dogs and then took a shortcut on a path that entered an area that requires leashes, but she didn’t realize that.]

Exculpatory evidence is being hidden from those arrested for January 6th activities

The New Neo Posted on by

The legal machinations illustrative of the prosecution of many of the January 6th defendants is demonstrated in the case of Cuoy Giffin. For Giffin, those actions include the government’s charging him although he never entered the Capitol at all and damaged no property or people, nor did he even attempt to do so. His crime was essentially trespassing (for which he was overcharged) and wrong-thinking:

Griffin was arrested on January 19, 2021, and as with many of those who were merely present at the Jan. 6 melee…the government prosecutors sought to detain him without bail for the duration of his criminal prosecution.

In its motion for pretrial detention of Griffin, the government argued that Cowboys for Trump [Griffin’s group] “advocates for fun rights” and that Griffin “is an inflammatory provocateur and fabulist who engages in racist invective and propounds baseless conspiracy theories, including that Communist China stole the 2020 Presidential Election.” According to the government, Griffin’s “inflammatory conduct, repeated threats, delusional worldview, and access to firearms makes him a danger to the community.”

Unlike some of the defendants who have been detained indefinitely so far, Griffin was released after three weeks. But the process that could lead to a trial (unless there’s a plea bargain) goes on. And here is the important part about exculpatory evidence [emphasis mine]:

After explaining [in a court filing] that the government possesses “[t]housands of hours” of video footage from a variety of sources, they conceded these materials include recordings of Capitol Police Officers allowing protesters to enter the so-called “restricted” area into which Griffin is alleged to have trespassed. The prosecutors stated [my additions in brackets and my emphasis]:

“[W]e are not in a position to turn over the universe of information we possess for Defendant to review. Although we are aware that we possess some information that the defense may view as supportive of arguments that law enforcement authorized defendants (including Defendant) to enter the restricted grounds, e.g., images of officers hugging or fist-bumping rioters, posing for photos with rioters, and moving bike racks, we are not in a position to state whether we have identified all such information.”

Let’s underline that point: federal prosecutors have evidence – which so far they refuse to provide to any of the Jan. 6 criminal defendants – that Capitol Police Department officers moved obstructions to allow protesters to enter locations that prosecutors are now calling “restricted areas.” And more than that, the government possesses evidence that the officers were taking photos with, hugging and fist-bumping many of those who they allowed to enter those areas.

We on the right have long known, through early reports from news outlets and blogs on the right that showed amateur videos about the January 6th incursion, that a lot of people were let into the Capitol that day, acted like tourists and were treated like tourists, and then left of their own volition. But if this information ever comes out in court, it probably will be news to our liberal friends – if they even hear about it then.

The government case looks weak, but even if the prosecution ultimately fails to convict, they have already won. They have won in the court of public opinion to a great extent, and that was always the point. A later revelation of the weakness of the cases, if it occurs, will be hushed up or twisted in some way by the MSM. The right has been served notice that the left is playing hardball and that any defiance will be met with the threat of arrest and detention without bail. Plus, even a weak case may end in convictions given the political climate of DC, its judges, and its juries.

January 6th was very very useful to the left, and will continue to be useful even if convictions never happen.

The deeper story of the confrontation between the “Central Park Karen” and birdwatcher Christian Cooper

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually recommend long podcasts, but I listened to this one last night and found it extraordinary and well worth a hearing. It’s a detailed exploration of what happened last year in a story that went viral.

You probably recall it – the woman shrieking, holding her dog, threatening to call the cops on an “African-American man” (her description) named Christian Cooper (who made the video), and the results: she was doxxed, threatened, and fired from her job. Since I read a lot of news, and because in particular I read news both in the MSM and outside of it, I already knew some of the things on this podcast that the MSM failed (I believe purposely) to report, things that would have changed the thrust and meaning of the story quite a bit. Therefore I would guess that, for the vast majority of people these details would probably all be new if they listened to this podcast (which they most likely won’t).

Bari Weiss is the interviewer and the man being interviewed is Kmele Foster, who did some in-depth research on the story and also interviewed Amy Cooper (the “Karen”of the tale). She is now in hiding and has been since a short while after the incident. Part of Foster’s interview with Amy Cooper appears on the podcast, as well. I salute Foster for his fairness, thoroughness, and even for his courage, because touching this story is something that took bravery. Kmele Foster is a black man, by the way.

Here is the link again.

One element of the story that didn’t surprise me and won’t surprise most readers here is the way in which the MSM shaped their coverage to sensationalize what happened and to make Amy Cooper the clear villain and Christian Cooper the innocent victim. Distortions by the MSM are old news, but it seems that Bari Weiss is still learning how duplicitous and misleading the paper for which she formerly worked, The New York Times, often is, and how destructive this can be.

My rather dry recitation doesn’t really convey the intensity of the podcast, in particular what Amy Cooper has to say.

Remember that Indian study about the viral loads of vaccinated people?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been revised:

Ravindra Gupta, the director of the team at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases that conducted the study, confirmed to The Fact Checker that the article had been initially rejected during peer review because a reviewer “was not happy with certain aspects.” The paper is now on its fourth revision — Research Square only shows the first version — and Gupta said that the “high viral loads” cited by the CDC essentially disappeared in the current version as more information was obtained from a third hospital. He said that revised paper is still under review for publication.

But hey, it served its purpose, right?

I criticized the study already here, although I didn’t yet know about this additional flaw. So much of what we read about COVID turns out to be untrue, and it’s hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Is it any wonder people have become distrustful as the MSM, many medical authorities such as the CDC, blue state officials, and the Biden administration try to whip up further fear?