Jack Cashill has a good word for the ever so widely despised-and-written-off ordinary non-elite white male.
For the last week or so, I have been living in the middle of a construction zone. In defiance of the climate scientists, Lake Erie and its fellow Great Lakes decided to grow instead of shrink.
While the scientists re-checked their data, the entrepreneurs got to work building sea walls. Through my lakefront windows, I have been watching one entrepreneur and his crew build me a wall. This is no small job. It’s a six-figure project that involves several major pieces of equipment. My favorite is the truck-mounted boom pump that receives the concrete from a mobile concrete mixer and distributes it through its mantis-like arms precisely to where it needs to go.
Running this operation are a half-dozen or so white guys. None of them were born with an ounce of conventional privilege. Some have not graduated from high school. All of them work ferociously as the situation demands. I get tired just watching them, but the elites do not seem to know they exist.
“Census data shows the number of White people in the U.S. fell for the first time since 1790,” shouts the much too happy headline in the Washington Post, but the Post gloats prematurely. No one wants to talk about this phenomenon, but working-class white men dominate just about every difficult and dangerous industry in America. …
It so happened that in the spring of 2020, just as the lockdowns were going into place, construction started on a 500-unit apartment complex across the street from my office. As the androgynous denizens of Westport skulked aimlessly along the street in their ubiquitous masks, a crew of youngish white men descended on the worksite.
From day one, these guys showed up unmasked. Some took smoke breaks. They joked, they laughed, they worked. They continued working even as the neighborhood lemmings marched through the streets, breaking windows, not quite sure what they were marching about. A year later, the lemmings could be seen lining up outside their favorite coffee shops, still masked, waiting for their next marching orders.
The guys across the street, meanwhile, had a building to show for their work. On Independence Day, while the soy boys sulked, the working guys celebrated as though they owned the country. They don’t own it, but they built it, pretty much damn near all of it. It is time we pay them their due.
For those that don’t realize how bad Taliban control is, this is the body of an afghan caught in a C-17 landing gear door that attempted to climb on to escape Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/4IoPIxcxR6
Lady Butler, Remnants of an Army, 1879, Tate Gallery. Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, the sole survivor of a British Army of 16,000 men, arrives at the gates of Jallabad in 1842.
Thomas Joscelyn sums up why we failed with dead on precision.
There is plenty of blame to go around.
Blame President Bill Clinton. His administration didn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. Clinton and his advisers passed up multiple opportunities to target Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda threat manifested on Clinton’s watch, leading to 9/11 and, ultimately, the war in Afghanistan.
Blame President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. In 2001, they had the opportunity to deliver a death blow to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But instead of committing the forces necessary to hunt down bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and others, they hesitated. The U.S. relied on local warlords and other actors, some of whom were duplicitous. Bin Laden and Zawahiri finagled their way out of the remote Tora Bora Mountains. Al Qaeda regrouped in the years that followed.
Blame Barack Obama. Obama decided it was in our “vital national interest” to help the Afghans build the “capacity” to defend their country on their own. In December 2009, he committed forces — at their peak, more than 100,000 of them — to accomplish the task. More Americans were killed in Afghanistan during Obama’s war than in any other period of this debacle. But Obama wasn’t fighting to win. His surge in forces came with an expiration date of just 18 months and then he chased a fanciful peace deal with the Taliban. To his credit, Obama ordered the raid that killed bin Laden. But Al Qaeda lived, despite Obama’s attempts to declare the group dead.
Blame Donald Trump. His instinct was to bring the soldiers home. Instead, he agreed to a small increase in America’s footprint, claiming that the U.S. was fighting for “victory.” He didn’t mean it.
Blame Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who portrayed the Taliban as America’s counterterrorism partner, saying the group had agreed to “work alongside of us to destroy” Al Qaeda. Trump repeated Pompeo’s claim, saying the Taliban “will be killing terrorists for us.” This is nonsense. The Taliban’s men are terrorists and there’s no evidence they’ve broken with Al Qaeda.
Blame the generals. It is true that they were asked to fight a war that was undermined by America’s erratic political leadership. But no general ever stood up to say: No. We cannot prosecute an unwinnable war.
Since 2018, the U.S. military has been invested in the State Department’s delusional peace process with the Taliban, repeatedly claiming that there was no “military solution” to the conflict. But this was always a lie.
As the Taliban takes control of Kabul, Americans can see for themselves that the jihadists had a “military solution” in mind all along. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were never ambivalent about their jihad. They were fighting to win.
AlJazeera has a video showing crowds of desperate Afghans filling runways at Kabul airport, desperately trying to get out of the country and escape death at the hands of the Taliban. Some panicking Afghans can be seen even attempting to cling to the outside of a US Air Force C17A transport jet.
Yaroslav Trofimov, in the Wall Street Journal, explains that Biden withdrew the air support too soon that is essential for the supply and defense of the US-style Afghan military we created and trained.
You can’t defeat superior numbers of less effectively armed troops unless you can keep the food, water, ammunition, and medical supplies coming in, and unless you can clobber human wave attack with air support. Take that support away and you lose.
This spectacular failure stemmed from built-in flaws of the Afghan military compounded by strategic blundering of the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. The Taliban, meanwhile, took advantage of the U.S.-sponsored peace talks to deceive Kabul about their intentions as they prepared and executed a lighting offensive.
The Afghan army fighting alongside American troops was molded to match the way the Americans operate. The U.S. military, the world’s most advanced, relies heavily on combining ground operations with air power, using aircraft to resupply outposts, strike targets, ferry the wounded, and collect reconnaissance and intelligence.
In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore. The same happened with another failed American effort, the South Vietnamese army in the 1970s, said retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, who commanded the U.S.-led coalition’s mission to train Afghan forces in 2011-2013.
“There is always a tendency to use the model you know, which is your own model,” said Gen. Bolger, who now teaches history at North Carolina State University. “When you build an army like that, and it’s meant to be a partner with a sophisticated force like the Americans, you can’t pull the Americans out all of a sudden, because then they lose the day-to-day assistance that they need,” he said.
The lure is a Whopper Plopper and the Creature From the Black Lagoon is a Wels Catfish (Siluris glanis). These things can grow up to 5 m. (16 ft) and a maximum weight of over 300 kg. (660 lb).
Unlike the Germans with their ponderous celebration of Goethe and Schiller, or the French with their adulation of Molière or Victor Hugo, the English celebrate their favourite authors with a lighter touch. Societies dedicated to the lovers of the works of a given author are common, but are generally private, amateur and low-key. Groups of amiable middle-aged to elderly bibliophiles with no particular academic pretension but a love for, and a generally encyclopaedic knowledge of, the writing of a particular person get together to enjoy convivial company and, as often as not, a posh dinner in London or Oxford once a year. Organisations such as the Sherlock Holmes Society or the Trollope Society publish slightly recherché background papers, such as Why Holmes Went German at St James’s Hall: The Reason Behind His Musical Taste, or From Winchester to Barsetshire: Anthony Trollope’s links with Hampshire. Addresses at formal events organised by these clubs are likely to be witty and reasonably erudite, but not over-intellectual or over-taxing on the audience.
What you won’t get from any of these amateur gatherings is anything like the high-pressure, jargon-ridden writing one sees in academic journals, or the deadly serious arguments, incomprehensible to non-initiates, that one increasingly hears in university lecture halls. They are emphatically societies, not research institutes.
Or at least most of them are. In the last year something very curious seems to have overtaken one of them, the Tolkien Society, founded in 1969 to celebrate the life and work of the author of the Lord of The Rings. Until 2020 the society was what you might expect: talks on music and Tolkien’s landscape, naming astronomical bodies after Tolkien place-names, the elvish language, and so on.
This year, by contrast, it has gone full-on woke, as witness the programme for its 2021 Annual Seminar, beginning on Saturday week. A straw in the wind came with the announcement of the theme, which read more than anything else like a formal call for papers from some new university anxious to make its mark on modernity with a trail-blazing conference. Contributions were demanded on Tolkien’s approach to colonialism and neo-colonialism, representation of race, gender, sexuality and the rest in Tolkien, and so on.
This call was answered with appropriate gusto. The programme for the event is too large to reproduce here: but we can give a flavour of it. It kicks off with Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings. We then have delights such as “The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire”: Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien’s Middle-earth; and The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism. The second day continues with more in the same vein: “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien; Questions of Caste in The Lord of the Rings and its Multiple Chinese Translations; and something which should puzzle anyone, Hidden Visions: Iconographies of Alterity in Soviet Bloc Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings.
This menu, more appropriate to a series of dreary staff seminars in a second-rate polytechnic than an event set up for a club of book-lovers, has already attracted deserved derision.
A 65-year-old drunk man chewed on a snake after it bit him in Bihar’s Nalanda district.
The man was identified as Rama Mahto, a resident of Madhodeh village under Chandi police station.
The incident took place on Sunday and he died on Monday morning.
The family of the deceased told police that Rama Mahto, who was under the influence of liquor, was sitting in front of his house when a baby snake (Karait) bit him on his leg.
Mahto managed to capture the snake and chewed it in a bid to to take revenge.
“While chewing the baby snake, Mahato was bitten more than 10 times on his face.
“After that he pulled out the snake and put it on a nearby tree. We asked him to go to the hospital for treatment but he refused and went to sleep.
“Mahto claimed that it was a baby and it would not be poisonous. He was found dead on Monday morning, ,” said Bhuson Prasad, president of Madhodeh Panchayat Samit.
