Ahhh, Afghanistan.

Yesterday, I listened to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a former Army Ranger with four tours of duty in Afghanistan, and current member of the House Armed Services Committee, say on CNN, “Nobody anticipated the speed of the collapse of the Afghan army and defense forces; I certainly didn’t. I knew that this would be a very difficult time as we ended our combat operations. I certainly didn’t anticipate the speed that we’re seeing right now. There’s going to be a lot of questions on a post-mortem that will have to be done to understand why that happened.”

Meanwhile, on the PBS NewsHour earlier the same day, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, NY Times correspondent in Kabul, said, “At its core, the Afghan military was built in the American military’s image, and that means complex logistics systems, different levels of integration, this expectation tha the Afghan military would kind of operate like the American military. But the American military has its own issues, and exporting that and expecting it to look the exact same without the litany of issues… it’s unrealistic. Not to mention, how long does it take for a military to become a military? Officers, generals, experienced non-commissioned officers, that’s not there. And then, couple that with poor leadership, widespread corruption, and other factors that have kind of led to this moment where soldiers and police on the front line have no faith in their government, they don’t trust their leaders, it’s just all dissolved as the Americans, who have provided air support for so long, and as soon as they kind of eased up on the gas, things started to come apart at the seams. And you know, that’s left the Afghan Air Force, which is a small but professional force, and capable, but not nearly big enough to cover the geographic spread of Afghanistan. And the commando units which have been well-trained, well-equipped, can fight moderately well, because they have core leadership that motivates other rank-and-file; again, it’s not big enough to handle what the Taliban have managed to throw at them.”

So… it seems to me that there are those who could have, and most likely did, anticipate the speed with which Afghanistan’s government would come tumbling down in the face of the relentless onslaught of the Taliban.

I wonder whether those who did piece two and two together were somehow excluded from the highest level discussions surrounding the US pullout from Afghanistan, or whether their concerns were given air, but nevertheless did not sway the argument against further endangering American lives in pursuit of an unattainable goal?

I wonder if we will ever quite understand the dynamics of these decisions.

Today’s tragedy – just one of those things…

It’s so exhausting, the news. I just don’t know where to go with it any more.

What is one to take away from these details?

“As wildfires have become hotter, more intense and more destructive in recent years liberals and conservatives have been locked in a debate over the reasons. During a visit to California in September, Mr. Trump said, ‘I don’t think science knows what is happening,’ when the state’s secretary for natural resources pressed him on the changing climate.”

“‘One camp is saying it’s all climate change driven, and the other is saying it’s all forest management,’ said Malcolm North, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Davis. ‘The reality is that it’s both. I get kind of frustrated at this all-or-nothing type of approach.’”

And:

“And wildfire experts say Mr. Trump’s analysis of the causes of the blazes [he’s in the ‘forest management’ camp] is problematic because most of California’s forests are on land owned by the federal government and their maintenance largely falls under the responsibility of his administration.”

Reminder: this is the 21st century. We were supposed to have flying cars that fold up into a suitcase. And robotic maids to clean up after us. (Ok, that’s from The Jetsons, but still, it’s the image of the future that I grew up with.)

Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires burn in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

We can’t even put our finger on how to measure the size of the problem. Acres? Dollars? Lives? If lives, are we talking about only human lives, or animals too? Remember in Australia, millions of animals were killed, some losing their entire habitats. And among the human lives, do we differentiate between firefighters and civilians? Between Democrats and Republicans? Is one kind of loss worse than another?

If we’re talking about acres, are they federal, state, or private acres? Same question with dollars. In statements like “Infrastructure damage estimates from the fires had exceeded $229 million, Mr. Newsom said,” what is being included here? This figure seems equivalent to the value of, what, maybe 100 homes. 200? Or is it one bridge and seven utility towers?

Whatever it is, it’s terrible. But is that a national emergency? A federal disaster? Why was this single, solitary, cost figure placed in the article, when it confuses more than it explains?

Between the actual things that are happening in the world, and the sometimes amazing responses to them (I don’t mean that in a good way), from the people who are supposed to respond to them, it’s easy to come away from it all with a feeling of doom. Not impending doom, like something is about to happen. But immediate doom, watching it happen, right now, and we’re in it, in front of it, under it.

And the California fires represent just one of those things. What about the teacher in the Parisian suburbs who was beheaded – beheaded! – in the street – in the street! – for having shown the recently republished cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his students? What about the coronavirus? Or the election meddling?

I’m having difficulty wrapping up this article. Tying it all together; drawing some kind of pithy conclusion. Except to share these words from my mother (and yours, I hope): “Tomorrow is another day.” As bad as the American Civil War was, there was a day after. A week, a year, a decade after. As bad as WWII was, there was a time after. As bad as Covid-19 is (and the loss of American lives to this virus are well into the range of deaths from those other two events), there will be a time after. A post-Covid era. A post-Trump era.

A post-climate-disaster era? Maybe not. But an era in which we at least look at it together, and take steps together, each giving a little, and demanding a little too, but none so much that there are winners and losers, as it feels today… This, I think, is an outcome that we can legitimately hope for. And that hope may be just enough to get us through this day, ready to face another.

The Republican Party Now Must be Banned

I’ve always felt that we need to have at least two strong and healthy political parties to make our system “work.” But based on this week’s events alone – Trump’s statements regarding his “trust” in Kim Jong-Un, the Michael Cohen testimony, and the Republicans’ lack of preparedness for same and refusal to ask meaningful questions – not to mention the tragic and despicable events of the other hundred-some weeks we’ve suffered through under this regime – I am starting to be of the mind that one of them should not be the Republican Party.

When the Democrats take control of the Senate in 2020, I would like to see the Republican Party, as it exists today, banned. Made illegal. A hate group. A terrorist organization.

There are various international standards for political parties to be banned. “The standard of proof for banning political parties, mandated by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg [for example], is high. In societies that value free speech and association, it is not enough to prove even the worst motivation; a party must also have a ‘real potential’ to make good on evil designs.”

[Germany’s supreme court decides not to ban the neo-Nazi party]

While Germany’s NDP party was not banned, even though it bears in principle a startling resemblance to the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, the reason it was not banned was that it failed this critical test. Its numbers had shrunk to a level that could not deliver on its promise.

The US Republican Party is fundamentally different, however. It can deliver on its promise, and is in the process of doing so, to the nation’s deep and possibly irrecoverable detriment. The Republican Party, it seems, does pass this test, and so must be banned.

This will not be easy. It will be a wrenching process. But it is a process we must be willing to go through if, in the words of Elijah Cummings, we feel any obligation to “keep our democracy intact.” If we don’t care about that, then forgive this intrusion. If however we do feel this obligation, to ourselves, to our peers, to our children, then our path is laid before us. It is only for us to walk it, and not to simply cease our journey over its arduousness or inconvenience.

The purpose of this article – more of a note, really; a marker – is not to demonstrate my case. Clearly I have not done so. The purpose is to draw that line in the sand. A spade has been called a spade. Add your own examples. The point is, either we look at where we are, or we don’t. If we do, it’s hard to miss the precipice ahead. We can either turn aside now, while enough of us still have our wits about us, and some level of influence over outcomes, or we can join the mass of those crying out as we go over the cliff.

If you think it’s beyond us to resolve, and instead are looking to God, hoping or praying that He will protect us and fix all of this, or wondering instead why He doesn’t send help, someone to take care of this situation, consider this:

He did send help. He sent you.

The 3D printed plastic gun issue

Such hostile invective being thrown around with regard to the 3-D printed plastic gun issue.

The folks who can’t understand why the government would take action now, that they’re stupid for pulling the plug after the plans have already been released, and that they shouldn’t even be getting all up about it, since it only fires a single round at a time… these folks really need to look up Moore’s Law. While this is not technically a mere technology evolution issue, it involves materials sciences and technology and chemistry, and all of these areas have seen phenomenal growth over the last several decades. Look at some of the phenomenal polymers of today like Kevlar and Nomex. These things didn’t exist before the 60’s. Put together with Moore’s, the rate of change is itself increasing, and so it is not unreasonable to expect that in another decade or so there will be “plastics” that will be as strong and heat-resistant as metals are today. There will be plastic guns capable of firing multiple shots, with reasonable accuracy, perhaps with now conceivably lethal plastic bullets as well.

Hanging Out in the Neighborhood vs Protecting the Wiretappers

Within the course of a single week, the American press brought us to two extremes of what life is, was, can be, ought to be. Maybe this happens a lot and we don’t always see the connections. Or at least I don’t!

The first article was actually a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal of Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2007. I don’t know how long the letter will remain available in its original source, and so I quote it here:

If you are of a certain generation, you remember standing next to your mother, her skirt billowing about her legs, while she hung out the wash. And if you were a girl, you thought that when you grew up, there you would be, pegging up your own sheets to snap in the breeze, your husband’s trousers to dance, his shirts to twirl and dry, all the while your own children carefully handing up to you the clothespins as the bright sun shone in benevolent good will. And then, later, down it would all come so sweet and fresh you just had to push your nose into it. OK, agreed, that’s an aesthetic profoundly in the past tense.

But now we find that the clothesline, that clean-clothes institution of absolute industry and perfect common sense, is considered such a horror that its presence, looming out there in the backyard like some porn shop across the street from the elementary school, means that you no longer have a “nice neighborhood” (“The Right to Dry: A Green Movement Is Roiling America,” page one, Sept. 18). We can only imagine what malevolent force, what vacancy of mind, has decided that the very presence of a clothesline and dangling clothes damp from a good scrub and spin, signal poverty, ignorance, bad people among us, people who cannot afford a clothes dryer? Is this how we now judge each other? Are these really the neighborhoods where we seek a home, the conditions under which we agree to live? If so, then we deserve clothes that smell like dryer sheets and sheets that smell like a long day at a boring job.

Julie Lange
Sequim, Wash.