War, What it is good for? Elain Benes from Seinfeld.
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Blame...
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the Biden administration has "failed" in its withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban is poised to retake control of the country as the U.S. is ending its nearly 20-year military presence there.
Pompeo also pushed back against President Biden's claim that he inherited a bad situation from his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Biden has blamed the Trump administration for making a deal with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal. In 2019, Trump criticized the ongoing U.S. presence in Afghanistan, claiming that American forces had been serving as "policemen" for 19 years and should not be doing so anymore.
Twenty years or 50 Years are down the Darin. We don't know the culture, we don't know the people in Afghanistan.
Now we know the people, and now we know the culture.
Just a thought
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Hisitancy...
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was grilled on whether or not President Biden encouraged vaccine hesitancy with comments he made last year cautioning he did not "trust" former President Donald Trump as his administration worked to roll out vaccines.
"Has there been any thought given, looking back, to the possibility that [Biden] may have created some vaccine hesitancy? When last year, around this time, the previous administration was rushing to get a vaccine authorized, and how the president said, ‘I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don't trust Donald Trump,’" Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Psaki during the press briefing Wednesday.
"Well, I think it's safe to say he still doesn't trust Donald Trump so that hasn't changed. But he does trust scientists, he does trust data experts, And he does trust the people leading the CDC, the FDA, which is the gold standard of approval for vaccines," Psaki responded.
Rezone...
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has voted against the controversial project at 960 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights: two 34-story towers that would offer 50 percent affordable housing but also throw the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s greenhouses into shadow.
The vote, while purely advisory and not unexpected, is another ominous sign for the proposed development and came a little over a month after Adams’s office held a remote public hearing in which only two out of 105 people spoke in support of the project. (Both were union representatives; the project would be union-built and -staffed, which is unusual for a project with such a high percentage of affordability.)
Adams offered his disapproval of the project without conditions or modifications, writing that while he supported “the development of underutilized land for productive uses that address the city’s need for additional affordable housing,” the zoning requested by the developer would have “no precedent in Brooklyn.” He suggested, in so many words.
Rezoning NYC becomes a major problem in the city. The City that buckled down the minute Covid-19 appears with 60,000 Death and a Governor's career down the tube.
Quality of life is more important today with Climate change issues and viruses that can spread and kill thousand in no time through mass transport systems and condensed offices .
Just a thought..
Eviction...
The high court’s order on Thursday blocks part of New York’s COVID Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act, passed last year, that allows tenants to self-certify that they’re experiencing economic hardship because of the pandemic. If they do so, eviction proceedings are effectively shut down till the end of this month.
The court’s majority signaled that the New York law was likely unconstitutional because landlords had no way to challenge a tenant’s claim to have been hard hit by the pandemic.
“If a tenant self-certifies financial hardship, [the law] generally precludes a landlord from contesting that certification and denies the landlord a hearing,” the high court’s order said. “This scheme violates the Court’s longstanding teaching that ordinarily ‘no man can be a judge in his own case’ consistent with the Due Process Clause.”
It is a complex issue, to cancel eviction, with it to cancel mortgage, cancel heat cost, and cancel bank loans, which is destruction of everything. Just a thought.
Surprise...!!!
The surrenders seem to be happening as fast as the Taliban can travel.
In the past several days, the Afghan security forces have collapsed in more than 15 cities under the pressure of a Taliban advance that began in May.
The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters and millions of dollars of American-supplied equipment paraded by the Taliban on grainy cellphone videos.
This implosion comes despite the United States having poured more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment and training into the country’s security forces over two decades.
Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key parts of the Obama administration’s strategy. These efforts produced an army modeled in the image of the United States’ military, an Afghan institution that was supposed to outlast the American war.
The United States’ 20-year endeavor to rebuild Afghanistan’s military into a robust and independent fighting force has failed, and that failure is now playing out in real time as the country slips into Taliban control.
Did anyone expected this to happen? I'll bet they all did in the State Department, Military officials and journalist who looked at the near history. Just a thought.
Friday, August 13, 2021
Mercy...
The Taliban captured a provincial capital near Kabul on Thursday, the 10th the insurgents have taken over a weeklong blitz across Afghanistan as the U.S. and NATO prepare to withdraw entirely from the country after decades of war.
The militants raised their white flags imprinted with an Islamic proclamation of faith over the city of Ghazni, just 130 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of Kabul. Sporadic fighting continued at an intelligence base and an army installation outside the city, two local officials told The Associated Press.
The Taliban published videos and images online showing them in Ghazni, the capital of a province with the same name.
The stunning speed of the offensive raises questions of how long the Afghan government can maintain control of the slivers of the country it has left. The government may eventually be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities, as the fighting displaces thousands of people.
We are obsessed with changing the way people think and behave in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan Syria... and we paid a heavy price in each.
We spent trillions of Dollars, loose young people, thousands of our soldiers, kill scores of natives to the benefit of a few.
God have Mercy.
Workplace....
With all this talk about Covid-19..... Use the mask, will save your life. Take the vaccine, will save your life. Herd Immunity, will save our lives. Now we turn a corner, multiple corners, and we are back to the starting point.
No body is talking about Quality of Life in New York City. Buildings, overbuilding, rezoning, more businesses in a small confide area and the virous is still around. Even if we overcome this virus, there are more to come.
Astra Zinecca vaccine is out. Johnson and Johnson is taking a back seat to others due to its problems. Now what is next?
Targeting the employees who are not vaccinated for a reason is as terrible as one can imagine.
Just a thought.
Thursday, August 12, 2021
Fear...
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
Border...
Officials are still trying to contact the parents of 337 children who were separated at the border during the Trump administration, according to a new court filing.
The parents of 31 children were discovered over the past month, according to the new documents. In June, the groups disclosed that officials were still trying to contact the parents of 368 migrant children.
The court filings are part of a continuous effort by the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union to connect children with their parents.
Roughly 250 children of the remaining 337 are believed to have parents who were removed from the U.S. according to the court filing.
About 75 of the remaining children's parents are believed to be in the U.S. Twelve children do not have a phone number listed that is associated with the parent, child, sponsor or attorney.
A sad story top to bottom. Just a thought.