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Best of the Web: After 20 years and billions of dollars, American defeat in Afghanistan worse than the Soviet failure - how has this happened?

Taliban in truck
© AFPTaliban fighters drive an Afghan National Army vehicle in Kandahar
As the last men of the dwindling American garrison in Afghanistan pack their bags, there is an echo of the Soviet Union's own withdrawal from the country, more than 30 years ago. But, in truth, Washington's defeat is far greater.

In December 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to support the unpopular government of the ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). They soon found themselves bogged down in a bloody war against the mujahideen guerillas. Nine years later, the Soviets decided that there had been enough bloodshed and, in May 1988, they began their exit. The final contingent of Soviet troops drove back across the bridge to the USSR in February the following year.

Twelve years later, US troops arrived to fight the Taliban. Soldiers of other NATO states then followed. Together, they stayed even longer than the Soviets, but are now on the way out. US President Joe Biden has promised that American soldiers will leave Afghanistan by the end of August.

As the US completes its retreat from its longest war, its enemy is on the march. In the past week, the Taliban have captured 12 of Afghanistan's 34 provincial capitals, including the second and third largest cities in the country, Kandahar and Herat, both of which fell on Thursday.

Comment: Grooves: Even if the lessons of Afghanistan manage to hit home in America, they will not likely carry over into future conflicts, power grabs, resource rapes, population decimation nor governance upgrades. The US is too big, too complex and too compromised to change.


NPC

Best of the Web: Why Do Some People Support Tyranny While Others Defy It?

psychopath
There is a fundamental question that haunts the pages of history and it is one that has never been addressed in a satisfactory manner. There are many schools of thought on why and how tyranny rises in any given society and all of them miss the mark in terms of explanations, primarily because they all allow their biases to rule their conclusions and blind them to the deeper aspects of power and conspiracy. In other words, they are willing to go down the rabbit hole only so far, and then they deny that the rabbit hole even exists.

The common assumption when it comes to autocracy or oligarchy is that people are "stupid" and easily manipulated into following compelling personalities that make promises they never intend to keep. This is a foolish oversimplification. In truth, the level of manipulation needed to lure a majority of people into dictatorship is so complex that it requires an advanced understanding of human psychology.

In our modern era, people cannot merely be ordered to submit at gunpoint, at least not right away. They must be tricked into conforming, and not only that, but they must be made to think that it was THEIR IDEA all along. Without this dynamic of self censorship and self enslavement, the population will eventually rebel no matter how oppressive the regime. A thousand year tyranny cannot exist unless a number of people are conned into applauding it, or, they directly benefit from it.

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Best of the Web: Taliban's 'master plan' in Afghanistan: All roads lead to the battle for Kabul

Afghan militia fighters
© AFP / Farshad UsyanAfghan militia fighters keep watch at an outpost against Taliban insurgents at Charkint district in Balkh Province in June.
City after city has fallen from government to Taliban control but Afghanistan's end-game is still unclear

The ever-elusive Afghan "peace" process negotiations re-start this Wednesday in Doha via the extended troika - the US, Russia, China and Pakistan. The contrast with the accumulated facts on the ground could not be starker.

In a coordinated blitzkrieg, the Taliban have subdued no less than six Afghan provincial capitals in only four days. The central administration in Kabul will have a hard time defending its stability in Doha.

It gets worse. Ominously, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has all but buried the Doha process. He's already betting on civil war - from the weaponization of civilians in the main cities to widespread bribing of regional warlords, with the intent of building a "coalition of the willing" to fight the Taliban.

The capture of Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz province, was a major Taliban coup. Zaranj is the gateway for India's access to Afghanistan and further on to Central Asia via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

India paid for the construction of the highway linking the port of Chabahar in Iran - the key hub of India's faltering version of the New Silk Roads - to Zaranj.

At stake here is a vital Iran-Afghanistan border crossing cum Southwest/Central Asia transportation corridor. Yet now the Taliban control trade on the Afghan side. And Tehran has just closed the Iranian side. No one knows what happens next.

Clipboard

Best of the Web: Who fact checks the fact checkers? A report on media censorship

censorship
The advent of fact-checker journalism may be wearing out its welcome. Perhaps the increasing politicization of American life is a contributor to the downward spiral of the fact-checking profession that is primarily run by politically engaged reporters, not expert specialists in the subjects they assess by any sense of the imagination. Not that any one group of experts should have the authority over the truth either. Self-appointed media gatekeepers are a ticking time bomb of political censorship, waiting to be unleashed when the temptations are too great and the necessity for impartiality is even greater. With White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling for collusion between social media companies and the government to censor "misinformation", this threat seems to be as close as ever.

Although fact checkers purport to be independent guardians of accountability, recent events have exposed them as mere enforcers of fashionable political positions. This brings us to a relatively new, but powerful company known as NewsGuard, which claims a partnership with Microsoft and gleaming spotlights in major outlets. Its staff and board boast powerful connections to the government, finance, and the media. According to an Op-ed in Politico written by NewsGuards' CEO, rather than simply being a fact-checking company that can only debunk stories after they go viral, NewsGuard rates entire websites' trustworthiness. This new strategy is aimed at discrediting the very source that alleged misinformation or disinformation may come from. NewsGuard publishes lengthy "nutritional labels," rating websites on various criteria of journalistic importance and outlining its reasons for giving certain ratings. Perhaps one day, these ratings may be used to filter out certain websites, which is what NewsGuard's CEO alludes to by citing the great political scientist Francis Fukuyama's article in Foreign Affairs.

In fact, the company made the following tweet on July 17, 2021, essentially siding with Psaki's call for a government-media partnership to censor internet content.

Comment: See also:


Megaphone

Best of the Web: 'Delta variant can infect vaccinated, mass testing pointless, need to live with the virus', AstraZeneca lead scientist tells Britain's parliamentary group

Pollard
Sir Andrew Pollard thinks testing may soon only be used to diagnose COVID in someone with symptoms.
The Delta variant of COVID-19 has wrecked any chance of herd immunity, according to the Oxford scientist who led the AstraZeneca vaccine team, as he called for an end to mass testing so Britain could start to live with the virus.

Scientists who addressed Britain's all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus said it was time to accept that there is no way of stopping the virus spreading through the entire population, and monitoring people with mild symptoms was no longer helpful.

Professor Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine team, said it was clear that the Delta variant can still infect people who have been vaccinated, which made herd immunity impossible to reach, even with Britain's high uptake.


Comment: Throughout history herd immunity has been achieved through mass infection, not through mass injections; moreover, it's likely that the experimental injections are in large part to blame for the rise in virulent variants.


Comment: That's an alarmingly wrong, and potentially deadly, comment from the paediatrician, because the data already shows that children, even those with multiple comorbidities, are at no risk from the coronavirus and its current variants, and there's increasing evidence showing that young people are more at risk of severe side effects from the experimental injections: See also: Police response times "under strain" because of staff shortages caused by "pingdemic," as NHS app calls for self-isolation


Black Magic

Best of the Web: 'Alex Jones was right'? US govt-funded project 'harvests' ORGANS from aborted babies for medical research, documents show

baby hand parent child
© AFP / JOEL SAGET
The US funded a project that collects body parts from aborted babies - some of them apparently alive moments before their organs are harvested - new documents show, prompting claims that conspiracy theorists have been vindicated.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded at least $2.7 million to a University of Pittsburgh program that sought to create a "tissue hub" sourced from aborted fetuses ranging from six to 42 weeks' gestation. Forty-two weeks equates to more than 10 months of pregnancy.

Details about the program emerged after conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress obtained 252 pages of documents as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against the HHS.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: Objective: Health - Law or Flaw? Let's Talk About Abortion


Syringe

Best of the Web: Media blackout: Renowned German pathologist's vaccine autopsy data is shocking... and being censored

prof peter schirmacher
Dr. Peter Schirmacher is not just an average pathologist. The German doctor is world-renowned in his field, honored by The Pathologist as one of the 100 most influential in the world. He is the acting chairman of the German Society of Pathology, director of the Institute of Pathology at Heidelberg University Hospital, and president of the German Association for the Study of the Liver. Bottom line, this professor and doctor understands pathology like very few on the planet.

This is why it's so perplexing that a bombshell report he released this week has been absolutely censored. Mainstream media won't report on it and Big Tech has eliminated accounts who attempt to share it. Considering the incessant push towards universal vaccinations by government, academia, media, and Big Tech, it really shouldn't be perplexing at all that his work is being quashed because it details mind-blowing data about the dangers of the so-called Covid "vaccines."

In short, Dr. Schirmacher performed autopsies on 40 people who had died within two weeks of receiving a Covid jab. Of those, 30%-40% could be directly attributed to the "vaccines." He is calling for more autopsies of those who die shortly after getting injected to see if his numbers pan out. But Germany has thus far been reluctant to act. Meanwhile, the report of this highly respected pathologist and pro-vaccine doctor is being suppressed.

Comment: The original quoted article in German can be found here.

Seeing how the powers that be respond to this information will be very telling. If they really were concerned about the health and wellness of the population at large, they would accept Schirmacher's warning and increase the number of autopsies performed on individuals who died after getting the jab. After all, what harm could there be in uncovering the truth? Either the doctor is right, and the vaccination campaign would need to be suspended due to safety concerns, or he is wrong and the campaign can continue unimpeded (and likely vaccine uptake would increase, as some vaccination hold-outs would have at least some of their fears alleviated). It is highly unlikely that the elites will respond in this manner, however; the good doctor will probably be ignored or smeared.

See also:


Red Pill

Flashback Best of the Web: Dead scientists, genetically engineered viruses and government pandemics: Conspiracy theorists were so right


Comment: This is an old one from our archives, an anonymous blogpost from 2009. While it remains to be seen whether 'culling the population' is an intended outcome of Covid-1984, 'conspiracy theorists' like this were remarkably accurate in most of their predictions...


puppet masters economist
© The Economist'Conspiracy theory' in 2009, acknowledged mainstream fact in 2020
If you sell crack, join a gang, or rob the mob you can expect to die a violent death, but if you listen to your mother, eat all the right foods, and study hard in college to become a microbiologist, you should expect to live to a ripe old age and die peacefully.

That being the case, a few eyebrows were raised when five microbiologists either disappeared or died mysteriously violent deaths in 2001. A short time later the number rose to 19, and then 29.

They were found stabbed to death in the trunks of cars, thrown off bridges, or they wrapped their cars around trees after their brake fluid disappeared. Once again, this is the stuff of Hollywood spy stories, and not the way you would expect a microbiologist to give up the ghost.

Magnify

Flashback Best of the Web: Scientists' suspicious deaths are under the microscope

don wiley
'Superstar scientist' Don Wiley
It's a tale only the best conspiracy theorist could dream up.

Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism.

Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage, a big whack of imagination, and the plot is complete, if a bit reminiscent of James Bond.


Comment: Notice how the authors are trivializing the murders with multiple allusions to fictional and stereotypical notions in an attempt to preemptively allay readers' suspicions. In all likelihood, these scientists' deaths - and the dark underbelly of Western military intelligence networks that connect them - could not be matched by anything in Hollywood fiction.


The first three died in the space of just over a week in November. Benito Que, 52, was an expert in infectious diseases and cellular biology at the Miami Medical School. Police originally suspected that he had been beaten on Nov. 12 in a carjacking in the medical school's parking lot. Strangely enough, though, his body showed no signs of a beating. Doctors then began to suspect a stroke.

Just four days after Dr. Que fell unconscious came the mysterious disappearance of Don Wiley, 57, one of the foremost microbiologists in the United States. Dr. Wiley, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University, was an expert on how the immune system responds to viral attacks such as the classic doomsday plagues of HIV, ebola and influenza.

Cult

Best of the Web: Why Are Globalists And Governments So Desperate For 100% Vaccination Rates?

human project
I don't think I am the only person that has noticed it - There has been a sudden deluge of covid vaccination propaganda and vaccine passport propaganda in the past month, more so than I think we have seen since the beginning of this year. I am speaking of the US in particular, but it is important to point out that in the US the establishment is still desperately clamoring for a much higher vaccination rate. In places like Europe, the UK and Australia vaccinations rates are higher and governments have moved on to the vaccine passport phase of their agenda.

Some people may be confused by the obvious lockstep that most nations are moving in as far as covid mandates and restrictions are concerned. How is it possible that almost all the governments on the planet are in agreement on medical totalitarianism? Well, it's rather easy to understand when you realize the majority of them are linked together through globalist institutions like the World Economic Forum, which has repeatedly called the pandemic a "perfect opportunity" to push through their plans for a "Great Reset".

The "Great Reset" is a long term ideological usurpation of what's left of individual freedom and free market economies, and it's goal is the imposition of a global socialist/communist dictatorship. Globalists wrap these objectives in pretty sounding words and humanitarian sounding aspirations, but at bottom the "Reset" is about an end to liberty as we know it. This is not an exaggeration, this is reality; this is what these people desire above all else. But how to achieve such a goal?