Malcolm 0-6-0

One of things which is often raised by critics of China is this bogus claim of their dominance of lithium deposits. Well just a heads up - Australia has a lot of the stuff as well. It's just that it has taken second place to our iron ore deposits. As for the manner of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was something that everyone wanted. It's a done deal. I am reminded of the British withdrawal from India - in the end it was exactly the same in what happened, however the human casualties were higher, much higher. The accounts of that period are harrowing. The end of military campaigns and colonial occupations are always such - I suggest people read up on the the number of casualties incurred as Europe sorted itself out after May 8, 1945. There wasn't a sudden outbreak of peace and magical days with no violence - it was the opposite, the killing and dying went on for several years, the difference was that there was no declared war. So to moralise is easy, but we must recognise the brutal truth that moralising like thoughts and prayers offer no solutions - they just relief our personal feelings.

I read an item in the latest Washington Post which reports that the new Afghan gov't has formally asked the US to retain it's diplomatic presence in Kabul. I also note that the US has announced that they took out a IS-K commander with a drone strike. That seems to back up President Biden's remarks at the press conference.

Instead of the past in Afghanistan sometimes we need to look to the future. The interesting thing from both the Taliban's and our point of view is that the airport bombing revealed that the group that carried it out IS-K IIRC is by all accounts opposed both to the Taliban and to westerners. That does not bode well for the Taliban Government. We tend to ignore that the vast majority of terror attacks launched by terrorists in the Islamic world are by extremists against moderates, and also by Sunnis against Shiites. Pakistan has incurred an enormous death toll amongst its citizens because of this, as did Iraq, during the rise of ISIS. Al Qaeda was a Sunni fundamentalist groups with roots in Egyptian Sunni extremism (IM) and also Saudi Sunni extremism (Wahhabists). Al Qaeda is by no means extinct and they will cleave to IS-K given their similar ideological basis. Whatever our feelings about the Kabul airport bombing we have had no choice but to leave - no one wants this idiotic war to continue any longer than it has. However, if the bombing is an indicator the Taliban are going to be facing an increasing internal insurgency from both the IS-K on the one hand and also some remnant non-Taliban forces in the northern provincial areas. It may well be that the Taliban will be forced to reach out diplomatically for western aid, so I'd suggest that despite the ease by which they walked into Kabul and the other provincial cities their current future does not look optimistic.

The strange thing, or not so strange, is that every social indicator from poverty to lack of education puts Alabama at the top of the list in the US as a leader in everything that is considered detrimental to civilized society. Or to put it another way - if it isn't in the Book of Genesis then Alabamans don't believe it's true. You can't beat endemic stupidity of that kind.

The problem with it is that you have to take so much that it would probably kill you, and if by chance you survive you have an irresistible urge to eat only hay and oats for the rest of your life .....

Charlie's death keeps reminding me of how old I'm getting. Sad to see him gone.

I don't know if I've told this story before. A little background first. Melbourne is situated on the far south eastern corner of Australia. As a result while it doesn't snow we get really penetrating cold winds coming up from the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in winter. These are accompanied by very cold rain. Anyway this would have been back in the early 90s IIRC. One of the English soccer teams came to Melbourne to play an exhibition game and they brought a lot of their mad supporters with them. It was late July which is a really cold part of the winter and it was blowing a freezing gale, it was raining and the wind chill couldn't have been much over 2 degrees C. These supporters who had clearly had confused Melbourne with our warmer north like Cairns in tropical Queensland were all over the city dressed for warm tropical weather - T shirts, shorts, sandals etc. while we native Melbournians had heavy winter gear on. If these mad soccer supporters hadn't looked so silly I think we would have felt sympathy. They were clustered together in groups - the reason I guessed was the same reason that penguins cluster together on the ice trying to keep warm.

Well down here in overcast Melbourne it's bloody cold and trying to rain and we're still locked down. And the daily COVID press conference from the State Government just had to relocate from the Parliamentary gardens inside to a dry spot. There that's your daily dose of misery -

As Kabul is generally recognised by the Afghans of whatever tribal affiliation as the capitol then establish an embassy and just deal with whoever is in charge. That's the general way most things in the diplomatic arena work. The Mujahedeen regime that the Taliban defeated was quite corrupt at all levels, but in most parts of the world corruption is just part of the game. The secret is to allow just enough to dribble down to the people so they don't get too jealous. Overall though we tend to forget that the Taliban were welcomed by many Afghans when they took power back in the 1990s. Islamic values are very strong in these tribal societies and I think that we in the West tend to model our perceptions on the behaviour of governments in Turkey, Indonesia or Egypt for instance which are very secular and ignore the fact that many Islamic countries are far less secular. We have managed to deal without recourse to invasion with Saudi Arabia which makes the Taliban look almost dissolute by comparison. The difference being the Saudis have oil so we're happy to forgive their little judicial quirks and treatment of women. The Afghans however, as we are becoming increasingly aware, are sitting on a lot of very valuable minerals, which is why China is interested, apart from deterring the Afghans from stirring up their Uighur problem. Only the monumental disarray of Afghan governments for the last 60 odd years has prevented the western mining companies trying to work there. So instead of behaving like headless chooks over this less than unexpected turn of events I'd suggest, if I had the say so, that we forget our wounded pride and think like the avaricious western capitalists we are - that's what we have always done. Re-establish diplomatic relations and do a bit of diplomatic grovelling - after all we all know that it's just for show and we might start making a return on the effort.

I anticipate what will happen is the same as happened before. For the moment the Taliban will be in charge, but as time passes the non-Pashtun tribal areas will begin to assert themselves and we will see a fall back to the old tribalism that existed during the Mujahedeen period and continued into the previous Taliban period. Then we'll be back to square one as usual in Afghanistan. Next time we might like to try simple diplomacy and not an invasion.

Something really funny happened on Twitter tonight. Some American anti-mask anti-vax employee of a American Republican congressman created the hash tag #AustraliaHasFallen to use the current lockdowns here to show what happens when people surrender their freedoms in the name of staying healthy. There's some planned demos apparently tomorrow in Sydney and Melbourne by the anti-mask dimwits. However, instead of stirring up the crazies, what happened was there was massive response from people posting the hashtag followed by a pic of their cat, dog or whatever animal looking cute. The end result derailed the attempt because there's now dozens of tweets along the line of #AustraliaHasFallen for my cat fluffy etc. etc. This has made whoever the stirrer was very upset and I think they've taken their nasty little plot to cause trouble and gone away.

We had 3 months last year. You get used to it, and the next suburb up the line seems to acquire a sense of being an exotic far away place

Well MAGA seems to be fragmenting, there are a remaining lot of conventional MAGA Trump adherents, and now a number of looney Congress men and women, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene plus a few others, who have formed the America First Movement. Taylor Greene was kicked off committee work because she's a QAnon follower, Gaetz is being investigated for underage sex charges while the few others are just dumb. These claim to be the true Trumpites - so there is a schism in the GOP Conservative right. This has caused the Republicans a lot of damage. Jenna Ellis who was the blonde second chair in Rudy Giuliani's fake hearing circus held after November 3 which sought to overturn the election by claiming voter fraud has publicly ditched the GOP because Ronna McDaniel the Chair of the GNC was discovered to have withheld funds from the Giuliani/Ellis hearing circus. Ellis is a real ultra Evangelical fundamentalist who now does commentary work on far right cable news. I earned some plaudits on Twitter when I suggested that Ellis might rename her breakaway GOP faction the Donner Party after a certain cannibalistic group who got stuck in the Rockies in the late 1840s in winter and were forced to dine off each other. Ironically MAGA grew out of the old TEA Party group led by another certifiable nut job, Michelle Bachmann who was in Congress for a couple of terms. Now MAGA is morphing into America First which besides the aforesaid Taylor Greene and Gaetz is composed of a small Congressional group of what were termed the "Dead-Enders" - these were the remnants of the TEA Party left when the TEA Party self-destructed after Bachmann became even too looney for them. America First was the name of the political movement formed in the 1920s by the KKK, the irony of this appears lost on the current America First movement. Whatever they call themselves America First are just populists playing of white fear and the usual Evangelical fundamentalism. The problem is that they attract a hell of a lot of people which probably tells us more than we ever wanted to know about the average education of the American public. Another irony is despite their claim to be the one true Trumpite faction, Trump has publicly supported Ronna McDaniel who, as I noted, held back funding to the Giuliani/Ellis hearing circus and also refuse to stump up money to fund Giuliani's current court woes of which being sued for $1.3Billion by Dominion is the least of them. So the cracks widen - American politics is fun to observe from the outside.

The inherent problem is that they gave everyone freedom of speech and opinion, before they checked if the people has sufficient education to exercise that intelligently.

Perfectly put - perhaps if they'd just agreed to pay the tea tax they wouldn't be in the mess they are now .....

Yes the big problem in American internal politics at the moment is the ascendancy of the White Evangelicals and their fake "pastors" in the Bible Belt. They have not even the slightest grasp of sanity or real politik. Utterly inward looking and the 21st century's equivalent of the Know Nothings of the 19th century. They thrived under Trump because they saw him as some surrogate saviour - which shows how crackers they really are. A small cluster of extremist Congress members on this far right are actively pushing to impeach Biden. It won't come to anything but they do have a following. They and MAGA formed the backbone of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Americans are discovering that freedom of religion has its downsides. In most Western countries religion is tolerated but generally not encouraged to assert itself. Sort of like the C of E, provide annual fetes, scones and something for the Archbishop of Canterbury to manage and leave it at that. In America it seems that they think these loonies actually do have democratic rights. Personally I'm of the opinion that if in the assertion of your democratic rights you demonstrate that you're a sandwich short of a picnic then all bets are off - but's just me. The denizens of the American Bible Belt really are certifiably barking mad. So against that quite large bloc I can't see Americans actually rejigging their approach to foreign relations.

I'm of the rather radical opinion that if the US was to actually, now that the Taliban have asserted control, make a serious effort to establish a diplomatic mission and provide some no frills humanitarian aid it would be a game changer. They would re-establish a presence and thus snooker the stated aims of the Chinese. It would be a complete turn about for them but I suspect it would pay dividends in future. I've always said that after Cuba fell to Castro's revolution the Yanks should have just accepted it and beaten the Russians to the punch by providing aid. It would have saved over 60 years of tension for no purpose that I can see. However that would take a massive shift of American public opinion in the way they conduct their international relations. I am reminded of how when the British Empire finally crashed and burned in the 1950s the British government accepted the fact and went into trading mode. They were able to establish reasonable relations with formerly rebellious subjects fairly quickly. Unfortunately the Americans are not pragmatic in their relations - which is a pity. Too many fundamentalist religious groups who have a somewhat medieval view of the world.

Having spent time working in similar places to Afghanistan in the ME in the 1990s. Mountainous terrain, isolated villages etc. etc. and observed the locals and how they react to foreigners even friendly ones, I copped an almighty amount of flak in 2002 when I was heavily critical of our efforts there supporting the American invasion. I also pointed out the history of foreign armies in Afghanistan, topped off with experience in similar places and said to anyone who would listen that we were mad going in there. Well to say I was drowned out by the flag waving "patriots' would be an understatement. I was variously accused of being a communist, a Muslim lover etc., anti-democratic, anti-feminist - you name it I was. Yes we should have tackled al Qaeda, but it should have been a short and sharp surgical operation not a full scale invasion. The strange thing was that at the time the Taliban were having real economic difficulties and Afghanistan was on the brink of collapse anyway while the presence of bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mts., on the border with Pakistan, was bringing unwanted heat down on them. They weren't great supporters of al Qaeda anyway - they just thought of bin Laden and his followers as wealthy Saudi playboys. As it turned out bin Laden was encouraged to move to the tribal territories of Pakistan where the Americans finally caught him in Abbottabad. But the last few days have well and truly vindicated my stance back then. However I'm not gloating - the Americans will get over it, just as a few years before the Russians had to get over it after 13 years there, and in the 19th century the British had to get over it after 3 attempts. The irony of course is that the Taliban are the linear descendants of the Mujahedeen who the Americans armed and supported to drive the Russians out. The Mujahedeen government fell to the Taliban because it was absolutely corrupt - much the same it appears as the "democratic" government that America just discovered bolted out the back door, with the "trained" army they and we had created. As someone who well remembers Vietnam the same thing happened there - the Americans believed the people they had bought and paid for were "loyal" - nope they were just well paid, there is a difference. When Russia got involved in the late 70s they found that Afghanistan was their Vietnam. Something which due to the material cost led to the collapse of the USSR. Now we and the Americans have discovered another Vietnam. I hope that twice is enough to teach us not to get involved in other people's civil wars. Still I don't blame Biden, from the moment that Trump released those Taliban prisoners and began drawing down troop numbers the game was over. It was a clear admission that the Afghan Government and army were expected to save their democracy. But as Biden has succinctly put it if they won't fight for it, it isn't the American or our responsibility to do the fighting for them. And on a gloomier note we are in the second week of our 6th COVID lockdown here in Victoria and it will go through to early September thanks to the Delta variant. We got that from NSW, although our case numbers are nowhere near their level. We went through that runaway phase last year for 3 months. Every other state has criticised our lockdown policy but it has allowed us respites for longish periods. Unfortunately every time we have a relaxation some idiot imports it. In June we had a fortnight lockdown because of some idiot furniture removalists from NSW who knew they had it, yet spread a trail through the state. Strangely no one sort fit to jail them . Earlier this year there was a push to allow Australians overseas to return - unfortunately most of them were in India and they brought back COVID and we had another snap lockdown. I'm getting close to proposing that the next idiot who manages to import it should be either shot, or put on a plane to Kabul.

That's magnificent - great job.

Yep....

I like that effect - it livens the image up.

There's always one...............................

Her: "Have you seen Chu Chin Chow my darling little Pekinese puppy?" Him: "Umm err... no dear ... ahem ..." Her: "It's just that seems to be longish dog hairs in that mud ........." Him: "Oh those, just some grass or somesuch I imagine .......ahem ....... "

Over the years I have discovered that if I had taken the time to learn the right way of doing something I would have saved myself a lot of time and inconvenience. But in my favour I would say that I would not then have acquired and mastered the wide range of expletives and obscenities that are available to us as English speaking people. There are plus sides to everything.