kgwilson

This is some of what the US gave the Taliban. Between 2002 & 2017 the US gave the ANA $US28 billion worth of weaponry most of which is now in Taliban hands. 2000 armoured vehicles including many $300k Humvees 40 aircraft including blackhawks & drones. Originally they gave 208 aircraft but many were used by ANA pilots to escape, others were in maintenance or inoperative. 600,000 military weapons including M16 assault rifles 162,000 pieces of communications equipment 16,000 night vision goggles https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/planes-guns-night-vision-goggles-talibans-new-us-made-war-chest-2021-08-19/ "Ironically, the fact that our equipment breaks down so often is a life-saver here," said one US official So as time goes by a lot of the stuff especially aircraft will be discarded as they have no means to keep it operative. I guess that is one benefit of making unreliable stuff.

Why not?

I thought now what happened to ..... and then the penny dropped.

If the Taliban have changed as a number of media reports indicate they want to be recognised as a legitimate government with other nations and have promised not to begin a murderous round of reprisals & protect the rights of certain individuals and women as well. They still will have some pretty strict Sharia laws but they have learned something in the last 40 years of conflict. The problem is, can their political side keep their terrorist side at bay. The old regime was excessively brutal with numerous public executions and torture. They need to make an example of some of their murderous lot by bringing them to account for their actions now that they have declared peace if they go on the rampage again. If they can do this, then the change will be good for Afghanistan. It will have some pretty draconian and strict laws but the level of killing should disappear. Upwards of 200,000 Ahghanis have died since the Americans invaded compared to 2,500 Americans and 1000 from other nations. At the moment there is just chaos and fear. The rapid takeover is an indication that there is a resigned acceptance of the Taliban. The people are tired of 40 years of war but above all tired of foreign influence. Only time will tell if this change is for the better..

The yanks may well have secured the airport but it is surrounded by Taliban with plenty of rockets to fire at arriving or departing aircraft. I notice they mostly have US HumVees and US armaments other than their ubiquitous AK47s. The US needs to set up a dialogue with the Taliban political arm to try and ensure they can get people out without the rank and file mob armed to the teeth going crazy.

Apparently we have sent a C17 & refuelling tanker to get people out, NZ is sending a Herc, the Brits are already there along with Italians & Germans & the yanks have secured the Airport (according to them anyway). We certainly have a duty to support those who helped us even though we should not have been there in the first place. It will be interesting to see how long they have to wait in detention or whatever before being granted visas or some form of residency given our pathetic record on such issues, eg the Tamil family from Biloela. Given that 90% of the ANA trained by the US walked away or were Taliban sympathisers, I wonder how many had infiltrated the ranks of Western helpers?

The US secretary of State has said "This is manifestly not Saigon". Well with Kabul in Taliban hands, the President and government Ministers fleeing the country, US helicopters landing in the embassy grounds evacuating staff, civilians and Afghans who worked for them, and US officials frantically burning documents, it looks exactly like Saigon in April 1975 to me with one exception. That is they have bases close by to evacuate to rather than ships offshore.

The fact that the Taliban is the organisation that is taking over is irrelevant. They are Afghanis and everyone else who has been there for the past 20 years is not. The Yanks have spent a Trillion dollars and trained Afghanis who had no commitment to anything they stood for. When I was there in the 1970s they were a proud people and very friendly and had no animosity to anyone. I was welcomed everywhere I went, even up into the mountains and the poppy fields. Most Afghanis just want their country back. The Taliban may be headed by a few religious nutters who want to turn time back 400 years but many of them are ordinary Muslim Aghanis. Sure they will have some repressive conservative fundamentalist laws but it is their country & we can not impose our so called democracy on them even after 20 years and a trillion dollars. The latest news is that the Taliban have entered Kabul and a spokesman has told Al Jazera news that they are setting up a meeting with the existing government for a peaceful transfer of power. All the while US helicopters are ferrying people out. Shades of Saigon 1975 absolutely. They got rid of the British, the Russians and now finally the Yanks and their lackeys which includes us. Since 2001 there have been about 3500 coalition deaths but there have been about 64,100 deaths of the Afghan military and 111,000 civilian deaths. To Afghanis the Taliban is not the enemy WE are.

I got my 2nd AZ shot yesterday & have had no effects at all. Nothing, didn't even feel the needle. First shot 12 weeks ago I had a mild headache & woke up in the night with the chills but that was it. The effectiveness reports are confusing as each new one seems to be different. The latest effectiveness reports against hospitalisation put AZ at 92% & Pfizer at 96% after 2 shots. Now a study in Europe of 1.3 million people has shown there is virtually no difference between Pfizer and AstraZeneca in developing blood clots. It now seems the new MRNA (messenger ribo nucleic acid) vaccines lose their effectiveness over 4 - 6 months & the Israeli study shows the Pfizer vaccine only 39% effective against the Delta strain. So who and what do you believe. Media hype, sensationalist and variable health reporting, political bullshit, anti vax crap and Sky News is enough to confuse anyone left who is still sane. My wife & I were out in the front garden & a couple in their 80s who live up the road came by. They are unvaccinated and aren't getting vaccinated. Why I asked. Answer because we don't know what's in it. I asked if they'd had a Flu shot. Answer Yes. Question do you know what's in that. No answer. Then we changed the subject. There will be lots of people with these sorts of completely irrational views because of what seems to them to be coronavirus white noise. They have tuned out & don't want to know. Well Delta reached Armidale today after Newcastle yesterday. It is on the march & is now probably unstoppable.

When I bought my new house with a heat pump hot water system I wasn't impressed with the fact that the hot water was never very hot. Then I discovered the regulator that limited the hot water to 60 deg or less by mixing cold with the hot. I simply removed that and now I have really hot water when I want it & since I put a timer on that circuit to only operate in daylight hours most of the power needed to run the heat pump comes from the solar panels on the roof. If I sell the house I'll reinstall the regulator before the pre sale inspection mob get a chance to whinge about it.

Often I'll ask for a cash price when buying in a shop but mostly it makes no difference these days but if you are buying from a business that includes a service cash talks loudly. Some of that cash never gets declared as income. I am always popping in to Bunnings for things and if I don't keep a receipt (you can get these emailed to you now) I can't remember what I purchased by the time the statement is ready (also on line) half the time.

I do pretty much the same though I have a fee free card so there are no rewards. I used to keep all receipts & reconcile these against the statement monthly. The account is always paid off fully each month. Now I only keep receipts for large items that have a warranty or multiple items on them because if I pay by phone (googlepay) a record of the transaction is kept on the phone and I also get an instant notification from my bank every time my card is debited with any amount. Without receipts though I sometimes struggle to work out what I spent the money on a month later when reconciling the statement. For me cash is almost history.

I got $100.00 from an ATM about 6 months ago & it is still in my wallet. It is kind of an emergency fund when I may be somewhere that does not have eftpos or credit facilities. I pay by credit card for everything, even a cup of coffee & on line generally via Paypal as it offers the best protection and money back guarantee. The only times I have been into banks in the past 4 or 5 years is to deposit landing fees and cash paid for soft drinks at the aero club. I keep one $2.00 coin in the car to put in the shopping trolley at Aldi. We now have an honesty tab at the Aero club & every couple of months I email members with the total they owe & they do a direct credit. There is still plenty of cash out there though, especially with older people. I see them pull out wads of $50.00 notes to pay for their groceries. The same goes for some tradies who I suspect do a few cash jobs here & there.

The argument that the climate is continually changing and has done for millennia is true but how do those who believe this is the case now reconcile the fact that the change since the industrial revolution (230 years ago) is far more dramatic than any other change in recorded history and that those other changes happened over thousands of years. Releasing carbon always occurred from all sorts of causes like forest fires, volcanic eruptions etc but we have dug up billions of tons of coal and oil that took billions of years to accumulate and released it in just 300 years. The maths and as Greta said the science is crystal clear.

Reagan was a B grade actor, an ultra conservative and a warmonger. He got a nickname "Ronald Rayguns". And the US still wonders why nobody likes them.

I believe that there are still a few Americans there. They better have enough choppers to get them out. I think their problem is going to be that the Taliban are better armed than the Viet Cong were.

Reported on the ABC today. The Taliban have taken control 85% of Afghanistan including the border crossing with Iran near Herat, the one I walked across in 1975. Sounds like a repeat of them being booted out of Vietnam when they were being choppered out of the embassy during the fall of Saigon & pushing Hueys off the deck of their ships so that more could land. Ironically this was in April 1975.

It is the same in regional NSW. We have never had a case anywhere near where I live and though most businesses now have the QR code at the door most people do not scan it. Since the Sydney lockdown and new rules regarding masks most people are wearing masks to go in to shopping centres and businesses though.

Within 2 to 3 years the lower end of the BEV range will be as cheap or cheaper than the ICE equivalent. These cars (eg. Tesla 2, BYD EA1 Dolphin) will have over 500km range, 5-10 minute charging and 1 million km battery life all with virtually no maintenance required. Why then would you even contemplate buying a new ICE car. The ICE UTE market will dry up too. The Tesla Cybertruck is not even in production yet but has over 1.2 million advance orders.

All he had to do was keep it straight & brake but was probably running out of room. It would handle like brick & the skinny front wheels and huge rear tyres just exacerbated the problem.

Scotty keeps making promises to maintain his ratings but thinks he will be able to maintain that when those come to nothing and then answers every questing with another question or changes the focus entirely. Then when it all turns to custard he tries to find another subject to big note himself with. Covid came along and the bushfires failures, sports rorts, etc got pushed into the background. Parliamentary culture came to the fore when Covid looked like being managed only to rear its head again several times with various Ministers involved. Then a cabinet reshuffle to quieten that down only to be overshadowed with a complete vaccination rollout failure. The debacles keep mounting up but eventually the chickens will come home to roost. At least I hope they will.

In 1975 I backpacked from the UK to India & spent several weeks in Afghanistan. It was part of what was known as the hippy trail back then. I found the people friendly and hospitable. I could go wherever I liked. I crossed the border from Iran on foot as the Iranian bus stopped at the Iran border control which was closed so I spent the night in a wadi in my little orange tent then after border control walked the 1500 metres to the Afghan side. They were pretty happy to see me and the US$20.00 note in my passport. This was standard practice everywhere & ensured an event free entry. I got a rickety old bus to Herat where I stayed for a week. The people were great the food was good and I eventually left for Kandahar, and on to Kabul. Then Afghans were masters of their own destiny after giving the British the heave ho and every thing was laid back and relatively ordered. It was just a matter of respecting their customs and dressing appropriately. I went up to the mountains by bus and saw the huge poppy fields. These were all controlled by various warlords but they seemed to have their own respected borders and I was never harassed & was welcomed everywhere. Even the trip through the infamous Khyber pass to Peshawar in Pakistan was a breeze. How things have changed. First the Russians who ended up with a bloody nose & then the yanks who hauled the rest of the West in with them all for 20 years of failure. Is it any wonder that these people despise us. We have never learned that we cannot change their thousands of years old culture by trying to impose ours and all its imperfections, graft and corruption. The Yanks left 17,074 pieces of equipment mostly crap there after 20 fruitless years and umpteen trillions of dollars spent, 4000 deaths and 20,000 wounded. Over 241,000 Afghans have died, 71,000 of whom were civilians.

From the Industrial revolution till today, in just 260 years we have used most of the resources nature has laid down over the past 4,500,000,000 years & in so doing have released CO2 plus countless other pollutants into the atmosphere, the sea, the soil and into almost every living thing including us. So we have done this in just 0.00000057% of this planets history in time.

There are many flavours of Unix. Ubuntu is pretty popular along with Mint and there are many light versions as well. When I retired as an IT manager in 2005 I was given a top of the range Dell Latitude D610 laptop with 500 MB of RAM & 40 GB hard drive running the latest Windows XP. Fast forward 15 years and it can't do anything as everything has moved on, even Email. I was given a 1 GB RAM chip so I now had 1.5GB & installed Lubuntu the light version of Ubuntu Linux. The machine is now really fast after a full reformat & disk partition before installation. There is freeware software for everything, printer drivers, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. There is a bit of tech stuff as you need to modify bits of code here and there but so long as you have a browser you can find out how to do it all on line & Lubuntu runs Firefox better than Windows ever has.

I remember Greta Thunbergs first speech at the UN and it struck me right between they eyes. The one paragraph that I always remember is "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" I still think this is the best and most succinct statement on climate change that has ever been made. It made basically no difference to politicians though who continue to push the unsustainable growth myth and will continue to do so until extinction. Our only hope is that the young with Gretas attitude finally make real change happen. Unfortuately I can't see it happening in my lifetime which at best is another 25 to 30 years The entire transcript "This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. "You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe. "The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. "Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. "So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences. "To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. "How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years. "There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. "You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. "We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not. "Thank you."