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Apocalypse Not: 15 Inside the Hot Zone

For the first time in our history, medical treatment is a political issue. However, before I rant on that topic, I need to admit that my theory about SARS-CoV-2 has been proven wrong. My theory was based on the conviction that our government couldn’t react quickly and decisively to get ahead of a virus, regardless of who was in office. The virus became less lethal because Mother Nature forced its attachment points to return to their original configuration.

Ultimately, I could still be proven right, but I lost confidence in my theories because SARS-CoV-2 is no longer acting as I predicted it would. For three months, the pandemic conformed to my predictions almost to the letter, but it isn’t now, so I was wrong.

So what now? It’s time for the new set of facts, and here they are copied from a post I can’t find at the moment, so I can’t credit the author. It is now time to come to terms with the fact that;

1. I am probably going to get COVID-19 at some point,

2. I am almost certainly going to survive it, and

3. I might very well give it to someone else.

My new assumption is that this is a year-round virus that’s eventually going to infect 100 million people and kill roughly 1/4 of one percent of those infected. I’ve accepted those numbers. Unfortunately, millions of others have not. Many people have no sense of where this is headed, and I understand why. They’ve been betrayed by a hysterical media that insists on covering each new reported case as if it were the first case.

The McAllen/Edinburg area of South Texas has been experiencing an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, which has filled the hospitals, filled the morgues, and has resulted in the deployment of U.S. Army medical teams to help us cope. I now know several COVID-19 patients, all of whom were OCD about mask wearing and hand washing. As we can see from Holland’s example, masks are not the answer; avoiding the three C’s — confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact —seems to be much more critical. We have known that since the pandemic began, only Japan has incorporated the 3 C’s into its social policy.

You cannot see a virus with a microscope, you need an electron microscope but the point being made here is sort of true so……Truth over Facts!

The increase in cases comes from mass mobile testing at various sites around the Rio Grande Valley. The sudden increase in deaths is not a mystery because we now know morbid obesity is a real problem with COVID-19. McAllen and Edinburg combined to win the dubious distinction of the fattest metro area in the country in 2019. When it comes to comorbidity, we are number 1!

Added to the mix is the fact that this area is tightly controlled by democrats and the hospital systems rely on federal funding because they are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), which means they get access to cash that the rest of the country kicks in because of reasons.  Most doctors here follow the “Fauci Strategy,” which is “to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they develop a shortness of breath and have to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine, and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).”

The results of the Fauci Strategy

The other problem with the South Texas outbreak is that we are told nothing about it. We hear how many test positive, and we get a daily COVID-19-related death count. There is no context, no explanations about why we are experiencing deaths at a much higher rate than the rest of the country. There is also zero coverage of the false positive problem and zero coverage of the inflated death count problem. But this is Texas, so we get news about the state going after unemployment fraud, rampant in the age of COVID-19.

Richard Cortez, an elected Hidalgo County judge who was (reportedly) a great CPA before he went on the bench, has issued back-to-back shelter-in-place orders that not one person in this county is following. The gyms remain open, as do the few restaurants that have not yet closed. My friends at the veteran-owned and operated 5×5 Brewery are watching four years of hard work. Every penny they’ve ever earned slips away because the town of Mission, TX, decided they were not an essential business.

We the people are no longer listening to the “experts” who have impinged on our lives and destroyed our economy. But ignoring them is all we can do, for those of us who have lost our businesses and livelihoods, there is always the ballot, but down here, if you’re not voting democrat, your vote counts for nothing.

Adding fuel to the fire is our controlled media, which labels the Sturgis motorcycle rally a “super spreader” event while ignoring the tens of thousands of BLM protesters who assemble nightly to burn, loot, rage, and attack police officers. Completing our new circle of misery, we have the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is obviously experiencing a severe mental decline, and that process appears to be accelerating rapidly.

I remain concerned that the controlled media narrative is so far removed from observable reality that it cannot be sustained. Yet here we are, August of 2020, and we are still in semi-lockdown over a disease that 99.9% of the population has no problem beating, especially if they are fortunate enough to have a doctor who prescribes HCL, zinc, Z-packs, and steroid inhalers.

This is worse than a bad Twilight Zone episode, but how does it end? The elites have been unmasked as petty partisan scum with inaccurate models. When questioned, they respond with petulant arguments from authority (a well-known logical fallacy). They, along with the media, have forfeited our trust in them, and at some point, there will be a reckoning. Inshallah, that reckoning will take the form of the rule of law being applied to elites in the same way it is being applied to small businessmen and women who are trying to make a living despite arbitrary, politically motivated tyranny from elected democrats across the land.

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Apocalypse Not: Mask Off Mask On

A few weeks ago, a Black Lives Matter protest occurred in downtown McAllen, Texas. They did not get far before being confronted by a local man with a chainsaw. The man was screaming racial slurs, which he, uncharacteristically for these parts, helpfully translated into English for those who are a little rusty with the lingua franca.

The man was arrested after scattering a handful of over-socialized, under-educated, upper-middle-class white kids who were protesting in support of Black Lives Matter. Black lives are not a thing in South Texas, where blacks are less than 1% of the population.

The South Texas Chain Saw man in action

So, while the rest of you are dealing with riots and cancel culture, we are dealing with an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 that is threatening to overwhelm our hospitals. As is expected with democratically declared emergencies, nobody knows any SARS-CoV-2 patients, the local hospitals are still laying people off, and hemorrhaging money. Despite a total lack of any evidence other than news people droning on about increased numbers, Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez decreed that as of midnight tonight (19 June), masks must be worn in all businesses, at all times in the Rio Grande Valley even when you are working out in a gym.

I do not believe the new COVID numbers for the Rio Grande Valley, nor should you. Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center in Paramus, New Jersey, leads the nation in nursing home deaths according to the Federal Center for Medical and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS reported that Dellridge had 753 deaths (in a 96-bed facility, mind you). The facility had reported 16 deaths of patients who tested positive for COVID-19.

We know that the media and the CDC have grossly inflated COVID-19 numbers, and it is not a mystery why. Any attempt to verify an increase in COVID numbers at local hospitals in McAllen is thwarted by armed guards and recalcitrant public affairs officers. There is no way to know what the hell is going on because trusting the government or media to tell us what is happening is for knaves or fools.

As is the case in every progressive district across the land, our judiciary is dangerously unaccountable and mostly a validation mechanism for the imposition of elite opinion. Elite opinion is Orange Man Bad, and they have been engaged in a systematic campaign to undermine the President since before he was elected.

The SARS-CoV-2 response is the most blatant example of expert class arrogance and media malfeasance in modern history. Quoting from this piece by Stacey Lennox:

Economies across the world were shut down based on a model that was blatant panic porn built on shoddy code. Even more maddening is the fact expert Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College had a history of getting almost every prediction he ever made completely wrong.

What is now at stake are the reputations of the scientific expert class, the Federal bureaucracy, the media, and virtually every big-money interest, from the pharmaceutical industry to Silicon Valley to Hollywood. If President Trump gets four more years, those special interests will suddenly not be so special.

Where was the first place you heard about hydroxychloroquine? President Trump’s COVID-19 update, where he mentioned it, stood by his belief, based on reporting by frontline physicians, that it worked. Just last week, the authors of a study published in the medical journal The Lancet, which stated that treating coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine could be fatal, retracted their findings.

Hydroxychloroquine costs $3.00 per treatment. Remdesivir, which doesn’t even work well, costs $1,400 per treatment, and it has a patent. Do you believe big Pharma was not behind the coordinated assault on the effectiveness of a drug that was proven to work on SARS-CoV-1, which has identical modes of attachment with SARS-CoV-2? Maybe it was all a coincidence, what do I know?

I know that the doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are using (but have run out of) Remdesivir. Our government designates hospitals in the RGV as “Hispanic Serving Institutions,” which entitles them to numerous federal grant funds. They are rule followers to the nth degree, and despite knowing that hydroxychloroquine and zinc will work, they are not about to do anything that might jeopardize grant monies. So they use Remdesivir, but have run out of the stuff and are now using Tylenol.

Welcome to the revolution. On one side are the American people who believe in our founding principles that guarantee every American has equal opportunity for success. We’ll call them the Ameri-cans. On the other side are Americans who believe in the French Revolution’s concept of equal outcomes for all. We’ll call them Ameri-can’ts. The Ameri-cant are rioting, claiming the country is inherently racist and all the ” Four Olds” must go. Have you ever heard of the four Olds before? Here’s a quick reminder:

The last crew to use the four olds killed millions of their citizens. In America, that is not going to happen because the one thing that democrat progressives cannot do is export their organic lunacy and blatant anarchy outside the urban centers they control. Unlike China (or any other country), we have the 2nd Amendment. You want to defund the police and place the responsibility for my security on me? I have no problem with that at all.  I am an American, and most of us are well-armed.

My prediction is that the President will win by a landslide this November. This country is still majority Ameri-can’s and we bend our knee to no man.  The remaining weeks running up to the election are going to be painful to watch, given the media’s continuing encouragement of rioting.

If my prediction is wrong, then we will experience what happens when you try to force “equality in outcomes” (Jacobinism to the historically literate) in a country founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all. A country where the citizens are armed and where trampling on individual liberties is not tolerated. I don’t think that will work, so I hope for the best while not fearing the worst.

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Apocalypse Not: The SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic is Over

As COVID Anxiety is turning into COVID rage, I am putting my streak of forecasting exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will play out on the line with another bold prediction. As this comes to pass, remember you heard it here first (unless you listen to the No Agenda podcast). The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is over; the number of new infections may increase, but the number of those patients requiring ICU treatment or dying from the virus will continue to plummet. This is because the virus was manipulated for gain-of-function experiments, and once it got out of the lab and into nature, Mother Nature, recognizing a freak when she sees one, is forcing the virus back to its original state, which is an annoyance to humans, not a death-dealing pathogen.

I am making this prediction based on the work of Chris Howard, PhD (Biochemistry), and his wife, Lynn Howard, MD (Pathogenic Microbiology and Infectious Disease Specialist). The paragraphs below are my notes from their presentation, which can be found here. 

Coronaviruses are found in most animal species, including humans. There are over 100 different variants of coronaviruses. Historically, they are nothing more than an annoyance; they cause viral sinus infections or common colds. They have a distinct ability to penetrate epithelial cells, your first line of defense in the immune system, so when you find a virus that penetrates that epithelium and activates to enter a host cell, then you pretty much have an annoyance, and it’s usually a respiratory issue.

Coronaviruses have never been that virulent until the SARS 1 epidemic in 2001 -2002. We were told initially SARS 1 was found in bat caves, but if you look at the genetic sequence of SARS 1 RNA and compare it to SARS found in bats, there are many similarities; however, they are not identical. The assumption is that it made a zoonotic leap from the bat to the human and in doing so mutated.  That sounds reasonable until you look at the sequence themselves and realize what has changed is not your typical zoonosis mutation. If you dig deeper you’ll discover that many years ago (80’s and 90’s) we were manipulating viruses to learn more about them, and by manipulating them we made them more transmissible, more infectious, and more virulent. This supposedly teaches scientist and epidemiologist epidemiological behavior of potential pathogens and this type of study is called gain of function research.

When virus’s mutate and jump from to a different species or change hosts the main driver of those changes is evolutionary pressure to be able to bind better. Viruses themselves do not change; they are around for one thing; to make more viruses. When a virus finds a good mode of attachment, you will see less change in the virus. Both SARS 1 and the SARS 2 have identical modes of attachment from the ACE 2 inhibitor binding to S1. S1 splitting to the TMPRSS 2 binding site which opens the virus leading to exocytosis into the cell.  There’s no difference between SARS 1 and SARS 2 in that respect except for the internal dynamics of the virus’s which means it was man-made.

SARS COVID 2 (the etiological agent is for the disease state) is a chimera which by definition is made in a lab. Chimera’s take a target virus, incorporate other characteristics from other viruses to create something different.  A pertinent example of gain of function would be to use a COVID virus to create an HIV vaccine. HIV is a retrovirus and they don’t have that ability to penetrate epithelium. Vaccinating someone for HIV is not possible so scientists are trying to  find a way  to carry a vaccine (or antigen in this case) through the epithelium.

When the genome of SARS COVID 2 was uncoded there were four subsets that are identical to portions of the genome of HIV. That impossible in nature, it could not have happened to the COVID virus in a laboratory..

For viruses’ evolutionary pressure usually is based on the binding; it doesn’t change the internal RNA or DNA strands of viruses. With chimeras as they reproduce you get a shift back towards the original, natural type of virus. As a chimera goes through patient after patient and population after population mother nature recognizes it to be a freak. When you hear there are now 30 strains of CVOID 2 there are not really 30 different strains (they all have identical binding site) it’s same virus changing enough to revert back to the original wild virus which is, to humans, an annoyance, not a life or death threat.

Lynn and Chris Howard practice what is known as precision medicine. Precision medicine is a catch phrase for using your genetics and using epigenetics to take a very precise approach to optimizing your health. This is high end medicine targeting wealthy, high end clients like professional athletes and I imagine that is why their research is not receiving more attention from our know-nothing press.

If you look at how the SARS COVID 2 pandemic has progressed it is clear (to me at least) the Howard’s have articulated the Occam’s Razor solution. It is the simplest of competing theories and thus (most likely) the closest to the truth.  Mother Nature does not take kindly to the release of genetically manipulated organisms into the wild. She recognizes them and eliminates them with the same pitiless certainty she applies to all her creatures that are unable to respond to evolutionary pressures only she knows and understands.

With each passing day the evidence that the lockdowns were a massive waste of time and money accumulates. In South Texas where the wearing of face masks has been optional for a week I often am the only person in the local HEB not wearing a mask. Masks do not protect you from viruses nor do they prevent you from spreading a virus if you have one. Mask wearing is Kabuki theater just like TSA checkpoints in our airports. We have been victimized by politicians and medical “experts” who have been wrong about every aspect of this pandemic. When confronted with the conflicting facts from the ground they have doubled down with unreasonable, unconstitutional, ineffective actions that terrorize the uninformed and are destroying our economy. For this they will pay. Inshallah.

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Apocalypse Not: Common Sense Prevails Over Low T Tyranny

The lockdown is, for all intents and purposes, over. Here in Texas, the gyms are finally open, as is the rest of the local economy, and mask-wearing is optional. In states with restrictive lockdowns, people are taking matters into their own hands and opening up their businesses despite orders to remain closed. Never has the difference between the political parties been so blatantly obvious, and Mother Nature is going to determine which party is using “science” in its COVID-19 response.

Suppose you believe that COVID-19 is a killer just waiting for us to drop our mask wearing and social distancing defenses so it can kill millions, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds (depending on model used) then the republicans are doomed as they will pay the price for opening their states too soon.

If you believe COVID-19 is not a killer, that most people infected by the virus remain asymptomatic, and only the older, vulnerable portion of the population needs to be protected, then the democrats are doomed by retribution for the destruction of our economy by over-reacting to suspect models.

Despite their repressive lockdown policies, there are encouraging signs from the blue states.  In New Jersey, Atilis Gym opened yesterday in direct defiance of the governor’s orders. When the state police arrived, they informed dozens of protesters outside the gym that they had violated the governor’s COVID-19 orders and then bid them a good day. The crowd erupted in applause, precisely the kind of discretion we expect from our fellow citizens working in law enforcement.

There are also too many stories about intolerable abuses against law-abiding citizens being reported daily. An epidemic of poor judgment, based on questionable science, is sweeping across the Blue states.

In Salem, Oregon, Lindsey Graham, the owner of Glamour Salon, opened on May 5th because she needed to feed her kids, pay her bills, and save her business from bankruptcy. She was closed by the police and fined $14,000.  Two days later, Child Protective Services showed up, and I’ll let her describe the visit:

On May 7 child protective services showed up at my home. They questioned my husband and I. Questioned my child without me present. They searched our home,’ she said as tears welled up in her eyes during a press conference Friday.

‘And I never expected such a violent, aggressive, vindictive thing could ever be done to me or my family because I’m trying to earn a living. Because I’m trying to work,’ Graham added.

Graham is a mother to three kids: a six-year-old son, a three-year-old girl and an eight-week-old son.

Low-T Tyranny is defined as a government official knowingly lying to your face and daring you to call them on it. If you do, they immediately play their victim card, making you (not their bullshit answer) the problem. There is a lot of low-tax tyranny going around these days, even in once-reasonable states like Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, was on a phone-in press conference explaining why it moved her mother out of a nursing home the same day she ordered recovering COVID patients be sent from local hospitals to local nursing homes. During the press conference, a local newsman called Ms. Levine “sir” several times. That is understandable, I’ve listened to the tape and Ms. Levine (a transgendered woman) has retained her masculine voice. She answered the question, the reporter saying her mother asked to be moved because she’s a smart old gal who can figure stuff out. This implied that if your mother wasn’t smart enough to ask you to move her out of a nursing home that is about to receive convalescing COVID patients, then that’s on you, or her, or whatever.

Then Ms Levine had a meltdown over being addressed by the masculine pronoun as if one can intuit a declared gender over the telephone. Her outrage became the story, not her apparent hypocrisy in moving her mother out of harm’s way. That is Low T Tyranny, thrown right in your face, by a person who knows decent law-abiding citizens will give her a pass at risk of being branded a transphobe.

So what now? We let the virus play out, and one side or the other is going to be proved wrong. At this point, I must note that my theory about how the virus would go appears wrong. I thought the Wuhan Virus was as virulent as advertised and had already passed through much of the population. This theory was based on my conviction that our federal government cannot possibly react fast enough to contain a virulent virus. Now that there has been more extensive antibody testing, COVID-19 has a long way to go before we can reach anything close to herd immunity. COVID-19  did not tear through the land last December as I thought it had.

What does that mean? Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of the Stanford Medical School, who recently concluded a study of every major league baseball employee (only 0.7% positive for the COVID-19 antibody) said this:

“I think in the back of people’s heads there is this idea that somehow we can eradicate this disease if we just stay locked down. That is not possible. The serologic evidence, even the MLB study, suggest this. It suggests the epidemic is too widespread to eradicate. It spreads via asymptomatic contact. Like people who don’t have very many symptoms, even mild cold symptoms can spread the thing. They aren’t going to show up for testing. They aren’t going to show up at a hospital or a doctor.”

Last March, I wrote about Farr’s Law, named for British epidemiologist William Farr in 1840. He stated that epidemics develop and recede according to a bell-shaped curve with or without human intervention. It appears that COVID-19 is receding, and that once again, Farr’s Law has proved valid. The democrat politicians who are threatening to keep their state, city, or county locked down well into summer are in for a rude awakening. As each week passes with fewer cases identified and a declining death count, they will be forced to make decisions that the public has already made for them.

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The John Paul Vann of Afghanistan Speaks

In the book The Operators by Michael Hastings, there is a quote from Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall comparing General Stan McChrystal to John Paul Vann. John Paul Vann was a former army officer who went to Vietnam as a soldier and stayed on working as a Provincial Aid Advisor. He was famous for his ability to drive around and live in contested districts (alone) and was a tireless advocate for the Vietnamese people. He was also a compulsive womanizer, an alcoholic, and a shameless self-promoter. Remove those negative traits, and replace them with a typical all-American Midwest kid raised in a stable two-parent household where he developed a strong sense of commitment, a bias for action, and the ability to thrive while taking calculated risks. You have Chris Corsten. He was the John Paul Vann of Afghanistan

Our two-decade-long involvement in Afghanistan has been a fiasco. Every aspect of our performance had major issues, none more so than the herculean efforts at rebuilding and rehabilitating the war-torn infrastructure. Yet buried deep inside the legacy of failure are stories of remarkable success. Carter Malkasain described one example of competent development leading directly to local prosperity (briefly) in the book The War Comes to Garmser.

Another example has just been published by my friend Chris Corsten, detailing his decade in Afghanistan as a soldier and a heavily armed humanitarian. The book is 3000 Days in Afghanistan, but I need to reveal something you will not glean from Chris’s writing. In the world of outside the wire contractors, men (and a few women) who worked in contested districts infested with Taliban, who lived in local compounds, drove local cars, rarely spoke English outside their compound, wore local clothes, and lived off the local economy to deliver massive aid projects on time and budget, Chris Corsten was the GOAT

Chris stayed the longest, had the most impact, and did, by orders of magnitude, the most projects. He was also a shura ninja when it came to working through problems with tribal elders. Chris Corsten is a legend—to those of us who knew what he accomplished and also to thousands of Afghans who became self-sufficient as hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland became productive again thanks to his irrigation programs.

The book is a clear reflection of Chris, and if you know him, the two personality traits that stand out are conscientiousness and integrity. Those two traits were combined with an attitude that was the common denominator among us working outside the wire: zero tolerance for wasted efforts, making work stupid, and excuses. Add to this mix the fact that Chris is a modest man who is not prone to exaggeration, routinely attributes all success to his subordinates, and loathes the idea of self-promotion. You have a writer who will lay out the facts. He does this in an almost businesslike manner.

As you get to the end of this remarkable story, Chris lists the spectacular amount of work accomplished during the 2010-2011 surge, and if you know what was going on in Afghanistan, it is easy to get confused. It seems impossible that Expats (mostly American, British, South African, and Australian) were living and working in local Afghan communities while supervising massive irrigation projects in districts where the military was sustaining casualties on a regular basis.

If you aren’t familiar with Afghanistan, you might read about Chris’s accomplishments without fully grasping their significance. In 2010, provinces such as Khost, Kandahar, Paktia, Kunar, Helmand, Farah, Nangarhar, and Herat faced challenging situations. Therefore, it is difficult to appreciate his achievement of completing every project he started, especially while being supervised by expatriates who were actively working in areas contested by the Taliban on a daily basis.

Chris and his crew demonstrated that aid can be effectively delivered in contested areas. Still, it must be carried out by knowledgeable individuals who have a personal stake in the situation. In Afghanistan, it was also essential for them to be armed.

Let me explain the situation regarding weapons. Our approach was based on the principle that if you can’t ensure safety, it will be difficult to survive. The threats facing outside contractors came in various forms. The most significant risk was kidnapping, while another major concern was the need to store, transport, and distribute large amounts of cash. You are not safe living in a local Afghan compound that holds a safe containing over a million dollars in cash. Similarly, you are not safe when you go to the local branch of the Kabul Bank to withdraw $700,000 for your monthly project payroll. It’s crucial to know how to convert $700,000 in U.S. dollars into smaller denominations of Afghan currency.

Not all of us carried firearms either – Jeff “Raybo” Radan, a former Marine infantry officer and Ranger School graduate (thus the Raybo call sign), worked a year in Helmand and never carried a weapon. He did projects in contested towns like Now Zad, but being a former Marine, he knew how to get a ride on Marine air and thus was able to travel safely. But most of us were armed, and all of us had weapons, including belt-fed machine guns (in some provinces), inside our living compounds. Our armed authority came from the Provincial governors, and if we ever used our weapons, we were accountable to them as well as the US Embassy.

Chris explains why former, experienced military men, who have already acquired knowledge of local atmospherics and a solid understanding of local culture, are the best option for staffing aid programs in conflict zones. All the men mentioned in Chris’s book (he uses assumed names) were prior military, and all of us had years on the ground before we were able to transition into what I term “Free Range” contracting.

3000 Days in Afghanistan should be required reading at both US AID and the Department of State as they sift through 20 years of lessons learned in Afghanistan. This week a senior USAID executive, who had extensive Afghanistan time, released a paper titled USAID Afghanistan: What Have We Learned. He concludes his assessment with four lessons;

  1. Do not try to do everything
  2. Stick to proven development principles
  3. Flexibility and adaptability are key, and
  4. Expect and plan for high levels of oversight.

Chris details all four of these lessons as he explains how he avoided graft, corruption, and shakedowns from security services. He also discusses how he effectively addressed theft and delivered meaningful aid by injecting cash directly into local economies. An unexpected benefit we discovered early in the program was the ability to take the Taliban off the battlefield by offering a couple of months of hard labor in exchange for a decent wage.

Chris threw no stones as he explained what we were doing and why we felt we should do more. He describes his disappointment at not getting traction with USAID and the State Department and then moves on. The program he was running got plenty of attention in the press at the time. There were NPR radio interviews, 60-minute segments, and multiple magazine articles, including this classic account in the Toronto Star about our team in Kandahar. The FRI blog was booming back then as I documented our massive infrastructure projects in Nimroz province. In the end, none of that mattered; it turns out that being successful where everyone else is failing can be problematic.

As William Hammink admits in his review of USAID in Afghanistan, we threw too much money into a country that could not absorb it. What is now obvious is that Chris Cortsen showed USAID exactly how to do Afghanistan aid. Spend a few years and a few million dollars to get all the irrigation systems back up and running, build a few schools, pave a few roads, bring in engineers with some commercial demo to blast rock, and build runways in remote mountain-top towns. You have done about all that should be done to get the country heading towards self-sufficiency.  Then you can leave.

3000 Days in Afghanistan is an easy-to-read account about a remarkable individual who sticks to the facts to make a compelling case for how sustainable development in conflict zones should be implemented. Buried behind the facts and the business-like narrative are the stories that someday will emerge from this program as historians start to comb through the records in search of what really happened in Afghanistan. They will find plenty about Chris, hopefully telling his story in rich detail. There is a lot to be said, and although Chris may not be seeking recognition for what he has accomplished, he certainly has earned it.

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Apocalypse Not #10 Something is Happening Here

What it is ain’t exactly clear; and that’s an understatement—in the past, national emergencies brought the country together, at least for a while. From the reaction to 9/11 to the legions of people conducting water rescues after Houston flooded a few years back, we have always come together to face a threat. When the COVID-19 virus was discovered, it appeared to be an existential threat. Based on modeling by epidemiological experts, we initially expected millions, then hundreds of thousands, and subsequently tens of thousands of deaths, with the extreme lockdown measures included in the modeling.

The models were not only wrong but also far from accurate. Based on COVID-19 antibody testing in California, Boston, and Iceland, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is approximately 0.1 to 0.3 percent. The more testing we do, the lower the IFR drops as the number of positives (the denominator) increases.

Last week, a trio of Silicon Valley legends (T.J. Rodgers, Joe Malchow, and Yinon Weiss) conducted a regression study to determine if the rate of lockdown in each state had a statistically significant effect on the number of reported cases. They found the correlation coefficient on early vs. late (or no) lockdowns was 5.5%. That number is so low that there is no correlation. The lockdowns did not affect the outcome in each of the 50 states.

One of the most eminent Professors of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Population Health, John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc, has again warned that we are making high-stakes decisions without reliable data. Yet the narrative marches on, with the media and authorities using the case fatality rate (CFR), not the infection fatality rate (IFR), to justify their caution.

So what now?

Unfortunately, there is no ‘what now’; instead, the population has a deeper, polarizing division. Most of the population would agree with my timeline and assessment. But it is also apparent that a large percentage of Americans believe there is a deadly virus out there that will scythe through the population if we lift the various lockdowns affecting 43 of the 50 states.

There is no way forward if we cannot agree on or define the threat as a nation. The problem now is that limiting the threat threatens the reputations of the leading scientists running our public health system, powerful academic institutions such as Johns Hopkins and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, influential philanthropists like Bill Gates, and the legacy media.

According to physicians on the front line, the failure to adapt to the virus as it has presented itself is costing lives. John Hinderocker from the Powerline blog explains the details in this post. He quotes from Dr. Paul Marik, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Critical Care COVID Management Protocol.

It is our collective opinion that the historically high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is due to a single factor: the widespread and inappropriate reluctance amongst intensivists to employ anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant treatments, including corticosteroid therapy early in the course of a patient’s hospitalization. It is essential to recognize that it is not the virus that is killing the patient, rather it is the patient’s overactive immune system. The flames of the “cytokine fire” are out of control and need to be extinguished. Providing supportive care (with ventilators that themselves stoke the fire) and waiting for the cytokine fire to burn itself out simply does not work… this approach has FAILED and has led to the death of tens of thousands of patients.

As Powerline further notes:

The systematic failure of critical care systems to adopt corticosteroid therapy resulted from the published recommendations against corticosteroids use by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) amongst others.

The most effective treatment for COVID-19 is a combination of very inexpensive, readily available drugs. This will prove catastrophic for the reputations of those who continue to insist that mass testing and a proven vaccine, or an effective drug targeting the virus, such as remdesivir, the antiviral medicine from Gilead Sciences, are required before lockdowns can end.

The lockdowns are going to end soon. Shelter-in-place orders have proved an incredibly destructive policy, and the harm has not been distributed evenly across the United States. Some people are suffering much, much more than others.

Yet the lockdown continues here in Texas with the Kabuki theater’s partial openings. Restaurants cannot turn a profit when they are forced to run at 50% capacity. I’m not sure why you would open movie theaters but keep gyms closed, given the comorbidity associated with the lifestyles of the large and lethargic.

Public health officials should encourage the population to get outdoors and enjoy fresh air and sunshine to bolster their immune systems through exercise. However, they are pretending they can calibrate the economy to limit exposure to a nasty bug, although science, in the form of epidemiological studies and regression analysis, would tell you these steps are not helping—they are hurting.

As Texas and other states emerge from lockdown, there will likely be an increase in positive test results, as more tests are conducted. What we will not see is a giant wave of critically ill patients needing ICU beds. That hasn’t happened yet and won’t happen now or in the future.  When what is not going to happen, happens, what are the elites, the press, and all the politicians who have been crying wolf for months now going to do? Who knows? Owning up and admitting their mistakes is not part of their DNA, so we can rule out being honest.

The great and powerful Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach once wrote that: America is a land so great that even fools cannot destroy it. We are currently testing his thesis. Let’s hope he was right.

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Apocalypse Not #9 What Happened to the Models?

It is now obvious that the modeling driving the COVID-19 response was wrong. They caused the nation to overreact, and now that we realize COVID-19 is not the threat we were told it was, what do we do? What the Trump Administration just did, right in front of you, was disappear the models, switch data sets, and start talking recovery. It was awesome to watch, made more so by the fact that not many people realized what they were seeing.

During Thursday’s Coronavirus Task Force press conference, all mentions of modeling were removed, replaced with slides from the US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network.

The death rate from this virus is expected to be lower than the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. Through antibody testing, we are learning that the China Flu bug arrived earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.

This is fantastic news, but we’re not celebrating, relaxing the lockdown, or restarting the economy.

In Texas, our governor appointed a commission to examine how to reopen the state. When he announced the commission members, he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice, and instead of acting on facts, the governor is appointing deceased individuals to commissions. That is not very Texan-like, and I wish we had a better leader like one of the seven governors who were not bullied into economic suicide by hysterical progressive elites.

On the day Governor Abbot announced his strike force, Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweetstorm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced that Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were never accurate.

The insistence of progressive politicians in believing the obviously flawed models of elite academics is going to, without question, kill Americans. And we don’t need models to know how many. Citizen Journalist Betsy McCaughey points out:

No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing, and drinking. Researcher Michael French from the University of Miami points out that the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. The unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a price tag larger than the COVID-19 threat.

Why can’t our leaders see this? Dozens of pieces are coming out daily pointing out the same thing, yet the narrative continues as if the pandemic is performing as predicted. 

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, our country went through a spasm of federal government action to “make us safe”. What came of that was the TSA. The TSA is in the business of ‘Security Theater’; it fails security tests over 95% of the time. They routinely allow weapons and ammunition to be unintentionally carried onto aircraft, something I’ve done myself. No security professional mistakes the TSA as anything other than Kabuki Theater. If you want safe air travel screening, you need to do it like the Israelis do, but we won’t do that because of Muh Racism.

The Kabuki theater will continue to require social distancing and mask-wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality-based front-line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, points out, there is no direct evidence that the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slow the spread of the Wuhan virus makes sense, but then again, so does the argument for developing herd immunity.

It is impossible to evaluate scientific data when the credentialed experts working with the data disagree on its meaning. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach, and it was the reason I said at the start of the Pandemic that we were too slow and the bug had long ago escaped into the population. I had no way of knowing it would prove mostly benign, but it did, and here we are.

The truth about the COVID-19 threat is evident. Progressive Democrats’ reluctance to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy due to continued forced unemployment and forced asset loss on the part of local and state governments. If this does not end quickly, we will lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.

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Apocalypse Not: South Texas Lockdown

The Rio Grande Valley consists of four counties: Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy. The population is almost 90% Hispanic, and most people born and raised here, including whites, speak fluent Spanish. Despite the prevalence of Spanish speakers, it’s still an unmistakably American place. The infrastructure is new as the population has grown significantly over the last twenty years. The VA system here is excellent, as military service has long been popular among South Texans.

The migration pressure on the border comes from Central Americans who muster at collection points on this side of the border for speedy processing. Once processed and released, they are taken to the Catholic Relief shelter, where they receive food and a bus ticket to the interior, and then dropped off at the Greyhound station. Mexican citizens can cross the border and stay in the valley as long as they wish, but they must obtain a visa to travel inland. Many local economies in cities like McAllen rely heavily on Mexican tourism, particularly during Christmas and Easter.

The McAllen/Edinburg area has a serious public health problem; we are (according to a recent Grubhub ranking) the fattest metro area in the United States.  Morbid obesity leads to type II diabetes and hypertension, and all three are the principal comorbidity factors contributing to fatal outcomes from COVID-19.

The counties have all issued shelter-in-place orders, and masks must be worn in public except when exercising. Cameron County has issued the most stringent mandates, including a prohibition on more than two people in a vehicle, which will pose a challenge for lawn maintenance crews. Children under age 14 have been confined to quarters. These measures are the wrong ones to take if we are concerned about the health and welfare of our fellow citizens.

One of the known characteristics of COVID-19 is that hypertension, diabetes, and being overweight dramatically increase hospitalization and fatality rates. It seems to me the perfect vehicle for public health officials to attack the epidemic of obesity in the population. If there was ever a time to start messaging about the necessity of a balanced diet combined with regular outdoor exercise, that time is now.

Instead, local officials have done the exact opposite. The regional parks and playgrounds remained open when schools and non-essential businesses closed. They were not crowded, and there were no issues with social distancing. Still, you could see groups of six to eight cross-fit enthusiasts working out together, families using the picnic benches, and others running or using the exercise stations.

I would think the city leader would be encouraging people to get out of the house and into the many city parks to let their kids burn up some energy. Instead, the city placed barricades around all jungle gyms, removed every picnic bench, closed all the park parking lots, and made it clear it doesn’t want people exercising in the parks.

Remember, the purpose of flattening the curve was not to shelter in place until the bug was gone; the assumption that we will all eventually be exposed remains in place. If we will all eventually get the bug, shouldn’t we strengthen our immune systems now that we have all this time on our hands? Getting people, especially children, outside and active helps boost their immune systems. Being immobile and sedentary indoors, passively watching television while consuming highly processed food, can decrease the immune system.

The Land Shark is a lockdown essential. It’s flat here, the streets are empty, and this old-school custom bike can fly. The surprise of the COVID quarantine has been being able to get outside to exercise instead of using an indoor gym. I had forgotten how good it felt to train outside—and it’s good for the immune system, too.

The local hospitals are empty, indicating that the curve has flattened, which was the purpose of social distancing and mask-wearing. Now that we have accomplished the goal of the shutdown, why are we continuing the shutdown?

The reason to open the economy is that it will save more lives than it will cost. There is little question that the lives lost to the economic catastrophe following an extended shutdown and collapse of the economy would dwarf the number of lives lost from  COVID-19.

The alternative to relaxing the quarantine and allowing the virus to run its course is to remain locked down until a vaccine or cure is found. This is why prominent health policy experts like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel are discussing an 18-month lockdown. That is flat out insane. How can Americans look themselves in the mirror and call themselves the land of the free without NCAA football this fall? The question answers itself.

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Apocalypse Not: Reality is Disrupting the Legacy Media Narrative

I started the Apocalypse Not series because I do not trust computer modeling or any experts warning of apocalyptic doom based on computer modeling. As Richard Fernandez, who writes the Belmont Club blog, observed: “My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model, however good, but founded on past data was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past.”

It is now clear that the future does not look like the past. I knew a flu virus with the same symptomology as the Wuhan flu swept through the Rio Grande Valley last December/January. Given the reported virulence of the Wuhan strain, it made sense to conclude that what had swept the valley was the Wuhan flu. This mild form of Wuhan was no picnic. My wife had never been as sick for as long as she was around Christmas.

I went on to note that on March 3rd, scientists identified two strains of the Wuhan virus, one that spreads quickly but is relatively mild, and one that spreads slowly and is dangerous. That explained to me what we experienced last Christmas, but my speculation was met with alarm by my liberal friends (and I have many who I value and respect) who responded with arguments from authority that stressed I was no expert and should not be commenting on topics I do not understand.

But then I remembered I was an expert, one of the few people who had ever deployed ashore off naval shipping into a combat zone to hunt down a microscopic pathogen that was turning into a killer. I mentioned this tongue-in-cheek; I was a Navy corpsman, trained as an advanced medical laboratory technician, sent ashore to obtain and process samples identified by environmental health officers, who were the real experts.  It is on such thin gruel that claims of expertise are often made.

HM2 Tim ‘Doc’ Lynch ashore in Beirut in February 1984, hunting down the source of a nasty typhoid outbreak at the Beirut Airport

Despite not being a real expert, it now seems the rest of the world is catching up to me. This morning, USA Today published an article stating that eight strains of the Wuhan virus are circulating globally. Plus, the fatality numbers in the USA are not adding up (as I have been pointing out for a month now), with most of our cases being confined to New York City.

Existential crises reveal the character of both our leaders and the people they lead. The governors of Washington State, Michigan, and Nevada are incompetent and cowardly. The Governor of New York and the mayor of New York City have been revealed as opportunistic. They are cooperating with the Trump administration to cover for their gross incompetence in emergency management preparation. It is no coincidence that New York City is getting slammed by the flu; they were utterly unprepared.

Our country has unprecedented wealth, leisure, economic freedom, and security because men who are the antithesis of Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo have eradicated every existential threat to the people of the United States. Those two men are directly responsible for the lack of preparation in New York.  As Julie Kelly, writing in American Greatness, observed;

A public policy researcher in 2015 detailed long waits in New York City emergency rooms. The head of the emergency department for the Mount Sinai hospital system quit in 2018 after less than a year on the job.

“I had to follow my moral compass and leave and decide this is not an organization that cares for patients,” Dr. Eric Barton told the New York Post.

Last year, city nurses threatened to strike due to overcrowding at three major hospital systems. “Nurse Anthony Ciampa said he had to choose recently between feeding an elderly patient at New York Presbyterian and treating several acutely ill patients because there weren’t enough other nurses on duty,” according to a March 2019 report in the Daily News.

And the outcry about ventilators? State officials were informed several years ago that the stockpile of ventilators was woefully inadequate to handle a severe pandemic. But instead of preparing for a looming crisis and buying 16,000 ventilators, the state’s health commissioner formed a task force to develop a system to ration the life-saving equipment. The task force “came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short,” the New York Post reported last week.

I expect gross incompetence from big city governments and democratic governors. They have been focused for years on ramming through their progressive agenda while painting all opponents as virulent racists or stupid hicks who don’t understand the need to eviscerate our traditional relationship with governmental organizations. What is alarming to me is the new intolerance of dissent on display in the chattering classes. As Brandon O’Neil observed;

…the implacable rage against anyone who deviates from the Covid-19 script and asks if shutting down society really is the right thing to do. Like medieval scolds, they brand such people dangerous, insane, a virus, accessories to manslaughter. ‘Shut them down!’, they cry, thinking they are signalling their concern for the public’s health when really they are advertising their profound contempt for freedom of thought and critical debate.

We do not know how badly the overreaction to this virus will hurt our economy or how many citizens will be financially ruined by the heavy-handed response. We can safely assume that measures to control the public, such as smartphone tracking, will be part of our lives from this day forward. That is not good.

What is also not good is our crappy main stream media. Here is the perfect example of how crappy they can be (hat tip to the Mark Margolis at PJ media):

Here are the top six countries by confirmed cases (based on the case numbers from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of 2:30 pm ET March 27) in descending order:

  1. USA (94,238)
  2. Italy (86,498)
  3. Spain (64,059)
  4. Germany (49,344)
  5. Iran (32,332)
  6. France (29,593)

Now, here are the top six countries by confirmed cases per capita (based on population numbers from the CIA World Factbook):

  1. Italy (1386.13)
  2. Spain (1280.78)
  3. Germany (615.57)
  4. France (436.17)
  5. Iran (380.72)
  6. USA (283.30)

The United States’ confirmed cases are the lowest of the top six countries affected by the virus. Yet the media and the shitbird democrats want you to believe we are far behind the curve because Orange Man Bad. This nightmare will end sooner than you think.  When it does, the United States has the lowest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases among the top six countries affected by the virus. However, the media and certain politicians want you to believe that we are lagging because of the negative portrayal of our former president. This challenging situation will come to an end sooner than you might expect. When it does, the public officials who demonstrated gross incompetence, exploited the crisis for personal gain, and refused to cooperate with the federal government due to partisan feelings should be voted out of office. Those politicians who filled the stimulus bill with typical Washington, D.C. waste should be regarded as social outcasts. The public officials who displayed gross incompetence, who used this crisis for personal gain, and who refused to work with the federal government because Orange Man Bad, should be voted out of office. The politicians who loaded the stimulus bill with traditional DC pork should become social pariahs.

The MSM is trying to make you believe that the coronavirus in the United States is spiraling out of control. They want you (you dumbasses) to understand Orange Man Bad when the majority of us think he’s doing a good job. However, the most egregious consequence of this crisis is the devastation of our economy. For that, the press, the alarmist governors, and the so-called “experts” who continue to cry wolf in the face of solid evidence that they are wrong should pay a steep price.   

No matter what happens, de Blasio, Schumer, Pelosi, and the female weirdo from Michigan will do fine because they have no skin in the game. Destroying our economy will not disrupt their lives; they don’t stand in line for toilet paper, they know there will always be a respirator and hospital bed for them, and they will always get a paycheck. They will always have well-compensated employment.

This crisis should spell the end of virtue signaling politicians. As this lockdown continues, we shall see what the consequences are for shills who ruined millions of American families for their own vanity. If this lasts for months, without the massive numbers of deaths we are being told are inevitable, there will be blood.

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Assessing Trust in The Afghan Peace Deal

Editor’s Note: Chim Chim is back with a post on FRI. It has been over a decade since we last heard from him  He is a friend of mine with years of experience in Afghanistan at the higher levels of the U.S. Intelligence community. It is fitting that he once again reaches out to Free Range International to weigh in with some thoughts on the Afghanistan peace deal.

 

Trust. It’s a mysterious term and rarely understood. Per its definition, key attributes exist such as reliability, truth, ability, and strength. Contrary to popular belief, trust is not earned but rather obtained through a leap of faith. It is natural and can easily be broken. When it comes to the Afghan Peace Deal, trust is non-existent amongst the three players involved—The US Government, the Afghan Government, and the Taliban.

But should one look closely at the situation from an historical perspective, how can trust exist? More importantly, who can be trusted most? Better yet, who SHOULD be trusted most?

During the Russian-Afghan War, the United States was heavily involved in supporting multiple Afghan militias fighting against our greatest adversary. We gave and gave and gave but then, once the Russians were defeated, we put on the brakes. It was arguably one of the most devastating moments in US National Security that would inevitably come back and bite us hard.

We made countless promises to the Afghans and never came through with any of those promises which led to a major civil war between dozens of local tribes and militias. This civil war allowed the Taliban to blossom into a major organization which ruled Afghanistan for many years.

Immediately following 9-11, the United States went into a reactionary mode and was quick to invade Afghanistan on the logic that the Taliban were harboring Al Qaeda. Few realize during this time several nation states were providing safe haven to Al Qaeda during this time as Al Qaeda cells were spread across the globe. Another point of contention is the fact that the Taliban were in talks with Al Qaeda in an attempt to push them out of country instead forcing them into safe-haven in western Pakistan.

Our decision was made and teams of special operators infiltrated Afghanistan initiating America’s longest war. We did this with virtually zero ground truth, meaning, we had no sources or assets for intelligence on the ground prior to our invasion. Many whom we initially engaged in combat operations were nothing more than localized militias whom had little if anything to do with the Taliban (Central) meaning we were fighting tribesmen who would later turn to the Taliban due to our own actions.

Immediately following 9-11, Russia became an American strategic partner. We actually relied on Russia’s past to procure our initial network on the ground in Afghanistan.  The one country Afghans despise most, we became strategic partners with.

As time unfolded and upon immediate successes in achieving two goals set forth from US SOF elements (eliminate Al Qaeda’s safe-haven and rid Taliban of government control), a new force was inserted shortly after—the US Conventional military and State Department.

During this time, the United States threw billions of dollars into Afghanistan. It was during this period which continues even today, the United States implementation of a “quantifiable” approach to warfighting which completely overshadows anything qualitative.

America spent billions on programs that had virtually zero oversight. One example is based on school text books in which the United States and our coalition threw an estimated $30 million into the contract however it is estimated less than $1 million worth of product ever entered the country. HeraldExtra.com shows just a portion of the issue in their article titled, Textbooks not arriving in Afghan school.

The vast majority of funds displaced were not displaced. They were handed to local warlords, provincial governors, tribal leaders, etc. But if people want to see who the vast majority of individuals pocketed these funds, just walk down “Millionaire Row” in Kabul where you will find Afghan mansions vacant—vacant because those whom had such homes built have now fled the nation in fear of a Taliban takeover.

Prior to leaving, these local Afghans milked every last penny they could from the United States. It was the easiest way for anyone to get rich fast and rich as in millionaire rich. Simply put, the Afghan power-players created a racket and the United States didn’t care. More interesting is why we did not care.

We did not care about the misappropriations of funds because of the quantifiable war which we created. Those who held the money needed to get rid of it. And they did. And in doing so, they wrote their own tickets of success be it military personnel boasting numbers on OPER’s/EPR’s or State Department, NGO’s, etc fluffing resumes for permanent hire needs upon completion of their time in country.

What the United States did in Afghanistan does not demonstrate reliability, truth, ability, and strength hence, our inept methods in Afghanistan demonstrate how untrustworthy we are in our Afghan mission.

As bad as we were, the locals and politicians also demonstrated a lack of trust.

Afghan leaders saw how much money was going into Afghanistan. They witnessed their pockets flood with cash. They were empowered on a level most Americans should be jealous of. And as crazy as this sounds, many of these Afghans were closely aligned with Russia and Iran.

The Afghan Government was and continues to be incredibly corrupt.

In 2008, an Afghan warlord once said, “You expect us to believe in your own Rule of Law? You want us to trust the newly established Afghan Government’s Rule of Law which you, the Americans implemented? Do you not see how corrupt your own nation is? Look at the case of OJ Simpson.”

Think about this sentiment for a moment. Reflect on what this warlord was saying. You do not need to agree with what was said but think of the perception held. Perception is reality.

Another warlord once explained why the United States tactical intelligence was flawed. He explained that we would hand out cash to “walk-ins” for information about potential Taliban. We would take that information and execute a mission to kill or capture that individual. But what we seldom knew was the “walk-in” was merely in a tribal dispute with the target. And oftentimes, the “walk-in” was actually the one more aligned with the Taliban than the target itself.

The Afghans manipulated the United States every waking chance they could. And, they succeeded in doing what they wished on individual levels as well as within different political parties. Simply put, the Afghan politicians as well as local leaders demonstrated virtually zero reliability or truth which showcases why they were and remain untrustworthy.

The United States knew the Taliban were our enemy in Afghanistan. The Taliban ensured we were never to forget this. Through video’s published online, a plethora of kidnappings, to constantly attacking our assets, the Taliban and the array of Anti-Afghan Forces never led up.

If early warnings existed pertaining a potential attack, the Taliban came through with it. If the Taliban claimed they would allow for a temporary ceasefire, that ceasefire pretty much always happened. If a break of the ceasefire was sent through the air waves, expect the attack. They TOLD us pretty much every single move they were going to make. Their information was reliable, it was constantly set in truth, and they demonstrated over and over again their ability to do what they said. And, their strength came from not just their numbers but rather the constant support they obtained through the Pakistani ISI, Iranian assets, and the Kremlin itself.

If you watch the evening news and see a report on a serial murderer then take a walk in the woods and come across that serial murderer, do you trust the serial murderer’s potential? You would be a fool not to. The point is, trust in an entity you do not like does not mean trust should not exist. Bad people and bad organizations should be trusted to do bad things.

What is difficult to swallow is when we possess trust in something we cherish and realize that which we cherish most should be the least trusted. In the case of the Afghan Peace Deal, maybe, just maybe, it is not the Taliban who should NOT be trusted. Rather, maybe we should be skeptical over the amount of trust we place in the Afghan Government and that of our own.

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