“Governor Greg Abbott today tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. The governor has been testing daily, and today was the first positive test result. Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently.
The governor will isolate in the Governor’s Mansion and continue to test daily. Governor Abbott is receiving regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment.”
Abbott received the coronavirus vaccine and can now be considered one of the “breakthrough“ cases
The Biden Administration, still reeling from its sloppy withdrawal from Afghanistan, is trying to put focus back on the coronavirus in the United States.
There are rumors that an announcement will be coming eminently that will recommend booster shots for nearly all Americans who received the COVID-19 vaccine, either within the past eight months or eight months ago.
Also word is that Johnson and Johnson vaccinated people will have to also get a booster, or else suffer potential consequences of the Delta variant…
What makes all of this confusing is the fact that it’s confusing! Only days ago the FDA and CDC and other alphabet health organizations or publicly stating that there would be no need for booster shots. That the MNRA vaccines, mostly they have excluded Johnson & Johnson from commentary, or affective against the variance.
However it would appear that the White House could’ve looked at Israel data, which shows that there was some susceptibility for people who are vaccinated to still succumb to the Delta variant..
So what’s next?
COVID-19 will be considerably more of a political football, it will still ravage, some will still call it fake, others will still wear 2500 masks, and the beat will go on…
But hopefully the death toll and hospitalization rate does not continue to go on, as it has been immense.
Today was a bad, bad day for President Joe Biden. But maybe worse for the United States.. and global stability..
The collapse of the Afghan government is the biggest foreign policy crisis of Biden’s presidency at this point..recalling setbacks for past presidents such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. The AP wrote in a fresh dispatch that the reverberations of the Taliban’s success were startling, endangering Afghan women and girls, posing new security threats and threatening to undercut global views of America’s reliability..
After Biden addressed the nation around 4pm, he flew back to Camp David again..
As he boarded Marine One, an image of him saluting appeared to featuring him covered in the late summer flies of August.
Other images showcased today are not pleasant.. they are actually graphic.
The fall of Saigon and Kabul are perfectly compared in this photo, chilling in similarities:
Other images were more harrowing.
People hanging on for dear life as a plane leaving the nation was swarmed with civilians attempting to escape for their lives… At least two died as they fell from the aircraft as it reached into the sky..
A war, 20 years in the making.. and an ending of the Taliban taking back over in just 20 hours …
Disturbing reports are already emerging from Afghanistan as the government collapsed and the Taliban seized power once again nearly 20 years after being driven out by the West.
There have already been reports throughout the advance of the Taliban of women being shot dead and girls as young as 12 being dragged from their homes to be “married”. Afghanistan’s descent into chaos has seen unverified reports emerge of thousands gathering to witness an execution in Kandahar at a sports stadium.
The media began to turn on Biden tonight in pure feeding frenzy style — even the fans at CNN and MSNBC questioned the Commander in Chief over decisions made in the past few days.
Decisions that included promises that the Taliban’s advance would NEVER be as fast it was..
Throughout the weekend, Biden had remained at the presidential retreat, receiving briefings on screens or over the phone while sitting alone at conference table. Advisers huddled separately to discuss when and how he should address the situation. When he returned to the White House midday Monday, many of his aides assumed he would at least spend the night. Yet almost as soon as Biden touched down in Washington, word went out that his stay at the executive mansion would be brief. After his 18-minute speech, Biden quickly decamped again for the mountains.
Meanwhile on Peacock: Former CIA Analyst and US veteran Matt Zeller said he was “appalled” by Joe Biden’s Afghanistan speech on Monday…
U.S. Army veteran Matt Zeller goes off on MSNBC about Biden’s remarks on Afghanistan:
Zeller: “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled.” pic.twitter.com/eGC5tMBvy4
Those who made big pronouncements in 2001 when we invaded, all the while the smoke was still billowing out and embers were still smoldering at Ground Zero ….?
Bush? Cheney? Obama? Trump? Biden?
This war went on, and on, and on for 2 decades.
5 presidents
American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.
U.S. contractors: 3,846.
Afghan national military and police: 66,000.
Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144.
Developing story has security experts worried, and should be forcing 100 million users to have equal fears.
According to reports, a security breach of at least 100 million T-Mobile users has occurred.
Along with the data that has been potentially breached, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, names, physical addresses, and even drivers license information..
According to what is known, Tmobile was first alerted to the breach by a forum post in which a hacker claimed to be selling huge amounts of personal data on people.
The alleged sleuth is requesting six bitcoin – or roughly $260,000 – in exchange for a subset of the data which contains 30 million social security numbers and driver’s licenses, VICE reports.
The seller suggested that T-Mobile had already responded to the breach, adding: “I think they already found out because we lost access to the backdoored servers.”
While the hacker has been removed from the hacked server, they claim they had already downloaded the data locally.
We found a great video on YouTube that profile some of the news coverage from October 2001 when the United States lead invasion of Afghanistan began.
https://youtu.be/2ndbfr1qrkE
And now, nearly 20 years later, thousands of United States soldiers injured and dead, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed. Trillion spent. And assurances from President Joe Biden in July that there would never be an immediate takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Despite all that, despite the war, and 20 years of division, the Taliban took over the entire nation in Capitol, route it out translators who helped United States, began to enforce a Burka policy on women, and stops females from working in the banking industry. All in hours.Despite all that, despite the war, and 20 years of division, the Taliban took over the entire nation in Capitol, route it out translators who helped United States, began to enforce a Burka policy on women, and stops females from working in the banking industry. All in hours.
What are the war was a necessity or choice, and whether you feel it was successful as a venture or a failure, we know this: 20 years of military and tactical battle, all wiped out in 20 hours..
Clyde Lewis posted this yesterday, a photo comparing it with drawl mission from Saigon to the withdrawal mission from Afghanistan. Both look similar, with the Chinook helicopter front and center on top of a building that seemingly looks like it could be the same exact, just update it.
Life is filled with synchronicity‘s. You never know what you’re going to get.
The rapid fall of Afghanistan’s national forces and government has come as a shock to Biden and senior members of his administration, who only last month believed it could take months before the civilian government in Kabul fell – allowing a period of time after American troops left before the full consequences of the withdrawal were laid bare..
We have written about Mr. Leeds before. His name comes from the film LADY IN THE WATER. That movie was panned by critics and remains one of the most unpopular of the M. Night Shyamalan films–but we have always loved it. It’s a bed time story, a fable, and a beautiful tale about mundane lives of human beings that can become extraordinary when you least expect it. And characters who rise to an occasion as they are all equipped with hidden talents and deep purpose. True purpose..
In the film, Mr. Leeds plays an important role.. Played by actor Bill Irwin, Leeds is one of the tenants in the apartment building where a magical fairy tale will soon ensue.. but until it does, he is busy daily watching his television set of the latest scenes of chaos, strife, warfare and murder across the planet.
Shyamalan presents him as a stoic man, someone who watches chilling news broadcasts play out 24/7 in his living room in a silent agony.
So often through the years, when big news occurred, I pictured Mr. Leeds continuing to watch developments with his expressionless face–but taking it all in and craving for peace and love to take over the planet.
During LADY IN THE WATER, Leeds questions whether humanity should be saved in his dialogue in the film. He goes on to inspire the main character of the film at the most crucial time. And it leads to redemption–redemption of the entire group of apartment misfits that never realized the power of humanity to work as one.
2020 TO THE ‘NORMAL’
During the 2020 presidential race and COVID pandemic, we were reminded by the media and purveyors of clickbait on the socials that everything was wrong. Upside down. Abnormal..
The kind of life that even had Mr. Leeds contemplating throwing in the towel.
After the tumultuous election and eventual Inauguration of Joe Biden, Mr. Leeds and all of us watched the media portray the new presidency as a return to “normal.” A return to the mundane.. the life that Mr. Leeds had previously gotten used to. Sure 2020 threw a number of wrenches into his life, but he wanted his typical 6 o’clock news back.
So as 2021 took flight, we were ready to get back into normal!
Back to work! Offices reopening.. businesses back! Vaccines rolling out and sleeves rolling up.
Until Delta. Until Lambda.. And until a brand new variant took hold across the southern United States, including Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and even beginning in some vaccinated Northern states..
What about normal?
THE ABNORMAL NORMAL
Mr. Leeds had become very used to warfare on his newscasts. Reports of battle lines, reports of casualties and coffins draped with American flags were his normal in LADY IN THE WATER.
But now a new normal is playing out. Mr. Leeds feels right back at home again as war begins to become the top story…
President Joe Biden on Saturday doubled down on his previous decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan despite the Taliban’s rapid advances. However he pledged to send more troops to evacuate civilians and warned the insurgents not to threaten that mission.
After consultations with his national security team, Biden said a total of “approximately 5,000” US soldiers — up from 3,000 — will now help organize evacuations and the end of the US mission after 20 years on the ground.
He warned the Taliban that any action “that puts US personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong US military response.”
“When I came to office,” Biden wrote, “I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500.”
Biden faced a choice as his presidency began, to either follow through on the deal, “or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.”
“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats,” he concluded. “I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
The working assumption in Biden’s inner circle had been that Kabul could hold for the short term, allowing the U.S. to stay diplomatically engaged and help Afghan women secure their rights beyond the U.S. withdrawal.
Some who read this today were not alive like us, and Mr. Leeds, in 1993.
During that year, when Bill Clinton launched a hasty withdrawal of troops (Bush put them there to feed the hungry and do a ‘humanitarian mission’ in 1992), things got out of control, as illustrated by this TIME magazine cover in October 1993:
Pictures on the cover: Michael Durant. He was held prisoner for 11 days..
The images can still be found today. Media had them at the time but immediately stopped showing.
But Mr. Leeds saw them.. It affected him greatly. It taught him the horrors of war, and the evils of humanity… He doesn’t forget.
And that, my friends, is why Mr. Leeds today is a little worried. A little concerned about what will occur in Afghanistan.
He is torn..
20 years in this nation, and for what?
For the same towns once liberated of the Taliban to be taken over by the Taliban two decades after 9/11..
Officially the Pentagon says there are about 2,500 American troops serving in Afghanistan as part of an advise-and-assist mission to help Afghan security forces. However, U.S. officials have acknowledged the number is higher as U.S. counterterrorism forces are not counted in the official training mission number.
As the Taliban takes hold, inch by inch, women are back in Burqas. Where are the Woke Crowds to lament? People are back in fear.. Mr. Leeds knows that we cannot be nation builders. But what is the right way to withdraw vs. the wrong way..? What is worse?
According to USGS, today’s earthquake occurred as the result of oblique reverse motion along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone which is roughly 75 miles west of the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. “The earthquake occurred at shallow depths on either a reverse fault striking west and dipping to the north with a component of left-lateral slip, or a fault striking southeast and dipping to the southwest with a component of right-lateral slip,” the USGS said in a report. “At the location of the earthquake, the local plate boundary is dominated by left-lateral strike slip motion and compression. The plate boundary in this location accommodates eastward, left-lateral motion of the Caribbean plate relative to the North America plate. Within this context, the earthquake likely occurred on the east-west striking, north dipping fault plane with a component of left-lateral slip.”
Meanwhile the death toll is growing into the hundreds as more buildings, already unstable, become worse as aftershocks continue..
From Reuters dispatches:
The nearest big town was Les Cayes, where many buildings collapsed or suffered major damage, according to authorities, who said they were searching for survivors.
“I saw bodies being pulled out of the rubble, injured and perhaps dead people,” said Les Cayes resident Jean Marie Simon, 38, who was at the market when the earthquake struck and ran home to see if his family was safe. “I heard cries of pain everywhere I passed through.”
