This afternoon’s rant The lesson of Barack Obama has been lost on so many men

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Among my friends are members of the black middle class who, despite their own accomplishments, find themselves engaged in a constant battle to intervene between their children and “the street,” as they refer to the ghetto/thug subculture. Even in suburbia and small towns, young black people are vulnerable to peer pressure not to “act white” (i.e., be studious, sober, law-abiding) and I suspect that many young Latinos have similar issues.

So the scenario I see is that the parents in the Gomez family managed to work their way out of urban poverty in Chicago, relocate to the tranquil town of Elkhart, only to watch their teenage sons succumb to the pressure to be “authentic,” to represent, as the kids say.

Instead of supporting those parents who want to keep their kids away from gang culture, liberal “activist” types actually encourage criminality by fomenting resentment of law enforcement.

I present to you another member of the black middle class, the former community organizer and former Senator from the Great State of Illinois. Handsome, articulate, charismatic, and popular, he ‘assimilated’ into mainstream American culture, was even able to defeat Her Heiress Apparent, and then be elected, twice, to the highest office in the land. This fine, upstanding gentleman did everything right, at least as far as getting elected — his policies while in office were repugnant — and should have shown other Americans of melanin that there really was a right way for them to succeed.

Yes, I hated his policies, and did not vote for him, other than in the 2008 Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, not for him, but against the odious Hillary Clinton, yet I had high hopes that his example would push the black community in the United States to do better, to more fully integrate into American society.

But, alas! so few of them seem to have learned the lesson of Barack Hussein Obama, and somehow think the way to success is to become rap “artists,” gang-bangers, absent teenaged fathers, and common street criminals.

Of course, there are a lot of black men in our country who do try to do things the right way. They find jobs, work hard at them, and do their best to support their families. The trouble is that we never hear about them; their lives are both steady and quiet. In my career, I’ve known hundreds of them, primarily as concrete mixer drivers, front end loader operators, and a couple of crane operators. They came to work every day, did their jobs, and went home at the end of the day. Three of them, Ike, Skip, and Joe — I won’t publish their full names — saved my sorry ass while I was learning on the job, in my first job with a ready-mixed concrete company.

But what we see and hear of today are the “men” who want to be brave, strong “outlaws,” thinking that shows how tough and masculine they are, will get them a lot of girls, and of course the tremendous monetary rewards they expect. Too lenient prosecutors like Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal loving Larry Krasner excuse their ever-increasing crimes, and eventually they are graduated to s(tuff) which gets them long stretches behind bars. Perhaps some think that “prison cred” is even better than “street cred,” if the sentences are short enough, but when they finally kill someone, they might spend twenty years behind bars, and twenty years of prison cred just leaves them out on the street after they get out, with no money, no skills other than crime, and they are behind the times when it comes to that.

Today’s left scream “MAGA!” and “raaaaacism!” against conservatives, but what we want is a civilized society, a civilized society which includes all people and races, behaving in a civilized manner and contributing positively to American society. We want immigrants who enter our country the right way and become upstanding members of our society. We need to return to the days when being on welfare was a stigma and not a goal or a way of life.

We need more Barack Obamas and far, far, far fewer George Floyds.

What did we achieve?

Captain Harry Wales in Afghanistan.

There was little choice for the United States to go into Afghanistan following the September 11th attacks. There were 2,459 American military deaths, along with 20,769 Americans wounded. Along with that were 1,822 civilian contractors and 18 Central Intelligence Agency operatives killed in the two months short of twenty years we were there. 457 British soldiers were killed there, and another 2,209 wounded seriously enough to be admitted to field hospitals.

Even His Royal Highness, Prince Henry of Wales, before he went bat guano insane over Meghan Markle, served in Afghanistan, as an Apache helicopter pilot.

Al Qaeda was routed reasonably quickly, although Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed until May 2, 2011, at a compound hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, lasted until July 31, 2022, after the United States had evacuated troops from the country, by an American drone strike at a villa in Kabul that he used.

Al Qaeda Is Back—and Thriving—in Afghanistan

The architects of 9/11 are profiting from gold and gem mines in the Taliban-led country.

By Lynne O’Donnell, a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. | March 22, 2024

Al Qaeda is back to its old tricks in Afghanistan. Much as it did before masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group is running militant training camps; sharing the profits of the Taliban’s illicit drug, mining, and smuggling enterprises; and funneling the proceeds to affiliated jihadi groups worldwide.

An unpublished report circulating among Western diplomats and U.N. officials details how deeply embedded the group once run by Osama bin Laden is in the Taliban’s operations, as they loot Afghanistan’s natural wealth and steal international aid meant to alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans.

The report was completed by a private, London-based threat analysis firm whose directors did not want to be identified. A copy was provided to Foreign Policy and its findings verified by independent sources. It is based on research conducted inside Afghanistan in recent months and includes a list of senior al Qaeda operatives and the roles they play in the Taliban’s administration.

To facilitate its ambitions, al Qaeda is raking in tens of millions of dollars a week from gold mines in Afghanistan’s northern Badakhshan and Takhar provinces that employ tens of thousands of workers and are protected by warlords friendly to the Taliban, the report says. The money represents a 25 percent share in proceeds from gold and gem mines; 11 gold mines are geolocated in the report. The money is shared with al Qaeda by the two Taliban factions: Sirajuddin Haqqani’s Kabul faction and Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s Kandahar faction, suggesting both leaders, widely regarded as archrivals, see a cozy relationship with al Qaeda as furthering their own interests as well as helping to entrench the group’s overall power.

There’s more at the original.

So, after going in and spending almost twenty years there, spending trillions of dollars and seeing over 2,000 American soldiers coming bad in body bags, all to destroy al Qaeda, the terrorist group are back.

The younger President George Bush included in the mission ousting and, supposedly, destroying the Taliban, the hardline Islamist faction which governed the country at the time. It wasn’t too difficult for American soldiers and Marines to kick the Taliban out of power, but, as we all know, the US, under President Donald Trump, negotiated a withdrawal from that abysmal place, though it wasn’t accomplished until August of 2021, under President Joe Biden. Naturally, under Mr Biden, the final departure was a complete mess and foul-up, in which 13 more Americans were killed, and the US handed power right back to the same Taliban President Bush swore would be driven from power.

And now we have this:

Taliban publish vice laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public

The Taliban say it’s mandatory for Afghan women to conceal their voices and bare faces in public

by The Associated Press | Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 12:19 PM EDT

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have issued a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public under new laws approved by the supreme leader in efforts to combat vice and promote virtue.

The laws were issued Wednesday after they were approved by supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, a government spokesman said. The Taliban had set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” after seizing power in 2021.

The ministry published its vice and virtue laws on Wednesday that cover aspects of everyday life like public transportation, music, shaving and celebrations.

They are set out in a 114-page, 35-article document seen by The Associated Press and are the first formal declaration of vice and virtue laws in Afghanistan since the takeover.

“Inshallah we assure you that this Islamic law will be of great help in the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice,” said ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq on Thursday.

There’s more at the original

Al Qaeda are back and the Taliban are back, returning to the same basic Islamist and authoritarian principles they imposed in their previous regime. And that, along with the failure of democracy in Iraq, raises the obvious question: what the f(ornicate) did we gain from all of the blood spilled and all of the treasure burned up and blown up?

President Bush was seduced by Natan Sharansky’s and Ron Dermer’s book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, in which the authors argued that the only moral foreign policy is to expand democracy across the world, and that once a people experience democracy, they will want to keep it. More, democracies will never be aggressors against their neighbors. Mr Bush tried to impose democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan — remember the purple-stained ‘I voted’ fingers? — but once American soldiers were not there to enforce democracy, it just never took.

Democracy is an artifact of Western civilization, a development of northern European and American culture. We managed to impose democracy on Japan and South Korea, but only after they had been completely devastated by war, and much of their military aged male population were killed or wounded. Those nations have copied and assimilated Western culture to the extent that they could. Israel is a Western democracy because it was resettled by Jews fleeing from Europe.

But let’s tell the truth here: We will never see true democracy or Western civilization in the Muslim Middle East, and we should not be naïve enough to waste our money and our blood on trying to push it. Iraq and Afghanistan are abject lessons in this.

Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right Aren't the left at least somewhat aware that they still depend upon a civilized society for their lives, property, safety, and professions?

I have previously mused that Philadelphia Inquirer main editorial writer Daniel Pearson could actually be a conservative, though ‘moderate Democrat’ would probably be far closer to the truth. Though Mr Pearson is not the Editorial Page Editor, I would guess that he has some influence. And I have noted how the newspaper has granted outside OpEd space to people who seem to share their general editorial positions.

That seems to have led to this:

Why Pa. should deploy the National Guard to SEPTA right now

Unless conditions improve, SEPTA’s survival is at stake. Deploying the National Guard can bring riders back and make SEPTA safe for everyone.

by Brian Pollitt, for the Inquirer | Wednesday, April 3, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

When a bus shows signs of a mechanical problem, you call a mechanic. The goal is to do preventive maintenance, rather than waiting for a complete failure. But if buses and stations are plagued by a breakdown of civil society, who do you call?

I’ll admit it: upon that last, the movie there, “Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” ran through my head. 🙂 Continue reading