By now surely you've seen this photo of 640 or so Afghans in Kabul yesterday?
That is not the Kabul Airport lobby. This is inside of the U.S. military plane that took them to Qatar. Did you notice how many were on the outside of some jets, and the unfortunate that fell from the sky while trying to cling on to the above departing flight?
Supposedly, we have already flown out 2000 high priority Afghans who were interpreters. How many more need to be saved? Including family, more than 100,000.
400,000 have already left, but those were the usual war emigrants. Who wants to go to
Tajikistan, but an offer has been made to take in 100,000 refugees from its neighboring Afghanistan.
Canada has promised to accept 20,000. The European Union has been chary.
How can the U.S. fly out more than 100,000 in a few days? You say they could have started weeks ago. But who knew the Taliban was going to take over the country in just a few days? Apparently not our intelligence community. I've used that 1975 Vietnam escape shot several times recently, but it certainly looks like what happened yesterday in Kabul.
Joe Biden's presidential address of this emergency was downright embarrassing. He mouthed the buck stops with me, but he also said the blame can be shared with the Trump Administration and Afghanistan leaders. Way back on July 8 he indicated that the U.S. military would leave the country by September. His huge mistake is as soon as he said that, he should have begun withdrawing those 100,000 Afghans in jeopardy. Many of them will now be executed, perhaps publicly.
The other blame-Biden issue is this new pandemic wave.
- The Delta variant was well-known in India six months ago in India.
- The spread was quick to the UK, South Africa and the Orient.
- As of July the variant was dominant in 124 countries.
- Early on it was known to increase virus load by a hundred, and contagion by a factor of two.
- True, WHO only assigned the label B.1.617.2 in May, but the Biden Administration, as it did to only approve emergency use of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in December of last year, should have, anticipating the opening of schools, had the foresight to do exactly the same to inoculate all children 5 years old and up.
- If the White House had done this earlier this summer, all K-12 students would by now have been safely vaccinated. Well, parents would have seriously objected, with good reason, so who knows what the vaccination rate would have been. But this current wave surely would have been dampened a bit, if not a lot.
- This group of zero to 12 accounts for just about 15% the U.S. population, and still today cannot be vaccinated. They are the super spreaders. You can also add many Republican governors.
But again, much of this is easy hindsight. Perhaps there is good reason for keeping this vaccine away from young children. We'll not know for years. Here is a recap of the
past history of vaccines and some long-term effects. Is any decision better than no decision? Perhaps not, but we don't know yet.
In the meantime, it is known that this Delta variant has already produced
up to 17 mutations. There is the
Delta Plus variant, which can be even more easily spread. The
Lambda C.37 first detected in Peru is swarming across South America, and might well not be effected much by non-mRNA vaccines, like those mostly used in the Orient. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appear to still be effective.
Oh well, enough griping for now. There are high school and college reunions. We've all been to a few. The cast and director of
Pretty Woman had a
25th Anniversary with Matt Lauer. Most of them had not seen each other for that long. This was one of those modern fairy tales that Rotten Tomatoes never really admired, bestowing
64/68 scores. The song
Oh Pretty Woman was co-written by Roy Orbison in 1964, reached #1 and was about his wife Claudette.
So has
Lauer recovered from those allegations of inappropriate workplace sexual behavior leading to his ouster from NBC's morning show in 2017, also resulting in his divorce? Interestingly enough, his current girlfriend, Shamin Abas,
looks like a twin of his former wife, Annette Roque. So I checked, and that clip of that 25th year reunion, which I just received from a friend yesterday, occurred in 2015, so Lauer hasn't yet been exonerated.
Finally, I recently looked at an email from United Airlines and saw that my lifetime miles was 2,385,180. The number of viewers to this blog site is approaching 2.385 million. My next United flight will probably be in January of 2022 to Los Angeles. Seems certain that readership to
SIMPLE SOLUTIONS FOR PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY will exceed my Star Alliance miles before that trip. But you need to
go to my original blog site to see this.
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