Enola Holmes 3 - Netflix Movie

Enola Holmes 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Stupid bit of fluff, although we do get to visit Malta, and Khost gets mentioned, which can lead to a rathole from which there is no escape, at least not without getting half of your army killed and spending a king's fortune and bankrupting your country.

Previous Enola posts:

• Enola Holmes
• Enola Holmes 2 | Official Trailer: Part 1 | Netflix

I'd never hear of Khost, so I had to look on a map:

Northern Pakistan
Khost is at the lower left. Map shown is about 300 miles across.

Several big cities in this area.

Afghanistan

Khost

Looks like fairly level ground, river runs through the town, and the entire area is ringed by mountains or at least serious hills.

Update August 2026 fixed missing links. Don't know how that happened.

Gunday Monday

RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade) by front door

Saw this image on Bustednuckles and I'm thinking this is serious home defense. And then I noticed the rug on the floor.

Afghan War Rug

Buzkashi

Buzkashi, the sport that uses dead goats as the ball, a breakdown
Jomboy Media

Aljazeera got me started.

Wild

Show of Afghanistan army
yadullah marvi

I don't think I've ever seen this particular combination of two very common devices.

The impossible truth about Afghanistan

Liza Anvary, an Afghan refugee (Ximena Borrazas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The impossible truth about Afghanistan by Cheryl Benard on Unherd opens with this:

In “The Impossible Fact”, the 20th-century German poet Christian Morgenstern tells the story of an academic who undergoes a traumatising experience. He staggers home, wraps damp cloths around his forehead and collapses into his armchair to process what has happened. In the end, he comforts himself by concluding that he must have imagined the whole thing, because if something “shouldn’t be true, it can’t be true”.

She goes on to liken our western foreign policy experts to this academic because what is happening in Afghanistan is not what they expected, therefor it must not be true. She points out the discrepencies between what our western experts say must be happening and what has actually happened in Afghanistan. I like it because it reinforces my opinion that the people in charge of our foreign policy are a pack of raving hyenas that have no idea what they are doing.

She does dabble in women's rights, but I think that is pretty much wishful thinking. Hill people steeped in Islam are not going to be inclined to change their ways, especially on the advice of raving hyenas.

More Bananastan

Taliban fly US Black Hawk helicopter above military parade in Kandahar
The Telegraph

I put up one post about this, or maybe a couple, and I thought that would be enough, but someone put some Ovaltine in my Cheerios or something, and this article on RT pushed me over the edge.

Our withdrawal from Afghanistan looks like the biggest screw up since I don't know what. Maybe in the history of the world, I dunno. It's completely inexplicable. It's so bad that no one has even tried to explain it.

I mean, who the fuck is in charge anyway? Biden? Somehow I don't think so. He might be in charge of his faction, but he's not in charge of the military. Apparently no one is.

See my previous post on the subject for some speculation on what's going on.

The Continuing Story of Afghanistan Bananastan

Current Status: Undetermined

It strikes me as a little odd that we haven't heard anything about how we managed to make such a mess of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. All I have heard is that the President really screwed up, but the President is just one guy in Washington D. C. Don't we have a giant military organization that is supposed to do the actual job of moving troops, supplies and support structures around? Don't we have a State Department that is supposed to oversee government employees who are stationed overseas? I mean how did this situation get so fucked up? 

Maybe I'm not connected to the right news sources. Seems unlikely, anyone who has anything to say at all, their word gets spread all over the net.

The Fire of Rome, 18 July 64 AD' by Hubert Robert

Borepatch gave me a clue. He points to The Intrepid Reporter, Bayou Renaissance Man and Charles Hugh Smith. Here's a line from the last:

It's not yet clear that there is any leadership left in America. What's playing on stage are warring camps of self-interested elites fighting to secure their power even as the foundations crumble beneath their feet. - CHS

Execution of Czar Nicolas II of Russia - Leemage/UIG/Getty Images

What I gathered from these guys is that there is a big fight going on between multiple factions: the entrenched political establishment, the military, the intelligence community (NSA, CIA, FBI et al.) and the new tech oligarchs. In light of this, the 25,000 troops deployed in Washington D. C. back in January starts to make sense. It wasn't because of the 'insurrection' by a bunch of tourists, that was just a pretext. It was because someone in the government was afraid of a real coup coming from one of the other factions.

Good Job, Joe Biden

Taliban Raising their flag in Afghanistan

Truth be told, the Taliban might have done this even if our pull-out from Afghanistan had been properly organized. Since it was so FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition), it is likely that this is how we will remember it.

I am sure that most of working people in the USA, whether they are working for the government or industry, are honest, industrious individuals. But when you get into the higher ranks of big organizations, and especially in the government, you get more people who are more concerned with making themselves look good and making other people look bad, and are not concerned about whether they are doing the right thing, much less whether they are doing a good job. These are the boot lickers, ass kissers, slimy back stabbers, swamp scum that populate Washington D. C.

I feel a song coming on.

The O'Jays - Back Stabbers (Official Soul Train Video)
Philadelphia International Records

From 1972. The Vietnam war was going strong.

Afghanistan Bananistan

Afghanistan Bananistan
Jeffrey Wells
This is a scene from the movie The Hot Rock:

With the help of a hypnotist by the name of Miasmo, Dortmunder sets up his own safe deposit box to get access to the vault and then plans to invoke the predetermined hypnotic trigger phrase "Afghanistan banana stand" to the vault guard. He then would be able to gain access to Abe's safe deposit box and retrieve the gem just after the bank opens in the morning.

Everytime I hear something about the mess in Afghanistan I am reminded of this phrase. It somehow seems appropriate. Perhaps someone should have mentioned it to President Bush back we first got involved here.

Daniel Greenfield has a good post about what happened: The Afghan Army Didn't Surrender: It Rejoined Its Tribes

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Failing Conventionally

Chaos outside Kabul Airport as crowds of people try to leave Afghanistan
POLITICO

I'm skimming the news this morning and all I am seeing is the cluster-fuck in Afghanistan and the usual hash about COVID. The mess in Afghanistan makes me wonder if anyone had considered what would happen when the US pulled out, or whether whoever was in charge thought it was obvious what would happen and that anyone with a brain would have packed their bags and gotten out a long time ago. I mean WTF? Anyway, stupidity as usual, nothing of much interest.

Major Russian Gas Pipelines to Europe
Novy Urengoy is the dot in the upper right hand corner.

There was a story about how the flow of natural gas from Russia to Germany has dropped by half. This is through the existing pipeline that goes through the Ukraine, not the new Nord Stream pipeline that goes under the Baltic. I'm not sure that one is operational yet. The story was some kind of attempt to cast it as a political move. 

Firefighters spead water on a fire at a Gazprom gas condensate plant near the city of Novy Urengoy in Western Siberia, Russia, Aug. 6, 2021. (Photo by Russian Emergency Ministry via AFP)

However, there was a big fire at a processing plant in Russia recently. You don't suppose that could have anything to do with it, do you? Freaking morons dragging politics into the real world. Leave politics in the imaginary world where it belongs.

Anyway, I did find this bit. It reiterates things we already know, but it's nice to hear a voice of reason amidst all the flak.

Failing Conventionally by Michael Every of Rabobank

85 years ago, the economist Keynes noted cynically in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money that:

“It is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

In other words, it’s better not to deviate from the market consensus or benchmark, even if that consensus or benchmark is wrong, because even if everything then goes wrong, at least you can say that *you* were not to blame individually - “the market” was.

85 years later, with advances in technology, society, and political geography few would have believed possible, what has changed in that investment mentality? In an age that champions diversity, do we have any greater freedom to take strong off-benchmark/consensus views, or do we still herd towards them regardless of knowing that a series of exculpatory individual “Whocouldanooed?”s after a crash does not compensate for the damage done by everyone being collectively wrong?

He goes on at some length after this, but it's all about current events affecting the markets, and I just don't want to know.

Deja Vu All Over Again

American Chinook Helicopter landing at U. S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan

Nothing has changed. Ever since the end of WW2, American foreign policy has been like a rampaging bull in a China shop. Now that I think about it, that was our policy during WW2 as well. It worked so well that we won the war. It worked so well, we just kept on doing the same thing. Have we learned anything? Nah, I expect we'll be up to our ears in another quagmire in short order.

P. S. Title history.

Via Liberal Guy

Taliban kicked Jews out of prison for arguing too much

The last Jews in Afghanistan argued so much the Taliban kicked them out of prison and stole their Torah. - Israel National News

Best thing I've read all day.

Via  parliament613

Girls with Guns

December 23, 2013. Rachel Washburn, former cheerleader for the Philadelphia Eagles, in a village in Afghanistan. Rachel is a first lieutenant in the United States Army and recipient of The Bronze Star. 

Stumbled over this while looking for pictures of tanks for a previous post. What strikes me about this picture is that even though her face only occupies an area about 50 pixels square, I still register the image as that of a beautiful woman. Are there other factors at work here? Like the text? Or perhaps it's the contrast with her companions in the photo.

Lone Survivor

Ben Foster as Matt 'Axe' Axelson

Grim little story of four Navy SEALS who are dropped off in lower Slobovia, sorry, some obscure part of Afghanistan, to take out a Taliban honcho. As you can tell from the title, things do not go well. It's a true story, though the movie was made in Hollywood, so some liberties have been taken.
    One interesting thing about this movie was the mountains. I've climbed a couple of hills, and any time I got above 10,000 feet it was a friggin' struggle, but then I have a flaky heartbeat. Robert Kaplan in Soldiers of God talks about how once Afghans are away from town they can walk up mountains without even breathing hard. Here we have Navy SEALS, young men in their prime, trained to perfection, and climbing this hill is a chore even for them. Which makes me think that maybe they should have done a little more high altitude acclimatization. On the other hand, this was a movie, and maybe the cues I picked up didn't accurately portray these soldiers tolerance for moderately high altitudes.
     Our guys did manage to kill a bunch of the ragheads, which makes me think that we do know how to train our soldiers. Still, ten to one is not good odds, even if you are ten times better than your opponents. That just makes it about even.

The World's Deadliest Arms Race

The World's Deadliest Arms Race
Tsar
This video is just over a year old. There is some good reporting being done, I'm just not in touch. Searching itv dot com website turns up lots of results for Exposure (the name of the show), but nothing for the name of the video. Likewise, National Geographic only has the last segment. Thank god for YouTube.

The prime ingredient in the bombs is ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Some people say it is coming from Pakistan, Pakistan says there are other countries around Afghanistan that could be the source. Doesn't really matter. It would only take 1% of Pakistan's production to supply the bomb makers with all they need. From an ABC news story from January of this year:

"It's like narcotics crossing the U.S. border," said the senior U.S. military intelligence official. "We don't know if we're getting 1 percent or 10 percent that's crossing." 

Update April 2016 replaced missing video. While it has the same title, I suspect it is not the same as the one I posted originally. That one produces this message:

This video has been removed for violating YouTube's policy on spam, deceptive practices, and scams.

Seems the makers of that video made a couple of errors.

Update March 2019 replaced missing video.

Update March 2021 replaced missing video.

Pic of the Day

Anonymous Donkey and Unidentified Soldier

By Beowolf, from Military Photos dot net. God forbid somebody should recognize the donkey.

Update May 2021 replaced missing photo.

COINTELPRO & Afghanistan

COINTELPRO & Afghanistan do not have much to do with each other, but looking into the first got me to thinking about how nations get to be the way they are. I have been thinking about Afghanistan lately and what we should do, so the two topics got connected by "nation building" and this is what we get.

Tam put up a post this morning that mentioned COINTELPRO, which I had not heard of, so I just had to look it up. The Wikipedia article on it makes it look like an evil government conspiracy, and it pretty much was (is?). The FBI was targeting a whole bunch of groups. They start listing them and they are all peaceful, liberal, "good" groups, and then they mention the Ku Klux Klan. What? How did that EVIL organization get lumped in with all those good groups? Which just goes to show that not everybody has the same idea of good and evil.

Then we come across this little blurb:

The Church Committee documented a history of FBI directors using the agency for purposes of political repression as far back as World War I, through the 1920s, when they were charged with rounding up "anarchists and revolutionaries" for deportation, and then building from 1936 through 1976.

Which made me think that these operations, however we view them now, had a part in making our country what it is today. Whatever that may be.

Let me change direction here and talk about Afghanistan for a minute. We have gotten ourselves into a quagmire there, much like the Russians did umpteen years ago. A big part of the problem is we are a nation with 21st century sensibilities fighting a bunch of 15th century barbarians, with guns, in the mountains.

I am thinking we need to pull back to a small area near a border with a friendly country. Oops, wait a minute, are there any countries bordering Afghanistan that are friendly to the US? Let's see who the candidates are:


View Larger Map

Iran is definitely not friendly. Pakistan may be "friendly", but I wouldn't trust them with a pack of cigarettes. Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan used to be part of the USSR. China has a little bit of border, but I'm pretty sure they aren't our friends. That whole part of the world is pretty much a disaster. It's a desert populated with Moslems. There isn't any green until you get to Pakistan, or up into the mountains in Central Asia.

Okay, this is looking grim. I am thinking the only way we are going to eliminate the Jihadists & Al Qaeda is to bring that area into the present, and they are so far lost in the past that it is going to take lot of doing and a lot of time to accomplish that. If we could establish a secure toehold with a school, a civilized community and a trading post, and we could build on that for a hundred years, well, then we might achieve something. This business of pouring billions of dollars into a hole in the ground is a waste of time, money, and people.

Of course, the big problem is money. The only thing I know of that Afghanistan has that the rest of the world wants is opium. I suspect that it is the single largest export, bigger than anything else by a factor of ten. Outside of opium, Afghanistan is importing ten times as much as it is exporting. I guess that's not surprising since the US is involved.

I was going to say Afghanistan needs to become self-sufficient, and not depend on opium, but I'm wondering if that might be even more impossible than the current war we are fighting there.

Afghanistan Bananastan

Just read a story in the paper about finding 500,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Afghanistan (couldn't find the story on my paper's website, or the Times either, whence it supposedly came). They busted a couple of dozen people. It looks like they were using this stuff to make bombs. But then I thought: it could all be a put up job. Any countries biggest business is agriculture (big in volume of material and land area, not in money), and fertilizer has legitimate uses, like being used as fertilizer. So secret bomb material cache -or- legitimate fertilizer warehouse? Of course, having a bunch of other bomb making material on hand (like timers, wires, diesel fuel) does make it look a little suspicious. Of course, those items also have legitimate uses in agriculture. Farm equipment runs on diesel, irrigation needs timers, and timers need wires, and a dry place like Afghanistan could use some irrigation. So if it's not just the good ol' boys havin' a little fun, then we may have put a real crimp in bomb making in Afghanistan .

This whole Afghanistan thing has been percolating in the back of my mind lately, and I am beginning to wonder just why we are there. Our avowed purpose is to wipe out Al-Queda and terrorism in general, but we don't seem to be making any real progress there. I mean we are trying to stop the beaters from beating other people, and at the same time we are trying to teach them to be civilized, and all the while we are trying to pull the wagon train out of swamp where it has been mired for the last 500 years. I am beginning to think it is just all too much.

Then there is the conspiracy theory that says we want control of Afghanistan so we can build a pipeline to India. That one has to be really convoluted because the Russians would be using it to sell the oil to India. Okay, we could have some Russians and Indians in cahoots with some people in Washington to get this done, but man, the payoff time is in years, and iffy to boot. It's a stretch to believe something like that.

But then we have heroin. Whenever TV show detectives get some screwed up case that makes no sense, they fall back on the adage of "follow the money", and the only money in Afghanistan is in poppies. But then we still don't know who is benefiting from the US being there. Are we trying to make Afghanistan safe for heroin producers? Or are we trying to gain control so we can suppress it, because Afghan heroin is competing with SE Asian heroin, and somebody doesn't like that.

Title comes from a line in the movie The Hot Rock. It seems to be a popular title for articles this week.