 I thought I'd say a little bit about Afghanistan. I've talked so much about Afghanistan. I feel a little, I'm sick of it, the whole topic, but a few things have happened. Since we last talked, I don't think I've done a show since 13 Marines were killed. I can't remember. Did I do a show since 13 Marines again? I don't think so. And the news this afternoon is, of course, that the last airplane has left the Afghan airports, the airport in Kabul, and we're done, the last American soldiers. I'm sure there's a bunch of special forces on the ground all over Afghanistan, but the bulk of the American troops are out of the country and gone. So we have been officially now, oh, look, Thomas is both here and there. Thomas is both doing super chat and in the live audience right here. That's cool. Thanks, Tom. We have now been officially defeated. We have now left Afghanistan with the tail between our legs. We have now, our last troops have left. The Taliban is in charge. The Taliban is as complete control, well, not complete control, but as control over most of the country, there was a little bit of opposition in the North where if you remember before 2001, there was a Northern Alliance. That area is probably gonna resist the Taliban rule for a while. It's not clear the Taliban has enough military strength to take them. So there'll be a small island of non-Taliban rule. I won't say freedom, because I doubt that the Northern Alliance is that free, but there'll be at least no crazy Islamists, I think they're much more pragmatic in their war up North. To me, it's just the whole thing has been unbelievable. I mean, the idea that the whole setup, the whole way in which this was executed, the pathetic nature of this, I'm waiting to see how many generals actually resigned as a consequence of the commander of the Afghan mission resigns if anybody in the Joint Chiefs of Staff or maybe the head of military intelligence is gonna resign over this, because this is a massive military failure. It's a political failure, but I don't expect Biden to resign. And I'm not sure I want him, given who's vice president, but it certainly is a massive intelligence failure, massive military failure, and they should be heads rolling. The fact is that the way this was executed, it just left it completely open for an attack on your troops. It was just a question of who would do it. It could have been one of, it could have been even much worse if one of the opposing groups within the Taliban decided to do it. They could have inflicted many, many more casualties in Americans. It could have been al-Qaeda, and of course it was, it turns out, or at least we're led to believe that it was a group of ISIS followers in Afghanistan doing this. It's humiliating, it's absurd, it's sickening, it's sickening to see another 13 American lives lost for no reason, really for no reason, in the name of defeat, in the name of the cowardice of our political leaders and of our military leaders, the unwillingness to actually win the war and unwillingness to actually inflict casualties. Of course, Biden the next day, like every American president has, we will get them, we're gonna cry, you know, the people responsible for this will pay a price and they put some, I don't know, aircraft or drones into the air and kill the leader of ISIS the next day. One of the things you should think about is, if the US military knew where the leader of ISIS was living so that within 24 hours they could kill him, or one of the leaders of ISIS, why didn't they kill him before? Why didn't they kill him a week ago, two weeks ago, a month ago, three months ago? Why wait until he actually killed 13 Americans before he killed him? If the military intelligence, and I believe they knew where ISIS is, they know this kind of stuff, if we know this, why aren't we actively crushing these people? Because we've given up on the idea of defeating them, we've given up on the idea of winning, we've given up on the idea of defending ourselves. ISIS has clearly dedicated to destruction and the motive of Americans, well, destruction is too big of a word because they're not gonna destroy America, but clearly dedicated to the killing of Americans and yet we know where they are, we know who their leaders are, we know where they're hiding and we do nothing, we just sit back and wait for them to strike us and then we act. This is the whole problem with the post, I'd say post-Bush conception of the war terrorism that is primarily almost dominantly reactive. We wait for them to kill some Americans and then we do something and it was the problem before 9-11. Bush had the right idea in the sense of taking the war to the enemy, but just the disaster in executing and his inability to understand the fact that this primarily was an ideological war and we lost the ideological war a month after 9-11 when Bush celebrated the Ramadan in the holy Muslim month at the White House a month after 9-11, which was a major travesty in my view. So tragic depressing, we left the several hundred Americans citizens in Afghanistan, one assumes that some of them didn't want to leave or that we couldn't get to them, who knows? I don't think there's any real good reporting or any good real information about why or who the hundreds of Americans who stayed in Afghanistan, what that is about, but clearly we didn't evacuate all American citizens. Again, hard to tell whether that was their choice or our choice. And then of course there are the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Afghans who helped Americans, who assisted the Americans and who have been abandoned in Afghanistan in spite of promises to get them out, promises that we have violated. What that airplane leaving Afghanistan today symbolizes I think for the world is that we cannot be trusted. I think it's that we will not stand by our word, we, i.e. America, that if you're an ally in the U.S., don't count on its support, you're on your own. You know, we're not gonna fight to protect you if push comes to shove, we will abandon you. Just like we abandoned our South Vietnamese allies in Hanoi in, was it 1974, we will do the same thing. We are doing the same thing now and we're likely to do the same thing in the future. America is weak, America will not fight, will not defeat its enemies, will not support its allies. I'm glad the troops out of Afghanistan, so at least none of them die for lost cause anymore. So in that sense, this is good. But this is not how it should have ended. This is not the right thing, it's just, it's given who we have as leaders given, but it's not just our leaders, it's American people. Given the philosophy of the American people, giving the willingness of the American people to demand victory or the lack of that willingness, at least well out of there, at least kids are not gonna die for nothing. Now the consequences of this and that is that you, you know, it would be shocking if Afghanistan does not become a center of terrorist activity. It'll be shocking of training bases for terrorists to strike against American interests around the world and not developed in Afghanistan over the next decade or two. There will be casualties. We're saving some soldiers by going home, but there will be casualties. Those casualties will just be long-term and they'll probably be civilians and they'll be elsewhere other than Afghanistan and a future president will, I can guarantee, evade the cause, evade the consequence and pretend, you know, and who knows how they'll fight? Who knows how they'll fight that war? What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. 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