News of the World: Afghanistan & COVID

The news of the world is most dominated these days by whatever fuckery is going on Afghanistan and whatever fuckery is going on with COVID-19.

Back on Thursday, August 19, 2021, I did a post called 

Afghanistan Fucks Itself where it may have seemed I wasn't taking the situation seriously enough.

Here is some my cogent analysis from that post: 

Joe Biden realizes we will never, ever unfuck Afghanistan.

Afghanistan can just fuck off.

The United States leaves and Afghanistan goes from fucked to more fucked. 

Afghanistan fucks itself.

Despite the absurdity of a post using "fuck" in every single sentence, I do think the situation in Afghanistan is very serious indeed.

And with the ISIS bombing of the airport in Kabul, the situation in Afghanistan is even more deadly serious.

Or to put in another way: Afghanistan Fucks Itself Even Harder.

There has been a long of hand wringing here in the ol' USA of whether or not President Joe Biden did the right thing in pulling our troops out of Afghanistan. Most of the hand wringing comes from political conservatives who never met a foreign relations problem that shouldn't be solved by shooting at it.  

For what it's worth, I think the decision to leave Afghanistan was the right one. After 20 years of expenditure of money, resources, materiel  and lives, we had nothing to show for our investments and our losses.  Whenever we left Afghanistan, be it tomorrow, next year or whenever, the odds were not in our favor we would leave behind a stable Afghanistan that was in our corner.  And we couldn't stay there forever despite the efforts of hard right hawks in Congress and the firm influence of the military industrial complex.  

The United States wasn't getting any younger or prettier and it was time to go. 

The other big question is whether or not President Joe Biden's exit from Afghanistan was handled correctly. Given how quickly the Afghan government and military capitulated to the Taliban, how much American military equipment is now in the hands of the Taliban and the thousands of desperate and frightened Afghans looks to get out of the country and away from the Taliban, the assessment of the execution of Biden's Afghanistan exit strategy doesn't look at all positive.  

The other big story is that the pandemic is still a thing, mostly because there is a concerted effort on the part of Republican governors to actively prevent communities from doing anything to limit the spread of COVID-19 and it's deadlier cousin, the Delta variant.

Florida is seeing surges in people ill with COVID reaching numbers equal to or greater than the height of the pandemic last year. But Gov. DeSantis is more concerned with preventing mandates for masks, social distancing and vaccines which in concert could be effectively rolling back the rate of infections and deaths in Florida.  

Gov. Abbott, despite actually coming down with this disease himself, is still actively blocking efforts for communities to help stem the tide of COVID in Texas.  Right now, if you need an ICU bed in Texas, you can't have one. Hospitals are maxed out. 

Despite the ready availability of a vaccine, there are people still looking for alternative treatments for COVID including horses de-wormer pills.  

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Mostly it's a partisan political divide.  Republicans, Trumpists, evangelical Christians and more of their ilk are actively engaged in resisting every common sense measure to curb the coronavirus which is actively making the pandemic worse.  

Or in other words...

Half of the United States fucks itself.