It stopped raining and the sun is shining! I kept getting flood warnings on my phone and I figured we were in for 40 days and 40 nights of rain. The dove I sent out came back with an olive branch, I guess it’s safe to go out for my walk now. You can thank Hurricane/Tropical Storm Henri for the rain. My apartment stayed dry, so it didn’t affect me at all. For all I know the first floor could have been under water. I have a talent for sheltering in place. I had my computer, TV, food, and a telephone to talk to people. Everything else is a luxury. I made serious dinners, cheesesteak and pork loin. It’s been a long time since I was able to find shaved beef for the cheesesteak. The one thing I was missing was garlic. I thought I had a few bulbs but was wrong. I should pick some up when I go out. I should walk extra far as I have not left the house for days.
I took advantage of the enforced staying at home and finished Gord’s Gold early. I could easily handle several more hours a week. My ideal would be to have a three- or four-hour weekly show of freeform radio. I’m working on future shows as I write this; I’m playing songs at random from my collection. It’s easy to forget some of what’s there. Here’s an appropriate one for today, After the Rain Falls by Cliff Eberhardt. That’s followed by Talk About the Weather by Jim Boggia, I think Windows Media Player has not only become sentient but is checking in with my weather app.
I am not going to write about Afghanistan but feel I need to write about not writing about Afghanistan. I don’t know enough to give an opinion that anyone should care about. I do know enough to know how ignorant I am, which is more than many people can say. Most of what I see and hear is people using the disaster there to bolster whatever beliefs they held prior to the collapse of the government. Do you know what would have happened if we hadn’t pulled out or pulled out differently or never gone in in the first place? If you do, you’re lying to yourself. Leave those speculations to the writer of Marvel’s What If? Things worked out pretty much as I expected, but that doesn’t mean I was right. I do feel confident that the pulling out just because we’ve been there 20-years or that it was America’s longest war is an invalid reason. It’s the same sort of reasoning people use when they think they should or shouldn’t do something because they are some age. It’s as wrong as those that say, “We’ve been there too long and put in too much effort for to let the Taliban win now.” That has a name, the sunk cost fallacy. The other fallacy probably has a name too. People ignore the inconvenient truths, inconvenient to their preferred world view. Some people ignore Afghan deaths, and some ignore that a generation of women were allowed to get an education. The only people I know are wrong are those that are sure they are right.
Here is a song by the one person I know personally whose opinion on Afghanistan carries weight; Fred Smith served there as a peacekeeper for the Australian Foreign Service.
Wise Madness 