Tea and Vitriol

The final hours of 2022 are upon us. Tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of people are planning to go out to celebrate New Year's Eve after nearly two years of government-imposed isolation and restrictions across the globe to "combat" the Corona Virus. Bars and nightclubs will be offering tacky paper hats and noisemakers, as well as a plastic cup of cheap champagne at midnight to ring in the new year to customers, who will be drinking at regular prices throughout the evening. All the while, the patrons will be shrieking to each other at how much fun they're having. I hope they will be. They are the ones who weren't invited to anyone's parties. News Year's Eve is usually regarded as amateur night for drinkers, which is why the various law enforcement agencies will be out at full force. Hopefully those partiers will be up and about by January 3rd. For myself, I am not particularly nostalgic about the passing of 2022 nor particularly hopeful for 20

  Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban this past weekend and with it the effective government of that nation. It was not unexpected. The US and our NATO allies have been leaving for months, although there was still a sizable US presence in Afghanistan, as well as tens of thousands of native Afghanis who were associated with the Western Powers whose lives were therefore at risk after our departure. What shocked the world is the swiftness with which the Taliban captured Kabul, since the US blithely informed everyone that such an event was months away and the the western withdrawal could continue in a slow, steady pace. Then, pow! The Taliban took over, chaos reigned in Kabul as tens of thousands of people tried to get to the airport to escape on US transports out of the country, more Americans were trapped in other parts of Afghanistan... And President Joe Biden? He was on vacation. Yet, there was a sense of deja vu about this. We HAD been there before, in Saigon, when