If you have $6,500,000 spare, you should go for it. I won’t mind an invite 🙂

And the listing below.

FSBO.com | Lakeview, OR 97630 3-Bedroom, 2-Bathroom Farm/Ranch

So the Biden administration has been asking Americans, American allies, and others who are trapped in Afghanistan to register with the State Department so they could be evacuated. The state department then gave the Taliban that list.
…
They can’t be that stupid. It MUST be deliberate. By giving the Taliban this list, the Biden administration just signed the death warrant of each and every one of those people

It HAS to be deliberate – Area Ocho

Let  me tell you a little story. It is not as dramatic as what is happening right now with Americans in Kabul being snitched by our own State Department, but it is why I do also believe it was deliberately.

After the missus and I married, we started proceedings to get her the necessary local  IDs and since she married a national, she automatically became a Venezuelan citizen. As everything government paperwork down there, it was a hot mess, slow and with rules and stupidity almost beyond comprehension and one of the things that happened was her US passport was retained/kept/got lost (Take your pick) and for a while she has no valid ID whatsoever. She is a smart however and still had both her U.S. issued Drivers License, SS card and Birth Certificate so in a sense, if shit hit the fan, she could produce some sort of identification.

She eventually got both Venezuelan ID (cedula) and passport, but her US Passport was gone. And then her grandfather died and she wanted to go to his funeral, but she could not go back because lack of passport and airlines would not sell her a ticket without proof and she could not get a visa because she was actually an American Citizen which does not need one, but needs to prove it is one with a US passport which she did not have.

We went to the consular office in Caracas and explained to the bored-looking lady our issue. Her passport was for all intents lost and she needed a new one issued just like all the Americans in the past that had their passports lost or stolen while traveling abroad.  The Sate Department “lady” looked at us like we were bothering her and she was late to her afternoon blow job, so she produced a huge stack of forms, told her to fill the appropriate blank spaces and turning them in to her.

It was a lot of crap to be filled and my wife was not in the best of minds because she was grieving for her beloved grandfather. I was reading along and trying to make sense of what seemed an overly complicated document for a passport loss, so I went back to the counter and asked help on a couple of questions. There was a new person behind the glass, a young man who regretfully informed me that he could not help. WTF? I asked him again and after a quick glance sideways, he told me in hushed tones that he was ordered not to help my wife.

That triggered a whole slew of alarm bells in my head. I returned to my wife, told her to stop what was she doing that something was not right and we left the embassy post haste. She was not happy, in fact she was crying not understanding what was going on and the funeral for her grandfather was 2 days away. When we got home, I sat with the stack of papers and read them carefully. Do you guys know what the paperwork was truly about?  Not loss of a passport and requesting a new one, but a request to renounce American Citizenship abroad. The missus read the paperwork herself and boy did she got mad because the double whammy of not being able to say goodbye to her beloved grandpa and that some State department asshole bitch almost got her in serious shit for whatever petty reasons she may have had.

We contacted her dad and sent the paperwork that was given to us alongside sworn statements of what had happened. It took a congressional inquiry to get shit straight and almost a year of waiting before my wife was able to get a new passport which was handed to her directly by the vice consul with his apologies for the actions of the individual who was no longer a member of the staff, nor remained in Venezuela (she probably got reassigned somewhere nice but quiet while things cooled off).

Like I said, this was not a monumental fuck up like the one happening now or what happened in Benghazi, but if you trust the State Department, you risk that they will fuck your life on purpose because they can and there is no punishment if they do.

The name of the Secretary of State who is supposed to be running and directing the rescue of Americans in Afghanistan plus doing the normal Secretary of State things is Antony J. Blinken. Am I the only one whose brain defaults to the character Blinkin from “Robin Hood: Men in Tights”?

And if you think about it, it kinda fits.

From LawDog:

The American Embassy informed us that they were “working on a diplomatic solution” and to be patient.

Dad hired a dhow, and crew, and we got back to Malta. We got a parting gift from the Libyans in the form of several hundred rounds through the hull — I was two years old.

August 15, 1971. We were in Malta. We woke up to discover that President Nixon had “floated the dollar”. I remember picturing a man with a Lincoln beard standing on a dock, throwing dollar bills into the water. Unfortunately, this meant that our US bank account was worthless in Malta. Dad was somewhere in North Africa, and I remember the exhaustion of being dragged all over the island after Mom took us to the US Embassy and was told that “things were fluid” and they’d try to help when things stabilized. It was after dark before Mm found a store that took mercy on a mother with two small children and took American Express traveller’s cheques at face value for food. The Embassy never did get back to us, even after things “stabilized”.

1976. More rounds went through General Murtala Mohammed (and his driver) than the last four James Bond movies. Unfortunately, the rebelling soldiers miscalculated, and the counter-coup by the Army was … enthusiastic. As this wasn’t our first rodeo, as soon as Murtala quit bouncing we loaded up the Land Cruiser, and headed for Port Harcourt, where an oil rig supply vessel was waiting.

Three stewardesses who were visiting their engineer boy-friends headed for the American Consulate in Lagos. Two of them made it back, after being informed that they needed to go to the aeroport and get out of the country. The Nigerian Army had locked down the aeroport, and had twitchy trigger fingers. I sat in the lap of one of the stewardesses on the road to Port Harcourt, and she didn’t stop crying and shaking.

The were more evacs from African countries, and from a couple of Middle Eastern places, but we never approached the US Embassy for help again.

Even later, as a man grown and feral, I knew better than to rely on the Government for help.

Adrenaline and fear add a metallic odour to sweat. Blood is coppery. Someone inevitably loses control of their bladder and/or bowels, but that smell is actually not as bad as the smell of blood and terror.

There’s always dust. And some jackass always sets something on fire, so the smoke coats your mouth, and hangs in your nose.

Then there’s the smell of smokeless powder. And burnt bodies. That’s a smell that sticks in your nose for a while, but it’s not as bad as the smell that comes later, when the bodies have been out for a while.

People get together, huddling out of fear and uncertainty into a big herd of panicky people. Locals herd with locals. Foreigners with foreigners. And once they herd up, the scavengers show up and start picking off the weak.

One will have a brother who knows a way through the jungle, or around the military patrols. It only costs you most of your savings, and as soon as you get out in the boonies, it’s a rifle butt in the teeth and the rest of your savings taken. If you’re lucky. If not, it’s a bullet and a ditch, and they take the savings off of your body.

If you’re a man. Women quickly find out that as soon as things went into the khazi, they go from “person” to “commodity”. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

As bad as all that is — and it’s way worse than you think — that isn’t the part that’s going to give me nightmares.

Absent sheer bad luck, a smart, prepared, violent man will survive this sort of thing.

And that’s going to give me nightmares.

The President of the United States. the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and the entire State Department can go fuck themselves right now.

Anyone who voted to put that muppet in the Oval Office can go fuck themselves right now.

I’m headed for the bourbon, and I’m going to hope like fuck I don’t have nightmares.

Had lunch with good friends and new friends, lots of talking & telling stories, shot a suppressed .22 bolt action rifle (sweetest thing) and then got to play with this:

Kriss Vector in 10mm. My first gun in 10 mm ever.  Heavy sucker with a funky felt recoil due to its non-linear blowback system.

Stupid so exalted, the Greek Pantheon simply collapsed and died trying to find a god for this moron.

Hat tip @MalRoadkill