I've never been this embarrassed and frustrated by America, and really the whole western World. We pulled out of Afghanistan knowing full well their government would collapse, wrong only about the speed it would happen. Ignore for a moment the Americans and Afghan allies trapped there because of the speed of the collapse. Think about the everyday citizens. Already there's reports of a woman shot in the street because she wasn't wearing a head covering, girls already being prevented from going to school, neighborhoods disarmed so citizens can't defend themselves. We know how this ends; a country of 38 million will become enslaved to "Sharia Law", they'll once again live in a world where every day they're at risk of dying if they dare speak an opinion contrary to fundamentalist Islam.

    America has spent the last several years bitching about "systemic discrimination", with Democrats ensuring us Trump wants to make "The Handmaid's Tale" come to life. But it was Biden who has actually (and knowingly) put a country of women back at the mercy of the ruthless, woman-enslaving, child-raping Taliban. And we've heard <crickets> from the Democratic base. The Taliban will kill woman at will, and yet the Democrats have no desire to save them. The Taliban will kill gays outright, and yet the party of LGBTQ+ can't be bothered to act. The party that complains America is too sexist has turned their backs on girls our troops have protected from birth, letting them be forced away from schools or even worse, into "marriages" to Taliban fighters(i.e, raped). The party that thinks that America built its wealth upon the abuse of the poor has no desire to spend a small portion of our annual budget to at least try to bring security and freedom to 38 million people in one of the worst areas of the world. The party that regularly slanders our military as full of right-wing racists thinks the security of 38 million people is worth less than keeping a few thousand American troops there continuously.

    While Democrats are especially hypocritical due to the nature of their untrue attacks on Republicans, Republicans are far from innocent in this. Trump ran on a "Leave Afghanistan" platform. Republicans have elected Congressional members opposed to any so called "nation building" at all, such as Rand Paul. According to them, we should have bombed Afghanistan and then just let them be, and we'd be better off. This was always an idiotic position, proven more false as time goes by specifically due to how hard it was to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with troops *in* the country. Dropping a few bombs and leaving would have allowed them to continue planning and launching more attacks. Then, GOP voters nominated Trump and got him into office. Trump kept his word and created the plan to leave(conditionally), despite the fact there was no expectation Afghanistan was ready for us to leave. Biden ignored that plan and simply left in chaos. But voters got what they asked for either way. A majority of Americans wanted to leave, but were either too uncaring or ignorant to consider the impact on millions of innocent people, or the impact on our security when the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are free to launch new attacks with near zero ability for the U.S. target them at the source beforehand.

    And the rest of the world? I expected their condemnations of the Taliban and the U.S. alike as we dealed Afghanistan right into chaos, but they don't seem to care enough either. Perhaps they're too afraid to condemn us because then the question will become, "If The U.S. won't do it, why don't you send your military in force and save the Afghans instead?". Nope. Virtual silence.

    The West failed by choice. We lost an average of 180 soldiers a year to Afghanistan, every one a tragedy; but that number had dropped significantly  since combat operations were turned over to the Afghan military. It wasn't going great for Afghanistan, but it was going. Despite huge losses of their own they had a military willing to fight so long as we were there to help. When it turned hopeless upon our exit, they crumbled. 

    From this point forward, every Taliban murder of a former Afghan ally, or stoning of a woman for violating Sharia Law, or forced "marriage" of a barely teenage girl to a Taliban fighter, the West had a role. We walked away. Shame on us.

Experiences with Rain-Bird 5000, K-Rain 4-inch/5-inch, Orbit Voyager II

 I've been doing repairs on my in-ground sprinklers, and preparing to expand sprinklers to areas not currently under a proper watering regime. I have some areas I've moved mobile sprinklers to, which is both annoying and water inefficient; instead of being watered in the wee hours of the morning like my automatic sprinklers, for a fixed and optimal period of time, they're watered in the afternoon from whenever I get around to it, to whenever I wake up and say "gah, I forgot the sprinkler again!". 

    Trying to resolve some issues with reach on the existing system, I had tested a K-Rain four-inch sprinkler head. I had previously had good luck with a K-Rain 5 inch model that I used on a spike, for a large semi-circle area. The four-inch didn't work well in that location so I moved it to a spike as a mobile sprinkler. I have it watering an approximate 60x30 strip, but this requires me to move it three times for complete watering. I don't like this. Since I was dissatisfied with the K-Rain 4-incher, I bought an Orbit Voyager II to test. Specific reasons for buying it were the distance was rated higher than the others, and the nozzles appeared possibly compatible with the Rain-Bird 42SA and 5000 series, though I haven't verified this yet, and it was cheaper than the Rain-Bird 5000. Again, this is being used above ground for now: I could have bought a gear-driven above-ground sprinkler but I assume I will eventually move these below ground in the near future.

    So to this point I've used the Rain-bird 5000 series(older ones, ~ 18 years old), K-Rain 5-inch, K-Rain 4-inch, and Orbit Voyager II. Cost was a primary driver of experimentation, with the exception of one location where I needed different coverage. If I could reduce a $15 head to $10, it would make a reasonable difference if I'm installing a new in-ground section. Here's my experience with each.

• Rain-Bird 5000: great sprinkler. I started replacing them after about 13 years as they began to fail. None of this failure was their fault; the soil-line raising over that period caused some to be sunk under-ground and get flooded with mud constantly. I had coverage issues with one area that was just never quite right, and so moved away from this head in attempts to fix it. I ended up moving the head and replacing it with a new Rain-Bird 5000. They've changed the design of the nozzle in the intervening years but I think they all still interchange. I feel like they've improved these over the years. I recall our oldest ones being difficult to adjust: requiring setting the left-position which is fixed, screwing the cap down, then adjusting the right-position; this is finicky if there's any movement in the sprinkler body itself(as there was with the flex-hose they were attached to the PVC with). With the last one I was able to grip the extended part of the sprinkler and move it as needed, then do pattern adjustment as normal.
  
• K-Rain 5-inch: Bought for above-ground usage on a spike to test covering an irregular but approximately 55'x25' area. This worked quite well, actually. I'm watering a not-quite trapezoidal area with a semi-circle spray, so it's less than perfect coverage, and truly needs 4-6 heads i think, but since it's a less-than-manicured section it has worked well enough for now. I'd like to use different nozzles but the big-box stores I frequent don't carry them and they appear incompatible with Rain-Bird. If it wasn't for the lack of support from the store, I'd choose these for large coverage areas. They're super-easy to adjust. I do worry about their durability, but haven't had issues yet.
• K-Rain 4-inch: Like their 5-inch brothers, the spray nozzles are hard to find. It seemed to drip a lot more water near the spray head than I've seen with other sprinklers, flooding the area near the sprinkler too bad to leave as an in-ground sprinkler. I moved it to a spike. After less than one season, it stopped rotating properly. I won't buy these again.
  
• Orbit Voyager II: This seems to have the difficulty of adjusting like the original Rain-Bird 5000s. The distance is better, and I feel like it has possibly better coverage in the middle of its spray range. The apparent inability to adjust the fixed-side pointing after installation means I won't likely use these going forward.

I hate when you spend much effort looking for better alternatives, then find out you had the best all along. After experimenting with the others, I'm back to the good-old Rain-Bird 5000s. They're the priciest of the ones I've tried, but the price difference of the others do not make up for their shortcomings.