You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.
Colin Powell,
March 3, 2026
United States and Israel v. Iran
The war continues on, obviously, with the Administration struggling to explain what its about, why now, and why it can omit Congress from its constitutional duty.
It's expanded into a regional war, so far all aircraft and missiles. Included in the exchanges are those between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon.
It's become perfunctory to note that the Iranian government is horrible, which it is. It murders and rapes its own citizens in the name of an extreme variant of Shi'a Islam. But, there are a lot of horrible governments in the world. North Korea and Russia's are two such examples, Afghanistan's is another, and Trump of course cut a deal with them allowing them to return to power.
The Iranians were going to have a nuclear weapon, it has been claimed, soon, with soon being a bit of a moving target. A nuclear armed Iran would be frightening and that's the best argument for this offensive war, which would make it a preemptive defensive war. Even that argument, however, seems very poorly developed.
Marco Rubio gave the justification that, if another nation (Israel) attacked Iran, they'd attack us back, and that was an imminent threat. He claimed Iran was going to be attacked.
That basically would amount to handing the power to declare war for the United States over to Israel.
It just seems that, in reality, an aged demented Trump looking for some sort of legacy was talked into it by the Neoconservatives and Apocalyptic Evangelist in his circle of influencers, with perhaps, probably, Israel itself playing a role in that. Of all those goals, the Neocon one would be the least disturbing, which is not to say that it would not be disturbing.
One disturbing thing about that is that NPR, in its Politics podcast, ventured the opinion, not put this way, that Trump is basically drunk on power and will keep toppling governments as long as he's successful in doing so. If that's the case, we can predict that Cuba will be next as its a pet project of Marco Rubio.
The US has lost some aircraft to friendly fire, which in the age of cell phone video, makes for interesting video.
There's footage of this F-15 being shot down over Kuwait, which was a friendly fire incident.
I actually didn't know the F-15 was still in use by the US, but this very late model has only been in service since 2021.
An interesting thing on this video, other than its a female pilot (she was lucky, as she nearly went down in the sea) is that the video shows the airplane to be an F-15, which means the Air Force, and not just the Navy, is flying some of these missions.
The U.S. death toll is up to five.
Afghanistan v. Pakistan
Hardly noticed in all the general war exploding in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan are fighting.
Cont:
United States and Israel v. Iran
Reports have revealed that at more than 30 military installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war in support of its being launched. One NCO reported that their commander told them today that the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ.
I know that this was going to occur, and at least one Evangelical pastor in the U.S. has said essentially the same thing. This, I'd note, how Mike Huckabee sees the world.
So now we're at least partially in an American Evangelical Christian holy war against Shia Islam. It'll be a shock to Evangelicals, but they're a tiny percentage of the globe's Christians, and the percentage of them that hold such Millennialist views is even smaller. This is going to hurt us all, however.
It's also being reported that J.D. Vance encouraged Trump to go "all in", for lack of a better word. I'm not sure of his thinking, but he might be approaching this with a Clausewitzian view of how to wage the war, although that will require ground troops in the end. From a military prospective, that argument has merit to it. What it lacks here is legality.
It'll go up over the next several days with the US and Israel ineffectually rocketing Iran, and Iran ineffectually rocketing the entire Arabian Peninsula in a war that's going to get much, much, worse.
War, what's it good for? Well it's good for raising the prices of everything, that's for sure.
Today In Wyoming's History: March 3: 1876 A nighttime raid takes horses and cattle from Crook's Powder River Expedition. The cattle are recovered, but are driven to Ft. Fetterman.
The mysterious Kentucky Meat Shower, in which chunks of meat, apparently, rained down in Bath County, Kentucky, occurred.
Governor Gordon Statement on Passage of the Budget by Both Chambers
“The budget passed today restored almost all budget recommendations for the people of Wyoming.”
CHEYENNE, Wyo. - March 2, 2026 - Governor Mark Gordon (R-WY) issued the following statement today regarding the passage in both chambers of The Essentials Budget.
“What a win for Wyoming! And what a win for the citizens across the state who got involved with their government, after the Freedom Caucus-controlled Joint Appropriations Committee members made sweeping cuts to an already lean budget, and came forward letting their voices be heard to their representatives.
I extend my gratitude to the members of the House who courageously opposed the proposed cuts and insisted on asking the tough questions, even late into the night. Questions that focused on transparency as well as, critically, the underlying reasons for making those cuts. These questions struck a chord statewide and were powerfully voiced right here in Cheyenne by citizens from across Wyoming.
I want to also thank the Senate, whose stalwart leadership paved the way to this amazing victory.
The budget passed today restored almost all budget recommendations for the people of Wyoming and, as one Senator said, is only $53M below my overall recommendation. By my back-of-the-napkin calculations, that’s close to 99%.
Wyoming's future is indeed bright. We must continue to invest in our potential, grow our industries, preserve our small-town identity, and stand firm against the hysteria of national groups seeking to undermine our state.”
The Governor would like to personally thank the members of the House who stood for Employee Compensation on third reading: Representatives Brown, L, Byron, Campbell, E., Chestek, Clouston, Connolly, Davis, Erickson, Filer, Fornstrom, Geringer, Harshman, Jarvis, Larsen, L., Larson, JT, Lawley, Lien, Nicholas, Posey, Provenza, Riggins, Sherwood, Singh, Storer, Styvar, Tarver, Thayer, Washut, Williams, Wylie and Yin.
As well, the Governor would like to personally thank the members of the Senate who stood for restoring the Governor’s budget recommendations on second reading: Senators Anderson, Barlow, Brennan, Case, Cooper, Crago, Crum, Dockstader, Driskill, Gierau, Jones, Kolb, Landen, Love, Nethercott, Olsen, Pappas, Rothfuss, Schuler, Scott
The Freedom Caucus really didn't get its way on this. They seem to have just conceded. Probably the plan is to complain about the left wing RINO, DINO, WINO, radical press monarchist communist libertarians.
Cont:
Governor Gordon Signs First Bills of the 2026 Budget Session
February 27, 2026
Governor Mark Gordon (R-WY) signed his first bill of the 2026 Budget Session into law today, signifying his strong support of life by signing HEA0001 HB0004, Birthing centers - Medicaid coverage into law.
Amidst growing maternity deserts across rural Wyoming, this bill allows critically needed birthing centers to serve more pregnant mothers. By allowing medicaid coverage at these centers, Wyoming has provided another financial tool to keep these centers open and mothers have another option for their maternity care.
“I am pleased to sign my first bill today. HEA0001 helps our expectant mothers. And supporting life does not end with words, it requires action,” Governor Gordon said. “There are rural areas in Wyoming where accessing maternity care is a real challenge. This bill allows Medicaid coverage at birthing centers and is a common-sense step that strengthens access for mothers across our state. Healthy beginnings matter. When we invest in mothers and babies, we invest in Wyoming’s future.”
The Governor also signed the following enrolled acts into law.
HEA0002 HB0005 Oil and gas bonding pool-investment and earnings
HEA0003 HB0034 Firefighters-retirement plans
HEA0004 HB0035 Firefighters - paid leave and hazard pay
SEA0002 SF0018 Attendance of students in K-12 schools
SEA0003 SF0031 Uniform mortgage modification act.
SEA0004 SF0047 Increase of Hathaway scholarship awards.
Alexander Mosaic, House of the Faun, Pompeii. Alexander the Great fighting the Persians.
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will purchase every foot of land upon the globe. I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire that kings and queens would be proud of; I will build a school-house upon every valley over the whole habitable earth; I will supply that school house with a competent teacher; I will build an academy in every town, and endow it; a college in every state, and fill it with able Professors; I will crown every hill with a church consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace; I will support in its pulpit an able teacher of righteousness, so that on every Sabbath morning the chime on one hill should answer to the chime on another, around the earth's broad circumference; and the voice of prayer and the song of praise should ascend like a universal holocaust to heaven.
Charles Sumner, c.1840
Quand les riches font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.
Jean Paul Sartre
March 2, 2026
The US and Israel v. Iran War.
Even before the weekend news show hits, the Administration and its GOP proxies were trying to form a theory of why the US, in concert with Israel, had attacked Iran.
Why Israel did it is fairly clear. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a mortal enemy of Israel and an existential threat. The fact that the US was going to war with Iran gave it a great opportunity. And not just Israel, according to some information that seems fairly credible, at least Saudi Arabia saw things the exact same way, sort of.
In both instances, those conflicts were religious in nature, at least form Iran's prospective. Iran sees the world in apocalyptic terms and a struggle against Israel is a part of that weltanschauung. Iran sees Saudi Arabia as representing Sunni Islam, and a virulent variant of it at that. In fact, Saudi Arabia was in fact allied internally with Wahhabism, although that's long ceased to be the case. Be that as it may, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam depart from each other radically and have been enemies since the latter first formed. For that matter, Persia and the Arabs have been enemies for ever. Persia was a major civilized empire before Islam, and it knows it. Persia, Iran, could be a great nation without Islam, and it knows that.
But what about the United States?
According to the befuddled Donald Trump we attacked Iran, because, well it was a big honking monster threat to us. The thing is, that dog didn't really hunt.
Two Salukis, Persian hounds, painted by the Xuande Emperor of China (1399–1435)
They were going to have a nuclear weapons, Donny told us, with in the next two weeks. But then, it was realized, that would mean the befuddled Donny, dressed like a toddler in his trucker's cap, had been wrong when he told us that we'd bombed Iran back to the nuclear stone age in what is now being called the Twelve Day War.
Oops.
Well, explanations for that being wrong, other than Trump Is Always Wrong, needed to be found, as the GOP mantra worships Trump almost as much as Trump worships Trump.
They were fibbing in negotiations over the nuclear weapons program we destroyed was tried next, was the next thing.
They were going to have missiles that could hit the US was tried, but it was pretty quickly revealed that at some point they might, but it would be years from now, plenty of time to go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war. Well, they were going to have missiles that could hit Europe, which is much more credible, but the problem is that the Europeans, whom we've been telling need to fend for themselves, have had a "m'eh" reaction to that. The country that really can hit Europe with missiles, and has a demonstrated ability to do it, Russia, which Trump has a crush on so large that it probably looms larger in his nighttime dreams than Melania, who of course is mostly in New York, helicoptering over Barron, whom we might note will not be joining the Armed Forces to serve in this war, putting him in good company with the ancestral Trumps. Since Frederick Trump first set foot in the United States, the Trumps have missed the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection, World War One, World War Two, the Korean war and the Vietnam War, a record few American families could match, including my own.*
Anyhow, that dog wasn't going to hunt either, so a new one had to be developed.
Neapolitan Mastiff. Indeed, the modern foundational Neapolitan Mastiff. Mastiffs are war dogs, of the "let slip the dog's of war" type. The only one I've been personally familiar with was enormously cowardly.
Finally, the "they've been at war with us for forty seven years" thesis was come up with.
Well, I'll give whoever came up with that some credit. There's really something to it. Iran's Shia clerical state has been at war with the rest of the world for more or less something like forty years.
Which raises this point. Up until now it was just our strategy to wait that out. . . and it was working pretty well.
Cleary, things had not reached a point where all of a sudden we needed to go to war on an emergency basis with Iran. And under the U.S. Constitution, this excuse is complete horseshit. In order to deploy force like this, in this way, we would have had to have been suddenly attacked.
We weren't.
This was completely illegal.
Not only that, it was highly ill advised. If Iran has been plotting against us for 47 years, it's had plenty of time to prepare for this day, and so far, it's been fighting back pretty well. Our burn rate of high tech munitions is unsustainable. It's burn rate on missiles might frankly not be. And its allied, for all practical purposes, with Russia. We're allied with Israel, which frankly depends on us for military support.
This was not smart.
We're going to be hit domestically. Iran is capable of waging an asymmetric war and will. It may have started that, in Austin, today. It's believed that it has targeted Trump in the past. If so, it will now, and there's no reason to believe it'll only target Trump.
The irony is, of course, that its likely not Trump who causes this to occur. While not meaning this to sound the way it might, Israel, knowing that Trump is a demented fool, may very well have played the sad bloated corpse of the once playboy, now hoping for redemption and to be remembered, twit. Saudi Arabia may very well have as well. And then there's Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, holding variant of Christian beliefs that Apostolic Christians, back during the Crusades, would have regarded as heretical. They may have thrown us into a holy war that we'll pay for, for decades.
At least it will be an American Evangelical Protestant Crusade. Due to the Black Legends, a common Protestant, and then atheist, argument stopper has been "what about the Crusades".
Well, MAGA, now you are the Crusader you imagined we were, even though we were never that.
At the end of the day, nobody publicly knows why we attacked Iran. The best guess is that it's a combination of Neo Conservatives (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), foreign influence (Israel and Saudi Arabia) and far right Evangelicals trying to being about the end of the world (Huckabee and Hegseth).
All brought about illegally and through influence on a very weak mind, that being Donald Trump's.
Oh, 150 Iranian school girls were murdered for this.
May the perpetual light shine upon them. Some of them were probably Christian.
Pete Hegseth, cultural warrior.
Heavily tatted Pete Hegseth, emblazed with Crusader images, but whom the Catholics of the Crusades, and the Orthodox through whose lands the Crusaders traveled would have regarded as a weird heretic, was busy, just before Donny launched a war against Iran, in the Culture Wars.
First, he engaged in a skirmish with wokeism and the Boy Scouts.
We're not completely unsympathetic with this. We've noted this cultural zeitgeist before.
It does seem to us, quite frankly, that the Boy Scouts, which we have very little personal connection, have evolved into being somewhat less than it was. It's less manly, it seems. And it definitely isn't the example of Muscular Christianity it once was. However, it seems to be an odd thing for Hegseth, who doesn't seem to have a sports coat that fits, to be engaged in so close in time to a major war being launched. Indeed, it seems a bit odd for the Secretary of Defense to care about this at all, but maybe Boy Scout interactions with the military are greater than I suppose. I'd have had to have been a Boy Scout near a military post to know, I suppose. I know a friend of mine, who was a Scout growing up in an Air Force family in the 70s related to me that all of their leaders were Air Force members and they always had Air Force tentage when they were camping.
On a related matter, Hegseth clearly wants women out of combat roles. This war, given as its a real one, gives him the opportunity to do that. It's going to be his last opportunity as well. The political tides are shifting. In November, the opportunity will be gone.
Somebody seemed to back Hegseth down, after which he went on to picking on the Ivy League.
I frankly didn't realize that Pete's an Ivy League graduate himself. Princeton. It really surprises me.
Which brings me to this. I think, that MAGA hates education in general. They Wyoming Freedom Caucus seems to. And if Hegseth, Cruz, Trump and Chuck Gray can come out of such vaunted schools and still be so blistering ignorant as they seem to be, it really backs up my long held opinion that the Ivy League and associated schools are a dumpster fire, but not for the reason that Pete and company would hold it.
Rather, they just aren't doing a good job of educating. Look at Trump and Hegseth. It's hard to believe they have more than 5th grade education. Or Chuck Gray. He comes across like a 7th grade brat.
Diverting
Back on Trump, while I completely discounted it for a long time, it's getting hard to ignore that the US is getting into more and more grave matters as the Epstein files begin to hit closer and closer to home. The thesis that some hold that Trump is creating diversions is getting a little hard to ignore.
People keep saying, even now, that there's nothing "to implicate" Trump. Oh bull, there most certainly is. There's apparently direct testimony of his "abusing", which means screwing, a teenage girl. No, I'm not saying he did it, but the information we already have about who he hung around with is pretty damming. And his conduct with adult women has been less than admirable. Even that gets ignored, however, for no good reason. There's no reason to believe that Carol Alt is lying about being groped by Trump, for example, but people ignore it.
We've dealt with it before, but if Trump didn't have his hands in the underaged cookie jar it would have been an act of restraint for a guy who otherwise has shown no restraint. It might be time to start really looking at these claims vis a vis Epstein.
But then there's a war going on.
Speaking of underaged girls, one of the first things that happened in the war against Iran was a school was hit and 150 girls were killed.
There's always collateral damage in war, to be sure, but this war wasn't legally launched. Killing those girls, therefore, is something akin to manslaughter, if the US did it. It'll go unpunished however.
Noblis Oblige
Theodore Roosevelt's sons served in World War One, and World War Two, one winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. FDR's sons served in the Second World War. Beau Biden served in Iraq.
This war gives the Trumps to finally serve the nation. They sure haven't done so, so far. At least Eric, Tiffany and Barron are young enough to serve.
They should.
They won't.
Americans have already died in the war. Nobody who dies will be a Trump.
It's probably fairly safe to assume that most of the children of those who visited Epstein Island won't be serving in harms way.
Footnotes:
*My father served in the Korean War. One of my mother's cousins served in Vietnam and he wasn't even an American citizen. I have uncles who served in World War Two and great uncles who served in World War One, albeit in the Canadian Army. One of my Canadian uncles served in World War Two as well.
