"We can't just quit now". Yes, we can.

The argument was predictable, so its no surprise.  Republican supporters of Mad King Donald are arguing that, well, sure it might have been a big whopping mistake, but we can't quit now.

Oh yes we can.

We've done it before.

We did that in Vietnam after seventeen years of effort and 50,000 dead.  Heck, we left and felt good about leaving, blaming our embarrassing departure on the South Vietnamese, whom supposedly we were there to help.

Mad King Donny did that with Afghanistan, actually surrendering to the Taliban and leaving the mess for his successor Joe Biden to handle.  To Trumpites everything is always Joe Biden's fault, but the abandonment of the Afghanis was Donny's fault.  

So he has experience in losing wars and pulling out already.

We went into this war because Israel basically duped Donny into it.  Knowing that Donny was of weak and declining mind, they convinced him that an Israeli strategic goal was an American one, as they couldn't achieve it on their own.  The entire concept was lame in the extreme.  We'd bomb Iran for two or three days, murder the leadership of the Islamic Republic, and suddenly everyone in Iran, exercising their Second Amendment Rights, would rise up and turn the country into a liberal democracy, complete with a representative government that loved us, and proper voter identification.

It was a stupid idea.

The Iranians are a captive people, but they aren't armed the way we are, and for that matter, if the Trump administration is any guide, even freedom loving. AR 15 toting, patriots will roll over like a dog when the government tells them to, even accepting that, well, guns are bad as King Donny said so.  Sparking a revolution in a foreign country by bombing the crap out of it won't achieve that goal.  Indeed, if the Germans, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, etc., are any example, bombing a civilian population causes support for the government.  At some point, some person whom wanted freedom is burying a child and hates your guts.

Not that Trump could appreciate this.  Trumps haven't served in the military the entire time they've been in the US.  Heck, the founder of the Trump dynasty in the US was regarded as a draft dodger in the German state he was from, although that can be debated (he was, after all, busy in the US serving food and running a house of prostitution).

So, now we have the Iranians proposing terms to us.

In order to "win" this war we'll have to seize the country.  Given the population of Iran, that will mean calling up the National Guard and occupying the country for at least a decade.  My guess is that we'd sustain at least 20,000 dead, not as much as Vietnam, but a lot more than any war we've fought since Vietnam.

Let's not.

Chances are pretty good that King Donald is going to accept whatever terms the Iranians dictate to the US and call it a victory.  It's a bit of an American tradition, after all.  The British and the Canadians beat the crap out of the US in the War of 1812 and we still pretend that we won it, when in fact the British dictated terms to us.  We won the Mexican War but only by forming our own Mexican body to surrender to us, legitimate Mexican authorities never did.  We declared victory in the Philippine Insurrection when the war became too unpopular to continue to fight, through which we dictated to the Filipinos that they'd have to go independent, just like they were fighting to be.  We went into Mexico in the Mexican Border War and then came back out, tail between our legs.  We flat out lost the Vietnam War but got out before everything folded up and then blamed it all on the South Vietnamese.

And of course, as noted, we surrendered to the Taliban.

Trump is going to Congress and asking for $200B to fight this war.  Just say no, Congress.  Trump will then declare victory and claim that we wiped out Iranian nuclear material, which we claimed to have earlier wiped out, and go home.  

This problem can be left for the adults.

If this war is to go on, one modest proposal.  The Trump family ought to serve in it.  Every single one under age 55. And in combat roles.  The Trump family head of household can make that happen.  And Trump lovers, like Chuck Gray, who are under 55 should sign up and go.  To not do so would be hypocritical.

Shoot, it would make this a rich man's war, and a poor man's fight, if that didn't happen.

But, the better course, just stop.  Chances are that's exactly what we're going to do anyhow.

Giving up completely on the GOP.

I've noted my political history here before.

I'm a Westerner and an Irish Catholic.  That informs my vote pretty heavily.

When I first registered to vote Ronald Reagan was President.  Marine Corps Raider veteran Ed Herschler, a Democrat, was the Governor of Wyoming.  D-Day veteran Teno Roncolio, also a Democrat, was our Congressman.  Republicans Malcolm Wallop and Alan Simpson were our Senators.  

That was sort of the political landscape here at the time.   More Republicans than Democrats, but there were still Democrats, and those Democrats tended to be pretty tough conservative people.  Republicans were already tacking off into batshit crazy economic theories but they weren't completely bathed in them yet.

I registered as a Republican.

I didn't stay a Republican for a really long time.  I don't recall when exactly I switched parties, but by the time I was at the University of Wyoming, I had registered Democratic.  I stayed in the Democratic Party for a long time.  I was still a Democrat when I became a lawyer and I know that I was when I was married.  However, sometime after that, I couldn't stand the sea of blood the Democratic Party had become.  I became an independent.

As an independent you missed the primaries pretty much, however, and starting in the Clinton era in general Wyoming Democrats began to drift over to the GOP.  After all, the mainstream of the Democratic Party wasn't all that different from the traditional mainstream of the local GOP.  After awhile, I registered as a Republican.

Little far right Dixiecrats like Chuck Gray like to scream that people like me are "RINOs", when in fact they're the malignant innovation into the GOP.  That element hadn't entered the GOP at the time I was first in it, and didn't for a long time.  Gray himself, who nobody really knew anything about, was probably the first, followed by Jeanette Ward, who served one term in the legislature before losing a bid to retain her seat.  While she lost, that showed the direction things were headed in.  Carpetbaggers who knew nothing about their state moved in and wanted to convert it into pre 1964 Alabama.

It's not as if the Democrats stood still.  As moderate Wyoming Democrats left the party, it too became delusional.  If the Republicans became increasingly fascistic or Dixiecratic, the Democrats lived intellectually in the Greenwich Villages' Stonewall Inn in 1969.  It made going back into the Democratic Party an outright impossibility for people like myself, particularly as they lashed themselves increasingly to abortion and perversion. 

More recently, I'll note, that seems to be wearing off.  The Democrats are still "pro choice", but they don't talk much about it.  For that matter Republicans who were really gung ho on being pro life have sort of lost their fire for that as well, following the lead of Orange Mussolini.

What the Republican Party, nationally, has become is flat out insane.  No thinking person can be a member of it and be comfortable.

There are still good Republicans here in Wyoming.  They began a big fight against the Dixiecrats prior to the legislature and largely prevailed this session, in spite of the fact that the diehard adherents of The Lost Cause were theoretically in control of the solons.  That should give local Republicans who aren't literally whistling Dixie some hope.

But with the current national Trumpites in control, the line has been drawn. 

For years people like Dixiecrat Chuck Gray, or Dixicrat Bextel, have claimed that the Republican Party here was infiltrated with Democrats. Well, it was. They're the Democrats.  Democrats from 1960 Alabama. They just don't know it.  But the screaming lunacy that they've espoused does have an effect after awhile.  Yell at people that "you are a RINO" for long enough, and they'll take it up.

I'm remaining registered in the GOP.  Chuck Gray's efforts to disenfranchise voters has been enough for me in and of itself not to change registrations.  Frankly, if I was to take a run at the House of Representatives, and I've thought about it, I would switch parties as right now that would give a person a place in the November election no matter what.  But I'm not going to do that.  I'm old, worn out, and very tired. 

So I'm remaining in the GOP in no small part so that I can vote for the decent primary candidates, of which there are some right now.

At this point, merely stating that you are "pro Trump" will be enough to cross my vote for you off the list.  At least three House candidates are promising to be Trump's biggest lover, and they're all of the list.  I hope I run into some of them during their campaigns.  I probably will.

And I've already quit giving MAGAs in my midst slack.  Frankly, since the start of the assault on Iran, that's been easy, as the "never war" MAGAs can't explain that one without sounding like hypocrites, and they know it.  Even a few have begun to look as if Valentines to Trump weren't a good idea.

But in the Fall.  I'm not voting for any Republicans for anything.

That won't exactly be easy.  So far here only one candidate from the Democratic Party has signed on to run for a statewide office.  He has my vote even though I like the only Republican whose announced for the same position.  And just because I'm not voting for a Republican doesn't mean I will vote for Democrats.  In my state house district a really decent Republican holds the seat and a young woman from the Democratic Party has announced against him. She's already on the sea of blood ticket.  I can't vote for her, but I won't vote for the Republican I've voted for many times before.

To vote for Republicans in 2026 you have to accept that a low IQ, deranged, octogenarian should have complete dictatorial control over the Federal Government, can start major wars on his own, can demolish parts of the White House as he has the tastes of a bordello owner, can cause the hiding of files on a major pedophile ring, and can have a domestic army occupy the streets.  It also means you have to be willing to sacrifice the environment of the planet for scientific denial.  You have to be willing to endorse lies at a never before seen rate, which makes you a liar yourself if you do. 

I can't go there.

Nolan Finely beat me to the punch:

Nolan Finley: It’s time to end the State of the Union

He is quite correct.  The show of the State of the Union Speech, based on the reporting, would have been more proper for Baathist Iran, North Korea, or Nazi Germany.  It wasn't a real State of the Union Address.

There hasn't been one for some time.  

Television destroyed what was once a serious endeavor.  If you look at old State of the Union addresses, particularly when they were still written, they were serious matters.  Now they have all the dignity of a pole dancer performing at a strip club, and they're getting worse.  

Any honest State of the Union delivered since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic would have to start off with "the State of the Union is grave" or words to that effect. An honest one now would have to start off with "the State of the Union is gravely imperiled" and go on from there.  The United States is in really bad shape, not all due to Donald Trump, but with everything about Donald Trump making the nation's condition much, much, worse.  

The nation is hugely polarized.  About 40% of the nation have fallen under the spell of an unintelligent but effective salesman.  Hatreds long thought in the past have revived in an aggressive form.  Congress has completely failed to perform its job, something it started to do at least as far back as the 1980s.  An attack on education and science that began under the Ronald Reagan administration has produced a drove of ignorant ill informed voters.  Ignoring a growing immigration crisis that started in the 1970s fueled massive Rust Belt discontent.  Over funding an all volunteer military has resulted in the creation of a post Cold War military class that's become an a danger to the nation itself.  Ignoring global warming is imperiling the entire plant while lining the pocked of an oligarch class that's rapidly depriving the same Rust Belt class that's now supporting it of any middle class way of making a living.  Ignoring science has also lead to a complete inability to understand basic human biological facts. 

This country is an utter disaster, and it's lead right now by a stupid man whose intellect is crashing into dementia.

Trump is a mentally ill man to start with.  Raised in a family that managed to avoid serving in times of war and whose wealth was started off by a German immigrant (ironically) who engaged in the sex trade, he's always been a self centered man focused on greed and engaging in lust.  In his dementia, he cannot see the world in any manner other than acquisition, and believes his own propaganda about his having a unique understanding of the "art of the deal".  He's the laughing stock of the globe, and at a some point fairly soon in the United States, he'll be regarded as the worst president in the nation's history and the worst human being to ever occupy the Oval Office.  If there's anything redeeming to Trump's reign at all it will be that his profoundly bad occupation of that office has demonstrated how severely various reforms to the Constitution are needed.

Be that as it may, the nation is not going to emerge from Trump the nation it was.  It will be a second rate nation, and that will be due to him, and those who served him.  The US will crawl back to the family of Western nations, but it will just be one of them, not the leader of them.  That's now fallen to the European Union.

When that occurs the millions who followed Trump will deny it, including some of those working for him now . Vance and Rubio will be two who will assert that they were never Trumpites.

On that, we digress.  State of the Union addresses were once written and they were much better when they were. Those days should return.  They were not intended to be an perverted administration's stripping performance while lustful inebriated fans cheered the stripper, which is what they now are.  Today's state of the union addresses are embarrassing in the extreme and not something a mature dignified nation would do, but then, right now, we are not a mature dignified nation.

State of the Union addresses should go back to being written.  If they are delivered orally, they should be given during the work day as they should reflect serious work.  And, frankly, there should be a mechanism, and a severe one at that, that if they are dishonest, there should be an immediate impact.  For example, although now it would have no legal impact, immediately after any oral State of the Union address there should be a vote of confidence.  If a simple majority votes note, the authority of the President should be suspended until he can come back in front of Congress and the nation and not act like a buffoon.

That would require, of course, a serious Congress as well, which we also lack.

Check Gate and two protestant pastor columnists.

The Cowboy State Daily has given us two really interesting articles by Protestant pastors.

Scott Clem, a Campbell County Commissioner and a former legislator, and one of the most conserrvative politicians in the state, has for the second time in recent weeks written a column striking at the behavior of the Freedom Caucus.

Scott Clem: When Campaign Cash Matters More Than The People's Work

It's a really well done article.

In contrast Lutheran pastor tacks the other way, although not as much as a person might think, based on his typical writings.

Jonathan Lange: Is This About 'Bad Optics,' Or A Witch Hunt?

Lex Anteinternet: Ash Wednesday.

In this spirit of this being Catholic Question Season, i.e,. the time of the year Catholics are mostly likely to get questions as to "why do you do that?", I"m rerunning something I've already rerun:

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing & ...: A couple of reruns. for the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, 2023, from a couple of years ago:   Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for no...

Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing & on Ash Wednesday

A couple of reruns. for the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, 2023, from a couple of years ago:  Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing.

Secular suffering for nothing

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them.  One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.

We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent.  And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two.  There are more days of abstinence during Lent.

And this post isn't about that.

Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.

I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight.  None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.

I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science  to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism.  There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point.  Food faddism is common.

Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day.  It's not going to do that.  A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.  

Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like.  None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks.  Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion.  And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.

I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever.  I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.  

Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out.   That's it.

So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker.  Pretty simple.

That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting.  I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight.  If you need to lose weight, see your doctor.  A real doctor.  Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody.  No, not him.  A real bonafide physician.  They exist.

Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.

Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy.  Some say a majority are overweight.  I get that.  But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight.  I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.

They do it as they need to be suffering for something.

Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins.  If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.

But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life.  It's inescapable.  Life is full of suffering.  Part of that suffering is brought about by license.

The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom.  License doesn't actually equal liberty.  The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom.  It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment. 

And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery.  People become enslaved to their wants.  A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind.  The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.

Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement.  If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice.  It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.

Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake.  The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.

And it achieves, of course, more than that.

Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.

Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.

Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything.  But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless.  It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else.  People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law.  They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.

Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else.  A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins.  Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery.  None of that, however, changes the basic point.

Humans sense that abundance can be slavery.  They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them.  They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.

And one on Ash Wednesday itself:

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday for those churches that follow the Catholic Latin Rite's liturgical calendar, which includes a fair number of Protestant churches.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent for Western Christians, Lent being the (approximately) forty day long penitential season preceding Easter.  Great Lent, the Eastern Christian seasons, precedes Ash Wednesday and commences on Clean Monday for Eastern Christians on the new calendar, but not on the old calendar which has, of course, which departs from the calendar we're otherwise familiar with.   The day is named for the Catholic practice, which is observed by at least some Anglicans and Lutherans as well, of placing ashes on the foreheads of those who come to the Ash Wednesday service, with the reminder being made that from ashes you were made, and from ashes you will return.*

For Latin Rite Catholics, Ash Wednesday is a day of fast and abstinence.  I.e, they eat only one full meal on this day and it can't include meat, which under Latin Rite Catholic rules does not include fish.  For Eastern Christians a much stricter Lenten fast and abstinence set of rules applies.  This sacrifice serves the purpose of being penitential in nature.

It also serves to really set Catholics apart, as fasting and abstinence are the rage in the west now, but for purely secular purposes, not all of which square with science or good dietary practices.

For the members of the Apostolic faiths, Lent also serves as a time in which for penitential reasons they usually "give up" something.  A lot of people have a really superficial understanding of this, assuming that Catholic "give up" desert or chocolate or something, and in fact quite a few people do something like that. Indeed, as an adult I've been surprised by how many Catholics (usually men) give up drinking alcohol, which means that frequent consumption of alcohol is pretty common society wide in a way that we probably underestimate.

Indeed, just recently, on that, I was asked by an exuberant Catholic Midwestern expat, who seemingly has no boundaries at all, on what I was "giving up" for Lent. This was the week prior to Ash Wednesday at which time I wasn't particularly focused on it myself.  The same fellow asked at least one Protestant what she was giving up, with that Protestant being a member of one of the American millennialism religions, to receive a totally baffled reply.  Indeed, I'm sure they don't celebrate Lent at all, so the question was odd.  Anyhow, he was giving up alcohol and asked if I'd like to join him, to which I absent mindedly said sure.  Later he was wondering if I thought it would be tough, which I'm sure it won't be at all and I'll have to find something else to mark Lent really.  But that sort of "giving up" line of thinking is very common.

In a lot of Catholic cultures the Lenten penitential observations have traditionally been much stronger, which helps explain Mardi Gras as we just discussed.  Even well after the Latin Rite rules were very much relaxed, in many Catholic areas, including Catholic areas of the United States, people engaged in much more extensive penitential observations with the "giving up chocolate" type thing really sort of an introduction to the practice.  In Louisiana, without going into it too deeply, there was traditionally a big spike in births nine to ten months after Easter, which reflected a very widespread serious observation among Catholic couples as to their penitential practice, for example.

Some of that is really coming back, which reflects an interesting trend towards a deeper understanding of their faiths by members of the Apostolic faiths and even a return of Lenten traditions in some Protestant ones.  During the full "Spirit of Vatican Two" era there was a lot of attention devoted to not giving anything up but rather to work on some spiritual need.  I.e, be self reflective and work on what that lead you to.  At the same time, the misuse of the word "fasting" became very common, with there being advice, even from the clergy, to fast from things other than food or drink.  You can't really fast from sinful behavior, or from narcissism, for example.  You can't even "fast" from the Internet, although "giving it up" for Lent might be a darned good idea (one that I really ought to consider, probably).

A lot of that is now passing and there's been a real return to more traditional observations of Lent, including fasting but also forms of dedicated worship and observation.

Which brings me to the next thing about "giving up".  One feature of this season is that many Apostolic Christians, as it is the season of repentance, have used the season to break bad conduct when there's support, spiritual and temporal, for doing it.  People with alcohol problems will use it to break them, smokers will quit smoking during Lent so they can quit smoking.  And sometimes people with serious attachments to sin take it head on during Lent, with some people I've known even announcing the renouncement of what are very serious sins from a Christian purpose over Lent in the hopes of breaking from the permanently. And many who do that, succeed at doing that.

Which in turn takes us to our final observation.  This season, which is lead by the Apostolic faiths but which is observed by at least some of the Protestants as well, tend to turn the self indulgent retained Puritan abstinence on its head.  I've noted this before, but North American and the Northern Europe may have strayed enormously from Calvinist influence in terms of faith, but not in terms of the concept that public suffering is really necessary.  That retained concept explains in large part the real focus in these lands, as opposed to others, in "giving up" something for no real purpose other than the sense it must be done.  People give up all sorts of things that Apostolic Christians around the world give up for forty some days, and often on a declared permanent basis (they fail at it more often than not), with it being notable that the purely secular nature of that makes it shallow from the onset.  Indeed, plenty of people who will spend Lent scoffing at Catholics for Lent will spend part of the season or all of it on some no carb, or no meat, or whatever, diet, for no real reason other than a constructed one. Suffering, in many instances, is the ultimate goal of those efforts, but suffering without something to redeem it.

For Apostolic Christians, all fasts are followed by feasts, and that's something to remember.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I don't think this is a practice in the East and its not a requirement for Catholics, something that in fact even confuses some Catholics.  Ash Wednesday is widely observed by Catholics and the placing of the ashes isn't restricted to Catholics.  Perhaps for that reason quite a few Catholics assume it is a Holy Day of Obligation.

One thing of note here is that Ash Wednesday also serves to point out to everyone who is a Catholic, as if a person has ashes on their head, they're probably Catholic, although not necessarily.  By the same token, if you are known to be a Catholic and don't make it to Ash Wednesday you'll tend to get comments about it.

I'll note I've already had the "why" question, sort of, from a coworker who isn't Catholic, but whose children attend Catholic school.  The coworker assumed that I have to go to Mass this morning, as its Ash Wednesday.

No, I don't.

Ash Wednesday is not a Holy Day of Obligation.  It's widely observed, and many Catholics observe it.  I have observed it myself, of course, particularly when I was younger.  the poor excuse I now have for not making it to Mass is that I start work before any Masses are offered, save for the 6:00 a.m. which I very rarely ever make, I don't usually take lunch, and I'm beat to a pulp by the time I leave work.

Sorry excuse on my part.

That tends to mean, however, that I get nearly as many "why" questions as people with ashes on their foreheads.  People know that I'm Catholic, whic h a good thing, so they wonder why I don't have ashes on my forehead.

Addressing politicians in desperate times. A series.

 

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Howard Zinn.

These are desperate times. 

Our politicians have made it so.

And therefore, we bear the burden of having made them desperate, by electing, overall, a really bad crop of national and state politicians. We did this by not asking them questions we should have, or just by believing the lies they told as we chose to believe them, or worse yet, we were too ignorant not to disbelieve them.  There's no credit in any of this.  The United States has gone from a highly imperfect functioning democracy to a highly imperfect dysfunctional kleptocracy.  To some degree even worse, we've gone from a country that did not want kings, to putting kings and everything they stood for right back in power.

Part of how we did that is by not asking questions.

Normally I wouldn't start threads about elections so early, and indeed when this blog started off it didn't' deal with politics at all.  But modern times inevitably crept in, and currently, as things are so desperate, there are posts on politics nearly every day.  We are, moreover, at a real crossroads in the country's history.  The Republican Party, a conservative party after the failure of the Progressive Movement to reform it early in the 20th Century, and a Buckley Conservative Party since Ronald Reagan, has collapsed nearly completely, with only remnants remaining, the way the Whigs did in an earlier era.  A party that calls itself Republican and claims to be Progressive exist, but it's neither.  It's a fascisic Protestant Francoist party that holds nothing in common with any prior Republican expression.  The Democratic Party is reforming before our eyes, and in spite of what Republicans say, after the killings in Minneapolis it's rocketing towards the center, picking up the dropped pieces of prior Republican platforms.

Other parties, of course, exist, but for the most part, their natural members cling to some other party in order to get elected.  A Socialist New Yorker ran as a Democrat in New York as he had to.  Independants from New England in Congress have done the same.  The Republican Party, essentially captured by Know Nothings, are fighting with remnant conservatives, like  Thomas Massie, or outright Libertarians, like Rand Paul, who remain in their ranks.  More locally, where more, and often horrified old school Republicans remain, they find themselves in constant rearguard action's against Francoist.

And this is our fault.  We didn't ask the questions.

And the Press didn't do a very good job either, at least on a local level.

I've routinely followed regional elections for years.  As soon as elections get rolling, the Press pretends to be asking the tough questions, and doesn't.  Indeed, I know of one case in which a really worthy politician was attacked by a (successful) opponent and only one news outlet followed up on what should have been seen as an obvious lie.  

Perhaps less excusable, every election cycle, at least locally, the press puts out questionnaires and then publish the results.  I always look forward to reading them, only to find out the questions are utterly lame and the answers aren't followed up upon.  It's as if"

Press:  What is the most important issue facing Wyoming?

A.  The important one.

Press:  Okay, thank you for your answer.

Local debates are almost exactly the same, as in:

Press:  Mr. Candidate, last year there was an effort to sell off public lands. Can you please tell us if you like kittens?

A.  I like them sauteed.

Press:  Okay, thank you. 

I'm not exaggerating much.

As lame as the questions from the press are, politicians have taken up even avoiding showing up for debates.  Republican candidates essentially say; "I love Donald Trump, and the Trumpiness of Trump, with all my heart and soul, and I don't have to talk to you left wing pressmen or the filthy dirty voters". 

Well, generally, they can't avoid everyone all the time everywhere.  The Press isn't going to do it, so you're going to have to.  Indeed, this happened just this past week when Harriet Hageman got a blistering from questioners at a forum at Casper College, causing it to be shut down due to "decorum".

Show up. Ask the questions.  Ignore party affiliation.  Vote for people who aren't going to screw you.

Blog Mirror: Scott Clem: We Don't Need More Sycophants, We Need Leaders

 A remarkable editorial by the very conservative Campbell County politician Scott Clem.

Scott Clem: We Don't Need More Sycophants, We Need Leaders

The Rural Blog: The day a letter is mailed at a U.S. Post Office m...

The Rural Blog: The day a letter is mailed at a U.S. Post Office m...: A USPS postmark is now stamped at regional facilities. (Adobe Stock photo) Few ink stamps are as crucial to meeting modern deadlines as the ...

This is flat out unacceptable and one more example of why everyone who worked at any point for the Trump Administration should be conscripted and sentenced to live outdoors on Diego Garcia for the rest of their lives. 

Wednesday, January 6, 2021. The Coup.

I wasn't going to mark this date.  This tragic event is only five years in our past, and therefore it is much too early, really, to be able to fully apprise it.

But attempt to apprise it we must do, and the coup that started on January 6, 2021 did not fail, it succeeded, and whether the fascistic/Francoist revolution it seeks to bring about will succeed or fail is not yet know.

The coup did not fail, as our justice system failed.  Trump could easily have been in court within six months and sentenced within seven.  Unfortunately, our criminal justice system moves as slowly as Baby Boomers at Walmart as its controlled by them, as is much of our society.  This insurrectionist is now in charge.

But will he succeed?

Most Americans do not support the would be caudillo Donald Trump and most are not part of a muddled fascist/Franoist/New Apostolic Reformation movement, or even have its world view. But those who do are running the country right now, aided and abetted by people like opportunistic Marco Rubio and a compliant Supreme Court.  The worst tests are yet to come.  This year, 2026, is going to be absolutely awful, least we are spared by some sort of Divine Intervention (which I note seriously, not in jest).

Usually, however, people get exactly what they deserve in terms of politics.  The roots of the populist revolution go back at least as far as 1973 and have been brewing for decades now.  We cannot expect that the fruits of political neglect can be harvest and discarded overnight.  We are paying for our errors, and stand to likely pay a heavier price yet.

But the country has come through such things before. The Revolution itself was one, the Civil War a second.  

May God grant that we get through this quickly, and with as little damage to the world as possible.

The ghosts of Billy Mitchell and António de Oliveira Salazar visit Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, graduate of the Wharton School of Business, has no grasp of mathematics or history.  He's become the poster boy for questioning the intellectual value of an Ivy League education.

And very clearly, one of the things he doesn't understand is shipbuilding and naval warfare.

Fantasy class warship, probably in the cruiser class, maybe, which the Trump administration plans on building as part of a "Gold Fleet", some naval marketing genius' terms for a vanity suck up project that will never get built, but which appeals to Trump's edge of death vanity.  The artwork heavily resembles a Revell model box for one of their cheaper modells from the 1970s.

2025 is the 100th anniversary of the court marital of Billy Mitchell.  Mitchell, a World War One aviator, accused the Navy Department and the War Department (which was more or less the Army Department) of “incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense.”  He had more than one point, but his big point was that the biggest ship could be sunk by aircraft.  The battleship Navy was horrified.

The British attack on the Italian port of Taranto in 1940 proved Mitchell quite right.  Pearl Harbor proved him right beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Mitchell was convicted in his court martial and went on to retirement the following year, but by 1941 he had been proven so right that he was lauded as a hero and the U.S. Army Air Corps named a bomber after him, the B-25 Mitchell.

Mitchell is still right, there's only one thing that's really changed. Aircraft have evolved.

They've evolved from mannered bombers and fighters to a new class of aircraft, the unmanned drone.  This event has been anticipated since late World War Two, and by the 1950s the British already assumed that the day of unmanned aircraft was about to arrive. The predictions on the speed of the evolution of such craft were wildly off, but the Russo Ukrainian War proves the day is now here, and not just in the air, but on the sea.  The Ukrainians have sunk or damaged about 24 Russian ships through the use of drones during the war and pretty much rendered Russia's Black Sea Fleet a nullity.

For decades now military theorist have wondered if the pride of the US Navy, the supercarrier, is actually obsolete. The speculation began as early as the 1970s when really good long range air to surface and surface to surface anti shipping missiles appeared on the scene.  The viability of such missiles was proven during the Falklands War when Exocet missiles in Argentine hands sank the HMS Sheffield and the cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor and severely damaged the HMS Glamorgan.  The Exocet went into production in 1975, and while still around, it's undoubtedly the case that it's improved over the last 50 years and there are other missiles around that are just as good or better.  The U.S. Navy started worrying about such missiles just as soon as they were produced, but the Navy's large supercarriers have never had to encounter them.

That is, in part, because we have not fought a peer to peer conflict since World War Two.  In spite of that, it's worth noting that the U.S. military has not exactly shown itself invincible in wars less than that.  The North Koreans and Chinese, the former of which only had an army from around 1946 or so, and the latter of which had just come out of a largescale civil war and which chose to deploy, to no small degree, troops who were conscripted out of the losing side of that war, fought us and our UN allies to a standstill in Korea.  Starting about a decade later we fought and ultimately were defeated by an Army that was quite primitive in comparison to our own, although a lot of that defeat was a morale issue.  Since that time we've fought and beat Iraq twice, but we were never able to prevail in Afghanistan, in no small part due to a major strategic miscalculation by Donald Rumsfeld, and our current Oval Office occupant ended up surrendering to the Taliban.

Now, of course, there's been very little naval action in anything that I've mentioned, but that shouldn't really give us any comfort. What naval action that has occured since 1945 shows that long distance anti ship warfare had improved remarkably since 1945.  The Argentines, not wanting to be exposed to it, didn't evey deploy an aircraft carrier it had during the Falklands War.  

Now, of course, people are pointing out that the awkwardly named Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has the most combat ships in the world, although its not regarded as the most powerful. That would be the U.S. Navy.  The U.S. Navy, with its supercarriers, holds that title, and it should.  But it can't be ignored that Ukraine has proven that sinking ships is now pretty possible with air and sea drones.

That's where the future of naval warfare is, not with vanity "battleships".

Indeed, that was proven in 1941.

The Navy knows that, but senior military officers right now know that if they want to keep their jobs they have to feed the demented monkey in Trump's brain.  And that brain isn't pegging out on the smarts meter by any means.  Statements by Donald Trump show him to be in the full grasp of dementia and raise questions on whether he was every very sharp.  

He's also incredibly vain.

And more than a little scared.

Being vain and scared, he's quite easy to manipulate.  Given the chance to name something after himself, and believe that it will be around after his body is rotting in its grave, which will be quite soon, he'll take the bait.  And hence the Trump Class of "battleship".

It'll never happen.

It takes at least two year to design a warship, and often multiples of that.  And then it takes another two to five years to build it. Trump no doubt plans on being living at age 90, but he won't be, and his demented brain will be reduced to complete mush should he live that long.  The Navy knows that, but the Navy likes to have money and ship projects bring in money.  Every since World War Two the U.S. military has engaged in acquisitions of things it didn't need for one reason or another, and the Army has proven that even a simple project like designing an assault rifle can take so long that a person who entered the overall task early in his career can retire before its done.

And hence António de Oliveira Salazar.

Salazar was the Portuguese dictator who came into power in 1932 and who fell into ill health and suffered a stroke in 1968.  The Portuguese government replaced him and he died 1970. But they never told him.  He was simply given glowing reports on how well everything was going and assured he was still running the show.

I'm pretty convinced that's more or less what's going on with Trump right now.

The Navy is simply going to slow roll this project.  Glowing reports are going to be given to the Demented Dear Leader.  The entire project will go swimmingly.  Meanwhile, others will report the same on the White House Ballroom.  Neither will ever be built.

Indeed, already the palace intrigue is on.  J.D. Vance is gathering allies.  Mike Pence is scooping up Heritage Foundation defectors.  Congressmen and Senators who are too tainted with the stench of MAGA, or who don't want to be there when Trump falls and takes MAGA out with it, are abandoning their offices to go on to new pursuits, readying themselves to reemerge cleansed from the inevitable bunker scenes that are already beginning to happen.

If you are an Apostolic Christian, and aren't worried yet, you ought to be. Or maybe not. Or maybe.

The Defense Department hosted a Christmas service at the Pentagon.

Now, if you are an Apostolic Christian, as the overwhelming majority of Christians around the world are, or if you are a member of a Protestant denomination that is closely based on the Catholic Church, or which even thinks that they are part of it, this service will come across very strangely.  But, as I've noted before, this is a Protestant country and a Protestant county in which the strains of Puritanism are deep.

The services of the Apostolic Faiths, i.e., the Catholics and the Orthodox, go back to the very origins of Christianity.  The Didache was written within a couple of decades of the Crucifiction and it shows Christians doing what Apostolic Christians do right now, which isn't a surprise to Apostolic Christians but which can come as a rude shock to Protestants.  The writings of the Church Fathers do the same.  If you read these text and remain a Protestant, while cutting a little slack for High Church Anglicans and conservative Lutherans, it's just a wilful decision to ignore the first 1,500 years of Christian practice.

But most people don't read those things and so they're going with what they learned as kids, or what they've sort of picked up, no matter how in error or ignorant it may be.  John Calvin, who influenced the Puritans, was flat out demonstrably wrong (and frankly not a nice guy) but most people don't know that if they're in one of the churches influenced by him, and for that matter they don't even know who John Calvin was.

The Puritans, because they were religious dissenters from the Church of England, which had militantly broken off from the Catholic Church in order that King Henry VIII could pursue a string of hopefully fertile bedmates, was not only pretty ignorant, but obstinately so in many ways, as it had a history of fighting with the Established Church.  The Church of Scotland was somewhat as well, particularly in its American form.  All of these churches have declined enormously in Europe while Catholicism has increased, reclaiming lost ground, but in the US their descendants are pretty numerous and strong.

Most Protestants aren't "Evangelical Protestants", but Evangelical Protestantism is really easy for people who want to be Christians without a whole bunch of Christian theology, want to escape the personally difficult aspects of Christian theology, or who just know that there's truth in Christianity and don't know where to go.  The do it yourselfism in them is pretty strong, and some, but not all, of them are pretty good at pointing out the sins of others while simply ignoring their own favorite  ones.  There's a host of ministers in this camp that are personally wealthy or who are married and divorced, and who have even engaged in affairs.  Flat out ignoring the Christian injunction against divorce and remarriage is pretty much the rule in most Protestant communities and it obviously is in some Evangelical ones.  Paula White is on her third husband, for example.  Joyce Meyer on her second.  Missouri pastor Rich Tidwell is a polygamist.

The point isn't to debate on all these topics, setting aside polygamy, Protestant denominations do not have, I think, the process of annulment, which can be controversial in the Catholic Church, and their ministers do not take vows of poverty, but rather the pick and chose nature of things is a problem, and it'll turn on Catholics and is already starting to.

The New Apostolic Reformation is an aggressive backer of Donald Trump and its openly a backer of Americanism.  Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is clearly aligned with the movement, and it's pretty clear that Secretary of Defense Hegseth falls in this camp.  Hegesth is practically the poster boy for ignorance in this category as he's festooned himself with tattoos that recall the Crusades while not realizing at all that Crusaders would have regarded him as a heretic.  But there he is, all emblazoned with sayings and symbols that properly belong to the Apostolic faiths, while living in what they'd all regard as an irregular marriage.

The same week that the Pentagon service occured Chip Roy took a direct swing at Catholics.

A lot of good Americans give their money to Catholic charities thinking they're helping people, and it turns out they're a part of a vast leftist network that is being used to undermine our country. 

Whether it's the open borders, Soros DAs, Arabella, or the 'Islamification' of Texas and this country—it's organized, and this is one example. Look at the Medicaid fraud up in Minneapolis. It was going to Somalis, and it was literally billions of dollars.

This administration is rooting it out; Congress needs to do more. That's why I called for a special select committee to follow the money of these radical groups. We need to do it.

Roy, who lives in Austin Texas, is a Baptist, something that isn't surprising both because the Baptist are a large Protestant religion in the United States and because Texas is part of the "Bible Belt" where the Southern Baptist are particularly strong.

The Baptists are not part of the New Apostolic Reformation as a rule and have a very large set of differing beliefs on different topics. The reason to note this, however, is that Roy's statement really brings out a certain strain of Protestant Anti Catholicism that's very deep in the country's history.  Setting aside any one thing he's complaining about, a strain of it is that Catholic charities don't seem to care very much where people come from.

And that's because Catholics aren't not supposed to view the world that way.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10:3 They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven

Letter to Diognetus.

For many years, the really strong Protestant religions in the US were the "mainline" Protestant faiths, of which the Episcopal Church was the strongest.  None of the Mainline Protestant Churches was friendly with the Apostolic Churches, but they ironically all had connections to it, with the Presbyterian Church having the fewest.  In truth, in spite of the Black Legends of the Reformation they'd spread, they all worried about how they were viewed by the Catholic Church, accepting large elements of the Church's views as correct, and particularly worried about whether they had Apostolic Succession, strongly suspecting themselves that they did not.  People have spoken much about the decline of Christianity in the West, but they've missed two elements of that story to a significant degree, one being that the Catholic church was persistently attacked by Protestant governments during and after the Reformation, and that this yielded to attacks by left wing secular governments thereafter.  The Catholic Church nonetheless endured in spite of all of it, and its' rebounding from that assault.  The Mainline Protestant Churches, however, are simply dying of their own accord.

All along there's been a strain of loosely organized Protestant churches that fall outside of the Mainline churches.  The Mainline Protestant Churches did not worry much about them, but as time has gone on, and the impacts of the death of the Reformation and the cultural revolutions of the Baby Boomers have played out, those churches have grown and are particularly infused with the American Civil Religion, which many barely churched Americans are as well. The New Apostolic Reformation is just a sliver of that set of beliefs, but Apostolic Christians should be concerned.  The Apostolic Faiths are growing in the US right now as people turn towards the truth, but this administration is infused with the NAR which leads to events like this.  Recognizing the Christian origins of the United States is fine, and saying something prayerful at the Pentagon in this season is as well.  But a performance such as this, combined with rumblings from somebody like Roy, should worry us.  Christianity is not an American thing.

Or, perhaps, something else is going on.

The Apostolic Faiths are growing and converts from Protestantism are part of the reason why.  The Mainline Protestant Churches are dying.  Evangelicalism remains strong, but things like this show the marked contrast with the Ancient Faith.  This may all be part of the death of the Reformation playing out before us.

There remains a danger in all of this, however.  There are prominent Apostolic Christians in the National Conservative/Christian Nationalist camp.  People like R. R. Reno, Rod Dreher and Kevin Roberts are founding members, and J. D. Vance is the most prominent politician who travels in that camp.  The views that the backers of people like Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth hold are not necessarily friendly towards Apostolic Christians at all.  While people in the Reno/Dreher/Roberts camp may rejoice as the seeming defense of Christian values by the administration (and I'm not sure that at least Reno and Dreher, the latter of whom has declared Trump unstable, hold that view), it's making common cause with people who are either inherently hostile to the Apostolic Faiths or, in the case of Trump himself, deeply immoral.  Being such a fellow traveler rarely works out and we'll be turned on.

Related threads:

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Confusing politics with religion.

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