It's been a weird and horrific week for the Republic.
Surgery with a cleaver.
They should have unionized in the meantime and asked for employment contracts, with one being that if they were terminated without cause for the next four years Elon Musk has to surrender his cash, along with Trump, assuming Trump has much.
Trump supporters, I'd note, are cheering on his actions, or rather Elon's, while the disaster looms. The Forest Service, which only had about 34,000 employees to start with, is losing 10% of them. That's going to hit Wyoming like a ton of bricks as campgrounds close and the like this summer, and the State has to learn to fight fires with its own money and resources, none of which we're doing the slightest thing about.
That ain't conservative
Regarding Musk, Ashley St. Clair, whom I was previously unaware of, announced herself as another one of Musk's concubines who has produced a child.
St. Clair is supposedly a "conservative influencer", but whelping children out of wedlock isn't conservative. This lays bear the whole hypocrisy of contemporary American conservatism. . . there isn't any in the US. Spreading your legs for Elon doesn't boost your street cred with real conservatism and it certainly doesn't make you Eva Vlaardingerbroek. It just makes you gross.
It does interestingly cast back to an earlier era, however, when men of royalty engaged in concubinage, because they could. Both Trump and Must exhibit that trait. They're not moral men at all, and yet somehow the peasantry attributes nobility to them.
It's interesting that the super genius Musk doesn't chose plain jane girls for his concubines. They're all not bad looking. Courtesans were often chosen for their looks and wits. Maybe these were too.
Of course, this assumes that St. Clair is telling the truth. She might not be.
It also show the weird Calvinism that prevails in the American Civil Religion, as well as, interestingly, the Boers. Musk is from a Canadian family that moved to South Africa. Calvinist, in their pure form, believe that God foreordained who goes to Heaven or Hell and there's nothing you can do about it. They were heavily represented in the Roundheads who fought the crown in the English Civil War. Anyhow, I recall reading a letter from one imprisoned Roundhead figure who asked if the Crown could send his mistress to him. His mistress, not his wife.
Calvinism, we might note, is also responsible for the warped "Protestant Work Ethic", but more on that in some other post.
Anyhow, it's funny how the Evangelical Protestants who find Trump "Godly" don't mind his sexual behavior, or that of Elon Musk's, neither of whom behave particularly Christian. Indeed, Musk has claimed in the past to be an atheist.
I'd like Evangelicals to explain this.
Vance lecturing the lumpenproletariat
J. D. Vance lectured Europeans, Germans in particular, on how neo Nazis really ain't that bad.
Telling.
Pete Hegseth tried to lecture people on something, but it was so spastic its hard to know what he was saying, if he knows. That he's a small man in a big job is pretty evident. He's not going to last in this position.
The Pentagon is bracing for defense cuts, fwiw. They ought to be bracing for women to be removed from combat MOS's, which is one of the few things this interregnum could do at this point which I'd support. What I don't support, however, is the elimination of education on sexual assault in the military, which the Navy and Marine Corps have done, following what they believe to be orders from up the hill. The Service has a huge problem with sexual assault, and it'll get worse.
In some ways, I wonder if the current leadership doesn't care about that. It'd drive women from the service, which they may be wishing for.
Portents
It's easy to see signs that aren't there, but since Trump came into office there have been a pile of local and national oddities.
One thing has been the number of airplane crashes. There's been a lot. A small private plane went down in Sweetwater County a couple of weeks ago, and one went down on the highway near Rawlins last week.
Yesterday there was a massive accident in one of the Interstate Highway tunnels near Green River that killed at least two.
Wyoming can't afford its highways, fwiw, which is one of the things that it is seemingly unaware of. Starting this year, probably, we're going to have to figure out how to. My guess is that we just will let them decay. There's remnants all over the state of old state highways before there was Federal money, and they're, well, bad roads and were pretty much from day one.
There's been a lot of shootings in Wyoming over the past year, not all of which hit the news. This past week two did, one in which a mother killed three of her four children and herself. Another occurred when a teenager playing with a handgun killed another teenager. I"m pretty convinced, as I'll post in another thread, that gun control is coming, and Trump will be the one who brings it in.
The Gulf of Mexico and the Press
Trump has excluded the AP from press briefs as they continue to call the Gulf of Mexico the the Gulf of Mexico.
Everyone on earth except for the Trump besotted calls the Gulf of Mexico by that name, and the second Trump leaves office by any means, it's going back to that name and he'll be derided for thinking he could change it.
Time, I might note, is apparently not afraid of Trump. Their current cover:
Good for them.
You can't save everyone
I had a friend I went to grade school with who was in real personal trouble by the time we were high school. It got worse afterword. He died in his 30s down in Louisiana at work, of a massive heart attack, but in actually from a lifetime of booze and alcohol.
There was no saving him.
I note that as it was obvious where his life was headed, just as its obvious where the country is headed. We're headed for a real disaster, but you can't tell the MAGA people that. They're incapable of believing it.
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