CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 150th Edition. Why Karoline is departing. Donald Trump's Weird Obsession with monuments to himself. The Invincibly Ignorant.

Trump looking out of the window of Air Force One with Natalie Harp, Sunday, September 7, 2025, before landing at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, New York, to attend the U.S. Open Men’s Championship, a shocking waste of public money.

Yesterday we discussed the departure of Karoline Leavitt from the Trump Administration.  Also yesterday, two different articles appeared purporting to give her reasons, both of which are pretty interesting.  Between the two, the article in The New Republic struck me as a bit more credible.  It's here:

Karoline Leavitt Quit Because Trump Was Driving Her Crazy

Trump is a pathetic man baby pretty much and shows what happens with a privileged kid is raised to become a spoiled brat.  Of course, his parents realized that which is why they sent him to military school, but it didn't work to straighten him out.

What very well may have worked would have been a hitch in the service, but that, as is well known, didn't happen. That omission is probably part of the reason that the pathetic man has such an inferiority complex today.

Anyhow, TNR holds that Leavitt had been looking to depart her role as Big Liar for Der Fibber for some time and was burnt out from her role. The straw that broke the camel's back was Trump repeatedly calling her on her maternity leave to find out when she'd leave her children and come back to serving him.

If true, that makes Trump even more of an asshole than we already knew him to be, but it's pretty credible.

And it's also perfectly credible that Leavitt was burnt out.  Explaining the sea of lies would be a huge burden.  And, for normal people, having children is really sobering.  I've often said that's when you really become fully adult.  While I think Leavitt's role in the administration in particular and American society overall has been completely despicable, she may have made that leap.  She is Catholic and the burden of her sins for Trump may have just grown too large.

The Daily Beast, on the other hand, holds that Leavitt decided to leave when she was left on the "decoy" Air Force One when Trump was smuggled out on a lesser aircraft.  He took with him, apparently, Pete Hegseth, Natalie Harp, Dan Scavino, and Walt Nauta.  Marco Rubio and Bessent were left to go down in flames if Air Force One was actually targeted.

Unlike a lot of the commentary on this, I don't think it was  unreasonable for Trump to make the switch, although like the CIA I'm not crediting Israeli intelligence on this one much.  But if Leavitt was really left to die on the decoy, that's inexcusable.  But it's not really clear that she actually was.  You would think this would be easy to determine, but it hasn't been.  She may not have been on either plane.

Anyhow, the DB reports she was upset about being left on the decoy plane, and as a mother of two, she should have been.  And if true, and we don't know that it was, that would be a despicable thing for Trump to have done.  

This puts Executive Assistant to the President Natalie Harp back in the spotlight.  There's already piles of rumors about here which are unlikely to be true, but it doesn't help.

Trump just can't accept defeat on anything as he's a spoiled brat.  He also has surrounded himself with sycophants like flies surround shit, and much for the same reason.  Its not surprise therefore that the flies on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to add an inscription bearing President Donald Trump’s name to the building’s exterior,  It'll read:

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump,’

The plaza where it's located will be outright named for Trump.

Well, maybe.

More likely the same court that told the administration to remove Trump's name from the building for being illegally pasted there will say "hold on, buckwheat" and stop it from occurring.

This does, however, bring up a topic that many people have been pondering and which was just discussed on NPR's Politics:

How Trump's focus on his legacy drives his decisions

NPR doesn't quite put it this way, but there's something downright weird about Trump's manic campaign of building crap, and it has been crap, and naming stuff for himself.

Trump's about to die.  It's a fact simply because of his age.  Around 15% of American men live to age 85.  He's 80.  He could literally die any day simply due to old age.  Having elected such an elderly man was foolish.  

While its purely speculation on my part, I strongly suspect that Trump is worried about his impending death, and I can see why.  He's lived a horrible life.  He openly worries about going to Hell, but he doesn't do anything to arrest that chance.  Reforming at age 80 isn't easy, particularly for a man whose on to his fourth wife, if you consider it a real marriage.  That's part of the reason, I'd guess, he's surrounded himself with people like Paula White, who believe in a diluted version of Christianity, or even one that's perverted the actual message of the Gospels.  There's almost nothing that Trump routinely does or says that are Christian in nature, but those religious figure surrounding him don't seem to rebuke him on his behavior to the extent that we can tell what hey do.

The people that Trump has surrounded himself with probably give him a modicum of assurance that his soul is A Ok, but he doesn't seem convinced.  He shouldn't be.  Anyhow, I wonder to some extent if he believes in the next world, in any form, at all.

His manic construction would suggest not.  He desperately wants to be remembered for something, and childish monstrous architecture seems to be what he's hit on.

It won't work.

Most of the things that the Romans built are gone.  The Coliseum is still around, but very few people know which Roman Emperor caused it to be built.  Most of the Trump crap will simply come down, and indeed it needs to.  The stuff he's pasting his name to will all be renamed.

It's vanity, and it's sad.  And expensive.

I've really gone after Trump on this site and people who voted for Trump and his sycophants. Just the other day I posted, in regard to Mike Lindell's bid for office:

Lindell had no chance of winning the primary as only the stupid and ignorant would vote for him.  That's what happened.  He's not accepting that however, claiming, in true Trump/MAGA style that there were "irregularities".

Lisa Demuth won the race with 43.4% of the vote.  Lindell did bring in 32.5% of the vote, which some have been shocked by.  One person asked if his supporters were stupid. 

Well, probably a lot of them are.

Let's be honest about stupidity, as the country has a real stupidity problem right now.

The United States has always had a strong anti intellectual streak, which endorsed the native intelligence of the common man. Frankly, it's been one of the problems the country's always been afflicted with. But at the same time, up until now, there's never been an era in which education was despised. Right now, we're seeing a lot of that. The reason is fairly simple. The really intelligent, through technology, have made it possible for the stupid to have a voice.

Which brings us to the bell curve.

Human intelligence it not really very well understood, even today.  Perhaps in some ways we don't know that much more about it than we ever did.  Btu what we do know is that in an average population, there's a mean.  Half the people are above it, and half below it.

More than that most of the people are somewhere on the middle part of the curve.  But if you divide it into thirds, 1/3d of it is considerably above the rest in terms of intelligence, and 1/3 considerably below.  Like Larry David's skit lampoons, we let the bottom third vote.

Therefore, it'd be somewhat fair to say that Lindell's 1/3d of the Minnesota vote represents "the stupid ones", and to some extent, it actually does.  While some of low intelligence would have voted for other candidates, Trump uniquely appeals to stupid.

He also uniquely appeals to the ignorant, which is not the same.  And that's where the story of intelligence gets complicated, particularly in voting.  I have a friend, for example, whose highly intelligent, but completely disinterested in politics.  He still votes.  A lot of rural people I know are big Trump supporters, not because they're dumb, but because they listen to their neighbors and they've all collectively bought off on BS Trump conspiracy theories.  As part of that, however, I'll note, that they're mostly poorly educated.

Anyhow, take the dumb, the ignorant, and the poorly educated together, you probably have at least 33% of the population.  Technology makes the difference.  In prior eras, those people were influenced by the smarter and the well educated around them.  Now, they're influenced by themselves.

After this, I got a first hand glimpse of how really intelligent people can be MAGA through ignorance.

A person I know, who is definitely highly intelligent, but very narrowly focused, and very focused on religious matters, sent me something on one of the millennialist religions that was influenced by Christianity, but which isn't Christian.  He follows stuff like that extremely closely.  This brought up in my mind something I just saw elsewhere on "post truth Christians".

The reason I note that is that I always find such statements to be sweepingly overbroad.  When people speak about "Christians" and societal, cultural or political matters, the mere use of the term is incorrect.  The MAGA Christians contain a strong element that doesn't regard we Catholics, the original Christian religion, as Christian at all.   The "post truth" Christians, in the article I saw, are Evangelical Christians. Well, informed Catholics have regarded them as post truth for their entire, and short, existence.

But my friend, who is alway studying what Muslims, Jews, the LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists are doing, doesn't realize that and I should have appreciated that.  He frankly just assumes that all Christians have the same view on everything, for the most part, and by extension that the Christians around Donald Trump are all the same, and just like us.

Anyhow, I tried to explain to him how people like Johnson and the group are part of the New Apostolic Reformation and how Doug Wilson figures  the nation should be Calvinist.

He clearly doesn't believe that.

And that gets back to this.  Amongst those who loyally back Trump are a bunch of people who aren't dumb (there are  bunch who are dumb), but almost invincibly ignorant.  The really do think Reagan is just like Trump and people are worried about Trump because he's a "conservative".  Mike Johnson is just a religious guy.  Charlie Kirk just a zealous layman.  Doug Wilson just the tweed wearing vicar of some local Protestant church.

It's a view of the world like its portrayed on The Waltons, or if you want it a little racier, Spencer's Mountain.

It's dangerously naive, but nearly impossible to penetrate.

Some ignorance, and I suspect more than a little bit of that here, is wilful.  It's an example of the tail wagging the dog in quite a few people.  I suspect my friend knows that the Trump administration is a dumpster fire, for example, but he voted for it twice under a sincere conviction that it seeks to advance Christianity against the enemy of secular humanism and Islam.  When the war with Iran came he was ecstatic.  When Israel was decimating Gaza he was all in on it.  Now he's finding that even in his own family people don't hold these views.

Admitting that you're wrong is a hard thing to do. Trump can't do that.  Neither can a lot of his backers.

Speaking of ignorance:

That one speaks for itself.

In terms of really bad news, military student Phillips P. O'Brien, who has been warning that rot is setting into the U.S. military, is now at its worse shape since World War Two.

He cannot be discounted.

I noted in my entry yesterday that we haven't seen a sailor's rebellion since the last days of the Vietnam War.  As also noted, at that time, the military was in horrible shape.  I'd find it hard to believe that we are in worse shape now as opposed to then, frankly, but I am concerned that we're in bad shape.  We may be seeing an over bloated military in a state of advanced decay.  We're certainly losing the war against Iraq.

I'd note, on this, Trump wouldn't be the only one to blame, along with Hegseth.  I would go back to 2013 in regard to the acceleration of the decline in the U.S. Military, when women were first allowed into combat roles (yeah, that again).  Barack Obama was President at the time. He also was when transgendered troops were okayed, which was insane.  So here we can actually blame Obama for something.

But it isn't that alone.  As noted here recently, keeping a bloated, if shrunken, big military after the Cold War was a mistake.  That allowed the US to engage in quasi colonial wars, which was a mistake. Rather than fix things, Trump, via Hegseth, has given in fully to a bloated military and, while keeping women in combat roles openly, begun in backdoor sabotage on a cultural basis and started to try to convert it into the New Model Army.

Finally, as predicated, each day brings a flood of new mailers.

Yesterday had its usual crop.  Notable amongst them was a Chuck Gray one claiming he kept "men" out of "girls" sports.  A very non political female friend of mine had a fit over that as she views female sports as women's sports.

I've received that mailer before. The thing that's really odd about it is that it shows a great big fat dude with facial stubble winning something over female athletes, but the due looks oddly like the cartoon portrayal of J. D. Vance you see around sometimes.

Hmm. . . 

In my friends case, her 12 year old daughter picked up the mail and asked "what's that supposed to mean"?

We also received here, on the same day, a large flyer calling Gray "California Chuck Gray" and pointing out that he's from Los Angeles.  

Well, fair enough but the artful illustration of him wearing a short brimmed straw Fedora and a Hawaiian shirt, all done electronically I'm sure, was a bit much.  I'm sure that he doesn't have either.

Also, it oddly made him look like what Westerners imagine elderly men in Florida to look like.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

Labels: 1970s, 1972, 1973, 2020s, 2026, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt, Lies, Military, Personalities, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, U.S. Navy, Washington DC Vandalization, Zeitgeist

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

The first significant administration departure.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House Press Secretary.

There's going to be a lot of speculation as to why she did this, but let's credit what she said. She's 28 years old, and just had a baby.

Her second.

Her husband is 32 years her senior.

Leavitt is a Catholic, as am I, but she's completely ignored the Catholic injunction against lying.  Lying on serious matters is a serious sin.  Personally, while I can not know her mind, I think she knows she's a liar.

I think she likely knows at this point, at age 28, that she needs to reform and repent.  Her first child was born out of wedlock with her current husband, Nicholas Riccio.  The second was born within the union.  Her affiliation with Trump has locked her into a web of lies for which she'll always be remembered.  Indeed, while this blog entry is somewhat forgiving, most pundits will not be, witness:

Karoline Leavitt Will Soon Lie Somewhere Else

From The New Republic.

I bet she knows that, and that it's time to get out while she can.  Get out, confess, and get clear.  Even at that, the burden she has of repenting from such a public life of outright lying is a heavy one.

I bet she tackles that.  A tell all book will be forthcoming. . . it'll be out before Trump leaves office at the end of this term, if old age doesn't take him to his reward, or lack of one, before that.

Well, may she find a path to peace. She needs it. 

So do her two children.

It won't be easy, overall, we might note.  Lots of people eventually confront their sins and reform, but very few have to confront the public record of it, which in the modern age lasts forever.  Leavitt is, as The New Republic notes, an outrageous liar and that will follower her the rest of her life.

Indeed, if you look at people who had really vile roles serving really vile people, and Leavitt's role has been vile and Donald Trump is a vile person, it's really hard to find anyone who overcomes it.  Albert Speer probably came as close to it as anyone, but even he, as charming as he was, never really did.  Georgy Malenkov, part of Stalin's government, completely fell after Stalin and eventually became a Russian Orthodox Lector, a sort of clerical position in the Eastern Rite churches.

The American things, of course, is to try to convert your infamy into a sort of fame, which is always sort of pathetic.  Monica Lewinsky is the prime example.

Well, as noted, my guess is that Leavitt, while home raising her children, will start working on a tell all book.  By the time its released she's  reveal, I'm guessing, how she never loved Donald Trump.

I also bet that Trump, right now, lives in fear of what that book will reveal.

Mini Mutinies.

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard to their deaths.  

At least those are the reports, confirmed in at least one case by the spouse of a sailor who tried to do just that.  "Big T" Pete Hegseth called the reports "fake news", with the Trump administration branding anything that is actually true as fake.

The ship, launched in 1988, has experienced food shortages, moldy showers, broken toilets, dead laundry facilities, and a lack of basics necessities such as soap and toothpaste during its ninth month deployment.

It's interesting in part because such conditions, while appalling, would not have been that much out of the norm in earlier eras.  Sailors just endured it.  But then, they endured a lot of similar conditions in daily life.  People were, in fact, tougher than they are now.

But it's also interesting as it might reveal something else going on.

The lats time the US Navy had really serious shipboard problems of this type was during the late stages of the Vietnam War, when the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation endured mutinies the Navy has refused to acknowledge as mutinies. These were serious events and they came at a point in time at which US military morale was at its lowest point since the Mexican War, during which time it had such low morale in some quarters that troops had deserted to join the Mexican Army.

The problem had expressed itself first in the Army, with the Army starting to experience everything from quiet disobedience in Vietnam to some outright revolts in the US.  The Kitty Hawk incident occured in 1972 with the Constellation event happening the following year.  Nothing like that has happened since.

The Kitty Hawk had a hard Vietnam War deployment of eight months before it was ordered back into combat and the event began.  That's notable, as the Abraham Lincoln has been out nine months.

Also notable for the 1972 and 1973 events is that everyone had completely lost faith in the Vietnam War by that time, and frankly in the military itself.  Rarely noted during the revision of the history of the war, the Vietnam War had destroyed the American Army as a combat effective force.  The US was lucky that none of our adversaries attempted any sort of additional war at the time. We likely could not have successfully contested one.

Servicemen who served in peacetime Navy before the Second World War were sort of their own breed.  A lot of them were tough careerist for whom the Navy itself was their home.  Set in that era, the movie The Sand Pebbles does a good job of showing what their view was like, and of course it came from a novel by a veteran who had served in that time.  A sort of oddly nostalgic look at the same thing, but set in 1973, is Cinderella Liberty, one of two sort of cynical Navy movies released that year, the other being The Last Detail.

During World War Two sailors, most of whom were wartime volunteers, knew what they were fighting for.  In the Cold War, for the most part, they did too.  Mutinies came when that was no longer clear.

It sure isn't clear now.  American servicemen aren't serving in a just cause and all of the military actions during the Second Trump Administration have been illegal, with one, the boat destruction off of South America, constituting murder of the targets.  The current war shows ever sign of being endless and pointless, and the men know it.

Some honorable commanders have simply resigned.  Enlisted men can't do that.  Serving in an illegal war on a ship that's a craphole, they're serving an administration in which many of them are not the right kind of people, as the administration sees it.  US resources are now really stretched on top of it.  All in all, what's going on board on the USS Abraham Lincoln isn't a good sign.

Toy boats

Part of what's not very honorable is the insane playing along which amounts to marking time until Trump is out of office. The Navy is doing that with the Trump Class of big missile cruisers which King Donny wants built.  Termed "battleships", because Trump knowns nothing about this topic and apparently thinks that battleships are nifty, rather than rendered obsolete decades ago, the CBO estimates that if built they'll cost the country $275B over 30 years.

They won't be built.

They are already costing the country money however.

Like the ballroom, this will keep dragging along until Trump is retired or falls face first in a Big Mac, at which time it'll be terminated.

Monuments to failure

On costs, it's now estimated that all of Trump's D.C. projects will cost nearly 1B.

The country doesn't have this kind of money and we know it.

Had Joe Biden proposed spending 1B on D.C. renovations, Republicans would be howling around the city crying "fiscal responsibility!" and people like Gray, Ranser, and Friess would be warning about the republic being on the verge of ending.  The Wyoming Freedom Caucus would be howling.

Not one Republican is going to say a word about this.

Part of the outrageous nature of the expense is what the administration is planning on.  Building is expensive and tearing down is expensive also.

The Democrats can be planned on to have angst about the expense of tearing things down as its expensive.  They already are.  Additionally, the Democrats remain dedicated to the law, whereas the GOP does not.  The GOP knows that as well and is no doubt planning that the process of tearing crap down will be tied up by worries about the expense and legalities of it.

Well, on this one, the next President should in fact take a page out of Trump's book.  Within an  hour after the inauguration the Corps of Engineers should be ordered to remove whatever has been constructed of the ballroom with in 24 hours, tear down what ever has been built of an arch within the same time frame, and de-guild the bronze statues, even if it means their destruction, with in six hours.  By the end of the 24 hours all the gold or gold appearing nicknacks in the White House ought to be removed to the bunker and the entire thing filled with cement. The reflecting pool should be drained and the Rhino Lining torn up.

Contracts with anyone who contributed to these atrocities should be cancelled and the entities barred from future government contracts.  

Radical reconstruction.

Replacement?

People are already wondering who will replace Leavitt as Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  Fortunately, Wyoming offers the perfect solution.

By Tony Webster - Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169386648

Chuck Gray.

Chuck loves Donald Trump more than Karline Leavitt ever did.  Chuck would never leave.  And he already as experience as a spoken media figure, having had a radio show on his daddy's radio station, and he is a really experienced liar.

Leavitt said some really outrageous stuff while she was spokesman, but they don't hold a candle to the sting of accusations that Chuck retouinely hurls out. Why he'd be calling people communists, Marxist, fascist, abiogenist,dogmatist,lutist, prologistableist, dramatist, in no time.

His only disadvantage would be that he's not a woman.  Most of the recent ones have been.  On the other hand, he's not married and he can't get pregnant (shoot, he's never even seen with women, or men, or mammals) so he won't be going anywhere.

And this gets him out of having to pretend that he's a Wyomingite nad having to buy all that Westerware.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 148th Edition. The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.

Everyone getting their own toys. Absurd military specialization.

Oh geez, here we go again:

Special Operations Command wants a 10-pound 5.56mm machine gun

The command that oversees U.S. special operators expects the Flyweight Assault Machine Gun to begin field testing in 2028, a spokesperson said.

Just recently I wrote a piece here about how it's really time for major reform in the U.S. Military, including a major scaling back of its size.  This is more evidence of that.

Military funding is so thick that we've reached the point where about every two weeks some branch or command of the military requests a new small arm.  It's frankly absurd.

The Army just recently adopted the M7 rifle and now is already looking at a M8 carbine based on the rifle. At the same time, it adopted a new machine gun. The M250.  Both are in a new cartridge.  The M7 was supposed to replace every variant of the AR15 (the M4 Carbine and the M16).  The M250 was supposed to replace the M249 and the M240, thereby also getting everyone on to a new 6.5 cartridge.

Special Operations was supposed to get the new SIG M338, which shoots a variant of the .338 Win Mag.  They are using the Mk 46, their own lightweight version of the M249.

Now they want a lightweight 5.56 machine gun.

The Marine Corps, for its part, has been so/so with the M7, and is using the 5.56 M27, a piston variant of the AR.  The M27 takes the place of both the M4/M16 and the M249 in the Marines.  It looked at the M7 and has rejected it.

The USAF uses the M4.  There are airmen who depend on a longarm, but they're relatively few in number so it really doesn't matter what the USAF uses.

Anyhow, this is nonsense.

The AR platform rifles have always been problematic. At this point the ARs share the same distinction occupied by the late 19th Century "trapdoor" Springfields in being a weapon that was never very good, got people killed early on, but which has lingered on forever.  Replacing it was a good idea.

The Army uses more longarms than anyone else and anything suitable for a soldier is suitable for a Marine.  The Marine Corps should be made to get with the program.  

Nobody needs a carbine. That's just stupid.

Nobody needs a 5.56 caliber weapon anymore. That's just stupid.

It's also a stupid waste of money.

For that matter, there being a M17 and M18 pistol is as well.

US military pistols tend to give me  heartburn to start with, as the post Vietnam War history of them has been dumb.  The M1911 never needed to be replaced, new ones just needed to be ordered.  Congress forced the 9mm and that's how we ended up with the M9.

Having said that, the oddly unloved M9 is a good 9mm pistol.  It really doesn't need to be replaced at all.  Just as the M16 was never able to replace the M14 fully, the M9 was never able to fully replace the M1911, which started a late in the day comeback even seeing the Marines re adopt it for special use as the M45.

Because everyone now loves striker fired pistols, we decided we needed one and adopted the SIG in the form of the M18 and M17.  That was bound to make Glock heads upset even though the Glock isn't that great of pistol, frankly.  The myth of the misfires started but apparently that is now over.

I guess I can tolerate there being a M18 compact variant of the full size M17, but frankly that's a little stupid for the most part.  I can see some use for it, but only some. Still, the USAF handguns are all M18s.  The Navy and Marine Corps also use the M18, rather than the M17.

Anyhow, during the Cold War, Congress at one time had enough and required the services to use uniform equipment.  After the Vietnam War that started to erode away.

It needs to come back.

Related threads:

The United States needs military reform. Der Fibber's Bunker and our outdated Cold War Military. This needs to go, and go back to the future.

Labels: 1940s, 1948., 2020s, 2026, Army, Military, Military Industrial Complex, The Second Trump Administration, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, U.S. Space Force, United States Marine Corps

The United States needs military reform. Der Fibber's Bunker and our outdated Cold War Military. This needs to go, and go back to the future.

Before World War One the size of the Regular Army was 127,000 men, up from 100,000 in 1914.  In 1939, before the start of World War Two, the Regular Army had 174,000 men.

It's time to go back to that.

Donald Trump this week:

Let's be clear.

We aren't being served well by a professional military class at all, and if most of the fighting strength of the nation was in the National Guard and Navy Reserve, we wouldn't be in a mess like Iran now.  If we did that, having a fortress at the White House would be pointless.

And frankly, it's pointless anyhow...

The ballroom is completely pointless.  There's another large Washington facility that can fit this purpose.  In short, the next President needs to scrape this monstrosity and fill the bunker in with concrete.

But let's take a little deeper dive into this.

Trump's building a bunker.

Just like Hitler did.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5437633

Am I saying Trump is Hitler?  No, he's more like Idi Amin.  Idi Amin was a nutjob who stood mostly for his fat self, and that sums up Donald Trump pretty well.  

But building a bunker underneath the White House shows a mentality, and not just in Trump, but in the military, that it's 1964 and the Soviet Union is going to start a Third World War today.

Dwight Eisenhower's nightmare of the dangers of the military industrial complex have come true. And not only have them come true, our military sucks.

Not on the troops level.  On the troop level, say E-1 through O-6, it's really good.  But the problem is evident.  We have a Cold War legacy military and its a danger to the country itself.

Prior to June 24, 1948 the United States had a completely different defense model, and it worked very well.  It defended the nation and it never constituted a threat to the republic itself.  It also didn't work great for assaulting other countries.  It didn't, accordingly, do great in the offensive War of 1812, but it did suffice to keep the British counter invasion from succeeding, if only barely, and in part due to British morale and logistical problems.  It won the war against Mexico and because of its structure it necessitated the US coming to terms with Mexico.  It defeated the racist Southern rebellion of the 1860s, albeit at great costs as the South had the same military structure.  It slowly won the long asymmetric war against the Native population.  It beat Spain and then prevailed in the Philippine Insurrection.  It performed brilliantly in World War One and World War Two.

Since then, with the new structure?  M'eh.

We didn't lose in Korea, but we didn't win either.  Interestingly, in that "conflict", the old model was still partially in place, and without it we couldn't have fought the war.  We turned around with hte new model and lost completely in Vietnam.  Since Vietnam we've fought Iraq twice, the first time, with limited objectives, we did okay, and the second time resulted in us getting bogged down for years.  We also got bogged down in Afghanistan and ultimately surrendered to the Taliban.  We're losing now and are going to lose to Iran.

So what's the structural problem here?

Before 1948 the US defense model was based on the following:

• Large professional Navy (which the Marine Corps was a tiny part of).
• Very small professional Army. As in very, very small.
• Large state controlled, in peacetime, reserves, which started being called the National Guard with the New York State Militia adopting that name in 1824.
• A small Coast Guard (originally the Revenue Cutter Service) that was in the control of the  Treasury Department.

That was it.

There was no standing Army at all . The founders thought standing armies were likely to take over the country, sooner or later.  A professional navy was different as it would always be busy sailing around the globe and therefore couldn't stage a coup.

The thought was that if the US was actually attacked, and the number of suspects who might attack it were quite small, the state militias could be called into active duty service to defend the huge country.  A very small standing Army was formed in 1784 for frontier duty, and expanded after the US was badly beaten up in a frontier Indian war in 1786.  It seemed to have been proven that if the country was going to engage in frontier Indian Wars, it needed some sort of Army.  It was also frankly felt that sort of Army was not a danger to the Republic, as it was like the Navy.  While the Navy was busy off of Gibraltar (no joke) or Chile (no joke), like everyone else's navy, the Army would be off in the wilderness were it would be on the edge of extinction and busy.  If a real war came, the state's would muster their militia and the Federal Government call them into Federal service.

Really optimistic painting of the First American Rgt as party of a U.S. Army series.  Painted in 1976, this depicts a 1976 view of this.  In real life frontier soldiers wouldn't have been wearing white wigs, probably would have been semi shaven, and a lot of the enlisted men wouldn't be wearing uniforms  Nobody can keep white trousers clean.

Frankly, some of this acknowledged that being a soldier requires training, but overall isn't that hard.  It wasn't that hard then, and it isn't now.  The Regular U.S. Army has always looked down on state militias, but the evidence doesn't support the disdain.  In this period, likely the only branch of the Army that really required training were engineers and artillerymen, which the Army did provide, and which did require a professional service to sustain.

It was Canadian militia that basically won the War of 1812, and had the British Regular Army not performed up to expectations, Ohio would be a Canadian province today, as would most of the Rocky Mountain West.

The Mexican War was also fought largely with wartime volunteers and state militiamen.  The Army branch that really shined with the artillery, which was made of troops in the Regular Army, again pointing out what I've noted above.  Much of the early western soldiering was done by the Corps of Topographical Engineers, which again demonstrates it. For regular grunt fighting, volunteers and militiamen worked just fine.

This was all proven again during the Civil War.  Almost all the troops on both sides were wartime servicemen.  Lots of notable officer in the war came right out of peacetime civilian careers.  And notably a really large and bloody war was fought for the long-haul by men who had only state service before the war.

The National Guard's contribution to World War One was so large that the US would not have been able to fight the war without it.  For that matter, the Mexican Border War coming right before it completely relied on National Guardsmen defending the border when the Pershing's Regulars went into Mexico. And again, in World War Two, it was the Regular Army and the National Guard that really kept things going until mid 1943.  A lot of early U.S. Army commitments relied on the Guard well into Operation Torch.  Frankly, the Guard was sacrificed to some degree as they were available and trained.  As late as the Korean War, and only two years into the new defense structure, the entire service relied upon Guardsmen and Reservists to a significant degree.

So that establishment has worked.

After 1948, and more particularly after 1950, the US started to assume that it needed to be on a wartime footing all the time, and that lead to the massive Cold War military. The Cold War was the reason for that.  The assumption was that if war broke out with the Soviet Union there wouldn't be time to mobilize, so the US had to be ready to go from day one.

The Cold War has been over since 1990.  The current size of the Army is 453,000, down from 700,000 during the colder parts of the Cold War, but way up from what it was prior to the Second World War.  The British Army, in comparison, is 109,410.  The French Army, which has commitments all over the globe, is 264,000 men in size.

And I'm not including the Air Force, which didn't exist until 1947.  Prior to that it was part of the Army.  It has another 321,848 active duty personnel.  Into that you have to add the Space Farce, the comical absurdity that has 14,000 personnel.

The Navy, before World War Two, had 160,000 personnel serving 790 active ships.  It has 344,600 serving 480 ships now.  That size is about right.

The active duty Army's and Air Force's is not.  It's entirely too large.

And the structure is wrong.  The Joint Chiefs of Staff, formed in 1942, cover every service including sub services of the services.  It currently has eight members for what ought to be two services.  Having a large body like that risks turning it into a sort of German General Staff.

Complete with the incompetency such large bodies have.  Note how well the German General Staff did in World War One and World War Two.

It's the kind of body that thinks it should build bunkers. And its the kind of body that has the problem noted here:

The U.S. Army’s Dangerous Obsession with WWII Europe

The Second World War, which is now over 80 years ago, is the last really successful war the US fought.  You can't say we've lost ever war since, although I've seen that claim made, but like a large colonial power, which aren't, or aren't fully, our professional military gets involved in a lot of smaller wars with dubious results. A lot of those bad results is that, at the end of the day, we look back upon the Second World War in Europe.  We've been preparing to restage it ever since 1948.

Now, there was some real reason to prepare for that war, really, and it darned near actually occurred. There's still reason to prepare for it, even though Donald Trump has a titanic crush on Putin and loves him dearly, making him the least reliable ally of all time, but we're preparing for it like it's 1941 and not 2026, which also makes us unprepared for anything else.  It also puts us in the mindset of a country that feels it needs to have a gigantic bunker at the White House.

Now, the contrary thread of thought here has been in place since the Militia Act of 1903, which formally committed the various state militias into being the official reserve of the Army.  The Army hated that at the time, but after World War Two, and during the Cold War, it brought the National Guard up to speed.  By the 80s the Guard was every bit as combat capable as the Regular Army is, and that's still the case.  Today, the US really can't fight a big war without the Guard, and truth be known it can't even make its overextended foreign commitments without it.

It's time to take that one step further.

And by that, I mean back to the future.  

The current size of the Army National Guard is 328,084. That ought to be brought up to an even 500,000, and the strength of the Army down to 175,000 active personnel.  The Air National Guard has 106,000 personnel.  The Air Force should be scaled down to about that size, and the Air National Guard up to about 400,000. Following that, the Army National Guard, the Air Force, and the Air National Guard ought to be folded into the Army establishment so there's no longer a seperate Air Force (or Space Force). The Marine Corps should fully go back into the Navy and the Coast Guard back to the Department of the Treasury.

The Air Force Academy ought to be closed and so should West Point. College ROTC programs can take care of training officers, and in an environment that doesn't lead to a military class.  I'd leave the Naval Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy, there, as sea related stuff is unique.  Being a soldier, frankly, isn't all that unique.  I've been one.

With this, the Joint Chiefs should be scaled down to three, one Chief from the Army, one Chief from the Navy, and one Chief from the National Guard.  The Chairman ought to always be a Guardsman.

Why all this?

Well, it's a lot harder to launch illegal foreign wars with a defense posture that's designed for actual defense, and not offensive warfare.  We aren't going to attack another country if we have to call up a bunch of Guardsmen to do it.  And we have less of a chance of becoming an imperial nation if we don't have an imperial military structure.

BREAKING: The House just voted to integrate Israel and the US Military (and this is a bad idea).

This idea is frankly insane.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I recall at home my mother was a fan of Israel.  Basically, she sort of thought it was a small nation that really stood up to larger neighbors, sort of an underdog things.  She also thought that it was a fulfilled promise of the New Testament that it existed, which is something I've heard the very orthodox Catholic theologian Jimmy Akin also express.

My father, however, was not as sympathetic.  He didn't express a lot of views on Israel, but basically he thought it came about as a way for Western nations to feel better about the Holocaust but that it foisted a large  European population on an Arab populace that had a different religion and didn't want them there, and that wasn't a good idea.  He also felt that Israel had a tendency to pick on its neighbors a bit.

When I was quite young, I shared my mother's view, in part because it seemed like every time it got into a spat it really cleaned up on its neighbors.  By my teens, however, my view was shifting and ultimately shifted a great deal.  I didn't become anti Israel, but I frankly sympathized to a large degree with the Arab Palestinians in regard to what had happened to them. By my 20s, additionally, I was of the view that Israel's ongoing existence as a Jewish state was a demographic impossibility.

Later my views shifted more towards the middle, but I've never really been in the "support Israel at all costs" camp.  One of my good friends, of an Evangelical background, holds the view that supporting Israel is mandated by the Bible.  I'm reminded, however, that the Old Testament is fully of examples of the People of Israel acting badly, which was frequently a reason that God would send a prophet to them, with the prophets frequently being unwelcome.

I'm a Catholic, of course, and I hold a much more nuanced view of the modern state of Israel.  It might be that modern Israel is indeed a fulfillment of the Biblical promise that the state would be restored, but I don't think that means at all that the country gets a free pass at everything.

And I'm much more of my father's view, and frankly probably well to the left of it, that American support of Israel has a lot to do with war guilt from the 1940s.  

The 1940s are now a long time ago. Israel is a country and it deserves to exist, although I still feel that its existence is very tenuous given the demographics of the neighborhood.  It doesn't deserve to be attacked, but it doesn't have license to wage genocidal level wars on neighboring territory, as the recent war in Gaza became.  Long term, if Israel is going to continue to exist, it's going to have to come to some sort of accommodation with its neighbors, and that means the entire region needs to figure out what to do about the plight of the Palestinians, which nobody has demonstrated an inclination to do.

Under Benjamin Netanyahu I suspect the silent Israeli policy, opposed by a large number of Israelis, is to drive the Arabs out of lands that were within British Mandatory Palestine.  That has never been openly stated, but if they were driven out, the thought would run, the demographic problem is solved.

The moral one certainly wouldn't be.

Anyhow, the modern GOP is more in love with Israel than any group of Americans has ever been, and that says something.  Israel always had the solid support of both parties, but now the GOP is absolutely besotted with Israel.  So much so, that we're integrating our militaries to a certain extent.

The irony of this cannot be overstated.  Since he came into office Trump has beat the National Conservative drum that the US is to be an isolated entity until itself.  He's come as close to taking us out of NATO as he can, and doesn't seem done trying, and he's ignored a major war that actually involves a major Western country, Ukraine.  He's all be declared that if Russia attacks Western Europe he doesn't care.  He's threatened to outright invade the territory of a NATO member, Denmark, in order to steal land from Greenland, which doesn't want us there.

But with Israel, it's totally different.

We're not only supporting Israel, with which we have no written treaty, we're backing Israel up in one of its wars, the one against Iran, which we can now not get out of and are basically carrying on, and losing on our own.  In spite of that, we're about to significantly merge our defense industries to no benefit of our own, but major benefit to Israel.  And in doing that, we might note, we're going it for a country that has periods in which its been governed by the extreme Socialist left.  It's also been a country which actively spied on the United States.

This is just flat out nuts.  

Israel has been in existence for nearly 80 years now and it can defend itself.  I see no reason at all to tie the US to regional wars which have a heavy religious element to them.  If Israel is going to persevere, it needs to find a way to do so with Arab allies, not the United States.  It's come a long ways towards doing that, and facilitating that is in the interest of world peace, even if it really has nothing else to otherwise do with US interests.  Fighting Israel's wars for it is flat out wrong, but this makes that more likely, and we're already doing that right now.

Indeed, if the US had a sane leader and a sane policy, we'd be looking for ways to pull out of the Middle East entirely.  We don't due to petroleum oil, which provides a good reason, in addition to the environmental one, to do what China is doing, which is to pull away from petroleum as rapidly as possible.  The whole world should be doing that, and recent actions by the Saudis, as well as some of the past decade, show that Saudi Arabia expects that to be done.

If we'd started it a decade ago, we'd be largely petroleum free, to everyone's benefit, right now.

So why are we doing otherwise?

It's really for the simple reason that the GOP has been captured by the American Evangelical right and that body has a strong theocracy behind it that views supporting Israel, and an eventually conversion of the Jews to (Protestant) Christianity as a prerequisite for the Second Coming.  Israelis know this and make use of it, which is how Netenanyu was able to push Trump along into a major war it could not have pulled off itself.

If this keeps up, this is going to have a bad end.

It likely will not, however, keep up, which is the irony.  

In the 2022 election Muslim Americans, enraged over Joe Biden's moderate support of Israel following the attacks on it by Hezbollah, voted for Donald Trump.  But at the same time younger American voters were shifting their views towards the Palestinians.  Younger Americans have no personal memory of the Holocaust. Their parents weren't swept up by it, and indeed, their grandparents weren't.  It's something in the rear view mirror, part of history.  Israeli attacks today, however, are not.  

Also new is the large numbers of Muslims in the US.  

Only 1.3% at most of Americans are Muslim, but only 2.4% are Jewish.  There are, therefore, more Jewish voters than Muslim ones, but in both instances their votes are only significant where they are concentrated, and Muslims are very much concentrated in some places.  They're making an electoral difference in those places.

The GOP is doing a really good job of angering massive numbers of Americans.  By now, it's largely lost Hispanics, who helped pull it through in 2022.  It's no doubt completely lost Muslims.  Those people who really didn't want the US in foreign wars are now wondering what happened.  Economic conservatives are horrified.

I very much doubt this provision will survive in the Senate.  It shouldn't.  But already, during the Trump Administration, we've seen the rise of outright antisemitism due to the war with Iran. We haven't seen anything like this since 1940.  It will grow worse.

And this will be one of the factors that's going to drag the Republicans down in the fall.  If passed, it won't survive the next administration.  And not only is it going to be a factor in dragging down the GOP in the fall, it'll help drag down far right Evangelicalism in general.

Indeed, I suspect the Israeli far right knew that, which is why it had to strike while the iron was hot, and Donald Trump in office.  It doesn't expect this era to last in the US.

Budgetary BS.

The House of Representatives passed its version of a massive the 2027 National Defense authorizing an $1.15 trillion in spending for the military 216 to 212.

Six deluded Democrats voted for it, seven Republicans voted against it.

The bill dumps a record amount of money into the military and:

•  Substantially expands military technology cooperation between the United States and Israel, the latter of which has a leader who duped demented Donny Trump into the current ongoing unending war.
• Had the fascist SAVE Act tied to it in the hopes that the Senate won't vote no on a defense appropriations bill.

It now goes to the Senate where its chances are doubtful.

Nothing in this bill should pass.

All guns, no butter, and no votes.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 6, 1976. First women at Anapolis. Not nothing the anniversary.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 6, 1976. First women at Anapolis.: The first women to do so entered the United States Naval Academy. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II began a "Bicentennial tour" of se...

We ran this a few days ago.

And now we see this article:

The Naval Academy enrolled women 50 years ago. It’s not celebrating.

It's no secret that Pete Hegseth is hostile to women in combat (one of the very few things I agree with Pete about), but that's not the same thing as not noting this milestone, which is pretty darned close to saying that women don't have a place in the Navy.

Well, actually, it's exactly the same thing as saying women don't have a place in the Navy.

Women have been in the Navy since March 21, 1917, as we noted on the anniversary of that occurrence:

Loretta Perfectus Walsh becomes the first female sailor in the United States Navy

Incorporating women into the Navy has been sort of a peculiar problem in some ways, and those ways are heavily biological, although honesty compels us to note that it's not as problematic now as it once was, or would be suspected as being.  

Approximately 75% of all sailors are assigned to sea-intensive ratings  rather than shore duty ones.  Only about 19% to 20% of the active fleet is deployed or underway at any one time, however.  About 20% of the Navy's manpower if female, with that figure applying to both the enlisted and officers.  There are instances you can find of ships that end up with a problematic number of female sailors pregnant, but on average only 0.7% to 1.5% of a female crew find that to be the case.  

Not that there are not problems.*  Having young men and young women in that level of close proximity is going to cause problems.  Again, I'm not in favor of women in combat and while I don't think of the Navy all that much, about any ship at sea can be a combat vessel in some fashion.  

The Navy changed its billeting policy in 2024 in order to allow pregnant female sailors to find land billets more easily than it had previously, so the Navy, in pre Hegseth Department of Defense it was moving towards being more accomodating.

So what's going on here?

I don't know, but it's part of a sub silentio drift in the DoD.  If the Hegseth run DoD just wants women out, or out of some roles, it can move in that directly openly.  Instead, it's been sort of just being hostile to them, of which this is one example.

And its not just female sailors, or servicemembers.  It's being silently hostile to minorities as well.  People who normally would have been promoted to senior positions are not being if they're women, or black, etc.  A portrait of a legendary senior black Air Force officer was removed from display without explanation.  

Without explanation, it has the appearance of a harassment campaign to quietly discourage women and blacks from joining the service.

And I have to wonder, to some degree, if the DoD is trying to make it through November before it takes a formal step of eliminating women from all combat roles.  It can't eliminate blacks from the service, of course, but it's also allowing Evangelical Protestant campaigning in the service, which is hostile to various religions, including various Christian religions.  At some point that has the effect of telling Catholic Hispanics and African Methodist blacks maybe they aren't welcome, or at least that they don't want to hang around with a bunch of troops who look and act like Confederate Partisan Rangers.

Or maybe it's not that extreme.  Be that as it may, the treatment of women in this fashion is hard to ignore.

Footnotes

*In recent years the bigger problem has been with the Department of the Navy's female Marines, who had to be expressly told to wear shirts while doing PT overseas.  Their omission of shirts clearly wasn't because it was just hot where they were.

Sunday, June 20, 1976. Departures.

The United States completed its withdrawal of troops from Thailand and closed the last military installations that it maintained there.  Thailand had played a major role in the U.S. air campaign during the Vietnam War.

The United States evacuated Americans and Westerners from Beirut by sea.

Last edition:

Tuesday, June 8, 1976. The last primaries of the 1976 season.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, 1976 Election, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military. A resolution?

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military.: The Department of Defense scaled back its list of recognized religions.   There were 211, now there are 31.  Here is the full list: Agnostic...

And a happy ending, or at least an ending, occurred to this story when the Pentagon redid its classifications to read as follows:

It's actually not a bad reclassification, although a person does hae to wonder why, in order to make a non Christian religion happy, the Christian identification was taken away from actual Christian religions.

One of the major newspapers ran statistics for the various religions in terms of the what percentage of the military is comprised of them. While there are Mormons in the military, the percentage is infanticidally small.  As noted earlier, however, there would be units in the military that would be heavily made up of Mormons, principally Guard and Reserve units in Utah.  Their spiritual needs would be different than those of Christian religions, however, which would gain importance in a large scale war.

According to exit polls form the last general election, 64% of Mormons voted for Trump in the last election.  20% voted for Harris.  56% of Catholics did, with 41% voting for Harris.  Catholics are a much larger demographic than Mormons and Trump has interestingly shown little concern about enormously offending them.  68% of Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant religion in the country, went for Trump.  Southern Baptist, I suspect, are probably the largest Christian denomination to be upset by the reclassification, if they are.

I don't know that I have a strong opinion on the list being reworked to address Mormon concerns, but I would note a couple of oddities about it.  One is that that the U.S. Government didn't define them as Christian, although they seem happy with the result.  The second is that what Trump may say aside, he doesn't love Mormons anymore than he loves anyone else.