Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?

A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself

Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun.  He never did.  He died following drinking too much on his wedding night.

Some evangelical Christians excuse Trump's lack of Christian adherence by casting him as Cyrus the Vance, the Persian Emperor who was not Jewish, but who regarded himself as appointed by God and whom advanced the cause of the  the Jews.  In their minds, the non believer Trump is advancing the cause of (Protestant) Christianity.

More of his Christian loyalists, however, come from a certain Christian worldview that's very strong in the US, but only in the US, the comforting, but completely false, "once saved, always saved" view of Christianity.

It's expressed here in the misunderstood posting of one Franklin Graham.

Graham is the son of the late Billy Graham, the famous Evangelical pastor beloved by many American Protestants.  I never grasped his popularity, and perhaps things like this are why.  What Graham posts here, and what has been widely misunderstood by those shocked by the comments, is in fact absurd.  Graham espouses the minority Protestant view that you can never lose your salvation.  Believe in Christ as your savior once, and you are good to go thereafter no matter what.

This sort of view explains why so many people who attend mega churches live in such flagrant disregard for the basic tenants of Christianity, particularly the sexual tenants.  And the belief, taken from and misinterpreted from one single line in the New Testament, is completely condemned by the whole of the Gospel.  St. Paul, who specifically spoke of people losing their salvation after their conversions, would be appalled.

But for somebody as lazy intellectually as Trump, it's no doubt comforting, assuming he worried about the afterlife at all.  He's lived a life of moral dissipation but, hey, he's okay.

The belief on Trump's part is no doubt not only comforting to him, but it probably emboldens him as well.  Compared to Cyrus, backed up by the intellectually think "once saved" theology and pastors who repeatedly assure him he's on a Devine mission, and with people like Pete Hegseth in his cabinet, what could go wrong?

Well, everything, in fact.  And indeed, everything is going wrong.

And therefore, we might legitimately raise this question.  What if Trump's place in Salvation History is  not that of Cyrus the Great, but rather Atilla the Hun?

It sounds absurd, but frankly its not less absurd that he being a Cyrus the Great, and certainly no less absurd than the claims he's a "Godly man" that some of his supporters make. 

Attila the Hung, during his lifetime, was called the Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God.  The thought was that Rome having became so sinful was being served by being whipped by Atilla by license of God.

The modern US is certainly no less sinful that Rome was from 434 to 453, the reign of Atilla.  The country still practices infanticide, something that only became legal anywhere in the US in 1970 (Hawaii).  The country has the reputation of being deeply religious but the Playboy Culture that came in starting in 1953 has lead to rampant sexual immorality and indeed sexual confusion.  The materialistic culture that started to come in during the 1950s has converted a class dominated culturally and economically by the middle class to one controlled by and for the extremely rich elite, the pinnacle of which was on display on Epstein Island.  Closeted homosexuals in office pretend they hold family virtues.  Office holders who maintain their deep love of family espouse divorce and contracept to avoid having one.  Money is everything.  We are willing to fight and die for oil rather than address the damage that it causes.  We go so far as to excuse our lifestyles and occupations, no matter what they are, surely endorsed by God, effectively mocking him.

All along, we pretend we are a devout people.

Vice President Vance, who is a National Conservative, lectures the Europeans about their losing their culture while the American Civil Religion is such a washed out version of Christianity that it must shock the listeners.  He has a point, to be sure, the West in general had engaged in massive moral decline with a life made easy after the recovery from World War Two.  But it's hard the case that the United States can look ti itself as a champion of Western values.

Which leads back to this.  

The Protestant  Reformation brought in the modern world.  It's dying before our eyes.  The United States is a Protestant country, and the United States as a great power is over.  It started to take blows when fallen away Methodist Hugh Hefner started to prostitute the image of  young women in a particularly harmful way.  As the culture became steeped in immorality, the mainline Protestant churches adopted it rather than offend.  And off in the corners some Evangelical Churches took a more radical view, with those views now expressed in the MAGA movement.

Closely related, although not appreciated to be, a culture that fell into lust naturally fell into greed.  No decent society, let alone a Christian one, would allow the wealthy the leeway they have in our society, nor would it seek to allow their unabated accumulation of wealth.  Greed and lust are, in fact, the two primary attributes of American culture.  The fact that we don't seem to realize that is because a third deadly sin has become manifestly American as well,. pride.  To state that Trump is a prideful man, and that MAGA is prideful movement, is to state the blatantly obvious.

And while we are at it, we might note that envy has now uniquely entered the picture  We evny what Denmark has in Greenland, and what Venezuela has it itself.

And look at Trump, and consider sloth. , , 

And finally, listen to Trump, on anything, and consider wrath.

These would be bad enough in one man, but when that man is elevated to the leader of a nation, that nation has endorsed it.  We, as a nation, have adopted all seven of the deadly sins as our primary national virtues.

So why wouldn't we invite a scourging, if only by our own conduct.

Nobody knows whether Donald Trump is going to Hell after his death.  That is not for us to know. Franklin Graham doesn't know. What we do know is that the Presbyterian raised Trump has lead a strongly immoral life in multiple ways even without examining the worst accusations against him, which in fact now deserve to be examined.  But the same is true of many supposedly "devout" Christians.  Indeed, the number of Christians attempting to be Christian, of all branches of the faith, is likely a tiny percentage of Christians in the U.S. overall.

What Trump is serving to do is to bring forward the hypocrisy of the American civil religion, the easy Christianity where the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Sincere devout Protestant Christians have been deeply distressed by Trump.  They should be.  But there's another emotion in some quarters as well, a sort of principled schadenfreude.  I.e., knowing that everything is collapsing and taking a sort of delight in it.

That may sound deeply odd, but perhaps it isn't as much as it might seem.  The moral draft that's been going on has been going on for decades, and its been an obvious problem. The sort of worship of money that divests the middle class and which exalts economic activity above everything, including the happiness of average people and the environment, has been going on for decades as well.  The profligate use of American armed force is not new. The hypocrisy of our ruling class, now at an all time high, has been developing for quite some time.  Some times it takes a crisis for people to wake up. If they don't, they just perish and somebody less dense takes over.

Will Americans wake up?

I think they might, but when they wake up it's not going to be morning in America.  That country has died.  It was already ill, and had been very ill since the 2010s, but Trump came in like the batshit crazy anti vaxers that are part of his overall movement and administered a lethal does of ignorance and stupidity.  The country they wake up to may, in fact, be more like an old one, hopefully.  One less powerful on the international stage, and less willing to throw its weight around without the cooperation of others.

In other ways, it's going to be something entirely new.  Far right Evangelical Protestantism will not survive Donald Trump.  People like Franklin Graham and Paula White are going to be regarded as ignorant fools.  The big box mega churches will be exposed for what they are, worship service centers think on the hard lessons of Christianity.

Faith won't die, and it hasn't anywhere.  The Ancient Faith has started to revive in France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church.  The Apostolic Faiths in North America are growing as the young turn their back on the American Civil Religion and Americanism in general, seeking the real.  The Protestant Reformation was already dying, but now that death will accelerate, even if the Protestant faiths, particular those of the early Reformation, will live on, particularly in their most conservative, and frankly Catholic, forms.

Holy Week started yesterday.  We live in interesting times.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 118th Edition. Why are the women discounted? The corruption of wealth. Hanging around in a cult will make you a weird cultist. New links and the fallen. A gift of cash on the floor of the legislature.

Ruslana Korshunova, a Russian model who had been to Epstein Island, and later went out a 9th story window.  Suicide was the official ruling.  Lots of Putin's enemies go out windows.  A lot of badly emotionally scared women kill themselves.

Why are the women not believed?

At some point in the past, due to sex scandals, it became common to demand that we don't doubt the women who claim they were assaulted or abused.

And for good reason.

The rumors about Playboy and things associated with it proved to be true. Rape, suicides, at least one young woman associated with it simply disappearing, a la The Limey, Hugh Hefner's out right perversions, 

It's not as if there weren't signs before. They were just ignored.  And the rich and powerful played along with it.

Including Bill Cosby, who was a frequent guest at the Playboy Mansion, and who turned out to be into drugging and raping women.  It's not as if there weren't rumors.

And there was Harvey Weinstein, about whom the knowledge of his demanding sex from starlets was pretty well known.

Weinstein, by the way, shows up in the Epstein files.

With each of these scandals, once they broke, women came forward after a first few brave ones broke the news.  It was emphasized at the time that women needed to believed when they claimed they were raped and abused.

It hasn't worked that way at all with Epstein.

Virginia Giuffre was flat out doubted when she came forward that she was provided to Prince Andrew by Epstein.  As time has gone by, it became more obvious that her claims were not lies.  Now she's dead, but it took pretty much all the way up to her death for her to be believed. And we now know that Andrew's association with Epstein is worse than at first imagined.

The Epstein files are packed with claims by young women against the rich and powerful. They include allegations of rape, but also murder.

And yet, the accusations are simply disregarded to a very large extent.

It's accepted, now, that Epstein provided young women to the rich and powerful, but the nameless rich and powerful.  So far, when direct accusations are made, they're shuffled aside.  Former model Carol Alt, for examples, says that while she was dating Epstein (showing some questionable decisions right there) she was groped by Trump while Epstein just stood there.

That accusation has simply gone nowhere.

Why?  Alt has no reason to make it up.

Those are, we might note, amongst the less grotesque that are associated with Trump, who is accused by some Epstein victims of outright rape, receiving a handjob from a teenage girl, and witnessing a murder of an infant.  All of which are simply totally discounted.

Are they false accusations, or perhaps simply mistaken ones?

They could very well be, but its interesting how they simply aren't taken seriously.

Bill Gates was accused of some things in the Epstein files that he denied and that appeared headed into being forgotten until Melissa Gates somewhat revived them, although she didn't actually say that what he was accused of, he did.

So, do we take all of these claims at face value?

If we don't, why not?

Granted, it's well demonstrated that every claim made by a woman against a man is not true. And some of these claims are outright fantastical.  But then, if you'd told me that Bill Cosby drugged women to rape them, I'd have claimed that was fantastical.  If you'd told me (even though it was publicly known), that one Playboy Centerfold posted things claiming Hefner was demonic on her apartment walls before killing herself, I'd have thought that fantastical.  At one point, if you'd told me that two of the Playboy centerfolds had been 17 years old when they were photographed, I'd thought that impossible.  If you'd told me that Prince Andrew was screwing a teenager procured for him by an American john, I'd have thought that fantastical.

If you'd told me some rich Floridan kept an island staffed with what amounted to teenage sex slaves, well I'd have thought that fantastical.

Trump we might note, is hardly free from being in the smoke where there is fire.  He has associations with men who have been ephebophiles that go way back.  A video recently surfaced of Trump at a 1991 beauty pageant dinner where he was the judge in which the servers were the very young models in very tight bathing suits. That's creepy in the extreme. A 2020 investigation by the Guardian revealed that the competition was used by Elite Model Agency founder John Casablancas and others to engage in sexual relationships with the vulnerable young models and that the competition was part of a broader network, sometimes with connections to Jeffrey Epstein, that placed young contestants in precarious situations with wealthy men.

Trump hasn't been directly accused, however, of raping anyone in association with that.  

Be that as it may, former contestants from Miss Teen USA (1997) and Miss USA (2006) have stated that Donald Trump entered the dressing rooms while they were changing.  Some were as young as 15 years old

Now, some of the stories in the Epstein files (the murder one in particular) are really wild.  

But some well within the realm of believability, which of course doesn't mean they're true. . . or that they should be immediately dismissed.

The corruption of wealth.

One common element of all of this is the absolute corrosion caused by wealth.  The singular aspect of Epstein island is that rich and powerful men wanted to go there, and that some of them wanted teenage sex slaves.

This isn't a new phenomenon of any sort.

We just posted on Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands 

I'm not saying he was something like an Epstein associate, or that he had the moral depravity of Donald Trump.  But noted in his story were two illegitimate children by mistresses.  Charles Lindbergh, who went from being an American hero, to disdained, to somewhat of a hero again had children by three German women in the 1950s and 1960s, including two women who were sisters.  All told, he had thirteen children, seven of which were illegitimate.  Keeping Elon Musk's genetic broadcasting straight is a difficult project at best, and he's now fighting with Ashely St. Clair, his most recent, um, whatever, over their son Romulus.  Bill Gates had one known affair.  It goes on and on.

And then we have Trump.

What we also have is ephebophilia, which is a primary sexual attraction to mid-to-late adolescents, 15 to 19 years of age.  Unlike pedophilia and is not classified as a mental disorder in the DSM.  And we have Hebephilia, the attraction to teens below that, which is classified as a mental disorder in the DSM.

Some of these girls are indicated to be pretty freaking young, although I haven't kept track of it.  It seems to me that I've seen references to at least one being 13, which is really freaking young and one was apparently 11 years old, which is absolutely horrific.  Most seem to be in the late teens, to the extent we know, but the operation  of U.S. law is keeping the identify of the girls secret, so we don't really know all that much about them.

We know it was really weird, however.

What we also know is that a respected scientist who studied ephebophilia found that most men of adult years would react to attractive females in that age range.  I.e., they'd notice an attractive female in the late teen age range, which is not at all the same as engaging in improper behavior with them.  The researcher himself was horrified to find that he did, but it makes some sense.  The 18 years of age brightline under U.S. law is somewhat artificially drawn and in fact it'd make sense to draw it higher, perhaps at 20 or 21 as it used to be for most things.  Playboy, as noted above, knew this and actually intentionally targeted down towards lower ages before nearly getting in trouble in Europe, which in the 1950s and 1960s had some very strict prohibitions on pornography.  Nonetheless more than one Playboy model was 17 years old when photographed, and others were just 18.  Eighteen years old is within the ephebophilia age range (and hence a good reason to boost such things up to 21).

We note that first and then go on to note that its been shown that men who have had about eight women sexually being to depress the age downwards.  I.e, their sexucal moral fences start to come down.  I don't know how this works for women, but it's known there is an effect on them as well, as as the "body count" increases the ability to form attachments decreases.

All this is because our species is naturally monogamous, with some slight collieries that have to do with death.  In a non disrupted state of nature we know that a strong bond forms between a couple that has known only each other, and it can be so intense that if ruptured, usually by death, a second one never forms.  We also know that a fair number of people are plagued by thoughts of their "first", as that's where the bond biochemically formed and they're incapable of getting over it.  What we noted above is that the more biology is ignored in this fashion, the looser the bond becomes.  Men that "cheat" tend to keep on cheating, no matter what, and at the eight number, they start to look downwards to younger bodies.  With women what seems to occur is that they simply lose the ability to stick with anyone, and as the number becomes higher, the more superficial and temporary their relationship become, even if the relationships form children.

As with a lot of things, as nature is violated, there are consequences.

Part of our natures is that when we were all aboriginal the wolf was always at the door.   That formed an instinct towards acquisition.  Maybe we could store up enough to last through the winter, when there were winters.  When we became more settled due to agriculture, that mean we could store up wealth.  Storing up a lot of wealth allowed at some point for people to directly engage in two of the seven deadly sins, gluttony and greed, with greed being the most obvious.  In a debased society, allows a person to engage in unrestrained lust as well.

In other words, love of money truly is the root of all evil.

Castrati

In a moral and just society, people would police their own avarice or society would police it for them.  

It's pretty clear that we don't live in a moral and just society.

After the horrors of the Weinstein crimes were releveled, there was a period of time in which progressives started creating a moral code that looked a lot like the original Christian moral code.  Weird, eh?  Anyhow, it's interesting here as it accepted that some sort of societal rebuilding needed to occur.

It does need to occur, but frankly what should be evident is that the curbs are going to have to be built in to take the food off the table.  What that means is taxes.

Ever since Ronald Reagan introduced the utterly bogus trickle down economic theory Americans have run around hating taxes and giving tax breaks to the super wealthy.  There's something frankly morally wrong with people who obtain vast amounts of wealth and then retain it, as opposed to people who obtain vast amounts and then apply it.  Indeed, a lot of people who obtain huge amounts of wealth, like Epstein Island level, seem to apply it to the Seven Deadly Sins, pride: greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.  

These people could be helped to avoid this fate, and I'm sincere about that, if they were simply taxed to prohibit it.  There's no reasons that people should be billionaires.  There's frankly no reason why a person should own more than one home, or at least not very expensive homes.

Of course, if we taxed people to keep them within a range of reason, say no more than $10M in personal wealth, many would scream that they were going to move to . . . wherever.  Let them go.

Most wouldn't, frankly.  Whatever is wrong with this class of people so that they must keep acquiring is so off base that they'll keep doing what they're doing that generates the wealth no matter what.

I'd note that just the other day Mehmet Oz, government figure, was running around suggesting that people should go to work earlier in life and work longer into life to help address the budget.  Helpful suggestions like this are always given by people who are nowhere near retirement or who don't work in dangerous jobs, so the recommendations are pretty much crap.    Be that as it may, if the administration can suggest that, and if it can be lead by a guy who is almost 80 and demented, well then we can tax the rich and expect them to like it.

They need to be, so they don't spend their money being destructive.

Hanging around in a cult will make you a weird cultist. 

Joe Epstein was really good at getting photographs of those who came to seek his favor.  So good at it, you have to wonder if that was part of a plan to make marks out of those people.

Will take down (Pope) Francis, The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.

Steve Bannon

The Trump administration, and those who surround Trump, are deeply perverted.   Which takes us to this:

Yeoman's Twenty-fifth Law of Behavior:  Hanging around in a weird cult will make you a weird cultist.

People often wonder how anyone associated with a weird cult ever believed in it.  It's not really that much of a mystery.  Most humans engage in groupthink.

Now, when talking of a "weird cult",  we must keep in mind that the term "cult" is grossly overused.  People frequently, for example, apply it to religions they just don't like.  On rare occasion some of those faiths may have started as "cults", but no long lasting religion is one, keeping in mind that by long lasting, we mean long lasting, not a few years or, in some cases, even a few decades.  And here, while some of the things we'd regard as cults claim to be religions, we're using the term both more broadly and more narrowly.  There are plenty of civil movements, for example, that are cults.

In our use of the term, we mean a movement that's nearly always lead by a single individual who benefits from it personally in some fashion, which is based on the outrageous and outrageous conduct.  Cults always rationalize conduct that defies what is plain human logic, which is why people outside them are typically baffled as to how the dupe people into belonging. Warren Jeffs'  Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a good example.  What it proposed got Jeffs lots of underaged sex.  NXIVM was a sex cult as well.  Scientology is a cult, albeit without that element.  QAnon followers are basically a cult.

The thing is with cults is that they are insular.  You really don't get to know what their adherents are thinking unless you are part of them, and then you keep it to yourself.  They are secretive at their inner core, and self associating.  Hang around all day every day with weird cultist and chances are, you will become a weird cultist.

One of the things a lot of people are now starting to notice about the Trump Administration is how downright weird it is, and how weird many of its central figures are.

It's been lurking there all along, and its more than a little bit of what caused people who were conservatives, but not MAGA, to really feel uneasy, in varying degrees, about hardcore deep MAGA.

Steve Bannon is, in my view, a disheveled creep.  Both inside the MAGA movement and outside of it, he seems just filled with hate.  Bannon claims to be a Traditionalist Catholic, but he's been married and divorced three times, placing him well outside of what the Church tolerates in this area.  And here we see he wanted to "take down" Pope Francis.

Pope Francis was a controversial Pope in the United States.  I was not personally a fan of Pope Francis, but he drew more criticism from Americans than he deserved.  I really wasn't a fan of his synodality movement, which lingers on, but which I suspect will sort of die a quiet death.  

At any rate, what we're finding out as the Epstein files get released is not only did he have a lot of associations with the very rich and powerful, those relationships carried on well past the point where there's any benign explanation for it.  Bannon hoping to take down world figures with Epstein's help.  Lutnick taking his family to Lolita Island.  It just goes on and on.  

It's really not possible to believe that all these people didn't know that sex slaves were on the menu.  It's hard to believe that most of them didn't know that.  More likely, they just didn't care.

Which leads to this:

The Trump admin posted that yesterday, on Valentine's day.

The use of the term "Daddy's Home" is openly perverse.  It's a sick joke that has heavy sexual and abusive, and sexcually abusvie overtones and always has.  In a lot of contexts, it has a heavy homosexual overtone.  All of that is true here.  Trump's the "daddy" to a large group of people who seem in that fashion.  It's perverse.

Also perverse is Trump's obsession with weight.

On Valentine's Day the Trump Administration posted a cartoon of Gov. J. B. Pritzker mowing down junk food.

Pritzker is a stout guy, but he's one of those stout guys who looks like he's fairly fit.  One of the things about weign in American culture is an overarching belief that everyone who is overweight is a slob, which just isn't true.

Now, it's not good to be overweight.  74% of Americans are overweight.  Donald Trump is quite overweight.

Indeed, there's something really weird at work here, as Trump looks fat and flaccid.  Pritzker looks overweight but fairly fit.  Chris Christie, who Trump likes to poke fun of due to his weight, is in between.  

A fat guy call other fat guys fat, is pretty weird.

Another example of our Twenty Fifth Law of Human Behavior came out last week in the form of a totally unhinged Congressional rant by Pam Bondi.  It was spectacularly weird.  

Bondi went from supposedly having some sort of Epstein stuff in her desk to not having anything to being in charge of an agency that redacted a huge amount of stuff.  Clearly, the government had a lot of stuff, and every time more of it is revealed, we learn of additional powerful men, some in government, who had connections with the teenage sex slave broker.  The Trump Administration has been in full blown panic about it for months and keeps hoping it can order everyone to move on.

What Bondi did was just fly off the handle, actually arguing that we should be paying attention to the Dow Industrial Average rather than raped teenagers.

Bondi is 60 years old but doesn't look it.  Like other members of the "family values" party, she's been married twice and divorced twice.  All of a sudden her visage is catching up with her age.  Stress will do that, and being cruel is stressful.

Bondi wouldn't look at the rape victims.  I've long said that the biggest enemy of women achieving full equality in our society is other women.  

Well, look at the Dow. . . 

New links and the fallen.

I've added a lot of new links in different categories here recently.  I never post when I've done that, but I have.  I've also been moving links that have been long dormant over to the inactive blog list.  Basically, if there haven't been any posts in over five years, I move them over there.

I always wonder why an active blog suddenly stops posting.  Sometimes, reading them, I'm pretty sure it's death.

I took two blogs in the military section out.  One is the Duffle Blog.  It's supposed to be comedic, but it just wasn't very funny, so it came down.  The other one was Mandatory Fun Day.

I loved Mandatory Fun Day when I was first made aware of it, but recently it's been off.  I suspect I knew what was going on, but the most recently entry confirmed it, that being the one where the blogger notes he's getting out of the military soon.  I suspect that he's taking a twenty year retirement.  Many members of the military do.

The reason it seemed off, however, is that for some time posts with his wife and children, or even references to them, just flat out stopped.  His wife and four daughters had appeared fairly regularly.  Commentors on the post on his getting out of the military started asking about them, and then one confirmed  what I'd suspected.  The couple divorced.

Being a married military couple with children is reputedly hard, due to long deployments.  Without anyone saying it, frankly, the situation has gotten worse since the inclusion of women in the military.  Cheating by soldiers has always been a problem, and cheating by married people in offices where they were close together has been a problem for a long time.  But take people away from their spouse for a year or more and plop them down somewhere where they're working cheek to jowl seven days a week, well. . . 

I don't know what happened with Austin Von Letkemann and his wife Katie, but apparently a year or two ago Mrs. Von Letkemann, who had her own creator content (TikTok?) accused him openly of cheating on her and they divorced soon thereafter.  I hadn't really followed them personally, but that opened up that content and it's really sad.  He's obviously always been a weight lifter, but he's gone form a fairly robust size to huge, which I'll comment on in a moment. She was originally a cute young woman but not what you'd regard as a bombshell and was fairly overweight.  They were a cute couple.  At some point she started working on her appearance and she's somehow gone to bombshell, of a certain type.  Contemporary bombshell, I guess, of the same type that people who think Erika Kirk is a bombshell.

Erika Kirk.  This is a certain sort of contemporary look.

She's also extremely angry and is making it plain she's never marrying again and that she feels really abused to be cheated on as she's now a single mother with four girls.  I don't blame her a bit.

Which I suppose makes these comments somewhat inappropriate.

Kate von Letkemann is a really attractive woman.  She has the Erika Kirk look, but is genuinely much better looking than Kirk.  Therefore this will seem a bit odd.

She was always very pretty, and I suspect when they married, she was extremely pretty  But in their early photos she went from cute to pretty.  She had auburn hair, and obviously relished her role as a mother of four.

At some  point she became a very blond, blond and had a tummy tuck. She's really made up like a doll now.

I wish people didn't do that.  Just look yourself.

And that leads me to Lt. Austin Von Letkemann.

Von Letkemann was always up front about suffering from anxiety.  Based on his videos, he must suffer from it quite a bit.  Some of the stuff he sells on his page would be of such a nature that I'd tend to call for a welfare check if he was a friend of mine.  I've wondered for a long time how a serviceman could get away with posting what he' posts, and now he's announced that he's a short timer.  

An Army officer who retires as a lieutenant is a very unusual thing.

Anyhow, during the time during which he's been doing is Vlog he's become massive as a weightlifter.

I've known some guys who lifted weights, some weightlifters, and some really big weightlifters over the years.  When guys get super huge, they tend to get obsessed with their size, normally, although I know a couple of instances in which this was not true.

Guys getting obsessed with their size is a bit odd, and it's actually not very manly.  Quite the opposite, actually.

Perhaps its vanity, but when weight lifting goes from wanting to maintain strength to "look how beautiful I am" it crosses a certain threshold.  Perhaps what that threshold is, in both of the instances noted here, is the threshold of nature.  A powerfully built man whose within the realm of reason can hold that strength and build for actual use, whether its work, being in the outdoors, or combat.  Once you get huge, however, its beyond the practical and into appearance.  There are no gyms out in the prairie or in the trenches.

The display of big builds is also really strongly associated with homosexuality.  Back in the day when there were book catalogs that came by mail I used to get them and they often had huge selections of books.  If you thumbed through them, and they had books on everything, once you go to the ones displaying weightlifters on the cover they were heavily geared toward homosexual men.  I suppose that makes some sort of sense.  Even where not the vanity level of this class of lifters is a bit much.  I once had the unfortunate experience of being a silent listener to a group of them discussing women, and how they avoided those who weren't as beautiful as they were for, um, services.  It was an immoral discussion in general, but it was weird in particular.

On Twitter I used to get the feeds of a guy who was an Eastern European agrarian farmer.  It was weird, as he was so far beyond the Pale, but somewhat interesting.  It devolved into photos of himself and his physique.  That may be why I don't get it anymore.  That's, um, odd.

Anyhow, if you go back a few years, he was obviously very fit and moderately tattooed and she was pretty and obviously very happy.  His t-shirts fit loosely, like most men wear them.  Now his t-shirts are tight and he's heavily tatted up, and very big, and she's all dolled up following a tummy tuck.

Sad situation.

None of which explains why I took Mandatory Fun Day down.  I basically did as its content had sort of run out  It's become more of a commentary on world events, and some of it is pretty good.  However, it's also the case that recently a lot of them lead in with a short comment on some cheesecake TikTok tart.  Indeed, that's what lead me to suspect that something had happened.  A guy living at home with four daughters and a wife probably shouldn't be, and probably isn't, looking at TikTok tarts.  You either have to go looking for that, or its just coming up on your feed as you are looking at that.  Most wives would resent it and it's not a good thing to role model, in any fashion, to young women.  It's not content I need here.

Accidental renaissance.

Linked in from the Jackson Hole Guide:  "Rebecca Bextel hands a check to Rock Springs Republican Rep. Darin McCann on Monday during the 68th Wyoming Legislature’s budget session in Cheyenne. KARLEE PROVENZA/COURTESY PHOTO"

How darned dumb do you have to be to hand out checks on the Legislative floor?

It wasn't a lot of money, but it was money, and now there's a criminal investigation.  I don't think the investigation will go anywhere, but this really doesn't say much for Bextel, who is of course in the carpetbagger class of the far right.  The donor explained more of the story, he's a carpetbagger too, with a "oh shucks" type of response.  He apparently thought that Bextel wouldn't do something this darned dumb, but then why didn't he just mail the checks rather than have a third party deliver them?  That wasn't smart.

I think these really are campaign donations. There's no crime here.  But it does reveal a lot about a group of people who railed about traditional politics as they play, well, traditional politics, with a difference.  They're pretty heavily carpetbagger backed with much of their money, like many of their candidates, coming from outside of the state.

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CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 117th Edition. Sen. Lummis wakes up from a long winter's nap.