Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump. Ignoramus Watch Part 4. Dr. Hegseth countermands George Washington edition.

 

April 22, 2026

During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered his troops inoculated against Small Pox.

This week Pete Hegseth lifted the requirement that troops be inoculated for influenza for "religious" reasons.

The current GOP is heavily anti scientific.

Opposition to vaccinations has been in American history largely a thing of smaller Christian and non Christian sects which are fairly anti scientific, as opposed to the majority of Christians who have no objection to vaccination.  However, when the far right of the country started to turn weird, listening to such medical lights as boob model Jenny McCarthy, that began to change a bit. Covid really made it worse as a significant portion of the country turned anti vax under the leadership of Donald Trump, who got the vaccine, but who recommended some really lethal approaches to the crisis as well.

Troops who don't get inoculated ought to just be given dishonorable or less than honorable discharges.  That's what should have occurred to those who refused the Covid vaccine.

April 24, 2026

The war department stands ready for what comes next. Locked and loaded. May God continue to breast—bless our warriors each and every day and on each and every mission.

Hegseth. 

Breast?

Okay, I get that it's a slip of the tongue, um, well, but it's an odd one.

May 12, 2026

The Aryan Nation, the Nazis, and the KKK are not far-right organizations.  Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been. The KKK was created and started by the Democrats in the United States to prevent blacks from being able to participate in the political arena, if you will. So, I'm going to say they've never been associated with the right, they've always been associated with the left.

Harriet Hageman.

Hageman's no dummy and she knows this is crap, or has drank so much of the Kool Aide she'll spout stuff that's absurd.

Every one of these organizations is from the far right and any claim to the contrary is patently absurd.  The claim about the Nazis, which I've seen before, comes from the party's very early, and frankly pre Hitler, days  and its name, the National Socialist Party.  The absurdity of that claim fails to realize that "socialism" in the context of nationalist parties doesn't necessarily mean Marxism, but "for society".  In the case of the Nazis, way early on their did espouse Socialism but by the time they'd come to power they'd abandoned it in favor of autarky and the early socialist in the party were sidelined or expelled.

And the claim about the KKK being founded by the Democrats and therefore left wing completely ignores that originally the Republican Party was the left wing party, and the Democrats were a right wing party.  The Democrats didn't evolve into the political left until the 20th Century and in the American South remained the conservative party into the 1980s.  Hageman herself is old enough to have voted in Reagan's first run for the Oval Office and therefore should be well aware of that.

This is totally reprehensible.

Cont:

Reporter: What extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal?

Trump: Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans’ financial situation.

May 13, 2026

So it turns out that Trump's advisors uniformly told him not to launch the war against Iran, but he did anyway, and the advisors, not wanting to be blamed for his stupidity, leaked.  He wants them prosecuted for treason, and sycophant Todd Blanche is looking to to it.

The real crime here is Trump's, who launched an illegal war.  With no declaration of war, every single Iranian killed in it has been the victim of some sort of crime, and every American who has died has been the victim of some sort of crime ultimately attributable to Trump as well.

Blanche is pathetic.  When this is over, and it will be, his careers should be flushed down the toilet.

And then there's this:

PabloReports: Ted Cruz called you a parasite and disparaged your work as a bartender.

AOC: I think it’s funny that he’s been taking a government paycheck for 23 years but has the audacity to criticize someone who has come from a family that had to work their way up and earn their place here.

This is really becoming a Republican specialty around here.  We get retired servicemen who come in after sucking on the government tit for 30 years, retire, and then start sucking on the other government tit, and then run for office on the "I hate the government" ticket.

In that sense, the Democrat running against Collins in Maine is really refreshing.  He's given a speech about his combat service and then noted how he can't figure out how that's relevant to being a Senator.  It isn't.  

Recently I saw somebody post something in favor of Brent Bien here in Wyoming, noting that he's served in combat or dangerous conditions all over the world, and how that will make him ready to lead.  Yeah, lead troops, not a state government. 

We have a whole host of candidates from the He Man Government Haters Club running locally.  They have a right to run, but while they're doing it, they shouldn't be draining their mommy.  It's hypocritical.

June 22, 2026

Unqualified for her office Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said her office would prosecute individuals caught vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

That would mean prosecuting Donald Trump, which should be done for a variety of reasons.

June 24, 2026

The ideology of the Mooslims is slightly different than the ideology of the Catholics. We have the Catholics and the Mooslims. Slightly different. But Venezuela has been great and Iran has been great.

Donald Trump.

Insulting in the extreme.

The ideology of Catholics, of which I am one, is the ideology of Christianity, as Catholicism is the first and original Christian religion  It's more than "slightly different" than Islam.

This provides a good reason for those Catholics who support Trump to really question what they are doing.

June 26, 2026

Under President Trump the U.S. unemployment rate is at a historic low of just 4.3%. It was at a dismal rate of 3.4% under Biden.

Karoline Leavitt.

What the crap?

June 27, 2026

The new special edition passports with a glowering Supreme Leader Trump's image in them features the words, "Welcome!  But be good".

Apparently some moron didn't realize that these were passports, not visas.

Related thread:

August 7, 2026

After an embarrassing display of conspiratorial lunacy, in which Rand Paul notably played a part, a panel of Republican dimwits voted to send a measure to the Senate floor to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer their moronic questions.

The basic truth of the matter is that the GOP has become completely scientific and dimwit conspiratorial in nature.  Basically, Flat Earthers, really.  I'm sure the whole panel will hold an investigation soon on whether we really went to the moon, and decide we didn't.

Not really on ignorance, but on the perversion that surrounds everything Trump, Republicans have been more or less silent on Rep. Max Miller after having a fit about Graham Platner.  Miller has been accused of abusing his wife by pouring boiling water on her and breaking the collar bone of his daughter.  Even his father in law, who is in the Senate, has been reluctant to criticizes him.

That's your party of family values.

August 20, 2026

We have a spike in oil prices that I don't really understand

Scott Bessent.

Seriously?

September 16, 2026

Trust in vaccines for deadly childhood diseases including measles has fallen according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.  Measles is on the uptake.

People who don't vaccinate their children for measles are, quite frankly, criminally stupid.

September 20, 2026

Yeah, sure the military asked for that. . .

September 24, 2026

"We almost have to go back to, what did medicine look like to the pioneer days in America?"

Republican Minnesota state auditor candidate, Dr. Scott Jensen.

Eee gads.

Oh, but it gets better, Sen. "Coach" Tommy Tuberville was holding forth on the Senate floor yesterday about the dangers of transvestitism and furries in commercial avaiation.

It’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

 U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

Maybe a Star Wars convention was in town?

Posted under fair use exception.

Tuberville says stuff all the time that's flat out stupid. How he was ever elected is a mystery, but frankly, he raises questions about Arkansas because of his routine idiotic comments.

Somebody else who routinely raised eyebrows before he was appointed to the government is Dr. OZ, who yesterday stated:

More than a third of people on Obamacare have never used the insurance policy once. If you were gonna pay your hard-earned money to buy insurance, would you ever use it? The answer is yes.

What an idiotic statement that was.  You never want to have to use your insurance. Did Dr. Oz go into the office everyday thinking "golly, I hope I get to turn something in on my malpractice insurance today!"

Cont:

Sen. Jim Justice held a huge birthday party for his dog on Capitol Hill, wheeling it in with a small covered wagon.

It's like the last days of the Roman Empire.

Justice is a West Virginian Republican.

So, we had John Barrasso calling the Democrats "weird" last weekend. . . 

September 25, 2026

Tommy Tuberville doubles down on stupid.

Tommy just causes me to unfairly bring to mind all the stereotypes I have about football coaches, a game I don't really like.

Last edition:

Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump. Ignoramus Watch Part 3. The Quack Edition.

Labels: Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, Health, Health and Human Services, Ignorance, Medicine, Playboy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Oprah Effect, Yeoman's Twentieth Law of Behavior

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 10, The Autarky Edition.

Autarky is the economic concept of producing everything a nation consumes within its own borders.  It's been tried numerous times, and inevitably leads at best to high prices and deprivation. At worst, it results in warfare.

Autarky was the official economic model of the Nazi Party after German economist Hjalmar Schacht joined the party in 1926 and after Gregor Strasser was ousted from party influence.* Nazi Germany provides a perfect example of how it doesn't work.  Germany was a major industrial power leading up to, during and after World War Two (it still is), but it could never produce enough of anything for its own economy, even in peacetime.  Moreover, it didn't have the raw materials to supply all it did produce.  It imported 20% of its food supply in the early 1930s, and by the late 1930s the Nazis had only managed to boost that to 83%.

The solution was simple.

What the Germans did have, they could just seize from neighboring countries through war, and then either kill off the native population or subjugate it.  That's exactly what it attempted to do.  It pursued that murderously in Poland and the Soviet Union, and through vassal states in the form of France, Romania and Spain.  Where that proved to be impossible. . . for the time being, it used bullying and threats, such as in regard to Sweden.

Even at that, it was never able to do it.

That seems to be to some extent what Donald Trump is advocating right now.

If we were playing hardball, all we'd do is say we're going to do no trading with Canada. If we did no trading with Canada would save $90 billion.

We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries..  We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean. Hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things

Trump seems to believe that by closing the economic border with Canada and Mexico, and everyone else, unless they essentially become vassal states, the US can simply go it alone and not be harmed.  Where it's obvious that won't work, we'll force acquisition, as we have now done in Venezuela and keep threatening to do with Greenland.  

This is immoral, and stupid.

You'd think that a guy who went to Wharton would have a basic grasp of economics.  Open economic borders, truly open economic borders, make countries rich, not poor.  That doesn't mean that there's never a place for tariffs, including for protectionism, but it's generally a bad idea.  

What makes for more sense is for the United States, Mexico, and Canada, to have a seamless economy with no tariffs at all.  The US and Canada had a nearly duty free relationship prior to Trump, save for the infamous very high ones on dairy, poultry, and egg products.  Those latter tariffs were absurd, but the US also has absurd tariffs in the agricultural sector.  The US relationship with Mexico is, right now, duty free.

An absolute lack of tariffs is how it should be between the three major North American economies.  Only an an economic ignoramus would disrupt that.

And only an immoral person would advocate taking the oil of another nation that is providing it under the gun.  The US has been an oil addict for a century, but was showing signs of getting off the stuff.  Trump, with his "it's always the 1950s" mindset can't seem to get out of that.

Trump should really know better.  Wharton has a reputation as one of the best, maybe the best, business school in the country.  He owes us an explanation, which he seems to be incapable of articulating, for his idiotic economic views. Wharton, and I'm serious about this, does as well.  I know one Wharton graduate personally, and he is brilliant. But the example of Donald Trump is to weird to explain. For that matter, the example of Wyoming's Chuck Gray, who is an absolute Trump sycophant, is as well.

We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values.

Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market

September 8, 2026

Retaliatory Canadian tariffs took place today with duties ranging from 15% to 50% across hundreds of U.S. products worth a total CA$27.6 billion, including dairy, agricultural equipment, paper, household appliances and electronics.

This will hurt Canadian consumer through increased cost to them, and American producers due to decreased demand.

Cont:

September 8, 2026

And as this wasn't enough, 5he United States is banning the import of some dairy products motorcycles and  most alcoholic beverages from Canada.

This is rank stupidity.  Peter Navarro ought to be sent to kindergarten and Wharton declared a clown college.

So, if you can, go out and buy a Can Am motorcycle and some Crown Royal.

Well, probably not.  I'm too old to start riding a motorcycle (I'd much prefer a mule) and I can't stand Crown Royal.  But if I liked Canadian whiskey, I'd go buy some for spite.

I may just for spite.

September 10, 2026

Customers Shocked As ‘Cybersecurity Incident’ Shuts Down Hilltop Bank Across Wyoming

Cont:

U.S. wholesale inflation hits 5.4% annually in August 2026.

More good news from the Trump administration.

September 11, 2026

Lame duck defeated state senator Bob Ide used the Hilltop disaster to say something monumentally stupid.

Hilltop Bank Shutdown Just Confirms Why Wyoming Needs Gold, Lawmaker Says

Bob, that's stupid.

September 15, 2026

Oil everywhere is up over $100/bbl and set to rise.

Prices at the pump are at record highs.

This appears to be set to get extremely bad.

September 16, 2026

The Fed raised interest rates, contrary to the wish of King Donald.

cont:

This guy is a Wharton graduate?

September 17, 2026

Railroad surcharges on grain have doubled over the past year.

September 18, 2026

If we buy $2 billion worth of bananas from Brazil, we’re actually losing $2 billion. So if we stop eating bananas, we actually save $2 billion.

Donald Trump

Oh for goodness sakes.  What an idiotic statement.

But one Trump appears to really believe.

First of all, a trade deficit in and of itself, unless you believe in autarky, si not a bad thing.  A rich country, which Trump is helping to end our status as, will probably have a trade deficit.  Trade deficits can be bad, but not simply because they exist, but for other reasons.

And, this is a classic example from the Wealth of Nations.

The US produces hardly any bananas.  Just some in Florida, which stay in Florida, and some in Hawaii.  

The US imports hardly any bananas from Brazil. Brazil only exports about  $21 million to $24 million anywhere.  Brazil does import $11.23 billion in fuel from the US.  And this economic analysis is moronic.

Even assuming that we bought bananas from Brazil, which we do not, if we are to eat bananas, and people like bananas, we have to buy them from a foreign source.  We given them money, we get bananas.  

That doesn't make us poor, it actually does the opposite.

Which, once again, leads to this:

WHARTON, WHAT THE FUCK IS MATTER  WITH YOU?  HOW DID THIS GUY GRADUATE WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ONE OF THE BEST ECONOMIC SCHOOLS IN THE WORLD?

September 24, 2026

The Secretary of Agriculture reports that if you don't like beef prices, you can switch to chicken or pork.

That's frankly quite true, and it's a thing that producers need to worry about.  Pork was the primary meat for most Americans up until the post Civil War era.  Once people make a major shift in diet, they tend to stick with it.

September 21, 1946 advertisement from the American Meat Institute featuring a leg of lamb.

On this topic, the news relates that a top Texas BBQ joint will no longer offer beef brisket. Too expensive.  That isn't a good sign.

Also regarding meat, the USDA is recalling 167,000 lbs of uninspected beef, pork and goat meat.

On all of this, the meat prices would be easy to blame on Trump, as the Wharton School of Business seems to be economically incompetent.  This, however, is largely due to other factors, although I don't know how to explain the inspection glitch.

One thing that will impact the price of meat. . .and everything else, is the price of fuel.  Indeed, after a year that featured record cattle prices, for those who had cattle to sell, profits are now being lost to diesel fuel.

A common cry out there in the hinterlands right now is to impose an export ban on diesel fuel.  Such a ban was in place from 1975 to 2015.  It's really debated what lifting the ban would do.  Midwest GOP candidates started crying for it recently, but Wyoming's Congressional representation opposes it. That doesn't tell us much, however, as Wyoming's delegation probably wouldn't oppose a proposal to nuke the state.

Anyhow, Trump indicated support for a temporary ban, and then energy secretary Chris Wright walked it back, which is extremely interesting, particularly as farmers in the Midwest are now having real second thoughts about King Donald now that they realize he's fucking them with his policies, and not other people they didn't car about.

Footnotes

*Strasser was permanently ousted from influence in the Night of the Long Knives.

Schacht is interesting in that he was never a Nazi himself and was involved in prewar anti Nazi plots.  He served in the German government nonetheless.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 9, 25th Amendment Watch, 23d Edition. The Canadian Harvard and Oxford doctor in economics vs. the Wharton playboy. The Trade War with Canada edition.

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CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 153rd Edition. The maddening intersection of all politics being local and the two party "system".

 

Lake Ontario

I can't really say that Donald Trump ineffectual, moronic, but potentially  expensive attempt to rename Lake Ontario into Lake America (and by the way, "America" is not the name of the United States) is the absolute last straw for me.  That straw was broken years ago.  It was obvious right from the onset that Donald Trump was not qualified to hold any elective office.  However, in his first, and only legitimate, term as President, there was still a Republican Party.  Now that party doesn't exist.  It's just a bunch of ass kissers.

At least on the national level.

I'll frequently say that "I'll never vote for another Republican as long as I live", and I don't want to.  A party that will not renounce and remove a person like Donald Trump, who is mentally ill, from the Oval Office cannot be supported.  It's horrific.  But the problem, then, is when you get down to the local level.

We just saw in Wyoming a real Republican Party toss out fake Dixiecrat Republicans from office.  The only real survivor of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus bloodbath was Bill Allemand.  Some of the really good Republicans who wiped out Freedom Caucus members, like Luke Reiner who tossed out Steve Johnson, will face Democratic challengers.  And at the state level, a really good Republican who took the GOP nomination for the Governor's office, Barlow, is facing a challenge from a Democrat and Rebecca Bextel, the clueless Double Secret Constitution Party candidate.  So the irony we now face is that the majority, but not all, of the recent Republican victors are good candidates and probably think that Donald Trump is in need of mental help.  Given that, an enraged vote for a Democrat here, or not voting for the office at all, would in fact be a bad move.

But that's no excuse to vote in favor of every Republican on the ballot here.

It's particularly not an excuse to vote for Harriet Hageman or Chuck Gray.  Indeed, there'd never be an excuse to vote for Gray.  Gray doesn't deserve any votes.

Hageman really doesn't either.  She's got in office acting like an enraged MAGA harpy even though she probably isn't.  In office, she's been the distaff variant of her late father.  A smart hyper provincial politician whose drank deeply of the hardworking pioneer myth to the extent that she's drunk on it, and like most of those of that belief, basically believes that farmers should own the whole state and you don't count.  She's been, frankly, mean in her public personal and her political one.

Stuff like this really puts Catholics in a spot.

We need to participate for the common good. Sometimes we hear: a good Catholic is not interested in politics. This is not true: good Catholics immerse themselves in politics by offering the best of themselves so that the leader can govern.

Pope Francis.

For a long time, we've been in a spot due to abortion and, more recently, gender issues.

Abortion is murder. There's no two ways about it.  Mutilating the body to change genders isn't murder, but it is a mental disease and entertaining it is gravely wrong.    At one time there were Democrats who acknowledged these things.  Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas is the last pro life Democrat in the body.  Generally, Democrats are in favor of seas of infant blood flowing out of doctors' offices everywhere.

Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated

Pope Leo XIV

Undeclared wars of aggression are also gravely wrong.  Under at least Pope Leo's view, only defensive warfare is morally licit.  Attacking Iran was not only illegal under the U.S. constitution, it was not morally licit.  Attacking Venezuela was illegal and illicit.  Murdering people in boats off South American coasts as they're suspected of being drug runners is illegal and immoral.  The people ordering these things are committing homicide, as are the people doing them.  The US is killing people illegally and immorally as a matter of national policy, or rather the policy of handful of illegally acting people.

Threatening to take property? or life because we can is gravely immoral. Threatening to steal Greenland, or whatever, is immoral.  Taking the mineral wealth of Venezuela is immoral.

We are a deeply immoral nation.

How does a person weigh these thing?

Well, in my case anyhow, it means that I will not vote for Republican members of Congress.  I just won't.  I won't vote for people who are supporting military murder or extrajudicial killings.

Indeed, I do not think it's morally licit to do so.

Nor is it moral to demonize people based on their race or inclinations, which this administration has done and continues to do.

Finally, as a Catholic, and the same would be true for an Orthodox Christian, or a Mainline Protestant Christian, this administration is thickly populated by a certain sort of Evangelical thought that would convert the nation into a Calvinist theocracy.   People find that, it seems, to far fetched to consider, but it's a fact and many other things that were only recently too far fetched to imagine have now occurred.

Moreover, abortion, at the Federal level, is no longer constitutionally protected.  That takes that fight down to the state level, at least for the time being, although it is certainly not impossible to imagine a Democratically government, House, Senate, and Oval Office, acting to protect it on that level.  Whatever is going on in regard to transgenderism seems to have sort of stabilized and there doesn't seem to be anything going on with same sex "marriages".  Indeed, nervous Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in one, putting him in the same category as Pete Buttigieg who was routinely lampooned by MAGA for being a homosexual in a same sex union.

Indeed, it's hard not to notice all the hypocrisy in the Republican Party on all of the remaining moral issues.  Bessent is homosexual and in a homosexual "marriage".  Vance is a Catholic but was boosting IVF.  Trump is a serial polygamist.  Republican politicians engage in marital infidelity and misbehavior with the GOP ignoring it ,while the opposite is true for Democrats when they transgress.

And finally, Trump, in order to remove the threat from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made a deal with him to appoint him to the head of the nation's health, resulting in a further moronic decline in vaccinations and a major boosting of health stupidity.

All of this, again, haunts the Apostolic Christian.  Does a person vote for Republicans on the threat of abortion reviving, and thereby vote for war, childhood death by disease, ICE shooting in the streets, and on and on, let alone just voting for the patently stupid.

Of course, the two party system really isn't.  And often you really don't have to vote for the Republican or Democrat.  I haven't voted for a GOP nominee for White House in at least the last three elections, nor have I voted for the Democratic one.  I voted for the candidates from the American Solidarity Party.

The trouble there is that there often isn't a ASP candidate on the local level. There are none here.  The third parties that show up here are the Libertarian Party and the idiotic Constitution Party.  The Constitution Party is worse than the Republican Party, and always has been.

So for this year, I will vote for Barlow for Governor  He's a good choice.  I'd like to vote for Byrd for Senate, and I won't vote for Hageman, but I have yet to decide what I will do.  For House I'd like to write in Christensen and I won't vote for Gray while I want to avoid Kinney.  

All somewhat tough races to face.

Locally, I'm lucky that I don't have to make such decisions for my local legislative districts.  The City Council race is non partisan.  The County Commissioner race is partisan, however, and one of the finalists is simply awful, and I'd guess, quite frankly, actually extremely liberal in spite of running as a Republican, and another nice but not a great candidate.  That leaves the two Democrats to consider.  Abortion and whatnot will not be a county issue and while I have not made my mind up on who I will vote for, I won't vote for two of the three GOP finalists.

If any come by, I'll flat out ask; "why are you in a party which picks on Canada, declares illegal wars, and hates the original native name for a large lake?"

Last edition:

King Donald's War, Part 12. The "Economic D-Day" edition. CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 152nd Edition, the irony edition.

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Here’s some good news: Nothing Donald Trump tries to do is working. Lucian K. Truscott IV

 

Here’s some good news: Nothing Donald Trump tries to do is working.

The Agrarian's Lament: The GOP's useful idiots in agriculture.

The Agrarian's Lament: The GOP's useful idiots in agriculture.: An old friend of mine who is a rancher has been somewhat active in this year's election cycle.  He is, of course, a far right Republican...

The GOP's useful idiots in agriculture.

An old friend of mine who is a rancher has been somewhat active in this year's election cycle.  He is, of course, a far right Republican.

I say of course as just about every rancher and farmer in Wyoming over the age of 40, and quite a few over the age of 35, are diehard right wing full blown MAGA Republicans.  Below the age of 40 things start to change a lot.  Most are Republicans, but a lot aren't diehard.  They're Republicans the same way everyone in Wyoming is a Republican, pretty much.  Generally conservative.

But above 40, they're in lockstep with Donald Trump.

My friend, this cycle, had a big Chuck Gray up near the DOT fence.  This wasn't too surprising as his grandson works for Gray.* **

Well, now, all of a sudden the noted friend is posting on the disaster of letting foreign beef into the country.  So are a bunch of other ranchers I know.

The Republican Party has been pretty much screwing ranchers and farmers since 1929.  It was the Democrats who save farmers and ranchers during the Great Depression.  Most small and mid sized ranches would have been utterly destroyed but for the Taylor Grazing Act.  

The Trump Administration, for its part, looks at farmers and ranchers the way the Democrats once looked at African Americans, people who could reliably be counted on to vote for the party no matter what.  In recent election cycles African Americans proved they were no longer reliable.  So far, people in Agriculture aren't showing any thought at all.

Indeed, they're showing cognitive disconnected.

This morning I've seen all sorts of complaints from ranchers about how they're getting killed in this economy, as noted.

And now Trump's bringing in below market cost foreign beef.

No shit.  YOU VOTED FOR IT.

Inflation, particularly of fuel, caused by Donald Trump's pet illegal war. The same with fertilizer costs.

WAKE THE CRAP UP.

The GOP is not coming to save you.  It's coming to screw you.

Indeed, trade talks just broke off with Canada.

Double digit inflation, caused by a massive rise in energy costs, is about to occur.

Footnotes:

Gray has more affection for Trump than Natalie Harp and Melanija Knavs combined.

The grandson is an interesting case in and of himself.  He's undoubtedly the first member of his extended family to go to university.  He's in law school right now.  He's also a diehard MAGA, and indeed, maybe even beyond that.  Now the question of how that happens is another matter.

The common myth, and it is a myth, about young people in conservative homes is that they go to college, where they lose all of their values, and their faith, emerging hardcore screaming liberals if not Bolsheviks.  This is, it is believed, because they're indoctrinated in college by leftist professors.

It's largely bull and in the scientific disciplines definitely bull.  Majors in geology, for example, aren't going to have time for liberal indoctrination.

For that matter, majors in English probably don't either.

So what's going on here.

Well, a person from a really conservative Protestant background may in fact find a lot of what they learn in college shocking.  The Earth isn't 5,000 years old.  Evolution isn't a fib.  Conquering the West wasn't bringing enlightenment to an oppressed people and, in fact, some of those being conquered where already Christian.  The US isn't bestowed by God with a new Israelite like mission, and for that matter, the modern state of Israel does some outright horrible things.

Faced with that onslaught, young people are in fact faced with the choice of accepting that Pastor Jim back at his own do it yourself Evangelical Church is flat out wrong on a lot of stuff, and Mom and Dad are ignorant, or concluding that everything they're being taught is a fib.

Most will conclude, to some degree, that Pastor Jim is wrong on a lot, and that Mom and Dad are ignorant on a lot of stuff.

Now, I'll note, this shouldn't impact member of the Apostolic faiths at all, but in the US some Apostolic Christians are heavily Protestantized and have bought in, through ignorance, to a lot of what the Evangelical far right believes.

Anyhow, a lot of this is about to collapse on an enormous scale, as we'll soon see.

**There was a good Republican candidate running against Gray, Christensen.  He had worked for the BLM.

Well, we're getting instead a Californian who worked for his daddy's radio station.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 151st Edition. Дональд Трамп. Нелегалы? Donald Trump, Moscow's man in the White House or just really stupid (probably really stupid)?

Is Donald Trump a Russian agent?

I don't think so, but it's no longer an irrational thing to ask.  Indeed, it has to be at least slightly pondered.

Yesterday Trump announced that the U.S. Army is scaling back on joint exercises with the South Korean Military.  More specifically:

I just think that this shows Trump to be really dumb, something I've been maintaining for awhile. 

But still, consider that North Korea is supplying troops and arms to Russia in Ukraine.  At least at one point, he apparently promised to stop the CIA from monitoring Kim Jong Un (my guess is that the CIA would continue to do it even if ordered to stop).  He's praised the North Korean despot repeatedly.

But then, he's done the same with Putin.  

And the fact of the matter is that he couldn't have done more to harm the US in the globe than he has, even if he was a paid agent.  He's wrecking the US economy, he's destroying our relationship with our allies (our real allies), he's threatened to seize territory belonging to our allies.  He's refused to give Ukraine the full amount of weapons it needs to defend itself, which aids Russia, and he's gotten us into a war which is depleting our supply of air defense munitions at an alarming rate and taxing the abilities of our Navy.

China will take advantage of this.

In order to successfully invade Taiwan, China needs relatively calm weather conditions, which only occur in that region in the spring and fall. Spring is gone, but fall is coming right up.  The war with Iraq that Trump illegally launched will still be going on in October and our supply of anti missile missiles will not have increased a bit by then.  It will likely have have grown worse.  The morale problem in the Navy (assuming its limited to the Navy, which is not a safe assumption) will be worse by October.  

Consider this.

Right now, the US can't be reliably counted on to contest a Chinese invasion of Taiwan at all.  Donald Trump could easily just say "oh, well, we're busy, and things and stuff" and let it happen. Frankly, I'd give less than 50% odds the US would actually attempt to counter a Chinese resumption of active hostilities against Taiwan, and unlike 1949, when the Republicans rallied to "Who lost China?"  the current GOP would just roll over like a wet dog if that occured.

But let's assume that the US attempts to do something.  We are still probably able to counter a Chinese seaborne effort, but we aren't going to be in very good shape to counter a missile offensive.  

Crossing the Taiwan Strait is a massive military undertaking.  Even right now China can probably not pull it off.  But it can try it, and if it does, the US can't endure a protracted aerial campaign.  Its not even showing the ability to do it with Iran, and that war will still be going on.

But let's take it one more step.  Can the US fight a sea and air war against China, an air war against Iran, and a ground invasion by North Korea of South Korea?

It's questionable.  And all those countries know that.

And Putin knows that if that occurs, U.S. aid to Ukraine is over.

The Second World War saw Nazi Germany allied to Imperial Japan and democratic Finland.  Wars make strange bedfellows.  All of these countries have relations with each other, and you can bet they're talking.

So, do I think the American President is some sort of odd agent in Russian employment?  Дональд Трамп.  Нелегалы?  No, I don't, but I do think he's stupid, and that stupidity is having disastrous consequences that are about to get much, much worse.  Much worse by October of this year, or perhaps the spring of next year.  Indeed, waiting it out would make strategic sense for China, while hitting in October would make political sense.

Creepy

Trump's relationship with Natalie Harp is approaching being creepy.

We can assume that Harp is an adoring sycophant, as to be employed by Trump, you have to be.  But still.  She apparently wrote him, stating:" You are all that matters to me." and "I don’t ever want to let you down."

Trump calls her “sweetie".

Okay, that doesn't mean that he's obtaining favors from her, but given Trump's track record, it's going to raise questions.  Trump is rumored to have had an affair with Playboy tart Karen McDougal some 20 years ago, when he was 60.  60 isn't young (trust me, I'm 63) but it isn't old either.  That's the same age he was when he reportedly had a one night stand with Stormy Daniels.  He'd been married in the American context to Melanija Knavs for two years at the time.  So if he quit cheating, we have to assume that at age 60 he was fornicating with women prostituting their image for pay (which he denies) twice and then suddenly reformed.  

Maybe.

Well, being a lech at age 60 isn't the same thing as being one at 80.  Harp is 35 and the 45 year age gap would be super creepy and just flat out too creepy for any woman of that age to engage in who wasn't um, a professional.  Besides, at this point it's fairly well established that Trump has an incomitance problem and stinks a lot of the time.

No, Harp is just another creepy fan of Trump's, seeing something in him that isn't there.

And, speaking of creepy.

Nancy Mace has been weird for a while, but she's rocketing to the bottom.

And even creepier.

A Trump speech from two days ago in front of policemen:

Every day I come to the White House, people are thanking me: ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you, thank you, sir,'

You know these young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls in the White House. You know they come in. Now I'm not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell?

These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls — they want to be safe, and they come, 'Mr. President, may I speak to you? Thank you, sir. Thank you’ — I said, ‘Why are you thanking me?’

’Because a year and a half ago, I was afraid to leave. I was afraid to open the door of my apartment, and now I walk to the White House every morning, and I have absolutely no fear.’

Donald Trump.

That never happened, and it's really creepy.  Young beautiful adoring women are coming to Donald Trump and thanking him for making things safe. . . no, they are not.

Some predictions

Well, with all that cheery news, what can we say?

Just this. Things are about to get a lot worse.  As we progress into the fall the oncoming electoral disaster for the GOP is going to become more and more of a crisis for Trump, and he's going to start doing anything he can to steal the election if not outright suspend it.  A war we are losing will still be going on.  The economy is going to start tanking.  Trump's mental state will continue to visibly decline.  Republicans in Congress will continue to do nothing, if not outright support the subversion of democracy.

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