U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes rejected the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration as it contained the proviso that the Imperial Household would not be disturbed.
The war, therefore, was still on.
Having said that, the US was now engaging in semantics, with there now being room for the preservation of the Imperial throne, if the Japanese people wished it. This took a step towards a democratic resolution the question, very much in the spirt of Franklin Roosevelt, even if the administration knew right form the onset that the Japanese people, who contrary to the widespread mythin did not regard the Emperor as a god, would wish to keep a monarchical sovereign.
The latter was also now clearly influencing the US view.
And the Soviets were advancing.
By Kaidor - Own work based on [1] and [2], CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24319997
The Red Army commenced the invasion of South Sakhalin, a direct assault on territory long contested between Japan, China, and Russia. The southern half of the large island had been held by Japan since the Russo Japanese War. This is still a matter of contention between Japan and Russia, showing how much certain old claims survive, in this case, through two successive Russian regimes and on into a third, and through two Japanese regimes.
Of note, the wikipedia entry on this regards the conflict between the Soviet Union and Japan as a "minor" part of the World War Two. The Japanese didn't regard it that way. The entry of the USSR into the war was ripping into their imperial holdings at lightning speed. The Soviet entry into the war mattered a lot more than the US has traditionally been willing to admit. With the Soviets entering the war, Japan had lost Manchuria and any hope it had of hanging on to anything on the Asian mainland were gone. Moreover, not only was a looming American invasion of the Japanese home islands now inevitable, the specter of a Russian invasion of part o fit was as well. There can be, frankly, little doubt that Japan had to be worried that the USSR would take Honshu.1
This, then, creates an interesting topic of "revisionism". The Soviet declaration of war on Japan mattered a lot more than Americans are willing to credit it with, while the Red Army's effort in Europe was helped much more, indeed on a level of magnitude hardly appreciated, by the West, than they're willing to admit to. The Red Army was, at the end of the day, an armed mob, which would have never achieved what it did, and may have well lost the war, with out the US and UK's support. And the Western Allied effort in Europe was much more significant winning the war than the USSR could have ever conceded, even if it knew it.
Indeed, at the end of day, it was the UK and British Dominions that won the war.
Mopping up operations on Mindanao were completed.
On the Philippines, General MacArthur stated that the atomic bomb was unnecessary since the Japanese would have surrendered anyway.
He was correct, and also thereby added his voice to the growing number of military figures, now forgotten in their views, that criticized the U.S. war crime.
The Kraków pogrom, the first anti Jewish pogrom in post war Poland, took place. 56-year-old Auschwitz survivor Róża Berger, shot while standing behind closed doors. The event was based on the absurd rumors of blood libel but was heavily influenced by the return of Jewish survivors of World War Two to the city. The participation in locals in the Holocaust, even when they were under heavy repression themselves, is something Eastern Europeans have never been willing to really admit or deal with.2
"3 elephants are being used by the 30th Div., 1st Army, on their march south thru the village of Pa-Tu on the road to Nanning. 11 August, 1945. The elephants are used for emergency work such as pulling out bogged down trucks and other heavy labor which can not be done by mechanical power or other livestock. Photographer: T/3 Raczkowski."
"One of the elephants that are being used by the 30th Div, 1st Army on their march south thru the village of Pa-Tu on the road to Nanning. The elephants are used for emergency work such as pulling out bogged down trucks and other heavy labor which can not be done by mechanical power or other livestock. 11 August, 1945. Photographer: T/3 Raczkowski."
Footnotes:
1. While not exactly on point, but related, I was accused of revisionism elsewhere the other day for suggesting that the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary. Well, revisionist or not, it was.
I'm open to the same charge here, I'm sure. The Soviet declaration of war is typically treated as opportunistic, even though the US very much encouraged it. Missed in this, the Japanese decision to take the "southern route" and to attack the US, and UK, in 1941 was a calculated decision to use the Japanese Navy rather than Army, which the considered "northern route", an attack on the Soviet Union, would have required. The Japanese Army had already tasted battle with the Red Army in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and were well aware that they were not up to fighting the Red Army. Believing they had no alternative between the two, they took on the US and UK, which they thought a better bet.
Figuring into this, the Japanese government was very anti Communist and there was likely some belief that no matter how horrific, from their prospective, an American occupation would be, it wouldn't be as bad as a Soviet one. On that, they were correct, and post war history demonstrates that the Japanese in fact very rapidly accommodated themselves to occupation, even to the extent of cooperating with the US during the Korean War.
All of which is really uncomfortable with the majority American view of "we had to nuke them".
2. All of this raises an entire host of uncomfortable issues concerning Eastern Europe. I'm not going to try to go into them all. You'd be better off reading Blood Lands.
What I will note, however, is that violent antisemitism had been a feature of Eastern European culture for a very long time. Eastern Europe's Jewish population had been the target of violence nearly everywhere for eons. This really only changed, in terms of violence, after World War Two, although anti semitic prejudice runs through the entire region and into Western Europe to the present.
The Polish example is an interesting one in that no nation suffered more in World War Two than the Poles. The Germans were murderous towards the Poles since day one, and a huge percentage of the Polish population died during the war. The Catholic Church in Poland was massively attacked, with simply being a Polish priest meaning that such a person had a high likelihood of being murdered. None the less, Poles participated in the German barbarities directed at the Jews, as did Ukrainians, the later of which also directed murderous prejudice at the Poles.
Japanese miners confronted their American overseers at the Pacific Guano & Fertilizer min eon Laysan, Territory of Hawaii resulting in a manager Joseph Spencer, resorting to firing from two pistols after the miners rushed the overseers. Two miners were killed and three wounded. Spencer was tried on charges but was acquitted.
Laysan.
Laysan is one of the very tiny Hawaiian Islands that stretch out west towards Midway. It had a guano mine up until around this time, but which ceased thereafter. The island, in part due to this incident, came to the attention of the outside world. The island had unique flora and fauna, but Japanese poachers were destroying the bird population and imported rabbits the vegetation. In 1909 Theodore Roosevelt declared it a bird sanctuary. The rabbits ultimately nearly ate themselves into near extinction on the island and the last of them were killed in 1932.
The island is uninhabited and has largely recovered.
A Soldier fires an M17 handgun at targets during the Victory Week Pistol Competition, or Regional Combat Pistol Championship, June 4. The top 10% of firers at the event earned a bronze Excellence in Competition marksmanship badge. (Photo Credit: Nathan Clinebelle)
The M17 and M18 pistols, manufactured by SIG, which are versions of their P320 handgun, are really taking the heat.
They have been for awhile, but this local incident really ramped things up:
Air Force Division Grounds M18 Handguns After Airman Dies On Wyoming Base
Let's first say, anyway you look at this, this is a terrible tragedy (but see below).
But is anything really wrong with the pistol. SIG says there isn't.
SIG, or expanded Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, is one of the premier firearms manufacturers in the world. In this context its party of a trade union with the German firm of J. P. Sauer und Sohn GmbH in order to work around Swiss laws that would largely prohibit the export of military weapons. SIG did export some prior to the industrial union, with the excellent Stg 57 in export variants, being a prime example, but in recent years SIG has seriously moved into the export arms market in a way that it had not before, following the well blazed trail of Mauser and Fabrique Nationale, both of which at one time occupied the stage of supplier of small arms to the world at different points.
The US was never part of that market until Robert Strange McNamara vandalized Springfield Armory and foisted the AR15 upon the military against its will. That had the impact of making the US a commercial small arms purchaser in a way that it had not been since the American Revolution, and we've paid for it every since. It's completely true that the US had purchased commercial arms prior to that, with it notably going to commercial sidearms after Colt's perfection of cap and ball revolvers, and it interestingly relied upon commercial firms for machineguns, but when Springfield Armory was around, it always had an excellent in house backup. After that, the US became entirely reliant upon civilian suppliers.
A lesson there, interestingly enough, is that to some degree being a commercial supplier of small arms to the US military has been historically a really bad deal for commercial firms. Being the manufacturer of the M1917 rifle during World War One nearly killed Remington right after the war, and relying on sales of AR15 models to the service has actually been sort of a bad economic bet for Colt. The lesson probably is that really relying on military sales to the US is risky.
The old model that Colt used, which was basically "here's what we have, it's really good, buy if you want it" is probably the best one.
Advertisement for Colt double action revolver.
And that's particularly the case as there hasn't been a single US handgun the US military has purchased since the M1873 was replaced by the M1892 which hasn't drawn criticism.
The M1892 is a nice double action revolver, but its .38 cartridge, ideal for police use, was anemic for combat, something that the Philippine Insurrection rapidly demonstrated. M1873s were brought back into service (more on that in a minute) and .45 Colt New Army's were purchased as M1982s were pulled. That was a stopgap measure until the Army could adopt an "automatic" pistol, which it did after leisurely testing in the form of the M1911.
The M1911 is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time, so its surprising that at first there were plenty of Army officers who hated it. They regarded it outright dangers as it was too easy to fire and it was found that excited cavalrymen would accidentally shoot their horses in the head during charges. Criticism of its short trigger pull lead to a new version of the pistol, the M1911A1, coming out during hit 1920s, simply to make it a bit harder to shoot, but as late as World War Two old cavalrymen were clinging to double action revolvers, which had no safeties at all, but which featured a long heavy trigger pull.
By that time the M1911 was beloved and for good reason.
The M1911 took the services all the way into the late 80s. In 1985, the Baretta M9 was chosen to replace it, when it really didn't need to be replaced. Indeed, the Army had to be forced to make a decision, which it was resisting, by Congress threatening to turn the project over to the Air Force, which had been responsible for the adoption of the AR 15. That caught Colt flat footed as even t hough they'd been the supplier of most military handguns to the military for over a century, they weren't really expecting the Army to move forward with the entire project.
There were three reasons in reality to find a new handgun. One was that no new M1911s had been purchased since the Second World War, so they were all getting internally rebuilt. New pistols needed to be ordered. The second one was tha ti was felt that the .45 ACP round was too stout for women, who now were in roles where they needed handguns. That was moronic, as women can shoot any handgun a man can. The third was that the US was foisting the 5.56 on our NATO allies and by adopting a 9mm pistol, we were throwing htem a bone, as every other NATO member save for NOrway used a 9mm pistol.
Which is something we shoudl have paused to think about right there.
The US, until after World War Two, had never been a supplier of small arms to other nations in any signficiant degree. Even after World War Two we were't a supplier of new arms, but our suprlus arms. IT wasn't until after teh Vietnam War that this changed. The big suppliers of military arms to the Western World were Germany and Belgium. The Browning designed Belgian handgun, the High Power, was to some degree the handgun of the free world. It had a proven track record.
The Baretta was a reengineerd P-38. The P-38, like the High Power, and the M1911, is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time. Given that, the M9 is a very good handgun.
US troops at first hated it.
Marines with M9s.
They hated it because they didn't want it, and soon attention was focused on breakages in the slides of the early Italian manufactured pistols. Baretta stated there was nothing wrong with the gun, and in fact, there wasn't.
It never really fully replaced the M1911, as if you really need a pistol, the M1911 wins hands down every time. But as 9mms go, it was a really good one.
Well, then came the Glock.
Glocks are frankly nothing special and a lot of real pistol aficionados do not like them. But they used a striker instead of an external hammer. There are some advantages to that, but for the most part, the advantages are more theoretical than real. Frankly, anyone carrying a striker pistol would be just as well off with a hammer fired one and never notice the difference if they actually had to use it.
Anyhow, the service determined that it needed a striker fired pistol because everyone else was getting one. Not too surprisingly, some in the service dithered on the project as it wasn't really needed, but them some senior officers who didn't know what the crap they were talking about threatened to directly procure Glocks, which would have been a horrible idea.
Tests were held and the P320 chosen.
Disclaimer here, I have one.
I have one, oddly enough, due to a Ducks Unlimited event. I didn't go out and look for one.
Having said that, it shoots extremely nicely. I can see why people like/liked them. In a heads up contest between the M9 and the M17/18, I think the SIG wins every time.
And now we have this issue.
Is it one?
I don't really know. I hope that its figured out. SIG, which also won the Army contest for new rifle (M7) and machine gun (M250), is taking piles of ill informed heat right now.
Let's take a look at the problem, some potential causes, and some fixes.
First, let's start with this.
Is there really a problem?
Sounds fantastical to even ask that, but the chatter about the SIG fits into a long US service tradition of claiming that the prior firearm was perfect and the new one plagued with flaws. Sometimes its even true, or perhaps a little true. Sometimes, it's bunk.
The history of Army handguns certain fits that, however. The Army was really long in replacing the M1873 and soldiers came to immediately hate its replacement. Was the M1892 bad? Well, not as a design, it was far more advanced than the M1873, but the cartridge really was a bad choice. The criticism was warranted.
What about the criticism of the M1911, which actually lead to it being redesigned a bit? Not hardly. The M1911 was a great pistol from day one and its defects, so to speak, were ones of perception on the part of those who were used to old heavy trigger double actions.
And the M9. Well, I'll admit that I was one of its critics. But the M9 is a really good handgun. The frame cracking was a freakish event and not something that proved to be an overall problem. The eral problem is that its a 9mm, but that doesn't have anything to do with the design itself.
And, if we expand out and look at the history of US rifles we'll find the same thing. When the M1 Garand was adopted there were some legitimate problems wtih its gas system, which lead to that being rapidly resdesigned. Still, that didn't keep pleny of critics of faulting the rifle as inferior to the M1903 and soldiers actually were very conscerned that stoppages they experienced in stateside training, which apparently were due to the ammunition being used for a time, meant the rifle was defective. Combat would rapidly prove that to be false, but it received that criticm at first.
The M14 received criticism for having some supposed problem with its bolt and action, which critics of the rifle will reference even today. One civilian produced variant supposedly featured reengingeering to address the prblem, whatever it is. It's difficult to find out hwat hte supposed problem was, and in actual use, ti seems to have been completely unnoticed. Some M14s, for that matter, featured M1 Garand lock bar rear sights which drives some competitive rifleman absolutely nuts. Anyhow, the rifle didn't have faults, but it received criticism for having them.
The M16 of course, did have real faults, and still does, all of which are attributable to its direct impingment gas system. However, the Army made the faults worse by suggesting the rifle never needed to be cleaned, wich was absurd, and by using fouling powder in early cartridge production. AR15 fans and the military seem to have gotten largely over this, but at first the rifle was really hated, and I'll admit that I didn't like it.
The point is that there might not be anything wrong with the M17 at all. What we could be seeing is an element of operator error.
Something about the entire "it discharged all on its owned from its holster" story sounded like a fable.
I started this post before the news above broke, but I kept expecting something like this. Frankly, murder or manslaughter wasn't what I was expecting, but some sort of operator error, or I'll confess suicide.
But here's the deal, once something gets a bit of a bad wrap in American society, particularly litigious American society, it's hard to unring the bell on the story.
And the story here, dare we say it, involves a lot of service users. . . .
Now ,why would that be significant?
Well, frankly, because service users are amongst those who are the least likely to be paying attention to what they're doing and screw up. Being in the Armed Forces or a police department doesn't make you a gun fan. It doesn't even really make you all that knowledgeable on weapons, quite frankly.
SIG might be right. There might be no problem here at all.
And if there is one, it might be an introduced one. That is, users messing with their sidearm accidentally or intentionally. Some police forces actually issue sidearms just to keep their policemen from doing that with firearms they own.
But let's assume there is a problem. What would it be?
The M17 features a really complicated striker design and the pistol was designed not to have a safety. Those two things alone may mean that the design has been somewhat compromised by complication and the addition of a safety it wasn't designed to have. That might, somehow, be defeated the need for a trigger "command". It's important to note that if the pistols are firing on their own, they're defeating the safety, but then the safety only prevents the trigger from being pulled.
That is, I'd note, a much less effective safety design than that on the M1911, but we'll get back to that.
Anyhow, the safety isn't going to stop block the striker. It doesn't work, say, like the safety on a M1903 or G98, which does. It just keeps the trigger from being accidentally pulled.
Another possibility is that something about the holsters is playing a weird role It seems unlikely, but its not completely impossible.
If I were a SIG engineer, and I'm not an engineer at all, I'd look at trying to develop a safety that hold the striker, if possible, and it might not be.
Okay, let's assume that it's all just hopeless, there's something wrong with the SIG and it can't be fixed. I'm not saying that's the case, but what if there is. Clearly a different handgun is in order.
Some have suggested just going back to the M9, and that's not a bad idea. The problem might be that after decades of use most of the M9s are in rough shape. I doubt that, but it's possible.
Well, so what. Just sort through the ones in the inventory and weed out those in bad shape. Issue the ones that aren't, and adopt the newest variant of the M9, which is nearly universally regarded as a very fine weapon.
The only reason not to do that is it has a hammer.
M'eh.
The other possibility. . . oh my. . .dare we say it. . . is to bring back the M1911.
Marine Corps MEU-SOC, the M1911 that proceeded the M45.
There's no reason not to, and in fact the Marine Corps did for awhile. There's nothing the M17/18 and M9 can do that the M1911 doesn't do better.
Kristi Noem didn’t approve FEMA rescue teams for over 72 hours after the Texas floods, following a rule she imposed that required her personal sign-off on any operation over $100,000.
Was there not a Barbie dress up outfit for the occasion?
This was pretty clearly going to cost over $100,000.
When Bush II was President, there was outrage that he didn't go to Louisiana to view hurricane damage immediately.
The very same thing was true when Obama was President.
Joe Biden took flack for not reacting to floods in South Carolina instantly.
Is anyone demanding that King Don put his golf shoes on the ground in Texas?
Not that I think it would do anything. I always thought the outcry about a President not going to to a disaster was absurd. Noem, however, deserves criticism here.
So, frankly, does the State of Texas, which falls into the "don't tax me" camp, and therefore has inadequate warning systems.
You do get what you pay for, and lack of payment can be tragically lethal. That sort of tragedy is going to be increasing during the Trump era, and for quite some time thereafter.
For the meantime, MAGA's should be howling. Shouldn't they expect the same level of direct involvement that Bush and Obama had?
And for Federal help. . . Wyoming delegation. . . what are you going to do to help us. . . it's fire season.
I felt at the time, and I still do, that the Obergefell decision was an absolute disaster. It was legally deficient in its reasoning, which was pathetic. Justice Kennedy's text failed to grasp the existential nature of marriage, but perhaps that was understandable as Kennedy, currently 88 years old, was in his 20s and 30s in the 1960s. Indeed, he turned 30 in 1966, by which time Americans were well on their way to forgetting what the biological purpose of sex is, and what the nature of marriage is.
Kennedy's opinion embraced a sort of Age of Aquarius sense of "love" being the reason for marriage, at its core root. Love is an aspect of marriage, hopefully, and there's a lot to that, but sex is as well and the type that leads to children, at least frequently. Indeed, the entire institution and everything about it is oriented in that direction.
That has very little to do with homosexuality in that unions between the same gender don't result in children. I know the arguments about adoption and the like, but that's fairly far from the point as well. Indeed, in a way, that gets into the following topic about IVF that we covered recently.
Something that the generation that came of age after World War Two really brought into the culture is sort of the opposite of the Rolling Stone's skifflesque You Can't Always Get What You Want. That generation pretty much got almost all of what they wanted, and still are. That sense of entitlement resulted in cultural self centeredness in which you are entitled to be what you want to be and everyone else has to darned well accept it and the consequences.
The problem was and is, however, that Obergefell, as it strayed so far from the law, and so far from where the culture then was (it's a horrible example of the old trying to get ahead of the culture) that it was bound to spark a massive reaction. And it did.
The populist right rage that developed soon after was already burning, but Obergefell poured gasoline on the fire. The culture had lost much of the conservative wisdom on the nature of sex and marriage already, and had gone through Chesterton's fence with a bulldozer in this regard. A culture that had accepted, prior to the early 1950s that sex was properly in marriage, and properly between married men and women, had gone to pretty much accepting that sex was entertainment and marriage was a celebration of love rather than a loving (hopefully) childrearing, economic, natural unit. People basically forgot what their natures produced and men in particular figures that they were entitled to play around with Fran Geraud, and women figured they had to endure it. And that's where we remain today. A culture that basically thinks the Hawk Tuah Girl is amusing rather than a tramp.
But once that moral decay had reached the point where people who could excuse their own conduct could imagine themselves to somehow still be good Christians suddenly were confronted with homosexuals making the same intellectual arguments, and that being adopted by the Supreme Court, it was just too much.
It was also clear, in spite of what Kennedy thought, that Obergefell was going to open the floodgates of radical sexual behavior. Same sex sexual conduct, no matter what a person thinks of it, had been around for time immemorial, although it frankly even now is not really very well understood. But transgenderism had not been, or at least not in the same fashion. The groups backing the concept of transgenderism rushed into the field and gained ground enormously, which large numbers of people were not and are not willing to accept, including some homosexuals and included many feminists.
That this was going to cause massive civil disintegration was obvious. Disorganized groups on the right and middle that were already upset by the loss of industrial jobs and immigration now were faced with a massive social advance on the left which did not square with their basic understanding of themselves, and for good reason. To add to it, it was forced upon them.
None of this was necessary. Various states were moving towards various civil unions for homosexuals as it was. The slow march of legislation would have brought about a change, whether it was a good one or not, at a pace that would have been accepted. That's what happened to the disaster of no fault divorce. Instead Kennedy's opinion forced it all, and more than he had anticipated, all at once.
It destroyed respect for the Court and gave traditionalists of all types massive pause. It started the rush towards right wing populism which was already going on.
This has been an interesting development as it seems that lot of people didn't really pay all that much attention to the legislatures elimination of gun free zones and expansion of concealed carry rights in public facilities.
The "Hands Off" protest is a nationwide movement. And it's showing up even in Casper, in central Wyoming.
Protests did occur yesterday in Casper, and apparently in a host of other cities, including Rock Springs. Based upon the article in the Tribune, the Casper protests suffered from the common problem all left of center protests in Wyoming tend to, which is rather than be focused on the immediate topic, they featured every left wing cause going, which is exactly why the left has no pull here.
Apparently there were large protests across the country, showing widespread discontent with Trump. Even some Republicans who have backed Trump all along, like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro are calling his tariff policy into question. Some of them are being surprisingly blunt, calling the tariffs basically dumb.
Here's the thing, however. Trump, born into wealth to the degree that he can repeatedly fail and not feel the effects, doesn't care. He has the supreme confidence of a man who is not introspective, and frankly, by all evidence, not very smart. He's believed in tariffs for over 40 years, having a shallow understanding of the economy, and not even grasping that the economy 40 years ago had real problems.
The US has lost its manufacturing base, but not to the degree people like Trump believe. Quite a bit of it fully remains. Many of the "lost" industrial jobs in heavy manufacturing were lost to automation. Those behind Trump understand that, and they don't seem to care that their concept of "returning" jobs to the US means taking jobs from real human beings overseas.
The ultimate irony of all of this is that the tariffs real goal, for those who aren't as dense as Trump seemingly is, was happening anyway. As world trade increasingly globalized roboticization was occurring anyhow, and as that occurs other factors, such as transportation, begin to factor heavily. So the tariffs simply disrupt the economy, destroy wealth, and probably actually slow that evolution.
Meanwhile Trump goes golfing, seemingly not caring what he's doing to real people, and not needing too, as he lacks the empathy, understanding, and financial exposure that would require him to. His wealthy backers and racial rearward looking functionaries continue on in their destructive march.
It's more than a year away until the mid terms. Ted Cruz predicted a bloodbath at the pools in 2026 if things go badly. And that's the ultimate irony. Trump was elected, basically, as people didn't like the social views of the left and didn't believe that he believed the rest of the nonsense he spouted. People tend to vote with their wallets.
Trump isn't going to change direction. Like many old people, his ideas are fixed in the distant path, when they actually might have made some sense. It's a common failing of the old. The nation is going to go into a heavy duty recession, the Republicans are going to get slammed in the 2026 election, and the left will be resurgent. A weary nation will, at that point, not care much about men wearing dresses and the like, and for that matter, the left may have made a slight course correction.
I was skeptical that there would be very many of these, but in fact there are. I should have known it.
Not firings. No, Federal (and State) employees who voted for Trump, or in Wyoming for members of the Freedom Caucus.
They were always voting to fire themselves. Did they not realize it?
Well, The naiveite would be amusing, but for it being so tragic and short sighted. Somehow these people believed that the merits of their work would save them from this fate.
Why?
It's not about the quality of their work. They're MAGA cannon fodder.
GoldieSk8s @GoldieSk8sReplying to @realdogeusa
Trump voter here. Mass firing probationary employees makes no sense. Forest Service, 26 yr old exemplary 2-year veteran 'probationary' employee GIS tech let go with no warning today. Along with a timber cutter, the lowest paid, most profitable employee they have. This is stupid.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
@realDonaldTrump
seriously, why the low hanging fruit? An EXEMPLARY 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years, intern converted to full time, one month shy of being off probation, fired on a Zoom call no warning, sent home in tears. Now I'm questioning my vote.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Replying to @elonmusk and @DOGE
You are losing some of your strongest supporters by attacking the low-hanging fruit (me, my family). 26 yo hardworking 2 yr employee of USFS let go with no warning on Zoom. My hard-working son witnessed this, and is disgusted & I am embarrassed. This is NOT how you save America.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·Feb 13
@elonmusk
going after the low hanging fruit? An exemplary 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years as an intern converted to full time, only one month shy of being off probation, fired on a Zoom call no warning, sent home in tears. Now I'm questioning my vote.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
@DOGE
going after the low hanging fruit? An exemplary 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years as an intern converted to full time, only one month shy of being off probation, fired on a Zoom call no warning, sent home in tears. Now I'm questioning my vote.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
Replying to @Bwahahahafunny and @adgirlMM
Son told me of a 26 yr old exemplary GIS tech at FS who was 2 yra into 'probationary' let go on a Zoom call. He was very depressed about it. This is not the way, taking out people regardless of performance. I don't understand why it has to be one extreme or the other.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
Replying to @MarioNawfal
Seriously, low hanging fruit? EXEMPLARY 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years, intern to full time, one month shy of being off probation, fired on Zoom, no warning, sent home in tears. Not classy. Now I'm questioning MY vote.
A friend and I were discussing the current state of affairs and the Donald Trump assault/Project 2025's aggault/Wyoming Freedom Caucus on the government. We both are pretty conservatives fellows. We both served in the Army. We both are lawyers. Both of our fathers were Korean War veterans.
We're both horrified.
In part we're horrified as it clear that a huge portion of Trump's base absolutely hates their own government. Just hates it.
In the discussion, something occurred to me.
The world the MAGA/Populist/Project 2025 people wish for is one they've never seen nor experienced. A lot of them, quite frankly, don't have the capacity to grasp what it was like.
More than a few of them don't have the capacity to live in a world like that either.
No American born before 1932 lived in the world these people imagine as perfect. That means, in my case, as a member of Generation Jones, and even more so for the Baby Boom Generation, the last people they know who experienced it was their grandparents.
Or more likely, their great grandparents.
And our grandparents are all dead.
There's no living memory of it at all.
Nobody has one, at all.
The first President I voted for, as noted here, was Ronald Reagan in the 1984 Presidential election. I thinking of it, the first Presidential election my father could have voted in, when the voatin gage was 21, would have been the 1952 Presidential election. The first Presidential election I can remember, although only vaguely, is the 1968 Presidential election, when I was five years old. If that held true for my father, the first one he would have remembered would have been the 1936 Presidential election, at which time FDR was already well into establishing the government that Musk and Trump are destroying.
It was the Great Depression that brought the government into people's lives in a major way, although that it was going to happen was foreshadowed by the Progressive Era. Theodore Roosevelt was really the first "imperial President" who was willing to broadly act with executive orders. Franklin Roosevelt expanded the government enormously, however, in reaction to the extreme economic distress. That gave us the government we have today, but World War Two and the Cold War expanded it.
FDR, of court, brought big government in, and with World War Two proving that it was necessary to retain it, and the Cold War building on that, we've had it ever since. But we might be able to state that modern American government goes all the way back to 1900, before Theodore Roosevelt really started to bring in the progressives and the concept that the government was supposed to make things safe and fair for average people.
The generation that had lived through the Great Depression and the war were grateful for the larger Federal role and accepted it. It wasn't until the late 1960s that things began to be questioned. Even by then most Americans had no real memory of a day when the Federal Government was only active nationwide to a limited extent.
Nobody has that memory now.
What will this all mean?
Well, assuming that Must/Trump pulls it off, starting here in a few months, a real schock. And the best evidence is, so far, that Musk/Trump will have enormously wrecked the Federal Government in that time period, no matter what happens with Trump himself (and there are growing signs that Trump isn't really going to be around that long).
And the shock that will ensue will be in everything from what amounts to minor irritations to body bags.
Wyoming is going to have to pay for its own forest fires, and fight them on their own for one thing, snarky comments from Cowboy State Daily imported columnist aside. The State's going to have to pay for its own highways as well, which it can't afford. Things will just burn, and the highways decay.
And we'll be at the tender mercy of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which seemingly hates state government as well. Municipal services are really going to take a hit, to include police and fire fighting.
Education, which the WFC basically opposes, as students might learn the world is older than 5,000 years and God might not be limited to the restrictions people who can't imagine a world older than that would demand to be placed on, will be gutted.
Benefits provided to all kids of people through the Federal Government, from Veterans benefits to Medicaid, are in real danger.
A Federal and state government that makes sure your food, water, and living conditions are safe, won't be there.
Robber Barons, however, will be there once again, for the first time in well over a century.
The truth is, most people won't like living in a United States that's a third world nation. But the rich will, as the rich have always profited in the third world. And that, not some sort of rugged paradise, is where we're headed.
Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism
As part of that, the National Conservatives and the populists seem to outright hate government employees. That's already come up in of comments about them, one being how they'll go into "more productive" work. This group has a very Protectant Work Ethic view of life, in which your Calvinist purpose is to prove your worth by working harder and longer and for less than the value of your work, and never retire.
Many street level conservatives have hated Federal employees for years. I've heard them complain about how they're all lazy as they didn't do the correct Protestant thing and choose to go into the rough and tumble of the free market, by which they mean the corporate controlled market.
This is sometimes stated by people who actually depend on the government in spades themselves, and can't recognize it. For instance, if you are truck driver, you are living on the government dole, Mr. Knight of the Road. Fortunately, in this instance, truckers will soon be out of business as highway subsidies will end and railroads will take back over, which is a good thing.
More than one of the NC/Populist crowd who holds this view also abhor retirement. The comments are out there, people just refuse to recognize it. The push in this crowd, short term, is to raise retirement age to 69, but the real push will be just to do away with Social Security in the end. That neatly solves the Social Security crisis.
So, anyhow, like driving on Interstates?
Get used to your state funding them, and they won't.
Like safe air travel?
Notice how many air disasters there have already been since Trump took over, they're likely not his fault, but you probably ought to get used to that too.
Miss polluted air and water?
Well, it'll be back.
Come to expect the Federal government to be there if you are black, or Catholic, and can't get hired?
Well, lower your expectations.
Looking forward to retirement?
Forget it.
Injured and need assistance?
Well, you have your family to turn to. Or the church.
Lose your job and need help?
Well, move in with your parents, or your children.
Miss the days when the Marine Corps was used to make sure American economic interests weren't harmed in Central America and around the world?
Well, you'll get to live out the nostalgia.
Like living in a country where the rich get richer, the poor get dead, and the middle class are on the verge of poverty?
The past election featured a lot of really dimwitted comments by those who decided to vote for Trump about making the price of food "go down".
Dimwitted.
The government has very little ability to make the price of anything whatsoever go down. There are a few options. For one, if an item is imported and taxed at the border, you can remove the tax.
That's the exact opposite of what the Genius with Really Good Genes proposes to do. That's going to raise prices.
Another is to impact the price of something the government actually controls, such as privatizing an industry or releasing a supply of something held by the government.
Neither of those are options right now.
Trump's really good brain has so far simply proposed to the Saudis that the produce a lot of oil. The Saudis are likely laughing.
If they did, that would drop the price of oil, which drops the price of everything else. It also makes US oil completely unviable economically as its very expensive to drill for. We already know this as a few years ago there was a glut of oil, which dropped its price and stopped US drilling dead in its tracks.
One of the things Trump promised his followers that he would do, which he can do to some limited extent, is deport aliens. Hopefully they're illegal aliens, but to a lot of his supporters, any alien will do, as long as the alien has brown skin.
Donald Musk and Ted Cruz, born respectively in South Africa and Canada, can stay, which is a real shame. I'd be okay with deporting both of them.
US agriculture depends heavily on illegal aliens from Mexico. It has for decades. It's a situation which never should have been allowed to develop, but it was because both Republicans and Democrats turned a blind eye to it. Now, the US is dependent on that migrant population.
Trump promises to deport all these people as quickly as possible. That means administering a massive shock to the farm economy, which means the prices of everything at the grocery store will go up, up, up. Trump will ignore that. Consumers won't be able to, and those who knew that this would occur ought to be plastering these on self check out lines:
It won't end there of course. The economic genius has fallen in love with tariffs, something that fell out of favor as they helped create the Great Depression, bring Hitler into power, and cause World War Two.
Trump really doesn't seem to be the smartest bulb in the bunch and apparently he skipped lessons in history. Part of the reason he cited for wanting to change the name of Denali to Mt. McKinley is that McKinley, who was President before income tax was legal, used tariffs to fund the rather small U.S. budget of the time.
What a boofador.
Trump tends to think like, and talk, like a gangster. As we discuss in an upcoming post, he may have in fact learned a lot of his "art of the deal" by having to deal with the mafia on New York construction projects. The mafia operates, in fact, a lot like Trump. They make big threats, and then hurt people, until a rival gang knuckles under or regular people give in.
The problem here, of course, is that countries aren't criminal gangs, usually (Russia sort of is), and they don't behave that way. Democratic nations particularly don't. Trump is getting the middle finger from Canada and Mexico right now, but the besotted American public hasn't noticed. If Trump imposes the tariffs he threatens to, Canada is threatening to flat out cease exporting into the US. What Canada has in spades, oil and lumber, it can sell elsewhere. We can't replace what we get from them.
That'll spike the price of oil massively. We can't offset the oil deficit that would result in as we're already, in spite of the moronic "drill baby drill" comments people make, drilling at capacity. That would easily add 1/3d to the price at the pumps, if not 3 times to it.
And the removal of lumber would simply end the construction industry.
Canada is also a major exporter of hydroelectric power into the US. If Canada starts taxing that, and it can, at a rate to offset tariffs, living in New England will be extremely expensive.
As for Mexico, go to the grocery store and see how many things are "grown in Mexico". With California in trouble due to Trump's immigration policies, and a retaliating Mexico you'll get to eat what can be produced locally.
Um, yum. Canned corn will still be there.
It'd be tempting to say "people will get what they deserve, but Trump didn't even take 50% of the popular vote.
Let's say that again. He didn't take even 50% of the popular vote.
He took 49.8%, which is regarded as impressive in American politics, but in reality is not. 50.2 % of the American public voted against him.
Third parties may have put Trump in office.
In some systems, if a person doesn't take over 50% of the vote, there's a runoff election between the top two vote getters until somebody does. If that had been done, would Trump be President?
Anyhow, with about 50% voting for him, and 50% voting against him, Trump doesn't have a mandate to do squat. Quite a few of his insiders know that which is why they're rushing to put in their projects while they can, which is really only until the next mid term election when an enraged public turns on the GOP. It's going to happen.
In the meantime, the 50% of the country that didn't vote for Trump is going to endure rising prices, destroyed retirement accounts, a Federal government that won't help with local disasters, and the increasing slide of the country into a mean, childish, brutish, thugocracy.
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