Ecclesia militans. On the use of the word "Christian".

Ἰησοῦς εἰς τὰ μέρη Καισαρείας τῆς Φιλίππου ἠρώτα τοὺς μαθητὰς αὐτοῦ λέγων· Τίνα λέγουσιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι εἶναι τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου; 

οἱ δὲ εἶπαν· Οἱ μὲν Ἰωάννην τὸν βαπτιστήν, ἄλλοι δὲ Ἠλίαν, ἕτεροι δὲ Ἱερεμίαν ἢ ἕνα τῶν προφητῶν. 

λέγει αὐτοῖς· Ὑμεῖς δὲ τίνα με λέγετε εἶναι; 

ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ Σίμων Πέτρος εἶπεν· Σὺ εἶ ὁ Χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ζῶντος. 

ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῷ· Μακάριος εἶ, Σίμων Βαριωνᾶ, ὅτι σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα οὐκ ἀπεκάλυψεν σοὶ ἀλλ' ὁ πατήρ μου ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς. 

κἀγὼ δὲ σοὶ λέγω ὅτι σὺ εἶ Πέτρος, καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρᾳ οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, καὶ πύλαι ᾅδου οὐ κατισχύσουσιν αὐτῆς. 

δώσω σοι τὰς κλεῖδας τῆς βασιλείας τῶν οὐρανῶν, καὶ ὃ ἐὰν δήσῃς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἔσται δεδεμένον ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, καὶ ὃ ἐὰν λύσῃς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἔσται λελυμένον ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς. 

τότε διεστείλατο τοῖς μαθηταῖς ἵνα μηδενὶ εἴπωσιν ὅτι αὐτός ἐστιν ὁ Χριστός.

_____________________________________________ 

Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi and

he asked his disciples,

"Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" 

They replied, "Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah,

still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." 

He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" 

Simon Peter said in reply,

"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." 

Jesus said to him in reply,

"Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. 

For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. 

And so I say to you, you are Peter,

and upon this rock I will build my church,

and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. 

I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. 

Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;

and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." 

Then he strictly ordered his disciples

to tell no one that he was the Christ.

Matthew 16:13-20

The other day I saw an item on Blue Sky posted by Atticus Finch of Georgia which linked in an article on "post truth Christianity".  It brought into focus something that's really been increasingly bothering me in recent years. . .well more specifically the Trump era.

Then, as an example of synchronicity, I was speaking with a close relative of mine who absolutely exploded on the same topic.  I didn't bring it up.  That person did.

Then, this past Sunday, Matthew 16:13-20 was the Gospel reading.

Yesterday there was a post on Twitter in which an Orthodox Christian reacted the same way I am here.

So here's what that topic is.

When the term "Christian" is used recently, it tends to refer to "Christian" support of Donald Trump.  And, hence the error.

While you can find individuals of any stripe of Christianity and religion supporting Trump, in reality, the Christians that support Trump are, for the most part, and most significantly, Evangelical Christians.  Yes, you can find a Catholic or Orthodox cleric here and there that does.¹ And, in fairness, you can find Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, and any number of other sets of beliefs with individuals who support Trump.²  But the real core of the "Christian" support of Trump comes from a slice of the Evangelical world, and just a slice at that.

The "post truth" comment is what really got my attention.  

American Catholics generally try to make nice with other Christian denominations, although less so in the post 1960 world than we used to, but lots of Protestants don't try to make nice with us.  So we have tended, post 1960, to keep some of our weltanschauung to ourselves.³ So much so, in fact, that we've allowed the Protestantization of lots of Catholics, who now think like Protestants.  While there are exceptions, when you find a real pro Trump Catholic, they probably have a Protestant world outlook and don't realize it.

So, to post truth.

Protestants have been "post truth" for about five hundred years.  Protestants outside the mainline Protestant churches are very post truth.

We've known that all along.

Starting with science, Catholics are in favor of science, not against it.  The entire Big Bang Theory is our deal.  We're not opposed to the theory of evolution.  People evolved from earlier primates.  The world is not 5,000 years old.  It's billions of years old.

We know that. We not only accept that (most of us) but we rejoice in it.  We don't feel that God has to fit within our limited human imagination.

Our basic view is that God gave us the intellect to explore his creation.  So far, we haven't found one darned thing that causes us to question our faith.  Moreover, if you belong to a religion that requires you do deny science, something about it is deeply wrong, even false.

So, yeah, there's a lot of "post truth" Christians out there, and they're coming from the Evangelical end of the pool.  If you find a Catholic holding those views, they've likely dipped their toes in it.  Some are swimming really deep in it.

And here's another thing, which my relative was exploding on.

Catholics have taken a beating for decades simply for being Catholic.  It's okay, Christ told us that we would.  In the US we get, from Evangelicals, the question of "are you Christian?", with the reply from them often being that if we're Catholic, we're not Christian.

Well, I guess when people had access only to their friends and neighbors and a pastor who had been miseducated on these topics, that was not only to be expected but semi tolerable, but it isn't any more.

We are the original Christians.

Πάντες τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ ἀκολουθεῖτε, ὡς Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς τῷ πατρί, καὶ τῷ πρεσβυτερίῳ ὡς τοῖς ἀποστόλοις. τοὺς δὲ διακόνους ἐντρέπεσθε ὡς θεοῦ ἐντολήν. μηδεὶς χωρὶς τοῦ ἐπισκόπου τι πρασσέτω τῶν ἀνηκόντων εἰς τὴν ἐκκλησίαν. ἐκείνη βεβαία εὐχαριστία ἡγείσθω, ἡ ὑπὸ ἐπίσκοπον οὖσα ἢ ᾧ ἄν αὐτὸς ἐπιτρέψῃ.

ὅπου ἄν φανῇ ὁ ἐπίσκοπος, ἐκεῖ τὸ πλῆθος ἤτω, ὥσπερ ὅπου ἄν ᾖ Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, ἐκεῖ ἡ καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία. οὐκ ἐξόν ἐστιν χωρὶς τοῦ ἐπισκόπου οὔτε βαπτίζειν οὔτε ἀγάπην ποιεῖν· ἀλλ' ὃ ἄν ἐκεῖνος δοκιμάσῃ, τοῦτο καὶ τῷ θεῷ εὐάρεστον, ἵνα ἀσφαλὲς ᾖ καὶ βέβαιον πᾶν ὃ πράσσετε.

See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid.

 The Epistle of Ignatius, 33 to 108, to the Smyrnaeans, written in 107.

Nobody with any religious education of a serious nature denies this whatsoever.  John Calvin and Martin Luther didn't deny that.  The only religion that can raise a hand on it are the Orthodox Churches, and they don't deny that we're first, they just take they position that they are also first, and that actually makes some sense.  There's a schism between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, but we all go back to day one.  That's not to make light of the schism, but it's significant in that we all know that our churches go directly back to the moment Christ founded the church.

No Protestant Church can claim that and maintain the claim, although some try to.  Those that do have to acknowledge that the Catholic Church is first, and try to argue that they're related closely enough to it in order to make the same claim.  That is the claim of the Methodist and Anglican Churches, for example.

All of which brings up the next point.  Any Protestant Church that claims to be authentically Christian that doesn't have a good explanation for this is in real trouble.  Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.  You can't be a Protestant Christian and just claim you are like the original Christian communities.  Take a look at what St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote in 107.  St. John the Apostle had only been dead for about seven years when he wrote that.  You aren't like the original Christians if you don't look like the Catholic Church, with Bishops, priests, and deacons.  You can't claim there was a great falling away, a Great Apostasy, early on.  There wasn't. We have all the books and we know that there wasn't.  Ignorance, on this topic, is your only defense (and now that you've read that, you don't have that).

Indeed, if you aren't Catholic, you need to have a really good explanation for it, and there really isn't one.

So, here's the thing, now that Trump is in office and flaming out we're hearing from the same group of people who said that we're not Christians that we need to throw in with them and support Trump.

We do not.

Trump is not a religious man himself, and there's very little evidence that he has any deeply held religious beliefs, if any religious believes at all.  Personally, he's a study on certain of the Seven Deadly Sins.  He's a warning on the love of money.  He's a serial polygamist.  He's a liar.

He's an evil man.

Throwing in with evil is never justified save for the principle of Double Effect.  I.e., my tipping the pizza delivery guy may have just funded the purchase of illegal drugs, but that was not the intended effect.  My working for the post office may mean that I'm delivering pornography (well, I guess that probably doesn't happen anymore in the age of the Internet, but you get the point), but that is incidental to the occupation, not its purpose.

But this obviously crosses over a line, somewhere.  If, for example, I were a German and this was 1940, a hatred of Bolshevism would not justify joining the SS.

And that's sort of where we are at now, in a way.

Some thinking Catholics supported Trump either openly or quietly with their vote, earlier, as they were opposed to abortion and the weirdness of social trends in sex and gender in general.  Well, the Supreme Court has reversed Roe v. Wade and the transgenderism thing is jumping the shark, if it hasn't already jumped it.  Indeed, in Europe, where it first appeared, it's in major retreat.  Obergefell hasn't been reversed, but there's been no case that presented an opportunity for htat to occur, probably because conservatives fear to advance one.

Irish born immigrant  Patrick J. Sullivan.  He became wealthy raising sheep in Carbon County and relocated to Casper in 1892, when he went into other enterprises.  He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1894 to 1896 and from 1898 to 1900, Mayor of Casper from 1897 until 1899, Senator from Wyoming from 1929 to 1930, appointed to fill the seat left by the death of Francis E. Warren.  While he was a practicing Catholic, he tended to deemphasize it at the time as it was damaging to his public standing, something that was the case up until Kennedy ran for President.

Now, mind you, I'm not telling you who to vote for, what I'm suggesting is whom you do not support, or to put it another way, what you should not get wrapped up in.

The MAGA movement isn't justifiable from a Christian perspective at this point, if it ever was.  It's weirdly nationalistic and in many instances engaged in idol worship in the form of fanatic adoration of Donald Trump, even somewhat crediting him with supernatural powers in "always being right".   The administration has committed the military to actions which are outright murderous in the Caribbean and South American Pacific.  It's waging an unjust and illegal war.  It creeps right up on being racist and some of its members hold beliefs that are deeply antithetical to Apostolic Christianity.  Some of the people in it are deeply evil, and all of them are deeply compromised.

Vote for those who you will, and in keeping with your conscience.  But some things to remember.  

Trump is not any kind of real Christian.  Attaching Christianity to this administration is going to have a massive negative impact as it falls.  It is in fact already doing so.  There are people in the secular world who truly believe that its the "Christians" who are supporting Trump, and that people like Mike Johnson and Mike Lee are posters for Christians. They are not.⁴  The fact that they're being made posters for Christianity means that they, and Trump, are driving thinking people away from the Church.  When Trump falls, he's going to take a lot of Evangelical Christianity down with him, just as the fall of the Confederacy during the Civil War heavily damaged the Episcopal Church in the South.

Catholics, we don't want to be part of that, and there's no reason that we should be.

Ecclesia militans.⁵

Footnotes

1.  A prominent example of that is Bishop Barron.  Bishop Barron shows up on occasion at Trump related religious gatherings and he servers on President Trump’s Presidential Religious Liberty Commission.

I'm not here to criticize a Bishop and I don't really understand what the Bishop is doing, or what the Commission does.  Nor have I followed it.  I'm just noting this.  Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is well liked, also serves on it.  Archbishop Elpidophoros of America and Bishop Salvatore Cordileone are advisory members.

2.  Stephen Miller, who just the other day accused the Protestant seminary student who is competing for a Senate seat from Texas of not being Christian, is Jewish.

3.  We can trace this to the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, as we have before, who basically promised to only be Catholic on Sundays.

Kennedy was a horrible example of a Catholic to start with.  But his election was such a thrill to American Catholics that a large number of them followed him into the same easy belief, which has been a disaster for a generation of American Catholics that we're only now just really beginning to recover from.

4.  Johnson is a Southern Baptist, which is presently the largest Protestant denomination in the US, having about 12.3M members.  In contrast the number of Catholics in the US is around 70M.  A person needs to keep in mind that not all Catholics are observant, but then neither are all Baptists.  Anyhow, Johnson also seems to adhere to the New Apostolic Reformation and sincerely believe that he's been licensed to lie in order to bring about a Protestant state.  Lee is a Mormon and therefore not a Christian at all.

5.  This huge icon is a Russian Orthodox icon.

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 8. $40,012,700,535,679.44

The National Debt at some point on August 21,

Republicans are flocking to decry it, after having participated in causing it.

They didn't cause it on their own, but they sure helped.  And Trump has spent money like a drunken sailor.

Part of the reason that Trump spends this way is that Trump drank deeply of Peter Navarro's economic kool aide.

Navarro believes heavily in tariffs and Trump, whose always liked the concept of tariffs, but who appears to no longer understand how they work, liked what Navarro had to say.

Tariffs have always existed as a means of boosting local businesses.  What they really are, is a species of sales tax.  The concept is to make stuff coming in expensive so that people won't buy it, and will buy something made locally instead.  That's about it.

The problem is that when you do that, you have to actually be making the things locally.  Tariffs might have made good economic sense if the US had started easing them in during the late 1960s when the post World War Two economy started to fade.  But we didn't, as we saw no need to.

By the 2020s, it's really a little bit late.  In fact, it's way late.  The world's economy is now highly integrated, surpassing the level that had only previously been obtained prior to World War One.  We don't have what people complained about, for example, in the late 60s and early 70s of cheap Japanese products taking the market (something that wasn't anywhere near the threat it was imagined to be).  What we have instead is an economy where anything serious has parts made all over the globe.  Nothing you are using, if has multiple parts, was "made in America".  It was made all over.

Given that, what tariffs really do is simply make everything more expensive.  It'd take at least a decade for high tariffs to "bring back manufacturing", if it can do that at all.

Whether it can ever bring in jobs is questionable at this point.  Since January 2025 the US has in fact lost manufacturing job, with about 75,000 departing . Trump likes to claim that new factories are springin gup all over the place.  In fact, a factory construction boom peaked in 2024, under Joe Biden, and has been crashing since.

It may just be that it isn't the late 1890s any more.

So all the Trump administration has really done is ineffectively switched income tax for a national sales tax.  It's hurting everyone, and it is largely illegal, resulting in a lot of the money being collected, having to be sent back out.

Congress can fix this, if it has the will. Republicans right now are pretending that they do, but with few exceptions, like Thomas Massie, they're rank cowards and voted for Trump's economic fantasies.  It may take a Constitutional Amendment to force the matter, which at a bare minimum should provide that save in the time of war and bona fide emergency, the budget must balance and retire a portion of any built up debt, with taxes to automatically rise to balance any budget that isn't balanced.

What needs to be done first of all is to get the budget under control.  That would technically be easy to do.  And part of that needs to be a sincere effort to eliminate the debt.  It's now completely impossible to do so rapidly, so it'll have to be done slowly.  

On expenditures themselves, the Federal budget breaks out this way:

Social Security: 22%

Medicare: 15%

Net Interest (on the national debt): 15%

Health (including Medicaid): 13%

National Defense: 13%

Income Security: 10%

Veterans Benefits and Services: 6%

Social Security is in trouble due to slow down in population growth.  Nothing can be done about that or should be.  Medicare is in the same boat.  

National Defense should be cut by 2/3s.  That can be done by eliminating the insane level of weapons expenditures and by going to a reserve based defense.  That'd help, but that won't accomplish everything, obvious.  Military retirement age should be changed so that thirty years rather than 20 are the qualifying number.  That'd help a bit.

Indeed, there are actually a fair number of Federal jobs that require twenty years in order to retire at some level.  Save for policing roles and military ones,. Fed retirement should require thirty years and only be capable of being drawn when you reach 60 years of age.

And yes, this is a crisis.

So, you might perhaps note, you are a Distributist.  Does this square with Distributism?

Overall it does.  At one time I would have considered tariffs a policy option to address foreign manufacturing, but nothing fails like failure and its obvious that isn't the solution to that.  Boosting U.S. manufacturing has to come some other way, and frankly technology is probably what would do it.  Technological revolutions tend to bring industry to where they occur.  Our problem here is that this is entirely in the hands of the super wealthy right now, who don't have your interest or that of the country's in mind.

Additionally, our current President is addled and looks back with romanticism on the past . He's actively working to destroy American industry as a result.  Electricity is the future of transportation, not petroleum.  Wind, solar and nuclear are the future of power generation, not coal (Trump does support nuclear).  We need to really get with the program and we can do that through regulation.  Phasing out fossil fuels should be an economic priority for obvious reasons, and an environmental one for obvious reasons, and a defense one for obvious reasons.

August 22, 2026

Another Trump Call For Imported Beef Riles Up Wyoming Ranchers

This is really an example of ranchers and farmers being members of the Leopards Won't Eat My Face Party.

Another Trump Call For Imported Beef Riles Up Wyoming Ranchers

Why ranchers and farmers vote for Republicans is beyond me.  So they're getting screwed by Trump?

What did they expect?

U.S.-Canada trade talks collapse just before deadline for tariffs

Using debt to buy back debt:

We're in huge financial trouble.

August 23, 2026

Trade talks between the US and Canada ended and the countries are now in a trade war.  Canada has made it clear that the US is about to suffer through energy imports.

August 24, 2026

From the CST:

Well boo hoo, cry me a river.

I'm a cattleman and frankly we're amongst the most reliably stupid voters for the GOP there is.

Vinegar Hill posted this yesterday:

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.

He's completely correct.  

Cattlemen and farmers will sit around in gatherings and support Trump on every other horrible thing he does, and then they're surprised when he turns on them.

Now they can share the pain they helped bring about.

On Canada, the Canadian government is absolutely furious over demands that were made of the country, including that Canada abandon the use of French and that it agree to mirror the US's trade polcies.

One Canadian figure called the demands "insane".

This administration at this point is so stupid on these matters its indescribable.

August 25, 2026

It's pretty clear that the Trump administration has no idea whatsoever as to what it's doing.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 7. The jackass in a tin barn edition.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, Agriculture, Alcohol, Chuck Gray, Curt Meier, Distributism, Electrical Power, Leopards won't eat my face, Localism, Mark Gordon, Mining, Petroleum, technology, Wyoming's boom and bust economy

Court Watch Part VIII. The only restraint edition.

Jefferson County Courthouse, Port Arthur, Texas.

July 14, 2026

In a blistering opinion, a Federal Court judge ruled that President Donald Trump improperly used a $10 billion lawsuit he filed against the IRS to extract personal benefits from the government and prevented the terms of a settlement agreement from taking legal effect.

And more locally:

Laramie County sheriff ordered to appear in court, explain why law firm can’t inspect records

July 23, 2026

Headline in the CST:

Wyoming attorneys oppose Trump’s AG pick

71 Wyoming attorneys signed onto the letter.  Lummis and Barrasso will ignore it.

August 1, 2026

Charges against an Olympic kayaker for vandalizing the reflecting pool have been dropped. 

That was predictable, but what the Justice Department admitted was not.  It admitted the damage was the result of "flawed installation by the contractor" as well as "the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026."

Every lawyer associated with this should be dismissed and disbarred.  Trump should be impeached.  The victim of these false charges should sue for malicious prosecution.

Closer to home:

Wyoming archaeologists take BLM to court over Native sites, human remains

August 5, 2026

The U.S. Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges against David Hearn, Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers for the pool vandalization that never occured.  Donald Trump had previously described these people as “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE".  He's the sick deranged people, but people who aren't victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome and think he's something other than a rampaging deranged narcissist know that. 

Now, even after the Toddler's tantrums, no charges are pending at all. They never should be.

Lawsuits should, and I predict will, be filed against the government over this.

August 8, 2026

The DC Circuit ordered Trump to halt his illegal ballroom construction but, in a wussy move, stayed its decision for fourteen days in order to allow Trump to appeal, which he, or rather his administration, will.

The Court, in its decision, noted:

Whether or not a massive ballroom should be constructed is for Congress to decide and is not a matter for Executive self-help.

August 11, 2026

It's not that there aren't some really issues here.

Judge dismisses closed primary lawsuit for the second time

But it does provide a good example of why it hurts things for everyone when a gadfly like Skovgaard decides to play lawyer.

August 12, 2026

Court steps in to counter coup attempt.

August 18, 2026

Good news:

Retired Cheyenne attorney renews legal challenge to Secretary Gray’s handoff of voter data feds

Gray violated the law on this and needs to be held fully accountable. Courts looking at this issue have uniformly supported the states that refused to provide the information.

Gray should be made to recover the information he supplied.  This was illegal.  

August 25, 2026

This doesn't decide the ultimate issue:

Supreme Court allows Trump administration to move forward with order imposing restrictions on mail-in voting

But coming when it does, it may very well be the law in a practical sense this election cycle, and impact the election.  It's specifically designed to frustrate Democratic voting.  However, as Amy Howe reports:

A separate ruling by the same judge, in a case filed by a different set of plaintiffs, temporarily prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from implementing one provision of the executive order anywhere in the United States. That ruling remains in effect, at least for now.

The decision is flat out wrong and the Supreme Court will regret it.  The Democrats are increasingly like to win both houses of Congress this Fall and they will begin to work on major Supreme Court reform. Trump can prevent that while he's in office, but he's becoming the political kiss of death for GOP candidates and when a new Democratic President comes in, this order will come off and the Supreme Court will be radically reformed.  Perhaps first up will be age limitations, likely 70 years of old, which will wipe out the conservative majority on the court.

A decision like this one will help bring about that downfall.  So does stuff like this:

Supreme Court allows White House ballroom construction to continue for now

The mail in voting one at least has some think judicial reasoning Staying ballroom construction was the obvious choice here and the Court didn't do it. That probably signals that they'll let this insane project go forward.

Last edition:

Court Watch Part VII. When the last law was down.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Abortion, Chuck Gray, Court Watch, law, Politics, South Korea, St. Sir Thomas More, The 2021 Insurrection, The Second Trump Administration, Wyoming, Wyoming (Powell), You heard it here first

How did war gamers get the war with Iran right, before it started, and the Administration didn't?

The other day I posted an item noting that old Avalon Hills gamers could have predicted the outcome of our ill advised and illegal war with Iran.  

Turns out, they did.  

I hadn't realized that at all when I posted that, but somebody I know well and who also likes hex and counter games did, and pointed it out.  

GMT Games has it as part of their Next War series in the form of Next War: Iran.

Here's GMT Games write up on its game:

Description

The Middle East has long been a hobgoblin for foreign powers and, as much as Afghanistan, also a graveyard of empires. Sitting squarely astride ancient trade routes and with the added impetus of the world's addiction to oil, the area has been a hot spot for centuries.

Now, with the old regime teetering and losing its grip, Iran makes a bid for forcing the West to recognize its complete sovereignty and control over its own affairs by striking at the one thing they care about: the flow of oil. Mining the Straits of Hormuz and declaring it closed to all traffic, Iran defies the world. The US, and perhaps some of its allies, takes action to re-open the straits and get the black gold flowing to the world again.

Next War: Iran is the sixth game in the Next War series. It is unique in the series in that the Allied player has to do the attacking while the non-Allied player attempts to defend its territory against neo-imperial oppression. With a long logistical tail, few true allies in the region, and the menace of Iran's A2AD capabilities, re-opening the Straits is a tall order.

The game came out in 2024.

Note the difficulty the war poses:

With a long logistical tail, few true allies in the region, and the menace of Iran's A2AD capabilities, re-opening the Straits is a tall order.

Gee. . . . 

Maybe Pete should have bought a few boxes of Next War:  Iran rather than worrying about low T.

The game was, we'd note, the 2024 Charles S. Roberts award winner for Best Hypothetical Game.

King Donald's War, Part 11. The worst defeat in American History. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Israeli paratrooper near the Mitla Pass, 1958.  Read on, it'll make sense.

Donald Trump is about to become what he never wanted to be: Jimmy Carter. Held hostage by Iran. And it was all voluntary.

Chris Christie.

We've never seen anything like it.  It's an existential defeat.  We're never going to recover as a country from this.

This is our 1958 Suez Crisis.

We've lost wars before, of course, in spite of what Americans like to believe. The War of 1812 was a loss.  The Korean War ended in a stalemate, which certainly isn't a win, if it's not a loss.  The Vietnam War was a flat out loss. And the war in Afghanistan, which didn't have to be a loss, became one as Donald Trump surrendered to the Taliban.  So, we've lost wars before.

But not like this.

People may be tempted to draw parallels to Vietnam, which was a really bad loss.  It was touch and go if the country would recover from for about a decade, and with the complete failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to get the hostages out by force in 1980, it really looked like we'd faded beyond repair.

Importantly, however, the United States didn't lose any allied because of Vietnam, in no small part because it didn't ask for any to participate in the war.  Some did, such as South Korea.*

The Reagan Administration, which I frequently criticize here, turned things around.  It rebuilt the military and made a calculation that it could spend the Soviet Union to death in the Cold War, which it did.  The Soviets collapsed and the Cold War ended, a major American victory. . . without fighting.

The fighting we've done since Vietnam has been impressive, right up until now. And that's the military that Reagan built.  A military designed to take on the USSR.  It still basically is.  It's a big war military.  So was our military in Vietnam.  

In Vietnam the military learned that it wasn't good at asymmetric wars.  And it finally learned the lesson that should have been clear in 1945 that airpower can't win a war.

In came Trump, and Hegseth, who have proven incompetent.

In a few short months they've lost the war to a second rate power, destroyed our relationship with our allies, eliminated our position in the globe as a superpower, emboldened the Chinese and probably the Russians, and made war with China, which we now stand a good chance of losing, inevitable.

There were signs that we were in trouble already, but they were mostly economic.  Between 1945 and the 2000s the US had lost control of its budget.  When the Cold War ended we did not return to a rationally sized military, even though we did go to a smaller one.  We maintained quasi colonial connections with some countries, notably those in the Middle East, which we did not need to.  At home we let education decline.  

In short, we lost the self discipline and sense of purpose a democratic nation should have.  And that lead to the election of Donald Trump, twice.  And in his second term, Trump has so accelerated American decline it leads to rational questions on whether or not he's a foreign agent.

Whatever he is, Donald Trump and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth aren't students.  They're not smart people.  They certainly aren't students of history.

Indeed, if they had, they might have realized this has happened before.

Following the Second World War the United Kingdom and France retained claims to being wold powers, indeed superpowers.  But the end of that is now clear in retrospect.  Both were losing control of their colonial empires rapidly.  The United Kingdom retained food rationing until 1954.  Both nations still fought colonial wars, although the French could really only do it with American help, which was only reluctantly given, if given at all.

In 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal.  The UK, France and Israel, the latter of which had its own issues with Egypt, decided to militarily intervene.  Israel attacked first, on October 29, with the objective of re-opening the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. The United Kingdom and France joined in on October 311 seeking to depose Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal.  France and the UK expected the Eisenhower Administration to support it, but it didn't.

The net result was that Israel gained in the war, although the US forced it to give back the parts of the Sinai it too.  The US and France proved incapable of carrying on without US support.

Israeli paratroopers near the Parker Memorial, Mitla Pass.  The paratroopers here are quipped with K98k rifles, likely Czechoslovakian built, although they could also be World War Two German production.  By אברהם ורד / IDF Spokesperson's Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33261678

In short, Israel got what it wanted from the war.  France and the United Kingdom were shown to be impotent without the US, and their status as global powers was severely retarded.

Sound familiar?  A major power that has Allies acts without them, and loses.  Those Allies regard them as now being second rate.

Just what happened to us against Iran, except the fall is so much more severe.

So, where from here?

Trump can't get us out of Iran.  We can't build anti missile missiles quickly enough.  Iran won't open the strait.  We can't make the open it.

We have only two choices.

The first one is to mount a full-scale ground invasion of Iran.  Completely setting aside the immorality of the current war and the immorality of escalating an immoral war, militarily, that's actually the only thing that makes sense.  If you were playing (the nonexistent) Avalon Hill United States v. Iran hex and counter board game, that's what you'd do.  You'd marshal ground forces in Kuwait (and maybe Iraq), call up National Guard divisions, and launch a multi division invasion.  

We could still win such a war.  The casualties would be massive, 50,000 dead or more, and the net result would make us a colonial administrator in Iran for at least a decade.

And we have to do it, if we're going to, soon. Basically in no more than a month. After that, our supply of anti missile AAA will be so depleted we will not be able to marshal in the region.

It couldn't be ignored as a real war, however.

Trump would have to finally go to Congress for authorization.  If he didn't, he'd be successfully impeached without a doubt.  And Congress is not going to authorize such a war.  So he won't.

Probably.

He could, and as he has no regard for the law at all, muster the multi division strength force necessary and launch the invasion wholly illegally.  That's really risky for him, however, and he's very unlikely to take that sort of risk.  If he did it, he'd be impeached.

The other choice is to surrender.  At this point, with the Strait closed, that's a defeat.  Indeed, it's worse than a defeat as while it would end the fighting, it wouldn't repair the de facto state of war between the countries. 

So a formal surrender is the only option.

And that will be a political disaster for Trump.

It also cements the geopolitical disaster for the United States.

Just as France and the UK went into Egypt without support from the US, and went into decline thereafter, we've gone into Iran's skies without support from our allies, including the UK and France.  They've moved on without us. At one time, they looked to us. . . now we'll look to them.

For the time being, however, we're hostages to Iran.  Iran knows it. This will just drag on and on while we deplete our weapons stores.  It won't resolve at all until after the November election.  It won't be possible to ignore it after that.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.  

The US as a superpower, 1945-2026.  Cause of death.  Neglect, hubris, and the vanity and stupidity of Donald J. Trump.

August 12, 2026

Headline in the CST:

Iran has said the Strait will remain closed u ntil the US accepts its terms.

August 14, 2026

The US and Iran both claimed to control the Straits of Hormuz yesterday, which means that the US doesn't control them.  Pete Hegseth claimed that the US can remain deployed in the region's waters indefinitely.

Iran has very clearly determined not to enter into any deal with Donny, at least one that isn't abject humiliating defeat.  And they don't have to. They're winning the war.  At this point, the only way the US can actually win would be a ground invasion, which appears unlikely so far.

The USS Abraham Lincoln is headed home to be replaced by the USS George Washington.  We wrote on this story yesterday:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

There's more to this than meets the eye, but what it is we don't really know.  One sailor attempting to leap overboard, which is now acknowledged, would actually not be that unusual in a deployment.  It was two that we know of, but one was with a life vest.  It's clear that morale problems have become severe. The ship hasn't had a port call in over 200 days, and that appears to be part of it.  Ships have had long deployments before, however, which raises questions.

Part of the aspect of this is, however, that a nuclear submarine can stay out indefinitely.  Oil fired ships like those of the Second World War could deploy for extremely long times, but they would make port calls.

August 15, 2026

The always empathetic Donald Trump:

Reporter: Family members of service members are concerned about conditions on the LIncoln. 

Trump: No they’re not. 

Reporter: Has the deployment gone on too long?

Trump: No. Not nearly long enough.

August 16, 2026

This strait will be opened and closed only under Iran’s command, and so long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in fantasies, Iran will

continue to enforce the blockade.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi August 15, 2026.

According to a NYT article behind a paywall, so I wasn't able to read it, part of the USS Abraham Lincoln's problems stem from Iran taking out a US Navy installation in Bahrain at the beginning of the war, requiring the Navy to switch it's regional logistical center to Diego Garcia.  If that's correct, it's another example of who the US was caught really flat footed when it started this war with Israel.

August 17, 2026

CNN reports that  there have in fact been multiple attempts to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln and ties low morale to there being no defined mission.

It's unlikely, we'd note, that the morale problem and resupply problems impact just one ship.

In an interview on Fox Trump threatened to "bomb the shit out of Oman" if it somehow interferes with whatever it is that we're going.

Reports are growing that Gulf states have become increasingly irritated with Trump.

August 21, 2025

King Donny threatened to expand economic sanctions against Iran by extending sanctions to its trading partners if it doesn't come to heel.

It won't.

That will impact the global economy, however, and make it slightly worse.

Footnotes:

*Australia and New Zealand fought in the war, but very rarely noted is that Australia had indicated it was going into Vietnam whether or not the US did and its somewhat responsible for the US going into the country.  New Zealand participated as it felt obligated to Australia.

Last edition:

King Donald's War, Part 10. "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied." Donald Trump, the killer edition.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Chris Christie, Iran, Israel, King Donald's War, Oman, Rudyard Kipling, Straits of Hormuz, The roles of men and women, The Second Trump Administration, United States, United States and Israel v. Iran, Wars

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

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

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

Karoline Leavitt Quit Because Trump Was Driving Her Crazy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, maybe.

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

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

How Trump's focus on his legacy drives his decisions

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

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

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

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

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

It won't work.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, probably a lot of them are.

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

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

Which brings us to the bell curve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He clearly doesn't believe that.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of ignorance:

That one speaks for itself.

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

He cannot be discounted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm. . . 

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

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

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

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

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

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