The New York Review of Books ran an issue on The Meaning of Vietnam.
The disaster of no fault divorce spread to Australia with the Family Law Act 1975.
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So we posted:
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 88th Edition. A pred...: Pretty effective 1970s vintage Army recruiting poster seeking female recruits. There's been some interesting signs of things to come rec...
And then there was this speech:
HEGSETH: We're not interested in your woke garbage and your political correctness
FORT BRAGG TROOPS: *Yeahhhh!*
I'm pretty sure that my predictions are coming rapidly.
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An interesting episode in Evansville:
And an episode all played out against the background of the state's GOP going increasingly to the very far right.
I'll note that this is "Pride Month". As I've noted before, I don't really get pride month for a bunch of reasons, one simple one being I don't see how a person can be "proud" of their sexual drive. That just seems odd to me. My views on the topic are found in the related thread links below, and a person can read them if they're interested.
I'm also kind of in the camp of the months just being the months, although I do see why Black History Month and Women's History Month got started to focus attention.
Anyhow, over time, Prime Month, which originally was limited to homosexuality, expanded out to LGBTQ, and that's another topic. L G & Q are related topics, but T is really a seperate one entirely, a fact that has caused some Ls to be upset by being included with Ts, and understandably so.
Anyhow, that's the topic of the post.
As noted, this is Pride Month and the Mayor of Evansville, on her own volition, put out small rainbow flags at the Evansville Town Hall. She noted that it represented a municipal spirit of acceptedness, although it was not a municipal act. It was a private one.
This shows something really interesting in general. For native Wyomingites, the view towards LGBTQ topics long was "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone". That's the native Wyoming view on a lot of things.
For this reason, for decades, locals in this community would find themselves in the grocery store line with a man wearing a tutu (I'm sincere on this), and think, "um. . .whatever". Or in my case, "um. . . poor taste in dresses".
The current right wing populist view, however, is very much "I care exactly what you are doing and I'm going to force you to stop doing it".
For locals, therefore, this entire topic has been a bit odd. There's been the movement towards "you must accept", which is generally met with "What? I wasn't bothering you" while also being met with "you must stop them", which has been met with "Why? They weren't bothering me".
Anyhow, the mayor put out flags.
This was, in turn, met with the actions of one Evansville resident who went out and drew swastikas on the sidewalk in protest. In addition, he threatened to purchase German swastika flags and put them out.
Why swastikas?
Well, nobody can really figure that one out. Asked about it in a town work session, he replied:
Yeah, there’s a difference. I’m not that stupid, but what I’m doing here is to make a point.
And what is that point?
Hard to figure.
Anyhow, Evansville residents reacted by having a sidewalk chalk fest. Seems about the best possible reaction, really.
A lesson here is that street level Wyoming isn't nearly as far right as GOP. At some point, that probably begins to have an effect.
Another lesson may very well be that the center needle on this has moved on, giving us an example of Yeoman's Twenty First Law of Behavior for the second time in two days. If that's the case, social conservatives will have a pretty hard time actually moving things back to where they want, as that requires a cultural change, and that change may have already taken place in the opposite direction.
Somewhat related, Wyoming's lone Congressman is backing a bill in Congress to change Pride Month (and I don't know how it ended up being called that) to "Family Month". A Hageman Facebook post stated:
This June, I am proud to cosponsor Rep. Mary Miller's resolution to officially declare June as Family Month.
It is time to reject radical ideologies and honor traditional family values that have shaped our country for generations.
A press release said something similar.
Some Facebook wag posted in reply:
Where's your Hageman family picture?
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Related threads:
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There's been some interesting signs of things to come recently, including where Hegseth is headed on women in the military, and where Trump's close acolytes are headed in regard to his increasing mental decline.
Interesting times.
We'll start with Hegseth.
As anyone who stops in here is well aware, I'm not a Trump fan. I'm conservative, actually conservative, but I'm not lockstep in line with anyone. Frankly, anyone who is, just isn't thinking. Anyhow, The Trump regime is not conservative but populist, and populist in the same way that gave rise to fascism in various European nations in the 30s, or to Communism to others in the teens and twenties. But I can see how we got here and indeed I'd been warning about this for some time before it happened. As readers here know, once Obergefell was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court I feared a political breakdown was inevitable.1 I also thought that claims made at the time that Obergefell wouldn't lead to a more radical development in the category of gender norms were badly misguided, and I was proved correct about that. The country was headed toward acceptance of homosexual unions as marriages, irrespective of what social conservatives may think of that, but Justice Kennedy and his fellow travelers hijacking the trend line without any real legal weight behind it jump started the country right into the transgender movement which helped radicalize an already radicalizing populist base in the right wing of the GOP.2
Women in combat roles in the US came the following year, 2016, and was controversial at the time and remains so in social conservative I recently posted on it, and I remain very much opposed to it. While I'm not a fan of Hegseth, he's on record as opposing it as well.
Some time ago Hegseth ordered that the service review its physical fitness standards on a gender neutral basis.3 This isn't really the first time that this has been done and the results can probably be predicted.
Indeed, they can be predicted in part due to the experiences of women in sports competing with men who are surgically and chemically altered to female morphologies, but more on that in a moment.
At the time, I thought that was probably step one towards removing women from combat roles.
Then Hegseth came out with a tweet (I wish government officials would stay off Twitter) endorsing a story in the Telegraph, a British newspaper. The article was this one:
Hegseth, in his comment, noted the problems of women in combat roles, although only briefly and vaguely.
Like a lot of things repeated on Twitter, the Tweet falls sort of teh full story:
The IDF is just suspending the study and will get back to a new one.
Before all of this, Hegseth ordered that "transgendered" troops leave the service. That was probably the least controversial thing he could do, and it makes perfect sense. Gender Dysphoria may exist, but transgenderism does not. Moreover, if you have to take medication just to keep your morphology, you really aren't ready for the rigors of military life.
Transgenderism in general, which will also get to below, is really a manifestation of, in my view, a mental illness. It's a trendy one, however, and is part of the culture wars which gave rise to a radicalized far right, and then to Trump.
Ordering that "transgendered" troops get out of the service is one thing, but then there's this:
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 85th Edition: Hegseth directs Navy to rename USNS Harvey Milk days into Pride Month.
This isn't related to women in combat, but it's certainly a shot in the culture wars and a surprising one. With the constant storm surrounding the Trump Regime, it didn't generate nearly as much controversy as I thought it would, and that may have been why it was done. Running that up the flagpole may have been a test by Hegseth to see how much flak he'll get if he orders women out of combat roles.
I suspect it was.
And I suspect that its coming very soon.
Indeed, it has to be soon.
And hence our next prediction.
People have predicted that Trump is running out of steam since day one, but now it appears he really is. In the old phrase, Trump has "jumped the shark". Indeed, there's an odd maxim that once something has maximum attention in the public eye, it's probably passed its peak.
There's a lot of evidence of this around, and it makes a big difference to what Hegseth, and others in the Trump Administration, depending upon how savvy they are to trends, are behaving.
Trump is increasingly erratic and weird. He's also becoming increasingly ineffective. Having done a lot early on in a flurry of Executive Orders, the Courts, save for the Supreme Court, so far, are effectively saying "hold on Buckwheat" and stopping much of what he's done. The entire goofball DOGE effort is the same. Indeed, at least one minor agency is being reconstructed, amazingly, after Musk and his wrecking crew attacked it.4 Indeed, DOGE achieved a mess, but that's about it. Bill Clinton's effort to cut the size of the government, which lead to a surplus in its day, was much more effective.
Now the wheels are coming off. Musk is feuding with Trump. The Senate may not pass the Big Ugly Bill, at least not in the form the sycophantic House did. Questions are being razed.
Trump is being publicly mocked as "Taco".
The bloom is off the rose, Trump's authority is declining, and the looming 25th Amendment is getting warmed up.
Have you noticed that James Donald Bowman, aka J. D. Vance, whom we heard from constantly early on, is now pretty much silent. That's not an accident. Vance will take over when Trump is booted, and my guess that he doesn't want to be tainted with Trump any more than he has to be. He's gone from insulting Ukrainian Presidents for not wearing suits, to just not being there.
Which brings this back around to women in the military, and other social issues. National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist rode into power on Trump's back as they knew that they could. They also know, however, that they need time to completely overhaul the nation to look like they want it to, and 18 months, all the more time I've given Trump before he is hauled off to an assisted living wing of Mar A Lago, isn't enough. Four years isn't either, and frankly the Democrats are going to retake the House of Representatives nexts year. If Vance doesn't secure reelection after this administration is done with, much of what the National Conservatives/Christian Nationalist did during their four years will just be dust in the wind.
In order for anything to stick, it has to be done quickly, so that the electorate is acclimated to it by 2028, or there has to be a plan to stay in power in 2028. My guess that Vance's disappearing act is part of that.
I fear what else may be.5
Back to some rambling.
As is often the case, a certain element of synchronicity tends to work on these posts, with various things coming up with that cause the thread to be posted. Just as I started contemplating the women in combat topic, again, a couple of such things did which are related.
I subscribe to Mandatory Fun Day on Instagram. A buddy of mine who had been in the service sent me some of his clips and they're hilarious, if you've been in the Army. If you haven't, they're probably completely baffling.
Anyhow, as I subscribe on Instagram, they started coming up on Facebook as "reels". No problem. The fact that they did, however, meant that I'd get suggested reels by other service members following in the creator's wake. They were uniformly pretty bad.
All of a sudden, having not taken interest in those, Facebook started suggesting reels by female service members, a large number of which are service women in their t-shirts being cute in a college coed fashion, or worse. Dancing female soldiers show up, and even twerking ones. Women showing how they dress in their uniforms, starting with pretty much only skivvies on, is another. Perhaps the one most illustrative of why I regard this all a problem was one in which a female soldier photographed herself in GI trousers, and regulation brown t-shirt, showing "how I feel when I see my man in uniform", which involved clutching her breasts and and having her free hand south of her fly.
And all of this is observable just on the suggested feed, not on what shows up if you click on it.
One I did click on, as it was so oddly titled, involved a cute young woman making babyish "moo" sounds, in an item entitled "she found her moo". The voice of the filmer was also female. Apparently the moo thing is some sort internet trend.
Anyhow, relationships, and you can use your imagination as to what I mean by that, are a problem in college dorms where nobody is expected to kill anyone. They've been a huge problem in the service, and the Marine Corps had to take steps some time ago to order female Marines to knock off seductive filming, some of which featured female Marines nude. Young women acting like young women away from home and in college dorms isn't surprising, but it sure isn't conductive to unit cohesiveness in organizations in which death and destruction is a routine norm.
Put another way, the "man" whom the young woman touching body parts which used to be referenced in the Jody Call "The Prettiest Girl I Ever Saw" is going to be a problem in any unit, let alone one in which a soldier may be expected to leave her behind to be killed.6 7
Moo.
Anyhow, while noting all of this, I also saw a series of stories recently about women being upset by having to compete against men, who are "transgendered". Also, UW is now being investigated due to Artemis Langford being in a sorority, at the same time that sorority sisters are trying to keep him out.
That caused me to realize how often its women who lead the charge in this are. Women know they are women and they justifiably feel that in sports they shouldn't have to compete against men. And they aren't the only ones. An international body that regulates boxing has imposed genetic tests on female boxers to make sure they're female.
The reason for all of this is that even second rate male athletes turn out to be almost unstoppable competition in female sports, when they compete as transgendered. Women resent it, and rightfully.
But oddly enough society hasn't seemingly noted something that Hemingway noted many years ago.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
I'm not saying that war is nice. Quite the contrary. But in some ways its the ultimate athletic endeavor, even now in the era of high tech weapons. And let us be honest Killing is part of it, but there's never been a conflict anywhere in the world where brutalization and rape haven't been part of it, nor has there ever been one in which some women took advantage of their assets in a wartime pinch.
Women don't belong in combat.
Let's go back to the plight of the UW sorority for a second.
The entire saga here shows how difficult it can be for public institutions in this bizarre era in which we live. It's obvious that a male should not be in a sorority, and Langford may dress as a female and wish to be regarded as one, but at least the last time I checked on the story, he hadn't "transitioned", which means he's full equipped. There's no reason that a young woman should be forced to live in close residential confines with a man if she doesn't wish to.
The other sad aspect of this is that this entire saga, in which they've sued, and I don't blame them, and now the Trump Administration is investigating UW, means that his entire delusion has become his identity, when had this been treated as what it was, a mental illness, it might all be past tense by now. Indeed, just looking it would suggest that it might very well have been.8
Anyhow, stuff like this puts universities in the can't win for losing situation. Charlie Kirk, a right wing populist babbler, has made comments on Langford, and a right wing populist law student just sponsored him talking on campus.
Pity poor UW.
Back to Hegseth t he White House is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support him, but there's been no takers.
Again, this Administration has shot its bolt, and its showing.
On other things military, we have this:
A President federalizing a Guard unit ab initio like this is very unusual.
Some are declaring that this is a first step towards nationwide martial law. I doubt it. It's a bad move however. Troops, including National Guardsmen, make poor police. They really aren't trained for it, but are trained to use force.
Usually troops, including National Guardsmen, who are deployed in this role aren't given ammunition. The opposite can happen, of course, as Kent State famously and tragically indicated. This is a bad look, anyway you view it.
To circle back, how much of what we're seeing now, will stick? Trump's really on his way out, and it's doubtful the culture has been much impacted, so far.
Footnotes:
1. This thread has been getting a lot of views for some reason recently, and is often one of the most popular ones of the week.
2. Kennedy provides us with another example of the disaster of the very aged being in a position of authority.
3. The order states:
High standards are what made the United States military the greatest fighting force on the planet. The strength of our military is our unity and our shared purpose. We are made stronger and more disciplined with high, uncompromising, and clear standards.
I am directing the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (USD(P&R)) to gather the existing standards set by the Military Departments pertaining to physical fitness, body composition, and grooming, which includes but is not limited to beards. The USD(P&R) will conduct a review of these standards and how they have changed since January 1, 2015 . The review will also provide insight on why those standards changed and the impact of those changes. The USD(P&R) has the authority to task the Secretaries of the Military Departments and other DoD Component heads as necessary to provide any required information in support of this review and will provide detailed guidance to the Military Departments.
We must remain vigilant in maintaining the standards that enable the men and women of our military to protect the American people and our homeland as the world' s most lethal and effective fighting force. Our adversaries are not growing weaker, and our tasks are not growing less challenging. This review will illuminate how the Department has maintained the level of standards required over the recent past and the trajectory of any change in those standards.
4. None of which has kept the perpetually behind the curve Wyoming legislature from heading off with its own DOGE effort, just as the Federal effort is sinking.
5. Having said that, by any standard Vance will be more normal than Trump, which doesn't mean he will get reelected in 2028.
6. They must be banned now, but the Army used to have a lot of Jody Calls that were outright foul, but probably serve to illustrate the atmosphere that units of young men tend to have, for good or ill. In this call, a solder recalls drinking in a bar and touching a woman next to him in various place until she says "GI, you know the rest", resulting in his now having a bunch of children.
7. As a totally random item:
8. I don't know all the details, but from what little you can pick up on the net, Langford's parents seem to have gone through a bad divorce and his father obtained custody. Langford relates that he solidified his view of himself as a woman following a desperate nighttime prayer. He was a Mormon, and while many faiths recognize praying for guidance, the Mormon faith has a "burning bosom" line of thought on some things. The LDS are not, however, supportive of transgenderism, which is interesting, and Langford now identifies as an Episcopalian. Some branches of the Episcopal church have been notoriously willing to accept gender trends, which is part of the reason that the Episcopal Church is rapidly declining in membership.
Related threads:
Last edition:
"Transgendered" troops to depart.
I'll be frank, I don't think transgenderism exists at all.
Gender dysphoria, however, certainly does. It's a psychological condition, and indeed, a mental illness, often a temporary one.
Moreover, "transitioning from a man to a woman", or vice versa, is impossible.
Whether or not that fiction should be allowed to medically occur for adults (for anyone not in their majority, it's child abuse), is another thing. I basically don't feel that it should be allowed, as its a manifestation of a mental illness that isn't served by being medically and surgically coddled, but I'll also fully admit there's more than one allowable medical procedure I don't think should be legal either. Plastic surgery, for example, for mere cosmetic reason for uninjured and the morphologically normal people is also wrong, in my view, and that's not the only such thing.
Nonetheless, the sudden, and it was sudden, post Obergefell societal trend towards treating this mental delusion as something that should be fully supported is not only stunning, but it's flat out wrong. It may be the only mental illness which has rising to be not only culturally tolerated, but for which the left makes cultural demands. As I predicated at the time of the Obergefell, making such demands would have a societal ripple that would be devastating, and it has been. There's a straight path from Obergefell to Donald Trump, as what it brought in was just a bridge too far.
So, here, I find myself agreeing with Secretary Hegseth's action, even though I'm not a fan of Secretary Hegseth.
UW looks to end embattled gender studies degree
And here's another item that come from the far right, and indeed from Project 2025, which generally scares me overall, but whose goal I find myself in agreement with:
Related posts:
Topic One.
