Wars and Rumors of War, 2025. Part 2. The world is not a development opportunity edition.

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

Matthew, Chapter 24.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Winston Churchill

Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.

Donald Trump on skipping the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery.

March 2, 2025

Turkey v. Kurds

Following an opening from Turkey's strongman ruler Erdogan, the PKK is suspending armed operations.

US Mexican Border

The US is deploying an additional 3,000 troops to the Mexican border.

March 3, 2025

Russo Ukrainian War

Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia

Absolutely stupid.

US v. Al Qaeda

On Feb. 23, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted a precision airstrike in Northwest Syria, targeting and killing Muhammed Yusuf Ziya Talay, the senior military leader of the terrorist organization Hurras al-Din (HaD), an Al-Qaeda affiliate.

US Central Command.

March 4, 2025

Russo Ukrainian War

The US suspended military aid to Ukraine.  Europe began immediately to fill in and J. D. Vance warned, based on nothing at all, that only Trump could negotiate peace.

More likely, this accelerates the eclipse of the United States.

March 6, 2025

Russo Ukrainian War

The Trump Cabal cut off intelligence access to Ukraine.  Shortly after this, Russia hit Kyiv with ballistic missiles.

March 8, 2025

Russo Ukrainian War

When his country called, Donald Trump called up his doctor who found that he ineligible to go into harms way due to shin splints.  

Like a lot of the 1960s "not me" crowd, to include Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, this hasn't meant, in the case of Donald Trump, that he doesn't mind ordering killing done. Trump's taken into almost new territory, however, by withdrawing intelligence from an ally dependent up on us while his political party, which once stalwartly opposed foreign aggression by countries like Russia and North Korea, largely stands by.

The United States now has blood on its hands, and through betrayal:

US intel ban leads to heavy Ukrainian losses

A lot of people who admire Trump believe he has a big business head and that he's bring this to politics.  Why this is a good thing is never actually mentioned. Government isn't a business.  Beyond that, is Trump really a good businessman?  We have very little evidence that the is.  What we have evidence that he was born very wealthy and its well known that those born into great wealth are highly unlikely to lose it all.  Very wealthy families that do lose everything usually do so in the course of a couple of generations.  It takes that long to dissipate the wealth.  My guess is that this is happening to the Trump fortune right now.  Big fortunes are lost through classic means, spending on largess and women usually.  My guess is that for those who are looking at the trump's fifty to seventy five years hence, you'll find that they're still rich, but not vastly so, and probably working mundane rich people's jobs.

Anyhow, one of the big myths about Trump is that he's a great negotiator . What he is, is a bully.  Since returning to the Oval Office he's applied his bully skills to numerous things and its really start to fail.  The tariffs are a good example.  Canada has now reached the complete "fuck you" stage with Trump and he can't do one single thing about it.  Probably by summer the Mid West will have rolling blackouts due to an electrical blackout. The dimwit Trump has promised to get the XL pipeline rolling again and build one extending all the way to Alaska.  My prediction is that the XL if completed under Trump will be filled with air as it was supposed to transport Canadian crude.  Donny probably doesn't know that.  The Canadians are never going to allow the US to build a pipeline on their soil.

On the war, Ukrainian President Zylensky was brought to the US to surrender title to his country's minerals as an extorted payment for ongoing support.  The meeting went famously wrong as J. D. Vance, now with in a hairsbreadth of being President, showed himself way out of his element and engaged in an argument with the embattled Ukrainian leader.  Trump, coming to Vance's rescue, once again showed his intellect is really lacking and his verbal skills are that of a child.  Since that time, using tactics that he learned as a real estate magnate, he's attempted to bully Ukraine into submission by withholding arms and intelligence to the country.  

In blunt terms, he figures that getting Ukrainians killed will make them pliant.

It's monstrously wrong.

And its not even artful.

There's pretty good evidence at this point that the bloom is really off the rose of this administration and that even within the administration itself things are beginning to breakdown.  Marco Rubio got into a yelling match with weirdo Elon Musk and actually prevailed.  Another cabinet member had to take babbling Trump off the phone and negotiate a deal with Trudeau himself.  Trump is slowly on his way out, but how much damage he does on the way out is yet to be seen.

At any rate, somewhere on the far side of things thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are joining the souls of those of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to lament being betrayed by the United States.  But at the same time, the departed spirits of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger can take solace that their betrayal of an ally wasn't the work of a demented toddler.

Here in the US, the hardcore MAGA's are all saying it'll work out, or coming up with reason why betrayal is okay.  It won't, and it isn't.

March 13, 2025

Russo Ukrainian War

Russia rejected lil Don's suggestion of a cease fire.

March 16, 2025

Middle Eastern War

The US struck the Houthis yesterday, who vowed retaliation.

March 17, 2025

Middle Eastern War

Hegseth Says Campaign Against Houthis Will be 'Unrelenting' Until Hostilities Cease March 17, 2025 | By Matthew Olay During a media interview yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. military will continue to tactically engage Iranian-backed Houthis until they stop acting aggressively against U.S. ships in the region. Hegseth commented on the topic following President Donald J. Trump's order for U.S. Central Command to launch multiple airstrikes against Houthis in Yemen, March 15, 2025.  "Freedom of navigation is basic; it's a core national interest," Hegseth said, adding that the current campaign is about restoring deterrents in the region in addition to freedom of navigation.  "The minute the Houthis say, 'We'll stop shooting at your ships [and] we'll stop shooting at your drones,' this campaign will end but, until then, it will be unrelenting," he continued.  Hegseth also said the airstrikes were meant to draw Iran's attention.  "The message is clear to Iran … Your support of the Houthis needs to end immediately. We will hold you accountable as the sponsor of this proxy, and I echo [the president's] statement [that] we will not be nice about it," Hegseth said. The Houthis have been acting aggressively in the Red Sea region since October 2023, when a U.S. Navy destroyer had to intercept three land-attack cruise missiles fired by the Houthis toward Israel.  Since then, the Houthis have launched over 100 drone and missile attacks targeting American and allied ships in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, resulting in many commercial ships having to alter their routes to avoid the region at a tremendous commercial cost.  Hegseth likened the severe economic impact of the Houthi aggression in the region to "being held hostage by a terrorist organization" and then pointed out that the Trump administration has indeed labeled the Houthis as such.  "To the Houthis: [the airstrikes weren't] a one-night thing … This is about stopping the shooting at assets in that critical waterway to reopen the freedom of navigation, which is a core national interest of the United States," Hegseth said, before again reemphasizing that Iran needs to "back off" from enabling the Houthis.  Hegseth said Iran and its additional military proxies — including Hamas and Hezbollah — are in a "weakened state."  "But it doesn't mean they still don't have the desire [for aggression]," he said, adding that Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.  "Iran must get that clear message and negotiate the end of their pursuit for nuclear weapons because … President Trump has said clearly that they will not get a bomb," Hegseth said.

March 19, 2025

Middle Eastern War

Israel is back to bombarding Gaza, so the cease fire did not hold.

Russo Ukrainian War

Putin agreed to an infrastructure ceasefire, which it turned around and immediately violated.

cont:

Israel has launched a new ground invasion into Gaza after breaking ceasefire

March 23, 2025

Middle Eastern War

The rocket and counterstrike feature of this war in Lebanon has returned.

Russo Ukrainian War

Ukraine has hit some major Russian air assets and fuel assets in the last couple of days.  Russia had hit Kyiv.

March 24, 2025

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.  Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic.

March 25, 2025

Middle Eastern War

The Trump administration petulantly denied texting war plans to The Atlantic, while insulting the recipient, while it simultaneously became more obvious that in fact it had occurred.

The US hit Houthi targets in Yemen again.

March 30, 2025

It's been a bad week, foreign policy wise, for the supposed great negotiator, Donald Trump.

United States v. Iran

In a press interview today Donald Trump threated to bomb Iran to the hilt if it does not enter into a nuclear deal with the United States.

Iran has replied it won't enter into direct talks with the US, but might be willing to discuss this matter in some other fashion.

Russo Ukrainian War

The great dealmaker also expressed frustration, or rather that he was "pissed off", with Putin, accusing him of lying and not wanting a peace.

Apparently Trump is the last guy on Earth who didn't already know this, besides flunky sycophants.

He's threating secondary tariffs.

Middle Eastern War.

Revealed on the leaked texts VP Vance was concerned that Trump didn't understand what the bombing.  He said:

3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.

I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc

Last edition:

Wars and Rumors of War, 2025. Part 1. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

Sunday, March 25, 1900. Socialist Party founded in United States.

Delegates from the Social Democratic Party and the Socialist Labor Party founded a Socialist Party in the US.

The party would prove to be a significant one up until World War One, and then it would decline thereafter, although it still exists.

Last edition:

Saturday, March 24, 1900. No smoking.

Labels: 1900, 1900s, Birds, National Weather Service, Smoking, tobacco

Friday, March 13, 1925. Tennessee prevents evolution in schools.

In a uniquely American struggle, due to the strong influence of Evangelical Protestantism in the country, the Tennessee General Assembly approved the Butler Act, which prohibited public schools from teaching evolution.

CHAPTER NO. 27

House Bill No. 185

(By Mr. Butler)

AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.

Section 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Section 2. Be it further enacted, That any teacher found guilty of the violation of this Act, Shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than One Hundred $ (100.00) Dollars nor more than Five Hundred ($ 500.00) Dollars for each offense.

Section 3. Be it further enacted, That this Act take effect from and after its passage, the public welfare requiring it.

Passed March 13, 1925

W. F. Barry,

Speaker of the House of Representatives

L. D. Hill,

Speaker of the Senate

Approved March 21, 1925.

Austin Peay,

Governor.

Calvin Coolidge held a press conference.

The Hay-Quesada Treaty between Cuba and the United States was ratified by the U.S. Senate, recognizing that the Isla de Pinos was the territory of Cuba.

Last edition:

Thursday, March 12, 1925. Passing of Sun Yat-sen. British rejection of the Geneva Protocol.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, China, Crime, Ireland, Isolationism, League of Nations, Nazi Party, Populism, Sex, Sun Yat-sen, The relationship between men and women, United Kingdom

The military tell of the tape, which probably isn't what you think, and why we really need allies.

 How things really balance.

Which also shows that the classic "NATO isn't pulling its weight" is bull crap.

The week of February 23, 2025. The week the US became Brazil.

J. D. Vance boring Peru, Tuvalu,  and Kiribati while the adult nations meet elsewhere.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King Jr.

This last week saw the conclusion of existential shift in the United States.  The country went from being a great nation, albeit with greatness foisted upon it due to World War One, World War Two and the Cold War, to becoming a second rate regional power hated by its neighbors and regarded as an also ran by the rest of the world.

Basically, since November, and concluding last week, we went from being what the country was following World War Two, to Brazil.

The concluding act was Donald Trump, whom the nation is pretending to be President, berating a heroic embattled President of a heroic embattled nation.  At that point, every head of state around the globe just switched the senile narcissist developer off.  He showed himself to be stupid and by extension, showed the US to be worshipping stupidity. 

Why would anyone care what we think.

In the next few days the act will play itself out.  The US will impose tariffs on our neighbors and sink into a recession that will last a decade or more.  We'll be lucky if it isn't a depression. This assumes, of course, that we're nto at war with China within a year and a half.  If that occurs, we'll fight it, and lose, on our own.  Our former allies have written us off all over the globe, and for good reason.  As an importing nation, we're about to find out economically that we just slit our wrists and everyone is going to let us bleed out.

And they should.

The decline of the US was perhaps inevitable.  Americans, and its Americans, not their government, have never figured out how to live within their budgets.  Government wise, we ran a big government from 1932 on, but always had a hard time balancing it.  We went off the charts thsi way in the first Trump administration, with the country lead by a stupid man who never had to live wthin his own budget.  The country, which has always had a strong element of anti intellectualism as Richard Hofstadter well explored in his published in 1963 Pulitzer Prize winning book on the topic in which he concluded  both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were in part consequences of the democratization of knowledge but also embedded in America's national fabric as a result of its colonial and evangelical Protestant heritage. He believe,d and we've recently discussed, that Evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.  In the turbulent times that have come from 1963, that's festered and become a near worship of ignorance over science, something that the Reagan Administration's abandonment of science fostered.

But its also the case that being ain international power is expensive and nobody has been able to maintain a singular global status forever.  The British run of it, for example, was much shorter than generally imagined. So was Spain's.  The Japanese effort barely got off the ground bfore it collapsed.  So our 1945 to 2025 run probably was a good run.

But it didn't need to end this way, with the nation collapsing as an international joke.

Some nations have come to this point and managed to transition with dignity.  The United Kingdom particularly did, realizing after the failed 1958 Suez Canal intervention that it could no longer hold on it its empire.  It simply announced the arrival of The Winds of Change and worked with those winds.  In the 1960s the United Kingdom was still a major colonial power. By the 1970s it no longer was, and was then a European power.  Today, it's one of the leading European nations.

A former British colony, however, provides a contrary example.  Unable to accept those winds, Rhodesia chose to stand against them and declared itself independent and unyielding to change.  Change was violently foisted upon it, giving us the mess of Zimbabwe today.

France may really provide the example we need to consider.

In the 1930s France was a political mess and appeared to be teetering on the edge of taking the same path that Spain had, a civil war between a strong left and a strong right.  World War Two interrupted that, but it also temporarily completed it, throwing the government to the far right autocracy of Marshall Petain.

France from 1940 to 1944 was not the every Frenchman in the Resistance nation that France and Hogan's Heroes pretended existed by any means.  A huge percentage of the French were comfortable with a new France that replaced "liberty, equality  and fraternity" with "work, family, and country".  Petain was, in significant ways, what Franco also was, an earlier version of National Conservative.  He was also, and this should not be forgotten, part of an elected government that even the Socialist who remained supported.

Not all Frenchmen supported the rightest government, of course, and as the months rolled by, and it was a mere matter of months, World War Two for France became a French civil war.  After June 6, 1944, and then after World War Two itself, Franch struggled with what it was to become and made a desperate effort to hang on to its empire, failing first in Indochina and then in Algeria.  France was lucky to have Charles de Gaulle, heroic, haughty, deeply Catholic and committed to democracy.  De Gaulle saved France, but huge elements of French society, particularly within the military, were opposed to his agreeing to dismantle the remaining parts of the empire and become, once again, a major European country.  De Gaulle and French democracy barely survived.

We're effectively in the same position these countries were after World War Two. And indeed, there were things to address.  The United States acclimated itself to running huge deficits and the last two chief executives, Biden and Trump, or rather Trump, Biden, and Trump again, vastly accelerated out of control spending.  The US remains a powerful global power, but this would have resulted in some reckoning sooner or later.  The American public has become poorly educated in many was post Ronald Reagan, and it no longer grasps why the US should be a world power.  Basically, Americans are like the French of the Vichy era, folding in on themselves into work, family, and love of a country that doesn't have to deal, they think, with anyone else.

National Conservatism, which will follow Trump's demise will fail. The US won't convert itself into isolated mythical kingdom, and it won't enjoy being the temporarily biggest bully on the block.  The real question is whether or not it will enjoy being Brazil.

Trump's stupidity and lack of releavant experience has caused the United States to be removed to the children's table.  The opinions of the country no longer matter on the global stage.

And honestly, some of this will be a good thing, while much will be bad.  While the US has been a major force for democracy and good in the world since the Second World War, starting with the Trumpist decline in the Republican Party, suppressed elements of real ignorance have been harming the world, chief among them being a stubborn refusal to recognize that the fossil fuel era needs to change, and quickly.  We've been, essentially, like China in that regard.

Now with the Western World's axis shifted back to Europe, with Canada and the other English speaking nations with it, the US will have to change, and quickly.  A blistering sense of arrogance and ignorance that has come to define Americans in recent years will have no currency and will not be tolerated. We'll be told what to do, and like it.

All empires fall. Some fall into stupidity.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

The best entries of this sad week:

We started to look into the elements that have caused Americans in this era to worship the rich and reject knowledge, and started with this one.

What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.

We also looked back on an event from when we were a great nations.

Friday, February 23, 1945.

What were the Trumps doing in the war. . . . well not fighting.

We posted one we thought would be controversial, but which received very little attention.

Women and combat

We also looked at another source of our ignorance and arrogance.

Lex Anteinternet: What's Wrong with the United States? Cultural and linguistic ignorance.

We reminded people that all of this is happening under a man who isn't even the President, he can't legally qualify to be that, but who has no mandate at all.

Trump's Mandate? There isn't one.

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List.

We also revived our warning that Christians in general are going to take a lot of this on the chin.

"Do not be led astray: 'Bad company corrupts good morals.' Trump, Putin and American Evangelicals.

Thursday, February 25, 1915. The Cottonwood Bluff War.

You know, insulting Canada and Canadians, as Trump has done, and slapping a tariff on Canada, as Trump has done, while tweeting about the need to finish the XL Pipeline, as Trump has done, is, well, really stupid.

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 2. The Stupidest Trade War In History Edition.

The 2025 Wyoming Legislative Session. Week 7. The photo says it all.

We concluded our first entry on wars for 2025 with Trump's petulant childish tantrum, which is basically where this thread starts.

Wars and Rumors of War, 2025. Part 1. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

Last edition:

Best Posts of the Week of February 16, 2025.

Monday, March 2, 1925. Delta Air Lines. . .

Huff Daland Dusters Inc., a crop dusting company, which would ultimately become Delta Airlines, was founded.

The United States and Estonia signed an agreement for mutual most-favored-nation treatment in customs.

Last edition:

Monday, March 1, 1915. Locusts.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Aircraft, Dardanelles, Imperial Russian Navy, Ottoman Empire, Palestine

Tuesday, February 24, 1925. Lake of the Woods Convention and Protocol

The United States and Canada signed the Lake of the Woods Convention and Protocol, defining the lake's boundary line more accurately, regulating its water level, and arranging for the settlement of port damages caused by overflowing that arose from work done on the Canadian side. 

This, obviously, before our currently demented occupant of the Oval Office decided that throwing rocks at Canada was fun.

Last edition:

Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, China, Chinese Warlord Era, Japan

Tuesday, February 10, 1925. A concordat.

Poland and the Roman Catholic Church signed a concordat establishing diplomatic relations, guaranteeing the full protection by the Polish government of the Catholic Church, in return for the solemn oath of allegiance by Catholic clerics to the Polish government.

Obviously something had inspired tension, but I don't really know what.  What's often missed is that the early Polish government was very left leaning.

Canada, which does not wish to become a US state under any circumstances, and the US signed a fighting rights agreement.

Last edition:

Monday, February 9, 1925. Pondering the borders.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Diplomacy, France, German Weimar Republic

Pandemic Part 10. A new paradigm?

 

February 17, 2022

The Center for Disease Control estimates that, taking the massive spread of Omicron around the country into account and the final relatively high vaccination rate in the country, 73% of the nation is now immune from the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, i.e. COVID 19.

Nobody is really sure exactly what that means.  But it might mean that we're entering a phase where the virus doesn't disappear, but it's much less disruptive to society.

It's still the case, however, that it remains a danger for the unvaccinated.

March 1, 2022

Wyoming's public health emergency shall expire on March 14.

March 21, 2022

A new variant of Omicron has developed, which is about 30% more transmissible than the already more transmissible Omicron.  It's spiking in Europe and in Hong Kong has caused an outbreak with a massive death rate, mostly concentrated in the unvaccinated elderly.

China has reported its first deaths in many months.

According to experts, the world is about 50% through the probable course of the pandemic.

April 14, 2022

Over 1,000,000 Americans have now died from the COVID 19.

July 22, 2022

President Biden has COVID 19.

At this point, two members of our four member family also have, with one having had it quite recently and finding it awful, but being grateful accordingly for having been vaccinated.

A new, more traditional type of vaccine, has now been approved.

September 20, 2022

On 60 Minutes over the weekend, President Biden stated; "The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over."  The HHS Secretary later confirmed that position.

Epidemiologically, it isn't over, but then neither is the plague's pandemic either.  The statement has been criticized, with 400 people per day dying of the disease, but by and large it reflects the mood of the public which has largely gone back to a new post Covid introduction, world in which COVID 19 is part of the background.

December 15, 2022

The new defense spending authorization includes a requirement that the Secretary of Defense rescind vaccination requirements for troops because, well because that's the idiotic sort of thing that politicians like to stick into bills.

All of the troops should be vaccinated.

December 24, 2022

China, which has not accepted western vaccines, reported 37,000,000 new vaccinations in a single day.

January 2, 2023

A new variant of Omicron, XBB.1.5, now makes up 40% of the new cases in the U.S.

And Covid is still killing.

January 20, 2023

Governor Gordon Tests Positive for COVID-19

CHEYENNE, Wyo. –  Governor Mark Gordon has received results of a COVID-19 test that showed he is positive for the virus. The Governor is experiencing only minor symptoms at this time and will continue working from home on behalf of Wyoming. 

March 1, 2023

The Washington Post broke a story that the Department of Energy issued a report believing, with "low confidence", that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a Chinese lab.

A really good analysis of this story can be found here:  

Why Scientists, Lawmakers & Diplomats Care Where COVID Began

In actuality, the Biden Administration early on ordered governmental intelligence agencies to get to the bottom of the virus' origin.  Eight intelligence agencies were assigned to the tasks, two of which have concluded, but with confidence doubts, that the virus was natural in origin. Two, we know now, felt the opposite, with it already known since 2021 what the FBI felt, with "moderate confidence" that the origin was a Chinese lab.  Two just haven't reported.

None of this kept some from claiming that it's now proven that the virus originated in the lab.

FWIW, private scientists, as opposed to intelligence agencies, overwhelmingly feel that it originated due to animal transfer in the Wuhan market.

March 18, 2023

Recent evidence points to raccoon dogs at the Wuhan market as the source.

April 11, 2023

President Biden declared the COVID emergency to be over.

August 22, 2023

Declared over or not, two new strains are on the loose and a new booster should be available mid September.

April 12, 2024

The CDC has found there's no link between the COVID vaccines and cardiac arrest in young people.

Not that this is a surprise.

It'll make no difference in the anti-scientific atmosphere of the day. A society that can believe that legalizing marijuana, which is largely untested and wholly unregulated, and that Donald Trump won hte 2020 election, will still believe that the vaccine is risky, but cause it wishes to.

June 15, 2024

Reuters has revealed that during the height of the pandemic, the US ran an anti-vax campaign in the Philippines to try to undermine Chinese efforts there.

There's no excuse for that whatsoever.

November 18, 2024

Is it the flu or is it COVID? One at-home test can tell you

January 26, 2025

The Central Intelligence Agency revised its report on the origin of COVID reporting, with low confidence, that a Chinese laboratory is to blame.

This was a report that was completed during the Biden Administration and was just now released.  It's being released now is unfortunate, in that it comes during the Trump Interregnum which is packed with people who generally have a contempt for science, which this will slightly fuel if anyone notices it given all the distraction at the present time.  Most Scientists think the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses, before infecting another species.

Last prior installment:

Pandemic Part 9. Omicron becomes dominant

If Trump isn't demented, what is he?

I've consistently advocated the theory that Donald Trump has a rapidly progressing case of dementia, and I'll stand by it, even though I have no qualifications to maintain that at all.

But what if he isn't demented. How do you explain his behavior?

We'll take a look.

He's just stupid

This is a real possibility.

There's no real reason to believe that Trump is intelligent.  His success in business, which is often cited is pretty much based on his having inherited a vast amount of wealth.  As studies have shown, people who inherit a lot of money are likely remain wealthy no matter what.  It actually takes real effort for them to fall down into a lower economic class.

There's plenty of evidence that Trump is simply dumb.  He appears to say whatever floats through his head he adopts the views of people around him without thought, he asks questions of his aid that are really, well, dumb.

And really stupid people often tend to be either profoundly kind, or profoundly mean.  Trump seems to fit in to the latter category.  The nuances of morality that most people have require some degree of intelligence.  Trump simply lacks that, perhaps, so being really mean just comes naturally to him.

How then did he get to be President?

Well one thing is that people tend to assume that wealth equals smarts.  He has a lot of money, so he  must be smart, right?

Nope.

But as people tend to believe that, they tend also to fill in the blanks for the stupid person so that their support of him is rationalized.

In the past, we saw that a lot with sports.  Some sports figure may be as dumb as a box of rock, but as people want to idolize him, they make excuses for everything the person says or does.

And the entire celebrity worship thing in American culture is part of that.  People take seriously things celebrities say, as they must be smart, or they wouldn't be celebrities, right?

To add to it, the dumb int he public eye tend, normally to be protected by handlers, which Trump was up until very recently.  Now that he's not the stupidity of much of what he says and does is really coming to the forefront.

Finally, intelligence is complicated.  There are polymaths who are sort of universally intelligent, but there are also people who can excel at one thing without really being smart at anything else.  Trump clearly has skills as a salesman.  That frankly seems to be the only talent he has.

On that, I've known a few salesmen really well and often been surprised by how little interest they have in the topic of what they sell, or anything else.  An extremely successful real estate broker I know, for example surprised me when he revealed he had once been a car salesman.  They are, however, both sales.

A car salesman that I knew once surprised me in a conversation by revealing he really knew nothing about automobiles at all, and wasn't interested in them.  Cars bored him pretty clearly, but he was really good at selling them.  Selling is what interested him.

Trump may very well be like that.  He has good sales skills, which doesn't mean he's really very interested in anything he's selling.

A problem with the stupid is that they won't acknowledge it.  I don't think its true that most stupid people don't have an inkling they're dumb, but how they react to it is different.  Some simply accept it.  Others reject it.  Some seek constant affirmation that they aren't dumb.  Trump seems to fit into that category.

Aiding that, we'd note, is that he's been surrounded by people who have been telling him that he's really smart his entire life.  Everyone has witnessed something like that personally, where somebody is protected from reality until they simply don't know what it is.

There's sort of a Chauncey Gardiner element to this, we'd note.  In the film Being There, a simple minded man is mistake for a genius and becomes an advisor to the President simply because of his appearance and apparent station in life.  It's very difficult for most people to accept that somebody who has achieved apparent success isn't extremely smart.  I recall my mother, for instance, being of the view that Barrack Obama must be a genius (I'm not saying that he wasn't) because he was a lawyer.  It doesn't take smarts to become a lawyer, and one of the most successful ones I ever met with not a smart man at all.  He was just lucky.

Added to this, people, once they latch on to a figure, tend to attribute their own values to him.  We've seen this in spades with Trump. He's not a religious man, but people believe he is. There's no reason to believe he cares about most of the populist agenda, unless doing so aids him personally, but people believe he does.

The scary thing here is, unlike the first time when Trump had people to real him back in, he doesn't now.  If he's not demented, and therefore not capable of being removed, he can do pretty much any dumb thing he wants to over the next four years.

He's simply narcissistic and amoral.

Full bore narcissism and complete amorality is really rare.  Even people that most other people accuse of narcissism are capable of at least some empathy.

Likewise, complete amorality is very rare as well. Even people with loose morals usually have some.

But not always, in either case.

Indeed, it's well know that psychopaths have no empathy for other people.  And some of them, we'd note, are pretty smart.  According to some, Julius Rosenberg, the Communist spy, was an example of all we've mentioned here.  He was really smart and only cared about himself.

Trump was raised in an environment in which only success mattered and only money determined what was success. That was the Trump culture, and by all available evidence, Trump took to it and thrived in it.

Nothing other than Trump matters to Trump.  That's pretty much it. And given that, cheating on spouses, dumping associates, switching positions, lying, and screwing the entire nation are okay if it benefits his view of himself.

And that explains why he completely baffles his opponents and why his admirers admire him. Those opposed to him cannot grasp how anyone can't see through Trump.  Those who admirer him can't bring themselves to believe that he doesn't care about them whatsoever, or the country, or anything other than himself.  

Normal people don't behave like Trump to that degree. Trump's an example of what the world would really be like if John Lennon's Imagine ruled the day.

Trump sees a world in which there are no values, no religion, and nothing, other than Trump getting all he can get.

I'd note, however, that in a way, Trump, if viewed this way, is the ultimate expression of his generation, the "Me Generation".  Not everyone, or even most, in it, but the generational ethos as a whole.  What matter was "me", not much else.  Trump expresses an extreme form of that, even if he acquired it at home from a father who was definitely not part of that generation.  That also makes it easier for his acolytes to vote for him, as some of them growing up sort of viewing the world that way themselves.  Other, however, likely most, really believe that Trump cares about their cost of living, their pocketbooks, and making "American Great."

Well, as we know, Leopards won't eat my face.

He's a Goodfella

Not literally, but rather by association.

Trump developed his real estate business in New York at a time at which if you were going to get by, you were going to deal with the mob.  If he has just as big of "big brain" as he claims, then he would have picked up how mobsters work, which to some extent is on bluff and threat.

The best example is from the movie The Godfather, which was closely based on the real behavior of the New York mafia.  When they wanted Jack Wolz to do something, they put a severed horse's head, from a beloved horse, in his bed. Wolz, who wasn't harmed himself, caved to their demands.

Trump constantly makes bluffs and threats, and in fact quite often his adversaries give him what he wants.  That may be his undignified and reprehensible negotiation style.  If a person is immoral enough, and unprincipled enough, that works. . . right up until it doesn't.

There's no "art" to this deal.  It's brutish.  

And, of course, sooner or later, it doesn't work.

And when that day comes, you have no friends.

Indeed, somebody ought to give Trump the test now.  When he says "I need this" somebody ought to say, come and get it.  

Harold Hardrada asked Harold Godwinson "How much of England will you give me?".  Godwinson replied "six feet, because you are bigger than other men".   In this administration, and soon, somebody is going to tell Trump "fuck you, and the horse that you rode in on", and the whole bluff thing just goes down the tubes.  Once you can't back a bluff up, it's implodes really quickly.

And then, you have no friends at all.

Here, for example, Denmark ought to tell the US to get its Space Farce base out within a few days.  We'd have to.  And if I governed Panama, the Canal  would actually be run by the Chinese within a few days.

Whatcha Gonna About It?

Not much.

And his supporters?

They'll just all claim they were never actually for him.

That's not the only possibility.

The Kremlin Candidate

Trump is a Russian asset. The only question is, is he knowingly one, or not, and why.

It's worth noting that it would truly be a master stroke politically if you could get your man into the Oval Office, if you were one of our enemies.  And then he could go about wrecking things on your behalf, destroying alliances, the economy and even simply our place in the world.

Nobody has every proven that Trump is a knowing Russian asset.  He's definitely a Russian asset, to be sure, but it may simply be because of his view of the world and his childish admiration of strong men, and maybe his wanting to be one.  Maybe its because on the eve of his own death, he wants to be remembered for something, and the only think he can think of is to be remembered as an American Napoleon.

But his relationship with the Russians has never been explained.  Do they have something on him, and if so what?

Many have wondered about this very question, but nothing has been proven.

Still, he's successfully taken a page out of the Nazi Party's book and broad cast lies so consistently that large sections of the US population believe them.  And now he's threatening our allies, and has to be taken seriously.

If Trump is a bought and paid for Russian asset, and largely only cares for himself, he's in an ideal position to simply bring the United States down.  He can alienate our relationship with our allies, destroy our economy, leave us a wreck, and turn us against each other.

And that's the best evidence that he's a Russian asset. That's exactly what he's doing.

Soviet literacy poster.

Related threads:

Hubris and Strange Coincidence.

What is wrong with the Putin supporting right?

A question that should be asked. Who are the dupes, fellow travelers, and assets? Op eds and the Russians.