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

 

April 22, 2026

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

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

The current GOP is heavily anti scientific.

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

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

April 24, 2026

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

Hegseth. 

Breast?

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

May 12, 2026

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

Harriet Hageman.

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

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

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

This is totally reprehensible.

Cont:

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

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

May 13, 2026

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

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

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

And then there's this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 22, 2026

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

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

June 24, 2026

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

Donald Trump.

Insulting in the extreme.

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

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

June 26, 2026

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

Karoline Leavitt.

What the crap?

June 27, 2026

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

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

Related thread:

August 7, 2026

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

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

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

That's your party of family values.

August 20, 2026

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

Scott Bessent.

Seriously?

Last edition:

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

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

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.  

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

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

And you wonder why Gen. X and Gen. Y flirt with Socialism? Mad King Donny, the Sun King, and his construction projects.

 $900,000,000.

Trump administration set to spend at least $900 million on White House construction

It'll be 1,000,000,000 when its done.

And you benefit not at all.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

The first significant administration departure.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House Press Secretary.

There's going to be a lot of speculation as to why she did this, but let's credit what she said. She's 28 years old, and just had a baby.

Her second.

Her husband is 32 years her senior.

Leavitt is a Catholic, as am I, but she's completely ignored the Catholic injunction against lying.  Lying on serious matters is a serious sin.  Personally, while I can not know her mind, I think she knows she's a liar.

I think she likely knows at this point, at age 28, that she needs to reform and repent.  Her first child was born out of wedlock with her current husband, Nicholas Riccio.  The second was born within the union.  Her affiliation with Trump has locked her into a web of lies for which she'll always be remembered.  Indeed, while this blog entry is somewhat forgiving, most pundits will not be, witness:

Karoline Leavitt Will Soon Lie Somewhere Else

From The New Republic.

I bet she knows that, and that it's time to get out while she can.  Get out, confess, and get clear.  Even at that, the burden she has of repenting from such a public life of outright lying is a heavy one.

I bet she tackles that.  A tell all book will be forthcoming. . . it'll be out before Trump leaves office at the end of this term, if old age doesn't take him to his reward, or lack of one, before that.

Well, may she find a path to peace. She needs it. 

So do her two children.

It won't be easy, overall, we might note.  Lots of people eventually confront their sins and reform, but very few have to confront the public record of it, which in the modern age lasts forever.  Leavitt is, as The New Republic notes, an outrageous liar and that will follower her the rest of her life.

Indeed, if you look at people who had really vile roles serving really vile people, and Leavitt's role has been vile and Donald Trump is a vile person, it's really hard to find anyone who overcomes it.  Albert Speer probably came as close to it as anyone, but even he, as charming as he was, never really did.  Georgy Malenkov, part of Stalin's government, completely fell after Stalin and eventually became a Russian Orthodox Lector, a sort of clerical position in the Eastern Rite churches.

The American things, of course, is to try to convert your infamy into a sort of fame, which is always sort of pathetic.  Monica Lewinsky is the prime example.

Well, as noted, my guess is that Leavitt, while home raising her children, will start working on a tell all book.  By the time its released she's  reveal, I'm guessing, how she never loved Donald Trump.

I also bet that Trump, right now, lives in fear of what that book will reveal.

Mini Mutinies.

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard to their deaths.  

At least those are the reports, confirmed in at least one case by the spouse of a sailor who tried to do just that.  "Big T" Pete Hegseth called the reports "fake news", with the Trump administration branding anything that is actually true as fake.

The ship, launched in 1988, has experienced food shortages, moldy showers, broken toilets, dead laundry facilities, and a lack of basics necessities such as soap and toothpaste during its ninth month deployment.

It's interesting in part because such conditions, while appalling, would not have been that much out of the norm in earlier eras.  Sailors just endured it.  But then, they endured a lot of similar conditions in daily life.  People were, in fact, tougher than they are now.

But it's also interesting as it might reveal something else going on.

The lats time the US Navy had really serious shipboard problems of this type was during the late stages of the Vietnam War, when the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation endured mutinies the Navy has refused to acknowledge as mutinies. These were serious events and they came at a point in time at which US military morale was at its lowest point since the Mexican War, during which time it had such low morale in some quarters that troops had deserted to join the Mexican Army.

The problem had expressed itself first in the Army, with the Army starting to experience everything from quiet disobedience in Vietnam to some outright revolts in the US.  The Kitty Hawk incident occured in 1972 with the Constellation event happening the following year.  Nothing like that has happened since.

The Kitty Hawk had a hard Vietnam War deployment of eight months before it was ordered back into combat and the event began.  That's notable, as the Abraham Lincoln has been out nine months.

Also notable for the 1972 and 1973 events is that everyone had completely lost faith in the Vietnam War by that time, and frankly in the military itself.  Rarely noted during the revision of the history of the war, the Vietnam War had destroyed the American Army as a combat effective force.  The US was lucky that none of our adversaries attempted any sort of additional war at the time. We likely could not have successfully contested one.

Servicemen who served in peacetime Navy before the Second World War were sort of their own breed.  A lot of them were tough careerist for whom the Navy itself was their home.  Set in that era, the movie The Sand Pebbles does a good job of showing what their view was like, and of course it came from a novel by a veteran who had served in that time.  A sort of oddly nostalgic look at the same thing, but set in 1973, is Cinderella Liberty, one of two sort of cynical Navy movies released that year, the other being The Last Detail.

During World War Two sailors, most of whom were wartime volunteers, knew what they were fighting for.  In the Cold War, for the most part, they did too.  Mutinies came when that was no longer clear.

It sure isn't clear now.  American servicemen aren't serving in a just cause and all of the military actions during the Second Trump Administration have been illegal, with one, the boat destruction off of South America, constituting murder of the targets.  The current war shows ever sign of being endless and pointless, and the men know it.

Some honorable commanders have simply resigned.  Enlisted men can't do that.  Serving in an illegal war on a ship that's a craphole, they're serving an administration in which many of them are not the right kind of people, as the administration sees it.  US resources are now really stretched on top of it.  All in all, what's going on board on the USS Abraham Lincoln isn't a good sign.

Toy boats

Part of what's not very honorable is the insane playing along which amounts to marking time until Trump is out of office. The Navy is doing that with the Trump Class of big missile cruisers which King Donny wants built.  Termed "battleships", because Trump knowns nothing about this topic and apparently thinks that battleships are nifty, rather than rendered obsolete decades ago, the CBO estimates that if built they'll cost the country $275B over 30 years.

They won't be built.

They are already costing the country money however.

Like the ballroom, this will keep dragging along until Trump is retired or falls face first in a Big Mac, at which time it'll be terminated.

Monuments to failure

On costs, it's now estimated that all of Trump's D.C. projects will cost nearly 1B.

The country doesn't have this kind of money and we know it.

Had Joe Biden proposed spending 1B on D.C. renovations, Republicans would be howling around the city crying "fiscal responsibility!" and people like Gray, Ranser, and Friess would be warning about the republic being on the verge of ending.  The Wyoming Freedom Caucus would be howling.

Not one Republican is going to say a word about this.

Part of the outrageous nature of the expense is what the administration is planning on.  Building is expensive and tearing down is expensive also.

The Democrats can be planned on to have angst about the expense of tearing things down as its expensive.  They already are.  Additionally, the Democrats remain dedicated to the law, whereas the GOP does not.  The GOP knows that as well and is no doubt planning that the process of tearing crap down will be tied up by worries about the expense and legalities of it.

Well, on this one, the next President should in fact take a page out of Trump's book.  Within an  hour after the inauguration the Corps of Engineers should be ordered to remove whatever has been constructed of the ballroom with in 24 hours, tear down what ever has been built of an arch within the same time frame, and de-guild the bronze statues, even if it means their destruction, with in six hours.  By the end of the 24 hours all the gold or gold appearing nicknacks in the White House ought to be removed to the bunker and the entire thing filled with cement. The reflecting pool should be drained and the Rhino Lining torn up.

Contracts with anyone who contributed to these atrocities should be cancelled and the entities barred from future government contracts.  

Radical reconstruction.

Replacement?

People are already wondering who will replace Leavitt as Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  Fortunately, Wyoming offers the perfect solution.

By Tony Webster - Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169386648

Chuck Gray.

Chuck loves Donald Trump more than Karline Leavitt ever did.  Chuck would never leave.  And he already as experience as a spoken media figure, having had a radio show on his daddy's radio station, and he is a really experienced liar.

Leavitt said some really outrageous stuff while she was spokesman, but they don't hold a candle to the sting of accusations that Chuck retouinely hurls out. Why he'd be calling people communists, Marxist, fascist, abiogenist,dogmatist,lutist, prologistableist, dramatist, in no time.

His only disadvantage would be that he's not a woman.  Most of the recent ones have been.  On the other hand, he's not married and he can't get pregnant (shoot, he's never even seen with women, or men, or mammals) so he won't be going anywhere.

And this gets him out of having to pretend that he's a Wyomingite nad having to buy all that Westerware.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 148th Edition. The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.

Trump vs. algae is the feud we deserve Congrats, America.

 

Trump vs. algae is the feud we deserve

Congrats, America.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 143rd Edition. The Chopper Edition.

And now it's a helipad

King Donald has spent a lot of his time this term of office remaking Washington D.C. itself.  He's already vandalized the Rose Garden, the East Wing, and the Reflecting Pool. Messing with buildings is something he is familiar with, and which he fancies himself good at, even though the evidence from D.C. is that he has the taste of a 19th Century bordello owner.

Now it's a helipad.  It'll be granite and on the White House grounds, and have the Presidential Seal on it.

The supposed reason is that the new Marine Corps 1 choppers are bigger, or more powerful, than their predecessors and therefore weren't working out well on the White House lawn.

The new helicopters are Sikorsky VH-92 Patriots. They are big.

Trump claims that Sikorsky will pay for the pads.  Lockheed Marine, which now owns Sikorsky, has more or less confirmed that.

I'll credit some of this story as credible.  These giant helicopters are really heavy, no doubt, and Washington D.C. is a swamp.  It may indeed have surpassed the dent in the lawn level.

Still, there's reason for concern.  Not one of Trump's major DC endeavors has worked out well. The East Wing desecration is way over the original price estimate and is likely to be torn down as soon as the illegitimate claimant to the office is out.  The Rhino Lining on the reflecting pool has been a disaster and has lead to a false criminal charge against an innocent former Olympian. Just on sheer experience, there should be concern that the price here will be off, the taxpayer will foot the bill (which maybe in this instance they should) and that it'll go badly.

Moreover, the helicopters maker footing the bill is disturbing, relationship wise.

Marine Corps 1 itself is one of those things that has turned the Presidency from being representative of the people into a type of king.  Eisenhower introduced it in 1957 as he wanted a quick way to get to his summer home in Pennsylvania.  There's no reason that the taxpayer should have been stuffed with that.  Now we've been stuck with a Presidential helicopter ever since.

Different countries, it might be noted, approach this differently.  Lots of countries do use government aircraft for chief executives, but some really restrain it.  Finland is one example.  It has aircraft for the chief executive, but if that person is traveling long distance, they do so commercially  A relatively recent Mexican president intentionally did that.

There's probably no way around this at this point, but frankly it is a bit much.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 142nd Edition, 25th Amendment Watch 21st Edition. The Vietnam Rag, Red Scare Editions.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Barack Obama, Communism, Conscription, Donald Trump, Red Scare of 1919, Red Scare of the 1950s, Socialism, The Madness of King Donald, Vietnam War, Vladimir Putin, Zeitgeist

Central Stoneroller (Campostoma anomalum)

Central Stoneroller (Campostoma anomalum).

They only eat algae and they're native to North America.  

The perfect solution.

I'm willing to accept a no bid contract to put them in the reflecting pool for a mere $15,000,000.

The Green Algae President: How He's Handling Four Messes He Created The mess at the Reflecting Pool as a metaphor for his many other messes

 

The Green Algae President: How He's Handling Four Messes He Created

The mess at the Reflecting Pool as a metaphor for his many other messes