The Mexican Federal Army fought Zapatistas at Tepoztlán, resulting in 500 rebel deaths.
Philadelphia took game two of the World Series, tying the series up.
A Filipina photographed on this day:
Last edition:
Showing posts with label Women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women. Show all posts
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Sunday, October 11, 1936. End of the Arab General Strike, Fascists attacks in London, War Concerns, Hermaphrodites.
The Arab Higher Committee announced an end to the 175-day-old Arab general strike in Palestine.
British fascists attacked Jewish shops and Jews in London's East End. 10,000 leftist demonstrated against fascism in Victoria Park.
The Rocky Mountain News warned of looming possibilities of war.
And FDR said the Republicans would ruin farmers.
Right then, right now.
It was the 1936 election season, of course, and the News was focusing on that.
It's interesting that FDR was polling very well with religious voters, which I suppose isn't really surprising. It's also interesting that Wyoming, which is the least religious state in the U.S., was already in the solid GOP camp.
The news took a look at the history of third parties.
And a story sort of foreshadowing a controversial topic of the current era.
The News was huge on Sundays, although it featured very few cartoons, oddly enough. It had a lot of feature sections. I've omitted the one on "Sex Appeal In Exploration".
Last edition:
Saturday, October 10, 1936. Things going on in Central Europe.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Cornell Rape and Other Matters.
Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.
St. Francis of Assisi
Chi Phi (ΧΦ) house at Cornell.
This will offer massive offense. It can't help but do so.1
It's also one of those posts which involves a lot of synchronicity.
The details.
I felt like bait.
Cornell rape victim.
Caption to lawsuit, entire suit visible here: Suit.
Recently the news of a gang rape of a young woman at Cornell University has been much in the news. I actually didn't pay a lot of attention to it at first as, oddly enough, I'd just read an article in the New York Times magazine supplement of a young woman who was gang raped at a university and the details, to the minor extent I was aware of them, were much the same. Turns out that it was actually a different event, and frankly the one I read about first was significantly more horrific in some fashions. After that, I looked on the net a bit, and as I'll explain below, I read of a young woman who had, almost successfully, but apparently not quite, achieved the removal of her self posted nude images from the net, and then following that, due my Twitter feed, saw a Catholic young woman commenting in horror to the comments by one of a contemporary comedian regarding sexual conduct.
Eh? Are these all related?
Yes, they are.
Let's start with Cornell.
The way the story is more or less reported is that the young woman. age 20, went to the fraternity room of a male friend she was interested in, after having become heavily intoxicated earlier in the evening. At the fraternity, she drank more and consumed at least ketamine and then was gang raped by members of the Chi Phi (ΧΦ). In a 50,000 foot sort of way, all that's correct. But when you did into the details the story is quite a bit different.
Rather, what happened, is the young woman in a sorority had an interest, both romantic and sexual, in a young man in a fraternity. Now, frankly, in any romantic interest there's always a sexual element, which will explore below, so the two are not necessarily completely separated. But what picks up from there grossly departs from what standards had been only fairly recently. She spoke to him on the phone and was invited out for the evening, starting off at a bar. They adjourned to the frat house, and when she got there, he included a friend and proposed a sexual threesom, i.e., that she consent to being screwed by him and by his buddy, and she agreed. The complaint alleges she was too drunk to say no, but frankly that seems incorrect. She also agreed to take ketamine, and consumed more alcohol. This didn't render her unconscious, but it did render her sexually pliable and various frat members came in to screw her and the word got around that you could have sex just by stopping in. At least at some point in this horrific series of events, one male member of the fraternity stopped in just out of concern, and found the first two men there and the woman under the covers. Satisfied, I guess, that things were okay, he left. Ultimately, several men penetrated her, including the first two.
The next day the one guy she liked and the girl started exchanging texts and she wanted, at first, to develop a romantic relationship with him still. She confessed awkwardice at what hat happened, but admitted at least some of the actions were consensual. And as gross as it was, she was an underaged drinker, the first gross act was. As time went on she convinced herself she'd been raped, and indeed she had been, and reported it, which at the same time was coincident with news of the event getting around campus and the girl feeling her reputation was ruined.2 It was not prosecuted in part as the Cornell police did not report the full details to the prosecutor. Apparently New York retains a very antiquated view of the law in this area, although it's not historically unique, that if a person starts consenting and passes out (which she didn't) they've consented.
Again, that view of this topic is antiquated, but it's not unique. The concept that if a girl starts down the road to sex, even if she didn't get very far down the road, which this girl clearly did, and passes out due to alcohol, has still consented, used to be a cultural norm and that tended to reflect itself in the law.
The cultural view is still there to a significant degree.
Which takes us there to the next horror.
In the second instance, a young woman went away to college. She was an adoptee raised by loving parents but it's pretty clear that when she got there she used it as an opportunity to "party". Indeed, she was drinking like crazy. She had some male friends she trusted, and went to a bar with them. While there, she drank very heavily and passed out. They raped her and used their phones to video themselves raping her. They then posted it on social media, which is how she learned she'd been raped.
This story is frankly more horrific. The young woman's error here was in getting drunk. She thought the men were her friends. When she was vulnerable, they flat out raped her. But they were so debased they shared the images of the rape on social media. The event was too much for her, and she dropped out of school.
Which takes us to social media.
While looking into this I ran across a story of another young woman. Looking at it, she appears to be a fairly nice if highly naive young woman who graduated with a fairly common but somewhat difficult four year degree. While in school, she participated in activities of a collegic nature, being a cheerleader.
She is also massively endowed, which even her "clean" photos make plain. She apparently picked up on that being a real attractant and started posting images of herself on social media, showing offer her clothed assets, which then linked to an "Only Fans" account where she could be seen nude. At some point the danger or stupidity of this must have occurred to someone (she graduated and I wonder if it was employment related) and she mounted a vigorous campaign to wipe out all the nude images. Apparently she was mostly successful, which is impressive, and which also suggest that she probably had to resort to legal help. In spite of all this, she still posts TikTok streams, clothed, which are clearly designed to show off her boobs and which frequently involve heavy drinking. She's trying to be an "influencer".
Well, it's sure not a good influence.
And finally to our last item.
A comedy clip, which appears to have started off as a "reel", showed up on my Twitter feeds as a comment by a horrified Catholic young woman. In it, the comedian is doing the engagement with the audience routine.
There are piles of such reels around by female comedians right now, and quite a few (but not all) like to engage in sex as a topic. I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with sort of the Lenny Bruce Effect, which is basically that to say something shocking when its not expected draws attention. It also expand the boundaries of what's considered shocking in a culture. Bruce was crude and vulgar and used the topic of sex in his routine. His personality trod close to his topics, he married a stripper. He died at age 40 of a drug overdose.
He also opened up the door to acts like Richard Pryor's. Today vulgarity is common.
Anyhow, the comedienne called out a couple and asked them if they were married, which they were, and how old she was when they met. 16. She then asked how many men she had engaged in sex with, something that in an earlier era would have resulted in immediate rebuke. That's become a big female edgy topic recently, with women boasting of their "body counts", as if it's all that hard for any woman who wants to have sex, to have it (more on that in a moment). She'd only had sex with her husband, which was then lampooned.
That's worthy of praise, not lampooning, and that was the American, and the European, norm up until the Sexual Revolution. Multiple sex partners were not admired in anyone, and for women that resulted in their being regarded as a "slut", which we'll discuss in more depth below.
Okay, where do we go with all of this? There is a lot to consider, and a lot of it isn't being considered.
Let's take the low hanging fruit first.
Chi Phi (ΧΦ) badge.
Fraternities, and sororities, need to be abolished.
A student movement at Cornell realized this before this assault. It wasn't the first assault alleged to have occurred in this frat house, and they tried to ban fraternities, unsuccessfully.
There is really no reason for fraternities any longer. They reflect the nature of education that existed before World War Two, and really well before World War Two. In the US, at least, they have their start in the late 18th Century.
While there are exceptions, for the most part university dormitories, "the dorms", did not become common in university settings until after World War Two at which point there was a massive expansion in the student population due to the GI Bill. The first purpose built drom at the University of Wyoming, which is of course a land grant institution, was considerably older than that, however, being Merica Hall, which opened as a women's dorm in 1908. It was originally called "Women's Hall." There was early housing for male students at UW before that, but in what is now called "Old Main", which also held all of the classrooms. It was built in 1886. This shows, perhaps, some of the awkward nature of the original housing arrangements. Combined classrooms and living quarters in buildings was a common early solution to student's residential needs. Hoyt Hall, which was a drom and a education building, was started in 1915. Knight Hall and the the Student Union were built as a part of a late 1940s Depression era construction project. Wyoming Hall was completed in 1951.
The first fraternity at UW, Sigma Beta Phi, opened in 1903. The oldest sorority in 1905.
That might seem to cut against my argument here, but it really does not. Upper education was mostly for the well to do. Land grant universities were not. There were some early school housing buildings in various locations, but they tended to be in buildings that were otherwise used for classes. Early dormitories at coeducational institutions tended to be built for women first. There were no such things as "coed" dorms.
Casper College, in Casper Wyoming, opened as Casper Junior College on September 17, 1945, a date we failed to note on this site. It was originally in the upper floor of hte high school, but moved onto its own campus in 1955. It did not have a dormitory until 1965.
So, then, what did a student do if there wasn't a dormitory, or wasn't room in one?
A person might think this is an easy question to answer, "rent an apartment", but it's not as easy as it sounds. As we've already discussed, lodging was more complicated for single people before refrigerators and modern stoves came into existence. Sure, you could rent an apartment, but it wasn't until the mid 20th Century that it was really relatively easy to live on your own in one. Students tend not to have a lot of money, and therefore its not like eating out every day was an option for a lot of them. "Starving student" had a meaning then that it doesn't now.
An option therefore was living in a boarding or "rooming" house, which a lot of single people did in general. We've already discussed that. Privately owned, they provided room and board but often under fairly strict supervision. A good example of this is given in the movie Brooklyn, which depicts a boarding house in the 1950s for young single women.
Student apartments did exist in some areas where the student population was fairly high. For large private schools, like Harvard, these tended to be multiple room, say with bedrooms for about four students, and a small room for a servant. That person took care of the cooking and cleaning for the students. Clearly this is long gone.
Cornell, we'll note, is a private university.
And then there were fraternities and ultimately sororities.
Housing and food was the main advantage of fraternities. A person needed a place to live, and like student apartments, fraternities had and still have a person who cooks and cleans. Indeed, I recall some students claiming they were joining fraternities just as the food was better than at the dorms.
Early on, with upper education being very exclusive, fraternities tended to function as literary societies. In the 19th Century, however, they were part of the large Protestant fraternal organization movement, and they began to incorporate secret rituals, some of them which were outright bizarre. I don't know about Chi Phi, but it does have an initiation ritual, which interestingly enough emphasizes integrity and honesty. This is interesting in that at the same time clubs that focused on dinner with dinging halls also started to exist, giving another food option to students, but also functioning sort of like fraternal organizations do today. Having said that, dining clubs never became enormously common in the US.
The GI Bill flooded universities after World War Two and they responded by creating dorms. Fraternities and Sororities also expanded, but by the 1960s their real purpose had passed. There was no longer a real need to join one as there was no real living advantage to doing so. Given that, their main purpose became social.
Social clubs with significant numbers of people who range from 18 to 22 years of age are a bad idea in general, unless they have massive supervision. A lot of returning World War Two veterans were, of course, over that age, and the real impact of things didn't begin to settle in until the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 50s and 60s the US was hit with the combined impact of a massive demographic influx, the Baby Boomers, a huge boost in the wealth of the country, and an assault on morals and image of women in the form of the views espoused by Playboy magazine. The impact was society wide but it had a particular impact on college and university campuses. Nowhere was that more felt than in fraternities.
The classic depiction of this is, of course, National Lampoon's Animal House. That's an exaggeration, like most comedy, but National Lampoon, an expression of Harvard Lampoon, was depicting what it knew, including really vulgar and immoral treatment of women. A central depiction in the plot of the film is a fraternity member wheeling a drunk underaged girl home in a shopping cart, after she passes out while they're about to have sex, from a "toga party" . Raping her was a bridge too far for the Lampoon, but it's depicted in such a fashion that it's implied that the chivalrous character, if you will, could have legitimately done that if he wanted to.
When I was at UW in the early 1980s, fraternities actually had "toga parties", although my guess is that they were inspired in that by the film. One fraternity that was familiar with, as a friend was in it, annually had the "Baby Ball" in which the members and invited sorority girls dressed in sheets, like babies, and slid down the stairs, which were supposed to be fallopian tubes. They also drank really heavily at this event.
By the time I was in law school, which would be the late 80s, fraternities were on the decline. That probably reflected a generational change, and a technological one. You could just as easily live on your own, and if you didn't want to, you could get a really nice dorm room. They've been declining ever since.
But, as we can see, they are still around.
They ought to be extinguished, as the Cornell student movement tried to do.
Let's start off with a statement that states the obvious, but apparently it isn't.
College students in the 18th Century are not the same as college students in the 21st.
This isn't to suggest that they were perfectly behaved. The 19th Century US was awash in alcohol all the time and there were some huge alcohol fueled student riots in the 19th Century, including one at West Point (the Eggnog Riot). And all sorts of weird harassment of underclassmen was common. In some ways, the abuse of younger students which remains common in some fraternities, occured on a wide scale. That wide scale abuse of younger students has pretty much stopped in the general student body (not in all fraternities, however), but that came with a broader student body.
What was not as common was the outright abuse of women in this fashion, save for one odd but instructive instance. Prior to 1865, some university students had enslaved women as servants, and they were subject to sexual abuse, not surprisingly.3
And up until the 1970s, seemingly, society appreciated that young men without supervision and young women without the same would get into all sorts of trouble. Kipling noted that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints", a line he wrote about the peacetime British Army, but which applies equally to any group of warehoused young men. Along the lines of our topic, sexual abuse of female service members has become widespread and nearly incapable of being eradicated. Given the atmosphere of fraternities, which has been libertine at least in the popular imagination since the 70s, rapes are going to be a feature of them.
Whatever function fraternities, and sororities, served, is pretty much over. Any benefit they provided, can be provided in other ways. There are going to be campus rapes no matter what, but keeping fraternities around is encouraging them.4
Which takes us to the next thing.
Failing young men and women. The battlefield casualties of the sexual revolution.
When this topic broke the week before last, it ended up on the weekend news programs, not too surprisingly. One of the people who commented on it was Republican 2028 Presidential hopeful, Chris Christie, in his role as a This Week commentator. Christe noted, albeit only briefly, that young men needed to be better educated that such conduct as was exhibited here is appalling.
That's a given, but how did we even get here, and what do we need to do?
And, frankly, young women need to be better educated in these areas.
And so do adults.
One thing that society in general needs to be better educated on is that university isn't for partying. As noted above, this sort of view has been around forever, I think you can even find Medieval examples, but starting in the 70s it became pretty bad in some quarters. In my view, this was part of the post war largess of the Baby Boom era.
Students going to university in the 60s and 70s that if they got through university they were getting a white collar job. That frankly, in many disciplines, built in a real slack attitude. Set from from home with parents that held real values but who had been damaged by the horror of the Second World War and the Great Depression, college was a chance to live it up, often on somebody else's money. Much of this has passed as the economy has changed from what it formerly was to one in which its much more difficult to get by in, but some of that attitude still exists, good examples of which, or perhaps more accurately bad ones, above. All of the examples except for the last one feature examples of this sort of behavior, and the "influences" example may actually be the worst.
This needs to end.
How to end it is another matter, although as noted the economy is ending some of it. Something that impacted it a bit when I was in university was raising the drinking age from 19 to 21, but that's already been done. In the Cornell example the problem of admitting teenagers to bars legally is highlighted That should end. If it were me, I'd just make counties that feature educational institutions dry. That's a severe approach, of course, but I'd take it. Studies show, fwiw, that almost all rapes of this type and of the service member type are accompanied by overconsumption of alcohol.
Beyond that, however, putting the bullet in the Sexual Revolution needs to happen, and frankly it's starting to. This helps explain the Trad Movement, in part, in the Catholic and Lutheran laity. When I go to Mass on Sunday and find a young married woman, often not much over 20 years old, in a matilla with her husband and a baby, I'm looking at the foot soldiers of the counter revolution. Same thing when I go to work and see the young men and women of Luther Classical College walking to school.
This We'll Defend.5
This emphasizes that the reaction ot the the Sexual Revolution has to be all inclusive and organic. You can't have a "Me Too" movement that doesn't recognize that. Adopting and teaching a standard, has to adopt it and that's adopting the entire smash. As Yeoman's laws of human behavior note:
It's interesting how often people try to evade this principal. All people fail in it, as we're fallen and we don't grasp the correctness of various things, but there are those who make a dedicated effort to avoid it. In a minor way I'm reminded of a couple I know that lived without the benefit of marriage for years, even having a child, who have gone hardcore into the MAGA world, and who are sending their child to Hillsdale school. They can't quite make it sync as while their instincts are good, they really have to work around to the origin of things to make what they're doing, make sense.
Indeed, while this goes off topic, this particularly American trait is one of hte fundamental flaws of MAGA. Many of the MAGA faithful, or former faithful, are in it as they have a sense that American society has gone off the rails. But what they're doing is leaning out of the wreckage of the train car they are in looking back at other toppled cars not realizing that theirs tipped over too. I.e., they're holding the Car Transgender and Car Homosexual in contempt while wanting to get back to the party in the Car Cheating On Spouse or the Car Divorce which tipped the train over in the first place.
Drilling down on this, what this means is that American society, if it doesn't want college age boys raping college girls, needs to dump the pornographic lifestyle its living in. Put a bit more bluntly, you can't have a naked Sydney Sweeney advertising a sports website and not expect rape to result.
Also drilling down, the old standard here, which was never perfectly applied, needs to be reapplied. Young men living in groups didn't generally rape young women as it had been emphasized that it was indescribably wrong. Moreover, they were taught, and again things happened, that sex was for marriage, not just their own selfish entertainment.6 They were taught was decency was. Decent people don't post "free pussy in alum pu".
A lot of work needs to be done in this area, but it can start right now by holding those men in this in contempt. Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar. Yes, they're innocent until proven guilty, but unless proven to be disconnected with these events, and to have acted to prevent them. Ingalls and Newell not only deserve contempt, they deserve to be branded as perverts, which is what they are.7
And assuming, which we are taught not to do, that this meets the New York definition of rape at some point, they shoudl be convicted and sentenced.
But what about Jane Doe? Indeed, what about all the Jane Does mentioned in this thread?
One of the really disturbing aspects of this is that we now have a society where a 20 year old girl at a prestigious university not only agrees to sex on a sort of first date, she agreed to group sex. That's perverse. Granted, there are people who are perverse, but now we have been taught not to say such things.
A girl who would have engaged in this conduct when I was young would flat out have been branded a "slut". That's not to be done now, and is termed "slut shaming", and perhaps the collapse in moral standards make the shaming obsolete. And it's worth noting that Jane Doe's conviction that everything was morally tainted here grew as the news of what she'd done was spread around. She was specifically taking heat from two sorority sisters over her role in the whole matter. That doesn't mean she wasn't raped. So much was going on in terms of drugs and alcohol in this story that if she wasn't impaired at the onset, at some point she most likely was, and she took the position right from the onset that most of it wasn't consensual. But what we have here is a really gross sex act with two young men she did consent to becoming a sort of orgy in a way, which she didn't consent to. This isn't the same at all as the Red Army showing up to a village in eastern Germany in 1945.
We need to avoid making this worse that it already is, but frankly we need to get back to a point at which that sort of conduct is shameful. Which brings me to the last two young women mentioned in this post. The influencer and couple mocked by the comedienne.
Regarding the influencer, somebody in her orbit, and may she herself, woke up to the fact that posting naked photographs of yourself was shameful, and they were yanked after quite an effort. Good for whomever woke up that fact.
But bad that her "influencing" is depicing the same sort of conduct that got the second young woman in this story in trouble. Her failure, if we are to deem it that, was not being sexually immoral, but in allowing herself to get into a drunken stupor in the presence of young men.
Which leads me to a comment that was made on the Facebook feed for the author of the article mentioned above. A commenter noted as the asnwer to the article entitled; Caitlin Flanagan: What Was Jane Doe Looking For?:
So basically… it’s dangerous to be around men?
I understand the argument about risk, judgment, alcohol, and putting yourself in vulnerable situations. Those are conversations worth having.
But there’s something deeply unsettling about telling young women: You know what men are like. You know these places are dangerous. Why did you go?
Women go to fraternity parties because they want to socialize. They want to flirt. They want to meet men. They may even want to have consensual sex.
None of those things should require accepting sexual assault as a foreseeable consequence of being around men.
At some point, “women need to make better choices” becomes an extraordinarily damning statement about men.
So the feminist position is “not all men,” but the anti-feminist position is apparently, “Ladies, you knew there would be men there”?
Well, she's correct in everything she said, the commenter, but she's wrong. Large groups of young men have fallen off the rails in this way since we have been a species. So, yes, "it's dangerous to be around men".
It is.
Not all men all the time, but this gets back to standards of the past. It's not that dangerous to be around a bunch of young men. . . who are near older men. . .and better yet if some of them are relatives. I've seen young men begin to act improperly towards young women where older men were present and intervened, sometimes forcibly.8 In other words, being at the Sheepherders' Fair is one thing, being at Moonies, apparently, quite another.
And, influencer, having a wardrobe made entirely of overly tight halter tops is dangerous. That does, in the real world, one thing. It advertises your boobs, and advertises that your boobs are available for the taking, along with things located elsewhere on your female body.
We'll loop back around here to the Flanagan article, which is drawing flak. Flanagan condemns franternitis solidly in the article. She notes that fraternities were dangerous when she was in college, and that a boyfriend she was breaking up with warned her never to go upstairs in one, which she never did.
Then she asked this question:
That’s the saddest thing about these old rituals. What attracts women to those parties—late at night, like Jane Doe—to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances?
She answers:
What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.
Footnotes:
1. On offering offense, Caitlin Flanagan, a journalist, has already written two articles on this and the second one, which will be noted above, has really drawn criticism.
2. We've left out a lot of details in our first summation of this, but her concern for her reputation isn't surprising. She consented to getting screwed by one man while performing oral sex on another, and then was screwed by multiple other men. One of the two original men actually texted her not to worry as things like this were becoming more a societal norm, which is complete bullshit.
3. Having said that, the practice of "wenching" was common amongst certain men, which involved picking up young women in bars of a certain class, that being the desperate underclass. This pretty clearly crosses over towards the topic of prostitution pretty quickly. Having said that, this definitely occurred.
4. On another note, not one of the very few men I knew who were in fraternities at the University of Wyoming graduated with a degree. This caused me to be surprised when I learned that a long time partner of mine had been a member of the same fraternity that two individuals I knew, who did not graduate, hate been.
I should note that one of those two fellows, while he did not graduate, didn't live in the frat house the entire four years either, and later went on to become a millionaire.
5. Motto of the U.S. Army, first adopted in 1778.
6. The topic of birth control has not come up here.
7. Ingalls actually has claimed that Jane Does sodomized him, and he's a sexual assault survivor. Oh please. At any rate, their joint actions on the girl were perverted, but frankly, her acceptance of being engaged in sex with both at the same time is also perverted.
Kretzschmar maintains that he was not part of the rape at all, and what he did was to go into the room and check on things. This seems to be more or less correct. His sin, here, is one of omission. He knew that something was going on and did nothing.
8. Contrary to what people might expect, middle aged men are often way stronger and more adopt in a fight than young men are.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
King Donald's War, Part 13. A Second Rate Military lead by a Third Rate Clown College with a Secretary of War who should be impeached.
As we noted yesterday, Thomas Massie has introduced articles of impeachment upon Pete Hegseth.
They actually stand a chance of passing.
They provide, in relevant part:
Massie needs a simple majority in the House to pass the resolution. It would require 2/3ds in the Senate to impeach and remove Hegseth.
Massie is nothing if not independent. I don't agree with him on everything, but he's been one of the few Republicans in Congress, as opposed to the pack of willing sycophantic cowards that claim to be Republicans. When the history of this era is written, he'll be a hero, whereas people like Mike Johnson will be pathetic weirdos, and people like John Barrasso spineless wimps.
Everything in this bill is correct.
One thing that isn't is incompetence, which this administration has shown itself to be on military matters. The US Military has been revealed to be, frankly, pathetically bad, or at least its Navy has has been. We're losing the war against a power that has outfought us, and out thought us.
Hegseth promised a renewal, of sorts, in the U.S. Military. Frankly, it needs one, and has for a long time.
Hegseth seems to have imagined a military that was pre 1948 in some ways. All white, and mostly men. The date we really need to look back to is this one:
Today In Wyoming's History: September 16, 1940. Conscription starts and the National Guard mobilized.
September 16, 1940 is the day the US went from a peacetime establishment and peacetime military to a wartime establishment and a wartime military. We've been there ever since. To at least some degree, we've kept a huge military with a huge military establishment, massive arms requirement, and a very large professional military class.
That needs to end.
What Hegseth got right, sort of, is that the Military began to be used for odd social experiments and it never stopped. People look back to the 1948 integration of the military as being when that started, but that really misses the point. Segregation of the Army (not the Navy) started during the Civil War when the Army took in large number of black troops for the first time. With the inherent racism of the country, it simply would not have been possible to integrate black soldiers into regular units. They would have been killed. Establishing black units in and of themselves was a major accomplishment, and one only the war could have brought about.
Some efforts to integrate the military more fully occured in the 19th Century, but inherent racism in American society really just didn't make it possible until World War Two when it started to occur on a smaller and localized scale. American reaction to German racism reflected back in the face of Americans and made integration of the military not only fully possible, but inevitable, after the war.
Minorities have always been a huge success story in the military, and that's been the case all along. It simply provided opportunities to them that didn't exist elsewhere. That lesson was learned but started to be misapplied in the 1970s when the Carter Administration saw the military as a way to advance the cause of women in society. That evolved into allowing women into combat MOS's which was a huge mistake. Women and men are different. And then the Obama Administration allowed "transgendered" individuals into the military starting in 2016, which was turning a blind eye to a medically enhanced mental illness.
Women in combat units did create an internal reaction in military units that went unnoticed to some degree. Male combat troops didn't and don't like it, and react accordingly whereas the influence of young women had a feminizing and softening, even cutsey, impact on the military. Look up "Battle Boo" on Youtube and you'll see what I mean.
Having troops set against their political leaders is a bad thing. But that has occured. This created the perfect situation for a sort of Curragh Mutiny, and it's happened.
The thing here is that this all needed correction, but competent correction, which would have required a an actually conservative administration to bring about. We don't have one of those. In stead we have a demented megalomaniac octogenarian who is surrounded by sycophants, weirdos, and dimwits. Pete Hegseth is a good example. A Evangelical Protestant Zealot with tattoos recalling the Crusades, which weren't done by Evangelical Protestants, a record of hard drinking and philandering, he presents himself like an insecure frat boy trying to hang out with college football players. He also, as noted, not only claims to want to restore the "warrior" ethos to the military, he seems to have something against minorities and a bias against women that extend to their just being women.
Like much of the overgrown bloated U.S. Military, he doesn't seem to have grasped that its not 1941 any longer either. The war in Ukraine has shown that the age of drones is here. Iran and the Houthis have shown an ability to launch missile strikes that would have made Peenemunde pound. Believing that the US could take on Iran with Naval air alone, something GMT Games had already shown you could not, US forces were left heavily exposed in Middle Eastern bases which were wiped out by Iran nearly immediately. Logistical tails were stepped on and the USS Abraham Lincoln became a symbol for the entire country, a rusting psychologically stressed hulk.
There doesn't seem to have been a lot of clear thinking going on.
Speaking of not thinking, and related to this war:
What the crap?
President Trump’s administration is planning to sell to Israel a munitions package worth $2.8 including 2,000-pound bombs which will be funded by a Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grant.
That's right. The heavily indebted United States will be spending money it doesn't have for Israel's military.
One thing that this war has caused and is causing is a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel. It's long overdue.
The common line is that "Israel is our only ally in the Middle East". Israel isn't a formal US ally at all. Indeed, in terms of formal allies, the only Middle Eastern one we have is Turkey, not Israel.
The US has a close relationship to Israel for historic and demographic reasons. The US was horrified to a greater extent than any other nation to what happened to Jews during World War Two and reacted by giving its strong support to the establishment of Israel, ignoring the fact that importing thousands of immigrants into a land already occupied by somebody else would result in problems.
Put another way, if Europe demanded that thousands of Mexican immigrants be allowed into Texas to create a new country, we'd freak out.
Added to that, the US has a substantial Jewish minority, although it has not been and has never been huge. It's about 2.4% of the population today. Somewhat ignored in this is that the US also has notable population of Middle Eastern immigrants, most of whom up until a couple of decades ago were Lebanese and Syrian Christians and Armenians. Perhaps because they were all members of Apostolic Christian faiths, that was just easy to ignore in some ways. It's France, for instance, that has traditionally defended the rights of the Lebanese. The US once concerned itself with the plight of Armenians, but that's been a long time ago. To some extent, perhaps because they were a more distinct minority, Jewish populations in the US have tended to be relatively better organized.
Anyhow, almost from day 1 Americans really bought off on the concept of the establishment of Israel being a really noble cause. In my household growing up I remember my mother feeling that way, although my father had a much more nuanced opinion. The plight of Arabs in the same region was generally ignored by Americans up until relatively recently, and only because populations of Palestinian and other Arabs have immigrated into the US. They're still a much smaller percentage of the population than Jewish Americans are.
Added to that, Islam has tended to really freak Americans out, and for good reason.
Israel has very divided politics and is going through something akin to what the US is, with the current Israeli government being, in my view, extreme. Nobody has ever stated it, but it seems relatively clear that there are those in Israel who would outright force Palestinians out of what had been Mandatory Palestine. There are Americans who have equally extreme views about modern Israel and its place in the world from a religious perspective.
Whatever brought the current Israeli government to power, it's also clear that there are huge numbers of Israelis who are horrified by recent events and would take Israel in another direction.
At this point, I'm with those who, like my father so many decades ago, take a much more nuanced view on Israel. Like Ukrainian born Argentinian-Israeli author Jacobo Timerman, I view Israel as a Middle Eastern state that has to learn to live in that neighborhood. It also, at this point, has to learn to get by on its own. It can build its own weapons and pay for them itself.
For that matter, while its a topic for another thread, the US wasn't a serious supplier of arms around the world until World War Two. It needs to stop being one now. Selling arms to some countries is, okay, in my view, but not to as many as we do, and for cash, not best wishes.
I'll note that it is interesting that a lot of our former arms client states have stepped out on its own in recent years. South Korea, for example, manufactures its own armored vehicles, artillery and small arms. Israel does produce some weapons of its own, but not all that many. I'm not for selling them arms anymore.
When people are killed by American arms, no matter who uses them, we're implicated.
Back to the illegal war in the Middle East that Israel got us into.
A resolution requiring the US to get out of that war passed the House yesterday.
H. CON. RES. 93
Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVESApril 28, 2026Mr. Moulton (for himself, Mr. Crow, Mr. Ryan, Ms. Houlahan, Mr. Panetta, Mr. Auchincloss, Ms. Goodlander, Mr. Vindman, and Mr. Scott of Virginia) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs
CONCURRENT RESOLUTIONDirecting the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran.
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(c)), Congress directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran, other than those elements of the Armed Forces that may be necessary to defend the United States or an ally or partner of the United States from imminent attack provided that the President complies fully with the requirements of section 5(b) the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(b)) with respect to any such use of the Armed Forces, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or a specific congressional authorization for use of military force against Iran.
It's not going to go anywhere, but it's not irrelevant. At least some are speaking up and standing out.
And some who claim to adhere to certain values should take note. In the Particular Judgement Mike Johnson is going to have to explain supporting all this killing and standing with Israel isn't going to excuse it. But then Johnson will have a lot to answer for.
cont:
The Houthis shot down a Saudi F-15 with a domestically produced missile today.
cont:
And Mike Johnson sent the House home early to avoid the impeachment vote.
That'd suggest either there were enough votes to pass it, or there were Republican Congressmen afraid to go on record.
They won't be back until November 9. They'd only been working for seven days since they came back from their last recess.
September 17, 2026
So it turns out the administration sent representatives to meet with the Houthis.
The same man who betrayed the Afghanis and surrendered their country to the Taliban is now negotiating with the Houthis while refusing support to Saudi Arabia.
Figures.
cont:
Apparently a deal was reached:
Yemen’s Houthis have agreed to allow US shipping unfettered Red Sea access if Washington refrains from direct military involvement in the Saudi-led war. That’s according to US reports which say the two sides struck the deal amid a Houthi offensive along Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
Al Jazeera.
So King Donny stabbed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the back, not that he is a nice guy.
Not that the Houthis are either.
The Houthis (Ansar Allah) are a Zaydi revivalist and Shia Islamist organization allied with Iran, which supports them. They've been a player in the Israel/Hezbollah War, as was Iran, and are attempting to gain control of all of Yemen.
Their emblem:
Some deluded sots who supported the Trump participation in the ongoing war against Iran maintained early on that it was sort of a Protestant crusade. The US had a Divine mission, some argued who were in the military, or the Department of Defense, to take on Shi'a Islam.
Well, apparently not so much.
For the second time, Trump has surrendered to an Islamist organization and betrayed somebody we supported.
Anyone relying on Trump for support is a fool.
And with this stab in the back, we will conclude this edition.
Last edition:
King Donald's War, Part 12. The "Economic D-Day" edition. CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 152nd Edition, the irony edition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)