I won't claim to have a lot of familiarity with Hillsdale, but what I do know, bothers me. From my very little exposure to it, it seems to focus in part on a sort of rah rah Americanism, in so far as culture and history are concerned (and of course the two are highly related.
That sort of view of American history was once very common in general. I'm old enough to have seen the very end of it when I was in grade school, and I'm also young enough to see it pass away. To give a really bad example, as it doesn't involve school text or teaching at all, if you grew up in the 1970s, you could simultaneously see She Wore A Yellow Ribbon run as a not that old rerun on television, and find Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee in the bookstore.
Students had received a pretty narrowly focused history education prior to the 1970s The United States was always right. There was that slavery thing but that was fixed. The West had been won, not conquered, and even if it had been conquered, it was to the benefit of the conquered people.
The Vietnam War really changed all that in a way that it had not been since the 1840s when the country had gone through the Mexican War. Conservatives never got over that.
The oddity to it is that people in this cultural camp would rather be taught lies than the truth, which never serves anything, and they want children taught lies if it means they'll come out of school believing in an unvarnished version of American Exceptionalism. The fact of the matter is, as this article points out, it won't. In the age of the Internet, while many evils have been spread, you really can't just keep a lid on the past. Pete Hegseth can restore Medals of Honor conveyed for action at Wounded Knee but you can't keep the facts, on both sides, from being known about what happened there.
People who are following Hillsdale on stuff like this think you can. In reality, however, what happens is the miseducated student eventually hits university or just real life. It only takes one crack in the dam to cause a flood, and soon they're off and questioning everything.
This is already happening in various spheres, I might note. One of the most interesting example is in Christianity. The entire Protestant Reformation was based on ignorance and its pretty provable. Of all the Reformation era reformers, only Luther had some serious points, and he didn't intend to cause a separation from the Church at all but, rather, once he started rebelling, he couldn't stop. At any rate, what this leaves Protestants with is that every single Protestant faith is founded on some sort of error, and often back with lies. For those with enough savvy or interest, it's easy enough now to find that out. What was the early Church like, they pose. Well, the Didache isn't too hard to find, nor are the works of the Apostolic Fathers. Lots of very serious Protestants have done this, often trying to support their view that their brand of Protestantism reflects the early Church, only to find that it doesn't, and then convert to Apostolic Christianity.
The same is true of history. The American Revolution was founded upon some amazing principals, but at the same time amongst the reason the colonists cited for rebelling was that the Crown was trying to halt westward expansion in recognition that the natives were also his subjects and that they were upset as the Crown hadn't forced the Church of England upon Quebec. The Constitution is amazing but there was a giant acknowledged hypocritical compromise allowing Southern states partial credit for slaves for representation purposes. The Civil War wasn't a glorious highly decorative contest between two equally valid points of views, but a rebellion against decency and humanity by Southern oligarchs. We didn't enter World War Two to save humanity, but entered it only because were were attacked in spite of a real effort by FDR to get us into the war earlier, and once in it, we didn't defeat the Germans or Japanese single handedly by any means. The British had more troops in the field in Europe until late 1944 and the Soviets always had many more in the field. The Japanese regarded the war in China as the main event up until some point in 43 or 44.
It's just the attempt to whitewash American history, which by and large is admirable, that leads to something like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Indeed, that book came out while I was still in high school and within the last two years I was continually in a situation where a highly educated person who just discovered it was repeatedly engaging me with "did you know"?
Locally there's been a movement in the Trump era to allow for "charter schools" here which are nothing other than private schools that come as close to being Protestant schools as conceivably possible. I'm familiar with one and it proclaims that teaches an "American Classical Education" and that it is "a Hillsdale College Member School, a distinction that offers our school access to curriculum and training from the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office.". I've known at least two families that chose it as their own world view was in the MAGA camp. The irony here is, as it is so often, that neither of the two families who are so concerned about their children receiving an "American Classical Education" are living an "American Classical Life".
They probably just don't know that.
Which gets back to, well, this:
In order to get back to what you think needs to be restored, you need to know what actually was.
I don't know about the rest of it, but history wise, the current variant of an "American Classical Education" ain't going to get you there.
*********************
I was going to post on it individually, but the July 4, or thereabouts, editions of Catholic Answers had some fascinating discussions on Catholics and the United States.
In spite of what poorly catechized American Catholics may think, there's always been tension between being a Catholic and an American, and early on the country was outright hostile to Catholics. As Catholics always have a worldview that's international in scope, as they view the Church as the Bride of Christ and serving all humanity, Catholics never have the really narrow world view that quite a few very far right wing Evangelical Protestants do. The episodes are worth checking out, but the second of the two is really fascinating on how Catholicism can and is impacting the United States and American culture long term.
************************
I was also going to post on the recent excommunication of the SSPX and relate it to how far right conservatism has crawled out very far on a branch that's going to snap off. I ended up shelving that, even though I'd started a pretty developed post on it. I'll just complete my thoughts on it here.
Pope Leo XIV recently took an action which his immediate predecessors wouldn't. He excommunicated the SSPX, the Society of Saint Pius X . As this is sort of a confusing topic, we will refer you to this, which explains it.
This is a really serious action. The Vatican didn't just address a few figures in the SSPX, but the whole SSPX. If you are going to an SSPX Mass, you are excommunicated.
Frankly,. while the Pope doesn't consult me on such matters, he did what needed to be done here. And there may be some who should take heed on on this, such as German bishops. Pope Leo isn't messing around. The SSPX is in schism which, in turn, introduces a certain element of irony.
The SSPX is not as large of group as the controversy might cause a person to suppose. Part of the reason this briefly received so much attention is that the SSPX stream sort of flows into the lake of traditional Catholicism, and that's a much larger group.
The actual SSPX has approximately 1,500 formal, professed members globally, including about 750 priests. The SSPX claims around 600,000 worshippers worldwide, with an estimated 25,000 adherents in the United States, but that's a rough number as not everyone who enters the doors of an SSPX church actually quite appreciates what it is, and some are Trads flirting with the society. The SSPX dates back to November 1, 1970 when French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had served the Catholic Church as Apostolic Delegate for French-speaking Africa, Archbishop of Dakar, and Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, a missionary order of priests, formed it in contravention to the Vatican. In 1988 the organization went into schism the first time when it ordained Bishops without the authority of the Vatican. The ordinations, as they were done by Bishops with valid holy orders, were illicit, but valid ordinations. They were slowly brought back into the Church and the ordinations lifted, but now they've done it a second time.
Okay, so what's behind this all?
Archbishop Lefebvre, who was at Vatican II and seemingly approved of it at the time, was in the group of traditionalist Catholics that came to take exception to it, most specifically, in the case of the SSPX, ecumenicalism and the new form of the Mass. Ecumenicalism is more of a European thing than an American one, so that one might baffle Americans a bit. It was a big deal here for awhile, but as the Baptist and Baptist like churches are such a big deal here, as opposed to everywhere else, it's more or less gone away. At the same time, in the US, the churches that were closest to Catholicism, the Anglican churches and the Lutheran churches, have been suffering a substantial decline and, as their churches "liberalized" and they began to self educate, they've started to cross over to Catholicism on their own.
For that matter, the Catholic Church globally has become more conservative in recent decades. The Latin Mass, however, is another matter. After Vatican II, and actually separate from it, the new form of the Mass came in and it came in with the "vernacular".
The Latin Mass, in its high version particularly, is beautiful, but frankly the new ordinary form of the Mass is as well, and, well, it has real advantages, the ability to understand it in your own language being a big one. Beyond that, however, the Church enormously expanded the set of readings with the new Ordinary Form from the much more limited set in the Latin Mass. There are real historical reason for both the long lasting use of Latin, which had started off as the vernacular for the Roman Rite, and the limited number of readings, but neither of them held any longer by the mid 20th Century.
The real dispute, however, is over Vatican II's reforms or more particularly, "Dignitatis Humanae," which recognizes a civil right to religious freedom, and "Nostra Aetate," which encourages dialogue with non-Christian religions while recognizing elements of truth and holiness within them. The SSPX feels that these went too far because (to reduce the argument unfairly) "there's no salvation outside the church". The SSPX maintains that these documents are not magisterial whereas the Church maintains they are.
The ultimate irony here is that there's no question that all observant Catholics acknowledge a duty of obedience and that the Pope is the head of the Church. As ultra traditionalist, the SSPX acknowledges this as well. Given that, it's almost impossible to rationalize their taking the SSPX into schism, which is a grave sin.
There's probably a forlorn hope in the part of members of the SSPX that the Church will change its mind on the excommunication and, for that matter, on "Dignitatis Humanae," and "Nostra Aetate". It's not going to.
While the SSPX may refuse to accept that, the entire event brings into focus why Pope Francis clamped down on the Latin Mass. The Mass can still be said, and for that matter the Ordinary Form of the Mass can still be said in Latin, but to say the Traditional Latin Mass requires permission and that's largely been withdrawn.
This was baffling to American Catholics when it happened, but the fact of the matter is that Traditionalist Catholics center around TLM, even if that's not what makes them traditionalist. It's probably difficult to explain to outsiders, but it's one form of observance that's very obviously traditional. Added to that, the persistent use of forms from the TLM in the Ordinary Form (kneeling when others are standing, not taking communion form Extraordinary Ministers, the wearing of manteas, all are visible form. You could be, however, a traditionalist, and I'm sympathetic with traditionalist, without doing any of those things. The line, I suppose, is when a type of devotion crosses into intolerance of a certain sort, or a rejection of something that's magisterial.
I'd thought that Pope Leo might open the TLM back up, but now that this has occurred, I doubt it. I think he's acting forcefully in keeping the sheep inside the gate for their own good.
Before "liberal" Catholics start rejoicing, however, I suspect certain "liberal" groups within the Church are next.
A hint that Pope Leo may be redirecting cames nearly simultaneously. The Pope has called for meeting of the Presidents of the world's Bishops' conferences to discuss Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, and which was not popular with "conservatives". On June 30 Pope Leo announced that he is calling the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to Rome in October for “synodal discernment” on how “to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris laetitia.” My guess is that it's going to be scaled back.
Pope Leo has been left with the Synod on Synodality, started by Pope Francis, which is supposed to issue its final report in October, 2028. June 30, 2027 is the deadline for Dioceses and Eparchies to prepare their reports. An international Ecclesial Assembly is slated to occur in October 2028. Some of the group reports have been released already, although that gives input on their thoughts and not really on where the Vatican may be headed. Pope Francis had throughout this process wrestled with the German Bishops who, in the eyes of many, were headed towards schism.
Whether it comes in October, or in 2028, I suspect the German Bishops are going to get the same message the SSPX did and told to conform or be excommunicated. The big difference, however, is that the laity who follow the SSPX are all volunteers, so now they have to determine if they follow their desires, or the Church. My guess is that a fair number will follow the Church. German Catholics, however are to the right of their Bishops by quite some measure and are much more conservative, and the Bishops themselves have been faced with the fact that their leadership has been plagued with declining attendance. If Pope Leo excommunicates the Bishops, or some of them, a large number of their laity are not going to be that upset, and the Bishops for that part have no real ability to follow the example of Martin Luther and take entire congregations out of communion with Rome. Those days are over unless you have a willing laity, and they do not.
All of this means, accordingly that Pope Leo is acting, well, very Catholic, and very traditional Catholic at that. For those who were hoping for a Pope that acted that way, it appears we now have one.
Speaking of Bishops, it was Pope St. John Paul II who required Catholic clergy to no longer hold elective office, as a small number did. That didn't prevent association with politicians, however. One figure who has done that a fair amount since Donald Trump's second term started has been Bishop Robert Barron, who was a highly popular Bishop with a blog. Bishop Barron's close association with Donald Trump has made some of us quite nervous, as Trump definitely isn't a religious man.
There's a lot that occurs within the Trump administration that should worry Catholics. A core membership of the Trump inner circle are American Evangelicals of the far right persuasion who don't believe Catholics are even Christians (and therefore share an interesting mindset with the SSPX which believes that pretty much all American Evangelicals are going to Hell).
Trump's far right positions has naturally caused the rise of the far left in some quarters, notably in New York, which will be sending a Democratic Socialist to Congress, and in Colorado which appears slated to do so. Democratic Socialists are not Communist and, indeed, in the revolutions of the 1910s through 1970s, Democratic Socialist would get the bullet in any country Communists took over. Nonetheless, Donald Trump, who did not seem that gung ho about fighting communists in the 1960s when he actually literally could have, had he wanted to, is all about fighting the Reds now.
All of the above gets back to what should true conservatives and true traditionalist do?
In terms of the Church, as I noted above, I'm sympathetic with traditionalist and I feel badly for them about the general loss of the Latin Mass. But I've noted that when there's a very orthodox priest and traditionalist Catholics in the Catholic population, it tends to show up best a devotionals in their behavior. Frequent attendance at confession, the wearing of outwardly Catholic clothing, and often large families Good for them. They serve, I'd note, as an influence on the larger Catholic community as a sobering and inspiring reminder of the core of the Faith.
But here's the thing. The education of everyone, like it or not, at a younger age, is much better now than it was in the 1960s. For that matter, it's much better now than it was in the 1990s, or 2000s. Vatican II is actually part of that. Following Vatican II the new Mass included many more readings than the TLM did, and no wonder. Advances in printing and the like no longer meant that the Church was challenged with the transmission of the Gospel to a polyglot world the way it had once been. If there are beautiful traditions to look back on, we have to acknowledge at the same time that restoring something means restoring what should benefit us, and that we can't go back, as much as we might want to, to an era when most people knew less and their world was smaller.
Put another way, modern Americans are not going back to what they think the 1950s were like in terms of education (what the 50s were actually like is another matter) and even Rod Dreher doesn't think we're going to build Benedictine walled cities any longer.
That doesn't mean accepting the present either, particularly one in which Americans, civilly, are in the Age of Stupidity.
The Secretary's campaign against female officers I'd guess to be part of a back door move toward limiting the role of women in the military, but what's up with the seeming bias against black officers? Maybe it's just a statistical glitch, but then we have the taking down and relocation of a portrait of black Air Force Gen. Daniel “Chappie” James Jr. a genuine hero. The excuse was that it was being relocated due to renovations or something. Chappie actually stared down Muammar Qaddafi during the latter's 1969 coup and nearly drew his M1911 on him in a true Western style standoff.
Maybe it's all a coincidence but it's an odd one.
For that matter, the entire Trump Administration is the whitest administration imaginable, which we could chalk up to coincidence too but for all the recent rumblings about who is and isn't a "real" American. Black have of course been in the country since before it was a country, indeed since 1619. At that time the Trumps were just doing whatever it is they did in Germany. Nonetheless, I can't think of any prominent black members of the current illegitimate administration.
Even the Joint Chiefs, who represent members of the Armed Forces, which have 30 to 33% minorities in the ranks, are lily white, and of course all male. African Americans, who are 13.5% of the population and 20% of the military, don't show up there.
Kristrún Mjöll Frostadóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland. She graduated from Reykjavik Junior College, the University of Iceland, holds a master's degree in international studies from Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and a master's degree in economics from Boston University.
She's 38 years old.
And she's a Social Democrat.
She makes Donald Trump and the entire Trump cabinet look like idiots and a country that feels that it has to elect idiots twice her age, idiotic.
Iceland, by the way, had a working parliament in 930. And yet they don't feel compelled to elect demented octogenarians. The oldest person to ever serve in that role was Gunnar Thoroddsen, who was 69 years old when he took office in 1980. He served three years and retired.
An example from a country that's been electing people a lot longer than we have. We don't have to elect demented geezers and wet our pants when the world "Social" shows up in politics.
That's something ignorant children do.
And demented octogenarian toddlers and their syncophants.
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.
Narva Triumphal Arch. It's green, just like Trump's Arch of Defeat should be. By Florstein - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19091231
Donald Trump, who can see the grim reaper at the door, and besides him when he goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning is desperately seeking a legacy that he won't achieve, that being some sort of serious man. As part of that, he seeks a monumental arch, while actually having just lost a war.
It ought to be algae green, just like the reflecting pool.
L'arche De La Défaite. The first monument to spectacular defeat ever erected by the loser. A fitting, if temporary, monument to the loser himself, Donald Trump.
Trump's second, and illegitimate, term is even two years old. With amazing speed, everything Donald Trump is touching is turning to shit.
Usually with dictators there's progress at first, simply because they tend to come in during a time of crisis and address that immediate thing before everything starts to fall apart, which it inevitably does. Arguably, in Trump's case that one thing was illegal immigration. Decades of high immigration had angered blue collar and lower Middle Class Americans in general, and Joe Biden lost control of the border with Mexico in his term, his failure to act in part brought about by a sense of humanity which unfortunately didn't carry over to his policies on abortion. Aided chiefly by that, but also fueled by anger over social changes that people simply didn't and don't support, Trump did the one thing he is good at, sold Trump.
But Trump was never popular with the majority of Americans, and, having no real existential or even political philosophy himself, he came with a pack of extreme ideologues will to advance their own agendas, as dictators always do, who don't care of people suffer as long as that extreme agenda is advanced. Trump's idealogues, however, actually come from two different camps to start with, far right wing Evangelical Christians and National Conservatives, who really don't see eye to eye on everything, while agreeing on some things.
And then there's Trump himself. Eighty years old and in declining mental and physical health, and unable to accept what he was, and is.
Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
Царь хороший, бояре плохие*
Giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea, I think the president, unfortunately, is receiving bad advice on this deal.
Ted Cruz
These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT”
Donald Trump, once again displaying his understanding of the world that if the stock markets are doing good, everybody is doing great.
The United States lost the war with Iran. It was not a war that the US should ever have been in to start with. Donald Trump was told by some of those in his own administration not to do it, but convinced by those who saw it as some sort of Evangelical Christian crusade, and coaxed along by Bibi Netanyahu, we went to war, illegally, with no plan on how to win it.
Iran won. They came out of the war stronger than they went in it, and now we're going to make them wealthier than they were before.
Some Republicans are finally actually reacting. They can see the Trump era ending and don't won't to be remembered as the men and women who paid radical Islam. Some can't quite bring themselves to do it, such as the cowardly Ted Cruz, who blames it on advisors.
Trump's not letting them do that. He's sticking to his actions and embracing the GOP with the stench of the illegal war and the dimwitted settlement to it. He's also trying to shove the final heavy lifting and excuse making off on J. D. Vance who is known to have opposed the war in the first instance. A person has to wonder about that.
Vance was supposed to go to Switzerland to sign the formal instrument of surrender. Something happened overnight, and now he's not.
Monuments to ignorance
I'm doing a great job on the Reflecting Lake. I got so into it. I've upgraded it like you wouldn't believe... It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be waterproof. It's going to be reflecting again.
Donald Trump. It's a pool, of course, not a lake. And, um, waterproof?
Algae came back to the reflecting pool immediately. It was predictable that it would, but the dark blue Rhino Lining probably increased the temperature of the water and made the water even more conducive to algae than before.
Pretty predictable.
The entire cost of the effort grossly exceeded what Trump claimed it would cost, going from seven digits to low eight digits. When the algae immediately appeared excuses were developed (it was the pipes), and the moronic MAGA conspiracy theories erupted. The algae was planted by Democrats, some truly ignorant people maintained.
Nope, it just grows in hot water.
Now, compounding the disaster, gallons of hydrochloric acid have been poured in the pool. It's removing the Rhino Lining.
That can't be ignored.
Hopefully, it's just accepted and the Tide-E-Bowl blue lining will just be allowed to rapidly peel off. A real solution that isn't something they'd use on cheap Texas hotel pool can be left for the next administration.
Perde i colpi**
She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her. She begged me to take a photo with her. She wanted a photo with me so much. I wouldn’t have even done it, but I felt sorry for her.
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's statements are completely made up. I am frankly astonished. I don't know why the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies, after all, it's not the first time it's happened.
I can only say it is disappointing that he does not show the same determination with the enemies of the West and of the United States, whose leaders he instead treats with far greater indulgence. There is one thing he should remember: neither I nor Italy ever beg.
Giorgia Meloni
The serious and offensive words of President Trump towards Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni offend all of Italy. For this reason, I have decided to cancel my visit to the United States scheduled for the next 21 and 22 June.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
Trump's at the G7. They should have sent Vance to that.
Trump's mental decline is frighteningly apparent to anyone who cares to see it. He gets angry easily and says anything that comes into his declining mind. Included in that has been an increasing number of statements to and about women that are common amongst senile old men.
He has the deluded belief, it seems, that people really like him. They don't. And now people are making that plain to his face.
He probably doesn't notice. The moronic things he says on a daily basis are probably often things he really believes.
Which takes us back to the first entry. Death is hanging around Trump, but like many an old boomer for whom the Reaper is sharpening his scythe, he just can't accept that that means, but others can. Republicans are starting to finally move on. The Europeans not only have, but are starting to say "Va' a farti fottere"***.
He's not needed, except by the people who need him, and we should all be frightened by that.
On the latter, an administration tweet endorsed the insane conspiracy theory that Democrats are secretly putting algae in the pool. A person would have to be a complete moron to believe that.
Cont:
Well, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the ongoing Israeli campaign in Lebanon.
The comedy of errors in this, keeping in mind that violent death is not comedic, just won't end.
Footnotes:
*"Good Czar, bad Boyers". This was a popular excuse for Imperial loyalist as to stupid Romanov decisions. It couldn't be the Czar, it must be the Boyers.
It was the Czar.
Fanatic adherence of lunacy continually do this. "It's never been tried" is the popular one for Communist on why Communism has never worked. Not really related, but on the Communist theme, during Stalin's early reign The New Republic wrote him to inform him that some bad things were going on in the Soviet Union.
Um, Stalin knew that.
**"His shots are wasted." Applying to mental decline in Italy, a similar phrase in English for a lost cause would be "his bolt is shot", which refers to a crossbow bolt.
***"Go fuck yourself".
Cont:
Yikes.
June 21, 2026
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and J.D. Vance is back on the plane to Switzerland, after cancelling earlier.
June 23, 2026
Both houses of Congress have now voted to end the war.
This puts Congress and the White House on a clear collision course.
June 26, 2026
Iran fired on a vessel in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, for being outside the lanes it established.
This emphasizes that Trump's disastrous war made Iran a more powerful nation in the region, not a less powerful one.
June 27, 2026
The war is now 120 days old.
The US hit Iran with air strikes.
Iran hit Bahrain with drones.
June 28, 2026
And, you guessed it, more strikes. Clearly this is the ceasefire that isn't as part of the peace that hasn't arrived to end the war we won, by surrendering.
cont:
And its getting worse. Now Iran is hitting Bahrain and Kuwait. Apparently this has to do with routes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran claims a right to control.
And so the war that Trump won, but lost, isn't even presently over.
July 2, 2026
Iran has hit Iraqi kurds, our allies, with drones.
Things have really been quiet on this lost war the past few days, and no wonder. Iran disregards the ceasefire when and where it sees fit. King Donald has no way out and no plan to find one. The only options really are completely pulling out, which would be an admitted major defeat, or invading Iran, which the country doesn't support.
With this grim reality, we'll end this edition.
July 4, 2026
A week of funeral processions commenced for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
July 7, 2026
The IRGC fired missiles at vessels in the Strat of Hormuz.
King Donny threatened to "finish the job" if Iran didn't come to an agreement.
And with that latest threat in a war that was supposed to last a few days, then a few weeks, then the US lost, we'll conclude this edition.
When I was young there used to be periodic calls for a National Identity Card.
The concept was that the card would show you were a US citizen, be your social security card, proof of ID, etc.
Everything in one package.
President Clinton proposed national IDs during his administration as part of his administration's health care plan. Some people on the right and left proposed it as a way to combat illegal immigration.
Frankly, it'd make a lot of sense, or it did, in context. The card could be general proof of your identity, be your SSN card, your medicare card, your draft card, etc.
It was always opposed by the far right. Indeed, opposed fanatically. Ronald Reagan joked that it would be "the mark of the beast", but that was a joke that tapped into the Evangelical element of his base. A halfway joke, basically, pitched at people who were already afraid that the Antichrist was soon to appear.
But the left opposed it too, and adamantly.
I note this for the current irony. The Trump Administration is boosting the SAVE Act as a means of trying to keep the "wrong" people from voting.
We all know who those people are. . . . wink, wink.
And that's because they know that in the fall they're going to lose.
But ironically, they're basically proposing that millions of adults do, and millions won't be able to do, what would have been done decades ago, if they hadn't run around preventing it.
Of course, that wouldn't have required a national seizure of the elections, but that isn't required now, either.
It's funny, we used to think that the state demanding your papers was fascist.
Now, Chuck Gray just gleefully turns voter roles over to the Federal Government. . . . which doesn't mean that the state demanding paper is not, in fact, fascist.
Donald Trump posted a picture of himself in uniform, purporting to be of himself at age 20, next to one of Barack Obama smoking a cigarette and wearing a panama at, when he was 18 years old. In truth, Trump was 17 or 18 years old in the photo he posted and he's in the Ne wYork Military Academy, where he was a student from age 13 to 18.
He was sent there because his parents found him to be a bullying asshole. At that time the thought was common that if you sent a kid to military school they came out a better person. That was still the thought when I was young, although in the wake of the ongoing Vietnam War, that was getting hard to believe and the schools were dying off.
Put another way, military discipline hadn't turned William Calley into "a plaster saint" as Kipling would put it.
The New York Military Academy itself reflects this. It's one of the oldest ones in the United States, but it went bankrupt in 2015. It's been reorganized, but it's student body is a shadow of its former self.
I don't know anyone who went to a military school prep school, unless you count the mandatory high school JrROTC that my high school had before it was eliminated in the late 60s or early 70s (a net search says that was in 1968, which seems early, but which would also show how much the Vietnam War was impacting things everywhere). I know one person who was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Nebraska as he was a difficult to handle kid. The school was probably Mount Michael, a Benedictine school which has a strong focus on science. According to that person, who later became a lawyer, it really helped him and he was grateful his parents sent him there.
If being sent to military school was more of a threat than a reality for most boys, being given the option of joining the military rather than going to jail was not I know one person who did just that, and by his account, it did straighten him out. He opted for that right after the Vietnam War and part of the process on his end was to volunteer to be a Ranger so he didn't have to serve with the deadheads who were part of his regular advanced training cycle. That may sound amusing, but when the Army was large that was more common than a person might think. A major reason for soldiers to volunteer to become paratroopers during World War Two is so that they'd be serving with a better class of soldier. Anyhow, in this person's case, while he knew he didn't want a military career, it did straighten him out as well.
Military school didn't serve to straighten Trump out at all. The characteristics that caused his parents to send him to military school are still there. A person has to wonder if he'd served in the Army if he'd be a less dismal human being.
Trump's draft card. His signature changed enormously between 1962 and when he signed it on a pornographic Epstein birthday card where it symbolized female pubic hairs.
Trump's draft classification is a bit more complicated than is generally acknowledged. He was initially classified as 2-S, meaning he had a student deferment. He was reclassified as 1-A after graduating from university in 1968, meaning he was fully eligible for the draft at that time, but he held that status only briefly. In October 1968 he was reclassified as 1-Y, which meant he was only eligible in the event of a national emergency and in 1972, which was at the point the draft was really winding down, he was reclassified as 4-F. It's the October 1968 and 1972 classifications which are the now famous bone spur classifications.
Student deferments started to become problematic during the war in 1966 and in 1969 they were hugely overhauled so that student deferments became much more problematic. Of course, by 1969 Trump was beyond the student deferment classification anyhow. An eligible person was very much liable for the draft at t hat time, and draft number for the years of the war are as follows:
1964112386
1965230991
1966382010
1967228263
1968296406
1969283586
1970162746
197194092
197249514
1973646
1968 was, accordingly, the high water mark of the draft, but nearly as many men were drafted in 69.
Was Trump's bone spur 1-Y nad 4-F bogus? I have no way of knowing and neither does anyone else at this point. I do know that bone spurs can make you ineligible to serve, but only in an odd way. A soldiers I was good friends with in basic training was having pretty severe foot problems and went in to sick call as a result He was diagnosed with bone spurs and given a medical discharge from the Army, although that still required him to visit his National Guard unit upon his return home. He was almost done with AIT at the time. When he went to the Guard and reported, they asked him how he was doing, he said fine, and they reenlisted him as prior service. Ultimately, he went on to a career in the Army and retired as an officer.
Bone spurs don't go away on their own, but they can be asymptomatic, which is presumably what happened here.
Anyhow, Trump didn't serve in the Army. If he had, he probably wouldn't have served in Vietnam. Most of the troops in Vietnam were volunteers, something commonly forgotten about the wartime draft.
Anyhow, serving in the military would have done him good. IT would have forced him into a world where money doesn't mean that much and isn't everyone's focus, and it would have forced him to deal with people who weren't rich, like himself.
Barack Obama turned 18 years old in 1979. Conscription was over, and he was a university student.
Part of the reason that the photo of Obama was put up by Trump was the sort of hip appearance that Obama affected in the photographs. People vary, but a lot of people really don't look the way they do professionally in their first year of college. Trump in 1979 had already affected a young businessman look, which is what he was.
The last President with military service ws George Bush II. His father was the last President with combat experience. No member of the Trump family has ever served in the U.S. military.
One of the things I've really noted about the Baby Boom generation is that there's a lot of guilt felt by men who avoided the draft. They were given a hard time about it when they were young, but defended it. At some point in the 1980s that began to change. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Nowcame out in 1979, and they are definitely anti war films that a draft evader or draft protester could love. But 1986's Platoonshowed a marked shift. It's an anti war film, but anti war. It is pretty sympathetic to the troops and even the Army in a way that the earlier movies were not. Every Vietnam War movie since them took that point of view until We Were Soldiers which is about as rah rah Army as can be. Somewhere in there the public view of the troops changed.
I've known a handful of men who either avoided the draft or felt like they did. One I know avoided service in Vietnam by joining the Army Reserve, which is still military service. He remained perfectly comfortable with his decision. One National Guard officer I knew was upfront about that being his original reason for joining the National Guard. He felt guilty immediately, and then ironically his Guard unit actually was one of the few that went to Vietnam.
More commonly, however, I've noticed that the men who felt they didn't go later developed almost sort of a hero worship of those who did.
Trump likes to portray himself as a hero. He isn't. He's really quite pathetic and his life is meaningless in al arger sense, as he's accomplished nothing of enduring value. Barack Obama, whom I frequently disagreed with, will always retain a place in history as the nation's first black President, an accomplishment which seemed to suggest we were finally over the legacy of slavery and egregious racism. It turned out not, and that helped bring Trump about.
Trump's casting about widely for some success to be measured by. As his mind deteriorates he's attacking his own past, and that of others.
The man that Trump should be comparing himself to is Vlad Putin.
By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70906985
Both Putin and Trump unilaterally got their countries into wars with smaller powers that they expected to rapid win, and are losing. Putin, this past week, started to be openly threatened by members of his own military. Russia has a long history of supporting enormous military suffering and then suddenly rebelling. When Russian soldiers show discontent, usually a revolution is right around the corner. If there is one, and right now the odds of there being one are relatively high, Putin will be killed.
The United States has no tradition of military rebellion, but Trump has created the same national crisis. Putin can't win the Ukrainian War and is losing it. Trump can't win the Iranian war and is losing it. The difference is that Putin has absolute control of his country, and Trump does not. There's some suggestion that Trump is now upset with Steve Witkoff and his son in law Jared Kushner, two people whom he naively allowed to negotiate with Iran because Trump knows nothing about negotiating with foreign powers at all. He knows that hasn't been working so now he's thrown J. D. Vance under the bus. Both Vance and Rubio opposed the war. Trump, whose been an asshole his whole life, is effectively requiring an opponent of the war to find a way out of it knowing tha t if he can't, that person's political career is over.
It'll be over, as Trump as an effective President will be over. Right now, the House is slated to go Democratic in November and there's a decent chance the Senate will as well. Even Lindsey Graham appears to be in real trouble. According to insiders Trump may want that as he likes being an asshole better than actually leading. The irony here as been pointed out by Thomas Massie. The GOP controls everything and yet they're still running around all pissed off.
So it's time for a Red Scare.
The US has had two Red Scares, one post World War One and another post World War Two. The second one actually made more sense than the first. The first one resulted in illegal actions by the Federal Government.
Both of those scares were more genuine than the current one by a long measure.
The current one is trying to be ignited due to the recent success of Democratic Socialist in New York state. Absent something really wild, New York will have a Democratic Socialist in Congress next year. This is nothing new. There have been actual Socialist in Congress before, and right now there are seven members of Congress with Socialist affiliations.
M'eh.
Socialism is the same as communism by a long shot. A person can be a strong believer in Democracy and, while it is regarded it its real form as antithetical to Christianity by Catholics (who also have strong criticism of Capitalism), there are Christian socialist. Usually American socialism is so watered down economically that it's capitalism, but the supposed socialist supports child care or something. Pretty tepid.
The US has had three Presidents whom you could accuse, or celebrate depending upon your views, who advocated or caused to be enacted socialist programs. Theodore Roosevelt was the first, but it came in his last unsuccessful run when he advocated for what ultimately became Social Security and also for government regulation of large corporations as public utilities. His cousin Franklin had a lot of socialistic programs, and enacted Social Security, although much of what he did was temporary. Harry Truman advocated for national health care, but then so did Richard Nixon. I guess that could bring us up to five, with the final entry, Donald Trump.
In some of his economic policies Trump is an outright Socialist. He's advocated for government ownership of shares of companies and for seizing foreign oil as if the US owned it. He frequently sees things as if the US is one big corporation and he's the dictatorial CEO.
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