Showing posts with label Zeitgeist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zeitgeist. Show all posts

Monday, October 12, 2026

25th Amendment Watch, 25th Edition and CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 161st Edition. The Time is Running Out Edition.

In looking for a photo to caption this, I found this fascinating World War Two (apparently) vintage Heuer advertisement featuring Swiss soldiers all synchronizing their watches.  Heuer is a Swiss company but was not part of the "Dirty Dozen" that sort of ignored Swiss neutrality laws in order to export watches to the British Army.  Fascinating advertisement.  Posted under the Fair Use exception.

October 4, 2026

Running out of time.

We're starting a new edition of this for several reasons.

To start off with, King Donald has been in rare form the last few days.  Whether these qualify as 25th Amendment events or not is another matter. They probably don't.  But they do show the titanic weirdness of the man.

The first was a long rambling post about trying to enact Permanent Daylight Savings Time.

Personally, I hate Daylight Savings Time and I always have.  It was a stupid idea when it came into being, and it still is.  I'd like to see it go.  But King Donald and some Republicans, and probably some Democrats as well, would like for it to be adopted year around.

This is dumb, and yes that's spelled with a "b".

The reason it's dumb is that the sun rises and sets when it does with no regard to the opinions and musings of man.  In real terms, there's a real high noon, and a real midnight. The clock should be based on that.

The stupidity of Daylight Savings Time somehow accepts the concept that by moving the arms of the clock, it somehow changes that.  What Daylight Savings Time is, in real terms, is Go To Work An Hour Earlier.  Apparently we're dim enough, however, to accept that if we pretend to move the arms of the clock, we're still going to work at 8:00 a.m. in the summer, rather than 7:00 a.m.

We're not.

Anyhow, Donalds wants the bill to pass.   If it does, at least it looks like the 119th Congress did something.  Here's his long screed:


As can be seen, Trump is personally blaming this on Tom Cotton, which isn't fair.  What this means is there aren't enough votes in the Senate to take it up and pass it, even if a majority in the Senate are in favor of it.

Cotton's reasons:


Cotton has been a pretty consistent back of Trump's all along, so this is really ironic.  He's getting stabbed in the back by the guy he supported, which isn't surprising.  Everything Trump touches gets destroyed. 

Cotton's reasons here are solid.  Everything he's stated here is correct.  I can personally recall the 1974 experiment with this.

Sunday, January 6, 1974. Messing with the time.

In a bizarre response to the ongoing oil crisis, the U.S. began a trial of year around daylight savings time.

I recall it well, as when I walked to grade school in the morning, it was pretty dark.  We still walked, however.

What I noted there has been noted by supporters of King Donald's proposal.  Kids don't walk to school as much as the culture's addiction to laziness and automotive transportation actually increased since 1974.

Anyhow, what are the reasons for this absurdity?

Golfing and tennis.  Oh, and "farmers want it".

On that last item, farmers don't care one whit about this.  They're going to work when they are going to work.  DST doesn't change that at all.

Indeed, I've always heard the justification for DST being the one that Trump is giving.  You can go out and play sports when you get home from work as you'll have more daylight.

M'eh.

The reason, anyhow, this appears here is that Trump posted, and therefore wrecked, Cotton's cell phone number. That's really mean.  Only a self centered asshole would do a thing like that.  Trump's been asked to justify it in a press interview and just repeats his reasons that he wants the vote.

Personally, and I have no way of really knowing this, I think he wants it as the Republican 119th Congress has done nothing and now we're headed into a general election with inflation ramping up, an  illegal war going on, and none of the list of usual suspects excuses working anymore.

Also for the same reason, Trump's been running around giving campaign rallies to the true believers.  I haven't tracked where he's been going, but I've read that it tends to be in places where there's a lot of MAGA.  Quietly some candidates in battleground states are trying to distance themselves from him.  Anyhow, at one such rally Trump, who didn't graduate from Wharton with honors and never appeared on the Dean's list, stated:

I am a person with very high intelligence—one of the highest IQs in the world.

Okay, this is at the really weird level.

Generally really intelligent people don't run around saying "I'm high IQ".  Trump says it all the time, which suggests that he's really insecure about his intelligence.

Frankly, at this point, if anyone believes he's super intelligent, they're probably either stupid or incredibly gullible.  MAGA by now is the bottom of the bell curve in intelligence and ignorance.

What's going on with the 25th?

It's rather clear at this point that my prediction that the 25th Amendment would be applied after the first 18 months of Trump's illegal occupation of the Oval Office were off the mark.  This probably should be regarded as a failed prediction.

Having said that, I saw somebody hinting at the possibility that their similar thought might not be.

I think it's a long shot right now, but there's still a chance, and a not insubstantial one, that a backroom plot, basically, remains in place.  The same basic parameters would be in operation, replacing Trump with J.D. Vance before the 2028 election.

My thought was that it would occur before the 2026 election in order that the GOP had a chance to save itself before that election. Clearly that was wrong.  But that in and of itself might be part of what's going on.  The various factions in the Trump backrooms that supported his campaign and which boost their pet theories on everything may very well have realized that the results would be unpopular.  Economic radicals behind the tariffs, for instance, likely were aware that they'd be hugely disruptive.  They may have given up the 2026 midterms from the onset.  They likely didn't appreciate that Trump would start a war with Iran, but most of the rest of the stuff Trump has done has backers within the administration.  All of those people also know that they're in the minority in terms of American culture so Trump is their best chance of making this stuff happen.

But, if I'm correct, at some point Trump has to go and take the stench out with him.  There will come a day, and it's probably in November, when Trump will be personally blamed for what's occurred.  The Republicans are going to lose both houses of Congress in a month.  A Fall Guy will be necessary, and Trump has made himself that person.  He's even asked for people to imagine him on the ballot.

A lot of people will.

After November 3 being a Trumpite in most places will have lost its value.  A lot of the Republican politicians who have supported him all along will grow silent, or more silent than they already are.  Harriet Hageman will likely not be heard to mention his name.  John Barrasso won't either.  Poor Chuck Gray, who has campaigned more than anyone else in Wyoming on being a deep lover of all things Trump, will be lost, but even he will rally to claim that "true conservative values"  need to be defended.

Anyhow, the point is Republicans are already dog trotting away from Trump. Trump is, at the same time, stabbing some of them in the back.  Chip Roy got it, and now Cotton is getting it.  After the vote in November, there will be very little reason to be a Trump backer in the GOP, save for being in a district of diehard MAGAs, which is a declining population.

The National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist still need Trump, however.  Nobody else is going to help them get in their worldview.  They can sort of home that Vance will, but Vance is too savvy to adopt anything fully that's going to wipe out his hopes of being President.

And hence the gamble.

Right now, it may well be the case that NatCons and Christian Nationalist are seeing how far they can have Trump carry on as a sort of dictator until it's too late, and Vance's chances in 2028 are destroyed.  That may have already occured.  Letting that occur might be one reason that Marco Rubio hasn't acted.  But my guess is that they're riding along and just don't quite know where that point is.

It might be coming very soon.  If Trump makes an effort to steal the 2026 midterms, and he will, that might present the opportunity.  If it isn't taken then, it has to be taken some time in 2027.  2028 will probably be too late.

October 10, 2026



This man is a titanic narcissist and deeply mentally ill.

Trump called Letitia James a "dog".

James has been a controversial Attorney General for the State of New York.  She went after Trump some time ago unsuccessfully.  I don't know what brought her back to mind for Trump, but she's been in the news recently over the Cornell rape story.  I'll have an item on that shortly, but in a comment he noted he feels "badly" for the seven men accused.

Eh?

It's hard to ignore that Trump is rapy wealthy men's best friend.

October 12, 2026
And you know what they're doing? They go straight down, you know, you can make those drill bits talk. You can make 'em sing, you can make them go, they go down. New York's over here, Pennsylvania-- they go down and they take a sharp left. And they suck our oil out. Can you believe it? Lines of different states, and you'll see one has Cadillacs, because they like Cadillacs better than they like Mercedes, but one has an Escalade, and one has a 50 year old Chevy. And you're talking about 3 ft. It's a line that goes right up. One has some beautiful drilling plants, and one has no drilling plants, it's got no money, it's got poverty.
Donald Trump.

This is a statement, I believe, on horizontal drilling.  It's posted as an example of his rambling speech.  This was just delivered over the weekend.

Cont:

Regarding the supposed agreement to cease hitting energy targets:
Reporter: You said Russia and Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire but both sides say they have not. 

Trump: They agree. You know why? Because I said you agree. That’s why. They agreed because I said they agreed.

Well, they didn't agree.  Apparently King Donald's word doesn't mean that much.

Related threads:

Daylight Savings Time, Dangers, and Crabbiness.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 160th Edition. On being a worthless sycophant



25th Amendment Watch, 24th Edition. He's crying for help, or completely insane.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 159th Edition. On being a dirtbag and "Unites States".

 


Republican Senator Eric Schmitt accuses Jack Smith of being a "dirtbag" and accuses him of being where he wasn't, complete with blown-up text messages.

I'm not a sports fan, and apparently Schmitt isn't either, as he confused the teams.  Amy Klobuchar, whose father was a sports writer hands Schmitt his head.

Schmitt has not apologized.  Failing to apologize under these circumstances would make Schmitt a Dirtbag who henceforth should be known as Eric "Dirtbag" Schmitt, the Dirtbag from Wisconsin who is a dirtbag.

Apologize Schmitt.

Schmitt was the AG for Wisconsin where he must have excelled in such stunning repertoire in the courtroom.  I'm amazed that some courtroom drama hasn't used "oh yeah!, well you're a dirtbag!"

In other news, in King Donny's royal decree attempting to rename Artificial Intelligence "Super Intelligence", as he has the vocabulary of a 5th grader, United States is misspelled.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 158th Edition. How the Internet Emphases the Absurd and Marginal and Make it seem Significant. Pastor Brian Sauvé

Friday, September 25, 2026

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 158th Edition. How the Internet Emphases the Absurd and Marginal and Make it seem Significant. Pastor Brian Sauvé

Holy Women at Christ's Tomb, Annibale Carracci.

One Brian Sauvé, senior pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, has been much on the net recently due to some comments he made on vlog or some sort of web based video show providing for all to see how the net has served to emphasize the absurd and marginal, serving to make it seem like a big deal.

Refuge Church is a "Reformed Protestant" Church and Sauvé  describes himself as "Reformed and Protestant, Paedobaptist, Postmillennial, and Patriarchal".  The church describes itself as basically a solo scriptura group holding to 66 books of the Bible, rather than 73, which means that the don't believe in the 66 books of the Bible as the New Testament itself describes how sola scriptura is invalid and the omitted books that a German monk, who should never have been that, took out were done so based on his prejudice and a misunderstanding on what books of the Old Testament the Apostles were referring to.

Patriarchal Sauvé certainly is.  And extremely so.

Sauvé in a September 18 podcast stated the following:

Women either shouldn't be on social media or any social media they have should be kind of a walled garden situation where some competent man is curating and blocking and directing and taking a look at what's going on.  I have access to my wife's social media accounts and I have blocked—this is not an exaggeration—thousands of accounts. Thousands of them. She generally has very little idea of what is going on in the real social media because I've created a walled garden of cute goat videos.

We have normalcy bias in a certain direction.  We consider normal what is actually insane. We consider normal women having unsupervised access to one another all the time. That's not normal.

We consider normal women having political rule. We consider normal women living unattached from a male—like a father, then a husband—for lengthy periods of time. You could fill in the blank with all of these modern feminist outworkings of the original feminist vision and what they've done is they've made women anxious, psychotic, depressed, miserable, and genocidally evil. And we just go, "Oh, that's normal.'"

People are going to hear me talking about, as my wife's head, monitoring her social media, and they're going to be like, "Brian is such a tyrant." You have normalcy bias for insane world. You're living in an insane asylum and you think it's the normal world and I'm saying, "No, we don't live in the insane asylum. We do what people did for thousands of years before today."

The interview went on and discussed how "crazy" it was to allow women to vote, something Hegseth fan boy has said of Doug Wilson in Idaho.

Unlike Wyoming, the least religious state in the country, Utah is the most religious state in the Union, and its religious landscape is dominated by the Latter Day Saints.  It's not as Mormon as it once was, however, with about 55% of the residents of the state being in that faith.  Culturally, however, they dominate it.  Catholics are about 5%.  About 25% claim no particular faith.The rest are mostly some sort of Protestant but there are, of course, Jews, Muslims, etc.

About 63% of the residents of Ogden are LDS.  Catholics make up almost 9% of the population there.  The rest would mostly be some sort of Protestant.

We'd note that Mormons, which Sauvé is not, are extremely socially conservative generally.  That's important to note as while, at least in my experience, Mormons and some conservative Protestant religions do not get along, the overall cultural conservatism of Mormonism heavily impacts the Jello Belt.  I'm not saying that to be mean or critical.  Utah has some of the most well kept towns, including small towns, in the country and as a rule Mormons don't go in for the weird cultural silliness that is part of the current zeitgeist.  Without condoning the tenants of their faith, their faith also causes them to have what some folks refer to as "nice families", as other conservative religious groups sometimes to.  You'd probably have to get into Traditional Catholics in order to find a similarly family oriented well kept group of people.

The Culture of a People reflects upon the place they live.  The views that Sauvé are not all that radical in the locality in which he is speaking them, as they reflect sort of broadly on the LDS, and specifically on some of the LDS, although most LDS would not hold them to the extreme that he does.

Now, as should be obvious, Pastor Sauvé is extremely socially conservative.  Why should we care?

We shouldn't.

The church is indicated as having a "mid sized" congregation.  His congregation ought to care what he thinks, and chances are they believe exactly what he does.  This sort of extreme patriarchal view is quite limited and goes way beyond what even very conservative members of various other Christian faiths typically believe.  It's also ironic in that women more than men were the foundation of the early Faith.  Women brought men to it. There's a reason that Mary Magdalene is the "Apostle to the Apostles".  And there's a reason that St. Brigid is so closely associated with St. Patrick.

But then, I'm an Apostolic Christian where strong women are the norm.  Protestants can keep John Calvin, we'll take Joan d'Arc.


And Protestants can keep telling us that we shouldn't ask Mary for help, we're going to keep doing so.

Virgin Mary at Zetum

Such a diminished view of women is odd, and sad.

It's also cultural and malformed.

But here's the thing.  It's the Internet that has given voice to stuff like this. But for that, Sauve would be an unknown Protestant Pastor in the Jello Belt.  Probably a lot of people in his own city wouldn't be able to tell you anything about him.  I couldn't tell you anything about the two large warehouse type churches' pastors here.  I'm sure that there are Protestants around here who hold the same beliefs.  I just don't know who they are, and there aren't many of them.

The Internet is really giving voice to a lot of things, ideas and people who shouldn't have one.  I don't know if Sauve was known before, but there's a whole host of like minded Protestants who show up on blogs all the time and spark Internet outrage. That outrage then circulates their message.

It's the same with people like Nick Fuentes, whose message is political and not religious, although there is some of that mixed in.  But for the Internet, he'd just be a barely employed oddball.  

It's one of the real challenges of our time.  We need to ignore these people.  They don't deserve a national audience.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 157th Edition. Press Revolt and other matters.

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:


But with your money.  

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 REPRESENTATIVES
April 28, 2026

Mr. 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 RESOLUTION

Directing 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:

The phrase on it translates as "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam".

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.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 156th Edition. Name Changes, Go home Cynthia, The Merits of Packing Heat.

What's in a name?

Central Wyoming College Opposes LCCC Rebrand To "Wyoming State College"

I don't blame Riverton's Central Wyoming College for being upset, quite frankly.

Wyoming has a really good group of community colleges.  They are Casper College (Casper), Central Wyoming College (Riverton), Eastern Wyoming College (Torrington), Gillette College (Gillette), Laramie County Community College (Cheyenne, )Northwest College (Powell), Sheridan College (Sheridan), and Western Wyoming Community College (Rock Springs).  The best of them is Casper College, which has crept up over the university status in some things and accordingly offers some four year degrees.  The University of Wyoming, which has always lived in fear of a second four year university being established in the state (it would frankly be quite an undertaking), has a Casper campus at Casper College.

LCCC has always baffled me a bit as its so close to UW that I'm not quite sure why somebody would go there.  But it is actually the second biggest educational institution in Wyoming, second only to UW.  It maintains a campus in Laramie for that matter.

So, the name change might make sense.

Bye, Felicia

Cynthia Lummis has not been in the public radar much since being elected to the Senate.  Most of the time when she surfaces its on the topic of cryptocurrency.

Lummis Slams Senate Democrats For Blocking Huge Crypto Bill

Wyoming doesn't give a rusty rat's ass about cryptocurrency.  We're in a climate change induced drought, diesel fuel is $8,000/gallon, mystery meat is being imported by King Donald into the country.

Just go home Cynthia.  Nobody is really going to notice.

A good reason to pack heat.

I always carry when I'm traveling. Things like this are the reason why.

Truck Driver Accused Of Stabbing Man 17 Times In I-80 Restroom Before Fleeing 

Of course, a person could say what are the odds of being attacked in such a fashion?

Not high, but not nonexistent.

Amy Roe Bechtel's killer had tried to gain control of a van driven by a family on I80 some years prior to her murder, they wrestled a rifle out of his hands and left him there.  Of course, he later killed Ms. Bechtel.  I knew one man who was carjacked, briefly, by a hitchhiker (he shouldn't have given the hitchhiker a ride).  A kid that I was in high school with is serving a life sentence for being part of a highway side murder.  I've been stopped once on the Medicine Bow Highway and then waved through as I had a rifle on my dashboard.

Things happen.

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