King Donny sent the fearsome Scott Bessent out to cause the Iranians to quiver in their boots, announcing that the US would inflict an "Economic D-Day" on Iran.
Except the US is going to exempt China, meaning that Operation Economic Outcast was stillborn from the very beginning.
The US is moving its ambassadors back to the Middle East, however, which suggests it either naively thinks this will work, or that it's just going to give up.
This post, by the way, is the first one that I've ever had Bessent's name as a label, which surprises me. He's been mentioned before, but I've never put in a label.
One thing I've thought about doing is posting how he's sort of uniquely a symbol of hypocrisy in the Trump Administration, or maybe in MAGA. MAGA proclaims loudly that it's for "Christian" values by which it means far right Evangelical values.
Christianity pretty clearly holds that homosexual sex is a mortal sin. St. Paul was blunt about it. And yet Bessent is a homosexual in a homosexual union in which two children are being raised. Most actual Christians of any type would question this, and if Evangelical Christians are to be believed, they find it completely abhorrent.
But then, by the same token, having an alleged president who is a serial polygamist, a special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, whatever that is, who seemed to be having an affair while in her earlier role and whose husband was wearing giant fake boobs in internet photos, etc. etc., is pretty odd too.
Indeed, it's impossible to reconcile.
Mind you, I'm not saying that a homosexual, including one who is in a homosexual union, cannot be an effective Secretary of the Treasury. I'm saying you can't have an implied policy that everyone who isn't, white, straight, and sympathetic to far right Evangelicalism isn't a real American and still have a homosexual as one of your primary cabinet members and really mean any of that.
Making it all the more odd, Bessent is one of those cabinet members who has in recent months been dragged out to try to explain away whatever brain fart the Trump has uttered.
That feature of this administration has been there all along. Whereas for a transportation issue you might, in normal times, get a Transportation official, in this administration you might very well end up getting the Chief Chef of the White House to address it. And people appear and then disappear in that role pretty rapidly. Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, regularly was being hauled out to address the Press on all sorts of things for awhile, right up until he said that Biden was validly elected to the Oval Office.
Goodbye Chris.
Anyhow, there's something extra weird about Bessent, who always seems extremely nervous, being hauled out to address the Press on the war while we have Pete "High T" Hegseth in charge of the "War Department". Hegseth definitely fits into the far right Evangelical mold and is loud about it, while also being loud about the services being for manly men.
Well, anyhow. So much for Operation Economic Outcast.
A British warship turned back the Ottoman gunboat Zuhaf as it attempted to enter the harbor of Kuwait City, a prosperous trading city of 15,000, which was under the protection of the United Kingdom. This lead the Ottoman captain to report that the city had been occupied and annexed by the British, which it had not nearly leading to a war between the Ottoman Empire, with Germany as an ally, against the UK.
Clara Maass, age 25, died after allowing herself to be infected with malaria as part of a medical experiment. Her act would directly lead to the malaria vaccine.
It was a heroic act by the young nurse who had previously served as a contact nurse for the U.S. Army during the Spanish American War. She was a devout Lutheran.
During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered his troops inoculated against Small Pox.
This week Pete Hegseth lifted the requirement that troops be inoculated for influenza for "religious" reasons.
The current GOP is heavily anti scientific.
Opposition to vaccinations has been in American history largely a thing of smaller Christian and non Christian sects which are fairly anti scientific, as opposed to the majority of Christians who have no objection to vaccination. However, when the far right of the country started to turn weird, listening to such medical lights as boob model Jenny McCarthy, that began to change a bit. Covid really made it worse as a significant portion of the country turned anti vax under the leadership of Donald Trump, who got the vaccine, but who recommended some really lethal approaches to the crisis as well.
Troops who don't get inoculated ought to just be given dishonorable or less than honorable discharges. That's what should have occurred to those who refused the Covid vaccine.
April 24, 2026
The war department stands ready for what comes next. Locked and loaded. May God continue to breast—bless our warriors each and every day and on each and every mission.
Hegseth.
Breast?
Okay, I get that it's a slip of the tongue, um, well, but it's an odd one.
May 12, 2026
The Aryan Nation, the Nazis, and the KKK are not far-right organizations. Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been. The KKK was created and started by the Democrats in the United States to prevent blacks from being able to participate in the political arena, if you will. So, I'm going to say they've never been associated with the right, they've always been associated with the left.
Harriet Hageman.
Hageman's no dummy and she knows this is crap, or has drank so much of the Kool Aide she'll spout stuff that's absurd.
Every one of these organizations is from the far right and any claim to the contrary is patently absurd. The claim about the Nazis, which I've seen before, comes from the party's very early, and frankly pre Hitler, days and its name, the National Socialist Party. The absurdity of that claim fails to realize that "socialism" in the context of nationalist parties doesn't necessarily mean Marxism, but "for society". In the case of the Nazis, way early on their did espouse Socialism but by the time they'd come to power they'd abandoned it in favor of autarky and the early socialist in the party were sidelined or expelled.
And the claim about the KKK being founded by the Democrats and therefore left wing completely ignores that originally the Republican Party was the left wing party, and the Democrats were a right wing party. The Democrats didn't evolve into the political left until the 20th Century and in the American South remained the conservative party into the 1980s. Hageman herself is old enough to have voted in Reagan's first run for the Oval Office and therefore should be well aware of that.
This is totally reprehensible.
Cont:
Reporter: What extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal?
Trump: Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans’ financial situation.
May 13, 2026
So it turns out that Trump's advisors uniformly told him not to launch the war against Iran, but he did anyway, and the advisors, not wanting to be blamed for his stupidity, leaked. He wants them prosecuted for treason, and sycophant Todd Blanche is looking to to it.
The real crime here is Trump's, who launched an illegal war. With no declaration of war, every single Iranian killed in it has been the victim of some sort of crime, and every American who has died has been the victim of some sort of crime ultimately attributable to Trump as well.
Blanche is pathetic. When this is over, and it will be, his careers should be flushed down the toilet.
And then there's this:
PabloReports: Ted Cruz called you a parasite and disparaged your work as a bartender.
AOC: I think it’s funny that he’s been taking a government paycheck for 23 years but has the audacity to criticize someone who has come from a family that had to work their way up and earn their place here.
This is really becoming a Republican specialty around here. We get retired servicemen who come in after sucking on the government tit for 30 years, retire, and then start sucking on the other government tit, and then run for office on the "I hate the government" ticket.
In that sense, the Democrat running against Collins in Maine is really refreshing. He's given a speech about his combat service and then noted how he can't figure out how that's relevant to being a Senator. It isn't.
Recently I saw somebody post something in favor of Brent Bien here in Wyoming, noting that he's served in combat or dangerous conditions all over the world, and how that will make him ready to lead. Yeah, lead troops, not a state government.
We have a whole host of candidates from the He Man Government Haters Club running locally. They have a right to run, but while they're doing it, they shouldn't be draining their mommy. It's hypocritical.
June 22, 2026
Unqualified for her office Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said her office would prosecute individuals caught vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
That would mean prosecuting Donald Trump, which should be done for a variety of reasons.
June 24, 2026
The ideology of the Mooslims is slightly different than the ideology of the Catholics. We have the Catholics and the Mooslims. Slightly different. But Venezuela has been great and Iran has been great.
Donald Trump.
Insulting in the extreme.
The ideology of Catholics, of which I am one, is the ideology of Christianity, as Catholicism is the first and original Christian religion It's more than "slightly different" than Islam.
This provides a good reason for those Catholics who support Trump to really question what they are doing.
June 26, 2026
Under President Trump the U.S. unemployment rate is at a historic low of just 4.3%. It was at a dismal rate of 3.4% under Biden.
Karoline Leavitt.
What the crap?
June 27, 2026
The new special edition passports with a glowering Supreme Leader Trump's image in them features the words, "Welcome! But be good".
Apparently some moron didn't realize that these were passports, not visas.
Related thread:
August 7, 2026
After an embarrassing display of conspiratorial lunacy, in which Rand Paul notably played a part, a panel of Republican dimwits voted to send a measure to the Senate floor to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer their moronic questions.
The basic truth of the matter is that the GOP has become completely scientific and dimwit conspiratorial in nature. Basically, Flat Earthers, really. I'm sure the whole panel will hold an investigation soon on whether we really went to the moon, and decide we didn't.
Not really on ignorance, but on the perversion that surrounds everything Trump, Republicans have been more or less silent on Rep. Max Miller after having a fit about Graham Platner. Miller has been accused of abusing his wife by pouring boiling water on her and breaking the collar bone of his daughter. Even his father in law, who is in the Senate, has been reluctant to criticizes him.
That's your party of family values.
August 20, 2026
We have a spike in oil prices that I don't really understand
A border incident on the Korean DMZ occured in which North Korean soldiers rushed American and South Korean troops and killed two Americans with primitive weapons.
The tree being cut down two days later as part of Operation Paul Bunyan, a US show of force resulting from the incident.
South Africa announced a multiracial government was be created for South West Africa as it moved towards independence as Namibia. South Africa had been holding on to the territory under the cover of a British League of Nations Mandate following World War One.
Catholic Priest the Reverend Roman Kotlarz was beaten to death by the Polish secret police.
Direct Action Day in British India, intended to be a peaceful demonstration in favor of carving out Muslim Pakistan, turned violent resulting in more than 10,000 people being killed around Calcutta.
The Muslim minority of India was adamantly opposed to being if a federation with India's Hindu majority, something that's understandable if we consider that Indian itself is a country, but not a nation. The hope of the Muslims, at the time, was to carve out what is today Pakistan and Bangladesh into one country.
Bangladesh became independent of Pakistan, from which it differs ethnically, in 1971. I can recall it very dimly occuring.
On the same day, in the same country, the All Hyderabad Trade Union Congress (AHTUC) was formed. It was a trade union center in the Hyderabad State which was affiliated to the All India Trade Union Congress and which was aligned with the Communist Party of India.
It's easy for us to forget how strong Communism was in unions, even in some in the United States. The real kind, I might add, not the Mike Johnson, "oh my, . . .they'd rather have national health care than die in the gutter so I'm pissing my pants" sort of stuff the GOP comes up with.
Anyhow, it was very strong in Australian trade unions, where it was opposed by the Catholic Church, which is one of the reasons the Australian political left still hates the Church to this day.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party was founded in Iraq by Mustafa Barzani.
Today the party is the ruling party in Iraqi Kurdistan and the senior partner in the Kurdistan Regional Government. The ideology of the party is based on conservatism, secularism, and Kurdish nationalism.
Kurdistan really should be an independent country.
The deposed former and last emperor of China, Puyi, later emperor of Manchukuo, testifies at the Tokyo Military Tribunal
Trump looking out of the window of Air Force One with Natalie Harp, Sunday, September 7, 2025, before landing at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, New York, to attend the U.S. Open Men’s Championship, a shocking waste of public money.
Yesterday we discussed the departure of Karoline Leavitt from the Trump Administration. Also yesterday, two different articles appeared purporting to give her reasons, both of which are pretty interesting. Between the two, the article in The New Republic struck me as a bit more credible. It's here:
Trump is a pathetic man baby pretty much and shows what happens with a privileged kid is raised to become a spoiled brat. Of course, his parents realized that which is why they sent him to military school, but it didn't work to straighten him out.
What very well may have worked would have been a hitch in the service, but that, as is well known, didn't happen. That omission is probably part of the reason that the pathetic man has such an inferiority complex today.
Anyhow, TNR holds that Leavitt had been looking to depart her role as Big Liar for Der Fibber for some time and was burnt out from her role. The straw that broke the camel's back was Trump repeatedly calling her on her maternity leave to find out when she'd leave her children and come back to serving him.
If true, that makes Trump even more of an asshole than we already knew him to be, but it's pretty credible.
And it's also perfectly credible that Leavitt was burnt out. Explaining the sea of lies would be a huge burden. And, for normal people, having children is really sobering. I've often said that's when you really become fully adult. While I think Leavitt's role in the administration in particular and American society overall has been completely despicable, she may have made that leap. She is Catholic and the burden of her sins for Trump may have just grown too large.
The Daily Beast, on the other hand, holds that Leavitt decided to leave when she was left on the "decoy" Air Force One when Trump was smuggled out on a lesser aircraft. He took with him, apparently, Pete Hegseth, Natalie Harp, Dan Scavino, and Walt Nauta. Marco Rubio and Bessent were left to go down in flames if Air Force One was actually targeted.
Unlike a lot of the commentary on this, I don't think it was unreasonable for Trump to make the switch, although like the CIA I'm not crediting Israeli intelligence on this one much. But if Leavitt was really left to die on the decoy, that's inexcusable. But it's not really clear that she actually was. You would think this would be easy to determine, but it hasn't been. She may not have been on either plane.
Anyhow, the DB reports she was upset about being left on the decoy plane, and as a mother of two, she should have been. And if true, and we don't know that it was, that would be a despicable thing for Trump to have done.
This puts Executive Assistant to the President Natalie Harp back in the spotlight. There's already piles of rumors about here which are unlikely to be true, but it doesn't help.
Trump just can't accept defeat on anything as he's a spoiled brat. He also has surrounded himself with sycophants like flies surround shit, and much for the same reason. Its not surprise therefore that the flies on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to add an inscription bearing President Donald Trump’s name to the building’s exterior, It'll read:
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump,’
The plaza where it's located will be outright named for Trump.
Well, maybe.
More likely the same court that told the administration to remove Trump's name from the building for being illegally pasted there will say "hold on, buckwheat" and stop it from occurring.
This does, however, bring up a topic that many people have been pondering and which was just discussed on NPR's Politics:
NPR doesn't quite put it this way, but there's something downright weird about Trump's manic campaign of building crap, and it has been crap, and naming stuff for himself.
Trump's about to die. It's a fact simply because of his age. Around 15% of American men live to age 85. He's 80. He could literally die any day simply due to old age. Having elected such an elderly man was foolish.
While its purely speculation on my part, I strongly suspect that Trump is worried about his impending death, and I can see why. He's lived a horrible life. He openly worries about going to Hell, but he doesn't do anything to arrest that chance. Reforming at age 80 isn't easy, particularly for a man whose on to his fourth wife, if you consider it a real marriage. That's part of the reason, I'd guess, he's surrounded himself with people like Paula White, who believe in a diluted version of Christianity, or even one that's perverted the actual message of the Gospels. There's almost nothing that Trump routinely does or says that are Christian in nature, but those religious figure surrounding him don't seem to rebuke him on his behavior to the extent that we can tell what hey do.
The people that Trump has surrounded himself with probably give him a modicum of assurance that his soul is A Ok, but he doesn't seem convinced. He shouldn't be. Anyhow, I wonder to some extent if he believes in the next world, in any form, at all.
His manic construction would suggest not. He desperately wants to be remembered for something, and childish monstrous architecture seems to be what he's hit on.
It won't work.
Most of the things that the Romans built are gone. The Coliseum is still around, but very few people know which Roman Emperor caused it to be built. Most of the Trump crap will simply come down, and indeed it needs to. The stuff he's pasting his name to will all be renamed.
It's vanity, and it's sad. And expensive.
I've really gone after Trump on this site and people who voted for Trump and his sycophants. Just the other day I posted, in regard to Mike Lindell's bid for office:
After this, I got a first hand glimpse of how really intelligent people can be MAGA through ignorance.
A person I know, who is definitely highly intelligent, but very narrowly focused, and very focused on religious matters, sent me something on one of the millennialist religions that was influenced by Christianity, but which isn't Christian. He follows stuff like that extremely closely. This brought up in my mind something I just saw elsewhere on "post truth Christians".
The reason I note that is that I always find such statements to be sweepingly overbroad. When people speak about "Christians" and societal, cultural or political matters, the mere use of the term is incorrect. The MAGA Christians contain a strong element that doesn't regard we Catholics, the original Christian religion, as Christian at all. The "post truth" Christians, in the article I saw, are Evangelical Christians. Well, informed Catholics have regarded them as post truth for their entire, and short, existence.
But my friend, who is alway studying what Muslims, Jews, the LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists are doing, doesn't realize that and I should have appreciated that. He frankly just assumes that all Christians have the same view on everything, for the most part, and by extension that the Christians around Donald Trump are all the same, and just like us.
Anyhow, I tried to explain to him how people like Johnson and the group are part of the New Apostolic Reformation and how Doug Wilson figures the nation should be Calvinist.
He clearly doesn't believe that.
And that gets back to this. Amongst those who loyally back Trump are a bunch of people who aren't dumb (there are bunch who are dumb), but almost invincibly ignorant. The really do think Reagan is just like Trump and people are worried about Trump because he's a "conservative". Mike Johnson is just a religious guy. Charlie Kirk just a zealous layman. Doug Wilson just the tweed wearing vicar of some local Protestant church.
It's a view of the world like its portrayed on The Waltons, or if you want it a little racier, Spencer's Mountain.
It's dangerously naive, but nearly impossible to penetrate.
Some ignorance, and I suspect more than a little bit of that here, is wilful. It's an example of the tail wagging the dog in quite a few people. I suspect my friend knows that the Trump administration is a dumpster fire, for example, but he voted for it twice under a sincere conviction that it seeks to advance Christianity against the enemy of secular humanism and Islam. When the war with Iran came he was ecstatic. When Israel was decimating Gaza he was all in on it. Now he's finding that even in his own family people don't hold these views.
Admitting that you're wrong is a hard thing to do. Trump can't do that. Neither can a lot of his backers.
Speaking of ignorance:
That one speaks for itself.
In terms of really bad news, military student Phillips P. O'Brien, who has been warning that rot is setting into the U.S. military, is now at its worse shape since World War Two.
He cannot be discounted.
I noted in my entry yesterday that we haven't seen a sailor's rebellion since the last days of the Vietnam War. As also noted, at that time, the military was in horrible shape. I'd find it hard to believe that we are in worse shape now as opposed to then, frankly, but I am concerned that we're in bad shape. We may be seeing an over bloated military in a state of advanced decay. We're certainly losing the war against Iraq.
I'd note, on this, Trump wouldn't be the only one to blame, along with Hegseth. I would go back to 2013 in regard to the acceleration of the decline in the U.S. Military, when women were first allowed into combat roles (yeah, that again). Barack Obama was President at the time. He also was when transgendered troops were okayed, which was insane. So here we can actually blame Obama for something.
But it isn't that alone. As noted here recently, keeping a bloated, if shrunken, big military after the Cold War was a mistake. That allowed the US to engage in quasi colonial wars, which was a mistake. Rather than fix things, Trump, via Hegseth, has given in fully to a bloated military and, while keeping women in combat roles openly, begun in backdoor sabotage on a cultural basis and started to try to convert it into the New Model Army.
Finally, as predicated, each day brings a flood of new mailers.
Yesterday had its usual crop. Notable amongst them was a Chuck Gray one claiming he kept "men" out of "girls" sports. A very non political female friend of mine had a fit over that as she views female sports as women's sports.
I've received that mailer before. The thing that's really odd about it is that it shows a great big fat dude with facial stubble winning something over female athletes, but the due looks oddly like the cartoon portrayal of J. D. Vance you see around sometimes.
Hmm. . .
In my friends case, her 12 year old daughter picked up the mail and asked "what's that supposed to mean"?
We also received here, on the same day, a large flyer calling Gray "California Chuck Gray" and pointing out that he's from Los Angeles.
Well, fair enough but the artful illustration of him wearing a short brimmed straw Fedora and a Hawaiian shirt, all done electronically I'm sure, was a bit much. I'm sure that he doesn't have either.
Also, it oddly made him look like what Westerners imagine elderly men in Florida to look like.
