This is very good. I was hoping you'd turn your attention to this, applying your particular gifts, and you didn't disappoint.
What really strikes me about this whole production — now that it's over and, with so many Trump events, all the scary predictions and speculations are replaced by the mundane, absurd reality — is how, in another context, it would be sympathetic, or pathetic (in the strict sense; evincing pathos): in the end, after all his "businessman" successes and his television shows and silly merchandising ventures — and the less-visible criminal deals where he operates as he does during the endorsements, showing up at the end and agreeing to grant his imprimatur to some shady or sleazy arrangement — he really has no idea how to "run" anything; how anyone imposes their will or vision onto an enterprise or an institution.
Trump admires dictators, probably because what they do is so clear and transparent: they tell everyone what to do and it gets done, which makes sense to him (and, as a "businessman," he's probably flattered into thinking that that's what's happening in his various ventures; that he's "in charge" and the people around him are enacting his will, as on the TV show).
But as President, he's lost: he governs by rally and by executive order (most of which are dismissed out of hand as either illegal or not having any effect because he's just announcing what he wants rather than going through the channels of control available to the Executive Branch), which is what his supporters like, since they don't understand government either so they love having their guy up there shouting about what should happen.
So when it comes to re-shaping the military, whether it's coming from Hegseth (as you suggest) or from Trump himself, the idea (unlike the Project 2025 material, which was put together by seasoned professionals who know everything there is to know about manipulating the apparatus of Washington) gets expressed this way, because the TV stars (Trump and Hegseth) literally have no conception of any other way to do it.
How do you change the direction of the organization you control? I guess you just gather them all in an auditorium, and stand up in front of them and announce to them how they need to be different. You don't conduct studies; start internal investigations or proposals; audition various projects from teams you put together; request reports from divisions; look back over annual reviews; interview team leaders; etc. You just find a stage, put all the personnel in chairs facing it, get up there, and announce what you want. It's literally all Trump (or Hegseth) are capable of thinking of, since their understanding of the world and how it works is so childish.
"after all his "businessman" successes and his television shows and silly merchandising ventures — and the less-visible criminal deals where he operates as he does during the endorsements, showing up at the end and agreeing to grant his imprimatur to some shady or sleazy arrangement — he really has no idea how to "run" anything; how anyone imposes their will or vision onto an enterprise or an institution. "
He was never a 'great businessman', that was almost entirely created fringe whole cloth by the 'reality' TeeVee show.
It's been calculated that if he'd just taken all the money he was given and inherited by his father and simply stuffed it all into basic market index funds, he'd have ended up orders of magnitude wealthier by 2016, instead of barely ahead of bankruptcy again, and reduced to laundering money for Russian Oligarchs via Deutsch Bank.
Read something today about how overweight—aka fat—was General Knox of George Washington’s senior command and about how General Knox was the military genius whose troops routed the British Redcoats early and decisively during the first year of revolution. Also, Trump, overweight and out of shape, sets the example. Alas, Pete has his cute American flag socks as the only positive takeaway from his Tuesday last gathering.
"American military legends and lore. That’s L-O-R-E. It is lore."
In rehearsals, I bet Trump misread "lore" as "love." So they spelled it out for him on the prompter, and he read the spelling-out bit out loud, the way Poppy Bush read out "Message: I care."
I mean these are not intelligent people and this was just a show of force and the pair of them Cosplaying being military leaders. Honestly I'm rolling my eyes so hard I'm in the middle of last week.
The Air Force Academy is renowned (if that fits) for cranking out dominionist authoritarian bullshitters. So no surprise there. Question is: are they the outlier outfit?
From all accounts, yes. There's a reason James Dobbs put 'Focus on the Family' HQ in Colorado Springs...the place is infested with Christian Nationalist Theocrats. It's why the Military Religious Freedom Foundation arose out of the Air Force Academy...
I think it's the omnipresent view of Cheyenne Mountain over the city that naturally channels you into apocalyptic thinking. (somewhere in my vast collection of photos are some pictures of the view outside the door of the motel room we stayed in there. a huge mountain looming over the city.)
I will admit though, my thoughts ran to "Cool, I'm within a mile of the Stargate!" :-) but then I've pretty much always lived somewhere that would be ground zero in the event of a nuclear war.
(I grew up, and now live again, in Tucson AZ surrounded by a ring of Titan missile silos (now long abandoned), 2 miles north of a SAC Air Force base and Hughes Missile plant (now Raytheon) so one of my childhood memories is the weekly testing of the air raid sirens every Saturday at 1 PM, which continued well into the '70's.
We all pretty much assumed that we MIGHT see the bright flash just before we were all vaporized, so didn't worry about it all that much. No 'duck and cover' drills for us. IN fact, one Saturday afternoon (I was 10 or 11) I was with my parents doing the weekly grocery shopping and they went off; I momentarily forgot it was the test and my first thought was "Oh well crap, there goes my Saturday, now we're all gonna die." )
My dad probly knew those silos – he was an engineer on the team that put those missiles together, and transferred to the inspection-in-situ team that wandered all over the west, just checkin'...
I'd bet a chunk of money Hegseth sold himself to Trump as a Warrior who would remake the military in his image, cartoon soldiers completely loyal to Trump. Its why he hammers his Warrior ethos constantly adressing his troops, its what he has to deliver to Trump, though he has no idea how to implement that kind of fundamental cultural change, let alone in a massive bureaucracy like the US military. Hegseth has no idea how over his head he is.
Trump likely showed up on a whim for a chance to pontificate in front of an unprecedened assemblage of military leadership, and also to push his message that he wants them ready to go into US cities and do something, ideally kick ass and take names, a super-ICE going after protestors and Antifa. If it all sounds a little fuzzy that's because it is.
I don't think Trump has any kind of "plan" for any of this. What he wants is what he always wants, chaos that he instigates for media content to manipulate and promote to his base. Miller, the other agressive showboat, seems fixated on his insane goal of deporting 10 million "illegals", not building a private brownshirt army capable of more than beating up women. They are all obsessed with looking tough, with the emphasis on "looking". The blowing up fishing boats thing is an example of that. It makes no sense other than macho posturing, it serves no imaginable agenda.
The embrace of the fascist/Nazi labels has led people to think the logical endpoint is a ruthless totalitarian machine, but I don't see it taking shape. The harassment by ICE is brutal and pathetic at the same time. They are content to play to their base and no one else, the tariffs and ICE harassment are planting economic land mines, as is the Big Beautiful thing. None of this looks like a plan to establish dictatorial control. A lot of damage, pain, and eventually death, but no control.
I think it's possible that enough of the gunfondling righties get no information into their skulls that is not approved by the King-in-waiting that, summoning their righteousness, they'll try to carry this thing over the f̶i̶n̶i̶s̶h̶ fascist line.
Well the 'urban' will really fuck their shit up, for one, honestly without even trying all that hard. It's amazing how defensible chokepoints like freeway exits,, bridges and tunnels are. I remember the Great DC Invasion by the 'Patriot Convoys' were defeated by [checks notes] 'normal rush hour traffic' :-)
Ahhh fun... Everyone defending the generals who didn't have the sack to tell Niger to pound sand and allow our boys to have proper ISR. The same generals who perpetuated the wars in the middle east and didnt sack up on the ROE changes that got our boys killed in the middle east. The same generals who pushed our military futher east since the 90s. The same generals who continue to purchase aircraft and ships at an immense expense to our tax payer and detriment to our foot soldier. The same generals who line their pockets after their retirements with DOD contracts that don't help the foot soldier. The same generals who continue to pass more and more "risk management" doctrine instead of allowing the military to train. The same generals who preached Chesty Pully, and Smedly Butler but never read a word that they wrote. The same generals who sent Chapman onto that hilltop on tora bora after the men on the ground said it wasn't necessary. Dont worry that medal of honor brought him back to life.
Having all 800 show up and nothing around the world change really shows you how useless they are. The military is fat and out of shape. The military is not properly trained. The military is not ready for a conventional or unconventional fight. The military is a paper tiger and it is the fault of these generals. Stop defending them. They have gotten our country 38 trillion dollars in debt along with every administration since who knows when. These generals are the ones who will send their solider to fight the american people. Its the solider that will end up stopping them.
Every administration is the fight of the people and these generals are just as guilty for the current state of affairs as all the administration's that came before them.
This is very good. I was hoping you'd turn your attention to this, applying your particular gifts, and you didn't disappoint.
What really strikes me about this whole production — now that it's over and, with so many Trump events, all the scary predictions and speculations are replaced by the mundane, absurd reality — is how, in another context, it would be sympathetic, or pathetic (in the strict sense; evincing pathos): in the end, after all his "businessman" successes and his television shows and silly merchandising ventures — and the less-visible criminal deals where he operates as he does during the endorsements, showing up at the end and agreeing to grant his imprimatur to some shady or sleazy arrangement — he really has no idea how to "run" anything; how anyone imposes their will or vision onto an enterprise or an institution.
Trump admires dictators, probably because what they do is so clear and transparent: they tell everyone what to do and it gets done, which makes sense to him (and, as a "businessman," he's probably flattered into thinking that that's what's happening in his various ventures; that he's "in charge" and the people around him are enacting his will, as on the TV show).
But as President, he's lost: he governs by rally and by executive order (most of which are dismissed out of hand as either illegal or not having any effect because he's just announcing what he wants rather than going through the channels of control available to the Executive Branch), which is what his supporters like, since they don't understand government either so they love having their guy up there shouting about what should happen.
So when it comes to re-shaping the military, whether it's coming from Hegseth (as you suggest) or from Trump himself, the idea (unlike the Project 2025 material, which was put together by seasoned professionals who know everything there is to know about manipulating the apparatus of Washington) gets expressed this way, because the TV stars (Trump and Hegseth) literally have no conception of any other way to do it.
How do you change the direction of the organization you control? I guess you just gather them all in an auditorium, and stand up in front of them and announce to them how they need to be different. You don't conduct studies; start internal investigations or proposals; audition various projects from teams you put together; request reports from divisions; look back over annual reviews; interview team leaders; etc. You just find a stage, put all the personnel in chairs facing it, get up there, and announce what you want. It's literally all Trump (or Hegseth) are capable of thinking of, since their understanding of the world and how it works is so childish.
"after all his "businessman" successes and his television shows and silly merchandising ventures — and the less-visible criminal deals where he operates as he does during the endorsements, showing up at the end and agreeing to grant his imprimatur to some shady or sleazy arrangement — he really has no idea how to "run" anything; how anyone imposes their will or vision onto an enterprise or an institution. "
He was never a 'great businessman', that was almost entirely created fringe whole cloth by the 'reality' TeeVee show.
It's been calculated that if he'd just taken all the money he was given and inherited by his father and simply stuffed it all into basic market index funds, he'd have ended up orders of magnitude wealthier by 2016, instead of barely ahead of bankruptcy again, and reduced to laundering money for Russian Oligarchs via Deutsch Bank.
It was ALWAYS cosplay for him.
Well, at least they had New Pornogrphers
Read something today about how overweight—aka fat—was General Knox of George Washington’s senior command and about how General Knox was the military genius whose troops routed the British Redcoats early and decisively during the first year of revolution. Also, Trump, overweight and out of shape, sets the example. Alas, Pete has his cute American flag socks as the only positive takeaway from his Tuesday last gathering.
Per this National Park Service blurb General Henry Knox topped the scale at 280 lbs.
https://www.nps.gov/fost/blogs/weight-of-a-war-or-the-big-men-of-the-continental-army.htm
"American military legends and lore. That’s L-O-R-E. It is lore."
In rehearsals, I bet Trump misread "lore" as "love." So they spelled it out for him on the prompter, and he read the spelling-out bit out loud, the way Poppy Bush read out "Message: I care."
I mean these are not intelligent people and this was just a show of force and the pair of them Cosplaying being military leaders. Honestly I'm rolling my eyes so hard I'm in the middle of last week.
Priceless title/subtitle. As a one time middle school teacher this one hit home.
Always.
The Air Force Academy is renowned (if that fits) for cranking out dominionist authoritarian bullshitters. So no surprise there. Question is: are they the outlier outfit?
From all accounts, yes. There's a reason James Dobbs put 'Focus on the Family' HQ in Colorado Springs...the place is infested with Christian Nationalist Theocrats. It's why the Military Religious Freedom Foundation arose out of the Air Force Academy...
I think it's the omnipresent view of Cheyenne Mountain over the city that naturally channels you into apocalyptic thinking. (somewhere in my vast collection of photos are some pictures of the view outside the door of the motel room we stayed in there. a huge mountain looming over the city.)
I will admit though, my thoughts ran to "Cool, I'm within a mile of the Stargate!" :-) but then I've pretty much always lived somewhere that would be ground zero in the event of a nuclear war.
(I grew up, and now live again, in Tucson AZ surrounded by a ring of Titan missile silos (now long abandoned), 2 miles north of a SAC Air Force base and Hughes Missile plant (now Raytheon) so one of my childhood memories is the weekly testing of the air raid sirens every Saturday at 1 PM, which continued well into the '70's.
We all pretty much assumed that we MIGHT see the bright flash just before we were all vaporized, so didn't worry about it all that much. No 'duck and cover' drills for us. IN fact, one Saturday afternoon (I was 10 or 11) I was with my parents doing the weekly grocery shopping and they went off; I momentarily forgot it was the test and my first thought was "Oh well crap, there goes my Saturday, now we're all gonna die." )
My dad probly knew those silos – he was an engineer on the team that put those missiles together, and transferred to the inspection-in-situ team that wandered all over the west, just checkin'...
One's been turned into a museum https://titanmissilemuseum.org/ part of the Pima Air and Space Museum. I don't remember what happened to the others.
I'd bet a chunk of money Hegseth sold himself to Trump as a Warrior who would remake the military in his image, cartoon soldiers completely loyal to Trump. Its why he hammers his Warrior ethos constantly adressing his troops, its what he has to deliver to Trump, though he has no idea how to implement that kind of fundamental cultural change, let alone in a massive bureaucracy like the US military. Hegseth has no idea how over his head he is.
Trump likely showed up on a whim for a chance to pontificate in front of an unprecedened assemblage of military leadership, and also to push his message that he wants them ready to go into US cities and do something, ideally kick ass and take names, a super-ICE going after protestors and Antifa. If it all sounds a little fuzzy that's because it is.
I don't think Trump has any kind of "plan" for any of this. What he wants is what he always wants, chaos that he instigates for media content to manipulate and promote to his base. Miller, the other agressive showboat, seems fixated on his insane goal of deporting 10 million "illegals", not building a private brownshirt army capable of more than beating up women. They are all obsessed with looking tough, with the emphasis on "looking". The blowing up fishing boats thing is an example of that. It makes no sense other than macho posturing, it serves no imaginable agenda.
The embrace of the fascist/Nazi labels has led people to think the logical endpoint is a ruthless totalitarian machine, but I don't see it taking shape. The harassment by ICE is brutal and pathetic at the same time. They are content to play to their base and no one else, the tariffs and ICE harassment are planting economic land mines, as is the Big Beautiful thing. None of this looks like a plan to establish dictatorial control. A lot of damage, pain, and eventually death, but no control.
I think it's possible that enough of the gunfondling righties get no information into their skulls that is not approved by the King-in-waiting that, summoning their righteousness, they'll try to carry this thing over the f̶i̶n̶i̶s̶h̶ fascist line.
"I think it's possible that enough of the gunfondling righties get no information into their skulls that is not approved by the King-in-waiting"
If you're mean Rupert Murdoch, this is true.
*you mean
The dream was that
1) society collapses due to "urban food riots"
2) urban food rioters head for the suburbs after stripping the bodegas bare
3) Heroic suburban warriors exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, protecting their wimmenfolk and MRE stash
Changing this to
1) Trump issues call for all patriots to go kill liberals
2) heroic suburban warriors drive to the urban and start shooting
I see a few problems with this new story.
Well the 'urban' will really fuck their shit up, for one, honestly without even trying all that hard. It's amazing how defensible chokepoints like freeway exits,, bridges and tunnels are. I remember the Great DC Invasion by the 'Patriot Convoys' were defeated by [checks notes] 'normal rush hour traffic' :-)
It is the 'Cosplay Administration'.
Ahhh fun... Everyone defending the generals who didn't have the sack to tell Niger to pound sand and allow our boys to have proper ISR. The same generals who perpetuated the wars in the middle east and didnt sack up on the ROE changes that got our boys killed in the middle east. The same generals who pushed our military futher east since the 90s. The same generals who continue to purchase aircraft and ships at an immense expense to our tax payer and detriment to our foot soldier. The same generals who line their pockets after their retirements with DOD contracts that don't help the foot soldier. The same generals who continue to pass more and more "risk management" doctrine instead of allowing the military to train. The same generals who preached Chesty Pully, and Smedly Butler but never read a word that they wrote. The same generals who sent Chapman onto that hilltop on tora bora after the men on the ground said it wasn't necessary. Dont worry that medal of honor brought him back to life.
Having all 800 show up and nothing around the world change really shows you how useless they are. The military is fat and out of shape. The military is not properly trained. The military is not ready for a conventional or unconventional fight. The military is a paper tiger and it is the fault of these generals. Stop defending them. They have gotten our country 38 trillion dollars in debt along with every administration since who knows when. These generals are the ones who will send their solider to fight the american people. Its the solider that will end up stopping them.
Every administration is the fight of the people and these generals are just as guilty for the current state of affairs as all the administration's that came before them.