Trump is so obviously incompetent and so blatantly evil that there remain only two types of people who support him: The truly ignorant and the wildly malevolent.

Trump doesn’t even bother to hide his shortcomings. He knows his followers have lost any capacity for honest evaluation, and now simply float along with him, in a foggy daze of acceptance.

Whatever stupidity, whatever incompetence, whatever failure, whatever crime he commits, the ignorant and malevolent simply shrug and say, “That’ s just Trump being Trump.”

And in that, they are correct. Incompetence and criminality are exactly “Trump being Trump.”

Today, we bring you an excellent post from the generally excellent economist Paul Krugman.

He explains how loser Trump and his band of losers lost the war, don’t understand or admit that they lost the war, don’t even care that they lost the war, and in losing, will forever claim they won.

Hmmm . . . sounds something like the 2020 election, doesn’t it?

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The Putinization of the American Military

When poseurs and yes-men run a war

Paul Krugman Jul 28

 

Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable.

The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.

But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.

Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.

But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.

So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates.

Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.

No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened.

Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.

For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:

The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that;

· Munitions aren’t depleted

· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail

· It’s Joe Biden’s fault

Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.

How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?

First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win.

Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.

Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.

And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz.

The conduct of the Iran war has also been highly Putinesque.

There have been many reports that Russia’s disaster in Ukraine partly reflects the fact that Russian generals are afraid to tell Putin how the war is really going. Sure enough, the British newspaper The Telegraph reports on rumors that “the Pentagon” — presumably meaning Hegseth — has until recently been hiding the extent of the munitions shortfall from the White House. 

And it quotes insiders saying that Hegseth himself may not know what’s happening, because his policy of purging officers he doesn’t like has created a “culture of silence” in which people are “very loath to bring bad news to Pete.”

Indeed, a New York Times report recounts how Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti as head of the Navy, replacing her with Daryl Caudle, who was not on the short list of officers recommended by senior Navy officials. But Caudle had the qualifications that Hegseth wanted: he signaled his lack of integrity and unfitness for command by supporting Hegseth’s attack on highly qualified female officers and hiring a MAGA insider.

I should add that Hegseth has been an equal-opportunity destroyer of the best and brightest in the U.S. military. In April he shocked and disgusted the military brass by summarily firing General Randy George, who was at the forefront of modernizing the military and learning from Ukraine’s brilliant use of inexpensive drones.

Simply put, we defeated ourselves.

I’ll interrupt to say that there is no “We” in these defeats. “Americans” did no lose. American soldiers did not lose. Unamericans lost. Traitors lost. The ignorant and the malevolent among us lost. Sadly, we who did not lose, now will bear the cost and shame of their loss.

The draft dodger loser with the fake heel spurs lost as he has lost so often in his life, and this time he doesn’t have his daddy to save him from himself.

True, this war was never winnable, and perhaps we should be thankful that U.S. defeat became obvious before Trump committed ground troops and needlessly sacrificed thousands of American lives.

But we should also consider that this defeat shows how deeply and pervasively Trump and Hegseth have crippled the U.S. military.

Their incompetence, corruption and irresponsibility have weakened us with incredible speed. And it will take many years for America to recover, if it ever does.

And now I leave the rebuttal to the MAGA ignorant and malevolent, who:

1. Will refuse to read Krugman’s comments or
2. Will read them and not understand them or
3. Will understand them, but will not care and
4. Will claim victory, and while so claiming, also will claim the loss was because of Democrats
5. Will continue to claim the pool was damaged by vandals, Trump won the 2020 election, and he hardly knows the woman.

As Trump famously said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Even he is aware of the depths of the MAGA ignorance and malevolence. In fact, he counts on it.

Today, Vladimir Putin is smiling. He always has supported Trump, and you can see why.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Have you heard the great news? Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services is personally supervising Trump’s health care.

History is filled with massacres that became infamous because of their scale, brutality, or historical impact. Here are some of the best-known.

Keep in mind that all the following were committed by otherwise “normal” human beings, many of whom were nice, honest, church-going, just like your friends, neighbors, and relatives. They weren’t brought up as monsters but became monsters as their leadership ordered.

In short, there is some bad in most of us, or at least many of us, waiting to be uncorked by an evil leader.

• Nanjing Massacre (1937)– Often called the “Rape of Nanking.” During the Imperial Japanese Army occupation of the Chinese capital, an estimated 100,000–300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed. Widespread rape and torture accompanied the killings.
• Katyn Forest (1940) – The Soviet NKVD executed about 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals. The Soviet government denied responsibility for decades.
• Babi Yar (1941) – Over two days, Nazi Einsatzgruppen, aided by collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews outside Kyiv. Tens of thousands more were later killed at the same site.
• Oradour-sur-Glane (1944) – German SS troops killed 643 villagers, including women and children, and burned the village. The ruins remain preserved.
• Lidice (1942) – After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis destroyed the village of Lidice, executing the men, deporting the women, and killing or dispersing the children.
• My Lai (1968) – U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. It became one of the defining atrocities of the Vietnam War.
• Srebrenica (1995) – Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. International courts later ruled it a genocide.
• Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) – U.S. Army troops killed an estimated 250–300 Lakota, many of them women and children.
• Sand Creek Massacre (1864) – Colorado militia attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment, killing about 150–200 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly.
• Kigali Genocide  (1994) – During the Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi, were murdered in roughly 100 days.
• Auschwitz II-Birkenau – The Holocaust involved the murder of about six million Jews, along with millions of other victims, across occupied Europe.
• Choeung Ek Genocide – Under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979), approximately 1.5–2 million Cambodians died through execution, starvation, and forced labor.

Some nations initially denied these horrors existed, but later recanted and apologized, though apologies do not save the victims.

America likes to portray itself as the “shining city on a hill,” a beacon of compassion and morality. We even have it engraved on our Statue of Liberty:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

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There are those who heard about “The Rape of Nanking,” and shrugged. “Just a bunch of Chinese.” And the killing of Polish people was ” just a bunch of Poles.” The Jews were “just Jews.” The Indians were “just Indians.” The Cambodians were “just Cambodians.” The Vietnamese were “just Vietnamese.”

And now, the destroyed lives are “just immigrants,” and illegal immigrants at that. Not criminals. Just immigrants.

Frankly, I shrugged at a couple of those, too. Cambodians? I’d seldom heard about Cambodia, much less knowing any Cambodians.

But what’s now happening in America is too close to home for me to shrug. This is my country that is committing such horror upon real families, a couple of whom I know.

David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, analyzed nonpublic data from ICE leaked to Cato, and he found that among those with criminal convictions detained by ICE, only 8% were convicted of violent or property crimes (about 5% were violent criminal convictions).

“And that includes very minor assaults. I mean, not like rape and murder,” Bier said in a radio interview with KPFA on Jan. 22. “These are someone had an altercation at a bar or things like that, not serious violent criminals who committed murder and rape.”

Contrary to administration rhetoric about targeting the worst of the worst, Bier described the arrests under Trump as “indiscriminate.”

“They have removed the prioritization that was in place under the Biden administration to go after those violent criminals that they’re highlighting,” Bier said. “They got rid of that policy and replaced it on Day One with a policy of arresting people who are the most convenient to arrest.”

Cato’s findings were corroborated by a New York Times analysis of ICE data obtained through the Deportation Data Project. Between the period of Jan. 20 and Oct. 15, the Times found that nationwide, 37% of those arrested in ICE operations had any past criminal conviction. Just 7% had a violent conviction. Another 30% had pending criminal charges, and 33% had no criminal charges.

The disparity was even wider in cities and states that have been targeted for enhanced immigration enforcement. In the four areas analyzed — Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and Illinois, the majority of those swept up by ICE had no criminal record (convictions or even pending charges). 

The New York Times analysis noted that while only a fraction of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, “The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.”

Hundreds of thousands of good, valuable, honest families have been destroyed for the “crime” of wanting to work for a better life for themselves and their families.

They generally were not looking for a handout. In fact, they didn’t even qualify for Social Security or Medicare, although they paid the taxes for these programs. 

You may know some of these people. They sweat in the fields picking your vegetables; they clean your house and your office; they bus your table and empty your trash. They taxi you. Some of them have lived here for many years, building good lives. Some even started businesses that might have hired you or someone you know.

And now their lives are broken, their children have lost futures. We have lost good people. And we shrug and turn away, or worse. “Serves them right for being illegal,” as though it were even possible for a poor brown-skinned or black-skinned or Muslim to gain citizenship in this new America of hatred.

We turn away because Trump, the convicted sexual abuser, claims they are “rapists.” We turn away because a hatemonger has aroused in us the latent hatred of those who are different from us, whether they be not Christian, not white, not rich, or not born here. (By the slimmest of a Supreme Court’s decision, Trump failed to punish those born here.)

We lost the compassion and decency that made us so proud to say, “I am an American.”

Those who submit to hatemongering (which really is fearmongering) are the morally weakest among us, who defend their lack of integrity with a veneer of church attendance and biblical preaching.

Hatemongers come and go, along with their weak-minded followers. Then the silent moral may begin to make their voices heard, and our nation might return to civilization. 

Trump may go. MAGAs may go. They may deny “really” believing anything Trump has said. They even may deny voting for him or speaking for him, though I know some who will retain the anger they felt at me because I spoke against Trump.

I have lost friends for reminding them about the truths they wish to deny and/or forget. But I simply couldn’t shrug. I just couldn’t.

And history will be written and rewritten. We vaguely may remember My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, the mass deportation of immigrants or the murders of Americans by I.C.E. and the Republican Party.

But will we ever regain our compassion, our honor, our common sense, our decency, our own morals and our moral standing in the world? 

It’s hard to say what a people will do after they have supported a low-intelligence, indecent, compulsively lying, psychopathic, often convicted felon, who has led them into hell. I can’t predict.

Trump himself has said he could shoot someone in the street and not lose any followers. Is he right?

The next few weeks will begin to tell us who America and we Americans really are.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

 

Economics, at its best, looks past labels and asks what actually happens: what causes what, which assumptions are being smuggled in, and whether a model describes reality or merely rearranges its own premises.

Terms like “bonds,” “notes,” “bills,” and “borrowing” mean something entirely different when applied to the private sector vs. a Monetarily Sovereign government. That this is not well understood by the public or even by economists is one of the great failings of that would-be science.

In science, calling something “entanglement,” “gravity,” or “consciousness” does not tell us what it is. It only tells us what category we have placed it in.

Everything we learn, we learn by analogy. Visualize an atom. You see something that’s like a miniature solar system. Visualize magnetism. You visualize something pulling on something, like a rubber band. And space-time is like a rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle. Those are your analogies for learning, but they are wrong.

An atom is not a bunch of point particles circling a nucleus like a solar system, nor does magnetism attract. It is more like a grid with numbers at each crossing, telling the grid what to do. Except, it’s not like that either.

Mathematics may be the greatest analogy ever invented. It gives us structures that can match observed behavior with astonishing precision. But a successful mathematical description is not necessarily reality itself.

It may be more like a map that predicts every turn while remaining silent about what the landscape actually is. Nature does not follow equations. Nature behaves. We invent equations that imitate that behavior.

The danger comes when prediction is mistaken for explanation. If an equation tells us exactly what entangled particles will do, physics may congratulate itself for having solved the problem. Yet the equation still may not tell us why entanglement exists, what physical reality produces it, or what the equations are equations of.

The oft-quoted term, “Shut up and calculate,” meaning “don’t worry about ‘why’ or even ‘how’; just determine ‘what’,” may be useful advice for getting results, but it becomes destructive when it is treated as the limit of legitimate curiosity.

Suppose we could perceive spacetime and gravity directly. Would spacetime appear smooth, granular, turbulent, knotted, flashing, layered, or alive with patterns invisible to us? Would gravity behave differently within an atom than between stars? Would it fragment near concentrations of energy? Would it respond to stimuli?

These questions sound speculative only because our present language and senses are so limited. They are attempts to imagine the hidden reality beneath our mathematical summaries.

The hardest question in physics is not “what?” or “how?” but “why?” Even discovering what spacetime looks like would not answer why it looks that way. If it consists of microscopic knots, why knots? If the knots minimize energy, why that form of energy? If some deeper field produces spacetime, why does that field exist and behave as it does?

Every answer generates another meaningful “why.” Knowledge may not be a mine with a bottom. It may be an endlessly branching structure in which every explanation becomes the premise of a deeper “why?” question.

This suggests a boundary more profound than ordinary ignorance. There are things we do not know but could learn. There also may be things our minds are not built to understand.

A dog cannot understand calculus, not because nobody has explained it clearly enough, but because the dog lacks the mental architecture in which calculus could exist. Human beings may stand in the same relationship to some aspects of reality.

Entanglement may be our first clear encounter with that possibility. We know what it does with extraordinary precision. We can calculate correlations and verify them experimentally. But every familiar analogy fails. No picture drawn from ordinary space, objects, signals, or causes seems capable of containing the phenomenon without distortion.

Perhaps entanglement is not merely difficult. Perhaps it lies beyond the range of concepts the human brain evolved to represent.

I wrote a short story titled, “The Meaning of Awareness,” that turns on one’s ability to visualize the phrase. “I know that you know.” Then, another level, “I know that you know that I know.” Then another level, “I know, that you know, that I know, that you know.”

The challenge was for the narrator to see how many levels he could visualize.

In the climactic paragraph, he says:

“Then in one all-consuming burst, I discard my fear, and organizing my structure, I exert my every mental effort. “I know, that you know, that I know, that you know, that I know, that you know . . .” Yes. There. I saw it. Only for a second, but I did see it. From here I see infinity. Triumph. I have attained level six. Yet in my triumph I feel despair, for I see now that I never shall understand level seven. It is beyond my aptitude.”

And then, a voice says,

“Then know this: There are those who have achieved level one hundred.”

“No,” I cry. “That cannot be. One hundred. What glories can such incredible creatures know? What is their universe?”

“They know beyond an infinity of infinities. They see all the multitude of dimensions. They visualize this cosmos and all the others beside it. They understand time before the beginning and time after the end.”

The human mind has limits It eventually loses its ability to hold the nested structure as a whole. The protagonist barely and briefly manages six levels, then learns that another entity can visualize one hundred. His limitation does not doom him to stupidity. It dooms him to ignorance. It dooms him to being human.

If an artificial intelligence can visualize, one eventually might visualize a thousand levels. We cannot imagine what knowing this would be like.

Mathematics has no such difficulty visualizing. A formula can represent one hundred, one thousand, or a million recursive levels with ease. The structure can be defined perfectly even though no human ever can visualize it. This separates mathematical description from human understanding.

Mathematics may continue far beyond the point at which intuition collapses. We may know that something exists, prove how it behaves, and still remain unable to conceive what that existence is like.

The same may be true of dimensions, infinities, and the ultimate structure of reality. Georg Cantor showed that infinity is not a single final vastness. There are larger infinities beyond smaller ones, and infinitely larger ones beyond those.

The unknown may possess a similar architecture. There may be an infinite universe of questions within human conceptual reach and an even larger infinity beyond it—followed by an infinite succession of still greater conceptual worlds.

Other creatures in the universe may be greater than we are. A different biological intelligence, or perhaps a future artificial intelligence, might hold structures that collapse inside a human mind.

Such a being would not merely calculate faster or remember more facts. It might perceive relationships that do not exist for us as conceivable objects. What we call paradox might appear to it as plainly as a circle appears to us.

But even that intelligence may encounter its own wall. Beyond its “hundred levels” may lie an entity capable of ten thousand. Beyond every conceptual horizon may be another horizon inaccessible to the mind below it.

Intelligence, then, would not be a division between those who understand and those who do not. It would be an endless hierarchy of what each kind of mind is capable of understanding.

Once you stop being able to answer, or even ask, the next meaningful “why,” you have reached the boundary of your conceptual world. The universe may continue beyond it, but your understanding does not. That boundary is not the edge of reality. It is only the edge of the mind doing the asking.

There may be an entire universe on the other side of the “WHY?” wall, and we are not yet tall enough to see over it. Mathematics may tell us that the universe is there. It may describe its outlines and predict its effects. But description is not vision, calculation is not comprehension, and “what” is not “why.”

The haunting possibility is not merely that there are truths we do not yet know. It is that there may be truths which are perfectly coherent, perfectly lawful, and perfectly describable, but which no human mind ever can understand.

We cannot imagine what we cannot imagine.

Rodger Malcolm  Mitchell