Let’s begin with a reminder:

Alan Greenspan, Former Federal Reserve Chairman: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”

Ben Bernanke, Former Federal Reserve Chairman: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. It’s not tax money… We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account.”

Beardsley Ruml, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York . “The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government. All federal taxes must meet the test of public policy and practical effect. The public purpose which is served should never be obscured in a tax program under the mask of raising revenue.”

Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell: “As a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally.”: There’s an infinite amount of cash in the Federal Reserve. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure there’s enough cash in the banking system.” 60 Minutes in March 2020

Statement from the St. Louis Fed: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.”

Paul O’Neill, “I come to you as a managing trustee of Social Security. Today we have no assets in the trust fund. We have promises of the good faith and credit of the United States government that benefits will flow.”

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize–winning economist: “The U.S. government is not like a household. It literally prints money, and it can’t run out.” “The government can always finance its spending by creating money.”

Eric Tymoigne (Economist) “A sovereign government does not need to collect taxes or issue bonds to finance spending. It finances directly through money creation.”

Now, you would have to say that these are pretty impressive guys, who know what they are talking about when it comes to money. And they all say the same thing:

The federal government doesn’t need your money, can’t run out of money, and has no reason to cut or to tax Socials Security or Medicare benefits.

Even if the federal government didn’t collect a dime in taxes, it could continue spending — at double the rate, triple the rate –forever. Federal taxes do not fund federal spending. Period.

Why does the government levy taxes if it doesn’t need or even use tax dollars for anything?

1. To control the economy by taxing what it wants to discourage (cigarettes, liquor, etc.) and by giving tax breaks to what it wants to reward (charities, renewable energy, rich people). Yes, that last one — reward rich people — is one unstated goal of the federal government. Why? Because rich people bribe Congress and the President.
2. To assure demand for the U.S. dollar by requiring taxes be paid in dollars.

And that’s it. The Monetarily Sovereign federal government DOES NOT collect or use tax dollars for funding. (Monetarily NON-sovereign state and local governments DO use tax dollars for funding. See the difference?)

Those are the facts. So why the following article?

THURSDAY, JULY 30, 2026
Federal aid for Medicare prescription costs to end
By Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson
The New York Times

The Trump administration said this week that it intended to end a Biden-era program that for the past two years has helped tamp down the cost of monthly premiums for drug coverage for people on Medicare.

Why? Think about it. Why is the government doing this?

The decision means that millions of Americans 65 and older could face higher Medicare drug premiums next year, when the cost of living is already a major concern. That could be politically damaging for Republicans in the midterm elections.

In the weeks leading up to November, Medicare beneficiaries could experience sticker shock while shopping for next year’s drug plan.

For 2025 and 2026, the federal government gave health insurers billions of dollars in subsidies to help them keep down drug premiums for people on Medicare. Without the subsidies, millions of people could have had to pay hundreds of dollars more a year for their drug plans.

So why is the government cutting benefits?

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said in a social media post Tuesday that the subsidies had been ended because the insurers no longer needed them.

He said every Medicare beneficiary would still have options for low-cost plans.

It’s not the insurers, Dr. Oz, it’s the people who have to pay the premiums. Oz is saying they no longer “need” lower healthcare costs!

And those so-called “low-cost plans” that Oz suggests have big deductibles. They are “low cost” because they are low pay.

But it is not clear yet how many people may have to pay more. CMS said it expected to make public the monthly premiums for individual plans in September.

About 25 million Americans have stand-alone plans for so-called Part D drug coverage under traditional Medicare. The premiums they pay are $36 a month on average, said KFF, a nonprofit health research group.

An additional 31 million beneficiaries get drug coverage through Medicare Advantage, a private-sector option for those 65 and older.

They should call it “Medicare Disadvantage,” because if you need surgery, you must receive prior approval. That’s when a pimple-faced kid behind a computer, somewhere in a distant city, decides whether you really need the surgery, despite what your doctor says–and the kid’s boss is financially motivated to say, “No.”

Anyone wonder how that turns out? 

The entire program is a scam operation that benefits insurance companies, and pays for some nickel and dime stuff, so you won’t complain when they refuse to pay a $50,000 hospital bill for a surgery your doctor said you needed to survive.

Again, why is the Federal government cutting benefits when it has infinite dollars to pay for benefits?

The reason: To widen the Gap.

The Gap is the financial difference between the rich and the rest. “Rich” is a comparison.  The wider the Gap, the richer are the rich. 

Question; If you have $100,000 are you rich?

Answer: Yes, if everyone else has $25,000. No, if everyone else has $350,000. The wider the Gap the richer you are.

So the rich, who always want to be even richer, get richer by widening the Gap. There are two ways they widen the Gap

1. Get more for themselves with those tax breaks we mentioned earlier, and
2. Make sure you get less, by bribing Congress and the President to make sure you get less.

Actually, they bribe not only Congress and the President, but also the media (via advertising dollars and ownership) and the economists (via university endowments and promises of lucrative jobs with think tanks).

So, you have all those information sources telling you that the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” (which are not trust funds) are running short of dollars (which Congress controls), so benefits will have to be cut and/or taxes increased, and it’s all 100% bullshit.

(Have you noticed that when the government needs more money for the military or tax breaks for the rich, somehow the money appears?)

If the government wished, it could press a few computer keys, and suddenly, the FICA tax (which doesn’t affect the rich) could be eliminated, and your SS benefits could be doubled or tripled (which wouldn’t help the rich), and Medicare could cover every man, woman, and child in America (which the rich don’t want because that would narrow the Gap).

So long as you remain ignorant and/or lethargic, the rich can continue the scam, that lets them grow richer while you struggle.

Oh, and I would remiss if I didn’t mention the phony “federal debt” which IS NOT DEBT. It’s bank deposits.

No one lends dollars to a government that has the infinite ability to create dollars. Those T-bills, T-notes and T-bonds are bank deposits identical to the deposits you make into your bank savings and checking accounts. 

Here are some estimates from the last couple of years

Bank	Approximate Deposits
JPMorgan Chase	$2.6–2.8 trillion
Bank of America	$1.9–2.0 trillion
Wells Fargo	$1.3–1.4 trillion
Citibank (part of Citigroup)	$1.3–1.4 trillion
U.S. Bank	$500–550 billion
PNC Bank	$430–500 billion

Do you hear people screaming that all our biggest banks are “in debt.” No, because that would be misleading. But to say the government is “in debt” is even more misleading because the government never can run short of dollars.

Remember this: A T-bill is just a dollar bill that pays interest and has a maturity date. As financial obligations, T-bills and dollar bills are the same. 

A government having the infinite ability to create and issue T-bills also has the infinite ability to create and issue dollar bills.

Let’s get even mor into reality. The Democrats supposedly are “for” the average -to-lower part of the financial scale, while the Republicans favor the rich.

But the Democrats may be the dumbest politicians in American history. Given Trump’s obvious lack of honesty, character, ability and truthfulness, and the Republican Party’s obsequence to that criminal, the upcoming election should be a tidal wave for the Democrats.

But in their unrelenting desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the Democrats now have decided to split into “Democratic Socialists,” liberals, and God know what else, thus assuring that the voting public will be too confused to know what the hell Democrats stand for.

So, what should be a “blue wave” is now in doubt, while the Republicans remain solidly in favor of the 1% who are very rich — and this stupidity is exactly how the 1% retains its rule over the 99%. (Hello Chainsaw Elon Musk and your fellow plutocrats.)

Does concentrated wealth use its available power to preserve and enlarge concentrated wealth? On that, the evidence is hardly mysterious. Research has found that economic elites and business interest groups have substantial independent effects on U.S. policy, while average citizens have little or no independent influence.

Corporate lobbying is associated with lower subsequent effective tax rates, political contributions affect corporate tax treatment, and even corporate charitable giving can be directed toward districts of strategically useful members of Congress.

Meanwhile, the outcome moves in the predicted direction. From 1989 to 2022, the wealth share of the top 1% rose from 23% to 27%, while the bottom half held only 6% in 2022.

When the same class repeatedly funds the politicians, lobbyists, think tanks, media messaging, and academic frameworks that produce policies favorable to that class, “perhaps they simply don’t understand” stops being the leading explanation.

The rich believe it, and I am starting to be swayed. The great unwashed really may be stupid and so deserve to be poor. How else to explain why any of these — black, brown, yellow, red, non-Christian, immigrant, compassionate, honest, fair-minded, female, elderly, not rich, retired, pregnant, ill, gay, or student — would support the party that despises everyone who is not a Rich, White, Christian Nationalist?

If you are not a RWCN, and you still plan to vote Republican, or if you are too lazy to write at least 100 letters and make at least 100 phone calls to your political representatives, then you do indeed deserve the fate they have in store for you.

However, if you plan to get off your duff and work for your own, and your family’s good, rather than waiting for someone else to do it, tell everyone you know just three little things.

1. The federal government never can run short of dollars to support bigger Social Security, Medicare, education, tax cuts and benefits for the 99% — and do it for everyone in America without collecting taxes.
2. Federal finances are not like personal finances, and federal “debt” is not debt, and federal spending actually cures inflation if the spending eases shortages of crucial goods and services.
3. That the unlimited ability of the rich to bribe politicians, the media and economists is criminal and should be made criminal again, as it once was before the Supreme Court ruled that bribery is OK.

Oh, and that reminds me. The Supreme Court has proved it cannot be trusted to police itself, so there should be term limits — say ten years — on every appointment. Those bribe-taking, amoral politicians in black robes need to be controlled.

As my mother used to say, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”  I’ll amend that: If you don’t demand, you don’t get.

It’s time to wise up and start demanding.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

 

 

Analogies, patterns, and relationships are three views of the same underlying phenomenon.

A relationship says that two or more things are connected in some way.
A pattern is a network of relationships that is sufficiently coherent to be recognized as a whole.
An analogy is the recognition that two different patterns share the same relationships.

In an earlier post, “Is there a limit to what we can understand?” we discussed a simple analogy: As a dog never will understand calculus, humans never will understand the universe.

Not that calculus is mystical or unknowable, but rather that a dog’s brain never evolved the conceptual machinery required to represent calculus. No amount of sniffing, barking, or loyalty will bridge that gap. Calculus simply does not exist within the dog’s cognitive architecture.

In that post, we said:

“Quantum 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.

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

There is no reason to believe that the human brain represents the ultimate stage of intelligence. Evolution equips organisms to survive, not to comprehend every aspect of reality. Just as there are ideas forever inaccessible to a dog, there may be an entire universe forever beyond the conceptual reach of human beings.

I’ve been trying to imagine what could that unknowable universe be? The question is almost circular. How can I imagine something that I cannot imagine? If an idea lies outside my cognitive architecture, Can I visualize what it would be like.

Then it occurred to me that the dog, in one important sense, does understand the results of calculus. It lives in a world shaped by calculus. Thrown balls follow trajectories that allow the dog to run and catch them. It experiences the consequences of calculous without understanding the underlying framework.

That suggested a question: What do humans experience that may be the consequence of principles we are fundamentally incapable of understanding? One possibility is the future itself.

We continually invent theories—block universes, multiple universes, branching universes, deterministic chains, probabilistic quantum events—in an effort to understand how reality progresses from the present into the future. How did the universe begin, or did it ever begin. How will it end — or never?

Though we simply may lack the mental machinery to visualize how the universe unfolds from one moment to the next, there plausibly may exist alien intelligences to whom the evolution of reality is as obvious as the path of a rolling ball is to us.

Imagine such a being looking at humanity with the same puzzled expression we reserve for a dog trying to carry a long stick through a narrow doorway and getting stuck. We think, “Why doesn’t the dog simply turn its head?”

Likewise, such an advanced being might wonder, “Why don’t humans simply see how the future unfolds?”

Perhaps the missing ingredient is not more information, but an entirely different way of perceiving relationships.

This thought led to another realization. Humans instinctively seek causes for any event. We are uncomfortable with the idea that an event may occur without any cause whatsoever. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic. We do not know whether any event causes a radioactive substance to emit a particle. We just know that in a given time a certain number or particles will be emitted. We do not know which or why. It just happens randomly, so far as we can tell.

I find it almost impossible to visualize an effect with no cause. Can  you? Mathematics allows us to describe such things, but description is not the same as intuition.

There is a profound difference between knowing and visualizing. I know the Sun is approximately ninety-three million miles away, yet I cannot truly visualize ninety-three million miles.

I know the Sun is enormous, yet I cannot genuinely picture something so large that it illuminates half a planet from such an unimaginable distance.

I know infinity as a mathematical concept, but I cannot visualize infinity. I know quantum entanglement, curved spacetime, and probabilistic wavefunctions through mathematics and language, yet none of these produces genuine mental imagery.

Our mathematics extends far beyond our intuition. It functions as a bridge across conceptual gaps that our evolutionary history left unfilled. We learn everything by analogy. We know what “A’ is because it is like “B,” with which we already are familiar.

In a sense, mathematics serves as the all-purpose analogy for learning what we cannot visualize. In quantum mechanics, the phrase, “Shut up and calculate” was commonly used to demonstrate, “Don’t try to visualize it. Just let the equations do the thinking.”

Perhaps another intelligence would not need that bridge. Even if the universe were fundamentally probabilistic, an advanced intelligence might not be troubled by the absence of classical causality. It might not think in terms of cause producing effect at all. Instead, it might simply recognize relationships.

Your dog does not know why food appears when you return home. It does not understand employment, grocery stores, refrigerators, or economics. It simply recognizes the pattern: You comes home → food appears. So, it finds your arrival salivating

Similarly, a vastly more capable intelligence might perceive relationships extending across decades. Two asteroids brush past one another. Thirty-seven years later lightning strikes a particular automobile.

To us, those events seem hopelessly disconnected. We demand every intermediate causal step. To the superior intelligence, they might simply belong together– not because it painstakingly computes trillions of interactions, but because it perceives the entire web of reality, simultaneously.

Consider this analogy: Humans recognize faces astonishingly well. You may encounter someone you have not seen for many years. Their hair has changed, their face has aged, their body has changed, yet we immediately think, “That’s Mary.”

If asked how you know, you struggle. Before you just met again, you would not have been able to visualize the exact shape of her nose, the angle of her jaw, the spacing of her eyes, or dozens of other measurable features. But now that you see the entire “her” everything comes together.

Recognition comes first. Explanation comes afterward.

I experienced something similar while painting, from memory, a picture of my late wife walking away into the distance. I painted and repainted without visualizing details. It began as just “anywoman” with her back turned to me. Then suddenly I recognized her. I had painted my wife without realizing it.

Even more remarkably, everyone else who sees the painting immediately recognizes her as well. Yet no one can explain precisely why. The painting simply possesses her pattern.

That is the key word. Pattern. We recognize patterns more than details.

Perhaps this is how a more advanced intelligence perceives reality. Not through isolated causal chains. Not through endless calculations. But through pattern recognition.

The brushing asteroids and the lightning strike belong to the same pattern in exactly the same way that my wife’s shoulders, posture, and neck belong to her. The advanced intelligence might find the cosmic relationship obvious.

Social humans evolved to recognize certain kinds of patterns. Faces. Voices. The way people walk. Often, at a distance, I see someone walking, and though they might be a vague blur to my elderly eyes, I know exactly who they are. I recognize the pattern of their walk, though I can’t articulate exactly what it is.

Similarly, sometimes I will fail to recognize someone whom I know, because I meet them “out of context.” I run into my dentist while walking in a park, and I have no idea who he is, though I have known him for years. It takes a few seconds of embarrassed stammering before the mystery is solved. The pattern is broken until I can regain it in my mind.

Dogs evolved to recognize scent patterns that are almost completely invisible to us. Bats evolved to recognize echo patterns. Bees evolved to recognize ultraviolet patterns. Every species inhabits its own pattern space.

Artists do this all the time. You paint or write something, and it just doesn’t look right. So you change it. You’re a decorator, and the room looks wrong. So you move a chair here, a table there, and suddenly it’s perfect.

Consider the “Golden Ratio.” 1.618033. . .

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. …

Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.

Imagine our hypothetical superior intelligence. It might look at the history of the universe the way we look at a face. It doesn’t calculate. It recognizes the sequence, asteroid encounter → 37 years → lightning strike may have the same kind of perceptual unity that the proportions of a familiar face have for us.

We ask it “How do you know they’re related?” It answers, “Can’t you feel it?”

Just as we can’t explain exactly why my painting is unmistakably my wife- just as why we don’t understand why the Golden Ratio is beautiful and perfect, there may be many patterns in time and space that we cannot sense, much less appreciate.

Mathematics may be humanity’s attempt to describe and understand patterns that we cannot directly perceive. Equations can describe relationships we don’t find intuitive.

IN SUMMARY

There is no reason for human pattern recognition to correspond to all reality. It corresponds to the problems evolution asked us to solve. There may be patterns beyond our recognition that other entities recognize and find equally pleasing — patterns in time and space.

Perhaps another intelligence evolved to recognize historical patterns spanning centuries, or dynamic relationships involving billions of interacting events. To such a being, history itself might appear as a single recognizable web.

The entire pattern of the universe would simply “look right.” This leads to a possible redefinition of intelligence. Perhaps intelligence is not primarily the ability to reason. Perhaps intelligence is fundamentally the ability to recognize certain patterns.

Experts in every field often recognize before they explain. The explanation comes later, usually for the benefit of someone who cannot yet perceive the pattern directly.

The greatest difference between humanity and a vastly more advanced intelligence may not be greater speed or memory. It may simply perceive patterns that are literally invisible to us.

The dog does not fail because it lacks determination. It fails because calculus lies outside its representational world. Likewise, humanity’s deepest mysteries may not be difficult because they are mathematically complicated. They may be difficult because they lie outside the kinds of patterns human brains evolved to recognize.

The universe may be waiting to be understood—not by gathering more facts, but by discovering entirely newly perceived relationships.

We learn through analogy. To understand something new, we compare it with something already familiar. We search for similarities, relationships, and recognizable structures. Analogy is the manifestation of something even more fundamental. The universe itself is built from patterns and relationships.

Everything we recognize as understanding is really the recognition of patterns. Everything we call explanation is the description of relationships. A melody is not merely a sequence of notes. It is a pattern. A face is not merely a collection of eyes, nose, and mouth. It is a pattern. The Golden Ratio is not simply a number. It is a recurring relationship.

Prime numbers are not interesting because of the numbers themselves, but because of the remarkable patterns that after years of searching, may remain hidden within their distribution.

Poetry moves us through patterns of rhythm, rhyme, sound, and meaning. A painting succeeds when its relationships simply feel right. The Mona Lisa is beautiful because the entire pattern possesses a coherence we feel, even when we cannot explain it.

“Amazing Grace” is more beautiful than many other songs because of the patterns and relationship of its notes, pitch, timing, expectations and wording, that generations of human brains have recognized as profoundly meaningful.

We recognize someone after thirty-seven years of changes, though we cannot specify precisely why. A dog recognizes its owner by the uniques patterns of the owner’s smell. A grandmaster recognizes a chess position. An experienced physician recognizes a disease. An artist recognizes a likeness. A decorator feels the “rightness” to patterns and relationships of furnishings.

 

Intelligence itself may be nothing more—or less—than increasingly sophisticated pattern recognition. Mathematics extends our ability to discover patterns that intuition alone cannot reveal.

Language allows us to communicate patterns. Science organizes patterns. Art displays patterns. Music experiments with patterns. Humor surprises us by violating expected patterns. Love may itself be the recognition of another person’s unique pattern accumulated through history.

If there exists a vastly more advanced intelligence, perhaps it might not possess more facts than we do. It simply might perceive patterns that are invisible to us.

Reality may not fundamentally be particles, fields, energy, or information. Those merely may be our descriptions. Reality may just be patterns and relationships. When relationships fit together into a stable whole, our brains experience that as beauty, truth, elegance, familiarity, and understanding.

They all may be the same cognitive event occurring in different domains.

Matter, energy, space, time, life, consciousness, mathematics, music, beauty, and understanding are all different ways those patterns are organized, perceived, or described.

And much forever may hide beyond us.

Rodger Malcolm  Mitchell

 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

This article is so classic Trump, that it will be greeted with either ho-hum or outrage that it even was published, depending on which side of sanity you vote.

Here is just the tip of it. Read the whole thing for the full context. It gets better (i.e. worse) the more you read.

Trump Has a Tate Problem;

The Manosphere Titans Are Tearing MAGA in Two, Michael Fanone and Peter Rothpletz July 28

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are sitting in a federal detention center in Florida, fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, where they face 59 criminal charges between them.

The Trump administration isn’t driving this, exactly. British prosecutors brought the charges and requested the brothers’ extradition; U.S. Marshals arrested the brothers in Miami on July 18, and last Thursday the White House said only that it would not intervene. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it, there was “no role for us to play at this moment or maybe ever.”

Even that much passivity is causing discord within MAGA, because they’ve loved these fucking freaks for years.

In May 2023, Donald Trump Jr. called the Romanian detention of Andrew Tate “absolute insanity,” and in June 2024 he joined a livestream with Tate, telling him: “you’ve got people attacking you as far as I’m concerned.”

Elon Musk endorsed Tate’s takes on British politics in a January 2025 post.

And Barron Trump cultivated a relationship with Andrew Tate, a connection the New York Times documented in December 2025.

Justin Waller, a Tate associate, says he arranged and sat in on a video call between the two men. Barron admired Tate, Waller claims, and spoke with him over Zoom once in 2024, while Barron was being fitted for a suit. The three discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates.

Tate, Waller claims, became a “big brother” to Barron.

Here was a self-described misogynist facing serious charges involving human trafficking, a man Romanian prosecutors accused of forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women. And the MAGA movement treated him as one of its own.

Then, at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February 2025, Romania’s foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, pulled Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell aside in a hallway for a brief conversation that touched on the Tates, who’d been banned from traveling.

The Financial Times reported that US officials had already raised the case on an earlier phone call, and that a request had been made to return the brothers’ passports and let them travel before their case concluded.

Isn’t it normal for accused criminals, especially when accused of sex crimes, to treated as brothers by the oh, so, very religious right?

Meanwhile, much to the delight of the MAGAs, we lock up and deport undocumented men, women and children, who have NO CRIMINAL BACKGROUND.

This has made America great, again.

Grenell told the FT he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu, though he did not deny discussing the brothers, and added that he supports them “as evident by my publicly available tweets.”

Hurezeanu, for his part, said the exchange was cordial, informal and brief, and that he didn’t feel pressured.

Within days, the Romanian travel ban was lifted. Shocker…

Read the rest of the article here, and please let me know whether you find ANY of it hard to believe.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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?

============================

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