The Agrarian's Lament: What have you done for me lately? Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 5.

The Agrarian's Lament: What have you done for me lately? Addressing polit...: An agricultural country which consumes its own food is a finer thing than an industrial country, which at best can only consume its own smok...

What have you done for me lately? Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 5.

An agricultural country which consumes its own food is a finer thing than an industrial country, which at best can only consume its own smoke.

Chesterton.

A long time ago I started a post on one of our companion blogs about agriculturalist and the Republican Party.  I can't find it now, maybe I published it, or maybe I didn't.

As I"m in both worlds, the urban and the agricultural, I get exposed to the political views of both camps.  The Trump administration has made this a really interesting, and horrifying, experience.  By and large professionals detest Donald Trump and regard him as a charleton  Farmers and ranchers are, however, amongst his most loyal base, even though there's no real reason for them to be such.  Indeed, with the damage that Trump is doing to agriculture this will be a real test of whether farmers and ranchers simply reflexively vote Republican or stop doing son and wake up.

The Democratic Party, not the GOP, saved family farmers and ranchers in this country when the forces of the unabated Homestead ACt and the Great Depression were going to destroy them.  They've seemingly resented being saved from those forces, however, as an impingement on their freedoms, and they've bristled at every government act since that time.  Farmers and ranchers would rather sink in a cesspool of their own making than be told how to properly build one, basically.

We here, of course, aren't a pure agricultural blog.  This is an Agrarian blog, and that's different.  We are, quite frankly, much more radical.

"The land belongs to those who work it." 

Zapata.

Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society

Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.

Still, we can't help but notice that American agriculturalist, more than any other class of businessmen, have voted to screw themselves by voting for Donald Trump. They voted for tariff wars that leave their products marooned here in the US while foreign competitors take advantage of that fact.  They've voted for a guy who thinks global warming is a fib (which many of them do as well) in spite of the plain evidence before their eyes, and the fact that this will destroy the livelihoods of the younger ones.  They've voted to force economic conditions that will force them off the lands and their lands into the hands of the wealthy.

Indeed, on that last item, they've voted for people who share nothing in common with them whatsoever and would just as soon see them out of business, or simply don't care what happens to them.

They've voted, frankly, stupidly.

Well, nothing cures stupidly more than a giant dope slap from life, and they're getting one right now.  The question is whether they'll vote in 2026 and 2028 to be bent over, or start to ask some questions.

We're going to post those questions here.

1.  What connection does the candidate have with agriculture?

They might not have any and still be a good candidate, but if they're running around in a plaid shirt pretending to be a 19th Century man of the soil, they should be dropped.

They should also be dropped if they're like Scott Bessent, who pretends to be a soybean farmer when he's actually a major league investor.  Indeed, big money is the enemy of agriculture and always has been.  

I'd also note that refugees from agriculture should be suspect.  The law is full of them, people who were sent off to law school by their farmer and rancher parents who believed, and in their heart of hearts still believe, that lawyers, doctors and dentist, indeed everyone in town, don't really work.  All of these refugees live sad lives, but some of them spend time in their sad lives on political crusades that are sort of a cry out to their parents "please love me".

I know that sounds radical, but it's true.

2. What will they do to keep agricultural lands in family hands, and out of absentee landlord hands?

And the answer better not be a "well I'm concerned about that". The answer needs to be real.

From an agrarian prospective, no solution that isn't a massive trend reversing one makes for a satisfactory answer to this question. Ranches being bought up by the extremely wealthy are destroying the ability of regular people to even dare to hope to be in agriculture.  This can be reversed, and it should be, but simply being "concerned" won't do it.

3.  What is your view on public lands?

If the answer involves transferring them out of public hand, it indicates a love of money that's ultimately always destructive to agriculture in the end.

Indeed, in agricultural camps there remains an unabated lust for the public lands even though transferring them into private hands, whether directly or as a brief stop over in state hands, would utterly destroy nearly ever farm and ranch in local and family ownership . The change in value of the operations would be unsustainable, and things would be sold rapidly.

Public lands need to stay in public hands.

4. How do you make your money?

People think nothing of asking farmers "how many acres do you have" or ranchers "how many cattle do you have", both of which is the same as asking "how much money do you have".  

Knowing how politicians make their money is a critical thing to know.  No farmer or rancher, for example, has anything in common with how the Trump family makes money, and there's no reason to suppose that they view land as anything other than to be forced into developers hands and sold.

5. What is your position on global warming?

If its any variety of "global warming is a fib", they don't deserve a vote.

6.  What is your position on a land ethnic?

If they don't know what that means, they don't deserve a vote.

7.  What's on your dinner table, and who prepares it?

That may sound really odd, and we don't mean for it to be a judgment on what people eat. . . sort of.  But all agriculturalist are producing food for the table. . . for the most part, if we ignore crops like cotton, or other agricultural derived textiles, of which there are a bunch, and if we ignore products like ethanol.

Anyhow, I'll be frank.  If a guy is touring cattle country and gives an uneasy chuckle and says, "well, I don't eat much meat anymore" do you suppose he really cares about ranching?  If you do, you need your head checked.

You probably really need it checked if the candidate doesn't every grill their own steak but has some sort of professional prepare their dinner every night.  That would mean that they really have very little chance of grasping 

8.  What's your understanding of local agriculture?

That's a pretty broad question, but I'm defining agriculture very broadly here.  Indeed, what I mean is the candidates understanding of the local use of nature, to include farming and ranching, but to also include hunting, fishing and commercial fishing.

Indeed, on the latter, only the commercial fishing industry seems to have politicians that really truly care what happens to them. How that happened isn't clear, but it does seem to be the case.

Otherwise, what most politicians seem to think is that farmers wear plaid flannel shirts.  I see lots of them wondering around in photographs looking at corrals, or oil platforms, but I never see one actually do any work. . . of pretty much any kind.  That is, I don't expect to see Chuck Gray flaking a calf, for example.

Last and prior editions:

Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't support liars and don't lie. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 4.

Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 3.

Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands users need to ask political candidates. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 2.

Labels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Commentary, Democratic Party, Politics, Questions for politicians, Republican Party, Trailing threadLabels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Camping, Climate Change, fishing, hunting, Politics, Public Lands, Questions for politicians, Right Wing Politics and Politicians, The Land Ethic, This is why we can't have nice things

Addressing politicians in desperate times. A series.

Labels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Commentary, Democratic Party, Politics, Questions for politicians, Republican Party, Trailing thread

Lex Anteinternet: Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos/The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Ninth Edition. Trump is insane and the end of the United States as a great nation.

Lex Anteinternet: Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos: Carney is an economist with a doctorate, as opposed to Donald Trump, who is an idiot.  His speech not only reflects reality, it marks the da...

Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos

Carney is an economist with a doctorate, as opposed to Donald Trump, who is an idiot.  His speech not only reflects reality, it marks the day American superpower status came to an end, murdered by Donald Trump.

Today, I'll talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.

But I also submit to you that other countries, particularly middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.

The power of the less powerful begins with honesty.

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable — as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.

It won't.

So, what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. And in it, he asked a simple question: How did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world, unite!" He doesn't believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.

Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this "living within a lie." The system's power comes not from its truth but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

'A rupture, not a transition'

Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot "live within the lie" of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

The multilateral institutions on which middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP — the very architecture of collective problem solving, are under threat.

And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions — that they must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.

And this impulse is understandable. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.

And there's another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from "transactionalism" will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.

Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty — sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows, this is classic risk management — risk management comes at a price. But that cost of strategic autonomy — of sovereignty — can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum.

And the question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.

Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions — that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security — that assumption is no longer valid.

And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb has termed "values-based realism" — or, to put another way, we aim to be principled and pragmatic.

Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.

And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share our values. So we're engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values. And we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world order, the risks that this poses, and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home.

Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond.

We are doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade and we're doing so in ways that build our domestic industries.

And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We've agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements.

We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we have concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar.

We're negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We're doing something else. To help solve global problems, we are pursuing variable geometry — in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.

So on Ukraine, we're a core member of the coalition of the willing and one of the largest per-capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.

Our commitment to Article 5 is unwavering.

So we're working with our NATO allies — including the Nordic-Baltic Eight — to further secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft and boots on the ground.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading block of 1.5 billion people.

On critical minerals we're forming buyer's clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply.

And on AI we're co-operating with like-minded democracies to ensure we won't ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.

What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

'Middle powers must act together'

Middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.

But I'd also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.

We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong — if we choose to wield them together.

Which brings me back to Havel.

What would it mean for middle powers to "live the truth"?

First it means naming reality. Stop invoking "rules-based international order" as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the old order to be restored, it means creating institutions and agreements that function as described.

And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion. Building a strong domestic economy should always be every government's immediate priority. And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence — it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy. Because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

'Honesty about the world as it is'

So Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent, we also have a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively.

And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability.

We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

And we have something else. We have a recognition of what's happening and a determination to act accordingly.

We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking the sign out of the window.

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.

But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just.

This is the task of the middle powers. The countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine co-operation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.

That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently.

And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Ninth Edition. Trump is insane and the end of the United States as a great nation.

 

Trump is insane.

What's more, Trump is insane and everyone knows it.  World leaders know it.  His opponents know it. And, moreover, his supporters, know it.

He's driving us over a cliff, and everyone knows that.

He's the last pathetic gasp of the Baby Boomers, as we endure a nation by the Baby Boomers, Of the Baby Boomers, and for the Baby Boomers, enduring the legacy of a government attacked by Ronald Reagan and brought into fruition by Dixiecrats.

I've predicted that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him, and moreover, his mere presence in the White House was really a smokescreen for National Conservatives.  If I was right, the moment now appears too late.

The United States has come to an end as a great nation.  

It might be able to rebuild, but it won't be what it was.  Nore should it be. A nation stupid enough to elect Donald Trump is no longer great.

The question is, how much damage do we allow him to do?

And I say "we" advisedly.  Stuffed suits like Dr. John Barrasso and castrati Mike Johnson aren't going to do anything.  His cabinet has people like scared Scott Bessent in it, who sound like they're terrified to be in public, or people who cheerfully shovel his oratorical vomit.  Congress could act, but the make up the GOP in Congress is 100% eunuchs who roll over to have their bellies petted by Trump or go into the corner scared and pee.

The nation's leaders have completely failed it.

The question is not, at this point, how can this be salvaged.  It cannot. The question is how much can be saved so that there's something to rebuild from when we reemerge in 2028 as a minor power, second rate nation, despised by the world.

The only thing, and it is the only thing, than can really save the nation now is mass protests.  An epic strike that shut the nation down completely would be something the Republicans could not ignore.

We don't even seem to have the guts for that, however.  We haven't seen anything like that since the 1960s and early 1970s.  

We aren't much of a people anymore.

Ironically, however, the wet dream of Donald Trump to be remembered as somebody, darned near anybody, will also fail.  He'll be remembered for being a fat, spoiled, mentally ill, child who ruined his nation with the help of ignorance.  His ballroom will not get built.  His Arc will not either.  Greenland, which he will steal, will be set free.  Melania will escape back to Europe to hide the disgrace of having associated with the man.  The Trump family will bankruptcy itself into oblivion.

Cont:

Okay, something's happened.

Trump at Dovos said the United States “won’t use force” to take Greenland, but repeated his dumbass claims that the US needs it for  national and international security. He said he would be “appreciative” if the world acquiesced to his desire to take over the territory. “Or, you can say no and we will remember.”

What does all that mean.

Sometime over the last 24 hours somebody got to Trump with news that if he went any further, they were invoking the 25th Amendment.  It's about the only possibility.

The others might be that Congress would really move to impeach, or the military was prepared to tell him to pound sand.

But something happened.  He was full batshit crazy over Greenland as of yesterday, and now he's not.  He was apparently actually set to over a bridge too far and something held him back, for now.

The man needs to go.  This is a chance for national redemption, but it won't last long.  Those who were set to invoke the 25th, if they were, need to carry forward and do it.

Cont:

Hmmmm. . . Air Force One returned and landed due to an "electrical issue" prior to his gong to Davos.

That "electrical issue" was probably a direct communication that if he went to Davos and indicated war was coming he better stay in Switzerland.

Cont:

And I know so many people from Switzerland. Incredible place, incredible brilliant place. But I then realized that they're only good because of us.

The dimwitted emperor.

We barely dodged a bullet with this guy, remove the idiot now.  Apply the 25th Amendment.

Last edition:

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Eighth Edition. The Senile Chief Executive.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, 25th Amendment Watch List, Denmark, Donald Trump, Greenland, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Mental Health, Norway, Old Age, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, The Madness of King Donald, War

Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administration. What's going on with Greenland.

Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administrati...: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.   Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump...

Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administration. What's going on with Greenland.

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.

 

Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump's avarice for Greenland was revealed, and not by Trump, but by Ted Cruz.

Look, the whole history of America has been a history of acquiring new lands and new territories, whether you go back to Thomas Jefferson making the Louisiana purchase — about half of the United States of America today — or you go back to America purchasing Alaska from Russia. You want to talk about — at the time they called it ‘Seward’s Folly’ — It turned out to, to be an extraordinarily consequential purchase, Greenland has massive rare earth minerals and critical minerals. There are enormous economic benefits to America, but like Alaska, it is located on the Arctic which is a major theater for major military conflict with either Russia or China,

In short, it's a naked imperial land grab whose intellectual justification dates back to the 19th Century.  The age of alliances and of the United States representing hope and freedom is over. The age of grabbing lands to exploit because we can is back. 

It's deeply immoral, but Donald Trump is a profoundly immoral man.

He probably also didn't come u pwith this idea, but it was a natural for him.  He's not smart enough, or learned enough, to know of manifest destiny.

We've never covered the concept of Manifest Destiny here before, although we've covered some of the latter stages of the exercise of it.  We probably should have, as we've mentioned the Indian Wars fairly frequently, which are tied to it.  Having said all of that, it's worth nothing that there was never a time at which the concept had anywhere near universal American approval, and it was often hotly contested.

Manifest Destiny had its origins to some degree in the earliest history of the Republic, but less than is sometimes imagined.  The term itself was coined in 1845 in an editorial by later Confederate propagandist John L. O'Sullivan, although an earlier editorial by the adventersome Jane Cazneau entitled Annexation is credited by some with being the first work backing it.  That advocated for the annexation of Cuba and was penned about the same time.   O'Sullivan had used the term "divine destiny" as early as 1839.  O'Sullivan entered the scene advocating for the annexation of Texas, and then in an editorial about the Oregon Boundary Dispute wrote:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The entire concept is patently absurd, but it had a strong pull on people as an excuse for aggressive expanding.  God, the concept holds, made the United States unique and it the country was charged with a divine mission that included expanding its territorial control.  It had opposition right from the beginning.  None other than U.S. Grant stated:

I was bitterly opposed to the measure [to annex Texas], and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.

An obvious problem with the concept is that once the United States reached the Pacific, the expansion should have been over.  It was used to justify everything about the worst of American expansionism up until that point.  Thomas Jefferson had seen the acquisition of Louisiana as a 1,000 year long preservation of agrarianism, but everything the country could do to exploit the West and its resources started nearly immediately.  The expansion not only left room for yeoman farmers to expand into, the country forces the native inhabitants into reservations and began destructive extraction of minerals nearly immediately.  The mixed legacy of expansion can be seen in contemporary illustrations, such as the often seen painting Manifest Destiny, showing a barely clad angelic woman pointing the way west, while in the shadows a Native American family (with fully topless Indian women) look back as they're pushed off the land.  Wyoming's state seal has a cowboy and a miner.  Colorado's features mountains and a the phrase, Nil sine Numine, Nothing without Providence.

By the time the Frontier closed in 1890, the entire concept was really losing its appeal.  The Battle of Wounded Knee that same year raised questions about the morality of Western Expansion in a new bloody way, although the questions has always been there.  A sort of national angst set in with nowhere to expand to.  That soon found the concepts old backers urging war with Spain.

Supposedly the Spanish American War was over Cuban freedoms and dissatisfaction over Spain's reaction to the explosion on the USS Maine.  In reality, McKinley was forced into it, or at least ended up going along, as it looked like the US could grab Cuba and add it as a new territory.  Opposition in Congress, however, . . . which affords us a roadmap now, statutorily kept that from happening.

What was wholly unanticipated, however, is that the US would brilliantly deploy its Navy to position it to take the Philippines.

Painting depicting Dewey in the Battle of Manilla Bay. Why, exactly, did we want the Philippines anyway?

Congress hadn't precluded the US from adding the Philippines, or Gaum, as U.S. territories.  The Philippines had a long running independence movement and a well educated class that thought of the American arrival as guaranteeing their immediate independence, which they were quickly disabused of.  The U.S. ended up fighting to keep the Philippines as a colony, although the war was deeply unpopular and lead to Theodore Roosevelt simply declaring that the US had won it, when in fact it had not. Some part of the Philippines contested for independence all the way into December 1941, when they then took up the cause against Japan.  Indeed, some other elements of the movement to gain independence, which by that time had been promised by the U.S., welcomed the Japanese as liberators and collaborated with them, something that was not held against them by the Philippine people later.

Up until the end of the 19th Century the US had been hostile to Great Britain for historical reasons.  The UK, however, immediately saw what was occuring, and was in its high colonial phase.  The reality of what the US was doing was portrayed in Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden.

Most Americans had a strong distaste for colonialism, and had it before the Spanish American War.  The population bought off on the concept that we need to "Remember the Maine", but that didn't mean owning Cuba.  The war did bring the US into the Caribbean like never before, and for four decades the US fought an endless series of Banana Wars, often to secure the interests of American business, that has made us hated in Central America to this day.

The US intervention in Venezuela was a page right out of that book.  The US intervened in a foreign nation that really isn't a problem country for us, and now the Administration is busy trying to figure out how to profit from its oil.

Greenland is the same sort of thing.

The justification routeinly features the same sort of rationalization that was used to shove Native Americans off their land.  They'd be "better off" with the kind entrepreneurial American hand guiding them, and they would "get rich" with their country more efficiently exploited, never mind if they didn't' want to get rich and they didn't want to exploit their land.  In Greenland's case, it's now bitterly clear that part of real estate developer Donald Trump's desire to steal the country is so that rich American enterprises can exploit its mineral wealth.

What if they don't want it exploited?

That though never enters the minds of a certain branch of American capitalism.  Maybe most people don't want endless economic exploitation.  Maybe we don't want to mine everything.  Maybe we don't want endless business growth.

By World War One the US had moved very much away from colonialism.  The country started a series of "good neighbor" policies with countries to our south.  At the end of the Great War we favored self determination for nations.  World War Two's results emphasized this even more, with the US now favoring collective security against nations that were fundamentally opposed to democracy.

Trump has thrown that all in the trash.

People, myself included, have been struggling to figure out what on Earth Trump is thinking, and if he's being paid to destroy the US position in the world.  Nobody really knows, but all this does point back to the lunacy of National Conservatism, which looks back on a world that never was.  National Conservative thinkers see the US in much the same way the members of the New Apostolic Reformation do, and both forces are at work here.  National Conservatives want the US to crawl into the Western Hemisphere, making it solidly Christian, and shut the door behind us. They figure Europe will do the same, if its not too late, in their view, with many looking at authoritarian regimes like those of Orbán and Putin as Eastern European models.  Putin, they imagine, will advance Orthodoxy, although there's no reason to believe that his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church is anything other than convenience.  Orbán is supposed to do the same with old world values in Hungary and Eastern Europe.  Immigrants to Europe and foreign influences are to be exterminated and tossed out.

That's what's going on in the minds of the National Conservatives, and that's partially what's going on with Greenland.

At this point, I frankly feel that its nearly inevitable that the US is in fact going to invade Greenland.  Europe can't really stop us from doing it, although it'll result in bloodshed.   It'll destroy the post war order completely. The Trump Administration will set about trying to exploit the minerals of Greenland immediately.

But that won't be the end of the story.  It's taken this along, amazingly, for people to get a concept of how horrible Donald Trump and his backers really are, but it's finally occuring.  Americans don't want to invade Greenland. They didn't want to invade the Philippines.  If, and I feel its a when, we do this, it'll be followed by several realities.

The first will be that exploiting a nation takes time, and those backing this move do not have it.  The House will flip in November, even though Trump will in fact take a run at suspending the election.  The Senate might flip in November as well, although that's doubtful, but Senate Republicans, their own careers on the line, will begin to back away from Trump.  In 2028 a disgusted populace will elect Democrats into office.

The US will leave Greenland, and in a big hurry.  It'll be independent.  The Trump legacy will be the pile of shit it deserves to be.  The US will begin the process of rebuilding itself, but as a much, much, weaker country than before.  That will be Trump's legacy.

May God grant that I'm wrong on all of this, and that somebody intervenes to stop this insanity before it's too late.

This again.  It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream.  It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.

Lex Anteinternet: Don Ho sings "Tiny Bubbles" - Hollywood Palace 1/2...

Lex Anteinternet: Don Ho sings "Tiny Bubbles" - Hollywood Palace 1/2...: To heck with the "Don Roe (row?) Doctrine. . . time for the Do Ho Doctrine.

Don Ho sings "Tiny Bubbles" - Hollywood Palace 1/21/67

To heck with the "Don Roe (row?) Doctrine. . . time for the Do Ho Doctrine.

Lex Anteinternet: Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

Lex Anteinternet: Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenl...:   An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan. Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat An open call to Greenlanders I note this in part because she...

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

 

An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat

An open call to Greenlanders

I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.

Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports.  I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule.  There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.  

I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it.  Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.  

Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.  

I've written a lot about how we got here.  The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another.  The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy.  I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.

If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed.  More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism.  Again, France provides the model.  After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party.  The French right died. 

I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way.  Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump.  By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026.  The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.

That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him.  Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump. 

Not all of it will be capable of being repaired.  A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.

But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think.  In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S.  Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans.  The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence.  We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.  

Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.

Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do.  A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration.  The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to.  Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair.  The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.

The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice.  Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.

If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference.  Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial.  The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere.  Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.

In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur.  A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it.  While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.

The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation.  Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place.  We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that.  Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit.  Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor.  Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves.  Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else.  Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end.  Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein.  Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.

Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away.  Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States.  But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.  

Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.

Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there.  The U.S. military won't be there.

Lex Anteinternet: Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

Lex Anteinternet: Some unwanted Christmas introspection.:   Today, of course, is Christmas Day. Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace...

Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

 

Today, of course, is Christmas Day.

Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace tradition now for almost four decades, a scary thought in and of itself.  I'll admit that I've grown very weary of it and have been now for quite a while.  It involves going to lunch with my coworker professional colleagues and it usually involves having drinks, a delay in ordering, more drinks, etc.

We always go to Mass on Christmas Eve.  Indeed, even as a child my family always went to Mass on Christmas Eve, although not Midnight Mass.  I've never been a night owl and I just don't want to be up that late.  That's the same reason I don't like to go to alte Easter Vigil Mass either.

I am, rather obviously, an early riser.  That's about the sole reason this blog even exists.  Almost everything on here is written very early in the morning.

Anyhow, as I was noting, I've grown really weary of the lunch.  It's clear to me that it's a big deal for some of my colleagues, but in noting that, what I further note is that the more secular they are, or the more convivial, the bigger the deal it is.  And for some it's a rememberance of those who started the tradition, in a decade that is now long past, and which is from nearly another world, the world of men at work without women as colleagues.  I'm not going into that here, although I will in the future.  I've never lived in it, and I don't imagine that world nostalgically.  My best workplace colleagues are women.

For me, with a sense that things must be on time and on target, I get really worried about things dragging on too long to get to Mass on time.  It's never happened, although for the first time yesterday it nearly did.

Things have been really odd recently, for reasons I'll not go into.  I realized right about noon that people had left, save for me and the one coworker I'm really a friend of/with/to.  I noted to her that everyone had left and perhaps we should too.

When I arrived it was rapidly clear something was gravely wrong.  The whole meal had that feeling, and at the end of it, a massive argument broke out/resumed between two individuals who had been engaged in it prior to our arrival.  Indeed, in reality, it was the culmination of an argument that had broken out in a heated fashion after the company Christmas Party (which this was not) and which, in retrospect, has been burning hot and cold now for months and months.

The whole spirit of the country is like that right now.

Around here, where it should be extremely cold right now, it's nearly summer temperature warm. That's not only weird, it's a massive warning sign.  This morning Doug Burgum is posting on "clean coal".  That's moronic and anyone with the slightest bit of sense knows that this has to stop.  Donald Trump, for his part, posted his typical stupid comments oozing anger and this:

I note this as part of what I think I witnessed was both the nation's politics and the nation's political atmosphere bleeding into daily life.  You can feel it everywhere. This must be what it was like to live in Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s.  The nation's gone insane, and a certain percentage of the nation is now angrily insane.

But it's more than that.  Part of it is, I"m sure, the inability to endure big changes and big expectations, combined with gross misunderstanding.  Part of it also is the anger that idol worshippers have when they realize their hero is human.  Maybe some of was the march of time on both parties.

Like several other things I've seen like this recently, I was so ill prepared for what I saw that my reaction time to it was just insufficient to deal with it.  It happened, nad was over, before I could do anything to stop it. And looking back, I should have stopped what I should have seen coming weeks ago. 

I've wearied and I'm not the man I used to be.  I'm too tired to put up with and endure such things. But why bring this up at Christmas? There must be some really hurt feelings today, and there must have been going into things.  For me, who has had to take up roles I never anticipated, it's a bitter failure and now a delicate matter to repair.

One thing I think I'm going to repair is the tradition.  It came out of the all male workplace past, and that day is over.  The tradition can remain in the past. The present and the passage of time overcame it.

More and more, the Mass part of Christmas, Christ's Mass, is the important part to me.  It always was really, but I managed to take the wrong road, the American Road, when I was young, even though I knew better.  The field, vette and prairie is what always appealed to me, and the book.  The courtroom not so much.  I've been dealing with the fact that its now too late to change that.

Or at least its too late to change the past.  Enduring the present and future of that, and the office, well not so much.  Sometimes the messages are clear.

"The man's done enough. Leave him alone."  Field of Dreams.

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The brave men and women of the USCG are pleased to be able to buy Trump wine and cider tax free.”

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The...: Announcement confirming that Trump wine and cider is now stocked at Coast Guard BX's. Sigh. Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Cath...

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The brave men and women of the USCG are pleased to be able to buy Trump wine and cider tax free.”

Announcement confirming that Trump wine and cider is now stocked at Coast Guard BX's.

Sigh.

Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State.  The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.

Oligarchy is now where we are at.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 107th Edition. Tacky Crap, Delusion, and the Sgt. Schultz defense.

Labels: 2025 Election Post Mortem, 2025 White House Vandalization, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, The Sgt. Schultz Defense, White House, Zeitgeist