Really quick rant

 I had posted this on a couple of farcebook post, the drama about the surf and turf from people that never deployed really irritated me, and they are also screeching that "you MAGAts need to enlist to fight in tRumps war with Iran" my response was " you retards screamed har, har, Ukraine for 4 years, and none of yall beta, cuck males signed up for the Ukrainian Foreign legion, so shut your pie holes while the adults are talking".  Needless to say, yall can see that I'm slightly irritated. 

Funny that, the same people screeching about weekly surf and turf that has been going on for years just because they don't like the administration are perfectly fine seeing the same being purchased by a sponge with an EBT card. And before anyone tries to gaslight me, Yes I deployed to the middle east,  but I was Army, we didn't get the good stuff. The navy traditionally had better food, with the exception of the air force.

   Posted off my kinda smart phone

"The Great Confusion"

 

I had noticed once President Trump had come down the escalator and announced his run for the presidency, at first the media and the establishment treated his run as a joke.  In their mind they knew that the this was going to be Hillary's year, she had graciously stepped aside because the donk cardinals and movers and shakers knew that in the world of intersectional politics. it was time to have a black president and Obama was the anti-Bush.  Biden had called him "Well Spoken Negro" if memory serves.  And yes somehow he got elected....in 2020 in post George Floyd America....Funny that.  Well anyway I digress.  The longer President Trump ran his campaign, the schism started in the body politics...Apparently President exposed cracks that people knew about that were never discussed...in public.   I was a lukewarm supporter of the GOP, but I wasn't a fan of the trade policies, remember my job got outsourced. But the anti-American policies and anti-2nd amendment policies of the democrats were even more of a turn off.  There were a bunch of us in middle America that Trump was able to tap into, the undercurrent of resentment.  We felt that we help build this nation, then got screwed over.  Our values were no longer appreciated.  The traditional values of generations that were the backbone of this country were sneered on.  Hillary called us "Clingers" because we believed in the America of our forefathers, not the America where the government controlled everything, but the citizens had a say.   Well anyway, Trump's election exposed the chasm that was building for the past 20 years and now there is chaos and there is no equilibrium right now,   President Trump is an agent of Chaos and nobody knows how to handle it more than he does.    It will be interesting what it will be like once President Trump finishes his 2nd term and retires Mare-lago if things will settle down.  I do know that the donks and the never trumper will not know what to do....they will be lost....adrift.....the reason for being has retired....I betcha the suicide hotline will be busy...or is that a tacky thing to say.....😁

   I shamelessly clipped this off farcebook from Michael Smith

Like it or not, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 fractured the old sociopolitical order in America —and a decade later, we still haven’t figured out what that means.

It is difficult to describe exactly what is happening to our social and political order, but something fundamental is clearly shifting beneath our feet. Institutions that once organized society are fracturing. Long-standing assumptions about family, religion, nation, and truth are being rejected or redefined. Schism seems to be everywhere, and even the most basic organizing principles of social life appear to be dissolving.

Not long ago, a “family” was generally understood to mean a mother, a father, a couple of children, and perhaps a dog running around the yard. Today the definition can mean almost anything. Religion, once a central pillar of Western civilization, has become passé in many circles unless it is fused with a political ideology, but the deepest shift is not about family structure or religious observance. It is about truth itself. We are no longer merely arguing about what is true. Increasingly, we are arguing about whether objective truth exists at all.

I’ve taken to calling it The Great Confusion.

Political identity has become almost unrecognizable. People who once occupied relatively stable ideological ground now seem to mutate into strange hybrids. Figures once seen as rational conservative voices—people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and even Megyn Kelly—now flirt with rhetoric that drifts toward conspiratorial thinking or antisemitic tropes. On the other side, liberals who once framed themselves as defenders of civil liberties now openly advocate authoritarian solutions to social and political problems: censorship regimes, speech restrictions, bureaucratic enforcement of ideological compliance, and the collectivization of social norms.

The language is raw, the hostility explicit, and the mutual distrust nearly absolute.

The weird part is that there seems no coherent ideological struggle between competing visions of governance, it is something closer to fragmentation. Political labels that once provided orientation—conservative, liberal, libertarian, progressive—are steadily losing meaning. People move between positions with dizzying speed, alliances form and collapse overnight, and entire political communities increasingly seem defined less by what they believe than by whom they despise.

I am certainly not a professional historian, but I have read enough history over the years to know that moments like this are not unprecedented. The late Roman Republic experienced something remarkably similar. For centuries Rome had been governed by a stable system of customs and institutions. Senators might argue fiercely, but they still shared a basic understanding of how the political order functioned. Eventually those assumptions began to break down. Norms were ignored, political factions hardened, and rhetoric grew increasingly apocalyptic. Romans themselves complained that the old order no longer worked, yet no one could agree on what should replace it.

Europe experienced another version of this confusion during the Protestant Reformation. For nearly a thousand years, religious authority flowed through a single institutional structure. Then the printing press shattered that monopoly almost overnight. Competing interpretations of truth flooded the public sphere and religious wars followed. People were no longer merely debating doctrine—they were arguing about who had the authority to define reality itself.

The early twentieth century offers yet another example. In the years between the world wars, political categories across Europe dissolved into strange and often dangerous combinations. Nationalists borrowed socialist rhetoric, socialists adopted authoritarian methods, and liberal democracies struggled to defend their own principles. Political language itself became unstable.

Periods like these share a common feature: the collapse of trust in institutions that once mediated truth and authority.

When institutions fail, or when large numbers of people lose faith in them, society inevitably enters a period of intellectual turbulence. The normal mechanisms that help distinguish truth from error begin to break down. Authority becomes diffuse, and everyone increasingly sees himself as his own arbiter of reality. Competing narratives proliferate, expertise is dismissed as propaganda, and conspiracy theories flourish because they offer simple explanations for a complicated world.

The result is the kind of social atmosphere we inhabit today—an environment saturated with information but starved for credibility and trust. People encounter an endless stream of claims, counterclaims, and interpretations, yet fewer institutions remain that command broad confidence as honest brokers of truth.

It is like driving across the country with no road map and only a compass to guide us.

Modern technology—particularly the internet—has accelerated this process in much the same way the printing press did during the Reformation. It shattered the gatekeeping power once exercised by media organizations, universities, and traditional cultural institutions. That democratization of information brought many benefits, but it also removed many of the stabilizing filters that once shaped public discourse. Ideas now circulate instantly and globally, often stripped of context, verification, or restraint. A claim can reach millions of people long before anyone determines whether it is accurate, misleading, or entirely fabricated. The most inflammatory interpretation of events often travels farther and faster than the most measured one.

History suggests that periods like this rarely resolve themselves quickly. Rome’s political crisis unfolded over nearly a century before the republic finally gave way to imperial rule. Europe endured generations of religious conflict before the modern state system gradually stabilized authority after the upheaval of the Reformation. The ideological turmoil of the early twentieth century stretched across decades before a new political equilibrium emerged.

That does not mean our present moment must follow the same path. History never repeats itself perfectly, but it does suggest that confusion is often the opening stage of large-scale political and cultural realignment.

When the old order loses legitimacy and the institutions that once anchored social consensus no longer command trust, society enters a kind of intellectual interregnum—a transitional period in which established norms dissolve faster than new ones can be created to replace them.

The Great Confusion is not simply a disagreement over policy or politics. It is a deeper struggle over the foundations of meaning itself, truth, authority, identity, and legitimacy. Until those foundations stabilize again, the strange alliances, ideological mutations, and social fragmentation we see today will likely continue.

What comes next?

The truth is no one really knows.

I sure as hell don’t.

Monday Music "Tell It all Brother" Kenny Rogers and the First Edition

 Yeah, you Get Monday Music on ......Wednesday YAY Go ME!....Real Life got in the way, my employer sent me to a 2 day class and between it and well

I didn't have time to post anything like I wanted to.    I had commented a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to post another Kenny Rogers and the First Edition song to go along with "Ruby"   This was another song that my Dad would play a lot on his reel to reel, it is one of those songs that I associate with him and the early 70's.

  I thought the music was a bit different than what I called the LSD fueled music of the Woodstock generation, this song was haunting to a kid.    

Tell It All Brother is the sixth album by Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, released in 1970 by Reprise Records. It reached #61 on the Billboard 200. Two singles were released and also charted, including the title track which reached the top twenty of the Hot 100.

Kenny Rogers and The First Edition, sometimes billed as The First Edition, was an eclectic rock band whose styles ranged from rock and roll to R&B, folk, and country. Its core members were Kenny Rogers (lead vocals and bass guitar), Mickey Jones (drums and percussion) and Terry Williams (guitar and vocals). The band formed in 1967, with folk musician Mike Settle (guitar and backing vocals) and the operatically-trained Thelma Camacho (lead vocals) completing the lineup.
As the 1960s counterculture was heating up, The First Edition signed with Reprise Records in the summer of 1967 and had its first big hit in early 1968 with the pop-psychedelic single "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" (US No. 5). After only one more chart hit, "But You Know I Love You" (US No. 19), the group, newly billed as "Kenny Rogers and the First Edition", once again hit the top ten, this time in the summer of 1969 with the topical "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" (US No. 6, UK No.2).
For the next six years, First Edition bounced between country rock, pop and psychedelic rock, enjoying worldwide success. By the mid 1970s, frontman Kenny Rogers would embark on a solo music career, becoming one of the top-selling country artists of all time.

This video clip was from The Dean Martin Show 
      I ain't complaining, finding video clips from the early music before MTV is "Iffy",

"The Red Green Alliance"

The Marxist/Communist view the islamist as fellow travelers in the intersectional identity politics of the left, they both have similar goals, to take down what they call the patriarial west, so both will use the other, but to know who is the stronger, remember when there was a protest in New York last year? when the islamist marching "with the global Infadia " and there was a Trans/LGBT parade and at the same time, guess which one won and the other one went away?...yep the "Free Palestine" one won....That one is the more powerful.  It is a precursor to what is to come.  and the modern left don't see the forest because of the trees.  If the West is to fall, they will be the first ones lined up against the wall and shot.

   I ripped this off farcebook....the 2nd cartoon came from my "stash"

I thought I understood the Red-Green Alliance. At least in a general sense of what it was — leftists and Islamists finding common ground in some kind of oppositional politics. I filed it under “things I know enough about.” Then this afternoon, out of morbid curiosity, I actually sat down and read about it.

It’s not just a strange marriage of convenience. It’s a case study in how movements with completely opposite end goals can work together long enough to do serious damage, and how the weaker partner in that arrangement almost always ends up destroyed by it.

Here’s the basic structure, which most already know. But it sets the stage.

“Red” refers to the radical left: Marxists, socialists, movements rooted in communist ideology. “Green” refers to political Islam: Islamist ideology, movements inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

On paper, these two groups should have nothing in common. One wants a classless secular workers’ state. The other wants a global Islamic caliphate governed by religious law. Those aren’t compatible visions. Not even a little.

And yet somehow, some way, they keep finding each other.

The first major example happened in Iran in 1978 and 1979. Leftists, liberals, communists, and secular progressives all joined forces with Ayatollah Khomeini to bring down the Shah. They weren’t completely naive about his extremism.

Many of them knew his politics were reactionary. They just convinced themselves he didn’t have the ability to actually take over. They thought they could use him, or at least outlast him.

They were wrong. Obviously.

After the revolution succeeded, the Islamists consolidated power and turned on their former allies. Executions. Purges. The leftists who helped bring Khomeini to power were among the first casualties of the state they helped create.

What makes that history even more damning is what was happening in the West at the same time.

When Saddam Hussein expelled Khomeini to a suburb of Paris in October 1978, Western journalists suddenly had access to him.

Over three months, Khomeini gave 132 interviews. He was portrayed as a pious reformer, maybe even a progressive figure. Intellectuals across Europe bought it.

Michel Foucault, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, traveled to Iran and wrote glowingly about the revolution in progress, describing it as a new form of political spirituality. He wasn’t some outlier. He was the voice of the Western intellectual left, and he got it catastrophically wrong.

That’s the historical lesson. And it’s mindblowing that it hasn’t been learned.

Right now in the West, you can watch this weird version of a tango play out.

The Democratic Socialists of America simultaneously advocate for transgender youth healthcare and call for globalizing the intifada. University protesters march under banners that combine socialist slogans with Hamas ones. Groups with names like “Queers for Palestine” exist, apparently without any awareness of what Hamas actually does to gay people in Gaza.

Philosopher Judith Butler, a prominent queer theorist, has publicly described Hamas and Hezbollah as part of “the global Left.”

This isn’t happening at the edges or in back alleys. It’s happening in mainstream progressive spaces, on major university campuses, in prominent activist organizations.

And we already know it’s not spontaneous. Qatar has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding academic programs at American universities, including Georgetown and Northwestern, that promote postcolonial frameworks which happen to align with both progressive and Islamist critiques of the West. Al Jazeera and its digital outlet AJ+ push the same talking points to Arabic and English-speaking audiences simultaneously. Iran and China have used bot networks to flood social media with antisemitic content, particularly since October 7. These aren’t coincidences running in parallel.

They’re deliberate pressure on the same fractures. Ouch.

The violence this produces…In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two young Israeli embassy workers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, outside a Washington DC event. He was captured on video chanting “Free Palestine” after the murders. His social media was full of socialist declarations and open contempt for the United States.

Days later, Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw incendiary devices at Jewish marchers in Boulder, Colorado. His online presence was wall-to-wall Muslim Brotherhood content.

Two attacks, two different ideological roads, the same targets.

Here’s what I find genuinely disconcerting.

The leftists in this alliance aren’t secretly Islamist. Most of them are sincerely progressive people who believe they’re fighting imperialism. The problem is that their energy and moral credibility are being put to work for a movement that would, if it got what it wanted, demolish everything they claim to stand for. Women’s rights. Gay rights. Secularism. Free speech. All of it.

They are, to quote a sadly tired and overused phrase that goes back to Lenin, useful idiots. There are no subtleties as to what happens to useful idiots after the revolution succeeds.

I do want to be clear about something. I’m not saying that everyone who criticizes Israeli policy, or who has concerns about U.S. foreign policy, is part of this alliance. That’s not the argument.

The Red-Green Alliance describes something specific. It’s an organized cooperation between Marxist radicalism and Islamism, aimed at taking down Western liberal democracy and, more explicitly, destroying Israel.

That’s a different thing from ordinary political disagreement, and blurring that line doesn’t help anyone think clearly.

What I am saying is that this alliance is more developed, better funded, and more deliberately organized than I previously understood. I almost wish I steered clear of this rabbit hole. Once again, I realize how unprepared I am to connect all the dots, I’m not a trained journalist.

The progressive left in the West has, in many cases, been too locked into its own worldview to see clearly what it’s walked into. Sadly, most don’t want to listen. At least, not the ones I’ve had conversations with. To them, I’m the brainwashed one. I’m the indoctrinated one. So maybe writing this is more of a catharsis for me. And maybe it’s more of an exploration so that I can deeply understand this phenomenon.

The Iranian leftists of 1979 had some excuse. Khomeini was a relatively unknown figure. They were moving fast inside a revolution with incomplete information. Foucault was writing from Paris, largely in the dark about what was coming.

But man…Western progressives in 2026? They have the complete historical record sitting right in front of them. If they had been paying attention at all to the past, then they should know where this leads in the future.

"Pax America Or Pax Naivete"

 I remember from the turn of the last century through the early 1960's having an American Citizenship and passport was a magical thing if you travelled.  people left you alone because if something happened, they knew that the U.S. government would interfere from sending people to investigate to sending in a detachment of marines to clean things up.  That is how the Americans rolled, that is having a reputation of speaking softly and carrying a huge stick.  A holdover of Teddy Roosevelt's foreign policy.  Don't screw with Americans.  But after the 1960 and later, it because a national pastime for all these groups to harass Americans and watch the "Paper Tiger"  do nothing.  This really became apparent during the 1970's after the debacle of Vietnam, and the ascency of the influence of the Soviet Union and its proxies.  I remember the various hijacking of planes, trains, bombings and they could be laid at the feet of the PLO who was supported by the Soviets, the Stasi, and when this pattern continued through the early 1980's with the seizing of our embassy in Iran by "students".   I want us to be respected again on the world stage, feared, I don't care if they don't like us, being liked has gotten us nowhere except taken advantage of.  I want the world to respect us again, with a touch of fear. like it used to be.   Am I silly? perhaps...but it has to be better than the Obama apology tour.

For half a century, the prevailing framework of world politics has rested on a set of polite fictions—mutually agreed-upon conventions and carefully maintained pretenses. America’s foreign policy establishment sustained these soothing myths through self-affirming narratives, willful blindness to uncomfortable realities, and a veneer of diplomatic nicety designed less to illuminate truth than to avoid honest debate. Over time, that posture coincided with a steady erosion of American influence. We adopted a strangely contradictory approach to the world: proclaiming strategic leadership while simultaneously shoveling taxpayer money to governments and causes across the globe with little expectation of loyalty, cooperation, or even alignment with American interests.

That contradiction lies at the heart of the frustration many people—me included—have long felt about institutions like USAID. Beyond the well-documented problems of waste, graft, and the steady flow of funds to ideologically aligned NGOs, the deeper issue was philosophical: an aid system built on the assumption that generosity alone would purchase goodwill. History suggests otherwise—and once you begin looking closely at the structure, the spending, and the incentives, there is plenty to hate.

When Trump and team looked at the overall situation, they saw that even with those “investments”, we still had to feed the leviathan that was created by the Global War on Terror to defend our citizens from terrorism—and even then, the value and protection of carrying a US passport continues to decline.

Being attuned to transactional dealmaking, I think Trump looked at the situation and said to himself, “Self, what the hell are we getting for our treasure and resources?” He looked at all the foreign aid going out the door, even the NATO and UN funding, and our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and the answer he came up with was “little to nothing.” Yeah, we “got” Bin Laden, but years after his power had peaked—the 7th Century savages had already moved on to more savagery. Pax Americana was working but getting more expensive and singularly dependent on America every day and political forces inside the US were using America’s own efforts to deal with external and internal threats under some pretty adverse conditions as weapons against her.

I think Trump’s gambit comes down to one thing—and that is getting a reasonable rate of return on America’s investment in national defense, NATO, force projection (the cost of having military bases all over the world), domestic law enforcement (including immigration enforcement, which, for all the performative grousing by Democrats is about national security), and foreign aid.

So, what if Trump’s gambit succeeds?

On his broadcast of February 4, 2015, Rush Limbaugh said:

“Why in the world do we give money to people that end up ripping us and criticizing us? Why do we end up giving foreign aid to certain countries that actively work against us? I have always thought that foreign aid should be merit based. Okay, you want foreign aid from the United States, we’re gonna have to list, and we’re gonna have the good list and we’re gonna have the excrement list. And if you get on our excrement list, you’re on it for a while. It’s gonna take you years to get off of it.”

What if the Trump administration follows the Limbaugh Doctrine and creates a Global Excrement List? I can scarcely imagine anyone better than Secretary of State Marco Rubio managing it.

What if Venezuela and Iran—as well as other perpetual trouble spots—fall under US influence rather than working for Russia and China? What if the United States becomes a regional/global hegemon with client states in orbit?

Would that be so bad?

What if America power was magnified by that collection of global client states, all working toward the same goals for freer trade, security, and liberty for their people?

A good concise definition of a “client state” would be “a nominally independent nation that relies on a more powerful state for economic aid, military protection, or political support and therefore aligns its policies with the interests of that patron state.”

I’m not talking about a bunch of client states in the mode of the old Soviet Bloc with puppet dictators, but something akin to what happened under the Monroe Doctrine, which established an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, and over time U.S. interventions—especially under the Roosevelt Corollary—led several countries to function as de facto client states of the United States.

Would that be so bad?

Of course, some will say that America can’t be trusted with that kind of influence, but the fact is that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Empty space will be filled by something or someone and as America has weakened itself, China and Russia have been more than happy to do that job.

Winston Churchill is alleged to have said that America can be counted on to do the right thing after we have tried everything else. Now that we have tried everything else, maybe Pax Americana and Monroe Doctrine sort of hegemony is the right thing.