Category: Uncategorized

  • Snafu

    There were a few issues counting against Pete Hegseth when he was proposed as SoS for Defense. There was the wife-beating, the far-right tattoos, the philandering, the lack of any relevant experience outside of presenting a show on Fox News, and him being an alcoholic. His confirmation was close-run, with JD Vance supplying the casting vote.

    His actions since then have shown his determination to stamp out wokeness. First by sacking trans, black and female soldiers. Evidently righting historical wrongs, he has renamed an army base after a Confederate general. He has also gone through naval libraries, removing books such as “Memorializing the Holocaust”, but keeping “Mein Kampf”. Priorities.

    A recent memo instructs the army to suspend all recreational activities other than those for sport or fitness. Soldiers will no longer be allowed to play pool, darts or cards to unwind. I guess the beatings will continue until morale improves.

    I guess he thinks these are all steps in the right direction, but he has overlooked the danger posed by the straight white cis males that he appointed. A leak enquiry has implicated his chief of staff, the deputy and his senior advisor in releasing top secret operational information to the public.

    They have all been sacked. Combined with previous purges, this leaves a huge hole in the leadership at the Pentagon, with more chaos expected. Hopefully this will prevent them from starting any wars in the near future.

  • Why so baffled?

    Yesterday at 14:20 CET, a military jet flew over my house in north-eastern Germany. It was heading East. There’s a whole load of trouble over there, and I presume this jet had something to do with it in some way.

    It’s all very concerning and I worry how this is going to turn out. I have read my history and remember the stories of “July 1914” and “August 1939”. Everybody in the whole damned world knew there was going to be a war and, one month later, there was a war.

    I know that feeling. Now.

    I hope it never happens. There are indeed many good reasons for hope, including plain incompetence. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

    All this is bad enough. Worse still is the reason for the currently critical situation:

    The USA1 betrayed us.

    It’s hard to describe my reaction to this. Upset. Shocked. Baffled. I never wondered how I would react to such a betrayal, as it was simply inconceivable. The USAians were always there for us; we were always there for them. No longer. We can’t trust them again either.

    Why did they do this?

    I’ve got a few ideas, as well as a list of villains to blame. My aim with this blog is to look at this mess and try to understand what’s going on and why it happened.

    At the moment, I just don’t get it.

    1. until it becomes “X, the country formerly known as USA” ↩︎