Heil Fire

 Let's just say what every MAGA minion knows and applauds: General Charles Brown, Jr. was fired as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he is black, just as Admiral Lisa Franchetti was fired as Chief of Naval Operations because she is a woman, just as Admiral Linda Fagan was previously fired as head of the Coast Guard because she is a woman.

These firings begin to create the opportunity that every dictator needs--refashioning the military to be only and absolutely loyal to the dictator. But whatever contributing factors are involved, these specific firings are about judging people on the basis of their race and gender.  

It is obviously not about competence, especially since the people making the decisions are without it.  All of these officers had long and varied experience, and long and distinguished records.  Like many of the changes being made, the appointment of the named replacement as chair of the Joint Chiefs is on its face illegal.

The current Chaos administration seems guided by some familiar principles: racism, imperialism and crony capitalism.  Its methods include lies (both Big and little), absolute loyalty, bullying, arrogance and inducing chaos.

A familiar pattern, though it is ahistorical in this sense: this was a country at peace, a country that was measurably prosperous, and a country that was working pretty well, with problems of a scale that democratic processes should be able to address.  In other words, unlike the onset of most tyrannical dictatorships, there was no extreme crisis that precipitated the kind of extreme changes that are still being implemented. 

The plans to do all this were open to public knowledge.  I knew them, Kamala Harris talked about them (though apparently not enough.)  There may be a certain amount of buyers' remorse out there now, and we are all in shock, but nobody should be surprised.  Project 2025 published their plans.  These people made speeches.  

Things weren't perfect but there were just two people running, and one of them was always going to do this, and--despite some general denials--pretty much said so.  Only ignorance--much of it willful ignorance-- led to the apparent results of the 2024 presidential election, and likely its influence on other elections, particularly for the Senate.  Ignorance, and a background of unacknowledged fear and denial.

This is Not Dictator's Day

 I awoke from yet another nightmare with an image forming: tiny figures smashing the supports under the huge building that houses us all.  The building itself appears undamaged.  But eventually it won't take much to bring it down.

King Chaos is an increasingly emboldened dictator, following the Hitler model perfectly.  Even with known and unknown individual acts of courage if not effectiveness, the bulwark of bureaucracy is quaking. The courts are starting to weaken.  Billionaires and megacorporations are stampeding into line, including Jeff Bezos' Amazon which offered tens of millions for Melania's "documentary" that no one else would even touch. By coincidence no doubt, Bezos' Washington Post has nixed a paid advertisement campaign to "Fire Musk." 

Virtually everything Chaos is doing is either illegal, un-Constitutional or corrupt, when it's not all three. 

Prince Chaos of Musk and his minions are soon to get their greedy eyes on personal data of millions of Americans kept in the data depths of Treasury and Social Security.  Some eager beavers fired Nuclear Security Administration staff overseeing the nuclear arsenal without knowing what they do.  They are now trying to hire them back, but they reportedly didn't keep contact information.  Weren't they going to pay these people?  What about their pensions?  All of this is monstrous.

At schools for the children of American military personnel at NATO headquarters in Belgium, teachers were frantically trying to obey new Defense department censorship by axing Black History month and anything vaguely to do with rainbows.  While stripping shelves of now forbidden books.  Says the New York Times report: "And teachers have been taking down their Black history month displays and nixing plans for women’s history month, after a Jan. 31 email from the acting under secretary for defense that said such celebrations “divide the force.” 

Another Times piece suggests there is apparently an under 30 generation for whom the "I was racist before it was cool" guy is a hero.  Orange is the new Green.

Another aspect familiar from a certain period of all too recent but also all too distant German history is the policy of imperialism emerging from the Chaos administration.  It's hard not to see Prince Chaos behind this, whispering about how we can use all those trace minerals to build more AI and rule the world somehow, or at least get to Mars (where do you think all the money will eventually go that they are supposedly saving from firing people and slashing medical care for the poor and the old--besides directly into the billionaires' pockets?)

The deathly irony of the white supremacist administration officially assuming power on the Martin Luther King Day holiday is now joined by the multiple instances of abuse of power and rank corruption made routine by the current occupant of the Oval Office, bringing a new degree of shame to the Presidency this day is supposed to celebrate.