Earlier today, America’s Drunken Stepdad of War Pete Hegseth gathered all the top leadership of the U.S. military to tell them no more Blacks, gay stuff, or beardos will be allowed from now on, not in his America’s Department of Warfighting Lethality. Not even in the Navy, perhaps.

Hegseth, a mediocrity who achieved the rank of major in the National Guard, served his nation as a gitmo torturer, a civil affairs officer in Iraq, and an equities market analyst at Bear Stearns where his service was later fictionalized by @horse_ebooks’s Jacob Bakkila in the video game “Bear Stearns Bravo.” In 2020, as a member of the Washington D.C. National Guard, Hegseth was blocked from serving in Joe Biden’s inauguration as an “insider threat” due to his white supremacist bicep tattoo, and also blocked from serving in the January 6th Capitol attacks by Donald Trump declining to call in troops to put down his own coup attempt. I only made up one fact in this paragraph and I defy anyone to guess which one it was.

“Lethality is our calling card,” said Hegseth, “and victory our only acceptable end state.” Big talk for the leader of a military that hasn’t won a war in 80 years. After forty-five solid minutes dropping blood-and-guts Reichsparteitag applause lines into a dead silence, the visibly dehydrated Hegseth was left licking his lips desperately between each word, the only recourse for a man who believes that drinking water is for queers. After explaining that he plans to fire every woman and minority in the U.S. military as well as any “fat generals” he might find, Hegseth rallied the rest of the troops by recommending that if they don’t like doing war crimes they should quit. He closed his remarks to a universal lack of acclaim followed by the most polite smattering of applause imaginable, then walked confidently offstage to beat a wife.

Hegseth was followed by Donald Trump who came on to tell the assembled military leadership to get ready to invade America.

But first:

Pudding? Mit Gabel essen?

Großveranstaltungen in Deutschland, laut NDR:

“Ein Social-Media-Trend, vor allem bei der Generation Z,” in Wahrheit.

Karlsruhe, “München, Nürnberg, Würzburg, Münster und Berlin,” bald sogar Zürich—alle essen Pudding mit einer Gabel.

Verschlafen: Ich bin ein Berliner.
Verdrahten: Pudding mit Gabel essen.

Abschließend: Pudding, mit Gabel essen.

Donald Trump said a lot of things to the U.S. military leadership today, as he does, much of it not strictly military related. He talked about stairs, he talked about fishing, he talked about swing states. He said many numbers: twenty five, three thousand, eight, one trillion, forty five, forty six, and forty seven (but he doesn’t want the credit for forty six). So many beautiful numbers.

But of course instead of the numbers everyone focused on the part where Trump said America is “under invasion from within,” and he was preparing to use American cities as military “training grounds” in a war against the “enemy from within.” I mean, sure, when you put it that way it does sound bad. But let’s return to the numbers. The beautiful numbers. Here are some numbers:

In 2001 the United States invaded Afghanistan, a central Asian nation of 252,072 square miles, about the size of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Afghanistan had a population, at the time, of a little over 20 million—a couple million more than the New York metropolitan area. While U.S. forces toppled the Taliban government easily, what followed was twenty long, bloody years of unsuccessful counterinsurgency which ended with a U.S. withdrawal and the immediate return of the Taliban government. Just today, New York Times Magazine published a 25,000 word four-part report by Matthieu Aikins on the domestic blowback of that brutal failed occupation in the form of what Aikins calls a special forces “culture of rule-breaking that led to war crimes and, eventually, a vigilante ethos openly embraced by leaders at home.”

The United States is fifteen times larger than Afghanistan in land area. According to Wikipedia, as of 2017 Afghans owned about 12.5 firearms per 100 citizens—the sixty-third highest rate of gun ownership in the world. America is first, with over 120 firearms per 100 citizens. Yes those guns are likely more heavily concentrated in the hands of Trump’s political supporters, but another estimate put the 2017 rate of armed U.S. households at 42%, still well above the 32% of registered voters who voted for Trump in 2024, even if each of those voters represented a distinct household, which they obviously don’t.

So while it is wildly impeachable for the President to even talk about ordering the U.S. military to invade the United States of America, let alone for him to do it, it’s also important to recognize that in no conceivable way does our military have the capacity to do it. If American soldiers wanted to use American heavy munitions to demolish American cities and slaughter American civilians remotely from the land, air, and sea, they could absolutely do that… to a few cities at least. It’s unclear what that would accomplish in terms of pacifying Donald Trump’s political opponents, but on the other hand it would certainly be a lot of crimes against humanity! I’m not sure the military leadership and service members of the U.S. Department of Warfighting Lethality have an appetite for any of that, on anyone’s behalf, but especially on the behalf of a mumbling, visibly addled President who believes that everything he sees on television is real.

At least the government is about to shut down! Happy Tuesday.

Today’s Song: Modest Mouse, “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes”

Kaleb Horton died, way too soon. Here’s “The End Result of My Herculean Big Bang Theory Spec.” If that hits for you, here’s a bunch more.