How Much Are You Willing To Swallow (not porn)

 

I'm not being paid.

I would love to be paid to do what I am going to do anyway.  It could be George Soros or a polka dotted pig from two galaxies over.  I don't care.  If such an entity would like to add to my bank account, everything from a penny to the GDP of the planet can go right into my account with no bitching from me.  Of course, that seems horribly unlikely since most of us would not understand the idea of paying for that which would be free and is going to happen regardless of payment status.  There was a time when I was regularly paid to write my essays.  I certainly accepted that money but when the pay quit, I kept writing.  No one has ever paid me to protest.  I protest anyway.  

I do not hate America.

I am a multi-enlistment veteran of the USN that joined voluntarily though I had some scholarship opportunities right out of high school.  The Vietnam war was still killing humans, even humans related to me.  Though I like to think I am reasonably familiar with history, I generally attribute hostile acts to specific individuals  or specific (relatively) small groups rather than declaring the USA as a place to hate.

I have no desire for everyone to be Trans.

I am not Trans and I am quite happy with my heterosexuality.  I probably know more Trans folk than come immediately to mind but I don't ask because as a general rule, I don't care.  So far, I have never identified someone's gender claim as a basis for negativity in my life.  The same could be said about any consensual sex. Any 2 or 20 folk in any mix of genders can sex the hell out of each other without affecting me at all. 

I don't want open borders.

A couple of decades or more ago I first observed that to be a nation, you had to have defensible and defended borders.  At the first mention of the idiotic border wall, I suggested that we could do better than relying on 10k year old technology especially since the first time the tech was defeated was probably also 10k years ago.

I have been hired for reasons other than my Blackness.

Some jobs I have had I was better at than damn near anyone else doing the job.  Other jobs found me being competent but having the distinction of showing up most every time I was expected to be there.  Not one time in my life nor, if they are to be believed, the lives of my siblings, has anyone ever suggested within range of my perception that I was hired solely because I am Black.

For as long as I can remember, I have heard stereotypical descriptions of the desires or habits of  Black people, poor people, Democrats, Southerners, etc etc.  Somehow, no matter how many of the groups I happened to fall into, the stereotypes were unlikely to apply to me.  Sometimes I would be hard pressed to find anyone that fit the descriptions.  Generally, the frequency of the stereotypes being true or accurate were about the same as for individuals not in whatever group being allegedly described.

There is a traditional term for those who make claims that are demonstrably, verifiably false.  Those people are liars.  You might attempt to be charitable towards them and explain away their misconstruals as mistakes or misunderstanding.  Nope, they are lying and for the most part, they know they are lying.  They are simply more concerned with "winning" the argument or discussion than they are with accuracy or fairness.

But in truth, those folks don't matter.  What matters is you and the titular question of this essay.  Those folks are knowingly and openly lying to you (and possibly about you).  I'm curious as to just how much of it you are willing to swallow along with the social and economic abuses that affect you negatively even though they are supposedly targeting the "others".  How long will you continue to beg to be lied to?  How long will you pretend there is anything to the obviously false statements?  What will it take for you American-up and start siding with your neighbors who demonstrate the falsity in the statements of those who would attempt to spread hate?

They are not lying because they expect to convince anyone.  They are certainly not expecting to convince me.  I have presented sufficient written evidence to identify that as a non-starter.  They are lying because they can.  Because you will not hold them to account.  Because they hope to convince you to hate the people they irrationally hate.  As long as you will continue to swallow it, they will continue to feed it to you.  It will never be more true or reasonable or fair or right.  It will never be justifiable.  It will only ever be a naked power grab.  The irony is that those who have more power than you will use those same exact tactics on you as soon as they are more worried about you than they are about me - regardless of the reason.

THOSE WHO CAN, PROTEST

 A lot of humans have issue with self-fulfilling prophecies.  They will say stuff like, "Why bother protesting?  What little I can do will make no difference." They then proceed to do nothing and lo and behold, it makes no difference.  Would it have been the same if they had actually done something??  I assure you, we'll never know.

What we can and do know, is that those who oppose the criminal, irrational and self-enriching actions of Felon47 are a very large group.  The NO KINGS protests of 10/18/25 proved that there is a large number of humans - citizens of the USA as well as many other nations - who are in strong and public disagreement with the actions and attitudes of him and his supporters.

If your reason for not protesting or for not doing what you can to support the protesters was that there were too few in opposition to make a difference, 10/18 disappeared that reason.  7 million or more of your closest friends, your family members, your neighbors all showed up in public at their own expense to display their dissatisfaction with this criminal cabal.

Now, I happen to know from conversations I have been a part of and things I have observed that a slew of those in opposition to the USA's worst mistake ever, for some very good reasons did not show up to the protests.  Some appeared to be Hispanic and though they were legal, citizens even, they knew they could be wrongfully arrested and abused with zero repercussions for the LEOs.  Some had more mundane reasons.  They have children or elderly or disabled individuals that depend on them and cannot be left alone.  Regardless of reason, the 7 million number being tossed around is at best, a small percentage of those actually in opposition to the orange clown.

Now though, now we have some idea of the scope of the resistance.  Because we attended this protest, we might have inspired enough hope to encourage more of our neighbors to attend the next one, to take a more active role in their opposition.  If all the protest accomplished was to let the back-benchers know they were not alone in their opposition, it would have been worth doing.  Hopefully, it also twisted into knots the intestines of those hangers-on who had it made known to them that Trump and trumpism will not be around to protect them forever.

Sophistry and Obfuscation

Once more, my friend Bill Foster has posted something to his Substack that I think deserves a wider audience.

Sophistry and Obfuscation

Why the Actual Defense Budget is More Than Double What You Think It Is

William E Foster

Oct 08, 2025

There has been a lot of talk lately about U.S. defense spending reaching one trillion dollars under the big, beautiful bill. Unfortunately, the amount we spend on defense is routinely underestimated by liberal and conservative sources of like. In recent months, even folks I like and respect and generally find truthful like NPR, Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart have gotten it wrong.

The number you will hear most often is the Department of Defense base budget. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 that was $826 billion. Nuclear weapons are not included in the defense budget as they are under the Department of Energy. If you add that $47 billion, you get $874 billion. You will see this number quite often. The big, beautiful building adds $150 billion to that figure.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the Bush administration pulled one of the biggest bait and switches in history with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Now, I admit that it’s an effective trick. Is Homeland Security defense spending? I would argue that it is right there in the name. What could be more basic to the defense of our nation than the security of the homeland and the protection of our borders? If it makes everyone feel better, we can talk about security spending instead of defense spending, but it seems obvious to me that it should be included. That figure is $112.4 billion in FY 24, up from $30 billion in 2004, its first full year of operation. Under the big, beautiful bill, DHS spending would increase $43.8 billion in 2026.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is not included in the DoD budget. Obviously, caring for those who served in the military is part of the cost of defense and to not include this in the budget is sophistry at best and more probably deliberate deception. The VA budget for FY 2024 was $325 billion. FY 2026 is unclear, but it looks like $369.3 billion. Military retirement pay is in the exact same situation, not included for the purposes of deliberate obfuscation. In Fy 2024, pensions for retired military members cost $260 billion. To be clear, I received 1.015384615384615e-7% of that money.

There are also significant costs for International Affairs throughout the budget that are actually defense spending. These include additional war funding because none of the obscene amounts spent so far include fighting a war. It also includes foreign aid, assistance to foreign militaries, embassy guards, etc. This includes programs like Foreign Military Financing ($3.3 billion), aid to Ukraine (about $107 billion so far), and another $42.36 billion, which includes paying for genocide in Israel.

Finally, we must remember we are issuing Treasury Bills for all this spending, which means we are paying interest on all this spending. This is hard to calculate, but interest on the national debt exceeded defense spending this year as the largest item in the federal budget. Interest is projected to cost $870 billion in FY 2024. The base DoD budget is 13% of the budget. We know now that defense spending is higher than 13%, as that is only the base DoD budget. We want to err on the conservative side, so I’ll use a figure of 20%. That means that $174 billion in the amount of interest on the national debt we pay related to defense spending.

We add all that together and we get:

Defense and DoE nuclear weapons: $1.24 trillion

Homeland Security: $156.2 billion

Veterans’ Affairs: $369.3 billion

Military pensions: $260 billion

International affairs: $150 billion

Interest: $174 billion

Grand Total: $2,349,000,000

This information is difficult to find and parse and this took me awhile. Even for a simple question such as, “what is the FY 2024 VA budget,” I received six different answers (in the same ballpark). You can argue about whether certain things should be included but it is quite clear that the U.S. budget is not $1 trillion but is somewhere far to the north of that and at least double. We should also note that there is credible research done by Stockholm International Peace research Institute that shows that actual spending demonstrated in the National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA) – the database where checks are written – shows that money spent is always much higher than what is budgeted. I chose to omit that analysis in the interest of coming up with a conservative figure that is certainly at the low end of the range of possibilities.

How does this compare to other countries? The official figure for the U.S. is that we spend 3.4% of our GDP on defense but if spending is more than twice the commonly acknowledged level then that means we spend more like 7% of our GDP. That means as a percentage of GDP, we exceed every nation except Israel, Ukraine and Algeria (possibly Russia depending on the figure). We outspend China by over $2 trillion. In fact, this budget is the equal of the next, …. I don’t know. I wanted to say how many countries our budget equals but the list I have only goes to 40. The other 39 countries in the top 40 equal to $1.48 trillion. The United States outspends the 40 highest military budgets in the world, combined, by a trillion dollars. The United States probably spends as much as the rest of the world combined and we outspend any meaningful combination of enemies by at least a factor of four.

Let us look at this spending in comparison to some other U.S. Spending. Social Security, which comes from its own trust fund, is only $1.4 trillion. All health care together is about $900 billion. Total interest is about the same. All “welfare” together is about $650 billion. The point is that defense is talked about as a significant cost, but it is beyond that. It is more than double any other single item in the ten largest costs the U.S. government incurs.

The public relations budget is illustrative of the scale of this spending. The Department of Defense spends only about .5% of its budget on advertising, but that’s enough to fund 5,000 people and an almost billion dollar a year budget, over half of total federal spending on advertising. That includes such things as paying $53 million over four years on patriotic displays at sporting events, paying retired generals to appear on media programs, even inventing a fictional expert during the Cold War (look up Guy Sims Fitch- fascinating). The DoD employees more people in its PR department than the Department of Education has in total. This is a tremendous effort, and it is all aimed at one thing: convincing you that all of this spending is necessary for your freedom and not mere socialism.

I’ve made this argument before, and people get a bit rowdy about it. My point is merely that socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Boeing last year got 36% of its total revenues from the government and it’s the lowest of them. RTX (Raytheon) got 100% of its revenues from militaries, 75% from the U.S. and the rest from foreign militaries, but those are mostly paid for by America. In fact, 90% of our foreign aid is not humanitarian but is a Pentagon jobs program in which we give Egypt or Saudi Arabia money, and they spend it on U.S. weapons. Lockheed Martin gets 73% of its revenue from the U.S. government. General Dynamics 69%. Northrop Grumman 87%. There is no sense in which these are private companies. Yes, they are publicly traded but they are 100% dependent on the government.

At this scale, this is socialism. I am not against that. I am a democratic socialist. I just want my socialism to help educate and feed and provide medical care for normal people. I don’t want inefficient, bloated Pentagon socialism that distributes money to national security consultants and contractors while ordinary folks bleed in America and poor folk all over the world get bombed.

And there it is. The Blue Angels are cool, but they are designed to make you think how cool and awesome they are and not to think of them incinerating a wedding. We spend all these dollars and stimulate our economy but it’s poor, mostly brown, folks who pay the price for it. One of the saddest things I ever heard was a little Afghan kid talking about how she prayed for cloudy days because on sunny days the drones could see you.

Here is a fact. In 21 years in the military, I didn’t do anything for your freedom. We are constantly told that the military is for freedom. But there wasn’t and isn’t one single thing in the Middle East worth the life of my friend or the wounds the others I know suffered. Contrary to the non-stop deluge of “patriotic” nonsense we all see all the time, no one died protecting your freedom. They protected your interests. They protected your economy or your gas or your job, but your freedom? That has not been in danger since the Civil War.

Dwight Eisenhower said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children ... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

It is common at every major event for someone to thank the military without whom the event would not happen, and I wouldn’t have the freedom to write this. Bullshit. Nothing in American history since 1900 has affected American’s freedom, except our own government at times. I am not saying that we should not have engaged in WW II but even in that major event, had we not entered, your freedom was never in danger. That is simply pernicious hyperbole meant to stop you from questioning our spending priorities.

What is real freedom? What does it mean? We are paying heavily for the military we are encouraged today to worship, paying for a military as large as the rest of the world combined. Is true freedom merely existence in a democracy? Or is it access to a job? To health care? To the chance for your family to have a better life than yours? Ask yourself what would give you more freedom, a universal health care system that costs you nothing (you could easily pay for it with cuts in defense) and an educational system that cost you nothing (as most Western European nations have) or a military the size of the next ninety nations combined? Imagine a world in which your health care and your education cost almost nothing. How much freer would you feel with no health insurance or school loans, something that would be easily affordable with a military only as large as 50% of the rest of the world instead of 100%? Every time a government building flies a giant flag or the military holds a parade or flies a jet over a football game, it costs money. It is your money and false patriotism that is designed to keep you from noticing that is not patriotism at all. It is creeping fascism. It makes you feel good and simultaneously suppresses the urge to ask, what does freedom really mean?

Worship of the military is death to a democracy. Washington knew this and that’s why we didn’t even have a standing army until after WW II. Having a military is a regretful necessity and we should begrudge every goddamn dime we spend on it because every dime is a theft from educating our young and preparing our nation for the future. We can have a strong military, but it should be as lean, as mean, and as small as possible to protect our interests. It should be for defending America not for defending the interests of an empire. We should never, ever glorify it but solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices people make and hope for a future where those sacrifices are not necessary. Patriotism is not blind worship of the troops but educating oneself about what our military actually does and asking hard questions about what freedom really means. Many more of our citizens are imprisoned by poverty, by hunger, by a lack of hope and opportunity than were ever threatened by foreign enemies. It is time to get our priorities straight.

What A Fool Believes

The disappointment continues.  I get a digital NYT newsletter each morning.  It contains some fluff bits - recipes, games, puff pieces, but it also has a lead story or two that are actual news.  That is where the disappointment comes in.  This morning one of the lead stories about the unconstitutional deployment of the military to cities within the USA included the following, "This is the president’s vision for law enforcement. He believes that crimes should be prosecuted to the max, and that low-level violations set a permissive climate for nastier ones. "

Of course, the NYT did not mention the fact that it is unconstitutional.  They did not mention that it is unprecedented.  Basically they were parroting whatever Felon47 said with damn little in the way of critical analysis.

We humans have some amazing abilities but, (for most of us at least) mind-reading is not one of them.  Given that, in situations where it doesn't matter or if speed is more important or we have no feasible method of proving or disproving a statement, we might generously forgive the simple taking of someone's word for it.  There are situations where that is probably the best and most reasonable choice.  But it is definitely not all situations.

Quite frequently there are actions that are temporally, geographically or, thematically associated with the statement.  Those actions can function as clues in a significant percentage of statements or claims made by humans.  In an essay written for a different project, I make the claim that "Belief Leads Behavior".  While I will make temporary allowances for habit, as a general rule what you actually believe(as opposed to what you say you believe) determines how you behave.  The light switch is my standard example.  When you walk into a room and reach for the light switch, it is because you believe that flipping said switch will result in desired illumination.  If you walk into that room a thousand times and the first hundred or so times nothing happens when you flip the switch, the next nine hundred or so times you will bring a flashlight or make other arrangements.  You no longer believe the light switch will accomplish your goal of illuminating the room so you stop flipping the switch.  Habit might keep you reaching for the switch even after you know it isn't working but that habit will not keep going for long.  

Felon47 has a long public history.  A history that includes several instances of law-breaking and/or law ignoring.  He violated housing laws in refusing to rent to minorities.  He demanded the Central Park Five be put in/kept in prison even after the law declared them innocent of the charges.  He has multiple felony convictions and has been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in illegal behavior on more than one occasion.  He has been accused of rape of young girls and convicted of sexual assault (rape) of an adult female.

Those are simply not the behaviors of someone who has any level of respect for or belief in the law.  The NYT knows this.  They have either reported on or been involved in (or both) any number of his instances of breaking or ignoring the law.  Hell, he took out a full page ad in the NYT in his effort to make sure innocent minority men went to prison for something they did not do.  The NYT knows about all of that.  

Felon47 has undertaken several different methods to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.  He files lawsuit after lawsuit in an effort to complicate things.  He files appeal after appeal of convictions in an effort to financially break his victim(s).  He even ran for POTUS to avoid prosecution and publicly considered preemptively pardoning himself. 

I have no idea how stupid one would actually have to be to know all of that and still harbor some idea that Felon47 has any respect for the law much less being inspired to make some idiotic statement about him "believing" that all crimes should be prosecuted to the max.  Now, you could modify the statement and make it believable.  Make it so that all poor people are prosecuted to the max or so that all minorities are prosecuted to the max or so that all non-wealthy immigrants are prosecuted to the max and I will have no argument to make.  But it could not be more clear from his behavior(s) as to how he actually feels about crime and punishment.

Felon47 treats the law as just another tool for him to use in defrauding business partners or otherwise enriching his family (read: him).  With the assistance of the NYT, we have watched these happen in real time.  My question is "why?"  Why is the NYT attempting to gaslight its readers and subscribers?

This is far from the only example of the NYT doing or saying something at his benefit or behest.  I see them touting Russian advancements in Ukraine while ignoring some very effective retaliatory Ukrainian strikes on refineries and factories that support Russia's war efforts.  Again, the question is "why?"  I refuse to believe that the NYT of all organizations does not understand the difference between journalism and parroting PR releases.

I can't answer my own question.  I do not know the "why".  What I know is that I am increasingly skeptical of any of their reporting of which I cannot immediately find corroboration.  For gaslighting to be most effective it requires the willingness of the victim to be gaslit.  I am unwilling to accept obvious bullshit just so I don't have to think about it, just so my cogitative life is simpler.  I'd like to know there are other folk like me out there.

The Business End Of The Shaft

 

If you sign up for a martial arts class, regardless of cultural origins, all of them will start by teaching you the basics. In the case of karate, once you master the basics, you get a black belt and are considered ready to begin learning how to fight effectively taking into account your own strengths and weaknesses. The basics are just the foundation.

The physical fighters of the military spend a lot of time and effort learning how to fight and maintaining physical fitness. If you added BUD/S to the rest of the disciplines I studied in the USN, I would have never gotten through any of them. An electronics tech should have an idea of how to use anything in their space as a weapon and should know what is more deadly but they should not be derelict in learning electronics so that they can lift weights, run in sand, and spar with martial instructors. We specialize not because we are incompetent to do other things (though some surely are). Rather we specialize because learning everything is impossible and is an impediment to doing anything at the highest level.

If you are ever given a choice to go into a fight carrying just the tip of the spear or, just the shaft of the spear, which would you choose? If the choice is mine, I am choosing the shaft. It can be used like the bo staff of traditional Japanese martial arts. It could be broken in half and used as escrima or Kali sticks from the Filipino martial traditions. The point is that you fight differently if you have the entire spear, just the point or just the shaft. This is the basis of my suggestion that everyone who is eligible for full voting citizenship, should be eligible for military service. No, you should not expect a paraplegic in a wheelchair to pass the Marine PT test but we should expect them to do what they can and the military should have some pretty detailed knowledge about what that is and what they should be taught.

While Pete Hegseth understands beer pong to an Olympic level, his understanding of all things military would not be out of place in a satirical cartoon written for 6 year olds. The overwhelming majority of the military never pulls a trigger or slits a throat.  We drive, mechanic, build, type, decode, cook, paint,  navigate, pilot, nurse, account, play musical instruments, translate, document and and and.  If you were to have everyone that was not a trigger puller stand down, it would not be long before the trigger pullers discovered the value of logistics experts.  Hegseth is so completely wrong that it almost seems intentional.  It is difficult to believe someone could actually be so clueless but either he is or, he is like his boss, working for their Vladdy Daddy.