Hegseth has admitted to excess drinking in the past, but he has vowed that, if confirmed to lead the Pentagon, "there won't be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I'm doing it."
So he didn't even promise to stop drinking - just no drinking during work hours.
He actually just promised not to dribble.
If a guy can go from being a drunk to running the Defense Department in only a couple of months, isn't that really just a testament to the resilience of the human spirit? Who are we to say it can't be done!
I'm not worried about the drinking so much as the war crimes.
And he did it without all that woke DEI stuff.
The silver lining here is that Hegseth brings the possibility of parody back into view, after so many years of Trumpworld being beyond parody. Once we actually get a nominee who shits his pants constantly and speaks in guttural snarls, we'll be over the edge again. But I think the distance between Hegseth's level of dysfunction and an actually funny parody is just right. This is not much of a silver lining.
Also, I completely missed this when it happened:
The lack of rigor in the Hegseth investigation is reminiscent of the F.B.I.'s investigation into Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious confirmation hearing, in 2018. Three years after Kavanaugh's confirmation, the F.B.I. disclosed that it had received more than forty-five hundred tips on him during its investigation, and that the Trump White House determined which ones received follow-up. (Max Stier, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh's who had reached out to the Bureau to report witnessing gross misconduct by Kavanaugh, was among those the F.B.I. never contacted.) The Bureau has a lesser standard for background checks of nominees than it does for criminal investigations. It regards the President who appointed the nominee--in both these instances, Trump--as "the client" who determines the scope of the inquiry.
5 is correct. And he likes to call troops 'warfighters."
NYT doing the fashion editor critique thing:
Amid all the theatrics and speechifying by the many committee members and Mr. Hegseth himself, his uniform offered an argument of its own. One that had less to do with the details of leading one of the largest departments in the government than with his ability to play the part, in a show designed by the soon-to-be executive producer of the country.
Here is the guy's opening statement if anyone wants to sift through it. It's fairly bland. He says he served "in the streets of Washington, D.C." -- I don't know what he's referring to.
How is it I'm 3 paras into the NYer thing and the WHITE SUPREMACIST TATTOOS haven't come up?
8: The whole DoD talks about 'warfighters', has for years if not decades. I think it originated as interservice BS: you can't just say 'soldiers' or 'troops' because that implies Army. So, you have to say 'soldiers, sailors, marines, etc etc etc' which takes forever. So, 'warfighters'. I stand to be corrected on this.
I'm not totally clear on the tattoos, but it seems like he deflected questions by pretending the concern was about a more innocuous tattoo, when it was actually the "Deus Vult" tat that got him booted from the inauguration. I'm still not sure how concerning it actually is. It's not like he has that tattoo and also wrote a book about re-empowering white men in the military and also got shitfaced and chanted "Kill All Muslims!" in public or anything like that.
12: I don't know why, but it's certainly not just him that uses the term.
10- I think he was national guard during BLM protests? And he is reported to have said something about how he could have shut down the protests if his chain of command hadn't been such pussies*?
*The financial times informs me we're supposed to say that now.
Hmm, was not aware of the warfighter thing. I thought it just some Republican lingo.
Language Log post on it from 2012.
16.last: Can we start using "cunt" like the British do?
See, I would die of shame before crowing in public about how I wouldn't say "pussy" until Donald Trump gave me permission. I will never understand this charismatic authority thing. But whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as we're doing military terminology, is there a concise definition of "lethal" the way they're using it? Clearly it doesn't just mean "effective" or "unbeatable" or whatever, but something more schematic, right?
12. Such foolishness culminated in Army's attempts to rename Dining Facilities (DFACs) to Warrior Restaurants. Nonetheless, people still call them DFACs or even chow halls.
The DoD solution to the waddaya call em problem is the compound noun "Service member". It was the term that OSD General Counsel Office liked and with that capitalization.
19.1 is amazing. I wish I still worked with American soldiers so I could mock them. "Back in a bit, I'm just going for a pee. Oh, sorry, I mean i must hie me to the Warrior Urinatorium."
You are also not supposed to talk about American soldiers, if I remember. According to the Pentagon style guide they are Soldiers. Capital S.
Lethality is also common Dod speak, often as a dyad with survivability, going back idk how long. AIUI it means just what it says, but Hegseth and Co seem to be using it as code for antiwoke, and I excepect the wider military as code for "Don't make us do counterinsurgency again".
"As long as we're doing military terminology, is there a concise definition of "lethal" the way they're using it? "
"The capability and capacity to destroy" according to US Army FM 3-0, "Operations". It isn't a term we use much. In the hands of the British soldier any item is lethal, often unintentionally.
24.last canonically loganberries, passion fruit, a banana, etc.
"Warrior Restaurant" is just such a perfect example of tone clash. Warriors are bold men of mighty thews and sinews who say things like "By Crom!" They eat in mead halls or taverns or by the light of flickering fires on lonely steppes, not in restaurants. You can't see Thrud the Barbarian sitting down and perusing a wine list. (Hence also why the non-Tolkien line about "Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!" in The Two Towers was so jarring; orcs have menus? Table service? Do they tip?)
Unsurprisingly, 'lethality' seems to go back to the post-Vietnam anti-COIN reaction.
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/07/16/trevor-dupuys-definitions-of-lethality/
I believe "warfighting" was introduced in the late 90s/early 2000s GWB reaction against "peacekeeping". It's horrible and the worst is that not only has it infected the British defence establishment, they've started using it as a verb where "fight" would do.
Apart from the sexual assaults and raging alcoholism which in a rational world should be enough to sink him, as someone put it on Bluesky:
The reason Congress should not confirm Hegseth as SecDef is that his SPECOPS-first vision of the military didn't even work where you'd have expected it to, in GWOT. Designing our military to revolve around special operations in a war against Russia and China it will very likely lead to our defeat.
The USMC have had a manual called Warfighting since 1989.
https://www.marines.mil/News/Publications/MCPEL/Electronic-Library-Display/Article/899837/mcdp-1/
Via something above, ngram fir lethality:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5497331ae4b0148a6141bd47/1539635194666-GVY21569VRI6ZBH2F98D/Picture2.png?format=1500w
I don't mind "warfighting" because you need to have a term for, you know, fighting a proper high-intensity war, rather than humanitarian ops or COIN or MACA or peacekeeping. "Warfighter", though, is cringe.
Similarly talking about the lethality of one particular weapon or whatever is fine - it's an important metric. It's a bit weirder to talk about the lethality of an entire military (sorry, Military) but it's probably OK as shorthand for "equipped with lethal stuff".
Form the Language Log post and some searches it seems to have been used mostly in a bureaucratic sense apparently starting the 80s, and in the Pete Hegseth sense more recently (and bleeding trough to non-official uses). In fact Hegseth seems to be a significant recent promoter of the term while stanning for war criminals from his position at Fox News.
For instance, the document that mc linked in 31 does not include the term "warfighter" but seems to use "forces." However, it is a rather abstract Art of War-esque document (and looks like Penguin has published it as a book) written by the commandant (or under his auspices). He had established a Warfighting center several years earlier. But undoubtedly a lot of talk of 'warfighting' led to the back formation of 'warfighter'.
Searching the NYTimes, the first mention seems to be on an opinion piece by Stansfield Turner in 1985 arguing against the MX missile. but seems to be referring to those at high-level advocating for the missiles.
A 2003 piece has it as defense industry jargon: The plants have only two customers, the Pentagon and the person -- soldier, sailor, pilot -- the industry calls the warfighter.
But increasingly since then pops up more generally and in particular with regard to discussions around Trump clearing folks like Gallagher in 2019 (which efforts Hegseth spearheaded).
Anyway, coming from the mouth of a rancid fuckhole like Hegseth I interpret it in a negative way. A piece of useful abstract jargon turned to malevolent propaganda by a right bloody cunt.
He actually just promised not to dribble
But they weren't asking him about playing football.
The phrase "External Revenue Service" is really funny to me.
Soon I will be as forgotten as Gen X.
Apparently one of the practical ways "warfighter" has been used is as a standard term for "soldier" across all the service branches which mostly use other terms. Not sure if that makes it equivalent to "servicemember" or if it's making a tooth/tail distinction as well though.
30 is where I was hoping discussion would go (not here but everywhere, including in the Senate), and it's a little frustrating to me that they took up so much time with the "are you for fucking real, sir?" questions. Here's Tammy Duckworth with some lethality, at least.
I don't know that I'm fully on board with this take from Bluesky but I can see it:
I wonder how many people understand that Trump's attempt to push through Hegseth is a show of dominance, AND that the incompetence is part of that show.
He wants to demonstrate that establishment types will acquiesce and accept an absolute disaster of a candidate on his say-so.
Like that Orwell line about how the point of goose-stepping is that it looks silly; it's meant to make it clear that you're too afraid to laugh at something absurd.
Also incompetence ensures loyalty (Gambetta, passim)
I mean, you can infer that from the outside (we've seen it many times before), but it's not necessarily the full story. The incompetence may also be part of Trump's vision of loyalty and dependence, and there may be specific outcomes he is convinced that this guy -- and relatively few other candidates whom he doesn't want to go to the trouble of finding -- can deliver. (See that crazy exchange about "Hitler's generals" from a couple of years ago.) I care a little less about the Kremlinology and more about what is likely to happen with the military over the next few years. It seems like a surprising amount of money for "just" a show of dominance.
It seems like a surprising amount of money for "just" a show of dominance.
Maybe I missed something - how much money has been spent for Hegseth's confirmation?
I think maybe Orwell had a metaphorical point about the horses in Animal Farm.
46 to 43. (Jinx to 45.) These two paragraphs from the OP link expand on the money thing:
The amount of private money being spent on the effort to confirm Hegseth is staggering for a Cabinet nominee. The sum is rivalled only by the cash that has been spent to pressure senators into confirming Supreme Court Justices. This week, one group, American Leadership pac, reportedly plans to spend a million dollars to muscle wavering Republican senators in five states into approving Hegseth. According to the most recent F.E.C. records, the group barely exists, other than as a political piggy bank for four enormously wealthy right-wing megadonors. Federal records show that, in the 2022 and 2024 political cycles, the group was funded almost entirely by the Texas oil magnate Timothy Dunn; Thomas Klingenstein, a New York financier who runs the conservative Claremont Institute; Bill Koch, a member of the oil-and-gas dynasty and the founder of the petroleum-coke business Oxbow Carbon, L.L.C.; and the Wisconsin billionaire Richard Uihlein, the chair of the Uline packing company.
In December, a dark-money group previously backed by Elon Musk, Building America's Future, also began pouring money into the fight. It spent half a million dollars on ads pressuring Ernst to support Hegseth after she voiced doubts about him. Musk and other Trump allies have made clear that they will fund primary challenges against Republican senators who oppose Trump's nominees. (According to Fox News, several of Trump's top campaign operatives--including his campaign manager Chris LaCivita and the pollster Tony Fabrizio--are set to become senior advisers to the dark-money group, which they plan to use as a private funder of Trump's second-term agenda.)
It might not be Trump looking for incompetence precisely, but he's certainly looking for blind loyalty, and when people quail about some instruction he takes that as prompt to double down. Sufficient explanation of the Sean Spicer crowd size episode in his first week.
Essay on "Gorilla Channel governance".
Day drinking at the edge of the congestion zone.
Tin Pan Alley is just 28th Street. I feel deceived.
The Museum of Sex is too close to the Museum of Math.
Why? Guys need something to do while their wives are at the Museum of Math.
Huh, that really seemed less obnoxious in my head.
It's been a while since I got caught up on reading glass door reviews of working at the Museum of Math...
I chuckled at 55.
I presume the glass door reviews of working at the Museum of Sex are tinted.
Hegseth would be actively bad for the force because you have a dire labor shortage and Anti-DEI will further reduce those willing or able to join.
They'll just enslave the Greenlanders and incentivize Canadian recruitment with the prospect of spicy Latina sex slaves through the conquest of Mexico.
It seems like a surprising amount of money for "just" a show of dominance.
But it isn't Trump's money, though. "A show of dominance" is a perfectly good answer for "why is Trump so keen to get this guy in" - he initially chose him on a whim, because he saw him on TV and thought he looked right, and now he has to get his way.
"Why are various weird rich people so keen to get this guy in" is a different question, but I think the quote in 49 is oddly written and misleading. Yes, it may well be a huge amount compared to previous nominations, but that isn't the right comparison. It's a tiny amount compared to the amount of money these guys have ($1m from "American Leadership PAC"? So that's $250k each? Loose change), and it's buying favour with Trump.
In another loss to cinema, NMM to David Lynch.
Film people will have to decide between Major League and the og Dune.
He made so many great movies, a real loss that he's gone. The witch in Mulholland drive...
He had a twitter, this from 2009: Thought of the Day: We are like the spider. We weave our life & move along it. We are like the dreamer who dreams & then lives in the dream.
https://x.com/barryfreednyc/status/1848332473303773337?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
72. I love that; it's perfect.
I just read the announcement from his family on Twitter and now I'm crying.
So, maybe I should watch Twin Peaks.
SpaceX calls it a "rapid, unscheduled disassembly." I call it the most Lynchian tribute Musk could manage on short notice.
One of these days their going to get those two stranded astronauts back down to Earth, yeah?
I'm gonna find ya
I'm gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya
Weren't there cosmonauts stranded for a bit during the dissolution of the USSR?
Man, Russians really leave their guys hanging.
I'm imagining the stranded astronauts looking at what's going on with all the space companies and agencies and thinking, no rush, take your time, we can just hang out here.
The astronauts aren't com8ng back on Starship, which is not yet man-rated. They're coming back on a different vehicle, Crew Dragon, which is fairly well tested.
76 reminds me of New Scientist's suggestion that it was an awful shame that they were just cutting up all those treaty-banned ICBMs for scrap, and what they should be doing is replacing the warheads with pyro and using them all up on Hogmanay 1999 to create the world's biggest fireworks display.
The voice on the subway to keep away from the doors as they close sounds like Doofenschmirtz's robot, Norm. Otherwise, the subway is great.
Traffic-wise, I think maybe the best thing that could be done is to stop allowing people to stop in the middle of the street where there's no room to pass on the crosstown streets.
From your mouth to the NYPD's ear. Not that they listen to anyone.
Weirdly, that seems to be about the only thing where no one honks at you.
Apparently, the post office is now Penn Station and Penn Station is Madison Square Garden.
I've been riding the RocNorth metro for most of a decade and have seen on its premises zero (0) rats.
That said, it's far from perfect. Mostly in that it should be bigger.
There's no visible rats in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hole either.
87: the rather touching story of the mind-the-gap announcement at Embankment tube: https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/blog/mind-gap-story-embankment-stations-announcement
Embankment tube, like many on the District/Circle line, has mice living between the rails, but I've never seen rats on the Tube.
I have seen one (1) rodent. And its owner was carrying it in a backpack.
New York has of course always had rats, but there are a lot more now than when I was a child. Seeing a rat in the eighties was a kind of creepy, memorable event, but for the last twenty years or so it's been all the time. I'm not sure what got worse to make that happen, but I'd love it if we could roll the rats back to the eighties level.
There's no many more dogs than I was expecting too. Maybe the rats are eating dogs?
So many dogs, babies, and really old people.
And Dunkin Donuts. I still don't get that one.
Dunkies in NYC? That's just outlying scattered coverage- you're not in Dunkin country until you get signs like this.
I have seen numerous dogs and donut outlets, innumerable old people. Food supply is not the explanation.
You can't play Pokémon Go in the Philadelphia train hole.
||
Huh.
"The publisher of a prominent blog about the Supreme Court was indicted Thursday in a multimillion-dollar scheme to evade federal income taxes and use money from his law firm to cover gambling debts from high-stakes poker games. SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein, who also has argued 44 cases before the high court, took part in poker games in Beverly Hills, Asia and elsewhere involving millions of dollars, hid winnings, concealed losses and misrepresented expenses, according to the 22-count indictment filed in federal court in Maryland."
|>
If you're hiding winnings and losses, maybe you can set one against the other legally?
106: Ooooh! Suprise contender for the next Supreme Court vacancy!
I've had fun gambling where the stakes ran all the way to the low double-digit dollars because I could just view it as a sunk cover charge for the evening to drink and play games, but man do I not understand the appeal of high-stakes gambling, even as an adrenaline junkie. My one time in Las Vegas, I watched people throw down insane (to me, anyhow) amounts of money on purely random roulette wheel spins and felt something akin to a fight-or-flight response. It seems to make my suppressed inner Calvinist claw its way to the surface.
"He also had his firm pay salaries and health insurance premiums for women with whom he had personal relationships, but who did little or no work for the firm, according to the indictment. [...] In 2016, for example, Goldstein understated his gambling winnings by $3.9 million, the indictment said. Two years later, he returned from Macau to a Washington-area airport with nearly $1 million in cash in a duffel bag. Although he acknowledged to a customs officer that the cash represented gambling winnings, he failed to report the money on his tax return for that year, the indictment said. In 2020 and 2021, he denied on his tax filings making any trades in cryptocurrency, despite more than $10 million in such transactions, according to the indictment."
You can carry $1,000,000 through customs and they'll just be like "welcome back"?
Anyway, I don't like to gamble for any serious stakes either.
I kind of thought that if you went through customs with a duffle bag full of cash, they'd lock you in a little room until you either pled guilty to something or hired a van full of lawyers.
110: The customs jerks in Mumbai wouldn't even let me keep my Juul.
Yeah, that's where I'll put it next time.
One for the device, one for the pods.
"In my experience, Americans are generally irritable, in a hurry, and they walk funny."
Also, noted for any upcoming trips to India
110: I feel like there must be a negotiation behind this. Like you can carry $1,000,000 through customs, if you started out with $1,100,000. And maybe if you started out with $1,500,000 you can walk out with $1,000,000, and no one will remember you at all.
Speaking of money, I lost $2.90 to New York this morning. We were going through the subway, maybe not very awake, and my son somehow managed to get the handle of his suitcase trapped in the turnstile. We had to pay a third fare to get it out.
119: It was actually Thailand that has a problem with them (flying out of Mumbai). Which is weird because there are weed and cigarettes literally everywhere, but vapes are strictly forbidden.
Hegseth would be actively bad for the force because a single-minded focus on lethality, if actually delivered, would weaken the force; if anything you're far too concerned with lethality already.
To take just one rather stark case, your awesomely lethal aircraft will mostly be destroyed on the ground on day one, because you have failed, despite decades of warnings, to build them hardened shelters.
More broadly, lethality is at most only half the picture. To date, the Ukrainians have proved roughly three times (!) more lethal than the Russians, and yet are still losing the war. I think the overwhelming lesson of Ukraine is that volunteer militaries aren't remotely large enough to win major wars. It follows that the first task of the professional force is not to be maximally lethal, but to survive long enough to provide training cadre for the conscript force which will actually be big enough to win.
Which shouldn't be controversial, seeing as that is roughly how you have won all your major victories since independence; most clearly and most pertinently, exactly how the USN beat Japan in the Pacific.
To date, the Ukrainians have proved roughly three times (!) more lethal than the Russians, and yet are still losing the war. I think the overwhelming lesson of Ukraine is that volunteer militaries aren't remotely large enough to win major wars.
This is a strange lesson to draw, because of the two sides in the war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian army ("losing the war") is a conscript force, and it is fighting against a Russian invader which is "winning the war" with what is, at least notionally, a volunteer military (allowing for some unsystematic forced-contract-signing and recruited prisoners). Russia has conscription but conscripts don't serve outside Russia.
The Chinese army, which you're worried about the US losing to, is also an all-volunteer force at present - in theory the provinces can conscript men to make up their recruitment quotas, but they don't need to because there are enough volunteers.
Hardening aircraft shelters is all very well but the article you link to thinks it would be worthwhile to build hundreds of hardened aircraft shelters in CONUS against the prospect of China launching its invasion of Taiwan by firing large numbers of ICBMs at the United States. The US would not know these ICBMs were not nuclear-tipped until after they finished their flight, by which time it might be a bit late.
I don't think that's a very plausible scenario.
Any war against China, meanwhile, is going to see the US at a severe manpower disadvantage whether it institutes conscription or not, simply by virtue of China being very big, and rather than trying to take on the PLA bayonet-for-bayonet, a more sensible strategy would probably be to drown as many of the enemy as you can while they are coming over, and knock the rest on the head as they crawl ashore (WSC, 1940) in which case the focus should not be on troop numbers but on... lethality!
Any war with China serious enough to require conscription is very likely to go nuclear before that force could be stood up.
Do Chinese mothers love their children too?
123.3 and 124.1 conflate lethality and voluntarism. I'll simplify: the Ukrainians, however constituted, are three times more lethal, and losing.*
*By their own stated victory conditions: restoration of the 1991 borders.
128: well, fair enough. Because three times more lethality at best gets you a draw against three times more population.
"exactly how the USN beat Japan in the Pacific."
Resurfacing the classic:
"Every Pacific naval encounter from late 1943 onward is like the IJN Golden Kirin, Glorious Harbinger of Eternal Imperial Dawn versus six identical copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships"
Our US office is closed today, but I was just on a call with some colleagues from Europe and one thanked me afterwards for joining on a day off and said, "Hope you manage to enjoy the rest of the day." Political comment or standard British saying?
OT: Does Leonard Peltier have to wait until tomorrow to get freed because it's MLK Day?
Great, now I'm wondering if Trump will claim all the last minute pardons are invalid because the federal government was closed when they were issued and if SCOTUS will reject his claim 5-4 three years from now.
130.2: could be either. I would definitely say something like that to someone who I knew had joined the call on their day off.
I probably wouldn't say it to an American today exactly because it might be taken politically.
123: all the US carriers at Midway were prewar ships (Hornet by the skin of her teeth, commissioned 20th October '41).
134 and they were all gone by the end of '42, hence why the USN had to ask to borrow one off the RN.
Some news on this: Hegseth's brother's ex-wife accuses Hegseth in a sworn affidavit of abusing his second wife. "A handful of Republicans who have learned of the accusations in recent days have privately raised serious concerns about them, according to people familiar with the conversations, suggesting that the new information could potentially sap the necessary support for his approval by the Senate." However, sounds like it's somewhat complicated by other legal filings.
Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Mr. Hegseth, denied Danielle Hegseth's charges in a statement.
"Sam has never alleged that there was any abuse, she signed court documents acknowledging that there was no abuse and recently reaffirmed the same during her F.B.I. interview," Mr. Parlatore said, accusing Danielle Hegseth of being "an anti-Trump far-left Democrat" who "had an ax to grind against the entire Hegseth family." [. . .]
In a 2021 order, dealing with the appointment of a parenting coordinator, a Minnesota family court judge said neither of the Hegseths claimed to be a victim of domestic abuse. The judge also said that there was no determination by the court that there was probable cause to believe that one parent "has been physically abused or threatened with physical abuse by the other parent." The Hegseths share custody of three children.
It also mentions his mother's recanted accusation that he abused women. Who knows if any of this will have any effect on anything. I don't even know why the fuck I'm bothering to report it.
Might be an effort to turn Trump against him by suggesting that he isn't an abuser.
The second wife in question said (something close to) "There was no physical abuse and I have nothing else to say to anyone about it." Which seems suggestive.
I figure either Hegseth will be confirmed or he won't and I'm not planning to spend much time following what happens before there's a vote. Though Kate Riga did make a good point that in addition to the questions about his personal character, there should be some consideration of whether he's up to the job as evaluated against conventional job qualification criteria.
I don't quite know what to do with the references above to certain elected or formerly elected Democrats as "nomenklatura" when the clearer connection to historical nomenklatura are the appointed offices and the non-government attendees of yesterday's inauguration.
there should be some consideration of whether he's up to the job as evaluated against conventional job qualification criteria
That's absolutely not going to happen though.
Hegseth's brother's ex-wife accuses Hegseth
If this is the thing that ostensibly causes Senate Republicans to vote against him, I'm guessing they were already planning to vote against him, which they they weren't (and won't). I'd be delighted to be wrong about this, obviously, though god only knows who Trump will find next.
"Wait, his brother's ex-wife, you say? Well, that's that, then!"
140: I just want someone to pretend confirmations aren't just sound bite events.
I can totally do that. I can't pretend Republican senators have spines.
Soundbite in 42 to 143, I guess...
