Less than a year after all the military’s generals and admirals were ordered to gather in Quantico, Virginia, where they heard speeches from both the Secretary of Defense and Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Pete Hegseth is once again considering issuing the same order, to the same generals and admirals, to return to a lecture room in Quantico for another speech. Last year, Hegseth’s speech was a chest-pounding tirade in which he told the generals there would be “no beardos” and “no dudes in dresses” and every service member would meet the same standards of physical training. The generals and admirals sat stone-faced as they listened to Hegseth’s tirade and a speech from Trump that was more typical of one of his rallies than it was an address to the nation’s top military leaders.

Last year’s speech to the senior officers and non-commissioned officers in the military was unprecedented. To order another such gathering for yet another speech in the space of about a year, right after Hegseth has fired several of the top generals in the Army and removed other senior officers from positions of leadership in the Navy and Air Force, isn’t just unprecedented, it’s unhinged.

The Wall Street Journal didn’t speculate on the reason Hegseth is considering gathering all the generals and admirals together for a second time in a year, so I will. Hegseth has lost the trust of the senior military leadership. During Trump’s utterly useless war on Iran, Hegseth ran through the military’s stockpiles of both offensive and defensive missiles to the point that stories are being leaked from the Pentagon that the U.S. doesn’t have enough Patriot anti-missile launchers to defend Europe from a missile attack by Russia or our allies in Asia from an attack by China or North Korea.

When the Pentagon starts leaking stories that involve major national security secrets like the weak status of munitions reserves, there is something very seriously wrong. Every time there are leaks like those we’ve been seeing out of the Pentagon, it means that things are even worse than we’re hearing. CIA Director Ratcliffe was sent to Moscow this week with the mission of warning Russia not to attack NATO countries. That story alone indicates two things: The U.S. has intelligence that Russia is considering such an attack, and we don’t have the kind of defensive arsenal to repel it.

Hegseth wouldn’t be considering ordering the generals and admirals to Quantico for another dressing down if he wasn’t panicked that he’s losing them. He has already reduced the number of four-star generals in the Army from 10 to five. He has made no announcements of replacements for those he fired, which indicates to me that he’s looking for generals whom he considers loyal to himself and Trump’s political agenda, and he’s not finding anyone.

The military simply doesn’t operate by the rules that Hegseth and Trump want. When you have to ask for loyalty and dedication to duty from someone in the military, you’ve already lost them. When you feel the need to threaten generals with dismissal, which is what Hegseth has done by firing so many senior generals, you’ve dug a hole you can’t get out of by issuing orders and more threats.

By the time an officer in the military service has reached the rank of general or admiral, he or she has spent most of their adult life in the service of this country. Generals and admirals are given the task of being in charge of thousands of people in uniform. An equivalent job in civilian life, when an executive reaches the top of the corporate ladder and is in charge of thousands of employees, pays in the millions, even the tens of millions of dollars. Generals and admirals earn less than $20,000 per month, with a maximum yearly salary of just over $200,000 per year. To put it plainly, they aren’t in it for the money.

It must frustrate Hegseth and Trump no end that they can’t offer money in return for loyalty. It just doesn’t work that way in the military. I can’t believe I’m having to write this sentence, but here it is: members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the Secretary of Defense and the President. Period.

Sure, there are some generals and admirals who could probably be described as MAGA followers of Trump. But there is a phrase to describe them in the military, and it is not a positive one. They are called “political generals” or “political admirals.” No self-respecting senior officer or non-commissioned officer in the military wants their compatriots to think of them as achieving rank by kissing political ass.

I think Hegseth has been casting around for “political generals” he can appoint to fill the slots he created with his recent firings, and he’s not finding any candidates worth serious consideration. Hegseth has hollowed out the top ranks of the services, and it’s starting to cost him. He and Trump want a military on their terms. Trump has ordered that new aircraft carriers be redesigned so they resemble those he remembers seeing in movies about World War II. Recent leaks from the Pentagon say that Trump’s obsession with ship design will cost the military tens of billions in additional money and produce ships that the Navy did not order and does not want. Hegseth just disbanded the only Army battalion dedicated to drone warfare because he’s obsessed with soldiers’ testosterone levels, not with the necessities of modern warfare.

The mere fact that Hegseth is even considering another lecture to the assembled generals and admirals tells them, and us, one thing. He’s scared shitless that he has already lost their respect.

He has lost it, and he’s not going to get it back by telling them to get their testosterone checked, especially not the women.

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Look at this fool. Remember this photograph. Come November, it’s going to count.

It was taken today of Trump signing another of his entirely meaningless – except to himself – executive orders, this one renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” He is apparently under the mistaken impression that he is sticking a finger in Canada’s eye. He’s not. He signed a document that will serve to remind everyone why they are paying higher prices for their toilet paper, Christmas wreaths, plywood from Home Depot, video game consoles, and yes, hockey sticks – all of which Trump put 50 percent tariffs on this week.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada isn’t going to let it go. His counter-tariffs are polling in the 70’s, up there in the northern part of North America. He’s never been so popular as when he stood up to Donald Trump and called his bluff. Trump’s egotistical stupidity has given him a free ride, and man, is he going to take it. Carney will use every opportunity between now and November to remind everyone on the U.S. side of the border what a utter fool Donald Trump is.

Companies in this country that are hurt by Trump’s tariff war will be filing lawsuits to stop his idiocy. Every day the tariffs are in place will cost U.S. companies money, and Trump has already lost once in the Supreme Court on the question of his tariff powers. Lawyers are out there stapling big signs to billboards offering their services to take a new tariff case to court. The lawyers will get rich and Trump will end up refunding the tariffs again.

Trump could have left Canada alone and gathered the press around him for another painful stroll outside to view the magnificent mess he’s made out of the White House, front and back. People travel hundreds, even thousands of miles to take their children sightseeing in Washington D.C. to see the White House and the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Now, all they’re going to see is a rectangular scar on the Mall that was once a reflecting pool and a construction zone that was once the People’s House.

He wants to put his mark on the nation’s capital. That isn’t working, either. The Kennedy Center sits there with big striped tarp covering up the place where Trump tried to put his name, and already the tarps are being referred to as the Kennedy Center diaper. Everyone in Washington D.C. knows who is so famous for wearing one that the shoulder bag carried by his closest aid is being called the diaper bag.

Trump wanted a quick, in-and-out war on Iran. Six months and a plethora of stories about an aircraft carrier wounded not by enemy fire but by Pentagon incompetence, Trump’s war isn’t working either. Out in the middle of the country, reporters can be seen in diners and coffee shops dutifully interviewing farmers who are declaring they will vote Democrat for the first time in their lives because Trump’s war on Iran has sent the prices they pay for fertilizer and diesel fuel, two of their biggest costs, through the roof. In Texas – Texas – voters are telling pollsters and anybody who will listen that they are against Republican support of data centers that are increasing the price of electricity and are thinking about voting Democrat for the first time in twenty years. Right this very minute, Trump is out there at a rally in Texas trying to drag Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton out of the hole he’s in versus Democrat James Talarico. These kinds of rallies don’t usually start happening until after Labor Day, but a recent poll by Texas Opinion Research has Paxton seven points behind with just two months to go until the election. I’ll say it again: In Texas.

Over in the Middle East, Iran is threatening to launch a new offensive against its Persian Gulf neighbors for their support of U.S. military bases in the region. Trump is putting up Truth Social posts with maps of the Strait of Hormuz marked as “U.S. Territory.” Iran is laughing out loud as they manufacture new Shahed drones and ballistic missiles in the underground facilities that Trump’s big war tried and failed to destroy.

None of Trump’s lunacy is working. He tried to bully Canada. A day later, the Canadian Prime Minister was being referred to as the “new leader of the free world” because he stood up to Trump. He tried to bully Iran with bombs and missiles. It didn’t work. The United States of America got run out of the Gulf region by Iranian drones that damaged every military base from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.

This afternoon, the Associated Press ran a story with the headline, “Patriot Missile stocks in Europe are “beyond critical” due to Iran war, officials say.” Where did all those Patriot missiles go? They got used up shooting at Iranian missiles and, incredibly, at $25,000 dollar drones during Trump’s misbegotten war. U.S. Patriots are the only defensive missiles that can shoot down Russia’s high-speed ballistic missiles. If Russia were to attack a European military installation or power plant right now, European countries “would be forced ‘to take punch after punch in the mouth,’” according to a defense official quoted by the AP.

The situation for NATO countries is apparently so dire that CIA Director John Ratcliffe was dispatched to Moscow week for high level meetings with his counterparts to warn Russia not to think of attacking Europe. Everyone wondered what the CIA director was doing in Moscow until that little gem leaked earlier this week, and now with the AP story about Patriot missile shortages in Europe, we know why. Trump’s war on Iran didn’t just exhaust our supply of missiles. It emptied out Europe’s too.

Democrats are calling for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing to put Hegseth under oath so he can be questioned about why there is a shortage not just of Patriot missiles, but of every U.S. missile in our arsenal, including ATACMS short range ground to ground ballistic missiles, the stockpiles of which were nearly emptied by Trump’s war on Iran that managed to accomplish only one thing: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the strangling of international oil shipping that has increased fuel prices everywhere around the world.

Give him a Sharpie and an audience of lickspittles in the gold-plated Oval Bordello, and the next thing you know, he’ll be renaming the Persian Gulf as Lake Trump, as if it is the new water hazard at his Dubai Trump International Golf Course. Donald Trump wants us to see him as the most powerful man in the world.

Have a look at the Reflecting Pool. It’s not working.

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Trump is such a man of the people, he wants to dump cheap, toxic ground beef on the market for the peasants to buy! Everyone celebrate their benevolent overlord and his brilliant plan to lower the cost of groceries! Please ignore the renewed trade war with Canada, which will send the price of toilet paper through the roof.

Truly, Trump is a political genius of unparalleled mastery of the economy!

And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you for a song, buddy…

Anyway, big episode this week, so come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Please support this work by becoming a paying subscriber. This podcast is free and will always remain free, but it still takes time and effort to produce. Your support means everything to us. For just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!), you can keep the OgPod going. Thank you!

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Ogre Nation News Update

Main Stories (2:51 - 20:35)

2:51 - 9:40 The bad news (and good!) about the infinitely corrupt SCOTUS ruling on Trump’s infinitely corrupt (and unconstitutional) mail-in ballot executive order.

9:41 - 20:35 The leopards are eating the faces of Trump-supporting beef farmers! Have a hamburger made from questionable foreign beef to celebrate!

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE (20:36 - 28:53)

20:36 - 24:10 ICE arrests a mother in front of her 18-month-old baby at a routine immigration hearing. More proof that cruelty is the point.

24:11 - 27:24 Green card applicants will be placed under increased “public charge” scrutiny, meaning children will go hungry and without medical care. Republicans: The party of “pro-life.”

27:25 - 28:53 Immigration arrests reach a record high under Markwayne Mullin. So why are Trump and MAGAland still mad at him? We explain.

Headlines for Short Attention Spans (28:54 - 43:01)

28:54 - 31:48 In his never-ending quest for self-glorification, Trump insults a Black WWII hero.

31:49 - 36:14 Trump goes all in on data centers. How will that go over with his base, who absolutely HATE data centers?

36:15 - 37:39 Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds is blaming immigrants in Florida’s measles outbreak. Guess who is actually the cause?

37:40 - 38:12 Ed Martin, one of Trump’s legal goons, is ready to litigate the midterms! What could possibly go wrong?!

38:13 - 40:25 What did Trump know about how badly a war with Iran would go, and when did he know it? We have the answer, and it’s worse than you thought.

40:26 - 41:37 Trump is wildly unpopular across the country. How unpopular? Come find out!

41:38 - 43:01 The NYT isn’t sugarcoating it: Republicans are in trouble in the Senate.

Self-care of the Week (43:02 - 48:40)

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream

Welcome back, teachers, to another productive year. As you know, we here at the West Hell School District like to pack these pre-student days with lots of professional development because, here in the administrative offices, we believe deeply in looking like we're getting something done, and for these few days, the only people we can do things to are the professional staff. Here are some of the selections for the upcoming PD sessions.

Welcome Icebreakers

Some of you may think it's silly to play games to help you get acquainted with people you have worked with for years, but the real purpose here is to get you reacquainted with the feeling of being treated like a child instead of a grown-ass adult. 

New Procedures Overview

We have taken those internal procedures that you barely got used to last year and changed them again. You'll need to throw out the forms piled up in your desk and/or uninstall the software on your computer to make room for the new procedural materials. This is sure to be a labor-and-time saving new procedure, by which we mean it will save us time and labor in the office by shifting the time and labor to you. Let all that excitement about teaching students suffocate under the load of soul-crushing administrative minutia. 

New Software Platform Introduction

We have adopted a new software platform for use in the district because the software we promised you we would use forever just finished its free trial period over the summer. We have not tested this new software yet, so if you run into any problems, just forward a note to the office and we'll pass that along to the company and I'm sure we'll hear back from them some time. Please do not question the usefulness of ethical concerns that come with our tech overlords; in particular, don't try to ask about the ethical or educational issues involved in the AI we're forcing into your classroom. We have heard that it is inevitable and must be accepted. Besides, it's totally free.

Terrifying Legal Stuff

A lawyer will be in to tell you some terrifying stories of teachers who did seemingly ordinary things and ended up facing billions of dollars in fines and decades in a gulag somewhere. Just try not to touch students, hand students anything, or make direct eye contact with them and you'll probably be okay.

New Stupid Social Media Tricks

A law enforcement officer will be in to scare you with tales of the newest social media trends and how to spot trouble with them in your classroom. This would be scarier except that all of these trends ended weeks ago to be replaced with new ones.

Textbook Program Training

A publisher's rep will be in to tell you how to do your job, based on the two years they spent in the classroom before giving up because they couldn't take it any more and wanted to do something cushier like pimping for a publisher. The rep will refuse to answer any questions about how to adapt the program to your classroom, and will instead offer useful advice about how she would use it if she were a teacher, and how you can use a simple 90 minutes from your thirty minute planning period to prepare materials. 

Data Session

Teachers will hunch over computer screens and try to find something useful buried in the piles of test scores from the state. There will be charts and graphs, and lots of forms to fill in with numbers and stuff, but no answers to questions like "Exactly what was this question on the test that most students got wrong?" If we just keep finding new ways to process the weighing of the pig, we are sure it will get bigger. 

Some Damned Useless Thing

We needed to block out the data time for everyone who teaches reading or math, so here's some placeholder for everyone else, because we didn't have time to find something useful for you.

Discipline

Administration wants teachers to know that they have been heard on the issues of student discipline and teacher morale, and they plan to do implement an assortment of new acronyms and programs this year that continue to put all the responsibility on the classroom teacher. Administration wants you to know that you have their full support, as in they fully support the idea of you handling this stuff yourself and not asking them to do something useful. 

Morale

Administration has heard that some of you are unhappy, and administration would like you to just shut up about it. Also, because one teacher made a procedural error last year, the full staff will now be berated like disobedient children. Thanks a lot, Brenda.

At Least One Hour of Cognitive Dissonance

No day of PD is complete without a self-contradictory. A session about how you shouldn't just use direct instruction, delivered entirely through direct instruction. A session about questioning strategies that uses none of those strategies. "Don't just read off the Power Point slide," reads the presenter off the Power Point slide.

Cavalcade of Cliches

Do you remember your why? Have you got your grit and rigor packed? Can you focus on all this inspirational language, or are you just wishing you could get some work done in your classroom? Sometimes these really do stir the soul a bit, until some admin pops up at the end to scold everyone about copier use and getting your lunch lists in on time.

Classroom Prep Time

Teachers are invited to finish preparing their rooms for the students any time after 3:30. 

Dolly Parton, you have probably heard, died this week at 80. I am rarely affected by celebrity deaths, and yet I found myself crying in the kitchen this morning listening to “I Will Always Love You.”

I teared up again reading the lyrics to Coat of Many Colors:

My coat of many colors
That my momma made for me
Made only from rags
But I wore it so proudly
Although we had no money
I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

So with patches on my britches
And holes in both my shoes
In my coat of many colors
I hurried off to school
Just to find the others laughing
And making fun of me
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

And oh, I couldn't understand it
For I felt I was rich
And I told 'em of the love
My momma sewed in every stitch
And I told 'em all the story
Momma told me while she sewed
And how my coat of many colors
Was worth more than all their clothes

What a woman. What a generational talent. What a loss. What a gift.

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Dolly was a feminist icon, even if she rejected the term. She wrote and sang about women working pink-collar jobs all day just to line men’s pockets, about the judgment heaped on unmarried women who got pregnant and how none was laid at the feet of men who impregnated them, about the toughness and love of the Appalachian women she knew whose lives and stories were ignored or mocked by so much of society. She adopted the trappings of hyperfemininity, dressing in a way I can only describe as drag, and one got the feeling that she did it not because she thought it was the way all women should be but because she was, at her core, a performer, and this was her globally recognizable costume that she frankly thought was pretty fun to put on. Dolly was not standing next to Gloria Steinem demanding abortion on demand. But she was just as crucial a part of the broader feminist cause: A woman who made legible the lives and struggles of women most powerful people are happy to never consider, let alone empathize with.

I’ve been thinking about why Dolly’s death has been so deeply felt by so many, and I think it’s at least partly because she showed us how to live well. She clearly had fun being famous — she didn’t complain; she didn’t saddle herself with the obligation to be a spokesperson for one group or another.

She did strive for decency and humility. In 2018, an event she was a part of took some heat because it was called “Dixie Stampede;” Parton renamed it “Dolly Parton’s Stampede,” and explained to Billboard magazine: “When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede,” she said. “As soon as you realise that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”

“Don’t be a dumbass” and “don’t hurt anyone on purpose” are pretty good rules to live by.

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Dolly was generous. Her Imagination Library has sent more than 200 million books to children and babies around the world — 200 million. She spent millions helping disaster victims, giving to at-risk young people who graduated from high school, and funding hospitals and scientific research (she helped fund the Moderna Covid vaccine). She was a devout Christian and a devoted defender of LGBT rights.

The anecdotes going around about her on social media speak to this fundamental goodness:

I hate the word “authentic,” but Dolly Parton was somehow intentionally one of the most artificial-looking women on the planet, and also one of the most authentically herself people in the world. She came from poverty and she embraced her background, forgoing not only shame, but any resentment. She embodied the women who are both envied and stigmatized, who provoke both desire and disgust:

Her life was not just rags-to-riches (or “rags-to-rhinestones,” as the Times aptly put it). She struggled. She spoke frankly about being able to do all she did because she didn’t have children — that if she had been raising a family, she would not have had the time or energy for the tens of thousands of songs she wrote and the thousands of shows and events she performed at — but also of the grief of wanting children and not being able to have them. She held unmet desire alongside gratitude for what filled in that space.

And she was funny as hell:

As is now so often the case when a celebrity dies, the worst people on the internet are plumbing her life for some evidence that she was “problematic” or even just kinda imperfect. I can pretty much promise that if Dolly was asked, she’d tell you she’s about as imperfect and problematic as any of us. Very few human beings contribute as much to this world as Dolly Parton did. She was not a perfect woman, but she was an extraordinary one. And we would probably all be better off if we emulated her humor, her humility, her decency, her generosity, and her insistence on taking responsibility for her own life — and having a lot of fun with it.

I have nothing particularly profound to add, except that like so many people around the world, I loved and admired Dolly Parton. I am sad she’s gone. I am glad she knew she was so widely beloved. I hope I can live even a little bit like her.

xx Jill

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