Recollections
I started typing this the day after I typed the last one of these. Therefore, I started typing this one on my father's birthday. He would have been 91 now. He died at 62. It's taken me more than a month to type this out, which shows how long some of these "new threads", aren't.
When I started to type this out, there was something significant I was going to relate to that, but I don't remember now what it was, as odd as that may seem. I will say that in some ways having his birthday so close in time to my own makes my own sad by definition. You never really get over some losses.
He died on April 2. That's pretty close to my birthday as it is, and my mother's birthday is later in April. So all of this is really a recollection of irredeemable loss. I recall one of my cousins noting regarding one of my aunts that our grandfather died on her birthday and after that, that's what she always noted about the day. I can see how that would be.
United Airlines and Southwest Cut the Booze.
Would you like a big steaming bowl of walrus blubber?"
Tilting
Wyoming Gun Owners, that group with which Anthony Bouchard is so prominently associated, has filed suit against the Attorney General seeking to prohibit the organization from once again having to disclose its donors under campaign laws. It's a preemptive move that's going to fail.
It's odd to think of reporting their donor rolls under the law being such a big deal to them. When parties seek to hide such information, there's always reason to pause and ask why.
Bouchard, by the way, has been much less in the news recently. Cheney has been more than Bouchard. I suspect Bouchard's sun is setting pretty quickly. He hasn't been completely silent, but he hasn't been heard of the way that he was being at one time.
At the same time, regarding Bouchard, this extraordinarily weird news broke out:
June 24, 2021
It turns out that the individual who sponsored the America First debate mentioned above is a resident of Florida.
And, in an odd turn of events, both Liz Cheney and Anthony Bouchard have criticized the individual, K. W. Miller, who acted as the forum moderator. The spat with Cheney is an obvious one, but with Bouchard less so. None the less, an entity supporting Miller has attacked Bouchard and accused him of being in league with "George Soros affiliated" leftwing groups and have accused "Bouchard sycophants" of trying to disrupt the debate.
Miller has endorsed Chuck Gray.
Whatever the merits or demerits of Bouchard, it seems fairly clear that he and George Sorors are unlikely to share any connections.
Bouchard has been pretty quiet recently, or alternatively he just hasn't said anything interesting enough for the press to really bother with. All glory is fleeting, perhaps even the antithesis of glory.
One place I have seen his name, recently, is in regard to the ramped up campaign of Chuck Gray. Gray is really vying for the hard right populist votes and has put out some campaign material taking swings at that market. One even shows him wearing boxing gloves.
Anyhow, some of the diehard Bouchard supporters will mention their favorite when Gray stuff appears on social media. They're still for Bouchard, even though his political sun appears to be rapidly setting, forever.
One interesting post of that type claimed that Gray was born in California but raised, more or less, in South Dakota. I don't know the story of his upbringing myself, although I know that he's not from Wyoming. Lots of candidates aren't from Wyoming, of course, and the state has a very high import population all the time. Gray, however, should probably rethink his wardrobe as he's almost never seen without a sports coat on, which pretty much tags you as not being from here.
Gray, as we noted in another thread, was invited to meet with Trump, as was Smith. Trump harbors a massive grudge against Liz Cheney and is going to back some Wyoming contender agaisnt her. It'll be interesting really to see if that makes any difference in the campaign. I suspect it won't.
Rewilding
A Tasmanian devil was born in the wild, on the Australian mainland, for the first time in 3,000 years.
Right away the instinct will be to say that "oh, humans wiped them out", but that wasn't the case. It was dogs. More particularly dingoes.
Well, in a way that was humans, to be fair. Dingoes were introduced by people to Australia about 8,000 years ago. They're gone feral since that time, as dogs will do.
Anyhow, rewilding is becoming a pretty significant global trend. Some Alpine regions of Europe are undergoing this process on their own. And now there's serious thought to sponsoring rewilding in Scotland. This reflects a series of things, of which a decreasing human population is one.
It'll be interesting to see if any of this is accompanied by re-agrarianizing, if you will. That is, will a return of wild places bring about a return of wilder living? I hope so.
On the Tasmanian devils, they're wiping out the penguin population where they've now been introduced. An application of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Oops.
Upper limit
A recent study suggest the absolute limit on a human's life falls between ages 120 and 150.
That interestingly squares with what the Old Testament relates about the upper age limit for human beings, and that written at a time when quite a few people probably didn't make it to old age in general, although more certainly did than is generally imagined. So there's no news here, but rather a confirmation of it.
None of which will stop Americans in particular from adopting unnatural dietary practices and the like in the belief that they not only can live forever, but be 20 years old forever.
Twitter Terminations
Speaking of age. . .
Famed third wave feminist author Naomi Wolf has been banned from Twitter for writing full out anti Covid vaccine wackiness.
Wolf holds a PhD, which begs the question of how an educated person could spread such goofiness as she was doing, particularly one who has been respected for her writings, if often highly criticized as well. It was odd enough that I looked her up for her age, which is 58. In other words, I was wondering if she was slipping into dementia. That's why I actually know her age.
That makes her a bit younger than I thought she was, so its unlikely, although at age 58 some people do start showing a mental slide or even slip into full blown dementia. Wolf clearly hasn't gone completely senile or something akin to it, but her comments are so strange that a person has to really stop to pause and ask what on earth is going on with her.
Wolf has always been controversial, but she's also raised a lot of points that deserved being raised and at least a lot of her earlier writing deserved, and still deserve, consideration. With this, she's pretty much tainted herself so much that her earlier work will probably largely head to the dumpster.
Trump's Trousers
Speaking of the ravages of age, what's up with Trump's trousers?
That a question being bandied about on Twitter, and elsewhere in the Internet, the morning I'm writing this entry.
Nothing, according to Snopes.
It was such a surprising item that when it came up, we followed up on it just a bit. And Trump's trousers did have a really weird appearance to them. Some people claimed they were on backwards, and some were claiming that he had wet himself.
All in all, what probably really is the case is that men's wool suit pants really wrinkle badly. At least moderns ones do. They heavier they are, the less likely they are to do that.
Which gets to the decline in men's ware, which also gets back to the decline in men wearing suits.
I need to pick up a couple of new suits, I'd note.
I'd also note, but only because some other journal noted it, that Trump wears enormous suit trousers. It's actually a really dramatic change from his earlier years. Indeed, when he was younger Trump nearly always wore a suit, but they really fit and looked good as a good suit should. Now they look like tents and the trousers are approaching M.C. Hammer volume. That's odd too.
Of course, it's really hard to stay in shape as you get older, and Trump is old. He's old and not in very good shape by appearances. All this, in some odd way, goes to the topic of why on earth does this country continue to vest power in people who are now very much past their prime?
Nowhere else to go?
The topic of Trump continues to come up continually.
There's some pundit consideration that it may be the case that Trump keeps coming up as the punditry keeps bringing him up. That is, people may have in fact moved on more than might be suspected. There's certainly a hardcore of Trumpites that won't let him go, and they're in control of the party apparatus in some places to be sure, including Wyoming. This has created some consideration on the Democratic side on whether or not to let the Republicans let go of Trump, as odd as that may seem.
Under Donald Trump the Republicans lost suburbanites and votes from independents. Being lashed to Trump is going to make that worse in 2022 and the Democrats know that. However, as as retiring Libertarian Congressman on This Week noted, the Democrats aren't doing all that great in terms of party membership either. The lurch left in in 2020 actually caused a large increase in Hispanics, Asians and African Americans voting the GOP and Trump himself.
We've noted this trend for years. The routine assumption by the Democrats that they own ethnic minorities is simply wrong. Hispanics have shown this trend, basically following the Italian American and Irish American trend line, for a long time. Indeed, they're highly analogous to both as they're now at the point that Italian Americans were in the 1950s and Irish Americans in the 1940s, in being both an immigrant community and a community that has a long presence, and hence native born, demographic as well.
Like those two other demographics, Hispanics are either members of the Catholic Church or, even when not, culturally Catholic. They're status in that regard was wounded by the Mexican Revolution, to the extent that they descend from Mexico, but it hasn't disappeared by any means. Given this, in spite of articles by such people who like to use the word "Latinex", and the like, they are no more represented by them than Irish Americans were by the Berrigan brothers.
And this means that as a population they have highly conservative social views which the Democratic Party is running away from and against now. As their economic situation has stabilized that has started to reflect itself in their votes.
This is also the case for Asian Americans. Asian Americans have been a cause recently for Democrats, who have adopted the Pacific Island and Asian moniker to lump a vast number of cultures that have no more in common with each other than Ukrainians have with Moroccans. So far, they don't seem to have taken offense, but the lumping is unfair. People of Chinese extraction do not share the same culture or history, for example, that Samoans do.
And that should be instructive for a variety of reasons, one being that some of these groups are highly conservative.
Indeed, two demographics within that group were represented in the 2020 Presidential race in the Democratic Party and that should be instructive. Tulsi Gabbard was one and Andrew Yang the other. While they are both Democrats, they are such eccentric Democrats that their race is instructive. Gabbard is of Samoan extraction, represented Hawaii in Congress, and is a Hindi. She's also so conservative that she'd normally be mistaken for a Republican on most things. Being from Hawaii, she pretty much has to run as a Democrat however.
Yang is wildly eclectic but was basically running from the future. Maybe he's a Democrat, as he registered to be, and he certainly isn't a Republican, but all the current left wing issues that most Democrats are really focused on right now are pretty much behind him.
African Americans, we've previously noted, are much more conservative socially than the Democrats are generally and have felt ignored. Their votes last election tended to show that, and as noted at the time, African Americans are joining independents rather than register as Democrats.
All this gets back to Trump. A double failure isn't a road map to success. It's the conservative message that works for Republicans, not being tied to a man whose seems to be more focused on himself than anything else.
Wolf ignorance.
President Biden was recently on a radio show where he spouted off about his grandchildren, who apparently call him "pops", asking him about why "they're killing all the wolves".
Wolves are apex predators, i.e. at the top of the food chain. That means they compete with us, and as canines they aren't exactly doodles. That's why they're killed by human beings.
I'm not, I'd note, in favor of exterminating them. But they should and do need to be hunted in recovered populations. That this isn't obvious makes it how obvious it is that we've strayed from nature.
Ellie Kemper and the Cancel Culture
Ellie Kemper is an actress I've never heard of who felt compelled to apologize for participating in a debutante ball I've never heard of.
There's a lot of constant news anymore about the "cancel culture". When this first came up hit was heavily vested in the far right, but it's started to stray out of it into the general culture as a topic, and even into minority cultures. Some prominent African Americans have criticized it recently.
As a topic, the words are loaded, but there is something too this. While a lot of the reaction deploying the word is reactionary, it's also the case now that our culture is in a bizarre episode in which its constantly feeling compelled to apologize for everything.
An overall aspect of this, is this. You can't really apologize that much for the sins of your forefathers and have it mean anything, and whatever horrible thing they may have done, at the end of the day, everyone else's forefather's did it too. I know that people hate this idea, but there isn't a person alive today who isn't descended from the oppressed, the raped, the enslaved and the disadvantaged. Likewise, every person today is descendant from murderers, rapists, and slavers. Everyone.
It's a really nice and comforting thought to believe that you are universally descended from the virtuous, but nobody is. Moreover, if you think you are, the only thing you can really do to honor your ancestors is to live a very virtuous life yourself. Most modern Westerners do not.
Kemper's particularly transgression was to participate, at age 19, in the Veiled Profit Ball, some sort of Southern debutante thing of the type that continues to surprise me simply because it existed. The event has a racist history in that it was started by former Confederate officers in St. Louis, Missouri and has really only opened up to overcome that recently.
Okay, but does that make Kemper a racist? Let's not be stupid, of course it doesn't.
Bothered by Stefanik
It's not that I'm bothered because I'm a giant Liz Cheney fan. I only really warmed up to Cheney in 2020 as she began to break away, more and more, from the official Trump line, showing her independence. My appreciation for her, however, really only developed after January 6, 2021, when she became one of the very rare Congressional Republicans willing to stand up against the coup attempt.
Stefanik, on the other hand, is somebody I didn't know about until she signed on to advance lies.
Maybe its that which causes me to wonder about the pregnant Stafanik. At 58 years of age I'll admit, I'm old and that perhaps entitles me to some Neanderthal views. But there's something weird about the Stefanik perpetuating a dangerous lie and about to become mother.
That kid, by the way, will either grow up and forever hold that against his or her mother, or will grow up and fall right into extremism. There's hardly any other potential result. She ought to think of that.
You're in the Navy Now
The U.S. Navy has informed Naval Academy football player Cameron Kinely that he will report for duty as a naval officer, not as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, after he graduates.
College sports have reached the societal stupid level, in the case of major sports, as we all know. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that the money vault is about to be opened, it'll get stupider. I don't blame the athletes for this, but the student part of that is much underemphasized. Good for the Navy to enforce their priorities. West Point recently didn't when it decided its age hold honor code doesn't really need to be fully enforced.
How do these guys get elected?
LOUIE GOHMERT: And I understand from what's been testified to, the Forest Service and the BLM, you want very much to work on the issue of climate change. I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they have found that the moon's orbit is changing slightly. And so is the Earth's orbit around the sun. We know there's been significant solar flare activity.
And so, is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate.
JENNIFER EBERLIEN: I would have to follow up with you on that one, Mr. Gohmert.
LOUIE GOHMERT: Yeah, well, if you figure out a way that you in the Forrest Service can make that change, I'd like to know.
What the crud?
North Korea's monarchical dictator called the food situation of his country tense.
Wow, it must be bad if they're admitting in that fashion.
Open the boarder. The problem will go away.
Just what we needed. The race to the inebriated.
Connecticut joined the dopy march into added American stupidity, legalizing weed. As Americans don't have enough in the way of legal intoxicants already.
Fifteen hours in a Waffle House
Some sports writer speant fifteen hours in a Waffle House eating waffles.
That's a lot of waffles.
Bras don't cause cancer
So read a headline I happend to run across.
Well, first of all, thank goodness.
Secondly, did somebody actualy think they did? Was this some sort of funded research project?
Monica Lewinsky, again.
Apparently an HBO intern sent out some sort of embarrassing email to some subscribers rearding Monica Lewinsky.
Why is this even a topic?
Be careful what you say
Former teenage disaffected star, now young woman hottie star, Billie Eilish is in the hot seat for apparently mounting an "anti Asian slur" when she was 13 or 14.
That's not that long ago in the context of Eilish's life, but forever ago in real terms given that she's now an adult, and then she wasn't.
Well, I'm pretty sureu Eilish isn't a racist and never has been. Perhaps a person shouldn't be held accountable for everything they say, at least in their tender years, and perhaps in their dotage.
D'oh!
Gosh, the AR15 was originally built for war? Next thing you'll hear is the Jeep was too. What on earth will they discovery next?
Sucker record
I've caught quite a few big suckers over the years. Many more when I was a kid and we fished the lakes, which I don't do much anymore.
Some I cut up for bait. Others I just left there on the bank.
I've honestly never thought of submitting one for the record. . . or that they even kept records for them.
NRA Invite
Governor Gordon has invited the National Rifle Association to relocate to Wyoming.
It's not going to happen, but what the heck?
I get that its good politics, but that's about it. They're not going to want to, and do we really want to make ourselves into an urban hub, which is what a large organization such as that requires.
The NRA, of course, has been in the news recently in a way that it doesn't want to be. Pursued by the Attorney General of New York, it decided to relocate to Texas and take bankruptcy. It's bankruptcy was dismissed when the Court found that it didn't meet the definition of being bankrupt, but by attempting to take this route, it tarnished its reputation, something that's been suffering anyhow.
The NRA suffers from being an example of what occurs when leadership never changes. The current leadership of the organization has been in control for seemingly forever. It's been effective, but occupying positions for life ultimatley always creates problems. An overhaul at the organization is overdue, but moving to Wyoming doesn't make sense as part of that.
Darned Hippies.
The Daily NK, an online publication in Seoul with sources in North Korea, reported that three teenagers had been sent to a re-education camp for cutting their hair like K-pop idols and hemming their trousers above their ankles. The BBC cannot verify this account.
“FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!”
What Phylicia Rashad stated upon Bill Cosby being released.
This is really hard to grasp, and she walked it back, but it shows that in spite of everything Cosby's reputation isn't as completely tarnished, in all quarters as a person might think.
On this, I heard a woman comment with sympathy for Cosby, which surprised me even more than Rashad's comments. The feeling she expressed was that his victims had placed themselves in a situation in which this could occur. I'm not commenting on that, other than to note I heard it.
7%
That's the percentage of of our DNA that is different from Neanderthals and Denisovians.
There seems to be ongoing surprise about this, but I'm not. Indeed, I don't think that Neaderthals are really a different species, but a subspecies, of Homo Sapiens. I know a lot less about Denisovians, but evolution is line, not a series of sharp steps.
I'm actually surprised, however, that its only 7%.
Banning Early Nuptuals
New York became the sixth state to ban "child" marriages, raising its age of consent to 18 yeras of age.
I don't endorse anyone getting married under 18 years of age, or at 18 years of age for that matter. It's just interesting to note how we generally regard that age range.
In the 70s, when the Vietnam War was one, we started depressing ages of majority. Since that time, however, as a practical matter, we've increased it.
Marriages at this age, contrary to common belief, have never been common in the Christian era, so the degree to which this is a real problem can be debated. It's also interesting to note that to the extent very young marriages are common, there's cultural aspects to it that generally aren't, or haven't, been raised.
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