Thursday, August 31, 1944. Montgomery promoted. The Red Army in Bucharest. The Mad Gasser in Mattoon, Illinois.

The Red Army entered a Bucharest already cleared of German troops by the Romanian Army.  Crowds cheered the arrival of the Red Army.

Romania would be one of the tragic examples of the Red Army not leaving where it appeared following the war. It would take a revolution in the USSR, more or less, and definitely in Romania, to restore Romanian sovereignty and establish Romanian democracy.

Bernard Law Montgomery was promoted to Field Marshal.

Almost slandered by American historians since the war, Montgomery was a great man and a strategic genius who had mastered the ability to fight with an economy of resources.  Born in England, but raised in Australia (his father was an Episcopal Bishop), he was truly one of the greatest Allied commanders of the war.

The 5th Army crossed the Arno.

Slovene partisans rescued 105 Allied POWs in the Raid at Ožbalt.

The US prevailed in the Battle of Sansapor.

Task Force 38.4 attacked Japanese positions on Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima.

The first of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon incidents in Mattoon, Illinois.

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World has a good episode on this really weird event.

Last edition:

Wednesday, August 30, 1944. End of Operation Overlord.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, British Army, Italy, Operation Overlord, Petroleum, Philippines, Polesti Romania, Red Army, Romania, World War Two

Sunday, August 31, 1924. Back in North America.

The around the world flyers landed at Indian Harbour, Labrador (which was not yet part of Canada), thereby having arrived again in North America.

United with Newfoundland, Labrador would not become part of Canada until 1949.

Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia proclaimed himself heir to the Russian throne.

Wine was released, which featured Clara Bow in her first leading role.

Last edition:

Saturday, August 30, 1924. Late summer scenes.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Art, Calvin Coolidge, Currency, French League of Nation Mandates, German Weimar Republic, Illinois, inflation, It was because of World War One, Ku Klux Klan, Lebanon, Monarchy, Norman Rockwell

Going Feral: Destruction of the wild.

Going Feral: Destruction of the wild.:   

Destruction of the wild.

 

Not-so Muddy Mountain Road

Great.

Making a formerly pretty wild area an effective city park.

This is just the kind of bullshit that ruins everything.

I hope the 4x4s coming off the muddy roads rip this newly paved road to shreds as soon as possible.

Clearly a bitter post on my part.

I"ve gone up the existing Muddy Mountain Road since I was a child.  I've hiked up the one that preceded it as well numerous times when the current road was closed, something that's declined in enjoyment as the motorized ATV crowd goes up and down the same road getting to listen to the racket their vehicles make (you can literally hear them for miles).

There's a lot about this that's flat out wrong.  One of those things is the absolute hypocrisy of Wyomingites, or in this case Natrona County residents, who loudly proclaim that the government shouldn't spend money on this or that, and then turn right around and subsidize the paving of a road for no reason, other than to allow people to flood the back country more easily, and with less effort.  The road literally serves no purpose other than recreation, that's it, and makes it easier for people to get there with no real effort.

Indeed, the existing road was a good one, and had I been around when it was put in, I probably would be p.o.ed as well.  

Meanwhile, in the winter, the same department that put in this road, if we have snow, won't be able to plow out the county roads that service the oilfield and ranches.

What on Earth does the Republican Party stand for?

Ronald Reagan was the first President that I was able to vote for, or against (I voted for) in my lifetime.

The GOP of that era was far from perfect, but I knew what it stood for.  

It was pro life, pro defense, tough on crime, pro fiscal responsibility, and overall conservative.

People have claimed that for the Trumpist GOP, but what of it?

1.  Pro life?

The GOP went into this election cycle claiming responsibility, which it had every right to do, for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which returned the abortion issue to the states.  Not surprisingly, however, a controversial issue remains controversial.  Now the GOP is running from the issue as quickly as it can.  It took its pro life plank out of its platform, where it's been for decades.  And now we have Trump, who has flip flopped on the issue for decades, stating this, in regard to a proposed six week provision in Florida:

I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time

This is really a simple issue.  Either you believe that life starts at conception, or aren't sure when a human is a human and therefore you err on the side of life, or you think killing only matters at some arbitrary point in time in which you can't stomach it.

At best, the Republicans here can claim to support State's Rights, but pro life?  Donald isn't.

Added to that is this, which gets also into the next topic.

I am announcing today that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.

We want more babies!

IVF means the creation of large numbers of embryos that are later killed, and in Catholic theology, IVF  is regarded as a moral evil.  

It's notable that Vance, who is a Catholic convert, has made some statements now generally supporting IVF as he runs towards Trump and away from his Faith.

2.  Fiscal Responsibility?

Trump added 8T to the federal debt in his term in office.

And he proposed, prior to Harris, cutting income taxes on tips, which has no logical defense.  Income is income.

Trump has stood for tax cuts, which have amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy.  People, including the wealthy like Elon Musk, have noted the country is going bankrupt.  Well, this is a big part of the reason why.

Back to the above, the GOP whined endlessly about Obamacare, and now proposes to expand government support for an insurance payment. What the crud?

3. Pro defense?

The Republican willingness in many quarters to abandon Ukraine says all you need to know about this. Added to it, Trump has a weird relationship with Russia that has never been explained.

Much of the current GOP wants to return to isolationism, which worked oh so well during the 1930s.

4.  Tough on crime?

Running Trump says all you really need to know on that.

This party, in spite of what its supporters believe, stands only for reelecting Donald Trump, and nothing else.

Mind you, there were signs of this happening for some time.  The entire spectacle of Evangelical Christians lashing themselves to the decks of the Trump serial polygamy ship was never easy to fathom.  National Conservatives came on board in a calculated fashion, thinking that when Trump shuffled off his mortal coil they'd be in charge, only to see the less popular portions of their beliefs mocked and categorized as "weird".  The Hawk Tuah girl was embraced by the Lynyrd Skynyrd branch of the populist whose Christianity is rather thin and not hardly of the Mike Johnson New Apostolic Reformation variety.

So what does that do to the populist movement in the GOP and the GOP in general?  Well, quite a few real Republicans are abandoning ship, particularly those cultural conservatives who were never really Trumpites, but believed there was a moral obligation to support the GOP due to its cultural conservative positions.  The American Solidarity Party is suddenly getting a lot of attention because its actually prolife.  But a lot of the Trumpites now stand for nothing but Trump and will go down with him like stormtroopers in Berlin on May 2, 1945.  Locally those politicians who have arisen in the Populist Freedom Caucus will keep on saying the same things they've been saying, even as their leader is saying the opposite.

Populism always gets co-opted in the end.  Here, it already has been.  Conservatism, for its part, was simply killed in the party.

Wednesday, August 30, 1944. End of Operation Overlord.

Operation Overlord officially concluded.

A French government was operating again in Paris and massive parts of the country had been cleared of the Germans.

The Red Army took Polesti, the oil refining center of Romania.  Most of the Romanian oilfields had already been taken by the Soviets.

The 8th Army commenced assaults on the Gothic Line.

Three soldiers from 7th Regt., 3rd Div. on patrol north of Montelimar. 30 August, 1944.

Filipino writer and guerilla Manuel Estabillo Arguilla was beheaded by the Japanese.

Last edition:

Tuesday, August 29, 1944. Marching in Paris, crossing the Foglia, the Slovaks rebell.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Battle for Paris, Battle of Marseille, Bulgaria, Eastern Front, Italy, Operation Goodwood, Paris France, Polish Home Army, Slovak National Uprising, Slovakia, World War Two

Saturday, August 30, 1924. Late summer scenes.

The Dawes Plan went into effect.

Germany replaced paper marks with a coin, due to hyperinflation.

Clashes with the Ku Klux Klan resulted in six deaths in Herrin Illinois.

The French High Commission of the Levant created Lebanese citizenship.

Edwards, Prince of Wales, met with Calvin Coolidge.

Saturday magazines were out.

Last edition:

Friday, August 29, 1924. The start of the Second Saudi-Hashemite War.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Dawes Plan, It was because of World War One, Kingdom of Hejaz, Monarchy, Saudi Arabia, Second Saudi-Hashemite War, Sultanate of Nejd

Sunday, August 30, 1874. The return to The Girl I Left Behind me and the Battle of Red River.

The Black Hills Expedition returned to Ft. Abraham Lincoln after covering nearly 1,200 miles over lasting sixty days.

The Sixth Cavalry and Fifth Infantry under the command of Colonel Nelson A. Miles attacked a large group of Southern Cheyenne near the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River in Texas in what became the day long Battle of Red River..  Though armed with Gatling guns and a 10-pounder Parrott rifle, the Cheyenne were able to hold them the Army long enough to escape up Tule Canyon into the Staked Plains.

Last edition:

Wednesday, August 26, 1874. Lynching black suspects and violating the Second Amendment.

Labels: 1870s, 1874, Crime, Ethnicities, law, National Rifle Association, Racism, Tennessee, Weapons

Friday Farming: At 84, Lander horseman still makes hay the old-fashioned way

 

At 84, Lander horseman still makes hay the old-fashioned way

Odds

A prediction, or rather an estimate based on odds.

I think there's a 55% chance that Donald Trump will not be the Republican candidate by November, or even by mid October.

No, I don't think that some random wacko is going to assassinate him.  

Rather, I'm going back to what I always thought, that one of the two candidates would depart due to the impact of time and mortality, and add to it.

On mortality, Trump really doesn't look well, when you see him as he actually looks, which is rarely.  Most of the time we see him in a baggy blue suit with his strange orange spray on tan and back comb over in evidence, a look we're so used to that we have come to regard it as normal, which it is not.  But if you see him golfing, which we do occasionally, you see him as he really is. A fat old pasty man.  He looks his age and doesn't look great.  If a guy looking like that died tomorrow, you wouldn't be surprised.

Added to that, however, is the growing evidence of mental decline.

Trump is under an enormous amount of stress.  If you've ever been familiar with somebody entering dementia, routine can keep them going for a long time.  Trump has had a surprisingly consistent routine since 2020.  The election was stolen has been his mantra.  Joe Biden is a crook and the worst President of all time.  He repeats it over and over, and he still is.

Now, however, Biden has mounted up and is fading into the sunset.  Trump, in turn, has entered the part of the map labeled "here there be dragons" and doesn't know where he is. It's showing in his behavior, which has become increasingly odd.

Indeed, his behavior is now so odd we're completely acclimated to it and pay it little regard.  In more or less controlled scripted moments, which seem to occur during the day time, he delivers a routine rambling speech, often with a flat affect.  He tends to go badly off script into the bizarre.  In interviews he can go way off script.

When he does, odd things show up again and again.  He's really smart, he tells us. . . a lot.  He draws big crowds, bigger than his opponents. . . 

It's weird.

At night, now, he seems to have taken to Twitter and the tweets are often really weird.

I'm not a psychiatrist but it looks to me like the stress an anxiety of the race are getting to him, and organically.

Hence my added prediction.  I don't think this nearly 80 year old who has avoided exercise his entire life can keep this up.  It'll kill him, or it'll render his mid mush to the point it can't be ignored.

And it'll happen before the end of October.

I'm not saying any of this, I'd note, as some sort of wish.  I've seen more than my share of death, and I've seen dementia.  We all die, but dementia isn't something we all endure and I don't wish that on anyone.

Tuesday, August 29, 1944. Marching in Paris, crossing the Foglia, the Slovaks rebell.

15,000 U.S. troops of the 28th Infantry division marched down the Champs Elysees in Paris.

The Battle of Marseille ended in an Allied victory.

The British 8th Army crossed the Foglia.

The Slovak National Uprising began.

At the time, with Romania having changed sides, the Red Army actually in East Prussia, and Hungary attempting to get out of the war, it looked as if the collapse of Germany was eminent.

It should be noted that the Warsaw Uprising was still going on.

The Jassy–Kishinev Offensive, Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive and Šiauliai Offensive all ended in Soviet victories.  The Red Army took the Black Sea port of Constanta and the Romanian city of Buzau.

The Soviets rejected the Bulgarian proclamation of neutrality.

The British government proclaimed the Polish Home Army was a de jure belligerent force.  The US also did.

Operation Goodwood, the Royal Navy effort to sink the Tirptiz, concluded as a failure.

Dumbarton Oaks concluded.

Last edition:

Monday, August 28, 1944. Hungarians reconsider.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, British Broadcasting Corporation, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Lithuania, Operation Dragoon, Operation Overlord, Personalities, Southeast Asia, The Holocaust

Friday, August 29, 1924. The start of the Second Saudi-Hashemite War.

The Sultanate of Nejd, led by King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, attacked the Kingdom of Hejaz, ruled by King Hussein bin Ali, British ally during World War One.

Flag of the joint kingdom of The Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, which would become Saudi Arabia.

Hejaz contained Mecca and the city of Jeddah.  Citizens of Jejd had been barred from making the pilgrimage to Mecca, bringing on the war, and the thereby the birth of Saudi Arabia., at least as an immediate causa belli.  A more significant one may have been the end of British subsidies to both royal houses, removing restraint on both of them, and in the case of Hejaz, the ability to bribe other Arab principalities.

The Reichstag accepted the London protocol of the Dawes plan.

Last edition:

Thursday, August 28, 1924. The August Uprising.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, actors and actresses, August Uprising, California, California (Los Angeles), Ethnicities, Georgia, USSR

Sunday, August 29, 1824. Battle of Gerontas (Ναυμαχία του Γέροντα).

The Battle of Gerontas (Ναυμαχία του Γέροντα) was fought in the southeast Aegean, seeing 75 small Greek vessels defeat an Ottoman armada of 100 vessels contributed by various parts of the Ottoman Empire.  The engagement was one of the most significant of the Greek War of Independence, fought from 1821 to 1829, which freed Greece from Ottoman rule.

Last edition:

Tuesday, August 24, 1824. Shipping Up To Boston with Lafayette.

Labels: 1820s, 1824, American Revolution, Boston, Bunker Hill, Personalities, United States

Tuesday, August 29, 1899. Volunteers back in the U.S.

Today In Wyoming's History: August 29: 1899  Wyoming volunteers returned from service in the Philippines, via the Port of San Francisco.  Attribution:  On This Day.

Sunday, August 27, 1899. A bridge over the Nile.

Labels: 1890s, 1899, British Empire, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Railroads, Sudan, Sudan (Khartoum)

Navy Corpsman, with Marine fatality. Vietnam.

 

Monday, August 28, 1944. Hungarians reconsider.

The Kaunas Offensive in Lithuania ended in a Red Army victory.

The 1st Army crossed the Marne at Meaux.

German garrisons at Toulon and Marseilles surrendered.    The encircled 11th Panzer Division begins a breakout offensive towards the north.

Lakatos.  His government stopped the deportation of Hungarian Jews.  He'd be overthrown by fascists in October.  He lived in poverty after the war until immigrating to Australia, where he died in 1967 at age 77.

A new Hungarian government is seated lead by Gen. Lakatos.  It announces that it wishes to negotiated with the Soviet Union, which did not result in an end of the war for Hungary.

The BBC began Southeast Asian broadcasts in Dutch and French.

Last edition:

Sunday, August 27, 1944. Collateral damage.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Battle for Paris, boats and ships, Buchenwald, Château-Thierry France, Eastern Front, French Navy, Italy, Monarchy, Normandy Breakout, Romania, Royal Air Force, U.S. Air Force, Women, World War Two

Thursday, August 28, 1924. The August Uprising.

Georgians rebelled against the Soviet Union in the August Uprising.

The certificate of identity for actress Anna May Wong, born Wong Liu Tsong (黃柳霜), (from Reddit's "100 Years Ago Today, and also on Wikipedia).

Famous as a Chinese American actress, she was a native of Los Angeles.  She died in 1961 at age 56 of a heart attack after a period of ill health.

Last edition:

Wednesday, August 27, 1924. Color photos over the wire.

Labels: 1918-1919 Paris Peace Conference, 1920s, 1924, 1930s, 1939, German Weimar Republic, It was because of World War One, Lighter than air aircraft, Photography, technology, Telegraph, U.S. Navy

Sunday, August 28, 1774. Mother Seton.

 

St. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton SC was born in the Colony of New York, in the city by that name.  Her prominent parents were protestants, as the overwhelming majority of those in the thirteen lower colonies were, with her mother being an Anglican daughter of an Anglican priest.  She married William Magee Seton, a wealthy 25 year old businessman, at when she was 19.  Both she and William were devout members of Trinity Episcopal Church.  Upon the death of her father in law, the family took in their six young in laws which added to their five children.

The undeclared war with Republican France that was fought on the seas between 1798 and 1800 rendered the merchant family bankruptcy, showing as an aside why the later War of 1812 was unpopular in New England, which depended upon trade with England.  In 1803 William was sent to Italy to convalesce due to tuberculosis but died in the British city of Leghorn where he was quarantine.  She was introduced to Catholicism while in Europe by Flippo and Antonia Filicchi, her husband's business partners, and converted in New York on March 14, 1805.  She began to become involved in education and then became a nun, founding a congregation dedicated to the care of children and the poor.

She died in 1821 at age 46.   Two of her daughters predeceased her.  A third, Catherine Seton, entered the Sisters of Mercy and is being considered as a candidate for a cause of Sainthood.

She was canonized in 1975.

Last edition:

Saturday, August 27, 1774. Resolution of the First North Carolina Provincial Congress.

Labels: 1770s, 1774, American Revolution, North Carolina

Space National Guard? Spare us.

The time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force.  So as president, I will sign historic legislation creating a space National Guard.

Donald Trump, yesterday, at the National Guard Association Convention.

The Space Force is frankly absurd and ought to be abolished, with its enlisted men folded back into the Air Force and its officers assigned permanent duty at Tasty Freeze drive up windows. 

But a Space Force National Guard?

Please, no.

Of course, if a bill like that passes through Congress, and as goofy as Congress has been in recent years, it probably would, no State Governor is going to turn down the chance to have the Mos Eisley Space Guard station put in their state, so every state will end up with a squadron of "Guardians".

The Space Force is flat out dumb.  It's duties belong in the Air Force.  One of the unfortunate legacies of the Trump administration, however, is this absurd new branch of the service.

Would that sanity would reign and it would go away.

Second and Third mortgages.

It’s one thing to sell your soul cheaply. It’s another to keep taking out second and third mortgages on it until all that’s left is debt and shame.

The Atlantic on conservatives supporting Trump. 

Sunday, August 27, 1944. Collateral damage.

Shoeless French women subject to abuse, swastika's painted on their foreheads, for dalliances with German soldiers during the occupation of Paris, August 27, 1944.

The Germans made limited tactical gains in Operation Doppelkopf on the Eastern Front.

The Red Army took August 27, 1944 Focșani, Romania.

The British 21st Army Group and US 12 Army Group advanced beyond the Seine.

The US 3d Army took Château-Thierry.

Princess Mafalda of Savoy, age 41, died of wounds sustained in a bombing raid on Buchenwald concentration camp.  She was imprisoned there, as was her husband, due to Italy's having changed sides during the war.

Her naked body was dumped into the crematorium but  Father Joseph Thyl was able to give it some attention.  Her death was not learned of until after the German surrender.

The RAF bombed the refinery at Homberg-Meerbeck in a daylight bombing raid, the first since the early stages of the war.

The incomplete French battleship Clemenceau was bombed and sunk at Brest by U.S. aircraft.

Dumbarton Oaks was still going on.

Last edition:

Saturday, August 26, 1944. De Gaulle in the streets of Paris. Bulgaria calls it quits.

Labels: Battle for Paris, Battle of Toulon, Bulgaria, Caen France, Charles de Gaulle, Collaborators, French Army, French Resistance Movements, Paris France, Rüsselsheim massacre, World War Two