What's more, Trump is insane and everyone knows it. World leaders know it. His opponents know it. And, moreover, his supporters, know it.
He's driving us over a cliff, and everyone knows that.
He's the last pathetic gasp of the Baby Boomers, as we endure a nation by the Baby Boomers, Of the Baby Boomers, and for the Baby Boomers, enduring the legacy of a government attacked by Ronald Reagan and brought into fruition by Dixiecrats.
I've predicted that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him, and moreover, his mere presence in the White House was really a smokescreen for National Conservatives. If I was right, the moment now appears too late.
The United States has come to an end as a great nation.
It might be able to rebuild, but it won't be what it was. Nore should it be. A nation stupid enough to elect Donald Trump is no longer great.
The question is, how much damage do we allow him to do?
And I say "we" advisedly. Stuffed suits like Dr. John Barrasso and castrati Mike Johnson aren't going to do anything. His cabinet has people like scared Scott Bessent in it, who sound like they're terrified to be in public, or people who cheerfully shovel his oratorical vomit. Congress could act, but the make up the GOP in Congress is 100% eunuchs who roll over to have their bellies petted by Trump or go into the corner scared and pee.
The nation's leaders have completely failed it.
The question is not, at this point, how can this be salvaged. It cannot. The question is how much can be saved so that there's something to rebuild from when we reemerge in 2028 as a minor power, second rate nation, despised by the world.
The only thing, and it is the only thing, than can really save the nation now is mass protests. An epic strike that shut the nation down completely would be something the Republicans could not ignore.
We don't even seem to have the guts for that, however. We haven't seen anything like that since the 1960s and early 1970s.
We aren't much of a people anymore.
Ironically, however, the wet dream of Donald Trump to be remembered as somebody, darned near anybody, will also fail. He'll be remembered for being a fat, spoiled, mentally ill, child who ruined his nation with the help of ignorance. His ballroom will not get built. His Arc will not either. Greenland, which he will steal, will be set free. Melania will escape back to Europe to hide the disgrace of having associated with the man. The Trump family will bankruptcy itself into oblivion.
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
We just published this item here on Donald Trump's insatiable lust for the destruction of land, lands even beyond our borders.
In the movie The Patriot, which is okay but not great, commences with these lines:
I have long feared, that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bare.
In a lot of ways, that opening scene is the best one in the movie.
No nation has a singular linear history, even though people tend to hear things that way. "This happened, and then that happened, resulting in this. . . ". In reality, things are mixed quite often, and things are quite fluid with juxtapositions.
Shakespeare claimed:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Perhaps. But in reality the tide in the affairs of men drags everyone along with it. But it's a rip tide. People's individual goals, desires and aspirations often are quite contrary to the tide on the surface.
That's certainly been the case with the United States.
If you have a Trumpian view of the world, the history of the United States looks like this, sort of:
Lots of people have that view. We came, we saw, we exploited, and everyone got happy working for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Trouble is, that's not true for a lot of reasons, a core one being it doesn't comport with who we really are. The entire worship of wealth and what it brings, and the wealthy and who they are, is deeply contrary to our natures, and frankly men like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are deeply perverted. Not because of their relationship with women, or because their names appear in the Epstein files in some context, although in the case of Trump, we really still don't know what context, but because of their shallow avaricious acquisition for and desire for wealth.
Timothy warns us:
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
And not only have their pierced themselves, but they pierce others, and entire societies with them.
So let's look at a few concrete things that we feel should be done.
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men
Revisit the Homestead Act.
Right from the onset of English colonization of North America, there was a pull between business exploitation and the simple desire for an agrarian place of one's own.
The truth of the matter is that when the nation started off, most people weren't "Pilgrims" seeking shelter from religious oppression. Nor did they wish to be servants of big mercantile enterprises. Most of the early English colonists were from agriculture or the trades and wanted to just work for themselves. That's about it.
The American Revolution was as much about that as anything else. When American Colonials dumped tea in harbors, they were protesting taxes, but what they were also doing is dumping mercantile controlled property into waste. It was grown somewhere else and it belong to rich remote classes.
The struggle was always there. The American South in particular had the planter class which depended upon enslaved labor to raise a market crop. That was about generating wealth. Most Southerners, in contrast, were Yeoman who had small places of their own. When the Civil War came the wealthy had the South fight the war.
The analogies to the present day are simply to thick to ignore.
The Homestead Act came about during that war, and in real ways, it expressed a Jeffersonian dream. People willing to invest their own labor could acquire a place of their own.
The drafters of the Act never envisioned the wealthy controlling the land. In some very real ways it was wealthy landowners that the North was fighting at the time.
Over the last few days residents of Wyoming have read about Chris Robinson, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., buying the Pathfinder Ranch. I have nothing about him personally, but the listed price for the ranch was $79.5M due to its giant size.
I can personally recall when it was owned by locals At that price, rather obviously, Robinson isn't planning on making money from cattle. And to make matters a bit worse, residents of Natrona County got to read about another local outfit going up for sale, which is much smaller, for $9M.
Even into my adult years, by which time it was already impossible for somebody not born into ranching or farming to buy a place such that it could be their vocation, most ranches were owned by locally born ranchers. This trend of playground pricing is making the status of the land the same as that which English colonists were seeking to escape from.
This could be fixed by amending the Homestead Act. The homesteading portion of that is fixed, but it would still be possible to go back and amend it such that land deeded to individuals under it, had to remain in agricultural use, and had to be held by families that made their money that way. exclusively.
I know it won't be, anytime soon, but it should be.
Revisit "Ad coelum ad damnum"
One of the absolute absurdities of the original Homestead Act is that it gave away not only the surface of the land, but the mineral rights as well. This made the system sort of like buying lottery tickets. Some people got rich just of because of where they'd chosen to homestead.
I really struggle with the concept of private ownership of minerals, including oil and gas, in the first place. I understand private enterprise exploiting it, but owning it? Why? It's not like private enterprise put the minerals in the ground.
Addressing this creates real constitutional problems, but ideally the mineral wealth of the nation should belong to everyone in it, not private parties. And it should be exploited, or not, in the national interest, not in the primary economic interest of those who claim to own it.
I know that this brings up the cry of "that's Socialism". It probably really is, but an unequal accidental distribution of mineral wealth on lands taken from the native inhabitants isn't just. At a bare minimum, something needs to be looked into. Indeed, as there was no intent to transfer that mineral title in the first place, perhaps it could collectively be restored and held in truth for the descendants of those original inhabitants.
Tax the wealthy
Every since Ronald Reagan there's been a ludicrous idea that taxing the wealthy hurts the economy. We know that this is completely false. We also know that a certain percentage of the wealthy will allow themselves to become obscenely wealthy if allowed to, and that they'll harm everyone else as a result.
There's no reason on earth that anyone ought to be a billionaire. Indeed, if you have more than $50M in assets, you have too much and something is potentially wrong with your character. High upper income tax rates and wealth taxes can and should address this. Elon Musk can be nearly just as annoying if his net worth was $50M as whatever it currently is, but he'd be a lot less destructive.
An alternative to this, if this is simply too radical, is to prevent corporations from owning most things, and to provide that once they get to be a certain size, at least 50% of their ownership goes to employees of those corporations. It'd at least distribute the wealth some, and keep avarice from defining our everyday existence.
Final thoughts
What seems to be clear in any event is that we cannot keep going in this directly. Today's "conservatives" serve the very interests that the American Patriots rebelled against, remote wealth. In spite of their tattoos and car window stickers, they'd form the Loyalist Militia trying to put down an an agrarian revolution in 1776. The thing is, that those conditions always lead to revolution. They did in 1776 in North America, and then again in more extreme form in France a few years later. They lead to the uprisings of 1848, the Anglo Irish War in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's time to address this while we can, as it will be addressed.
The first commercial flight of the Concorde supersonic airliner took place with one departing Heathrow in British Airways colors and another departing Orly Airport in Paris in Air France colors. The British jet flew to Bahrain and the French one to Brazil.
The plane remained in service until 2003.
On the same day communist forces in Angola established the People's Air Force of Angola.
The symbol of what ultimately became the Progressive Party.
Back when the Republican Party wasn't mostly run by castratis, the National Progressive Republican League was organized by a group of Republican Party members who were dissatisfied with the U.S. President William Howard Taft, who was liberal centrist, as opposed to the current GOP, which is fascist (even right down to state capitalism and ultra nationalism).
The Territory of New Mexico adopted a proposed state constitution.
China is imposing a 55% tariff on some (it appears quite a bit of) beef from Brazil, Australia and the United States.
In Casper, Vintage Wine and Spirits and Wyoming Rib and Chop are closed as of this morning.
Donald Trump vetoed a water project in Colorado which was passed unanimously by Congress, and which is in a district that is represented by MAGA Lauren Boebert and which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump mostly, it appears, as an act of revenge on Colorado.
The costs of at least 350 drugs in the U.S. are expected to rise in 2026.
Also, according to Trump Golf Tracker, Donald Trump has golfed 79 days out of 347 days since returning to office (22.8% of the presidency), at a taxpayer cost of $110,600,000.
The price of oil today is generally $57.41/bbl, below US profitability. Wyoming oil is generally at $57.84/bbl.
Coal rose to $107.50 /T on December 31, 2025, up 0.80% from the previous day. Over the past month, coal has fallen 0.78%, and is down 13.72% compared to the same time last year.
There's no part of this that will be a positive for the U.S. economy, or Wyoming's. There's been too much oil on the market now for years, which has made Wyoming's petroleum economy unstable. More oil will simply make it worse, much worse. Sinking a bunch of infrastructure into a foreign country will make it worse.
This will be an economic problem, if not a disaster.
And here's another GOP bit of great economic news:
Дональд Трамп — агент России, will be imposing tariffs on NATO members over his avarice for Greenland.
Дональд Трамп — агент России.
January 20, 2026
The stock market is collapsing and Treasury bonds are being sold off by the Danish retirement system due to the instability of the American budget.
If this becomes a general trend over the next thirty days the U.S. will go into a recession and the Dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency.
All this sparked by the demented avarice of the dimwit in the Oval Office.
January 21, 2026
Trump added $2.25 trillion to the national debt in his first year back in (illegitimate) charge.
Yesterday the United States mounted an early morning military operation and removed the chief executive, arguably an illegitimate chief executive, from office and brought him to the United States to face criminal charges, even though the real ability of the US to charge somebody overseas with a crime is dubious and we ignore that when people do that to us.
Later in the day, Donald Trump, also an illegitimate chief executive, gave a press conference.
This demonstrates senility. There's no doubt about it.
January 9, 2026
There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,. . .
Donald Trump.
Need anyone say more?
The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked now.
January 10, 2026
At a meeting with oil company executives, which was odd in and of itself.
"Hold on, I need to look at my beautiful ballroom” — then got up and walked to the door.
Wow. What a view! This is the door to the ballroom!
The man is a child, but then, that's what senility does.
It's worth finding the video. Trump is clearly senile and its at the point where nobody can hide it. Rubio is sitting there grim faced, because that's all he can do.
It's not, I'd note, just me that's been noticing a rapidly declining cognitive ability in Trump.
If Trump was a partner in a law or accounting firm, he'd have been wheeled out the door by now. If he ran a business on his own his employees would be jumping ship. The man is mentally gone.
At this point its absolutely the case that these conversations are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, taking place behind Trump's back. Rubio, Vance, etc., are discussing his mental incapacity. Rubio is full blown on correction mode all the time. Vance is hiding most of the time. The big question is who is angling for what. We have no reason to believe that these characters all get along with each other, and we know that the Trump administration basically breaks down into 1) National Conservatives, using him as a distraction (Vance, Miller), 2) New Apostolic Reformation Evangelicals who figure that Trump is divinely charged with a mission to bring in a new, Evangelical, Christian age (not in the admin, but think Mike Johnson), 3) rank sycophants who worship Trump unthinkingly and 4) rank opportunist (Marco Rubio). Any one of these groups save for the sycophants would have pushed Trump out by now, but no one group is really in agreement with what comes next. Opportunists don't want the NatCons or the NAR people in, the NAR people don't want the opportunists or the NatCon people in, the NatCon people know that this is their only chance.
January 15, 2025
January 16, 2026
Invoke the 25th Amendment you cowardly bastards.
January 17, 2026
He's completely unhinged:
The 25th Amendment needs to be applied now. Trump is a madman. This is utterly insane and anyone supporting it is a complete moron.
Congress, step in.
Section 4
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
Do your duty. Congress can declare itself to be the body that declares Donald Trump to be Bat Shit Crazy. If it was a Democratic Congress, presumably it would. It only requires a few Republicans who are sycophantic toadies to go get it done.
Get it done.
January 19, 2026.
Okay, MAGA adherents and Republican politicians, explain why this isn't batshit crazy:
cont:
The Atlantic.
Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw
Will Republicans in Congress ever step in?
The man is bat shit crazy. He needs to be removed.
From that article:
Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.
Congress, screw up your courage and do something.
January 20, 2026
Trump gave a long, rambling, completely unhinged speech today in Europe.
This is effectively the final constitutional test. The Emperor Has NO Clothes. He's batshit crazy and everyone knows it. If the cabinet will not act, it's because their souls are corrupt. It's up to Congress at this point, and the Republicans are gutless cowards.
If they don't act, this is the end of the United States as a great power, and likely the end of the American economic era. It's a disaster.
It's also the end of this edition. Trump's dementia is now in the rapidly accelerating stage and we've entered a new stage of frightful senility. I had predicted the application of the 25th Amendment over a year ago. What I hadn't counted on was evil men like Stephen Miller, or complete fools like Scott Bessett. It's doubtful that it'll be applied now. Like Hitler's minions, they're rather go down in the bunker, or can't realize that they are.
