A 1915 Sandwich tour de force.

 

Nolan Finely beat me to the punch:

Nolan Finley: It’s time to end the State of the Union

He is quite correct.  The show of the State of the Union Speech, based on the reporting, would have been more proper for Baathist Iran, North Korea, or Nazi Germany.  It wasn't a real State of the Union Address.

There hasn't been one for some time.  

Television destroyed what was once a serious endeavor.  If you look at old State of the Union addresses, particularly when they were still written, they were serious matters.  Now they have all the dignity of a pole dancer performing at a strip club, and they're getting worse.  

Any honest State of the Union delivered since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic would have to start off with "the State of the Union is grave" or words to that effect. An honest one now would have to start off with "the State of the Union is gravely imperiled" and go on from there.  The United States is in really bad shape, not all due to Donald Trump, but with everything about Donald Trump making the nation's condition much, much, worse.  

The nation is hugely polarized.  About 40% of the nation have fallen under the spell of an unintelligent but effective salesman.  Hatreds long thought in the past have revived in an aggressive form.  Congress has completely failed to perform its job, something it started to do at least as far back as the 1980s.  An attack on education and science that began under the Ronald Reagan administration has produced a drove of ignorant ill informed voters.  Ignoring a growing immigration crisis that started in the 1970s fueled massive Rust Belt discontent.  Over funding an all volunteer military has resulted in the creation of a post Cold War military class that's become an a danger to the nation itself.  Ignoring global warming is imperiling the entire plant while lining the pocked of an oligarch class that's rapidly depriving the same Rust Belt class that's now supporting it of any middle class way of making a living.  Ignoring science has also lead to a complete inability to understand basic human biological facts. 

This country is an utter disaster, and it's lead right now by a stupid man whose intellect is crashing into dementia.

Trump is a mentally ill man to start with.  Raised in a family that managed to avoid serving in times of war and whose wealth was started off by a German immigrant (ironically) who engaged in the sex trade, he's always been a self centered man focused on greed and engaging in lust.  In his dementia, he cannot see the world in any manner other than acquisition, and believes his own propaganda about his having a unique understanding of the "art of the deal".  He's the laughing stock of the globe, and at a some point fairly soon in the United States, he'll be regarded as the worst president in the nation's history and the worst human being to ever occupy the Oval Office.  If there's anything redeeming to Trump's reign at all it will be that his profoundly bad occupation of that office has demonstrated how severely various reforms to the Constitution are needed.

Be that as it may, the nation is not going to emerge from Trump the nation it was.  It will be a second rate nation, and that will be due to him, and those who served him.  The US will crawl back to the family of Western nations, but it will just be one of them, not the leader of them.  That's now fallen to the European Union.

When that occurs the millions who followed Trump will deny it, including some of those working for him now . Vance and Rubio will be two who will assert that they were never Trumpites.

On that, we digress.  State of the Union addresses were once written and they were much better when they were. Those days should return.  They were not intended to be an perverted administration's stripping performance while lustful inebriated fans cheered the stripper, which is what they now are.  Today's state of the union addresses are embarrassing in the extreme and not something a mature dignified nation would do, but then, right now, we are not a mature dignified nation.

State of the Union addresses should go back to being written.  If they are delivered orally, they should be given during the work day as they should reflect serious work.  And, frankly, there should be a mechanism, and a severe one at that, that if they are dishonest, there should be an immediate impact.  For example, although now it would have no legal impact, immediately after any oral State of the Union address there should be a vote of confidence.  If a simple majority votes note, the authority of the President should be suspended until he can come back in front of Congress and the nation and not act like a buffoon.

That would require, of course, a serious Congress as well, which we also lack.

Blog Mirror: The Supreme Court's tariff decision extends far beyond tariffs

Reich is spot on about this.  The Supreme Court's opinion is far broader than the press has picked up on.

Check Gate and two protestant pastor columnists.

The Cowboy State Daily has given us two really interesting articles by Protestant pastors.

Scott Clem, a Campbell County Commissioner and a former legislator, and one of the most conserrvative politicians in the state, has for the second time in recent weeks written a column striking at the behavior of the Freedom Caucus.

Scott Clem: When Campaign Cash Matters More Than The People's Work

It's a really well done article.

In contrast Lutheran pastor tacks the other way, although not as much as a person might think, based on his typical writings.

Jonathan Lange: Is This About 'Bad Optics,' Or A Witch Hunt?

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comments on Culture. A Galwaywoman's comment on men and women, Rubio's comments on Western Civilization, and Hegseth hosts a Christian Nationalist.

A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are.

The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is one of the agricultural ones that we link in here.  Ms. Winter is a married Galway greenhouse farmer (that's how I'd put it) in her very early 20s (maybe actually 20) who took up greenhouse farming when a close friend of hers died.  Galway is very rural Ireland and Galwegians are very rural Irish.  I've actually heard them referred to as "Bog Irish" by other Irish.  The county is one of the few areas of Ireland where there are bonafide Irish Gaelic speakers and it has its own accent, which Ms. Winter very thickly has.

This entry was surprising, in a way in that its very anti first wave feminist, but in a really genuine way.  It may actually be fourth wave feminist.  If released in the US (I believe most of Ms. Winter's followers are Irish), it'd create some sort of firestorm in some social medial communities.

Having said that, she isn't wrong.

And her vocabulary and manner of speech is delightfully Irish.

Two different right wing cultural views emerged from Trump servants so far this week.  What's interesting in part about them is that many commentators aren't able to realize that they actually express radically different world views, which shows how poorly people are informed and educated in some things.

The State Department, which still calls itself the Department of State, posted a photo of Marco Rubio with this entry, summing up his recent deliveries to European figures:

The United States and Europe belong to a civilization that stretches over continents, crossed over oceans, and persisted for thousands of years: from Athens to Rome to America.  

Western Civilization must embrace its noble legacy if it is to reverse its decline.

This flat out puts Rubio in the National Conservative movement and is their thesis to the core.  It doesn't say anything, you'll note, about religion at all, it's all about culture.  You can perhaps read more into that if you want, any many would, but this is pretty much the Dinneen/Dreher/Reno thesis.

You can pretty much rest assured that its not the Trump thesis. Trump just isn't smart enough or interested enough to grasp something like this at all.

Rubio has endorsed Vance for 2028, but it's probably an endorsement of convenience.  By doing this, Rubio has raised his flag in the National Conservative camp.  This, moreover, may actually be what Rubio believes.

Rubio is drawing a lot of attention, and getting a lot of excitement, in Reaganite and other genuinely conservative camps.  He's not a populist.  The big question is whether he can overcome the stench of having been associated with Trump.  A secondary question is whether contemporary American culture, less than half of which is all that conservative, sees itself in this fashion very deeply.

In contrast is Pete Hegseth, who will never overcome the stench of Trump.

The Department of Defense posted this item about its activities this past week:

We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service.

We are One Nation Under God.

 

First of all, the Department of Defense has no business whatsoever having monthly prayer meetings.  The United States may be One Nation, Under God, but this basically is a forced acknowledgement of a certain type of Christianity, that being a minority branch of it by far, over every other religion.  Yes, I'm a Christian, and a member of the original Christian faith, but not every soldier is, and no doubt there are soldiers who have no religion at all.  

Moreover, this is Doug Wilson, who appeared here in an earlier discussion.  He's a Calvinist who holds really extreme views.  You can be rest assured that considerably less than half of the American population wants a Puritan Calvinist regime in the U.S. Indeed, a couple of people responded to this Twitter post with:

Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale 13h

Doug Wilson routinely mocks the pope and the Catholic Church.

It’s beyond shameful that  @PeteHegseth  allowed him to lead taxpayer-funded anti-Catholic worship services.

Hale a Democratic Catholic blogger who has a pretty good blog dedicated to Pope Leo that you can also find on our blog lists.  He served in a prior Democratic administration and I'm still waiting for him to explain how an insider Democrat reconciled that with the Democratic Party's support of abortion.  That's an side, but that issue is one of the ones that keeps people like me from being Democrats, even though we aren't voting for very many Republicans any more.

Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson 13h

Listen. Doug Wilson is one of the most disgusting revanchist monsters on Earth. He doesn’t think women should vote, wants slavery back, and believes the U.S. should be a theonomy—Government by God. He runs a cult in Moscow, ID.

This is wildly unconstitutional & deeply immoral.

I don't know who Stewartson is, but describing Wilson as a revanchist is correct.  Monster might be a bit much, but he doesn't think women should vote and does think that the U.S. should be a Calvinist theocracy.  I don't know what he thinks about slavery and I'm not going to look it up, but Wilson is articulate and extreme.

And that's why Hegseth's actions here are really disturbing.  Rubio is trying to stake a claim for Western Civilization as special, something the National Conservatives hold and which a lot of people disagree with.  Hegseth is here advancing Christian Nationalism of a type that holds a very peculiar view on the United States' place in the world. 

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 118th Edition. Why are the women discounted? The corruption of wealth. Hanging around in a cult will make you a weird cultist. New links and the fallen. A gift of cash on the floor of the legislature.

Labels: Distributism, Epstein Scandal, Seven Deadly Sins, Sex, Standards, Taxes, The wealthy, Yeoman's Twentieth Law of Behavior, Yeoman's Twenty-fifth Law of Behavior, Yeoman's twenty-third law of behavior, Zeitgeist

The Squalor of the Epstein Class. Happy Presidents Day

 The first headline really capsulizes the situation.

The Squalor of the Epstein Class

Happy Presidents Day

Epstein ran the biggest sex ring ever and now Pam Bondi is engaged in biggest cover up ever!

The survivors deserve justice!

Going Feral: The Feral Week of February 8, 2026.

A question of mission for Wyoming Game and Fish

This is why we can't have nice things: "Wyoming Cheers End Of Obama-Era EPA Climate Change Rule"

EPA to end 'endangerment finding' and funding for climate change

Hawaii Encourages Landowner Participation in Bounty Program to Remove Invasive Axis Deer

"Abundance" comes to the Colorado; Lee attacks public lands again; Billionaires buy real estate And more tidbits

Proposed Bill Would Legalize Corner-Crossing On Wyoming Public Lands

The Agrarian Week. Week of February 8, 2026.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, February 12, 1916.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, February 12, 1916. Russians advance agai...: Russian forces captured Fort Kara-gobek at Erzurum. British forces failed to take Salaita Hill in what is now Kenya in the first large scale...

Sunday, February 8, 2026

The Rural Blog: Agriculture leaders warn of possible 'widespread c...

Lex Anteinternet: The Making of the Christian Man By Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

U.S. Cattle Population At 75-Year Low Creates Demand, Profit For Wyoming Ranchers

The Aerodrome: The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, ...

The Aerodrome: The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, ...: The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, FAA closes El P... :  Oh great, now what? Without explanation, FAA closes El Paso and New ...

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, FAA closes El P...

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, FAA closes El P...:  Oh great, now what? Without explanation, FAA closes El Paso and New Mexico airspace for 10 days, cites national defense  

Guest Column: Proud Of Wyoming And UW – And If You Take Time To Learn, I Bet You Will Be Too Guest columnist Marilyn Kite writes, "Most Wyoming citizens are proud of our state. But today, we hear attacks. Where all these attacks are coming from is a puzzle, but they are likely driven by out of state forces that know little about our history and public assets."

 

Guest Column: Proud Of Wyoming And UW – And If You Take Time To Learn, I Bet You Will Be Too

Guest columnist Marilyn Kite writes, "Most Wyoming citizens are proud of our state.  But today, we hear attacks. Where all these attacks are coming from is a puzzle, but they are likely driven by out of state forces that know little about our history and public assets."

Painted Bricks: Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

Painted Bricks: Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate ...: What the crap? The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and th...

Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

What the crap?

The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and then it went on to catch them elsewhere and expand out a bit from there. Basically, we like historic buildings here.

One of the things we've noted, however, in doing this is that fables grow up around buildings.  Sometimes it's really hard to figure out their origin.

I've been familiar with this building for over fifty years.  It's one of three sister buildings in Casper that all were designed by the Casper architectural firm of Casper firm of Garbutt and Weidner, who at least based on these three buildings, were heavily into the same appearance for their "skyscrapers" at the time. This is the "ConRoy Building", the Consolidated Royalty Building.  We noted its centennial several years, well nearly a decade, ago, elsewhere:

Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that are 100 years old.

I've been meaning to post this forever but just wasn't in any big hurry to do it. Then it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't do it soon, these places would be 101 years old, not 100. So here goes.

A thread dedicated to a few local places and establishments that made it to year 100 in 2017.

The ConRoy Building

 

 The ConRoy (Consolidated Royalty Building).  The building's appearance has changed somewhat, but you have to really observe it to notice the changes.  The windows were replaced from the original style about fifteen years ago, giving it more modern and more efficient windows.  The elevator shaft, not visible here, is an enlarged one to accommodate a larger elevator than the one put in when it was built in 1917.  The awning restores the building to an original appearance in those regards which it lacked for awhile, but at street level the building has a glass or rock masonry treatment which clearly departs from the original.

One that I've mentioned here before is the ConRoy, or Consolidated Royalty Building.  Built in 1917 as the Oil Exchange Building, the building was one of Casper's first "sky scrapers",  if in fact not the absolute first.  Ground was broken in the summer of 1917 and the building was completed some time in August 1917. The Consolidated Royalty Oil Company, a company in which former Governor B. B. Brooks had a major interest, occupied the fifth floor of the structure.

 

The ConRoy Building occasionally gets some interesting avian visitors.

Unlike its two sister buildings, the Wyoming National Bank Building (now apartments) and  the Townsend Hotel (now the Townsend Justice Center) designed by the same architect, the building has never been vacant and remains in use today.  At least one of the current tenants descends from a firm that was a very early tenant, and perhaps a 1917 tenant.

 

The building has been updated over time, and its appearance is slightly changed due to the addition of an odd decorative rock face in the 1950s, but it by and large looks much like it did in 1917 from the outside.  It's one of the few old downtown Casper buildings that hasn't undergone major appearance changes over the years.

May 2, 1917 edition of the Casper Daily Tribune announcing vacancies in the yet to be built Oil Exchange Building.  The remainder of this issue was full of war news, and indeed it was partially the oil boom caused by the war that brought the building about.

More recently it figured here, as the owners of the building commissioned some murals on the fire escape doors:

Backdoor art.

So how on earth does it end up in a political campaign?

Frankly, I have no idea, but the entire idea of it being built by "a Democrat" is a real wild one.  The principal figure in the building being built was B. B. Brooks, who served as a Republican Governor for Wyoming, as we noted above.  Brooks had his offices on the fifth floor of the building.

B. B. Brooks, Republican.  He would not be amused.

This building has been continually occupied since 1917, and some of the businesses currently in it have been in the building since the 1940s although as earlier noted, one of them might have been in the building as early as 1917. Of the other two sisters, one is now the Townsend Justice Center which houses Natrona County's courts, and Wyo. Bank Bldg is an apartment building with a cafe on the street level.

All three buildings originally had, fwiw, massive period style lobbies which are sadly now all gone although you can catch glimpses of them, particularly in the Wyo. National Bank Bldg. The ConRoy once had a cigar store and magazine stand on the street level, after the lobby was taken out, and into the 50s, which explains the current appearance of its very small lobby today.  Basically, the ConRoy and the Wyoming National Bank building were victims of "modernization" concepts in architecture from the 1950s and 1960s, at which time those buildings were forty years old and less, and nobody thought of them being particularly historic.  The Townsend probably retained its architecture the longest, as it was a hotel originally, and up into the 70s when it closed. By that time it was pretty much a flop house with a popular cafe.  I recall it as my father had lunch there until the cafe closed, which many other downtown businessmen and professionals did as well.  It made for an odd place to go as a kid, which I sometimes did with my father, as the cafe was really popular, as was the adjoined Petroleum Club, but in the lobby the working girls were recovering from their prior night.

The ConRoy, on the other hand, has hummed on much like it has since 1917, although some of the notable early tenants, like the Casper Star Tribune, have moved on.  The building was recently featured in the Oil City News when some of the equipment for a new elevator, replacing the one from the 1950s that replaced the one from 1917, was lifted by crane into the structure.

Anyhow, this is baffling.  Of course, I only know of this as somebody else whose familiar with the building pointed it out to me and was horribly amused by it.  I don't know that I am, as I like things to be accurate.

But why would a person do this, and how would such a wild rumor get started?

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, FAA closes El Paso and New Mexico airspace for 10 days, cites national defense

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Without explanation, FAA closes El P...:  Oh great, now what? Without explanation, FAA closes El Paso and New Mexico airspace for 10 days, cites national defense  

Blog Mirror: Without explanation, FAA closes El Paso and New Mexico airspace for 10 days, cites national defense

 Oh great, now what?

Without explanation, FAA closes El Paso and New Mexico airspace for 10 days, cites national defense

 

Thursday, February 10, 1876. Terry ordered to take action against Sioux.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 10: 1876  Gen. Terry ordered to take action against Sioux and Cheyenne who remained off their reservations.

Last Edition:

Monday, February 7, 1876. Colorado women get to vote.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, Colorado, suffrage

Blog Mirror: February 9, 1976: "Taxi Driver" Premieres

 

February 9, 1976: "Taxi Driver" Premieres

I was not aware that this was a 1976 movie, but then, I've never thought of the topic either.

I've actually never seen Taxi Driver all the way through.*  It's just too icky for me.  But the point raised here, tracking the depictions of New York City from the early 1960s into the 1970s, from "magical" to decline, is a really interesting observation.

Somewhere I have a series photographs of my mother in New York that must date from the late 1940s.  She and some friends went down from Montreal to visit.  She told me once how "clean" New York was, that being her observation from that trip.

I've been to New York state, but it's been years and years.  My exposure to New York City, however, is limited to the airport, a memory which is equally old.

Footnotes:

*Indeed, of the movies mentioned in this thread, the only one I've seen all the way through is Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Last edition:

Friday, February 6, 1976. Peltier arrested. Prince Bernhard implicated. Smith warns. Black Jack dies.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, American Indian Movement, Army, Crime, Equine Transportation, Monarchy, Personalities, Pine Ridge Reservation, Rhodesia, Rhodesian Bush War