Italian municipal elections were abolished so that municipal officials could be appointed by the fascist state, something Der Fibber hasn't quite gotten around to here, yet.
A funeral Mass was held for Rudolph Valentino at Saint Malachy's Catholic Church in New York City. The parish is famously associated with the theater district in New York.
The Soviet steamer Burevestnik sank in Kronstadt in a pier/ship collision accident, killing 65 passengers.
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The National Debt at some point on August 21,
Republicans are flocking to decry it, after having participated in causing it.
They didn't cause it on their own, but they sure helped. And Trump has spent money like a drunken sailor.
Part of the reason that Trump spends this way is that Trump drank deeply of Peter Navarro's economic kool aide.
Tariffs have always existed as a means of boosting local businesses. What they really are, is a species of sales tax. The concept is to make stuff coming in expensive so that people won't buy it, and will buy something made locally instead. That's about it.
The problem is that when you do that, you have to actually be making the things locally. Tariffs might have made good economic sense if the US had started easing them in during the late 1960s when the post World War Two economy started to fade. But we didn't, as we saw no need to.
By the 2020s, it's really a little bit late. In fact, it's way late. The world's economy is now highly integrated, surpassing the level that had only previously been obtained prior to World War One. We don't have what people complained about, for example, in the late 60s and early 70s of cheap Japanese products taking the market (something that wasn't anywhere near the threat it was imagined to be). What we have instead is an economy where anything serious has parts made all over the globe. Nothing you are using, if has multiple parts, was "made in America". It was made all over.
Given that, what tariffs really do is simply make everything more expensive. It'd take at least a decade for high tariffs to "bring back manufacturing", if it can do that at all.
Whether it can ever bring in jobs is questionable at this point. Since January 2025 the US has in fact lost manufacturing job, with about 75,000 departing . Trump likes to claim that new factories are springin gup all over the place. In fact, a factory construction boom peaked in 2024, under Joe Biden, and has been crashing since.
It may just be that it isn't the late 1890s any more.
So all the Trump administration has really done is ineffectively switched income tax for a national sales tax. It's hurting everyone, and it is largely illegal, resulting in a lot of the money being collected, having to be sent back out.
Congress can fix this, if it has the will. Republicans right now are pretending that they do, but with few exceptions, like Thomas Massie, they're rank cowards and voted for Trump's economic fantasies. It may take a Constitutional Amendment to force the matter, which at a bare minimum should provide that save in the time of war and bona fide emergency, the budget must balance and retire a portion of any built up debt, with taxes to automatically rise to balance any budget that isn't balanced.
What needs to be done first of all is to get the budget under control. That would technically be easy to do. And part of that needs to be a sincere effort to eliminate the debt. It's now completely impossible to do so rapidly, so it'll have to be done slowly.
On expenditures themselves, the Federal budget breaks out this way:
Social Security: 22%
Medicare: 15%
Net Interest (on the national debt): 15%
Health (including Medicaid): 13%
National Defense: 13%
Income Security: 10%
Veterans Benefits and Services: 6%
Social Security is in trouble due to slow down in population growth. Nothing can be done about that or should be. Medicare is in the same boat.
National Defense should be cut by 2/3s. That can be done by eliminating the insane level of weapons expenditures and by going to a reserve based defense. That'd help, but that won't accomplish everything, obvious. Military retirement age should be changed so that thirty years rather than 20 are the qualifying number. That'd help a bit.
Indeed, there are actually a fair number of Federal jobs that require twenty years in order to retire at some level. Save for policing roles and military ones,. Fed retirement should require thirty years and only be capable of being drawn when you reach 60 years of age.
And yes, this is a crisis.
So, you might perhaps note, you are a Distributist. Does this square with Distributism?
Overall it does. At one time I would have considered tariffs a policy option to address foreign manufacturing, but nothing fails like failure and its obvious that isn't the solution to that. Boosting U.S. manufacturing has to come some other way, and frankly technology is probably what would do it. Technological revolutions tend to bring industry to where they occur. Our problem here is that this is entirely in the hands of the super wealthy right now, who don't have your interest or that of the country's in mind.
Additionally, our current President is addled and looks back with romanticism on the past . He's actively working to destroy American industry as a result. Electricity is the future of transportation, not petroleum. Wind, solar and nuclear are the future of power generation, not coal (Trump does support nuclear). We need to really get with the program and we can do that through regulation. Phasing out fossil fuels should be an economic priority for obvious reasons, and an environmental one for obvious reasons, and a defense one for obvious reasons.
August 22, 2026
This is really an example of ranchers and farmers being members of the Leopards Won't Eat My Face Party.
Why ranchers and farmers vote for Republicans is beyond me. So they're getting screwed by Trump?
What did they expect?
Using debt to buy back debt:
We're in huge financial trouble.
August 23, 2026
Trade talks between the US and Canada ended and the countries are now in a trade war. Canada has made it clear that the US is about to suffer through energy imports.
August 24, 2026
From the CST:
I'm a cattleman and frankly we're amongst the most reliably stupid voters for the GOP there is.
Vinegar Hill posted this yesterday:
An old friend of mine who is a rancher has been somewhat active in this year's election cycle. He is, of course, a far right Republican.
I say of course as just about every rancher and farmer in Wyoming over the age of 40, and quite a few over the age of 35, are diehard right wing full blown MAGA Republicans. Below the age of 40 things start to change a lot. Most are Republicans, but a lot aren't diehard. They're Republicans the same way everyone in Wyoming is a Republican, pretty much. Generally conservative.
But above 40, they're in lockstep with Donald Trump.
My friend, this cycle, had a big Chuck Gray up near the DOT fence. This wasn't too surprising as his grandson works for Gray.* **
Well, now, all of a sudden the noted friend is posting on the disaster of letting foreign beef into the country. So are a bunch of other ranchers I know.
The Republican Party has been pretty much screwing ranchers and farmers since 1929. It was the Democrats who save farmers and ranchers during the Great Depression. Most small and mid sized ranches would have been utterly destroyed but for the Taylor Grazing Act.
The Trump Administration, for its part, looks at farmers and ranchers the way the Democrats once looked at African Americans, people who could reliably be counted on to vote for the party no matter what. In recent election cycles African Americans proved they were no longer reliable. So far, people in Agriculture aren't showing any thought at all.
Indeed, they're showing cognitive disconnected.
This morning I've seen all sorts of complaints from ranchers about how they're getting killed in this economy, as noted.
And now Trump's bringing in below market cost foreign beef.
No shit. YOU VOTED FOR IT.
Inflation, particularly of fuel, caused by Donald Trump's pet illegal war. The same with fertilizer costs.
WAKE THE CRAP UP.
The GOP is not coming to save you. It's coming to screw you.
Indeed, trade talks just broke off with Canada.
Double digit inflation, caused by a massive rise in energy costs, is about to occur.
Footnotes:
Gray has more affection for Trump than Natalie Harp and Melanija Knavs combined.
The grandson is an interesting case in and of himself. He's undoubtedly the first member of his extended family to go to university. He's in law school right now. He's also a diehard MAGA, and indeed, maybe even beyond that. Now the question of how that happens is another matter.
The common myth, and it is a myth, about young people in conservative homes is that they go to college, where they lose all of their values, and their faith, emerging hardcore screaming liberals if not Bolsheviks. This is, it is believed, because they're indoctrinated in college by leftist professors.
It's largely bull and in the scientific disciplines definitely bull. Majors in geology, for example, aren't going to have time for liberal indoctrination.
For that matter, majors in English probably don't either.
So what's going on here.
Well, a person from a really conservative Protestant background may in fact find a lot of what they learn in college shocking. The Earth isn't 5,000 years old. Evolution isn't a fib. Conquering the West wasn't bringing enlightenment to an oppressed people and, in fact, some of those being conquered where already Christian. The US isn't bestowed by God with a new Israelite like mission, and for that matter, the modern state of Israel does some outright horrible things.
Faced with that onslaught, young people are in fact faced with the choice of accepting that Pastor Jim back at his own do it yourself Evangelical Church is flat out wrong on a lot of stuff, and Mom and Dad are ignorant, or concluding that everything they're being taught is a fib.
Most will conclude, to some degree, that Pastor Jim is wrong on a lot, and that Mom and Dad are ignorant on a lot of stuff.
Now, I'll note, this shouldn't impact member of the Apostolic faiths at all, but in the US some Apostolic Christians are heavily Protestantized and have bought in, through ignorance, to a lot of what the Evangelical far right believes.
Anyhow, a lot of this is about to collapse on an enormous scale, as we'll soon see.
**There was a good Republican candidate running against Gray, Christensen. He had worked for the BLM.
Well, we're getting instead a Californian who worked for his daddy's radio station.
He's completely correct.
Cattlemen and farmers will sit around in gatherings and support Trump on every other horrible thing he does, and then they're surprised when he turns on them.
Now they can share the pain they helped bring about.
On Canada, the Canadian government is absolutely furious over demands that were made of the country, including that Canada abandon the use of French and that it agree to mirror the US's trade polcies.
One Canadian figure called the demands "insane".
This administration at this point is so stupid on these matters its indescribable.
August 25, 2026
It's pretty clear that the Trump administration has no idea whatsoever as to what it's doing.
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The Mexican government executed 20 people by firing squad. They'd participated in the uprising several days prior.
Out Our Way featured the cowboys for today.
I've been shouted down for saying that the elderly Baby Boom generation needs to yield, often by Boomers themselves.
Well, it's a good interview. A lot of this is exactly what I've said here. The one thing I adamantly disagree with is his endorsement of euthanasia. That is completely immoral.
I've noted this enough here that it might be one of the most common, or at least reoccuring, themes of this blog. As noted, when I've brought it up, I often get shouted down. Now we see a law professor in his 50s bringing it up, and noting that he's a victim of the situation himself.
He's a Gen Xer.
Colorado's Big Thompson River flooded killing 151 people in Larimer County. It was a flash flood in an area in which the geography contributed to the disaster.
You'd think I'd have a clear memory of this, but I don't. I can vaguely recall it happening, but that's about it.
Susan Ellen Stern, a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weatherman and the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF) died of drug related heart failure.
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Earthquakes in northeastern China killed 650,000 people.
The loss of life on this scale is nearly unimaginable. It equates to the number of Americans, of both sides, killed in the Civil War.
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Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale were nominated for the 1976 Democratic ticket on the first ballot.
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Canada's House of Commons approved the permanent abolition of the death penalty.
General António Ramalho Eanes was sworn as the new president of Portugal.
Aparicio Méndez, age 71, was appointed to be the new president of Uruguay effective September 1.
A border clash between El Salvador and Honduras killed several El Salvadoran soldiers.
An earthquake in Indonesia killed 573 people.
German SS special forces leader Joachim Peiper was assassinated in the village of Traves, Haute-Saône, France where he had stupidly been living. Peiper served only nine years of a life sentence and after various post war occupations, relocated to France under an assumed name. Discovered shortly before his murder, he gave interviews, and blamed the French defeat in 1940 on French cowardice. His house there was set on fire and he died within. His body was found with a .22 pistol in his hand.
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The U.S. Forest Service closed Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and Dark Canyon Wilderness on Sunday, June 28, due to the catastrophic Babylon Wildfire. The same day, the National Park Service (NPS) announced it was closing the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park as well.
Wake up Utah.
This is the result of climate change. You keep electing people like MAGA zealot Deseret Mike Lee. In Lee's case he feels climate science is a fib, and, based upon his background, he wants to take the public lands for housing (and development) so that as many souls can be downloaded onto Earth as soon as possible to bring about the end of the world, under his belief system, probably.
Vote these people out. It's not too late to reverse this idiocy.
Leaks in the dam started at 7:30 am and increased over a two hour period. Crews were sent to repair the dam but by noon the earthen dam was beyond repair and collapsed.
Belfast pubs were bombed as part of ongoing IRA and UVF campaigns.
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The Indianapolis 500 was run for the first time since 1941. George Robson, took the race.
The U.S. Senate passed bills creating Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee.
You can tell the likes of Harriet Hageman and Deseret Mike Lee weren't in Congress at the time.
The Kingdom of Iraq extended the "D'Arcy Concession" of the oil fields in the Diyala Governorate for an additional 35 years past its scheduled expiration date of May 27, 1961. In reality, events would cause the concessions to be renegotiated after World War Two and expire in 1958, the year that the Kingdom of Iraq itself expired.
Most of the concession territory was in Iran and was cancelled in 1932.
Mount Tokachi erupted in Hokkaidō, Japan, killing 140 people.
The volcano is located within the Daisetsuzan National Park.
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The President of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko endorsed kleptocracy, the practice of public officials stealing tax money for personal use, in a speech at a stadium before 70,000 people and millions of listeners, noting that he himself "personally spent on average more than 35 percent of the national budget on himself" during the 1970s and 1980s.
He warned; "If you want to steal, steal in a nice way, but if you steal too much to become rich overnight you will soon be caught."
He was eventually overthrown and died in exile at age 66.
This sort of open corruption used to be pretty much a third world thing, and I guess it still is in some ways. Now, of course, we're seeing corruption of a different type, but rivaling, or exceeding it, in the United States, which pretty much informs the world of what we now are.
The acrylic bubble of the Montreal Biosphere, designed by Buckminster Fuller for Expo 67, was destroyed by a fire during remodeling.
It was rebuilt, but without the transparent panels, and reopened in 1990.
Baseball great Ramón Hernández was born in Venezuela.
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The House of Commons voted to nationalize the British coal industry. The House of Lords would follow and Royal Assent would be received on July l2.
A C-45 crashed into the 58th floor of the Bank of Manhattan building killing all five passengers but nobody else, given that it occurred at 8:00 p.m.
Things were not going well in Iran.
Cherilyn Sarkisian, better known by her stage name Cher, was born in El Centro, California. Bobby Murcer, the baseball announcer and player, was born in Oklahoma City.
Murcer passed away in 2008, but Cher is still with us.
The first color feature film, The Black Pirate, was released.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin addressed the British public about the ongoing strike in the UK, the first such emergency radio broadcast of that type in that nation.
The first test of the Mark 6 torpedo exploder was conducted.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough was born, and turns 100 years old today.
A major fire broke out at Fenway Park.
It was a Saturday.
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