The American drafted Japanese "Law for the Special Establishment of Independent Cultivators" passed. It would reduce the percentage of Japanese farmland farmed by sharecroppers renting from landlords from 46% to 10%.
The American occupation of Japan was heavily Distributist.
Chiang Kai-shek visited Taiwan for the first time. Ruled by the Qing dynasty from 1683 to 1895, the island had been a Japanese territory from 1895 until 1945, when it was returned to China.
By Self-created photograph by Jonathunder - Own work, GFDL, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64543672
If this is a match of intellects, and it likely is, Canada has already won the trade war.
Carney is undoubtedly a genius and the only international leader currently in office, maybe ever in office, to have run the economies of two different countries. Trump is increasingly obvious of rather low intellect and a real estate developer with a very narrow understanding of the economy, who is in turn heavily influenced by Peter Navarro, a 77 year old economic theorist who uniquely champions tariffs. To make matters worse, Trump is suffering a rapid dementia related mental decline.
The US right now is destroying its own economy.
August 26, 2026
Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. steel, aluminum, furniture and clothing (50%), cheese, appliances and some seafood, (25%) and on electronics and tools (15%), effective September 8.
It also pledged aid to Canadian workers.
It was a dollar per dollar match on US tariffs, which it basically offsets.
As a side effect of this, the price of household paper products, toilet paper and paper towels, is climbing.
Thanks Don.
On the contest of intellects, the petulant baby in the Oval Office threatened to rename Lake Ontario the Lake of America or something. Trump actually thinks he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, even though it remains the Gulf of Mexico in reality. The Lake Ontario thing is incredibly stupid. Nobody reacted positively to it, although I'm sure that administration flunkies will pretend it's a great idea. Curtis Hertel Jr., chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, stated:
Donald Trump has been America first in name only his entire presidency. He promised lower prices, higher wages, and no foreign wars … all of that is bull shit. Renaming th fourth best Great Lake isn’t going to change that.
Americans aren't impressed with the latest Trump stupidity.
On Trump dumping American cattlemen, John Barrasso, Senator from Trump, oh, um, Senator allegedly from Wyoming, posted this on Twitter:
Americans want US beef on the table – not foreign imports. Wyoming ranchers produce the highest quality beef in the world. Our ranchers don't ask for special treatment. They simply want a fair marketplace. It needs to be easier – not harder – for Wyoming ranchers to feed America. I will continue to fight for policies that strengthen Wyoming beef producers and invest in the American cattle herd.
Barrasso is a Trump suck up and hasn't really done much for Wyoming in years. During election cycles he's for whatever he thinks Wyomingites are for and is otherwise a rank cowards pretending he thinks Trump is brilliant when he knows that he's not. Last time he ran he became worried about gadfly candidate Reid Rasner and accordingly pulled to the hard right.
Barrasso must regard the Wyoming livestock industry as sufficiently powerful enough to actually hurt the GOP, or this an issue near enough to the hearts of Wyomingites, that he needs to speak up. He didn't do that when public lands were on the table. It's interesting in part because the Wyoming range cattle industry in particular, and agriculture in general, have been so pro Trump and pro GOP that it's quite literally actually stupid. We posted on this the other day.
Hageman, of course, has incentive not to. She's a Trump endorsee and is now running against James Byrd tof Lummis' seat. This makes her exposed on this issue. If she speaks up, and she's going to have to, it puts her between somebody that supports here that she probably thinks is a heaping bowl of stupid in reality, but then exposing her to voters who she probably figures are more heaping bowls of stupid. Byrd is perfectly suited to exploit this as Hageman comes from a farm/ranch and can't stay silent before she looks like a traitor.
Lummis, of course, comes from a ranch too, but as she's nto running, she doesn't have to say anything. She seems to be bucking for a Trump cabinet post, anticipating that people will jump the Trump ship post election.
On other economic fronts, the US came out with its "Economic D-Day" against Iran, which are really sanctions against Iranian trading partners, but not really. It delayed the imposition of them to January 1, 2027, which means they won't happen at all.
Mexico normally imports 1,000,000 head of cattle into the US every year.
This is actually the resumption of importation that had been occurring until the screwworm outbreak. The Trump administration blamed that on the Biden administration, like it does everything else.
Closer to home, yet another Casper restaurant is biting the dust.
There's been a real rash of these recently. Something is going on. An article in Oil City notes that the list includes Little Shop of Burgers, Benny Montanaro’s Pizza (which I'd never even heard of), and Outback Steakhouse.
GiGi’s consignment store in Casper is also closing.
Next to House of Sushi it appears an entity called Jae's Place is opening in the old Wonder Bar space.
I don't really understand Jae's Place, but apparently its a wester wear store that supports a charitable mental health foundation. That's admirable but frankly opening in that location is desecrating a Casper landmark. The space had been the Wonder Bar more or less continually since 1937, having originally been located in another space. It became a steakhouse under the name C85 a decade or more ago that sold out to Wyoming Rib and Chop which became, you guessed it, another Casper restaurant that closed.
I understand that Jae's Place is a charity so I should not have a non charitable attitude about it, but there's a really old Western Wear store just a block away that I hope is not hurt by this multi state entity and for a long time Casperite seeing this converted into retail is disappointing. Workmen have been busy for weeks molesting the interior so the damage will likely be permanent.
This is the sort of thing that happens when a place has no sense of itself.
These photographs are of the "World Famous" Wonder Bar. The Wonder Bar has operated on Center Street for decades, although it has had short periods of time in recent years in which it operated under a different name (Tommy Knockers, Dillingers, and very briefly, "Sludge and Eddies"). Still, the bar has been around so long that even efforts to operate it under a different name do not deter the locals from continuing to refer to it as the Wonder Bar.
Downtown Casper once had a vast number of bars. This are of downtown had multiple bars on a single block. Only the Wonder Bar survives as a bar.
At some point in time, decades ago, Lee Riders paid to paint an advertisement on the side of the bar. The sign is still there, although an effort to paint over it was made at some point. This reflects the stockman heritage of central Wyoming, and indeed at one time quite a few cowboys and sheepherders spent time in the Wonder Bar.
As an aside, it's hard to see how a town that has a microbrewery every other door can't keep a legendary bar open.
September 2, 2026
The House passed another stopgap budget bill to keep the government running.
Frankly, I"m not a big fan, meaning not a fan at all, of the big expansion of data centers and I'm absolutely opposed to them being constructed on vacant agricultural land.
This was a hearing in front of the County Commissioners. It looked like each of the current sitting commissioners made some sort of comment at the end, as the Oil City News reports:
Of the five sitting commissioners, only Laird is on the ballot this election. Laird is correct on Donald Trump's position. Trump basically called communities that don't want data centers stupid as life is all about money and he loves money and you should love money because Trump loves money and you should love Trump, and money, but Trump most of all.
This must be a nightmare of Chuck Gray, who has been trying to hate things Wyomingite's claim to hate, and they seem to hate data farms, but Trump, who Gray loves, loves them.
On something Trump and Gray presently hate, wind farms:
We noted the passing of Wendell Berry here on September 1, but I didn't go into much introspection on him in relation to us. This omission was, ironically, time caused.
I didn't have time to.
Since Berry's death I've ready comments by people, principally on Twitter, reflecting on how influential Berry was on them. He was certainly influential on me, but not quite in the way that he was on others. Berry wasn't the source of my world view. Rather, what he was was the distiller of it.
I had an Agrarian mindset before I'd ever heard of Berry. I came into Berry, in fact, because I had an agrarian mindset. Indeed, I had an agrarian mindset before I had heard of agrarianism in a philosophical sense. I was really a nascent agrarian by the time I graduated from high school, although only vaguely so.
By the time I had graduated from university as an undergrad, I was a full blown, if undefined, agrarian. What I really wanted to do was to hunt, fish and garden, and be allowed to do so. If I could have, I would have ranched. I didn't have the means to do that, or to make my other goals my present habitus or mode of living, at least in full, although at the time wildgame provided most of my meat, and my father's garden most of my produce. What I didn't have, was a good and steady income and the destruction of the extractive economy, which I was disenchanted with anyhow, kept me from having one. I had already found a literary fellow traveller in the form of Aldo Leopold.
Law school seemed my only option, and so I went.
The Agrarian impulse however only strengthened during that time. Getting out of law school in 1990 I recall telling a friend of mine that I had no ambition, as all I wanted to do was ranch. He told me that didn't mean I had no ambition, that was my ambition. Well, that's one of those insights that is a bit shocking when you first hear it, but it was correct. At that time I still carried a sort of weltanschauung that required me to make something of myself in the eyes of the world, something that had been instilled by my mother.
In spite of starting practicing law, my agrarian world outlook only increased. At that time I discovered the Southern Agrarians somehow, which was mind blowing. For the first time, really, I learned that there others who held the same viewpoints on many things that I did. The Southern Agrarians, who are very problematic on some things, nonetheless really helped define my philosophical worldview to me and I realized that what I was, was an agrarian.
The Southern Agrarians were almost all dead by that point in time. Only Andrew Nelson Lytle was left alive. So the movement seemed to be dead itself, but the arrival of the Internet allowed even a very isolated person such as myself to learn who else was out there. That lead me to Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry. Berry was by far the more influential.
Indeed, Berry took the world out look I had and really distilled it. There were a lot of things I believed but I didn't have the existential nature of defined. Berry did that for me. His influence on how I sese the world was massive.
Distilling my world view didn't stop with Berry. Sometime after discovering him I discovered the Distributist, including Chesterton, and that really completed it, basically. I often say, when there's ears to hear it, that while not all Distributists are Agrarians, all Agrarians are Distributist.
Berry stands in my intellectual formation with Leopold and Chesterton, three men who now are at some lively gathering beyond the veil.
Berry's death is a major and tragic loss for the intellectual life of the nation. Not just agrarianism, but the soul of the United States itself. Berry lived life the way it really should be lead. He was deeply Christian (he was a Baptist) and a man of letters who farmed. He saw America for what it was, what it had become, and what it should return to. He advocated for Christian principles and lived a Christian life, while having a deep land ethic and understanding of the land itself. He urged us to "become native to this place".
I've never really been able to pull off what he lived and advocated. But I may be about to.
Berry, in his youth, was an opponent of the Vietnam War in a region that was likely not opposed to it. His departure comes during the reign of Donald Trump.
Berry, like all true agrarians in contemporary society, likely knew that what he stood for was not going to be adopted by the culture at large. The Southern Agrarians were already lamenting the destruction of the last of agrarianism during the 1930s. The Unsettling of America, a masterpiece, was published in 1977. Particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan, each passing year has made the plight of agrarians worse in this country, as its yielded to an unprincipled culture and greed. Restraints placed on the evolution by the law, which do exist, and by the culture, which also exist but which are greatly weakened, have nearly fallen by the wayside.
Berry was 93 when he died this past week. Donald Trump, suffering from dementia in the Oval Office while nearly ruling as a dictator, is 80 years old. Berry was of the Silent Generation (Leopold was of the Lost Generation). Trump is a Baby Boomer and virtually defines that generation, in spite of what many in it would like to believe.
Berry stood for, and will continue to stand for, the opposite that everything Donald Trump does. He was a sincere Christian deeply in nature and the virtues of self control on al things. Trump is, at best, a faux Christian who stands for destruction and avarice. They represent the two poles that struggle for the soul of the nation, one who would anchor us in a quiet and unassuming harbor, and another who would drag us out into and down under in the tempest.
Wendell Berry, August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026. May the perpetual light shine upon him.
While this will aid beef producers, it doesn't address the existential problem of the packing industry monopoly. Breaking that, and particularly breaking that on Distributist principals, would have a massive impact. That won't be happening, however.
Instead, this basically would allow producers to sell their own beef across state lines. While some people will buy beef in that fashion, most people won't, and that doesn't do much at all for the cost of beef sold at restaurants and the like.
As noted, applying the Sherman Anti Trust Act to the meat packing industry would have a real impact. A bigger one would be limiting corporate ownership to a single packing facility.
Small herd size is a problem, but it will take years to address. By that time, given the very small herd size, we may very well be seeing a meat production climate that hasn't existed since the introduction of refrigerated rail cars in 1878. The massive increase in the Western herd during the Civil War and the invention of the refrigerated rail car shifted the American diet from pork to beef. Various factors have been making inroads on beef for years, and the price at the counter, which this will certainly not immediately address, is shifting it once again, and has been for many years.
Whether this will serve as a salve on farmers and ranchers so they can justify voting for a party that has screwed them for years is yet to be seen.
We weren't really ready to start a new one of these, but Chuck Gray has been in such rare form recently as it starts to look like he's going to lose in ten days and his dreams of a carpetbagging political career be crushed, that it mandates it.
Gray, as Secretary of State, sits on a variety of state boards and has been using that position to attempt to advance his campaign for higher office, any higher office, all along. Generally in the global warming is a fib camp, he at one time was okay with development projects of all types but now is anti "woke wind". Lots of people don't like the viewscape and land use aspect of wind and solar farms, and he's hoping to tap into that dislike, but he's such a disagreeable pissant he can't seem to say it that way. Nor can he explain his prior positions.
The real gem in this is that he almost voted to preclude use of an access road to a power substation that provides power to farmers on the basis that it might receive electrical power from solar farms or wind farms or provide power to data centers.
When the State treasurer noted that this meant, he changed his vote, but had to blame the whole thing on somebody else.
Data centers are now big in the news around here, and for good reason. Gray is opposing them as he figures it's good politics. Put a gigantic strip mine in over the same area, and he'd be all for it. It's difficult to tell from one moment to the next if Republican candidates this year are members of the Flat Earth Society or Greenpeace.
Gray is particularly disgusting. He's consistently rude and nasty. It's difficult to understand why anyone would vote for him, unless they're really duped.
I wonder how this news works for people like Gray:
August 14, 2026 Oil supply disruptions due to King Donny's war are predicated to last well into 2027 if not through it. Diesel is up over $5.00/gallon here locally. There's no way on earth prices like that don't cause a rise in the price of everything else. And, related to that:
Bessent was sent out yesterday to try to calm fears, but ended up being ridiculed. The US is buying back bonds which did help stabilize the bond market, at least for now. People have been wondering about the appeal of Democratic Socialism all of a sudden. I think this states it pretty well:
I'm not for all of those things. I'm not for a universal basic income, or universal childcare. But the point is very well made. And this:
First of all, beef prices have nothing to do with Joe Biden. Secondly, the "thank you for our attention" line is stupid. The real stupidity here is that American agriculturalist support the GOP, which routinely hurts them. Ranchers and Farmers are solidly members of the Leopards Won't Eat My Face Party. Last edition:
