USDA Forecasts Higher Retail Egg Prices for 2025

 What the crud?

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December 27 Stories

USDA Forecasts Higher Retail Egg Prices for 2025

Census of Aquaculture Reveals Top Selling Seafood Types

Top Ten Weather Stories of 2024 – Southern Plains Wildfires

Top Ten Weather Stories of 2024 –Western Wildfires

Actuality: Notable Western Wildfire Season

Higher egg prices?  Donald promised to lower prices.  That simply can't be true.  Prices must go down.

Tucker "Lord Haw Haw" Carlson on Leadership.

Carlson, as an apologist for the vile, has crossed into territories heretofore not trespassed onto.  Lindbergh and Fr. Coughlin would be aghast.

Emad Eldin Adeeb: In your interview with Putin, you didn’t talk about freedom of speech in Russia, you did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations

Tucker Carlson: Leadership requires killing people

Carlson is becoming the embodiment of Yeoman's Twentieth Rule of Behavior, or as Jimmy Akin would say, "sin makes you stupid".  He's gone from being sort of a political shock d.j., to just flat out saying stuff that's stupid.

Carlson lies, and he knows he's a liar.  Lying is sinful.  His audience likes being lied to. Self-delusion is also sinful in some instances, particularly in believing slanderous lies.  Carlson's lies have made himself, and frankly his audience, increasingly stupid.

The question is how darned dumb can this get before even his followers have had too much.

Rich Men North of Richmond, Part II. American Fascisti

 I just posted this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Rich Men North of Richmond, Part I. Resisting the...: Rich Men North of Richmond , which is independently produced, I think, had made a big Internet and music scene splash, and frankly, not beca...

This, and it's not a new theme here, took a look at how we got to where we are, where populism has taken over the Republican Party.  How, the question ultimately is, can people who see the plaint truth about Donald Trump and his attempt to subvert American democracy continue to support him?

Most of the comments along these lines never really are able to answer the question.  Indeed, we haven't here. That's because they all assume that most people are rational, and this is at least somewhat true, and that most people will yield to truth in the end, which is also somewhat true.  Indeed, droves of people have left the Republican Party and become independents.  However, and this is important, more than 1 million voters across 43 states switched to the Republican Party from 2021 to 2022, and that trend hasn't stopped. 

That is, while a lot of educated "country club" or middle class conservatives have abandoned the GOP, a lot of people are coming in.  And they're coming in during the current political atmosphere.

Which leads us to this.

What if it isn't the case, deep down, that populist Republicans, who now control the GOP, aren't aware that Donald Trump is lying about losing the election.  What if, at least deep down, and on some level, they know that he's lying.

What would that mean?

Well, what it would mean is that the disaffected class that intends to vote for a Rich Man north of Richmond while complaining about Rich Men North of Richmond have reached to the point where they no longer regard their class as legitimate, and therefore what they are doing and supporting as completely legitimate, because the other view doesn't count.

Consider this Facebook exchange I saw the other day: 

"I almost lost my Corvette and my cat!"

All reactions:

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Their bullshit needs to end through constitional revolt.

Eh?

Or:

Office Hours: Why are Republican voters more willing to believe every sort of lie?

Tonight’s Republican debate and Trump’s discussion with Tucker are likely to be cesspools of lies, but lies don’t turn off Republican voters.

Maybe the first reply answers the second.

Maybe Republican voters aren't really willing to believe every sort of lie, or at least not in the way baffled pundits of all types are baffled by, myself included.

Maybe they know they're lies, but lies that seem, to them, to serve a greater truth, in their view.

And that's what is really scary.

The first comment, boxed in the way some people like to do with Facebook comments, refers to one of Joe Biden's endless blundering statements, which in this case related his bad experience with a house fire to what occured on Maui.  It was a really goofball thing to say.  But the fact of the matter is that there isn't anything Joe Biden says that populists don't hate, even things they would have fully supported if he hadn't said them. And that's because Biden, who started off a centrist, went to the center left, and then went fully to the left, is a representative of Democrats, whom the populists essentially see asn objectively evil.

This is almost impossible for main stream and conventional Americans to grasp, and even though in the populist movement who fairly clearly hold these views would be unwilling to usually admit them in this fashion, but all the signs are there.

Class reduction through objectification is an old and very established thing.

The Communist Parties of the world practiced this extensively.  They represented "the workers" or "the people". Their opponents were exploiters of the people, in their propaganda.  Ultimately, that meant that they could be killed in the millions, as they weren't really people.

The Nazis did this with the Jews, as well as with the Slavs.  Jews and Slavs were lessor, in their propaganda, although bizarrely they were also supposed to be a super crafty opponent.  Never mind that none of that was true or that any rational thinking would dispel such an absurdity, that's what they promoted and that's what the German people adopted, resulting in the death of millions.

Lesser fascist movements and near fascist movements held the same view of Communists, and to some extent Socialist, that the Nazi Party did, which hated Communists along with the Jews (and indeed generally assumed that all Communists were Jewish), and therefore felt perfectly justified in suppressing them to the point of death if necessary.  Of course, in many places, the Communists (who weren't majority Jewish by any means) felt the same way about right wing movements. At any rate, therefore, this produced severely repressing governments like that of the Italian fascists or Spanish Francoist, who nonetheless quite frankly enjoyed widespread popularity with large segments of their people.

And notable with all of these movements, they reduced their ideology, at the street level, to a single man.

The Nazis of course reduced it to Hitler.  Indeed, the Führerprinzip held that everything should "work towards the Führer.  People didn't really know what Hitler might want to do on any day to day level, but they generally could grasp it, and that was the thing to do.

Hitler in armor as "The Standard Bearer".  I doubt Hiter ever rode a horse, and certainly not one like this, but goofball uberheroic portraits of autocrats is an autocratic thing. Witness all the portraits of Trump as a Revolutionary War patriot when he was never in the service.

And the Italians did that with Mussolini, 

Typical portrait of Mussolini, focusing on his face with his jaw jutting out defiantly.  To most people, he looks like a jackass, but to true believers, this was his admired visage.

And the Reds in Russia did it twice, first with Lenin, and then with Stalin, before becoming sufficiently entrenched that later leaders didn't need a personality cult.

The PRC did it with Mao, and North Korea has done it with every single one of their leaders.

And all of this is highly instructive.

Reduced to a man, thinking over the complicated failed thesis that these movements put forth was unnecessary.  People didn't read Mein Kampf.  Most Russians at the time of the Revolution could barely read, and they weren't going to sit down a read a pamphlet by a British Library Butt Sitter.  Most Chinese weren't going to bother with Mao's Little Red Book.  People just figured that they weren't doing well, and it was somebody else's fault, and it seemed that the Communist, the Fascists, etc. ,had their back and grasped it, at least right up until the state came for them, or conscripted them, or confiscated everything they had.

Or, by way of another example, it may very well be the case that Southern secessionist grasped that blacks were in fact people and equal people at that.  Their actions clearly demonstrated, that, from entrusting their children to slaves for care to the Jeffersonian expedient to wifely succession.

In each of these instances, it should be noted, the supposed "difference" was emphasized as an excuse for acting with extreme bias towards the other group.  Nazis called their opponents Untermenschen, "below people".  American Southerners certainly portrayed blacks that way.

German propaganda poster, which appears to portray Soviet paratroopers as Untermensch.

Have you listed to the comments of populists?

Hearing random Republicans accuse Democrats of being Marxists and Socialists is common.  Republicans that don't toe the extreme right wing line are "RINOS" or Democrats, with that being said as if being a Democrat meant you were an Untermensch, which pretty much what is meant.  Even run of hte mill Republican conservatives in Congress, who at one time would have "disagreed with my distinguished colleagues" now hurl the invective "Democrat" or accuse somebody of "supporting Biden's radical. . . " as if there's any truth to the accusation.  It's pretty much the same thing as a Communist in Stalin's ear accusing somebody of harboring incorrect views, of a Nazi accusing somebody of being Jewish, or of a pre-1970 Southerner claiming that "somebody has a 'nigga' in the wood pile", without any credit being given, respectively, to 1) harboring different views isn't a criminal act, 2) being Jewish isn't either, and 3) having African American ancestry (which a huge number of Southerners do) isn't shameful, except for the compulsion that ancestry may indicate.

I fear we're here:

And if we are, that answer the question of why criminal activity doesn't phase some Trump supporters.

Now, this doesn't explain it all.  Some of it is the phenomenon of extreme frustration with having been long ignored.  Some of it is a long-running American belief in conspiracy theories.  Some of it is the disbelief that thing could have really gotten so astray, which would mean, in part, that we let them go so badly.  But not all of it, and not all populists.

The question is, therefore, how large is this group, and what does that mean?  If Trump takes the Oval Office a second time, it will be disastrous, although to what extent, cannot yet be told.

Lies and secrets.

Lies and secrets, Tessa, they are like a cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only destruction behind.

Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

Wait a moment, did you just compare Tucker Carlson to Joseph Goebbels?

Fox political columnists at work.

Why yes, I did. Thank you for noticing.

I did that here:

German poster in Dutch, part of an effort to recruit occupied Europeans to German arms out of fear of Communism.

German propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary

The anti-Bolshevik theme is the best horse in the stable.

Goebbels' comments are something that are frighteningly relevant in our current society.  Communism was the enemy of mankind, but so was Nazism.  Indeed, they both shared the common trait of mass murder as a central element of their ethos, which gave the regimes an odd sense of being constantly imperiled by huge plots, in their view, which necessitated murder, in their view, which in turn made millions of people culpable, and therefore loyal, through guilt.  

Victory or Bolshevism was the theme of this poster, which ironically portrayed starving Germans in the manner of which recalls Holocaust victims.  After 1943 the theme of this poster was in fact becoming increasingly true, although victory was no longer possible, as the Red Army was now advancing toward the German frontier.  Germans would have recalled that being a threat during the Russo Polish War of the early 1920s, when Trotsky seriously imagined entering Germany after defeating Poland, but now it was rapidly becoming an inevitability, which the German government implicitly acknowledged through this poster.  In fact, the German government would take no action to withdraw the civilian population from Prussia, although individual German commanders sometimes did, which mean that thousands of German men were shot and tens of thousands of German women raped when the Red Army entered the country.  The final months of the war would be a combat blood bath as German soldiers often went down fighting attempting to let the civilian population get out, a situation which was brought upon them by a barbarous Nazi government.

The Nazis, right from the onset, portrayed themselves as the cultural defenders against Communism, which made many forget, and then adopt, their radical views which were not "conservative" in any real sense. After reaching an accord with the Soviets just prior to World War Two, this was downplayed, but it was ramped back up again prior to Operation Barbarossa and kept at a fever pitch through the remainder of the war.  The message to Germans was that the Nazis were the only defense of Western culture against an "alien" Communism, although Communism itself was originally a German movement.  The message was sufficient for many Germans, including high ranking ones, to put aside their doubts about Nazism on the basis that it seemed to be, based upon what they were hearing, their only alternative to Communism.

Of course, for millions of Germans, the end of the war and Germany's fighting it out past mid 1943 would bring Communism to them.

By way of contemporary analogy, millions of Americans today have been listening, and continue to, to populist propagandist who spread lies and whip up panic over their being the only alternative to "wokeism".  Tucker Carlson and his ilk portray the far populist right as the only means of combating a host of truly concerning liberal ideas.  By espousing lies, they bring those ideas closer to implementation.

Oh my, some are thinking, how could you compare a "conservative" "news" figure to an um. . . conservative government figure. ... who, um, is listened to by millions even if his version of the truth isn't the truth, to a person who was listed to by millions whose version of the truth. . . 

Now, a couple of things.

I'm a conservative.

But I have a brain, value the truth, seek reality, think for myself, and accept the truth is the truth, and there's only one truth, not shades of it.

I'm shocked by how some very serious, well-educated people, listen to Tucker Carlson.  He's a propagandist for Trumpism and has openly spouted lies. He still is, and people, amazingly, are still listening to him.  And as I noted, people rightfully scared of some propositions that progressives put forth, such as that DNA doesn't matter, and you can be what you self identify with, are being led down the primrose false path that only Donald Trump, and his band of followers, can save the nation.

Not likely.  Indeed, if history is any guide, extremism ends in the opposite extreme.

Nazi Germany gave us the German Democratic Republic.

Russian Imperial retrenchment gave us the Bolsheviks.

Napoleon Bonaparte gave us the restoration of the French monarchy.

And yet people sit down at the Fox lunch counter, are served up a steaming bowl of scat, and declare it to be delicious prime rib.

How does that happen?

Probably a variety of ways, but perhaps there are three chief amongst them.

One is, and it's probably the majority reason, is that a lot of people conclude things emotionally.  Most people, in fact.  So they base their decisions on that.

The GOP and the Democratic Party ignored the working class in the country for decades, and came to ignore the middle class. And the Democrats grew used to rule by the courts, not democratic rule.  People knew that they didn't believe that Bobby could become Bobbie chemically or that unrestricted immigration didn't help them, or that they personally weren't evil because they owned a gun.  Trump told them that they were right, and that progressives were part of an evil conspiracy of dunces.

So when Trump told them that the conspiracy had stolen the election, even though there was no theft, and he simply lost, having never won the popular vote in the first place, they believed him and some still do.

The way that works is that "I know that I'm right, people who tell me that I'm right are right, so Tucker Carlson must be right".

For some, it isn't even that advanced. They love Trump as he told them what he wanted to hear and they'll go to their graves believing that Trump is some sort of hero.

None of that changes this basic fact.  Whatever the merits of conservatism, or populism (and the latter is not only conservative but liberal as well, both in a radical way) are, Trump is a threat to democracy and without democracy all values are in danger.  People like Trump, or Greene, or Boebert, are threats to the well-being of the nation, and frankly their values, when examined, are swimming in the shallow end of the pool.

Tucker Carlson, however, is something else, entirely. . . .well not entirely. Frankly, a lot of people associated with Trump stink from what they shovel, and Trump certainly does as well.

Tucker Carlson, major league liar.

Recently he was confronted in a fly shop somewhere:

Liar Carlson confronted by irate large customer.

Fair?

That's an interesting question.

Here's something revealed about Carlson the other day:

Among the documents released Tuesday as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems was an email from Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that the organization was “Still getting mud thrown at us! … Maybe Sean and Laura went too far.”

Two months after the election and just days before Jan. 6, 2021, Fox host Tucker Carlson texted with an unknown Fox employee about how badly he wanted to stop covering President Donald Trump.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson texted Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson added.

Dan Eggen, Washington Post.

Given that the man is a lying tool, exposing his vile nature in front of his daughter, who would not, it should be noted, be a child, while extreme, may be warranted.  

If your brother sins, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.

If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’

If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.

Mathew 18:15.

Carlson is an Episcopalian, married to the daughter of an Episcopal priest.  He claims to "hate" much about the Episcopal Church, while remaining a member.  The Episcopal Church has, in its mainstream, diluted much of the Christian message and in fact incorporated within its institution in some places those who openly endorse things St. Paul openly condemned.  But it doesn't condone lying.

Maybe calling Carlson a liar in public, and perhaps in front of his family at that, is warranted.  

Maybe it's time to call more of these anti-democratic liars what they are, liars, while at the same time being blunt to politicians and public figures about the other falsehoods they adopt.

For that matter, in public discourse, maybe its even time to do the very difficult. Which would be, for instance, "that Liz Cheney sure is a liar, eh", to say "no, she told the truth, people didn't want to listen" and or "man alive ol' Biden sure caused the price of gas to go up" to say, um, no Putin did..

And with Tucker, all the more so as he's now going on to lie about the nature of the January 6 insurrection.

At some point, the only way to address the publicly vile is to confront them to their face and make the disgusting nature of their behavior known to them publicly.  Carlson's not an idiot, he's lying to people intentionally for some sort of personal advantage.  When there is no advantage to him personally, he'll cease.  

And perhaps he'll repent.

Or he can just go, the functional equivalent of being treated like a tax collector.

Joseph Goebbels shoved out crap for the Nazis, which at least he partially believed himself.  While he didn't loyally serve his wife, having serial affairs, he loyally served Hitler and shoveled out the lies for him.  He and his wife had six children together.

Goebbels, through his propaganda, helped convince the Germans to keep on keeping on in a war which brought the Red Army all the way into Berlin, destroyed Prussia, the largest and most dominant German state, resulted in the rape of perhaps 2,000,000 German women, 100,000 in Berlin alone, and the enslavement of eastern Germany in Communism for decades.  All of this in perpetration of a series of lies, although he no doubt believed some or maybe all of them about German racial superiority and the inferiority of others, particularly the Jewish people.  He and his wife, both of whom cheated on each other, murdered their six children as Berlin collapsed.

Lies have consequences. All of them do.

Big lies have big consequences.

Participation in lies

The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXVII. Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad fīnem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?*

Let's do a post that's guaranteed to somehow offend everyone. 

 Cicero denounces Cataline.*

Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying?

Voltaire.

Lies, Blinders, Hypocrites

Al Franken's 2003 book, written before his stint in Congress, and before his political fall from grace.  Copyrighted image posted under the fair use exception.

Al Franken, the left wing comedian, was Minnesota's Senator from 2009 to 2018. 

My goodness, 2018 seems so long ago, it's like a different world. 

Franken tended towards biting social and political satire.  It's not everyone's cup of tea, but he was funny as a rule.  He migrated towards being disgusted, principally with the political right, and in 2009 entered the Senate.  His downfall came due to one Leeann Tweeden in an event which, while it would seem Hollywoodescque in some ways now, probably wouldn't have led where it did if it were to break as a story now. 

Tweeden was one of those figures who came up due to being exposed, literally, in Hugh Hefner's monument to juvenile male fantasy, which has now been exposed as related in every fashion to the worst sort of sexual crimes imaginable, that being the Playboy magazine rag.  Having prostituted herself photographically, she leveraged that into a sort of career, which in turn ended up with her being assigned to a tour for the troops in Afghanistan, sort of like one of those now embarrassing events memorialized in grossly exaggerated form in Apocolypse Now.  You know, big boob babe appears in front of troops, with musicians and comedians, so they can ogle over her. Franken trespassed a line that shouldn't have been crossed, by her account, in some forced kisses that were part of rehearsals.  I'm not discounting that he did it, and that this was completely wrong.  The fact she perceived them that way gives credence to it. **

[Y]ou may fool people for a time; you can fool a part of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Abraham Lincoln. 

Following that, other women came forward, as universally seems to be the case in these instances. Were the accusations true?  I don't know.  I didn't follow them at the time, and it is, I'd note, seemingly universally the case that this occurs.  Having said that, in some of these instances, such as those involving Bill Cosby, some of them definitely are pretty believable.But should Franken have resigned? I didn't think so at the time.  Yes, that made him a cad of a sort, but 2018 was already two years after the election of an individual to the Presidency who had made a completely crass comment about grabbing women's genitals.  Franken wasn't accused of that, and a large percentage of the voters, although not a majority, voted for that candidate, Donald Trump.  Soon, Republicans accused of gross sexual misconduct would disregard it, as in the case of Matt Gaetz.  Franken may have done the honorable thing, but he may have in fact been more honorable in his resignation than he needed to be, or the times called for. 

He seems to have recognized that now. This past February, Franken commented that he regretted resigning from the U.S. Senate and noted that he might run for office once again.  He probably ought to. 

So why am I bringing this up? 

One of the things that propelled Franken into office was his disgust with "lying liars". That disgust doesn't seem to exist anymore either. I've noted this before, but as a Catholic, I'm in that branch of Christianity, which is the largest, whose theologians regard lying as so serious that some theologians hold that all lies are sins, no matter how trivial.  They further hold that some lies are mortal sins. And yet one of my co-religious based his campaign for high office in the state on lies. 

You can't judge the state of another person's soul, but you can hold contempt for his conduct.  One person has already held such contempt for the conduct that she has resigned rather than serve under him.  Maybe he doesn't believe they're lies.  But that says something about the season of lies we're now in, in that case.  You can't blind yourself to lies, and you can't willfully disregard the truth in order to opt to believe in them as you want them to be true.

One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots.  Ten thousand idiots are a poltiical party.

Kafka.

Unintentional Irony: 

A recent headline:

"Cards Against Humanity” Game Creator To Send Wyomingites’ Money To Pro-Abortion Group

The killers, in the movie, The Killers, played by Charles McGraw and William Conrad.

No kidding.  An inventor of something "against humanity" is for killing infants.

Makes sense.

Recently, the news has been just thick with irony, and ironic headlines, including additional ones in this area.

The violent complaining about violence.

An abortion clinic, which was not yet in operation, was hit by a while back by a female arsonist in Casper recently.

Now, I don't condone arson, but I don't condone being dense either.  Here's the headline that appeared after the clinic was burned.

Abortion clinic founder after fire: This world seems to be encased in violence

Really?

Abortion is the epitome of violence.  You can't cite the world getting violent as a defense to your own violence. It'd be like the Germans complaining about a concentration camp being bombed on the basis that bombing is violent.

"My goodness, Fritz, the Americans dropped a bomb inside the camp wire. . . the world sure is getting violent".

Men:  Shut up, speak up, now shut up.

Here's another abortion related headline:

Abortion Rights Advocates Say They Need More Men's Voices

For decades men have been told that abortion is none of their business and that indeed, once they withdraw, so to speak, nothing that happens is their business.  Indeed, men who are opposed to abortion are told to butt out.

You can't have it both ways.

If men have a say in the issue of abortion, they also have a say, indeed a coequal one, in whether a baby is to be aborted.  That is, the mother ought to inform the father, and he ought to get a veto over the abortion.  

That would actual recognize that this is at least a two person affair, or rather three.

That probably isn't the male voice they're seeking to elicit.

Some things never change.

In the further unintentional irony category:

Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost

@USTRANSCOM_CDR

·

1h

The character of war is changing. We won’t have the luxury of operating under the same conditions as yesterday.

A statement that's true about every single war fought since the first war was fought.  

D'uh.

We love the high price of petroleum, but hate the high price of gas. . . They aren't connected, are they?

And speaking of trying to have things both ways, a local politician was posting stuff like this nearly every day on Twitter:

Americans woke up today to a double whammy of record inflation and record gas prices. Gas tanks and wallets are running on empty.

@POTUS

owns this record inflation, and American families can’t afford his spin.

I've noted this before, but in Wyoming, high prices mean lots of oil field jobs.  Low prices mean no oilfield jobs.  If we want oilfield jobs, we need high prices.

With the price dropping, by the way, the same fellow hasn't congratulated President Biden on dropping the price.

Weird.

Speaking of politics. . .

Politicians need fun

Under-fire Finnish PM Sanna Marin says even politicians need fun

I'm sure that's true.

She probably actually said:

Jopa poliitikot tarvitsevat hauskaa

Marin is 36 years old, and surely at that age even politicians deserve to have fun.  

And, we would note, unlike less youthful politicians in the US she isn't spouting slop form Twitter or Twitter alternatives all the time.

Well, this year, why not?

Newly Released Sasquatch Data Shows More Wyoming People Are Bigfoot Believers

Sure, in a year in which a slight majority of Wyoming Republicans think an out of stater who has been in the state for only a decade, and who seems to have never really had to struggle independently for his place in the world would make a good Secretary of State, why not Big Foot?

On this:

Over the last 50 years or so, there have been 28 reported sightings in Wyoming of a tall, muscular creature, covered in dark hair, with long arms, leaving behind huge footprints. 

That would not be our presumptive Secretary of State.  He's only been in the state about a decade , as noted, and does not appear to be hirsute.

I've already noted an effort by the outgoing legislature to remove election responsibilities from the incoming election questioner.  It won't happen.

Elected officials, by the way, in Wyoming take this oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, obey and defend the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Wyoming; that I have not knowingly violated any law related to my election or appointment, or caused it to be done by others; and that I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity.

This would require said incoming individual not to be screwing around with elections, however, as a former legislature that was already his duty.

Which raises the amusing question of whether the Chief Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court can refuse to swear in an oath breaker.  I.e, if we know that somebody is facially breaking the oath, thereby breaking that fidelity they've sworn to uphold, can the office be denied.

That won't happen, but it's an interesting thought.

"Am I blue. .  "

Lady Gaga says she hopes 'purple' Texas turns blue at Arlington concert

M'eh, who cares what she thinks?

Gaga, one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, is just another yapping voice following the Madonna route of getting a good Catholic education and then forgetting what it taught so that she can get a career based on her presentation of her image, and then asking to be taken seriously.

Serious people are to be taken seriously.  You can't build up a career on silly fluff and then demand to be taken seriously, even if you are by that time actually serious.

Speaking of the serious. . . 

As she really is.

Melisa Raouf became the first woman to advance to the finals of the Miss England contest to abstain during the pageant from wearing makeup.

Good for her.  Makeup is stupid. Women should eschew it.

Poor Karen's

I think I've known two women named Karen.  One was the wife of a former partner of mine.  The couple divorced.  I don't know why, but I never knew her that well.

The other is a young Mexican American woman whose family owns a restaurant.  She's not superficial or entitled.  She's probably too serious to be insulted by the current misuse of the name Karen, an example of which is presented below.

Lauren Boebert: “Joe Biden is robbing hard working Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory.”

What?

Boebert somehow manages to reduce serious issues to absolute nonsense. 

Why do people vote for her?

So here we have the issues of societal debt, student debt, and its impact on American society and education, a set of issues that are complicated and serious.  We also have the issue of, I guess, homosexuality, maybe, which is an issue that's never really been sorted out at the existential level  And what is Boebert saying about these heavy issues?

Who knows, but it sounds dim.

Slacker Baristas?

Delia Kane, age 14.  The Exchange Luncheon, Boston.  January 31, 1917.  Slacker?

If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans, and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand . . . Maybe you weren’t gonna vote in November and suddenly you just got 20 grand,. . . if you can get off the bong for a minute … it could drive up turnout.

So stated Ted Cruz on a videoblog of his own.

Frankly Ted tends to be an asshole.

Being a barista is a job that strikes me as being hard.  All jobs like that, waitresses, bar maids, bar tenders, servers, are hard jobs.  Usually insulting one or making life difficult for one is a sign that you've never had to do a job like that.

Indeed, people who have done jobs like that are usually very polite to others who have done jobs of that type.  My father, who hardly drank at all, had been a bar tender in college and was just such an example.  In contrast, I once worked with somebody who gave wait staff a terrible time quite frequently.  He'd never done such a job.

I wonder if Cruz has?

Anyhow, Cruz's comment is insulting to working people.

It also displays a blistering lack of knowledge on the current state of education in the U.S. A few years ago, I read of a recent law school grad working as a barista. That was during a period in which new law school grads were having a hard time finding work, which has since changed.  People taking those jobs aren't slackers, they need a job.

Cruz also went after the FBI recently.

Ted Cruz says FBI needs 'complete housecleaning' due to its 'horrific' abuse of power

We'll quote again Cicero, "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad fīnem sesw effrenata iactabit audacia?"

One person whose patience with Cruz has apparently reached its limit is Liz Cheney, or at least she is now liberated from any restraints by the results of the primary election. She tweeted:

Liz Cheney

@Liz_Cheney

Understanding

@tedcruz

isn’t difficult. He lacks principle and has always been a chameleon who will say anything, anytime. He thinks he’s so smart no one can see through him. Ted, we can. All of us can.

Ms. Cheney's optimism on everyone being able to see through Cruz are no doubt optimistic.  Cruz actually has fans, and he's positioning himself to run against Ron DeSantis in 2024, assuming that Trump, whom Cruz once publically scorned but now supposedly admires, doesn't run.  DeSantis, I suspect, is running no matter what.

I've never liked Cruz and when he ran for President in 2016 I was disgusted by his comments about the Federal land going to the states, "like Texas".

This isn't Texas, and we don't want it to be.

Regarding Cruz, how is it that Barrack Obama's right to run for President was questioned on the myth he was born in Kenya, while nobody seems to be ready to suggest that Cruz, who was born in Canada, isn't qualified?  Granted, I think he is, legally, but given the wacky interpretation things have been getting recently by people who seem prepared to question a normal readying of the Constitution, why not?Anyhow, he's really not qualified to run as a he's a robot.

I bet that is rare.

In Rare Move, Duke Law Professor Leaves Academia to Return to Big Law

Having said that, one of my really good law school professors did the same thing. And one of my not so good ones did as well, although I understand he was very successful in private practice.

Headline Typo

A headline in the Tribune reads:

AG Opposes holding penitentiary hearing in abortion ban case.

Penitentarily hearing?

No, the Attorney General opposed an evidentiarly hearing, not a penitentiarly hearing.

Seriously?

Nikki Haley

@NikkiHaley

·

8h

Biden is the most condescending president of my lifetime. He’s done nothing to unite the nation. Nothing to bring healing. Nothing to alleviate the pain millions of Americans feel everyday. He’s been a divider in chief and come November he must hear from all of us.

I don't know who they are, and I don't care.

My Twitter feed constantly suggest that I check on the latest doings of certain celebrities.

One of them is Megan Thee Stallion.  I guess she's a singer.  I'm sure her last name isn't "Stallion"

Up until recently, as I don't know who she really is and my mind was just filling in the blanks, I thought that last name was "Three Stallions".  I only noticed very recently that I was wrong.  Perhaps that shows a mindset inclined towards Native American names.

Another one is Harry Styles.  I don't know who Harry Styles is or why anyone cares what he's doing.  I could probably look that up, but I'm not going to.

Another link noted that Billie Eilish is wearing baggy shorts, having experimented briefly with appearing as an actual adult woman, her having returned to appearing like a toddler.

I don't have a really appropriate song for this topic, so this'll have to do.

Footnotes:

*The opening lines of Cicero's first speech against Cataline.  Translated, they state:

When, Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?