The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Islands earthquake occurred which resulted in an tsunami that devastated parts of Hawaii, most notably Hilo. Up to 173 people were killed, mostly in Hawaii.
People fleeing the tsunami in Hilo.
Warnings were given but many ignored them, thinking them an April Fools Day joke. The event is responsible for a much improved warning system.
Bituminous coal miners went on strike in the U.S.
The U.S. Navy destroyed 24 Japanese submarines. Seems like a terrible waste really.
The UK made Singapore a Crown Colony and separated it and its mostly Chinese ethnic population from Malaya.
What does Russia want was a question that was posed (from more than one Reddit sub).
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
We just published this item here on Donald Trump's insatiable lust for the destruction of land, lands even beyond our borders.
In the movie The Patriot, which is okay but not great, commences with these lines:
I have long feared, that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bare.
In a lot of ways, that opening scene is the best one in the movie.
No nation has a singular linear history, even though people tend to hear things that way. "This happened, and then that happened, resulting in this. . . ". In reality, things are mixed quite often, and things are quite fluid with juxtapositions.
Shakespeare claimed:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Perhaps. But in reality the tide in the affairs of men drags everyone along with it. But it's a rip tide. People's individual goals, desires and aspirations often are quite contrary to the tide on the surface.
That's certainly been the case with the United States.
If you have a Trumpian view of the world, the history of the United States looks like this, sort of:
Lots of people have that view. We came, we saw, we exploited, and everyone got happy working for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Trouble is, that's not true for a lot of reasons, a core one being it doesn't comport with who we really are. The entire worship of wealth and what it brings, and the wealthy and who they are, is deeply contrary to our natures, and frankly men like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are deeply perverted. Not because of their relationship with women, or because their names appear in the Epstein files in some context, although in the case of Trump, we really still don't know what context, but because of their shallow avaricious acquisition for and desire for wealth.
Timothy warns us:
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
And not only have their pierced themselves, but they pierce others, and entire societies with them.
So let's look at a few concrete things that we feel should be done.
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men
Revisit the Homestead Act.
Right from the onset of English colonization of North America, there was a pull between business exploitation and the simple desire for an agrarian place of one's own.
The truth of the matter is that when the nation started off, most people weren't "Pilgrims" seeking shelter from religious oppression. Nor did they wish to be servants of big mercantile enterprises. Most of the early English colonists were from agriculture or the trades and wanted to just work for themselves. That's about it.
The American Revolution was as much about that as anything else. When American Colonials dumped tea in harbors, they were protesting taxes, but what they were also doing is dumping mercantile controlled property into waste. It was grown somewhere else and it belong to rich remote classes.
The struggle was always there. The American South in particular had the planter class which depended upon enslaved labor to raise a market crop. That was about generating wealth. Most Southerners, in contrast, were Yeoman who had small places of their own. When the Civil War came the wealthy had the South fight the war.
The analogies to the present day are simply to thick to ignore.
The Homestead Act came about during that war, and in real ways, it expressed a Jeffersonian dream. People willing to invest their own labor could acquire a place of their own.
The drafters of the Act never envisioned the wealthy controlling the land. In some very real ways it was wealthy landowners that the North was fighting at the time.
Over the last few days residents of Wyoming have read about Chris Robinson, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., buying the Pathfinder Ranch. I have nothing about him personally, but the listed price for the ranch was $79.5M due to its giant size.
I can personally recall when it was owned by locals At that price, rather obviously, Robinson isn't planning on making money from cattle. And to make matters a bit worse, residents of Natrona County got to read about another local outfit going up for sale, which is much smaller, for $9M.
Even into my adult years, by which time it was already impossible for somebody not born into ranching or farming to buy a place such that it could be their vocation, most ranches were owned by locally born ranchers. This trend of playground pricing is making the status of the land the same as that which English colonists were seeking to escape from.
This could be fixed by amending the Homestead Act. The homesteading portion of that is fixed, but it would still be possible to go back and amend it such that land deeded to individuals under it, had to remain in agricultural use, and had to be held by families that made their money that way. exclusively.
I know it won't be, anytime soon, but it should be.
Revisit "Ad coelum ad damnum"
One of the absolute absurdities of the original Homestead Act is that it gave away not only the surface of the land, but the mineral rights as well. This made the system sort of like buying lottery tickets. Some people got rich just of because of where they'd chosen to homestead.
I really struggle with the concept of private ownership of minerals, including oil and gas, in the first place. I understand private enterprise exploiting it, but owning it? Why? It's not like private enterprise put the minerals in the ground.
Addressing this creates real constitutional problems, but ideally the mineral wealth of the nation should belong to everyone in it, not private parties. And it should be exploited, or not, in the national interest, not in the primary economic interest of those who claim to own it.
I know that this brings up the cry of "that's Socialism". It probably really is, but an unequal accidental distribution of mineral wealth on lands taken from the native inhabitants isn't just. At a bare minimum, something needs to be looked into. Indeed, as there was no intent to transfer that mineral title in the first place, perhaps it could collectively be restored and held in truth for the descendants of those original inhabitants.
Tax the wealthy
Every since Ronald Reagan there's been a ludicrous idea that taxing the wealthy hurts the economy. We know that this is completely false. We also know that a certain percentage of the wealthy will allow themselves to become obscenely wealthy if allowed to, and that they'll harm everyone else as a result.
There's no reason on earth that anyone ought to be a billionaire. Indeed, if you have more than $50M in assets, you have too much and something is potentially wrong with your character. High upper income tax rates and wealth taxes can and should address this. Elon Musk can be nearly just as annoying if his net worth was $50M as whatever it currently is, but he'd be a lot less destructive.
An alternative to this, if this is simply too radical, is to prevent corporations from owning most things, and to provide that once they get to be a certain size, at least 50% of their ownership goes to employees of those corporations. It'd at least distribute the wealth some, and keep avarice from defining our everyday existence.
Final thoughts
What seems to be clear in any event is that we cannot keep going in this directly. Today's "conservatives" serve the very interests that the American Patriots rebelled against, remote wealth. In spite of their tattoos and car window stickers, they'd form the Loyalist Militia trying to put down an an agrarian revolution in 1776. The thing is, that those conditions always lead to revolution. They did in 1776 in North America, and then again in more extreme form in France a few years later. They lead to the uprisings of 1848, the Anglo Irish War in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's time to address this while we can, as it will be addressed.
Basil III (الأنبا باسيليوس, Ⲁⲃⲃⲁ Ⲃⲁⲥⲓⲗⲓⲟⲥ) bebame the 17th Metropolitan of the Holy and Great City of Our Lord, Jerusalem (Holy Zion), and Archbishop of the Holy and Ancient Archdiocese of Jerusalem, all Palestine and the Near East.
A mine explosion killed 52 coal miners in Palaú, in the Mexican state of Coahuila.
The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, December 27, 1925
I'm glad this isn't going forward. It shouldn't, because of where it's located.
But because of where its located is where it drew attention.
In Natrona County, over the past year, residents have risen up in opposition to this gravel mine, a proposed solar farm in the western end of the county, and a proposed nuclear generator manufacturing facility north of Casper. In Gillette there's some sort of controversy going on over some sort of nuclear facility. And there's a big debate on a wind farm in Laramie County.
It's hard to know what to make of all of this.
What is clear is that local politicians respond to the controversies. I'm sure if you asked any one of the Natrona County Commissioners if they supported energy, they would say yes. And they'd all say they support mining. But when the votes come, they're voting like they're members of Greenpeace.
And one local legislature says that his nickname is now "No nuke" for his opposition to the nuclear generator facility.
Nuclear energy is the safest and most efficient form of power generation we have, and until the mysteries of fission are unlocked, if ever, it'll continue to be. In a rational world we'd have a five year plan to replace every coal burning plant in the country with nuclear power.
Indeed, going one step further, we'd mandate the retirement of petroleum fueled everything in that time frame, or perhaps ten years.
The reason we don't is because, for the most part, even though we're the smartest animal on the planet, we're not anywhere near as smart as we like to think we are. If we were, we'd make decisions based on logic. Most people don't. Most people make decisions based on emotion.
It's easy to understand why a person would emotionally resent a gravel pit in their backyard, more or less, or solar panels taking up acres of land. The same with windmills. Nuclear? Well, the opposition to nuclear is due to our having used the bomb to murder thousands of Japanese civilians. It's stuck with us and we fear it, as that was our first use of it. People will tell you they are worried about contamination and the like. Bah. It's Hiroshima and Nagasaki they're worried about, even though that can't happen.
I'm old enough to remember when we had open pit uranium mining in Wyoming. In the early 1980s I knew a few guys who worked out at the Shirley Basin mine site, including one who lived in the little, now abandoned, town of Shirley Basin. I also knew some who lived and worked in Jeffrey City, where they worked in uranium mines. When they closed down, the state was distraught.
Now it seems nobody remembers that, and the thought of anything nuclear drives people into fits of despair.
I think a lot of it is fear of change.
That in fact explains a lot about populism And it explains why the current heavily right wing populist in Natrona County are adamantly against something that the populists in Washington D.C. reading Uglier Home and Paved Garden are for.
Change, we're told, is inevitable. If it is, it's because we will it so, much of it through our absolute laziness. We want our lives to be easier and more convenient just for us, but at the same time we want things to stay the way they are.
Which for a person like me, whose an introverted, introspective, agrarian, is particularly amusing in some ways.
I really hate change, myself, and I also want things to be the way they were. But not five or ten years ago, like so many of the people who protest on these matters. Indeed, many are quite new imports.
Victor Colorado, 1900. One of these houses was my great grandparents'.
I'd like them to be like they were in 1879 when my family first arrived in this region. . . or even earlier if possible. I'd settle for 1963, when I personally arrived.
I won't get those wishes.
I will note, however, a nuclear powered America might look more like American in 1879 than the one of 2025 does. As I look out at all the protests I'm struck by how many people in Wyoming are absolutely wedded to the oil and gas industry. It wasn't always so.
Back in the 1960s (I have a long memory) a lot of locals remained pretty skeptical about the oil and gas industry, in part because the state had recently been shafted for its reliance upon petroleum. People loved it again in the 1970s but when that boom collapsed people swore to never be reliant upon it again.
We apparently got over that.
Now we fear what we know to be true. Petroleum and coal won't last forever. The dirty little secret of the petroleum industry in Wyoming anymore is that drilling is really for gas far more than petroleum oil. Petroleum is on the way out, like it or not, and the United States is an expensive oil and gas province to drill in. Absent actually prohibiting its import, which I wouldn't put past Donald Trump, Saudi petroleum will always be cheaper. For that matter, Russian petroleum will always be as well and thinking you can really prohibit India China from importing it is absolute folly. Coal, which we've dealt with extensively, in a slow but accelerating death spiral.
The sort of imaginary world so many in MAGA wish to return to. Big powerful cars, driven by guys of course, but at the same time don't want to return to, as living without as much as these people did, compared to us, would be uncomfortable.
Donald Trump may say "drill baby drill", and put thousands of acres up for coal leasing, but Trump in many ways is the last dying gasp of of the 1950s.
And the 50s of our imaginations never existed. But we fear that it didn't, as we fear the thought that our oil stained hands will reach the point where we'll have to grab a bar of Lava soap and scrub it off, forever. The jobs will go away.
Funny thing is, from time to time, there's been serious proposals to put in something related to local agriculture, which was here in the beginning of our statehood, and still is. Wyoming hadn't really supported a big ag project since the 1930s, and indeed local municipalities oppose things related to agriculture. It's short sighted.
But then, perhaps I'm romantic about for various reasons that recent migrants to the state don't share.
"Real buffalo meat for banquet. Stephen T. Mather, Director of the National Parks entertained the newspapermen who made the tour through Yellowstone National Park with the late President Harding at a banquet in the new Willard Hotel, Dec. 10th. The above picture was made in the new Willard kitchen just before the banquet. Those in the group, left to right, are: H.M. Albright, superintendent of Yellowstone Park, Harry Frantz, Yellowstone Guide, Anthony Gracofci, Chef; Senator Stanfield [i.e. Mather] of Oregon, Former Cowboy and Director Mather [i.e. Senator Stanfield]"
The Nobel Prizes for 1924 were announced. Recipients were honorees were Manne Siegbahn of Sweden for Physics, Willem Einthoven of the Netherlands (Medicine), and Władysław Reymont of Poland (Literature).
The Society for Human Rights (SHR) was organized in Illinois. It's charter provided that its mission as one "to promote and protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of factors according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age." It advocated for rights for homosexuals. It's founders were arrested in 1925 and the organization came to an end.
Gold was discovered near the village of Boliden in Sweden.
The 7th Cavalry, with a number of native scouts, left Ft. Abraham Lincoln bound for the Black Hills in what is recalled as the Black Hills Expedition.
The expedition was economic in part, in that it was to look for gold in the Black Hills, and military in part, in that it was to look for suitable fort locations. Its organization was as follows:
The table of organization for the 7th Cavalry for the Black Hills Expedition of 1874 was as follows.[15]
Field and staff officers:
Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, 7th Cavalry.
Lt. Colonel Frederick D. Grant, 4th Cavalry and acting aide
Major George A. Forsyth, 9th Cavalry commander
First Lieutenant James Calhoun, 7th Cavalry adjutant
First Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith, quartermaster
Second Lieutenant George D. Wallace, commander of Indian scouts
Cavalry companies
Company A - Captain Myles Moylan and Second Lieutenant Charles Varnum
Company B - First Lieutenant Benjamin H. Hodgson
Company C - Captain Verling Hart and Second Lieutenant Henry M. Harrington
Company E - First Lieutenant Thomas M. McDougall
Company F - Captain George W. Yates
Company G - First Lieutenant Donald McIntosh
Company H - Captain Frederick W. Benteen and First Lieutenant Francis M. Gibson
Company K - Captain Owen Hale and First Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey
Company L - First Lieutenant Thomas W. Custer
Company M - Captain Thomas French and First Lieutenant Edward Gustave Mathey
Harry Yount, sometimes erroneously referred to as Wyoming's first game warden (he wasn't), passed away in Wheatland at age 85.
Yount was from Missouri in 1839 and joined the Union Army during the Civil War, being taken prisoner by the Confederates from whom he escaped. His escaped from captivity was barefoot and lead to a condition of rheumatism, which left him eligible for benefits for the same when they were first passed in 1890. After the war, he headed West and engaged in a classic series of Frontier occupations, including bull whacking and buffalo hunting.
In the 1870s he was engaged by the Smithsonian in order to collect taxidermy specimens, and he became a regular member of the Hayden expeditions throughout the decade. During this period, he also took up prospecting. He was well known enough to be the subject of a newspaper profile in 1877. Around this time he became a commercial hunter in Wyoming, that still being legal until Wyoming took efforts to outlaw it early in the 20th Century.
In 1880, he was hired at the impressive salary of $1,000 per year to become Yellowstone National Park's first game warden, gamekeeper, or "park ranger" at a time at which the law was enforced in Yellowstone by the U.S. Army. He occupied the high paying job for fourteen months. Upon resigning he noted:
I do not think that any one man appointed by the honorable Secretary, and specifically designated as a gamekeeper, is what is needed or can prove effective for certain necessary purposes, but a small and reliable police force of men, employed when needed, during good behavior, and dischargeable for cause by the superintendent of the park, is what is really the most practicable way of seeing that the game is protected from wanton slaughter, the forests from careless use of fire, and the enforcement of all the other laws, rules, and regulations for the protection and improvement of the park.
His resignation seems to have come over a disagreement with the park superintendent, who wanted him to spend more time building roads.
After leaving the Park, he prospected, after a short and unsuccessful stint as a homesteader, in the Laramie Range for almost forty years, a remarkable stint at that occupation. He took out a marble mining claim and spent his later years there, working also at prospecting right up to the day he died. He collapsed near the Lutheran Church in Wheatland after walking into town, something he did daily. He was 85 years old.
Younts Peak near Yellowstone is named after him. The Park Service gives out the Harry Yount Award, established in 1994, annually to an outstanding ranger employee.
The Soviet children's magazine Murzilka appeared for the first time.
A bill to nationalize British coal mining failed, 264 to 168.
The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance was founded in Mexico City by Peruvian politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as a Latin American left wing political party/alliance of left wing political parties. It still exists.
The first issue of Liberty, dated May 10, appeared. It lasted until July 1950.
German miners went on strike in he Ruhar over wages.
Ten years after the terrible disaster at Eccles, West Virginia, which killed 180 coal miners, 119 were killed in a mine explosion at Benwood, West Virginia.
Gov. Warren T. McCray of Indiana was booked into the Marion County Jail after being found guilty of fraud by a Federal Jury.
McCray had been an opponent of the Ku Klux Klan who helped figure in his conviction, although McCray admitted the truth of the allegations, which involved promissory notes and land speculation. Becuase of the KKK's involvement, McCray was pardoned by President Hoover in 1930. He lived out the rest of his days after serving three years of his sentence on his farm.
We haven't featured one for awhile, as they haven't been great, but on this day, The Country Gentleman restored the dignity of magazine cover art with a spring theme.
The Ku Klux Klan shot 22 people in Lilly, Pennsylvania, killing two. The gunfire was sort of the equivalent of a drive by shooting, with the KKK shooting randomly into the town's railroad station after some townsmen, miner workers who were heavily immigrants from Eastern Europe, had "played a stream of water from the town fire hose upon the visitors(KKK) as they were marching back to the station."
The KKK was in Lilly for one of their ceremonies in a local field and was returning to the station for transport to Johnstown, PA. They did catch the train, and upon arrival at Johnstown they were met with 50 policemen who arrested 25 Klansman and confiscated 50 firearms. The next day, an additional four residents of Lilly were arrested. Twenty-nine people were charged with murder.
Lilly was a mining town, and like most of them it had a strong contingent of Catholic and Orthodox miners, members of ethnicities that the Klan didn't like. A strong UMW union town, the residents weren't cowed by the KKK. A monument to their efforts has been placed in the town in recent years.
Locally, there were concerns about spring floods. And the flight around the globe was suffering delays.
And the accusations against the former Attorney General Daugherty were getting bizarre.
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