Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 6. “Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.”

Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.

The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2025.

May 14, 2025

Wyoming Delegation Not Supportive Of Trump's Idea Of Tax Hike For The Rich

So Barrasso and Lummis separate from Trump on this?

Neither one of them are actually Trump supporters in terms of their personal beliefs, but have adopted his views for political survival in Wyoming, which is fanatically pro Trump.  Everyone is well aware that the budget is in a crisis stage and at some point soon the US needs to have a balanced budget. That can only be done through raising taxes, and they know it.

Additionally, taxing the wealthy will not hurt the economy, and everyone knows that.  Tax rates for the wealthy were much higher in prior decades with no ill effect on the economy.

A matter of critical interest.

Wyoming Is The Second Most Expensive State For Beer Lovers

And one Wyomingites just won't believe

Reaction To Trump Tariffs Helps Push Wyoming Oil Prices To Four-Year Low

This is an absolute fact, but if you follow the story on Facebook, a lot of Wyomingites just won't believe it. That would mean Trump is hurting the local economy, and they can't accept that. . . at least not yet.

Oil is at $62.02/bbl this morning.

May 15, 2025

Given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins. 

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon.

Oil is at $61.60/bbl.

May 17, 2025

Thanks to Republican mishandling of the economy, specifically increasing debt, Moody's downgraded the economy from Aaa to Aa1.

The GOP can't seem to grasp that you actually have to pay for the government.

New Jersey transit engineers are on strike.

Trump's "Big Beautiful Budget Bill", which would add $4T in debt, failed 16-21 in the House Budget Committee.

The irony is that those voting against it want more spending cuts, but only increased taxes will address this developing crisis.

Let's put this in bold, as people just don't seem to grasp it.

THE UNITED STATES CAN'T "CUT" ITS WAY OUT OF ITS BUDGET CRISIS.  IT MUST RAISE TAXES.

Cont:

It's really time to stop calling Trump a businessman:

He's a real estate developer. Clearly he's otherwise a business illiterate.

May 19, 2025

The Trump deficit expanding budget bill made it out of committee on a 17-16 vote with those who were to vote no, voting present.

This bill will be a disaster for already an already irresponsible Federal government.  Taxes need to be raised on income, particularly upper incomes to make the budget balance and this insanity cease.

May 22, 2025

The House of Representatives passed by a margin of one a funding bill that will swell the deficit disastrously while making cuts in Medicaid and food stamp while adding to border security.  Taxes will be cut, when they should be raised, and will irrationally be eliminated on tips and overtime.

Trump, who speaks oddly at best, has called this his "big beautiful tax bill"

Walmart is cutting 1,500 corporate jobs.

The stock market is crashing because of the bad tax bill. The bond market is flat.

West Texas crude is back down to $60.96.

Cont:

The "tip" exemption appears to be for "cash tips".

FWIW, bar tenders tend to get cash tips, but restaurant workers less and less.  FWIW, cash tips are notoriously underreported anyway, as they're impossible to keep track of.

May 23, 2025

Hageman’s Budget Vote Critical As House Passes One Big Beautiful Act 215-214

The next one is interesting:

Barrasso Cheers Vote To Kill California Mandate To ‘Force-Feed’ EVs On Everyone

Republicans are for state's rights, except when the state exercises the right to do something they don't like.

Likewise, the GOP is for local control, but really isn't.

At Lusk Town Meeting, Locals Say Wind Projects Have Ended Friendships

Developer Of Controversial Casper Gravel Mine Wants To Renew State Leases

Trump:

What does the "thank you for our attention to this matter" intend to do?

May 29, 2025

Federal trade court blocks Trump's emergency tariffs, saying he overstepped authority

That the power wasn't there was obvious.  Now the question is whether the Trump administration will obey the Court.

May 30, 2025

An appeals court is allowing the tariffs to be collected while the matter is on appeal, which is a poor ruling.

June 2, 2025

Well, of course. . . 

R&D job postings down 18% since president took office

From the same article, about the impact on the economy:

A 25% cut ultimately would reduce gross domestic product by an amount similar to the decline seen during the Great Recession, they said.

cont:

“Was it all bullshit?"

Donald Trump, reportedly, about Musk's promise to cut $1B from the government spending.

That anyone could seriously think that $1B could be cut from the discretionary budget demonstrates that the person has no grasp on the Federal budget whatsoever.

June 3, 2025

Elon Musk on the "Big Beautiful Bill".

It is an abomination, but so was the work that Musk was doing:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 85th Edition. DOGE dipshittery and Clinton efficiency.

June 4, 2025

Oh my. The CBO predicts Trump's Big Ugly Bill will cut taxes by $3.7T and raise the deficit by $2.4T. It's pretty obvious what Congress should do. A lot of House members are suddenly declaring they didn't read the bill.  That's a pretty good sign its in trouble.  Speaker Johnson claims the magic of supply side economics, which hasn't been dragged out since the Reagan years, will make it all okay. Elon Musk and the Trumpites are now in a full fledged word war with each other. Trump is threatening to hike steel and aluminum tariffs 50%. June 5, 2025 The Wind River Job Corps in Riverton, was ordered to "pause" its activities in anticipation of getting the axe from Congress. cont: Proctor and Gamble is laying off 7,000 employees. cont: June 12, 2025 The conclusion of negotiations with China leaves tariffs on that country at 55%. June 13, 2025 Trump signed a Congressional resolution counteracting California's prohibition on the sale of petroleum vehicles after 2035. It appears that a TACO moment is coming up. The messaging here is really spastic.  Illegal immigrants in cities are violent criminals, unless they work in the hospitality industry, in which case they're good, long time workers, which is also true of farms, even though the DHS has a plan to raid farms with National Guardsmen to remove them. Eh? Of course, regarding agriculture, which I'm very familiar with, this is all an unintended consequence of the Bracero Program, which started the process of taking American laborers out of the fields, all of which raises a larger question.   Will Americans return to the jobs occupied by foreign workers, and what sort of pay will it require, if they will, to cause them to do that? And with this entry, we close this edition. End of Part Six. Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 5. The Roller Coaster Edition.

Labels: 2020s, 2025, China, Donald Trump, Economics, Food, Jerome Powell, Petroleum, Red Caesar, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, Trump Trade Wars, Wyoming's boom and bust economy

Monday, February 2, 1915. Serum run concludes.

The serum run ended in success with Balto and Kassen, and team, coming in at 5:30 a.m.

President Coolidge signed the Air Mail Act of 1925 turning over air mail to private contractors, which in turn was a boon for US civil aviation.

Up to then mail order entity Sears, Roebuck, & Co. opened its first department store at 8:30 a.m. in the morning at its its headquarters at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street in Chicago. 

Actress Elaine Stritch was born in Detroit.

I don't think there's any thrill in the world like doing work you're good at.

Elaine Stritch

M'eh.

Last edition:

Sunday, February 1, 1925. Balto, the future King Zog, wild party in Laramie.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 1925 Serum Run, Agriculture, Alaska, Albania, Crime, Disease, Food, Ireland, Irish Free State, j, Laramie Wyoming, Personalities, Women, Wyoming (Laramie)

The sad news. Tattered Cover to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

 Denver’s Tattered Cover files for bankruptcy, will close 3 stores and cut 27 jobs

Beloved book chain’s new CEO says company can no longer support 7 stores in Colorado

One of my favorite bookstores, although it hasn't been what it was when I first entered it back in the 1980s.

Sunday, December 10, 1922. War Surplus.

The cover of the Casper Daily Tribune had some truly important new on its cover, including the developing crisis over German reparations.  It wasn't that reason I decided to post the paper, however.

Rather, I posted it for this big war surplus store advertisement on page 2.  This is the earliest example of this I've seen.

Surplus stores were a feature of my childhood and even young adult years in a major way.  The "War Surplus Store" on 1st Street, on the Sandbar, was a somewhat disorganized collection of stuff guaranteed to fascinate a boy for as long as the boy's parents would allow him to wonder around in it, full of stuff dating back to World War Two.  It's now closed, of course, and instead is the outdoor clothing store Gear Up.

That wasn't Casper's last surplus store, however.  Yates, outside of town, fit that description, and was again fascinating.  It probably closed fifteen or so years ago when its owner relocated to Australian with his Australian wife, figuring that, even as a younger man, that with his savings and Australian social services, he'd no longer have to work.

I hope that worked out.

Laramie had a really small surplus store when I first lived there, but it closed while I lived there in the 80s.  Examples still exist, however.  Jax in Ft. Collins keeps on keeping on, although that's only a small part of its large collection of wares, and Billings retains a good surplus store to this day.

This location is a parking lot today:

James Reeb Mural, Casper Wyoming

This is the memorial to civil rights activist James Reeb in Casper Wyoming.  I should have taken this photograph when this mural was new, as its faded considerably since first painted, and it isn't even very old.

The competing Casper newspaper had a dramatic headline:

Japan gave up Jiaozhou Bay Territory, a former German possession.

The 1922 Nobel Prizes were awarded in Stockholm. Recipients were awarded in Stockholm. Recipients were Niels Bohr of Denmark (Physics), Francis William Aston of the United Kingdom (Chemistry), Archibald Hill of the United Kingdom and Otto Fritz Meyerhof of Germany (Physiology or Medicine), Jacinto Benavente of Spain (Literature) and Fridtjof Nansen of Norway (Peace).

Saturday, July 1, 1922. The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 Starts.

Saturday weekly's were predictably patriotic on this July 1 Saturday of 1922.

The Saturday Evening Post went to press with what would have been a gender bending cover, women being an enduringly popular illustration topic then and now.

 

The Country Gentleman chose children as the theme, which they often did.

President Harding traveled to Gettysburg.

A group of Miners and Operators visited Harding at the White House.

Herbert Lord was sworn in as Director of the United States Agency of the Budget.

Lord had served in similar roles in the U.S. Army, from which he had just retired, and had proven very adept at it.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 commenced, with any major railroad strike being a national disaster at the time.  It would run into August.

In Wexford, the IRA derailed a train, that somehow being a revolutionary act that made sense, somehow.

Construction commenced on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. It was the first planned regional shopping center.  It is still in operation.

Monday, December 19, 1921. Rockin' 1922

You may have noticed, if you are a regular reader here, that the daily entries for a century ago have very much trailed off. That may have been not noticed as the temporary daily ones for eighty years ago have picked up.

This is a history website, after all.

Anyhow, this 1921 Casper Daily Tribune is put up for two reasons, one in the front page above.

That's the headline "Year 1922 To Rock World".

I guess I've always associated the word "rock" like that, to come from "Rock and Roll". 

Apparently not.

And here's the next one:

528 West Yellowstone Highway today is an auto body shop . In 1921, however, it was the U.S. Army Goods Company, a surplus store. That caught my eye as just a block away, at 254 West 1st Street, there was a store when I was young called War Surplus.  It's now Gear Up, an outdoor clothing store.

We always called War Surplus the "Army store" when I was a kid, and my father referred to it as the "Army Navy Store".  I wonder if this nearby store was the same store, and it just moved a block deeper into the Sand Bar at a later date?

It was an enduring fixture of my youth, at any rate, and in the 60s and 70s it had a lot of genuine war surplus items from the 40s through the 70s.  It also sold Carhartts, and heavy work clothing, much like the store noted here on the way to the Standard Oil Refinery (now also long gone) did.

Anyhow, I've always associated that store with surplus becoming widely available after World War Two.  For whatever reason, I didn't associate the same thing with World War One.  I likely should have, as overproduction of some items occurred on such a vast scale in the Great War it caused a scandal, and a Congressional investigation, later.

Friday, June 10, 1921. Money.

The Bureau of Budget, the founding organization for what is now the Office of Management and Budget, came into being.  Likewise, so did the Government Accountability Office, hence ushering in a full century of fiscal accountability and wise use of Federal funds.

And a group of automobile dealers visited President Harding.

The late Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, was born on the Greek island of Corfu.

Blog Mirror: Pharmacy in World War II: The Drugstore

I'm related, by marriage, to a family that was, at one time, a family of pharmacists and which had a fonly remembered pharmacy here.  Hard not to recall that when reading this item.

Pharmacy in World War II: The Drugstore

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Blog Stew — Best Eaten in Your Sleeping Bag

Ah geez. . .

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Blog Stew — Best Eaten in Your Sleeping Bag:   • Now it will be CabelasBassProShopsSportsmansWarehouse.  There is an interesting angle as to what happens to the Remington firearms brand...

Does freakin' everything have to merge? 

Painted Bricks: Wyoming Territorial Seal, Big Hollow Food Coop, Laramie Wyoming

Painted Bricks: Wyoming Territorial Seal, Big Hollow Food Coop, La...: 

Wyoming Territorial Seal, Big Hollow Food Coop, Laramie Wyoming.

This is a nice rendition of the Territorial Seal of Wyoming on the Big Hollow Food Coop building in Laramie.  We've featured this building before, but we missed the seal in our prior photographs.  Indeed, one of our remote roving contributors to this blog just picked this one up.

Wyoming has a complicated history in regard to seals, and this one was actually the state's third.  This is additionally slightly complicated by the fact that some versions have the year 1868 at the top, rather than 1869.  1869 is, I believe, correct.

The seal depicts a mountain scene with a railroad running in the foreground in the top field.  In the bottom left it depicts a plow, shovel and shepherd's crook, symbolic of the state's industries.  The bottom right field depicts a raised arm with a drawn sabre.  The Latin inscription reads Cedant Arma Togae, which means "let arms yield to civil authority", which was the territorial motto.

This seal was an attractive one and in some ways it was a better looking seal than the one the state ultimately adopted.  The state actually went through an absurd process early in its history in attempting to adopt an official state seal that lead, at one time, the Federal mint simply assigning one for the purpose of large currency printing, which featured state seals at the time.  Part of the absurdity involved the design, which was describe in the original state statute rather than depicted, which lead to the sitting Governor hiring his own artist as he didn't like the one art of the one that had been in front of the legislature.  That caused a scandal as the one that he picked featured a topless woman, which had not been a feature of the legislative design, and ultimately it was corrected to the current design.

All in all, looking at the original one, I think they could have stuck with it.

May 26, 1920. Canning Clubs and hand rolled cigars.

A Canning Club Girl, May 26, 1920.

Girls Canning Clubs were a movement in the early 20th Century that was a reaction to a similar corn growing club for boys much in the same way that the Girl Scouts were a reaction to the Boy Scouts.  They started off as Tomato Clubs and evolved into general Canning Clubs, sometimes finding an expression in 4H.

I'm sure that canning is still done in 4H today and in recent years it seems to have undergone a bit of a revival.  My suspicion is that our current times will increase that trend.

Lee Ying, Washington D. C. Cigar maker.  May 26, 1920.

Lee Ying apparently operated his own shop and he didn't appear to be particularly pleased to be the subject of a newspaper photograph on May 26, 1920.  This probably was just another day at work for him.

Cigars, like canning, have enjoyed a bit of a revival recently.  Indeed, the things they're associated with have as well, two being whiskey and the concept, if not the actual practice, of leisure.

Rain

Pennys started out as Gold Rule.  This is the first one back in the day, in Kemmerer Wyoming.

Earlier this past week we published this:

Lex Anteinternet: Storm Clouds: Yesterday we published this: Lex Anteinternet: Gathering Storms. : Economists are openly speculating now that we may be entering a period ...

Which took note of this within it:

Lex Anteinternet: Gathering Storms.: Economists are openly speculating now that we may be entering a period of deflation. A drop in petroleum prices combined with a drop in so...

Today we have the news that JC Pennys, a company founded in Wyoming, is in bankruptcy.

I have to agree with this Forbes headline, however:

Don’t Blame The Pandemic: JCPenney Goes Bankrupt After Decades-Long Struggle To Reinvent Itself

Pennys has been having trouble for awhile, as anyone who has toured the former retail giant in recent years would know. Still, I hate to see this happen as I did occasionally buy clothing there.

And this isn't unique to Pennys.  As Forbes also noted:

The retailer joins Neiman Marcus, J.Crew and Stage Stores in seeking bankruptcy in recent weeks. It also follows in the footsteps of Sears, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.

Which isn't to say that this should be taken lightly.  Pennys was a big store, but it wasn't a Walmart.  I.e., it was higher quality and this reduces customer options fairly seriously.

And its one more blow in something that's rapidly reaching a depression level economic trend.

Blog Mirror: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Ma Boyle's Amazing Outdoor Retailing Concept

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Ma Boyle's Amazing Outdoor Retailing Concept: Gert Boyle (Outside). Reading a post in Outside online about Gert Boyle, who built Columbia Sportswear from a little hat company to wha...

51%

That's the percentage of the local grocery market that Walmart occupies.

And that's a lot.

Not that those groceries would have been bought at local grocery stores anyhow.  The town has one, but it's a specialty store.

As late as at least the 1960s there were quite a few local grocery stores left in the county, although even then the market was dominated by national grocers.  By the 1980s the number had dwindled down to three.  Now there's only one left and its not a general grocer.  No real local grocery stores are left.

Still, this is a disturbing, if understandable, trend. The grocery stores that do exist here are all part of national chains, so what claim do they have, other than that they are specialty grocery stores, over Walmart or Sam's Club?  Not much other than that, although that is definitely something.

To date, Americans seem to be largely comfortable, at the grocery isle level anyhow, with this trend. Walmarts drive prices down which benefits consumers. They also drive wages down and wipe out local retailers, which doesn't, as it converts middle class occupations into low paying jobs.  The connection between the two seems, however, oddly lost on most people.

And regionally, a fact of the matter is that with a highly transient population, loyalty to local retailers is of course going to be largely absent, for the most part.

This trend isn't unique to grocery stores, we'd note.  It's simply that its expressed here in a way that directly and obviously impacts everyone. . . the dinner table.  It's not a trend that is inevitable, it's one that we simply allow, without thinking much about it, and in everything.

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

The last garden I put in, 2017.

Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.

The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.

And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).

No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity.  And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.

On prior entries here you'll find photographs of  grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables".  Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables.  I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.

Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".

Pueblo Indian, 1890, living the lifestyle I would, were it an option.

I'm not dissing this.  Indeed, in my imaginary world in which I get to live just the way I'd want to, I'd be one of those guys who ate local as much as possible.  I'd put in a big garden every year and for meat I'd eat the fish, fowl and game animals I shot during the year.  Yes, I'd go full 1719 if I had the option.

Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.

My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table.  But the idea remains attractive.

Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.

That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.

"Modern Street Market", 1920s.

And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.

Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.

Let's consider the humble cabbage.

Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it).  But cabbage doesn't keep all winter.  Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live.  And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall.  But once it started to frost, that would be it.

So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September.  That's it.

You can't keep it after that.

And this would be true of most fresh vegetables.  You'd have them when they first matured.  If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer.  If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once.  In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.

Well what about after that?

Just truck it in, right?

Well, not so much.

In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce.  Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.

Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option.  It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century.  I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.

If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.

So no vegetables in the winter?

No, that was not the case at all.  It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".

1918 poster urging people to turn their backyards into gardens.

For one thing, canning was already a thing, both commercial canning, which was common, and home canning, which was also common. So you could buy canned vegetables all year around.  And this time of year thousands of people. . . mostly women, were busy canning their own garden produce.

Poster urging home canning from World War One.

The process for canning had been worked out in the mid 1800s, and it spread fairly quickly, in part due to armies picking it up to feed their troops in the big wars of the 19th Century.  One thing armies did, I'd note, is to can meat as well, in British parlance "potted meat", which few average people do, but the mother of my father in law did in fact do just that, the only individual person I've ever known to do that.

Famine was a real specter in World War One and World War Two. This Second World War urged home canning to combat it.

I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful.  I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy.  Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child.  Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women.  I know very few people who do it now.

This World War Two era poster urged growing more at home and canning.

My parents always froze some of their garden crop.  But this wasn't an option for people a century ago.  People didn't have home freezers like so many do now.  For that matter, the overwhelming majority of people had an ice box.  Refrigerators weren't a common thing at the time.

Exceptionally nice ice box.  Most homes didn't have one this large or elaborate.

We've dealt with this before, but ice boxes kept stuff cool, not frozen, and had to be regularly replenished with ice for that purpose.  People were still using ice boxes into the 1950s although their days were rapidly waning then.  At any rate, suffice it to say, if you could only keep things cool at home, you clearly had no means of keeping things frozen. No frozen vegetables at any time of the year in 1919.

Some vegetables keep a long time, however, if kept correctly.  Potatoes, for example, keep a really long time.  I've kept potatoes that were harvested in September or October all the way through until late February or March, when I was nearly ready to plant the next crop.  

That emphasizes why a crop like potatoes was such a big deal at one time.  They keep.  And a potato that's kept isn't much different in February, if kept properly, than it was in October.  "Meat and potatoes" weren't a staple as people lacked imagination or something.  You could have potatoes with your meat pretty much all year long.  And there's a few other crops in this category.

Additionally, some crops dry well. Beans are one, and so do peas.  Cowpeas (Cow Peas) were an 18th Century staple.  You probably know them by the name "Black Eyed Peas". Still a popular food in the United States, particularly  the South, they are a food staple in some parts of the world.

Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well.  The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily.  If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.

So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?

Well, yes.  At least they were available during the summer most places.  If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.

But that's only part of the story.

Painted Bricks: Grant Street Grocery, Casper Wyoming

Painted Bricks: Grant Street Grocery, Casper Wyoming:

Grant Street Grocery, Casper Wyoming

Grant Street Grocery in Casper Wyoming is the only surviving small neighborhood grocery store in the town and even advertises the same.



Opened in 1921, the store was converted into a specialty grocery store and deli some years ago, and features meats and cheeses, as well as many other items, that are unlikely to appear on the counters of regular grocery stores.  It's featured here for its simple sign, as well as being a remnant of something that was once very common, a neighborhood store.

I've mentioned this once before, but even during my lifetime a trend away from residential grocery stores, which was already really pronounced when I was a kid, has really developed.

When I was a boy, there was a grocery store that we could walk to and occasionally did for gum and the like on Ash Street.  Downtown there were two more, one on Center and another in North Casper one more on the Sandbar. There was yet another on Elk Street. Finally, there was one downtown on Yellowstone Street.

Today, all of these are gone and only Grant Street remains.  The Sandbar store was the last to close and it morphed into a butcher shop alone, under the same name, that still exists.  Meat was always their strong point.  Grant Street itself closed for a time and was remodeled as a specialty grocer, as noted above.  Prior to that brief closure, it hung on by delivering groceries, being perhaps a bit ahead of its time in some ways in regard to that.

The store on Ash is a t-shirt shop now.  I don't know what the Elk Street store is.  The one downtown, the old Bluebird, is a restaurant.  One of the old groceries is a private residence, which I think is what it was even at the time it was open, its owners operating it the really old fashioned way and living on the premises.  When they retired, they kept on living there, I think.

Okay, maybe I don't care if football players (who are individual people) take the knee, but keep your Corporation's "opinion" to itself.

Note, this is one of the many draft posts that I started a really long time ago, and then never finished.  I have on the order of 300 posts, most barely started, that fit that description.

Writer's block?  No, just the nature of available time.

Anyhow, this item oddly shows right back up in the news again.

Some time back I posted on football players "taking the knee" during the playing of the National Anthem.  As anyone who read it may have noted, I'm sort of generally lukewarm on any opinion there, unlike a lot of people I see (if Facebook is any guide).  I.e, I didn't have a fit about football players taking the knee and, absent an individual athlete's protest reaching the level of that of the 1968 Mexico City, Olympics, I generally don't get too worked up about that.

At the same time, I also tend to disregard individual opinions of people who have risen to fame through their athleticism or because they're entertainers.  Recently, for example, I read where Beyonce was expressing opinions at a concert of some fashion.  It would be nearly impossible for me to care what Beyonce's opinion on anything at all actually is.  Indeed, I thought her daughter's instruction to "calm down" at a recent awards show was pretty much on the mark.

But opinions, particularly social opinions, by corporations really aggravate me.

Recently this has become particularly common, and while I'll give a few entities a pass, it smacks to me of being blisteringly phony.  If corporations, as a rule, suddenly endorse something that's been recently controversial, the issue has probably actually become safe to express.

What this amounts to, of course, is belated virtue signalling, and it's phony.  Corporations main goal, indeed, their stated and legal goal in almost every instance, is to make money for their shareholders.  That's their purpose and focus, and when corporations suddenly take up a cause, what they are often really doing has nothing to do with values and everything with trying to co-opt a movement for profit or not offend a group that's been lately in the news and has obtained financial power accordingly.

Indeed, it's frankly much more admirable when a corporation has a stated position that it adheres to in spite of financial detriment.  The fact that they know an opinion will be unpopular and they stick with it probably says its a real belief.

Which gets back to the perceived views of people in general.  If you look out at a crowed of people supporting anything, or in modern terms posting their support in some fashion on Facebook or Twitter or the like, probably over half, and I'd guess around 2/3s, have no strong convictions on the topic at all. They may believe they do, but in other circumstances they'd be there supporting the other side equally lukewarmly.

Today is American Independence Day.  The day came in the midst of a truly bloody war.  Around 23,000 Americans lost their lives in the war fighting for the Revolution, including those who died of disease, and a nearly equal number were wounded in an era when being wounded was often very disabling.  The British took about 24,000 casualties of all types, meaning they took fewer than the Americans.

But among the "British" were a sizable number of American colonist who fought for the Crown.  Up to 1/3d of American Colonist remained loyal during the war to the United Kingdom.  Only about 1/3d of the American Colonist supported independence or the revolution at all.  The remaining 1/3d took no position.

Even at that, it's not all that difficult, retrospectively, to find example of combatants who fought on both sides of the war.  Some captured American troops were paroled with the promise to fight for the British, and did.  The times being murky and records difficult to keep, some men just fought on both sides depending upon how the wind seemed to be blowing, a risky course of action, but one that some did indeed take.

Howard Pyle's illustration of Tory Refugees.

After the war those die hard Loyalist who couldn't tolerate living in the United States, including many who were so outed as Loyalist they had little choice on that matter, relocated to Quebec where there descendants are still sometimes self identified by initials that note an honorific conveyed by the Crown.  But 1/3d of the American population didn't pull up stakes and relocate, which tells you a lot.  And what that conveys is that a lot of people who thought that the Colonies were making a mistake just shut up.  Indeed, it proved to be the case during the War of 1812 that British soldiers met with sympathy and assistance in Virginia as they marched on Washington D. C., and that was because many Virginians, in that state which had been a colony, of course, retained a higher loyalty and sympathy with the United Kingdom than they did the United States.

But if you read most common commentary today you'll be left with the impression that the Americans, and by that we mean all of the Americans, were eager to shake off the chains of British tyranny.  And I'd wager that as the war began to turn in Congress' favor that view became common at the time and that it really set in by the time the American victory became inevitable.  So most of the men who spoke quietly in favor of King George III at the Rose and Thorne, or whatever, on Saturday nights in 1774 were praising George Washington by 1781.

This commentary, I'd note, isn't directed specifically at Americans in the 1700s by any means, but is more broader.  There are big exceptions to the rule of the get along nature of human opinion to be sure, for example I think the Civil War may be uniquely an exception to it, but people shouldn't make any mistake about this in general.  During the 1930s a lot of trendy social types teetered on the edge of real Communist sympathy while some conservative figures in the country spoke in admiration of Mussolini's and Hitler's governments in their countries.  By 1941, however, everybody in the country was an outright die hard opponent of fascism and militarism.  By 1950 nobody had ever been a Communist sympathizer, not ever.  

In 1968 and later a lot of young Americans protested vigorously about the American role in Vietnam. Quite a few of them vilified American servicemen.  By mid 1980s the same people were backing the troops and by the 1990s quite a few of them were for other foreign wars.

If this suggests that people's stated opinions are fickle and can't be trusted its meant to.  I was in university during the Reagan Administration and a college student would have had to been cavalier or in very trusted company to express any kind thoughts at all about Ronald Reagan.  One of my most conservative in every fashion friends of long standing would openly declare that Reagan was going to reinstate the draft and send us all to fight in Nicaragua, which was just the sort of nonsensical opinion common at the time.  One young computer employee in the geophysics department was unique not only because he was an early computer genius, employed with their super computer that probably is less powerful than a modern cell phone, but because as a recently discharged Navy submariner he was an adamant and open Anti Communist.  Nobody openly expressed views like that.

Which isn't to say that a lot of people didn't think them.

Which is also not to say that a lot of those same people, in the presence of the granola chick at the bar, didn't express the polar opposite.*

Which gets back to the topic of corporations.

If people's confused and muddled approach to what they declare their views is quite often the rule rather than the exception, this isn't the case with corporations.  More often than not, their goal is the bottom dollar.  They're looking out at the confused and muddled crowed and assuming its focused and distinct, and they then leap on board because they want to sell you pants, shoes, or whatever.  and that's cynical even if its self confused cynical.

Which is all the more reason to ignore, or actually buy from the company that is open about just wanting to sell you goods because that's what they do.

*Which recall Zero Mostel's character's line in The Front as to his reason for becoming a Communist.