Funny I saw a bunch of reporting on this just the other day, none of which noted that Wyoming was a state that had such a law. . . no doubt as it didn't until yesterday.
I'm not going to shed any tears for the porn industry.
In other sex, sort of, news, a dude who looks like a dude went to the lady's room accompanied by the press (including a dude) and hoped to get arrested.
The Geneva Protocol, officially the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare", was signed in Switzerland by representatives of Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom United States Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Greece, British India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Siam, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Arguably US use of CS gas in Vietnam violated the treaty. The USSR violated it with lethal gas in Afghanistan.
The first National Spelling Bee was held in Washington, D.C.
The competition was won by 11-year-old Frank Neuhauser of Kentucky, who became a patent lawyer in his adulthood.
And an episode all played out against the background of the state's GOP going increasingly to the very far right.
I'll note that this is "Pride Month". As I've noted before, I don't really get pride month for a bunch of reasons, one simple one being I don't see how a person can be "proud" of their sexual drive. That just seems odd to me. My views on the topic are found in the related thread links below, and a person can read them if they're interested.
I'm also kind of in the camp of the months just being the months, although I do see why Black History Month and Women's History Month got started to focus attention.
Anyhow, over time, Prime Month, which originally was limited to homosexuality, expanded out to LGBTQ, and that's another topic. L G & Q are related topics, but T is really a seperate one entirely, a fact that has caused some Ls to be upset by being included with Ts, and understandably so.
Anyhow, that's the topic of the post.
As noted, this is Pride Month and the Mayor of Evansville, on her own volition, put out small rainbow flags at the Evansville Town Hall. She noted that it represented a municipal spirit of acceptedness, although it was not a municipal act. It was a private one.
This shows something really interesting in general. For native Wyomingites, the view towards LGBTQ topics long was "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone". That's the native Wyoming view on a lot of things.
For this reason, for decades, locals in this community would find themselves in the grocery store line with a man wearing a tutu (I'm sincere on this), and think, "um. . .whatever". Or in my case, "um. . . poor taste in dresses".
The current right wing populist view, however, is very much "I care exactly what you are doing and I'm going to force you to stop doing it".
For locals, therefore, this entire topic has been a bit odd. There's been the movement towards "you must accept", which is generally met with "What? I wasn't bothering you" while also being met with "you must stop them", which has been met with "Why? They weren't bothering me".
Anyhow, the mayor put out flags.
This was, in turn, met with the actions of one Evansville resident who went out and drew swastikas on the sidewalk in protest. In addition, he threatened to purchase German swastika flags and put them out.
Why swastikas?
Well, nobody can really figure that one out. Asked about it in a town work session, he replied:
Yeah, there’s a difference. I’m not that stupid, but what I’m doing here is to make a point.
And what is that point?
Hard to figure.
Anyhow, Evansville residents reacted by having a sidewalk chalk fest. Seems about the best possible reaction, really.
A lesson here is that street level Wyoming isn't nearly as far right as GOP. At some point, that probably begins to have an effect.
Another lesson may very well be that the center needle on this has moved on, giving us an example of Yeoman's Twenty First Law of Behavior for the second time in two days. If that's the case, social conservatives will have a pretty hard time actually moving things back to where they want, as that requires a cultural change, and that change may have already taken place in the opposite direction.
Somewhat related, Wyoming's lone Congressman is backing a bill in Congress to change Pride Month (and I don't know how it ended up being called that) to "Family Month". A Hageman Facebook post stated:
This June, I am proud to cosponsor Rep. Mary Miller's resolution to officially declare June as Family Month.
It is time to reject radical ideologies and honor traditional family values that have shaped our country for generations.
A press release said something similar.
Some Facebook wag posted in reply:
Where's your Hageman family picture?
Whoever posted that was probably well aware that Ms. Hageman goes by her maiden name, under which her legal career was established prior to her marriage, and not the last name of her husband. More significantly, she has no children.
I've always wondered if somebody would start to take notice of this. As a far right Republican, Hageman ran on family values but, with no children of her own, made reference to her nephews and nieces, which aren't ballpark close to you own children.
Now, women don't have children for a lot of reasons. Some can't, for various biological reasons. Sometimes their spouse is sterile, either due to biological reasons or surgical mutilation. Lots of times, however, children were simply avoided, a species of tragedy, frankly, for those who have had children and grasp how they complete your lives, and make you into a real adult.
In polite society, you don't ask, however.
But American polite society is nearly a t hing of the past anymore, and here maybe there's a point to raising it. Amongst the things the far right of the GOP has embraced is pronatalism.
Pronatalism is a philosophy that is based on the concept that (married) couples ought to have a lot of children. Frankly the general thesis of it is that "our" culture is dying and we need to combat it by having children. The concept has actually been around for a very long time and is sometimes associated with the phrase "the battle of the cradle" and the concept of "race suicide". No less of President than Theodore Roosevelt advocated the idea, stating that a man or woman who was childless by choice "merits contempt."
Which is I guess why the question is fair game in regard to the Congresswoman. I'm not suggesting that she has avoided children by choice (I don't know), and even if she had, I wouldn't suggest that, therefore causes her to "merit contempt" However, ff you raise the topic, well then. . . questions can logically follow.
The current GOP has become so focused on this that its floated the idea of a baby bonus, something that hasn't been paid in a Western nation for years and which has never been done in the U.S. The proposal was to pay parents of newborns $1,000, which is just about the cost of one week of Huggies. It's a stupid idea.
From the perspective of Catholics, however, this is a lot of fish on Fridays' during Lent. You find people adopting something sort of generally associated with you, in this case children in marriage, but for oddball secular reasons, and as if the concept is brand new. Catholics don't have children in marriage as a part of a race war. Indeed, Catholics don't really recognize the validity of the concept of "race" at all, which is pretty plain if you go to a Mass in any metropolitan area of more than 10,000 people. By the same token, we don't eat fish on Fridays during Lent (or in many cases, the rest of the year) as we've adopted the Mediterranean Diet or something.
There's been some fears, I might note, that the current set of populists would do just that. It's quite clear that some in the National Conservative/Christian Nationalist camp, would do that if they could.
Anyhow, sidewalk chalk over the top of swastikas was a good end to an odd story.
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare promulgated rules prohibiting separate physical education classes for boys and girls and schools from excluding pregnant students from the classroom.
I can't recall this happening, and I wonder if there were nuances to it. In junior high, which I was just going into, PE classes were definitely separated into male and female. They were not in high school.
I can only recall one pregnant student while in high school, and she was married.
Uganda nationalisted all land holdings.
Sultan Alimirah Hanfere, leader of Ethiopia's Afar people and of the Afar Liberation Front, declared war on the Ethiopian government.
Among
Wyoming’s newborns, Theodore was the most popular male name in 2024 with
Charlotte as the top female choice, according to the Wyoming Department of
Health (WDH). For boys, Theodore was followed by Oliver, Hudson, James,
William, Henry, Grayson, Liam, Noah and Waylon. For girls, Charlotte was
followed by Eleanor, Emma, Ember, Evelyn, Harper, Amelia, […]
Today is Mothers Day, as surely everyone in the US is aware.
I'm going to comment on Mother's Day for a couple of odd reasons, even thought I didn't originally intend to.
The first is this comment by Robert Reich for the day:
Robert Reich@RBReich·14h
Your Mother’s Day weekend reminder that the so-called “party of family values” has historically blocked:
-Paid family & medical leave
-Universal childcare
-Universal pre-K
-Expanded Child Tax Credit
-Programs to support reproductive health
Doesn’t sound very pro-family to me.
First I'll note that I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Reich. Reich is very far left, but his economic commentary, in my view, is generally pretty good. And like him, I'm greatly distressed over what Donald Trump is doing to the country.
Secondly, I really hate the writing convention of saying "this is your reminder". Did I ask for a reminder? If I didn't, that's really annoying. Reich also likes to state "I don't know who needs to know this" which suggest that nobody needs to know whatever he's going to tell us.
He should quit using both of those writing conventions.
Anyhow, like a far lefty, he's bought into the seas of blood position of the Democratic Party. "Programs to support reproductive health" is Orwellian speech for infanticide.
Reich is Jewish, which always makes me wonder how he can support a thesis that holds that infants in the womb, earlier than a certain number of weeks, aren't people. It's the exact same argument that resulted in the Holocaust. It's the exact same argument that expanded into eugenics based homicide in Nazi Germany, and which has advanced murder in the guise of "assisted suicide" in various Western Nations.
I'll be frank that I've never been a huge fan of Mothers Day or Father's Day which remind me, in some ways of the Alcohol and Old Lace episode of the Andy Griffith Show in which two elderly sisters were distilling moonshine for "holidays", of which there were an insane number of manufactured ones. But I really shouldn't be that way for Mother's Day. There are real reasons to honor motherhood and what it entails. But murdering infants isn't a good way to do it.
And there's no reason to pretend, no matter how much the left would like to, that the "my body, my choice" argument is a good one, or even a valid one. A fetus in the womb has a body and its choice i not likely to be murdered. And that body, genetically, is made up of the DNA of two people, not one. You don't get ot be a mother through a unilateral act of self will. Motherhood in some instances wasn't planned, of course, but then much of life is not and a massive murderous do over isn't every justified.
The other reason I chose to post is that somebody I know had been at a Vigil Mass in which the attending celebrant mentioned mothers, but largely, apparently, in the context how mother's support their men, which was pretty much apparently it. The celebrant was Indian (from India). I'm only noting this as its so easy to forgot for Americans, and probably Europeans, how we are actually a minority of the globes' population, and the culture view of other people may be very much not the one we hold.
That oddly enough occured on the same day, yesterday, in which I listed to a Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World episode on 1 Esdras, which is in some (all?) Orthodox Bibles, but not the Catholic Bible, which is itself larger than most Protestant Biles. In it, there's a debate between three Guards about what is the most powerful thing in the world. One Guard presents this, which references the prior two arguments that came before his.:
Then the third, who had spoken of women and truth (and this was Zerubbabel), began to speak: “Gentlemen, is not the king great, and are not men many, and is not wine strong? Who is it, then, who rules them or has the mastery over them? Is it not women? Women gave birth to the king and to every people that rules over sea and land. From women they came, and women brought up the very men who plant the vineyards from which comes wine. Women make men’s clothes; they bring men glory; men cannot exist without women. If men gather gold and silver or any other beautiful thing and then see a woman lovely in appearance and beauty, they let all those things go and gape at her and with open mouths stare at her, and all prefer her to gold or silver or any other beautiful thing. A man leaves his own father, who brought him up, and his own region and clings to his wife. With his wife he ends his days, with no thought of his father or his mother or his region. Therefore you must realize that women rule over you!
“Do you not labor and toil and bring everything and give it to women? A man takes his sword and goes out to travel and rob and steal and to sail the sea and rivers; he faces lions, and he walks in darkness, and when he steals and robs and plunders, he brings it back to the woman he loves. A man loves his wife more than his father or his mother. Many men have lost their minds because of women and have become slaves because of them. Many have perished or stumbled or sinned because of women. And now do you not believe me?
“Is not the king great in his authority? Do not all lands fear to touch him? Yet I have seen him with Apame, the king’s concubine, the daughter of the illustrious Bartacus; she would sit at the king’s right hand and take the crown from the king’s head and put it on her own and slap the king with her left hand. At this the king would gaze at her with mouth agape. If she smiles at him, he laughs; if she loses her temper with him, he flatters her, so that she may be reconciled to him. Gentlemen, why are not women strong, since they do such things?”
It is profound, and note how it came in an ear in which women, in most of the world, would have been regarded as second class citizens. I should note, however, that he went on to then discuss Truth, with that being the most powerful thing in the World.
While it likely shouldn't, that reminded me of Kipling's great poem, The Ballad of the King's Jest, which has this line:
Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.
We spake of them all, but the last the most,
For I sought a word of a Russian post,
Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword
And a gray-coat guard on the Helmund ford.
Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes
In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.
Quoth he: “Of the Russians who can say?
“When the night is gathering all is gray.
“But we look that the gloom of the night shall die
“In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.
“Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
“To warn a King of his enemies?
“We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
“But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
“That unsought counsel is cursed of God
“Attesteth the story of Wali Dad.
It's interesting how Kipling put it, "Four things greater than all things are--Women and Horses and Power and War".
President Ford ordered the evacuation of Americans from Phnom Penh.
Operation Babylift began as a U.S. effort to bring South Vietnamese orphans to the United States. Widely lauded today (it would be unlikely to take place, frankly, under the current administration), there was some criticism at the time on the assertion that not all the children were actually orphans, and that it was a cultural based decision given that young people were being taken out of their native land to avoid communism.
Gen. Weyand met with President Thiệu in Saigon and promised more American aid to South Vietnam, but declined Thiệu's request for a renewal of American bombing of North Vietnamese forces. As they both well knew, without U.S. air support there was no hope for the ARVN.
South Vietnamese Prime Minister Trần Thiện Khiêm resigned. He would take up exile in France and then the United States, converting to Catholicism there. He died in 2021.
Israel and South Africa signed SECMENT, a secret mutual defense agreement.
Bobby Fischer refused to play a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, and thereby ceded the title of chess champion.
Actress Mary Ure, most famous for her role in Where Eagles Dare, and the wife of Robert Shaw, died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates at age 42.
En veinte y dos de febrero de mil setecientos y veinte y cinco años, como Teniente de Cura de éste Presidio, enterré de cruz baja a Diego, indio parvulo de nación Apache, de cuenta de Juan Ruis, soldado, y por ser así lo firmé en dicho día ut supra.
Bachiller Thomas Anttonio Bezerra Nietto (rúbrica)
It was coincidentally the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter.
A freshman legislature is introducing a bill that will ban sanctuary towns and counties in Wyoming, of which there are none.
Some interesting bills:
HOUSE BILL NO. HB0019
Social media-parental consent for minors required.
Sponsored by: Representative(s) Harshman, Lawley, Washut and Wharff and Senator(s) Barlow and Olsen
A BILL
for
AN ACT relating to trade and commerce; requiring parental consent for minors under age eighteen (18) to use a social media platform; providing definitions; requiring rulemaking; and providing for effective dates.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:
Section 1.W.S. 40‑32‑101 and 40‑32‑102 are created to read:
CHAPTER 32
SOCIAL MEDIA REGULATION
40‑32‑101.Definitions.
(a)As used in this chapter:
(i)"Account holder" means a person who has or who creates or opens an account or profile to use a social media platform;
(ii)"Minor" means a person who is a resident of Wyoming, who is under the age of eighteen (18) and who is not married or has not become emancipated as provided in W.S. 14‑1‑201 through 14‑1‑206;
(iii)"Social media company" means a person that is an interactive computer service that provides a social media platform for use;
(iv)"Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company makes available for an account holder to create a profile, upload posts, view the posts of other account holders or interact with otheraccount holders or users.
40‑32‑102.Social media platforms; parental consent required; remedies.
(a)No social media company shall allow a minor to be an account holder on the social media company's social media platform unless the social media company obtains the express consent of the minor's parent or guardian.
(b)Each social media company shall deny access to its social media platform for each account holder who fails to meet the verification requirements specified in subsection (a) of this section until the social media company receives the express parental or guardian consent required under subsection (a) of this section.
(c)The attorney general shall promulgate all rules for:
(i)The process by which a social media company can obtain parental consent for a minor seeking to open or create an account and be an account holder on a social media platform;
(ii)The method by which a parent or guardian of a minor can provide consent for a minor to open or create an account and be an account holder on a social media platform;
(iii)The methods by which social media companies shall verify the authenticity of the parental or guardian consent provided for a minor to open or create an account and be an account holder on a social media platform;
(iv)The methods by which a social media company shall allow parents or guardians to revoke or withdraw consent previously given for a minor to open or create an account and be an account holder on a social media platform and for parents or guardians to revoke or withdraw nonconsent previously expressed and thereafter consent for a minor to open or create an account and be an account holder on a social media platform.
(d)The attorney general may pursue any remedy authorized under the Wyoming Consumer Protection Act against a social media company that fails to comply with this article.
Section 2.The attorney general shall promulgate all rules necessary to implement this act.
Section 3.
(a)Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, this act is effective immediately upon completion of all acts necessary for a bill to become law as provided by Article 4, Section 8 of the Wyoming Constitution.
(b)Section 1 of this act is effective July 1, 2025.
SENATE FILE NO. SF0021
Ban on cell phone use in schools.
Sponsored by: Senator(s) Schuler and Representative(s) Brown, L, Clouston and Larson, JT
A BILL
for
AN ACT relating to education; requiring school districts to adopt policies prohibiting students from using cell phones and smart watches in schools as specified; providing exceptions; providing a definition; specifying applicability; and providing for effective dates.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:
Section 1.W.S. 21‑3‑110(a) by creating a new paragraph (xliv) is amended to read:
21‑3‑110.Duties of boards of trustees.
(a)The board of trustees in each school district shall:
(xliv)Adopt policies to prohibit students from using cellular telephones and smart watches during instructional time. For purposes of this paragraph, "smart watch" means a wearable computing device that closely resembles a wristwatch or other time keeping device with the capacity to act in place of or as an extension of a person's cellular telephone. "Smart watch" does not include a wearable device that can only tell time, monitor a person's health information or track a person's location. Policies adopted under this paragraph shall not prohibit students from using cellular telephones and smart watches under any of the following circumstances:
(A)In the case of an emergency or in response to a perceived threat of danger;
(B)When an employee of the school district authorizes a student to use a cellular telephone or a smart watch;
(C)When using a cellular telephone or a smart watch is included in a student's individualized education plan or plan developed under section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended;
(D)When a health care provider determines that the use of a cellular telephone or a smart watch is necessary to manage a student's health care.
Section 2.Not later than July 1, 2025, each school district board of trustees shall establish policies in accordance with this act.
Section 3.
(a)Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, this act is effective July 1, 2025.
(b)Sections 2 and 3 of this act are effective immediately upon completion of all acts necessary for a bill to become law as provided by Article 4, Section 8 of the Wyoming Constitution.
(END)
December 21, 2024
Chuck Gray is backing proof residency and ballot box banning efforts again this session.
It's ironic in the Trumpiest state in the union the paranoia about people illegally casting votes remains. If they are doing that, they'd be ironically illegally voting, for the most part, for Trump.
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