Emiliano Zapata led a group of armed men in commandeering a police station in Villa de Ayala. They then enlisted 100 townsmen in their revolutionary army.
The Mayor of Jerusalem, Raghib al-Nashashibi, and 150 prominent Arabs in Palestine sent a cable to the Turkish parliament, urging the Ottoman nation to stop further sales of land in Palestine to Jewish immigrants.
A prominent Palestinian figure, he would figure in successive regimes, and his second wife would be Jewish, and from France.
Perhaps love conquered all.
He died at age 71 in 1951.
A common sight in cities at one time:
Cleveland Mounted Police. Note the cut of the great coats.
Renee Nicole Good, widow and mother of one, shot dead by ICE at age 37. The event was widely filmed. ICE will claim their agent was in danger, and perhaps he was, from her car. It's a needless tragedy nonetheless and the courts will no doubt sort it out. Anyway a person looks at it, masked man looking like an army of occupation are an abomination.
It was bound to happen.
Nearly since day one of the illegitimate Trump interregnum, Trump has used use ICE as if it was an uniformed, masked, Sturmabteilung, with that agency recruiting from the MAGA demographic. They were going to kill somebody, sooner or later.
The irony is, really, that they killed a white American, which means Americans might actually care about what happened.
The defense will be that the officer thought the car was going to run him over. Maybe he did. But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that ICE routinely gets into situations where it's hyperaggressive, something made easier by being dressed like soldiers, which they are not, and being masked. In the U.S. no policeman should ever be masked, and moreover, no policeman should look like a soldier. It makes people afraid, and people who are afraid, panic.
Officers can panic too, and of course, armed men, sooner or later are going to shoot somebody.
Today In Wyoming's History: December 16: 1875 William S. Sweezy takes over as U.S. Marshall, replacing Frank Wolcott. Wolcott would later famously be associated with invaders side of the Johnson County War.
Freedom Caucus leader John Bear went on record at a meeting of legislators on how to handle the upcoming populist initiative to reduce property taxes by 50%, after they've just been reduced by 25%, as favoring completely eliminating property taxes in favor of sales taxes.
On the imported geezer reduce my property taxes on the house I bought after I moved here from California initiative, he feels that the effect wouldn't be cumulative (50% of the just reduced 25%), while other legislators do.
May 2, 2025
A press interview of Freedeom Caucus member Bear reveals the WFC wants to treat the Wyoming budget to some DOGEy style actions, particularly in regard to grants and loans.
May 4, 2025
I don't know anything about the woman from Teton County who was his competition, but Miller was another individual who spent a career in the military, and therefore was a lifelong recipient of public funds, and who has now returned as an opponent of the Federal government.
For reasons I won't go into, I've seen some of the book that is featured in this article, and there's no way it should be in the children's section of a library.
A draft bill would allow for nuclear facilities to have armed guards as a type of private police force.
Private police forces are rare, but not completely unknown. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association at one time was authorized to have them, although that's long ago in the past. While I haven't kept up on it, so I don't know the current status, railroads at one time had them as well.
DOGE has been such a disaster that even Trump is questioning it. This is the last thing Wyoming needs
Deep down, to a large extent, the Freedom Caucus just hates the government.
Meanwhile:
The State's Democratic Party is abasically as dead as a doornail. Those looking for a middle path aren't being offered it by the Democrats, who recently replaced their leadership. The thin, bow tie, wearing newly elected leader provides an apt symbol for a party grossly out of step with the state.
Wyoming lawmakers step toward bill clarifying corner crossing’s legality: Some agricultural industry lobbyists urged a legislative committee to wait and see whether the U.S. Supreme Court takes the case, but others — including law enforcement — testified that they could use precise legal directions.
Gomers in the Wyoming “Freedom” Caucus: If the caucus was a herd, it would be full of gomers, columnist Rod Miller says. Its members make a lot of noise, but can’t get the job done.
And of course 82 year old Jim Magana, who seemingly hasn't managed to grasp that the positions he consistently advocates hurt the reputations of ranchers in general, is at it again:
Magagna should have stepped down from a leadership role with the WSGA a good 30 years ago. He's hurting the livestock industry by seemingly never accepting its no longer the 1960s.
Ayes included Pearson, Cowley Republican Rep. Dalton Banks, Cheyenne Republican Rep. Steve Johnson, Riverton Republican Rep. Pepper Ottman, Douglas Republican Rep. Tomi Strock, Thermopolis Republican Rep. John Winter and Casper Republican Sen. Bob Ide.
Opposing were Buffalo Republican Sen. Barry Crago, Cheyenne Republican Sen. Taft Love, La Barge Republican Rep. Mike Schmid, Baggs Republican Rep. Bob Davis and Laramie Democrat Rep. Karlee Provenza.
Of course, Casper Republican Ide is in favor of it.
Don't vote for the people in the aye column.
And with this hideous idea, we're going to close out this edition and start a new one.
China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins.
The Chinese Civil War was the topic of a political cartoon as well.
The murdered Game Wardens were Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson who were killed by ardent Nazi sympathizer and German immigrant Johann Malten. The same Game Wardens had arrested Malten for game violations when investigating, interestingly enough, claims that Malten had been involved in espionage and was relaying weather reports on shortwave, something that was illegal during the war when there was a blackout on weather reporting as the information was useful to submarines. Upon visiting Malten's cabin in the Sierra Madres they found he had committed numerous game violations.
On this occasion they were stopping by to see if Malten had continued to ignore the law. They were shot down out of hand when they arrived.
Malten burned his cabin down and it was officially reported that he'd died within it, although the evidence of that is very poor. There were reported sightings of him for years thereafter.
And a selection of 1945 cartoons.
I knew about this story because former Wyoming Game Warden David Bragonier wrote about it in his book about Wyoming Game Wardens, Wild Journey: On the Trail With a Wyoming Game Warden in Yellowstone Country. It's a good book, and I recommend it.
Bragonier discusses this event, although I clearly don't remember everything I read in his account. That's probably not too surprising as I read the book in 1999. What I recall but didn't see in the accounts on the murder you can find here is that the investigation was associated not only with the killer's German nationality and his strong Nazi sympathies, but also with shortwave radio transmissions that could not be pinned down.
There's a bunch of interesting things that could, and if a person had time, should be explored here as the story raises all sorts of undeveloped oddities.
One of them is that Lakanen and Simpson are two out of the three Wyoming Game Wardens who were murdered by immigrants (to the extent I know why the various ones who lost their lives in the line of duty did). I'm not saying that immigrants murder game wardens, but this is an interesting fact. The other one is John Buxton, who was murdered by a youthful Austrian immigrant in 1919. In that instance he had taken a .30-30 Savage rifle from a 17 year old who drew a revolver and killed him. The reasons that Buxton was checking the boys is unclear. Stories frequently claim they were hunting out of season, but that seems incorrect. They were certainly overarmed for rabbits, however, with a .30-30 being way too large for that pursuit. Buxton might have been checking them as their activities seems suspicious, which frankly they do, or because there was a state law at the time that prohibited aliens from carrying firearms.
The killers handgun, we might note, was concealed.
I only note this as its odd. Hunting is common in Germany and Austria, and indeed there's a strong hunting culture there, but it's highly regulated. As a result, poaching is fairly common as well, even though its highly criminal. Indeed, one of the SS's units during World War Two, the Dirlewanger Brigade, was originally made up of convicted poachers, although it moved on to other criminals over time.
Anyhow, I wonder if these people were just hugely out of sink with any culture at all.
In the earlier murder, it's been noted that the young men had been in run-ins apparently with Italian immigrants in the same location. Austro Hungaria and Italy had been on opposite sides of World War One. Again, I'm not saying that caused the murder, but I do wonder if they conceived of themselves as being very much on the outside of things.
Another interesting thing, although having nothing to do with the focus on this page, is the lingering Nazi sympathies in some quarters amongst German immigrants who chose to continue to live in the country. That carried on, quietly, well after the war, even after the news of the Holocaust became known.
Odd.
If Malten was actually a spy, that may explain the killing in and of itself.
Another thing this story oddly brings up is the extent to which trapping remained economically viable.
Trapping was pretty common in Wyoming up into the 1970s, when there was a fur market price collapse. I had, well still have, traps, although I haven't set them for decades. In the 1970s high school kids like myself supplemented our incomes by trapping or hunting coyotes for their furs. The market was so lucrative at the time that there were people who flew in from out of state and hunted coyotes near Miracle Miles, something we didn't appreciate very much as we didn't have those sorts of resources available to us. The Federal Government was also big into predator control at the time which we also didn't appreciate much for the same reason.
Furs are, fwiw, an actual renewable resource fabric, one of the few.
Fur coats were a big deal for women at this time and would, again, be throughout the 1950s. They were not nearly as much of a luxury item as people like to remember. My mother had a heavy mink coat that she brought down from Montreal that she wore on really cold days. As a kid I loved it when she brought it out, due to the feel of the soft minks.
It was, in spite of Donald Trump and the Sweet Home Alabama crowe dof the GOP may believe, colder then.
I've never looked into it but I suspect that synthetic fabrics had as much to do with the decline in furs as anything else. That started during World War Two and is well evidenced by the Air Force's switch from sheepskin flight altitude flight jackets to synthetic ones. That trend continue into the 1950s and I suspect it just generally caught up with fur coats by the 1980s. Indeed, the association of fur with luxury somewhat increased in that time, with it generally being the case that things are regarded as luxurious not only for their scarcity, but because they really aren't needed.
More on fur clothing some other time.
I guess the final thing I'll note is how dangerous of job being a game warden is. A lot of the crimes you investigate are, by default, armed crimes.
Given that, it's amazing to look back and realize that when I was a kid wardens didn't carry sidearms. They weren't allowed to. I recall when that changed and many did not take up what was then the option to carry them. Now they're required to.
Indeed, I was recently stopped by a warden and frankly he wasn't very nice. That's a new trend as well. I don't like it. But not only was he not nice, he was extremely intimidating carrying a government issued handgun on a government issued gunbelt and wearing a government issued flak jacket.
I've really hated the militarization of the policy and this is all part of it. Everytime I see a policeman anymore, including a game warden, they're dressed like they're going into Hue in 1968. All policemen of every type are civilians. They're simply deputized civilians. They shouldn't look like an occupying army. And if the treat people rudely, and many do, and are standing their armed treating you like you are a detained Vietnamese villager, it's scary.
A little of that comes across, I'd note, in Bragonier's book, in spite of my recommendation of it. It's a good book, but he displayed an element of contempt for the public he served in it.
David Bragonier must be, I'd suspect, gone to his reward by now His biography indicates that he was born in Iowa in 1937 and moved to Wyoming after graduating high school. He became a game warden over twenty years later, in 1958, something that would be extremely difficult to do now due to the education requirements. He briefly worked for the Forest Service before that.
A man becoming a Game Warden at 39, which he did, would be really unusual now. Probably impossible.
I actually have twice tried to plow that field myself, rejecting it once as I just go engaged. I would have been about 30 at the time. It'd be completely impossible for me to become a Game Warden now as I not have a wildlife management degree. I suppose that requiring that specific degree is a good thing, but I do miss the days when a lot of Game Wardens were basically from ranching families. Even when I was that age, many of them fit that category. My cohort was probably about the last one that would meet that description.
I went on, of course, to a successful career in the law, and I was already a lawyer, of course at age 30, and had been for a few years. I took one fork in the road. You aren't supposed to look back. Luke tells us, in a different context, that "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God". I'll confess I've looked back a lot.
Having said all of that, I spoke the same warden (turns out he's very green) as I found a poached elk about two weeks later. I had to guide him in, by phone, to the location. He was very nice on that occasion, and that's how things should be.
China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins.
The Chinese Civil War was the topic of a political cartoon as well.
The murdered Game Wardens were Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson who were killed by ardent Nazi sympathizer and German immigrant Johann Malten. The same Game Wardens had arrested Malten for game violations when investigating, interestingly enough, claims that Malten had been involved in espionage and was relaying weather reports on shortwave, something that was illegal during the war when there was a blackout on weather reporting as the information was useful to submarines. Upon visiting Malten's cabin in the Sierra Madres they found he had committed numerous game violations.
On this occasion they were stopping by to see if Malten had continued to ignore the law. They were shot down out of hand when they arrived.
Malten burned his cabin down and it was officially reported that he'd died within it, although the evidence of that is very poor. There were reported sightings of him for years thereafter.
And a selection of 1945 cartoons.
The 3 November 1945 declaration was made in Indonesia, encouraging the formation of political parties as part of an anticipated Indonesian democracy.
Irvin Charles Mollison was sworn in as a U.S. Customs Court judge in New York City. He the first African-American to serve on the federal bench within the continental United States.
L'Osservatore Romano printed a long list of Fascist offenses against Catholics.
Italy announced a new law providing that any newspaper publishing attacks on the government that were "too strong and too frequent" would receive two warnings, after which the paper would no longer be recognized.
Mikis Theodorakis (Μιχαήλ "Μίκης" Θεοδωράκης), Greek composer known for Zorba the Greek's score, was born.
Constitutionalist Gen. Pablo Gonzáles Garza entered Mexico City
Sheriff's Deputy Constable Pablo Falcon and Deputy Sheriff Encarnacion Cuellar were shot and killed when they were ambushed by six men at a dance hall three miles from Brownsville, Texas. They are asserted to be the first victims of the Plan of San Diego, with it being ironic in that they were both Hispanic. Other causes for the ambush have been theorized.
The Germans scuttled the cruiser SMS Königsberg in the Rufiji River, German East Africa following the vessel being heavily damaged in action against the Royal Navy.
