Stream to table. Two Sundays.

Stream to table. Two Sundays.

Stream to table. Two Sundays.

Mala Ipsa Nova

The University of Wyoming is preparing for a $35,000,000 cut its budget, which comes on the heels of a $42,000,000 cut in 2016-2018.

I really think this is a mistake. 

This is something I've written about before in terms of Wyoming's economy, but like it or not Wyoming's economy is dependant upon four things and is pretty much limited to four things; those being 1) the extractive industries, 2) tourism, 3) agriculture and 4) government.  Right now all of those things are hurting.

Education can be viewed as a species of governmental employment in that it is public employment. Beyond that, its been the claim in Wyoming for years and years that the state needed to "diversify" the economy. The extent to which that can really be done, it might be noted, in the current American economy is debatable, although there are things that definitely could be done and won't be.  Be that as it may, a really strong educational system with a really strong university is one of those things.  Without that, we won't be diversifying our economy.

Of course, what we could do is make really targeted cuts.  Athletics could be one and the university could opt out of Division 1 athletics. What that would do I frankly don't know, but it could be looked at.  And it might be time to look at the universities degree programs, which might emphasize some over others.  UW lacks, we might note, graduate programs which would be of value to the state but which has one graduate program at least which is now of questionable utility to the state.  The time has come to ponder these things.

One group of people who won't be gathering to ponder, apparently, are legislators, who decided this past week not to go back into a third session this year.  Or at least so far.

People who will not be required to ponder more are travelers, who may need to now do more planning about intended "stops".  On Monday ten of the state's rest stops are going to be closed.

This causes me to recall that years and years ago, when the kids were small, I thought about publishing a book just dedicated to the state's rest stops. This followed the idea of doing a book on the state's roadside historical markers, which it turns out had already been done, but which lead to our Today In Wyoming's History website, which itself turned into a book.  The book on rest stops was putatively titled I'm Just Here For The Potty, which riffed on Gretchen Wilson's then popular song, I'm Just Here For The Party.  In thinking on it, it's a good title for a blog, and now it is one, with no posts, just yet.  If travel ever opens up again in the state, I'll start working on it.

June 13, 1920. Silent Cal chosen for VP.

The morning news was reporting what the evening news had the prior day, Harding was the GOP nominee.

And people were learning that Calvin Coolidge would be his running mate.

Coolidge was a New Englander who at the time was the Governor of Massachusetts.  He had come to prominence the prior year during the Boston police strike and unlike his running mate, he had no hidden bones, or mistresses, in the closet.

Concrete Ships

Concrete Ships.

Because they're interesting.

Blog Mirror: Snake Avoidance

Snake avoidance.

June 12, 1920. Warren G. Harding Nominated

On his day in 1920, Warren G. Harding, nobody's favorite President, was nominated for that position by the Republican Party.  The nomination would propel him to the Oval Office, which he'd occupy only briefly, dying of a heart attack in 1923.

Harding had started off as a newspaper owner and writer who entered politics contemporaneously with purchasing a newspaper.  He had done well as an Ohio politician and had a slow start in the 1920 campaign until his return to normalcy speech in May.  The Republican "Old Guard" supported him as he wasn't one of the more radical Republicans who were running that year.

Harding was ably supported in his political aspirations by his wife, Florence, but his personal life was complicated and had already become an issue for the Republican Party, which was being taken care of in back rooms with the application of cash.  A long running affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips had just ended when she blackmailed him during his run for the Presidency.  The blackmail attempt, in fact, is the second one she'd attempted.

The Hardings and the Phillips had been close and had traveled to Europe together prior to World War One while the affair was ongoing.  It broke there and Florence Harding was furious, and claimed it wasn't the first time Warren had so strayed.  The Hardings returned to the US but Carrie remained in Germany with her children and threatened to blackmail Warren the first time when he was set to vote on a declaration of war against Germany.  She had returned to the US prior to the war and the affair had recommenced.

In 1920 the affair ended and she threatened to expose it. The GOP paid her off by paying for an extended Asian tour and annual stipend.  This was occuring just at this point in the campaign.

That wouldn't stop Harding from commencing an affair with the much younger Nan Britton, who like Carrie was from Marion, Ohio.  In fact, not only had it commenced, he already had an unacknowledged child by Britton.

Britton would become pregnant by Harding in 1919, something kept secret during his lifetime and only proved through DNA in much later years.  The affair with Britton ran until Harding's untimely 1923 death, although he was much more careful about his instructions with Britton regarding their correspondence than he had been with Phillips.  He also was providing child support to Britton during his lifetime, but his widow Florence cut it off after his death.

The President and the First Lady, who was protective of his legacy, in 1922.

Britton attempted to reveal the affair and the child through the publican of a book upon Harding's death, but the claim was contested and capable of being contested at that time given the state of science at the time and the fact that Harding, who had mumps as a child, had not produced any children with Florence.  Britton never wavered in her claim and DNA testing revealed in the 1990s that Elizabeth Ann Harding Blaesing wsa in fact the daughter of the late President.

Britton never married.

The grade school I went to as a kid had originally been named in honor of President Harding, who had only recently died at the time it was built.  The School District originally ran "Harding School" as a school for mentally disabled children and the stigma associated caused the district to rename it when it was converted in the 50s into a much larger conventional grade school which was named after James Garfield, another President that isn't usually subject to huge admiration. The old name remained on the concrete entryway of the old part of the school, however.

Launch of concrete ship, Cuyamaca, which had a home port of San Diego.  June 12, 1922.

Blog Mirror: At the Heart of The Buckeye State

At the Heart of The Buckeye State

Signs of the times.

Gone With The Wind has been removed by HBO from its demand offerings.  The film (I've never read the book) definitely has racist elements, but should they have done that?

In some recent posts here I've noted how the services have banned the display of the Confederate battle flag on their installations.

That was long overdue and I was quite surprised, really, that it was allowed in any form at all now.  Having said that, I didn't take into account coffee cups and bumper stickers and things like that, which would make up most of the impacted displays.  A search for official, or even unofficial, U.S. military use of the Confederate flag failed to reveal any, although a long serving soldier (now long retired) indicated that you would see it in Vietnam from time to time.  A search for that did reveal an obviously posed instance of that, but I don't know the context.

If anyone has any more on this story, please post it as a comment.

Anyhow, as a Westerner who always found the Confederate flag offensive and who grasps why it's offensive to blacks, this is a good move by the services even its probably mostly symbolic.  If it isn't mostly symbolic, it's long overdue.

I'll note, fwiw, that we've posted on the Confederate flag here as long ago as 2016, so we're not taking a new position to be in the current midstream of popularity.  That thread was one of the few here that got a lot of posts, mostly by upset and made people, and for some time after it was posted it'd suddenly become one of the most popular ones of a day or week, as probably mostly made people stopped in to view it for some reason.

There's also a move to rename the ten U.S. Army installations named after Confederate generals in the 1917 to 1942 time frame.  That's more complex and I'll post on it here soon.

On the Confederate flag, NASCAR has now banned it.

NASCAR has is origins as a Southern sport in a very distinct way, and it grew out of rum running.  Many of its early racers were rum runners. I've never warmed up to it and never know anything about it. Indeed, I've cited NASCAR as a reason that you shouldn't have people who don't participate in an activity regulate it, as if I was put in charge of NASCAR there'd be no NASCAR.  It's not that I don't like it, I don't get it, and accordingly its one of those activities that I don't care anything about and if left to run it, I wouldn't.

Anyhow, NASCAR is a Southern thing in its origin and as late as the 1980s its easy to imagine the "Good Ole Boys" of "Hazard County" driving to a NASCAR event in the General Lee, with the Confederate battle flag painted on the roof.  Now it isn't.

Of course, NASCAR isn't a Southern thing anymore either.  It's gone national. Still, seeing NASCAR ban the flag is actually pretty surprising and significant.  I'll be really curious to see where this all leads as I suspect, but may be in error, it'll provoke a bit of a counter reaction from some fans.  Having said that, it really isn't a Southern thing at all like it once was, so I may very well be way off the mark and this will pass without a note.

For that matter, we may actually be in an era, which started a few years ago, in which symbols of the Southern cause in the Civil War are losing their appeal to Southerners in general.  Confederate symbols have been removed from state flags to a large degree.  I don't know if any remain. Those symbols were incorporated in the 20th Century during the Lost Cause era, but have pretty much come back off in the last few decades.  That was controversial itself, but it doesn't seem to be now.  Maybe modern Southerners have lost their attachment to the "Blood Stained Banner" that was their third national flag.

The "Blood Stained Banner" is the nickname given to that flag, and it wasn't actually adopted, oddly enough, as the Confederate standard until March 4, 1865, about a month away from their ultimate defeat.  It was closely based on the square standard adopted on May 1, 1863, however.  That the Confederacy would run around worrying about flags in the Spring of 1865 gives insight to the human mind and how it self distracts.  In March 1865 Confederate troops were departing the service of the Confederacy en masse and the war was all but over.  Nobody was making flags at that time and adopting a new one was really silly, but then even after Hitler killed himself in May 1945 the successor German administration appointed a national postmaster, as if they were delivering the mail.

That last flag was incorporated on a lot of Southern official and unofficial things thereafter, from state flags to the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, but that was a 20th Century thing starting in the early 20th Century.* One hundred years later, the opposite is going on pretty quickly.

One thing that's also going on is the mass defacement of monuments, here and abroad.  Included in these are two Christopher Columbus statutes which are claimed to have been seen by the vandals as symbols of "white supremacy".

Defacing monuments, even controversial ones, is really problematic if they've been up for awhile and tend to be a symbol of virtue signaling.  An oppressed population tearing down a statute of a current oppressor, such as Iraqi's treating down statutes of Saddam Hussein, are one thing, but a population tearing down an old symbol, like Russians toppling statues of Lenin, or Americans toppling down statutes of Columbus, are hypocritical to a large degree.  The same populations that do that are often the same ones who were all keen on putting them up in the first place, and would be again today if it fit the zeitgeist.  A population expressing their current view about a current figure is one thing, mobs defacing things of the past are quite another and don't tend to pass the test of time well.

One reason for that is that every single living human being is a descendant, every single one, of thieves, murderers, rapists and colonizers without any exceptions whatsoever.  This doesn't excuse past injustices of any kind, but much of this sort of activity is based on the concept that some group is uniquely to blame and that doesn't pass the smell test.

Colonizers may have been doing something we don't approve of now, but in the past it was a universal human activity.  The Spanish in Mexico, for example, defeated an imperial power in the form of the Aztecs, and that's just one example.  And while moderns might like to wring their hands on the Spanish in 1492, both in the New World and in Spain itself (the year that the Spanish Reconquista was completed, which was regarded as much more significant at the time), if we want to go back and correct all colonial injustices we have to recall that the Spanish were the victims of Berber and Arab Islamic colonization, and that the Berbers and the Arabs were the victims of Islamic Arabian Peninsula colonization, which came some years after the fall of Roman colonization, which of course was simply following in the wake of Greek colonization. . . etc. etc.  

Indeed, the anti colonial concept didn't exist in the world in any concrete form until the American Revolution created it in 1776, and it took us a long time to really hone that.  It didn't spread as a concept notably until Simon Bolivar picked it up some decades later, and as a global concept, well that really took Wilson's Fourteen Points for it to become rooted.

So the basic gist of it is, that before you lop of Columbus marble head, you better first look closely at your own culture and find the colonizers in it.  There will be some. That doesn't mean that taking in that fashion is justified, but it does mean that it is to some degree a human norm.  The concept that it should not be is a Christian one, and if we're going to adopt that view, and we should, we need to adopt all of what goes with it, which people generally aren't too keen on doing.  

Indeed, those inclined to assault a statute can't be presumed in total to have adopted the only set of values that would hold that the deeds of man, much of which are negative, should be regarded as folly.  It's unlikely that very many attending to a statues defacing are then going on to express vows of poverty and chastity so as to make their act pure.  Probably hardly any, as in none.

Finally, a person has to wonder where the societal statute of limitations applies to such acts.  If current populations are allowed to deface a current symbol, as noted, that would be one thing. But if defacing a statute of a 15th  Century figure is a good thing to do, would it accordingly be a good idea to take down statues of Caesar and Alexander, where they might be found, given that those guys were perfectly okay with a lot of things we might find offensive today?  Should the Pyramids and Egyptian monuments be destroyed, their antiquity notwithstanding, on the basis that the Egyptians were pretty bad, pretty often?  There are thousands of such examples that could easily be made. The point is that if you can justify defacing fairly old statutes on the concept that they represent oppression suffered by you and your ancestors, pretty soon you end up acting like the Taliban and are blowing down ancient monuments in the desert in the name of your own personal sense of the definition of purity.

In terms of symbols, HBO is removing Gone With The Wind from its stable of on demand offerings.

Gone With The Wind is largely viewed as a great film, but it has racist elements without a doubt.  At least one of the female black actresses, Butterfly McQueen, simply hated her role as she was portraying her character which, under the old studio system, I don't blame her for a bit.  I.e, she was forced to play a demeaning and insulting role.  The portrayals of blacks in the film are insulting and the romantic portrayal of Southern planters absurd.

Still, it's a great film, and that's the problem.  The story is, for all its flaws, and there are some whopping ones, engaging to watch and the technicolor filming is awesome.  Clark Gable's wry smiles and glances in the film make it worthwhile to watch all in themselves.  At the same time, it's Lost Cause sentiments are rampaging insulting to anyone with a sense of what the Civil War was about.

HBO, by doing that, is engaging in a little bit of cinematic book burning, sort of.  Gone With The Wind isn't Birth Of A Nation by any means.  If some of it, indeed a lot of it, is shockingly racist to watch, well that might serve to remind us of what the Lost Cause era was like and why we are where we are now, in terms of African Americans still suffering what they suffer.  Gone With the Wind came out in the late 1930s and tells us a lot about the views of that time, coming as it did right before World War Two and a good decade before the Federal Government started its push towards civil rights.

If HBO, and for that matter, all of the entertainment industry, wants to act in virtue and not just virtue signal, it might take a look at more contemporary offerings.  Hollywood is all about looking good but at the same time it's all about violence in films.  If you watch nearly any television channel you'll stray across a police show at some point, and it won't be long, in which burnt out police are using questionable tactics along with burn out DA's using questionable tactics to bring in the bad guys.  Indeed, entertainment centered on police went somehow from Car 54, in the 50s, to the "law and order" presentations of the 70s, something that was reflective of a public reaction to the protests of the 1970s, and it's never really come back.  It's funny how an industry that is the flagship of "Me Too", rediscovering old values and branding them as new, so as to not have to really adhere to them in depth, hasn't really grasped this one yet.  If life imitates what passes for art, we shouldn't have much doubt on why we fall so short.

In other news, Starbucks, which like to do virtue signalling itself, is closing 400 stores in a shift to a takeout marketing strategy.  This is no doubt as a result of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

I'm not personally keen on Starbucks even though I really like coffee.  Part of this is simply because I don't like their coffee very much.  Quite a bit of it is, in my limited experience, blisteringly acidic.  I like good coffee but I don't like feeling that I just drank something that was brewed to strip paint from a merchant tanker making an overall call to a dry dock in Seattle.  But in addition to that I really hate chain merchants virtue signalling.

If a local store, whatever it is, takes a stand on something, well the more power to them.  They put themselves at risk by doing that, and I'll give them the thumbs up simply for doing it, and I trust they give me the thumbs up if I choose to eschew them thereafter as I don't agree.  That's the exchange in doing that, and that's to their credit.  But with chain merchants its just a bunch of hooey, in my opinion. Usually by the time they've done that they're grown so large that their local competitors are either nonexistent or so marginalized that the virtue signalling is risk free in the extreme.  That accordingly smacks of simply riding the zeitgeist.  I'd fully expect such chain outfits to support McCarthyism in one moment and oppose it in the next.  In most cases the risk is about the same as it would have been to support the war effort during World War Two or the National Recovery Act during the Depression.  M'eh.

I do feel differently, I should note, about entities that support something to do with their target market.  Grocery stores doing something on hunger, sporting goods stores doing something on conservation, and things of that type, mean something. Coffee shops doing anything other than worrying about hungry people or the conditions of the growers are another.

Anyhow, Starbucks is one of those outfits that I don't admire for the reasons stated above, but I also frankly don't admire how the American economy has come to so closely resemble the manufacturing of a Model A Ford.  It's an assembly line.  Coffee can be brewed by about anyone pretty easily.  Starbucks doesn't need to be on every corner.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Not to pick on Southern Rock, a mostly defunct musical genre, but the Confederate flag seemed to be really popular in that community at the time and its really difficult not to view that as a white Southern reaction to the Civil Rights era and its focus on the region.  The Lynyrd Skynyrd hallmark Sweet Home Alabama is itself a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man, although Young himself thought he'd gone overboard with that song.

Southern Rock, which was based in the blues and therefore had a genuine Southern origin, was part and parcel of the other sorts of Southern electric music that traveled with and was part of rock music at the time.  All it was heavily blues based and its sometimes difficult to tell where the blues left off and rock genres began.  Swamp Rock, out of Louisiana, was another example, but even British rock like that of Ten Years After shared a lot of similarities.  As rock music moved increasingly into glitch and glam with the big hair bands of the late 1970s a lot of the more genuine rock music of the 50s, 60s and 70s started to fade away and today they very much have.  This was part of the reason for the rise of Country Music from the 80s to the present day.

Country Music has a heavy base in the South and its really a form of Southern music.  Association with the rural South or an imagined rural South is strong in it and while I can't think of any use of the Confederate flag within it, my guess is that it'll take steps to distance itself from the South of the Confederacy as well.  Indeed, as one odd example, I've often wondered what the name of the band Lady Antebellum was supposed to mean, and the association with the glorified Antebellum South is nearly impossible not to make.

June 11, 1970. Leaving Libya

F100 Super Saber taking off from Wheelus Air Force Base, Libya.

On this day in 1970 the American military presence in Libya came to an end when the U.S. Air Force turned Wheelus Air Force Base over to the North African country.

Few people today would even be aware that the USAF had a base in Libya, but it first started having a presence at Wheelus during World War Two when it took over the former Italian air field in 1943 after it was captured by the British.  It occupied the air field steadily until this date in 1970. During much of that time the US had friendly relations with the country's monarch, King Idris I.

King Idris I of Libya, who reigned from 1951 until 1969. The former king would live out his life in exile in Egypt.

Idris was overthrown in a military coup led by Muammar Gaddafi, who subsequently ruled the "republic" from that point until is his violent death at the hands of a revolutionary crowd in 2011.  During Idris' reign the nation went from being one of the poorest in the world to being one of the richest, due to the discovery of oil, and at the same time the purpose of the USAF presence in the country declined to the point of irrelevance.  Gaddafi wanted the US out and the US, for its part, was glad to leave.

Wheelus was soon used by the Soviet Air Forces as a base and as a Libyan air force base.  It was hit  in 1986 by the U.S. during it raid on Libya during the Reagan administration.

USAF FB-111 landing after air strike in Libya in 1986.

The air strip is an airport today.

On the same day William Bentvena was shot by Tommy DeSimone, an event, mostly recalled from the movie Goodfellas.  Bentvena was a "made man" of the Gambino crime family and DeSimone would disappear in 1979.

June 10, 1920. Activities in and about Washington.

Republican Convention, June 10, 1920.

While the Republican Convention was going on in Chicago, back in Washington the Federal Water Power Act, now the Federal Power Act, went into law The act regulated hydroelectric activities and is the basis for power regulation in the United States.

Also in Washington some young women were getting a lesson in baseball.

Germany on this day announced that it had reduced the size of its army to 200,000 men in compliance with the Versailles Treaty.

Lex Anteinternet: Freezing

Lex Anteinternet: Freezing: The temperatures, that is.  And in early June. And I mean literally, not figuratively. "It's going to snow tonight", a fri...

Shoot, even the highway in and out of Laramie is closed, due to snow.

Freezing

The temperatures, that is.  And in early June.

And I mean literally, not figuratively.

"It's going to snow tonight", a friend told me who watches the weather closely.  He meant on the mountain, but that's close enough, particularly if you live at an elevation just sufficiently higher than the town to get snow when it rains in town.

This spring the weather was cold, like winter. That's not that unusual here, but it was unrelenting and it kept on keeping on.  Now the weather is like mid spring, which means cold. 

I know that its only a matter of time until I get on the elevator and some office dweller will look over and cheerfully say "It sure has been hot!", bused on the calendar rather than the actual weather.  But it hasn't been.  And it isn't.

June 9, 1920. In Memorium.

Fort Worth, Texas.  June 9, 1920.

Fort Worth was the subject of wide lenses on this day in 1920.

I've been to Fort Wort and this looks sort of familiar today, but I'm not familiar enough to really comment on it.  Is anyone who stops in here familiar with the town?

War memorials Council appointed by the Secty. of War as an advisory group for consultation with the War Dept. in matters respecting the deposition of overseas dead.

In the US the council appointed by the Secretary of War dealing with overseas war dead had their photograph taken.  In the UK, on the same day, the Imperial War Museum opened.  It is one of the greatest military museums in the world.

June 8, 1920. Republican Convention, White House visitors, Churchill on uniforms.

Prominent woman Republican, Helen V. Boswell, at Republican Convention.

The Republican National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1920. There were six possible nominees for the position of Republican candidate going into the convention, including one surprising name in the list.  The candidates were:

Warreng G. Harding.
Leonard Wood.
Frank Lowden
Hiram Johnson
William Sproul
Nicholas Butler
Calvin Coolidge
Robert LaFollette

How LaFollette, the famed "Wisconsin Bolshevik" made that list is a mystery.

The convention was wide open so any of those running could have been chosen going into the convention.

On the same day Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks visited the White House.

Pickford and Fairbanks.

Fairbanks and Pickford had only recently been the subjects of a potential scandal when it was debated whether a prior divorce by one of them (I forget which one) had been finalized prior to their marriage.  Apparently it was worked out by now.  It was the second marriage for both, and it wouldn't be the last one as they'd divorce in 1936 and each would remarry again one final time.

Winston Churchill addressed parliament on the subject of British military uniforms, which was part of an overall debate on the subject.  He stated:

I propose to deal with the general aspect of this matter in a general statement. Although it may not completely answer all the points raised, I think it will be better if hon. Members have the opportunity of having this statement in their minds, and then they can see whether it is necessary to put down further questions next week. 

The only expenditure which will fall upon this year's Estimates in regard to full dress for the Army is that in respect of the Foot Guards, which are to be immediately supplied with full dress during the current year. The Household Cavalry have had full dress throughout the War, and it is only a question of maintaining this. The troops, of course, have a free issue. 

As regards the officers, new entrants will receive a grant of £150 towards the cost of uniform, and those who joined during the War will get £150, less the amount of outfit grant already received, which in most cases is £42 10s. The re-issue to the Guards and Household Cavalry troops of full dress stands in a special position on account of the ceremonial duties which these troops discharge in the capital of the Empire. 

The extension of full dress to the other branches and units of the Service, which my military advisers also consider desirable, will be spread over the next four or five years, unless it should be decided, when the Estimates are reviewed next year, that this programme should be abandoned. Ample notice will be given to all units, and no existing stock, either of khaki or khaki uniforms, will be wasted. Khaki with the cap or steel helmet will remain permanently the working service dress of the whole Army. There is not, nor ever has been, any question of its abolition. 

The only question which is now before us is the issue of full dress uniform to the Guards, and the retention of full dress uniform by the Household Cavalry. This involves an expenditure, not of £3,000,000, as one would suppose by reading a certain class of public criticism, but of £140,000 for other ranks and £20,000 for officers. This expenditure has been included in the Estimates of the present year. If we had decided against re-clothing the Guards in full dress and maintaining the full dress of the Household Cavalry, we should have to supply them with another complete new outfit of khaki at a cost of £30,000. 

The total avoidable expense is, therefore, not £160,000 but £130,000, and £130,000 and not £3,000,000 is the figure to which the Government is at present committed.

The abolition of full dress for the Household Cavalry and the Guards would mean that the Household Cavalry uniforms and the uniforms of the Household Cavalry and Guards bands, and approximately 7,000 bearskins now in stock, would become useless, and this would involve a waste of fully £80,000. The total net expense involved in re-clothing the Guards and retaining the Household Cavalry in scarlet is thus £130,000, while the total waste involved in discarding the existing stocks of full dress would be approximately £80,000. The transaction would therefore appear to be not unjustified, even from a purely financial standpoint.