Uniparty?

The Co-op.  Bigfoot works there as he's a distributist.

The final weeks of the 67th Legislature brought to light the tension within the Republican Caucus. It is clear to any follower of the Legislature that Republicans are divided by two different world views: for purposes of this column, these sects will be referred to as the “conservatives” and the “uniparty.” 

From a Cowboy State Daily editorial by Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams

Uniparty?

Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, a highly conservative legislator from Park County, has chosen to refer to the factions in the GOP by these newly minted terms.

I'd question her perception in coining them.

Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams is highly conservative.  I don't know what her overall views are, but on social issues, there's no doubt of that.  Frankly, I'm also highly conservative on social issues.  

Most of the establishment GOP in Wyoming is pretty darned conservative, but traditionally not all that conservative on social issues, which may surprise a lot of people and which was probably a definite surprise to Freedom Caucus freshmen.  Somebody like Jeanette Ward, fresh off the Interstate from Illinois who made sounds about Illinois being "fascists" and how she was glad to be in a maskless state was probably pretty surprised to find that anti mask legislation bit the dust, and by now she's probably surprised to learn that while she was fleeting The Prairie State for the Equality State to avoid having her children mask up, we were making children mask up too.

Well, Texas is still open for those wishing to so relocate. . . 

Anyhow, "Uniparty" would mean, by linguistic derivation "One Party".  Why is the more traditional conservative to moderate conservative wing of the GOP, which has been the dominate party here since the 1970s, the "Uniparty"?

Indeed, arguably, that term would better apply to the insurgent populists who have taken over the GOP organization here and who hold the position that a person dare not question Trump in any fashion, lest ye be tossed from the warm hearth of the Republican fire and tossed out into the cold domain of the wolves in sheep's clothing, the Democrats?

Her overall editorial isn't bad, but this demonstrates something I posted on just yesterday.  The GOP here traditionally hasn't been populist.  They're the new arrivals.

Uniparty, I learned, is a new Trumpist word, whic his the height of irony, as the GOP since his mid term has taken pretty much the Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer approach to things.  Trump is not to be questioned and we are to work towards the leader and apply the führerprinzip.  Use of term, therefore, suggests that the speaker is tapped into Trumpist populism.  A Political article notes:

“The Uniparty” is the latest populist buzzword to seize the imagination of the drain-the-swamp crowd, those who see grand conspiracies in the machinations of the “deep state” and globalist-corporate forces. It has a crisp clarity, instantly conveying the idea of an establishment cabal, Democrat and Republican alike, arrayed against their outsider hero, Donald Trump.

So, in using the term, Rodriquez-Williams essentially asserts that the populists, who aren't really clearly conservatives (more on that in an upcoming post. . . after first discussing the Democrats. . . who originally were a populist party), are the real conservatives, where as the other folks in the GOP are part of a joint Democratic/Republican establishment mob.

You know, the one where Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney agree with Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi as demonstrated by. . . . um, well, anyhow.

At least Rodriguez-Williams didn't resort to the grossly inaccurate name-calling that some in the populist camp do, and for all I know, she may not be a populist.  Consider, instead, the Cowboy State Daily editorial by Rep. John Bear:

Liberals, who had maintained control of legislative leadership during the interim, formulated committee bills taking advantage of the growing revenue surplus while failing to provide a long term solution which would require the government to to tighten  its own belt.

Liberals maintain control of Wyoming's legislative leadership?

Ummm. . . in order to take that seriously, I'd have to be willing to accept that Elvis is alive and running a flower shop in Portland, Jim Morrison actually didn't pass in Paris but changed his name and joined the U.S. Navy, following in the footsteps of his father, Amelia Earhart didn't disappear in the Pacific, but flew on to Chile in jet stream winds and became a barista, George Armstrong Custer didn't die in Montana but joined the Sioux and spent the rest of his days on the Reservation, and that Bigfoot works in the coop in Laramie.

Okay, the last one of those is true, but not the rest.

There are some liberals in the legislature, but they're few, and they're all Democrats.  

Of minor interest, Rodriquez-Williams is from California, which is a bit ironic as her article protests against Sommer's complaints about out of state ideas.  Bear is from Trenton, Missouri.

Which points out again, a lot of the Wyoming far right, came from far away.

Does it matter?  Certainly it doesn't legally.  A person is free to run and be elected, as long as they qualify for office, which doesn't require much.  Indeed, Jeanette Ward didn't even qualify to hold office until after she won the primary.

But here's the thing.  To a very large degree, a person's Weltanschauung is formed in their formative years, and the things you worry about or care about tend to be ingrained in you then.  Rodriquez-Williams is from California, although she came here as a highway patrolman and worked in that role for a while.  Chuck Gray is from California and was schooled in Pennsylvania and has very little connection with Wyoming.  Foster Freiss, the hard right's recent, darling here, was from Wisconsin and kept a second home in Arizona.  Bear is from Missouri.  Ward is from Illinois.  Bouchard is from Florida.

None of them went to high school with the sons and daughters of local welders or oilfield workers.  Probably none of them ever worked on a drilling rig, or served in the local National Guard to help pay for school.  None of them probably worked on a ranch or cut hay.  None of them grew up in a state where a raging blizzard meant your parents told you to put on your rubber overshoes and then shoved you out the door.

Populism is supposed to bring the wisdom of the people to politics.  But if you aren't part of the people, whose wisdom are you bringing?

Related threads:

Left, Right, and Changing Lanes. The Evolution of the American Political Parties. Part 1, the Republican Party.

Slavery in Renaissance Italy

Up until today, I was unaware that there was slavery in Renaissance Italy, Italy of course being a region at the time, not a nation state.

There was.

Somebody has come out with a theory that Leonardo da Vinci's mother, about whom nothing is really know, was a Circassian slave.  I don't know about that, and it's probably impossible to prove. The evidence for it is, frankly, in my view extraordinarily weak and completely circumstantial, but that there were slaves held in Italy at that point in time was a surprise to me.

Which probably means that there's more here to be surprised about. Where else in Renaissance Europe was slavery practiced?

Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservation, Germans retake Kharkiv

Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 

Demonstrating how Wyoming really hasn't changed much, the move was hugely unpopular in Wyoming, or at least was politically unpopular.  

The history of the reservation dated back to 1924 when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased a collection of ranches and amassed 37, 117 acres in the valley. The area was always spectacularly beautiful, but ranching conditions were generally poor.  Rockefeller's intended purpose from the onset was to donate the land to the Federal Government, something which of course appealed to him but much less to locals who were scraping by in industries derived from the region's natural resources.  In 1929 Rockefeller's initial donation of land went forward on a reduced basis, with only the Grand Teton National Park coming into existence.  The donation was smaller as Wyoming's Congressional representation opposed the larger donation, leaving Rockefeller with 32,000 acres and an annual tax bill of $13,000.

In 1942 Rockefeller informed Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that if the project did not go forwad, he would sell the land.  This resulted in President Roosevelt's Federal reservation.

On March 19, Wyoming's Congressman Frank A. Barret introduced a bill to return the land to National Forest status.  In Congress, he based his argument on preserving the grazing permits in the former Federal domain that was part of the reservation.  Teton County Commissioner Clifford Hansen, who would later become Governor, and whose Mead family contributed a later Governor and other significant state politicians, also spoke against, although he was directly impacted, holding grazing permits in the area.

The bill passed both houses of Congress, but Roosevelt issued a pocket veto that contained a memorandum stating:

The effect of this bill would be to deprive the people of the United States of the benefits of an area of national significance from the standpoint of naturalistic, historic, scientific, and recreational values,

Campaigning by conservationist deterred any further legal effort to abolish the reservation, and its being opened to grazing in 1945 due to wartime conditions somewhat allayed local fears.  In 1950 the controversy was resolved through S. 3409 which merged the monument and neighboring national park, but also provided: no further extension or establishment of national parks or monuments in Wyoming may be undertaken except by express authorization of the Congress."  This did not prevent later wilderness designations, which have continued to be opposed in ways that can be argued to be short-sighted.

The Third Battle of Kharkiv resulted in a German victory.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J22454 / Zschäckel, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5434453

The heavily photographed German victory saw German troops reenter and take the city, including a spearhead featuring the SS.

By JonCatalán(Talk) - Own work (Original text: I created this work entirely by myself.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6646109

The Red Army lost 45,219 men as killed, or missing, in action and another 41,250 were wounded.  The Germans lost 4,500 killed or missing from the SS Panzer Corps, and 7,000 wounded.  The Soviets could afford to lose more, of course, but the battle demonstrated that even at this mid-point in the war, the Germans could afflict outsized casualties upon the Soviets and still make significant advances.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 101III-Zschaeckel-189-13 / Zschäckel, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA

The German victory set the stage for the Battle of Kursk, which exhaustion precluded them from advancing on at this time.

The 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which was sometimes attached to the 82nd Airborne and the 11th Airborne, but which was often an independent combat team, was formed.  The unit fought in Italy, southern France, and Belgium during the war, and was slated to be deployed against Japan when the war ended.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  The French Line ship Wyoming sunk by the U-524.

The submarine USS Triton was sunk by the Japanese off of Kairiru,

Thursday, March 15, 1923. Life on the prairie, snow in Omaha, German offer.

Life on Montana's prairie detailed.

Omaha, Nebraska endured a significant snowstorm, receiving 13" of snow.  That doesn't seem like a lot, but its still recorded as one of Omaha's biggest snowstorms.

Germany offered France and Belgium 20 billion gold marks to go home.

Left, Right, and Changing Lanes. The Evolution of the American Political Parties. Part 1, the Republican Party.

Chuck Gray's recent fantastical editorial in the Tribune brought this to mind, along with letters to the editor every week accusing somebody of being a "RINO".

Parties evolve, but the parties themselves, and their members, don't seem to recognize this.  This causes endless ironies in finger pointing exercises.

To listen to the current GOP in the state, everyone who is not a Trumpist is a RINO, a secret liberal Democrat or maybe even a Communist bent on the destruction of the nation.  The populist right doesn't seem to realize here that 1) it's the new arrival in the state party; and 2) it's the new arrival in the GOP.  Trumpist/Populist could in some ways be accused of being DUYs. . . Democrats Until Yesterday.

A quick look at this, using the unfortunate blue/red color scheme adopted by the American press as an example of misbegotten American Exceptionalism.

The History of the GOP

The Republican Party, had it not adopted that name, and had the "Liberal" "Conservative" monikers been around in 1854 when neck beard (truly) Horace Greeley gave them that name, was originally a center left to radical left party, and could have called itself the Liberal Party.

The party was anti-slavery (liberal) and pro-American System in terms of economics (liberal).  That is, it took a radical view on human liberty, siding with natural law, and was in favor of state participation in the economy.

We'll skip the big early example of its policies, the prosecution of the Civil War in order to end the bondage of slavery, and go right to other examples.  The GOP used the Civil War as an excuse to advance the American System, with the Transcontinental Railroad and the Homestead Act being the big early examples.  It entered public life with the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862.  Free of Democratic blocking, it could charge ahead with its concepts of equality and government sponsorship of industry.  Following the war, it kept at it, with it being the party that sponsored civil rights and favored government interaction in the economy all the way up until the death of Theodore Roosevelt in January 1919.

During that period, it wasn't uniformly on the left.  It was center left in the majority, with the far left in the party struggling to rise.  The only time it really did rise was with the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909.  That brought Progressives to the forefront and they dominated the party.  The split with Taft however caused a rift in which the Progressives bolted, and the Democrats adopted a Progressive platform.

Former mainstream Republicans came back in the party and even Roosevelt himself did, but the ball had been passed. With Roosevelt's death in 1919, the chance to revive it died as well.  Dedicated Progressives became Democrats, where the movement was strong in the northern party, or joined more radical parties, with some becoming Socialist and some even joining Communist parties.  The flame having burnt out, the party became a Conservative Party with the rise of Harding, dedicated mostly at that time to maintaining an imagined pre Great War sort of nation.

That's what the party became in earnest with the collapse of the Hoover Presidency and the Great Depression.  The GOP was "conservative", but mostly in the sense of being against stuff.  It was against the New Deal, it was against foreign involvement.  It was against most of what Theodore Roosevelt had been for.  It retained that basic instinct, which is in part why it lost elections in the 1930s, until the fall of China in 1949 when it was shocked into realizing that being against foreign involvement meant supporting the rise of Communism.  At that point, it became anti Communist and supportive of foreign involvement.  That meant supporting big government.

From 1949 until the election of Ronald Reagan, the GOP was mildly conservative, but only barely so.  Discerning the difference between Republicans of the era and Democrats was not all that easy until around 1968 when modern Conservatism began to rise.

It was thinkers like William F. Buckley who began to give intellectual weight to the GOP in the 60s, with those individuals having a concrete philosophical concept of what being a Conservative meant.  Still, it was the "Country Club Republican" who dominated the GOP from the onset of the Depression until some point in the 1970s.  They were fiscally conservative, and in the 30s and 40s they were opponents of foreign entanglements.  That was pretty much the extent of their ideology.  Starting, as noted, in 1949, their anti Communism lead them to be in favor of taking on the Communist around the globe, although the Democrats were in favor of the same thing at the same time.  In spite of Buckley and his fellow travelers, it wasn't really until the late 60s that an ideology really developed.

The first time it really showed up was in 1968. That's the same year the Democratic Party nearly split in two over the Vietnam War at Chicago.  Republicans didn't split, they continued to support the war, and they were increasingly opposed to the rising liberalism in the Democratic Party, most particularly the rising social liberalism.  The extra judicial opinion of Roe v. Wade in 1973 increased the party's discovery of Buckleyite conservatism and the financial crisis of the early 70s, fueled by the spending of Country Club Republicans and Democrats, increased it. The result was Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was the first really ideological Republican President since Theodore Roosevelt, although his wing of the GOP was not completely dominant.  Country Club Republicans remained hugely influential in the party, and in essence they governed together as a more or less friendly coalition.  Reagan Republicans yielded to Country Club Republicans again with both Bush's, who were also heavily influenced by Neo Conservatives, who were largely former Democrats or in some cases actually former Trotskyites.

Reagan, however, also brought into the Republican Party Southern Democrats, who were populists.  Making a political calculation that this remaining body of conservative populists would abandon the Democrats as the Democrats had abandoned them brought the GOP into the South for the first time.  It also, however, brought populist into the GOP for the first time since the late 1890s.

Populists would be a noisy distraction in the Republican Party throughout the Reagan and Bush years, but it was really the coalition of Country Club Republicans, Buckleyites and Neo Conservatives who controlled it.  Starting with the second George Bush, it began to run into real problems as it could no longer gain the majority of the popular vote.  It also tended to only give lip service to the populists, which tends to be the case for populism's history.

Donald Trump, whatever his merits or demerits, tapped into the populists, knowing that Republican and Democratic Populists, and they remained in both parties, were angry and completely disaffected.  He brought them wholesale into the GOP, and they are his base.  And now, for the first time in the country's history, they're able to control large parts of a political party nationwide.

Given the history of populism, the GOP should be worried.

Before we do that, however, how can we sum up the history of the Republican Party, so we can tell who are the dreaded RINO's and who are not.  Well, thus:

• From March 10, 1854, until January 6, 1919, the Republican Party was the nation's liberal party, an period of 65 years.
• From 1919 until 1949, the Republican Party, the Republican Party was a conservative party, but one lacking an intellectual foundation, a period of 30 years.
• From 1949 until 1980, the Republican Party was a moderate center right party, a period of 31 years.
• From 1980 to 2016, the Republican Party was a Buckleyite conservative party, a period of 36 years.
• From 2016 to the present, a period of seven years, the GOP has been in a civil war between Buckleyite conservatives and populists.

Mid Week at Work: WHEN TECHNOLOGY CHANGES THEN SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE

 WHEN TECHNOLOGY CHANGES THEN SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE

An uncomfortable question.

As a warning in advance, this is going to sound harsh.

Here's a photo that I'm linking in from Twitter:

This is a scene that's repeated daily all over Ukraine.  A sad, and timeless one.  A father is leaving his wife and child to fight for his country.  

Early in the war this repeated constantly at the Polish border. Men took their families to Poland, and then they turned back to fight for Ukraine.

This last weekend, the Trib had an article about two Polish women and a child who were refugees in Wyoming.  I read it, because I read the Trib, but also as I wondered if it referenced an earlier story.  It didn't.

I don't blame the women for taking refuge here during the war. 

This is a snippet from the earlier article:

In Douglas, there’s a similarly normal picture: Floorhands and pithands working on an oil rig. One of the workers on this rig – his name is Andrii – has just started.

After a perilous first night getting stuck in a snowstorm 9 miles away from the rig, and then having to be rescued by the rig manager in the morning, Andrii is just grateful to have a job.

Five countries, six months of waiting for a work visa and over 500 job applications later, he is here, working 12-hour shifts.

Iryna and Andrii came over to America with Uniting for Ukraine, a government program started by President Joe Biden in an effort to help Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s invasion. They are not refugees; instead, their status under the program is considered “humanitarian parole.”

First of all, Iryna and Andrii are refugees, no matter what they are called. But here's the bigger question.

Why is Andrii working on an American oil rig rather than defending his country?  Photos show him as a young healthy man, and he's clearly healthy enough to work on oil rigs.

It's a legitimate question for which no answer is provided, and the question does not appear to have been posed.  It should have been.  Absent a really good answer, Andrii shouldn't be in the US working, he should be in his home country defending it. 

Wednesday, March 14, 2023. International cartographers

By Krzysztoflew, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2394054

The Conference of Ambassadors of the League of Nations, deciding unresolved claims from the Polish Ukrainian War, 1918-1919, awarded Eastern Glacia to Poland including Lviv, Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivsk) and Tarnopol (Ternopil).  Ukraine had, by that time, functionally ceased to exist. Following World War Two, the Soviet Union would redraw the border to give them to Ukraine and move the Poles west, and likewise move Germans west as well, redrawing the German frontier as well.

Millions of people found themselves moving, or if they'd already been refugees, unable to return home.

By Spiridon Ion Cepleanu - History Atlases available., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17831314

To a large extent, this reflected both the mixed national boundaries of empire and the sharpening of nationalism following World War One.  The Poles and the Ukrainians blended into each other on the western fringes of the Russian Empire, and some Polish populations remain in Ukraine today.  Lviv, for its part, had a significant Jewish population before the Second World War resulted in their extermination.  The Poles, as a people, extended much further East before the Soviet Union forcibly redrew its border after World War Two.  Russia also redrew Ukraine's border after 1919 to Russia's favor.

Paris Peace Conference map of Ukraine.  Note that its borders were considerably larger, and that it does in fact include Crimea.  And in this map, Moldova was largely Romanian.

Of note today, Ukraine once extended further north, and further east.  Russia effectively sits today on land that it started occupying in the 1920s that had been Ukrainian.  Today, however, it should not be presumed that Russian territory originally claimed by Ukraine retains a Ukrainian population.

Also of note, Ukraine today sits pretty much within a smaller version of its original claimed modern borders.  A large section of Poland ended up within it following World War Two, but about 60% of that had been claimed by Ukraine right after World War One, reflecting in part the mixed Polish Ukrainian population in that region at the time.

Saturday, March 13, 1943. Freedom from Fear.

Gen. Henning von Tresckow attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler in an aspect of "Operation Spark" in which he handed a bomb disguised as a gift of liquor to a staff officer boarding an airplane with the German dictator.  The bomb, which would have killed all on board had it exploded, failed to go off.  The fuse, a British time pencil, failed to detonate.

The plan was not a fully formed one, unlike the July 20, 1944, plot.  The thought was simply that with German losing the war, Hitler's death would spark a coup d'état.  This attempt is the only one depicted in the movie Valkyrie prior to the July 44 attempt.

The plot was one of several that this circle of German officers would attempt, but it was the first.

The Germans removed the final 10,000 Jewish residents of Kraków.

The Saturday Evening Post had the last of its four freedom illustrations appear in the magazine, the four taken from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt. This one was "freedom from fear".

The illustration featured a (middle-aged?) couple tucking their children into bed.  It's likely the least well liked of the four illustrations, but it is full of interesting details.

The two children are being tucked into the same bed, for one thing, something that the viewers would not have thought odd even in a middle class home of the era.  The young children are, moreover, a boy and a girl, which would also not have risen to odd comments at the time.  The father is still wearing a tie, even though we'd presume this is early evening.  The newspaper he's holding notes what the world had to fear, at the time.  Viewers today would probably put the male image in his 50s and the female adult in her 40s, but chances are pretty good that Rockwell was portraying a woman in her 30s and a male around 40.

The bedroom, given the angle of the background, is likely an attic bedroom.

It'd be worth asking how we've done with the four freedoms over the years.  Perhaps we can do that in another tread, but in regard to freedom from fear, fear is still with us, and indeed we live in an era of record angst.

The accompanying article was written by Stephen Vincent Benét.

The Canadian Pacific Ocean liner RMS Empress of Canada was sunk by the Italian submarine Leonardo da Vinci in the South Atlantic, 1,400 of 1,800 passengers survived, with 392 being lost, half of which, ironically, were Italian POWs.

On the same day, the Canadian corvette sank the U-163 in the Atlantic.

Finland signed a trade agreement with Nazi Germany.

Japanese troops ended their assault on Hill 700 on Bouganville.

 J. P. Morgan, Jr. died at age 75 in Boca Raton.

Pope Francis cites evolutionary biology.

Gender ideologies;

do not distinguish what is respect for sexual diversity or diverse sexual preferences from what is already an anthropology of gender, which is extremely dangerous because it eliminates differences, and that erases humanity, the richness of humanity, both personal, cultural, and social, the diversities and the tensions between differences.

Pope Francis in La Nación.

Further; 

Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,

Friday, March 12, 1943. Patton in command.

3-12-43 (Friday) We left Rabat one week ago to day.  We have done a lot but much remains to be done.  Freedenhal just exited he did not command and with few exceptions his staff was worthless due to youth and lack of leadership.

Bradley got back last night.  Ike has three plans. One that I should keep on with II Corps and have Bradley replace me at Rabat.

I said no on that one as it is unfair to Kemp.  Though possibly safer for me.

Plan 2.  For Bradley to go to Rabat and plan with Kemp and when this show is over to have me go back to [?] Haskey and B. take II Corps. Note that as utterly crazy.

Plan 3. For B to stay on as Deputy Commander with me get him a staff to work in with mine and then when this battle is over  to have me go [?] with my staff to [?] Haskey and Bradley take over. Kemp to plan until I get [?]

I accepted this as best. I am not at all sure that this show will run  according to plan and feel that as long as it is interesting Alexander will keep me. If it [?] down I can get out.

If Rommel attacks first that will be something different -- [?] may.

Wrote Gen Orders to Troops. [?] came to lunch. After lunch I went with him and inspected 2[?]th Inf. Col Taylor & 18th Inf Col. [?].  The 2[?]th been  badly shot up but seemed fine.  18th has done well and  is quite [?]

Terribly cold took a drink to get warm.

Gen [?] called at 2100 to tell me he had heard on the radio that I was a LIEUTENANT GENERAL.  [?] [?] [?] a [?] I am sleeping under  the three stars.  When Iwas a little boy at home I used to wear a wooden sword and say to myself.  "George S. Patton for Lieut Gen" at that time I did not know there were [?] [?] Now I want and will get five  stars.

Diary of George S. Patton.

The Royal Navy lost the HMS Lightening off of Algeria. She was attacked by E-boats.  The Turbulent was sunk by a mine off of Sardinia.

The U-130 was sunk by the USS Champlin off of the Azores.

The Red Army took Vyazma.  The Italian Army destroyed the Greek village of Tsaritsani, lilling 40 civilians.

Best Posts of the Week of March 5, 2023

The best posts of the Week of March 5, 2023.

I'm not going to add it, but I have to note that the item on Mrs. Lenin last week includes a photo of her looking titanically crabby.

The 2024 Election, Part II. What could go wrong?

The 2022 Season

Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season Ends, the 2023 Season Begins.

Tuesday, March 6, 1973. Oil Price Controls

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 5, 1923. The Thomas, Collins, affair.

The Professionals. A second review.

On International Women's Day, 2023.

Delia Kane, age 14.  The Exchange Luncheon, Boston.  January 31, 1917.

Friday, March 9, 1923. Communists, Racists & Drinkers.

Wait a moment, did you just compare Tucker Carlson to Joseph Goebbels?

Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part 3. Spring Storms.

Thursday, March 11, 1943. The Holocaust and Yugoslavia, The French and Royal Navies and the Battle of the Atlantic, German failures in North Africa, Lend Lease renewed, Evading the Draft

The Jewish population of the Yugoslavian (Macedonian) cities of Skopje, Štip and Bitolawas deported to Treblinka by the German SS with the assistance of Bulgarian soldiers.

The day prior, Yugoslavian Communists had warned the Jewish residents of  Bitola of the impending German plans, although only a few managed to escape them.

The Harvester. which had been built for the Braizlian Navy just prior to World War Two, with the Royal Navy taking over the contract.

The U-433 sunk the HMS Harvester which was damaged and dead in the war.  The U-432 in turned rammed by the French corvette Aconit.  The Aconit turned to rescue the survivors of both sinkings.  The Harvester had sunk the U-444 the day prior, which went down with the loss 41 men, two men surviving.  26 went down on the U-432, with 20 being picked up by the Aconit.  145 went down on the Harvester.

The Aconit on March 14, 1943.  She'd been built by the British to be lent to the Free French.

The U-432 was on its eighth war patrol. The U444 on its second.

The SS Panzer Corps entered Kharkov and penetrated to the center of the city.  The Red Army, for its part, advanced to fifteen miles from Vyazma, near the Russian border with Byelorussia.

In North Africa, the Afrika Korps, now in clear decline and withdrawing toward the Mediterranean, made three unsuccessful attacks on the British west of Sejanane, Tunisia.

News of the disaster at Kasserine was beginning to filter home.

Lend Lease was extended for another year with an 82-0 vote by the Senate and a 407-6 vote in the House.

In the current U.S. House, if current events are any measure, it'd have significant opposition.  Tucker Carlson would no doubt call it into question.

Rodney Wooster, age 27, was arrested in Lewis County, Washington, for draft evasion.  He was hiding in the woods in a cabin at the time, having taken up residence in the cabin the prior year.

You don't hear much about draft evasion during World War Two, but it was a big story at the time.  12,000 U.S. residents were imprisoned for evading the draft, nearly a division's worth of men, but most arrested men were simply funneled into what they were seeking to avoid, military service.

Wooster, a Washington native, seems to have been a lumberjack before the war and have dropped out of school in 8th Grade, something not uncommon for the time.  Following World War Two, he married and lived in Washington the rest of his life, passing away in 2006.  Whether he was truly evading, or knew the full implications of it, are not known, but the subsequent history of spending the rest of his life in the same community would suggest that whatever was the case, he probably entered the military in 1943.

Sunday, March 11, 1923. Wrongful arrests.

100 members of the Irish Self Determination League were arrested in London, Glasgow and Liverpool, and subsequently deported to Ireland at Ireland's request.

Members of the League, which opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, even though the treaty had incorporated Irish self-determination, were either Irish by descent or birth. They subsequently sued and won on the basis that their deportations had been illegal.

Blog Mirror: Nebraska’s Lake Monster- Giganticus Brutervious

 

Nebraska’s Lake Monster- Giganticus Brutervious

Wait a moment, did you just compare Tucker Carlson to Joseph Goebbels?

Fox political columnists at work.

Why yes, I did. Thank you for noticing.

I did that here:

German poster in Dutch, part of an effort to recruit occupied Europeans to German arms out of fear of Communism.

German propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary

The anti-Bolshevik theme is the best horse in the stable.

Goebbels' comments are something that are frighteningly relevant in our current society.  Communism was the enemy of mankind, but so was Nazism.  Indeed, they both shared the common trait of mass murder as a central element of their ethos, which gave the regimes an odd sense of being constantly imperiled by huge plots, in their view, which necessitated murder, in their view, which in turn made millions of people culpable, and therefore loyal, through guilt.  

Victory or Bolshevism was the theme of this poster, which ironically portrayed starving Germans in the manner of which recalls Holocaust victims.  After 1943 the theme of this poster was in fact becoming increasingly true, although victory was no longer possible, as the Red Army was now advancing toward the German frontier.  Germans would have recalled that being a threat during the Russo Polish War of the early 1920s, when Trotsky seriously imagined entering Germany after defeating Poland, but now it was rapidly becoming an inevitability, which the German government implicitly acknowledged through this poster.  In fact, the German government would take no action to withdraw the civilian population from Prussia, although individual German commanders sometimes did, which mean that thousands of German men were shot and tens of thousands of German women raped when the Red Army entered the country.  The final months of the war would be a combat blood bath as German soldiers often went down fighting attempting to let the civilian population get out, a situation which was brought upon them by a barbarous Nazi government.

The Nazis, right from the onset, portrayed themselves as the cultural defenders against Communism, which made many forget, and then adopt, their radical views which were not "conservative" in any real sense. After reaching an accord with the Soviets just prior to World War Two, this was downplayed, but it was ramped back up again prior to Operation Barbarossa and kept at a fever pitch through the remainder of the war.  The message to Germans was that the Nazis were the only defense of Western culture against an "alien" Communism, although Communism itself was originally a German movement.  The message was sufficient for many Germans, including high ranking ones, to put aside their doubts about Nazism on the basis that it seemed to be, based upon what they were hearing, their only alternative to Communism.

Of course, for millions of Germans, the end of the war and Germany's fighting it out past mid 1943 would bring Communism to them.

By way of contemporary analogy, millions of Americans today have been listening, and continue to, to populist propagandist who spread lies and whip up panic over their being the only alternative to "wokeism".  Tucker Carlson and his ilk portray the far populist right as the only means of combating a host of truly concerning liberal ideas.  By espousing lies, they bring those ideas closer to implementation.

Oh my, some are thinking, how could you compare a "conservative" "news" figure to an um. . . conservative government figure. ... who, um, is listened to by millions even if his version of the truth isn't the truth, to a person who was listed to by millions whose version of the truth. . . 

Now, a couple of things.

I'm a conservative.

But I have a brain, value the truth, seek reality, think for myself, and accept the truth is the truth, and there's only one truth, not shades of it.

I'm shocked by how some very serious, well-educated people, listen to Tucker Carlson.  He's a propagandist for Trumpism and has openly spouted lies. He still is, and people, amazingly, are still listening to him.  And as I noted, people rightfully scared of some propositions that progressives put forth, such as that DNA doesn't matter, and you can be what you self identify with, are being led down the primrose false path that only Donald Trump, and his band of followers, can save the nation.

Not likely.  Indeed, if history is any guide, extremism ends in the opposite extreme.

Nazi Germany gave us the German Democratic Republic.

Russian Imperial retrenchment gave us the Bolsheviks.

Napoleon Bonaparte gave us the restoration of the French monarchy.

And yet people sit down at the Fox lunch counter, are served up a steaming bowl of scat, and declare it to be delicious prime rib.

How does that happen?

Probably a variety of ways, but perhaps there are three chief amongst them.

One is, and it's probably the majority reason, is that a lot of people conclude things emotionally.  Most people, in fact.  So they base their decisions on that.

The GOP and the Democratic Party ignored the working class in the country for decades, and came to ignore the middle class. And the Democrats grew used to rule by the courts, not democratic rule.  People knew that they didn't believe that Bobby could become Bobbie chemically or that unrestricted immigration didn't help them, or that they personally weren't evil because they owned a gun.  Trump told them that they were right, and that progressives were part of an evil conspiracy of dunces.

So when Trump told them that the conspiracy had stolen the election, even though there was no theft, and he simply lost, having never won the popular vote in the first place, they believed him and some still do.

The way that works is that "I know that I'm right, people who tell me that I'm right are right, so Tucker Carlson must be right".

For some, it isn't even that advanced. They love Trump as he told them what he wanted to hear and they'll go to their graves believing that Trump is some sort of hero.

None of that changes this basic fact.  Whatever the merits of conservatism, or populism (and the latter is not only conservative but liberal as well, both in a radical way) are, Trump is a threat to democracy and without democracy all values are in danger.  People like Trump, or Greene, or Boebert, are threats to the well-being of the nation, and frankly their values, when examined, are swimming in the shallow end of the pool.

Tucker Carlson, however, is something else, entirely. . . .well not entirely. Frankly, a lot of people associated with Trump stink from what they shovel, and Trump certainly does as well.

Tucker Carlson, major league liar.

Recently he was confronted in a fly shop somewhere:

Liar Carlson confronted by irate large customer.

Fair?

That's an interesting question.

Here's something revealed about Carlson the other day:

Among the documents released Tuesday as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems was an email from Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that the organization was “Still getting mud thrown at us! … Maybe Sean and Laura went too far.”

Two months after the election and just days before Jan. 6, 2021, Fox host Tucker Carlson texted with an unknown Fox employee about how badly he wanted to stop covering President Donald Trump.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson texted Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson added.

Dan Eggen, Washington Post.

Given that the man is a lying tool, exposing his vile nature in front of his daughter, who would not, it should be noted, be a child, while extreme, may be warranted.  

If your brother sins, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.

If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’

If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.

Mathew 18:15.

Carlson is an Episcopalian, married to the daughter of an Episcopal priest.  He claims to "hate" much about the Episcopal Church, while remaining a member.  The Episcopal Church has, in its mainstream, diluted much of the Christian message and in fact incorporated within its institution in some places those who openly endorse things St. Paul openly condemned.  But it doesn't condone lying.

Maybe calling Carlson a liar in public, and perhaps in front of his family at that, is warranted.  

Maybe it's time to call more of these anti-democratic liars what they are, liars, while at the same time being blunt to politicians and public figures about the other falsehoods they adopt.

For that matter, in public discourse, maybe its even time to do the very difficult. Which would be, for instance, "that Liz Cheney sure is a liar, eh", to say "no, she told the truth, people didn't want to listen" and or "man alive ol' Biden sure caused the price of gas to go up" to say, um, no Putin did..

And with Tucker, all the more so as he's now going on to lie about the nature of the January 6 insurrection.

At some point, the only way to address the publicly vile is to confront them to their face and make the disgusting nature of their behavior known to them publicly.  Carlson's not an idiot, he's lying to people intentionally for some sort of personal advantage.  When there is no advantage to him personally, he'll cease.  

And perhaps he'll repent.

Or he can just go, the functional equivalent of being treated like a tax collector.

Joseph Goebbels shoved out crap for the Nazis, which at least he partially believed himself.  While he didn't loyally serve his wife, having serial affairs, he loyally served Hitler and shoveled out the lies for him.  He and his wife had six children together.

Goebbels, through his propaganda, helped convince the Germans to keep on keeping on in a war which brought the Red Army all the way into Berlin, destroyed Prussia, the largest and most dominant German state, resulted in the rape of perhaps 2,000,000 German women, 100,000 in Berlin alone, and the enslavement of eastern Germany in Communism for decades.  All of this in perpetration of a series of lies, although he no doubt believed some or maybe all of them about German racial superiority and the inferiority of others, particularly the Jewish people.  He and his wife, both of whom cheated on each other, murdered their six children as Berlin collapsed.

Lies have consequences. All of them do.

Big lies have big consequences.

Wednesday, March 10, 1943. The Peak of the Battle of the Atlantic. First combat mission of the P-47.

By Crew of PB4Y-1 107-B-12 of VB-107, November 1943.

March 1943 was the peak of the Battle of the Atlantic, with the largest convoy battle of the war, the battle over Convoys HX 229/SC 122 about to commence.  Commencing on this day was the two-day battle over Convoy HX 228 in which nine U-boots would sink five Allied vessels, one of which was a warship.  The battle over Convoy SC 121 ended on this day, in which 27 U-boots sunk 12 merchant ships.  During March German submarines sank 120 merchant ships while losing only 15 submarines.  A Royal Navy figure later observed: "The Germans never came so near to disrupting communications between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March 1943."

After April, however, Germany naval fortunes were to decline rapidly.

On the same day, the U-633 was sunk by the British freighter Scorton, which rammed her.  In its career, it had been on a single patrol and sunk one vessel.  On the same day, Germany changed its Enigma Code, according to Sarah Sundin's blog, temporarily making the Allies blind in the Atlantic.

A couple of things to recall. At this stage of the war, the Germans were still doing very well in the Atlantic, and indeed their fortunes were increasing in that theater.  Crossing the Atlantic remained extraordinarily perilous.  Allied ships went down continually.  And it was exclusively a Western Allied affair, which they bore alone.

German commenced rationing nonessential goods, thereby prohibiting the manufacture of suits, costumes, bath salts, and firecrackers. It restricted telephone use and photography at the same time.

It's not surprising that they took this step, but rather it was taken this late.

Sarah Sundin reports.

Today in World War II History—March 10, 1943: Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes fly first mission with US Eighth Air Force based in Britain. US II Corps retakes Sbeïtla, Tunisia.

P-47C taking off, 1943.

P-47s did not have long enough range to escort bombers all the way to Germany and back, but they were nonetheless a game changer for the USAAF.  A new generation of fighters surpassing the capabilities of most Axis fighters was beginning to come online.

Here again, the Western Allies were waging a titanic war on the sea and in the air.  This benefitted all the Allies, but it was not borne by all of them.

The USSR established Laboratory No. 2 to research atomic energy.

Saturday, March 10, 1923. Hoover on Prosperity

 

Blog Mirror: Pershing the Martinet

Pershing the Martinet

Blog Mirror: George F. Will: Woke word-policing is now beyond satire

 

George F. Will: Woke word-policing is now beyond satire

But can you have it on Friday's during Lent?

 White Gator Chili

Probably not.

Blog Mirror: Three Years

 

Three Years

Tuesday, March 9, 1943. Rommel departs. Air Force limits. De La Rocque arrested. Goebbels looks in the Stable. We Will Never Die opens. Mardi Gras.

Erwin Rommel was recalled by Hitler from North Africa and put on medical leave. General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim assumed command of the Afrika Korps, and would remain in command until its surrender.  Effectively, Hitler had rescued Rommel.

Von Arnim.

Von Arnim bore a remarkable resemblance to actor Keenan Wynn, who played Col. "Bat" Guano in Dr. Strangelove.

Wynn, left.

Von Arnim would go into captivity in the UK and then later the U.S.  He would not enter the Bundesheer following its establishment, perhaps due to age, and died in 1962 at age 73.

Sarah Sundin notes on her blog:

Today in World War II History—March 9, 1943: US Eighth Air Force Central Medical Establishment recommends 25-mission combat tour for bomber crewmen and 200 hours or 50 missions for fighter pilots.

Of note, making it through 25 bomber missions at the time was against the odds.  Also, I didn't know that there was a limit for fighter pilots.

De La Rocque.

French right wing political figure François de La Rocque, who had gone from accepting the French surrender and Petain's rule to being a secret opponent of it and founder of a right wing resistance movement, was arrested by the Germans. Regarded by some as a precursor to de Gaulle, he would survive the war and die in 1946 at age 60.

De La Rocque had interestingly gone from the far right into moderation prior to the war, first being part of the Croix de Feu and then being a founder of the French Social Party.  The latter party was a combination of conservative and corporatist, but it was not anti-democratic. Some credit it with giving the French middle class an alternative to fascism, thereby preventing fascism from rising in France.

German poster in Dutch, part of an effort to recruit occupied Europeans to German arms out of fear of Communism.

German propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary

The anti-Bolshevik theme is the best horse in the stable.

Goebbels' comments are something that are frighteningly relevant in our current society.  Communism was the enemy of mankind, but so was Nazism.  Indeed, they both shared the common trait of mass murder as a central element of their ethos, which gave the regimes an odd sense of being constantly imperiled by huge plots, in their view, which necessitated murder, in their view, which in turn made millions of people culpable, and therefore loyal, through guilt.  

Victory or Bolshevism was the theme of this poster, which ironically portrayed starving Germans in the manner of which recalls Holocaust victims.  After 1943 the theme of this poster was in fact becoming increasingly true, although victory was no longer possible, as the Red Army was now advancing toward the German frontier.  Germans would have recalled that being a threat during the Russo Polish War of the early 1920s, when Trotsky seriously imagined entering Germany after defeating Poland, but now it was rapidly becoming an inevitability, which the German government implicitly acknowledged through this poster.  In fact, the German government would take no action to withdraw the civilian population from Prussia, although individual German commanders sometimes did, which mean that thousands of German men were shot and tens of thousands of German women raped when the Red Army entered the country.  The final months of the war would be a combat blood bath as German soldiers often went down fighting attempting to let the civilian population get out, a situation which was brought upon them by a barbarous Nazi government.

The Nazis, right from the onset, portrayed themselves as the cultural defenders against Communism, which made many forget, and then adopt, their radical views which were not "conservative" in any real sense. After reaching an accord with the Soviets just prior to World War Two, this was downplayed, but it was ramped back up again prior to Operation Barbarossa and kept at a fever pitch through the remainder of the war.  The message to Germans was that the Nazis were the only defense of Western culture against an "alien" Communism, although Communism itself was originally a German movement.  The message was sufficient for many Germans, including high ranking ones, to put aside their doubts about Nazism on the basis that it seemed to be, based upon what they were hearing, their only alternative to Communism.

Of course, for millions of Germans, the end of the war and Germany's fighting it out past mid 1943 would bring Communism to them.

By way of contemporary analogy, millions of Americans today have been listening, and continue to, to populist propagandist who spread lies and whip up panic over their being the only alternative to "wokeism".  Tucker Carlson and his ilk portray the far populist right as the only means of combating a host of truly concerning liberal ideas.  By espousing lies, they bring those ideas closer to implementation.

We Will Never Die, a Jewish pageant featuring spectacular artwork (copyright protected) on its cover, opened on the East Coast.  It acknowledged that it was held in memory of what it then thought to be Europe's 2,000,000 then Jewish dead, showing that knowledge of the Holocaust was in fact widespread, contrary to what some will claim.

Today was Mardi Gras for 1943.  On the same day, readers of the nation's newspapers learned that the wartime ban on sliced bread had been lifted the prior day.  The ban had been to save steel needed for slicing machines.

Friday, March 9, 1923. Communists, Racists & Drinkers.

Lenin suffered a third stroke in less than a year, a clear sign that his remaining time was short.

Thirty members of the NYPD were revealed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The United Kingdom, in a bill introduced by Lady Astor, rose the in premises drinking age from 14 for beer and 16 for hard alcohol to 18.  It was the first bill to be introduced by a woman in parliament.

British alcohol consumption, normally associated with beer, has varied considerably over a century, as reflected in this directly linked in graph fro a parliamentary report.

As can be seen, wine has increased considerably since 1930, but then it had large popularity early in the 20th Century before dropping off.  World War One, likely due to wartime shortages, made a huge denti in British drinking which leveled it off, but it's climbed steadily since the 1950s.

Another British look from 1800 to 1930.

That reported noted:

History of alcohol consumption

1550-1650: commercialisation of domestic brewing industry; tobacco a commodity of mass consumption and an accompaniment to drinking; increased market for French wines—higher per head until present day [14] 1650-1750: the period 'when Europeans took to soft drugs', including coffee, tea and chocolate; the intermittent gin craze from the 1730s to the 1750s masks a stabilisation or decline in alcohol consumption over the period.[15] Beer was promoted by many anti-gin campaigners as the patriotic (and sober) alternative to gin. Despite this, beer consumption fell significantly throughout the 18th century, largely due to the increasing popularity of tea, coffee and chocolate .[16] 1750 to 1850: fall in alcohol consumption up to about 1840, particularly wine, increase in tea, which replaced beer as the popular staple of every day consumption.[17] 1850 to late 19th century: large increase in consumption; the 'consumption of beer, wine and spirits all peaked around 1875. The consumption of tea also grew'. These trends were associated with rising living standards.[18] Late 19th century to mid-20th century: decline in consumption per head—associated with temperance movement, alternative leisure activities, including public parks and libraries.[19] Mid-20th century onwards: increase in consumption from 3.5 litres per head to 9.5 (with slight falls in the early 1990s and 2005 onwards)

That report concluded:

Conclusions and recommendations

29. The history of the consumption of alcohol over the last 500 years has been one of fluctuations, of peaks and troughs. From the late 17th century to the mid-19th the trend was for consumption per head to decline despite brief periods of increased consumption such as the gin craze. From the mid- to the late 19th century there was a sharp increase in consumption which was followed by a long and steep decline in consumption until the mid 20th century.

30. The variations in consumption are associated both with changes in affordability and availability, but also changes in taste. Alternative drinks such as tea and alternative pastimes affected consumption. Different groups drank very different amounts. Government has played a significant role both positive and negative, for example in reducing consumption in the First World War as well as in stimulating the 18th century gin craze by encouraging the consumption of cheap gin instead of French brandy.

31. From the 1960s consumption rose again. At its lowest levels in the 1930s and -40s annual per capita consumption was about 3 litres of pure alcohol; by 2005 it was over 9 litres. These changes are, as in past centuries, associated with changing fashion and an increase in affordability, availability and expenditure on marketing. Just as Government policy played a part in encouraging the gin craze, successive Government policies have played a part in encouraging the increase in alcohol consumption over the last 50 years. Currently over 10 million adults drink more than the recommended limits. These people drink 75% of all the alcohol consumed. 2.6 million adults drink more than twice the recommended limits. The alcohol industry emphasises that these figures represent a minority of the population; health professionals stress that they are a very large number of people who are putting themselves at risk. We share these concerns.

32. One of the biggest changes over the last 60 years has been in the drinking habits of young people, including students. While individual cases of student drunkenness are regrettable and cannot be condoned, we consider that their actions are quite clearly a product of the society and culture to which they belong. The National Union of Students and the universities themselves appear to recognise the existence of a student binge drinking culture, but all too often their approach appears much too passive and tolerant. We recommend that universities take a much more active role in discouraging irresponsible drinking amongst students. They should ensure that students are not subjected to marketing activity that promotes dangerous binge drinking. The first step must be for universities to acknowledge that they do indeed have a most important moral "duty of care" to their students, and for them to take this duty far more seriously than they do at present.

33. Since 2004 there has been a slight fall in total consumption but it is unclear whether this represents a watershed or a temporary blip as in the early 1990s.

The British government has been actively working in recent years to address British drinking.