In the West, it was a week of a dedicated effort by a coalition of various people, conservative and liberal, to stop a land rape proposal. Whether it worked or not, to the extent we hope it will, isn't clear.
It was also a week in which it became clear that Wyoming's Congressional delegation really doesn't feel that it has to listen to the voters.
It was also a week in which it became increasingly clear that US intervention in Israel's' air war with Iran didn't achieve anything, which caused Donald Trump and his defense secretary Hegseth to start weirdly bouncing off the walls.
And it became increasingly clear that that the DOGE gutting of USAID killed thousands, while Robert F. Kennedy is launching off on killing more.
It appears the Big Ugly Bill with Mike Lee's scheme to sell public lands that fall within the former putative state of Deseret, which he acts as if he represents, will occur today or tomorrow.
Call your people in Congress today and inform them you are opposed.
If you live in Wyoming, inform them that they better start putting in their resumes for post Congressional punditry right now, as you'll not vote for them for anything ever again. They aren't representing you if they vote for this.
In spite of overwhelming public opposition, Mike Lee's public land sale provision remains in the budget reconciliation bill.
The Trump Administration is well on its way towards being one of the most lethal in modern American history through the spread of lies and medical disinformation, and the withholding of funds for aid where it can be effective.
At some future point in history, historians are going to look at this era as one in which rational thinking simply broke down into mass delusion.
American screenwriter and television producer Rod Sterling died at age 50 of a heart attack.
Serling was an extremely heavy smoker, which was no doubt the cause of his death. He'd been a paratrooper during World War Two, serving in the Pacific.
He's best remembered for The Twilight Zone.
Serling in 1959, at which time he would have only been 34 years old. This photo gives us a good example of what we've noted elsewhere, about how people aged more rapidly in the past. The cigarette in hand would have helped contribute to that. World War Two probably didn't help either. Serling's bracelet features Army jump wings.
Stricken plane landing on aircraft carrier, June 28, 1945.
While 23,000 Japanese troops remained in the field, in isolated areas, MacArthur announced that operations on Luzon were complete.
They weren't, really. The 8th Army and the Filipinos would remain to mop the remainder up.
The Soviet backed Provisional Government of National Unity in Poland, made up of the PPR: 7 ministers, Socialist Party: 6 ministers, People's Party: 3 ministers, PSL: 3 ministers and Democratic Party: 2 ministers, was formed.
The Polish Government in Exile did not recognize it, although several of its members were from the Government in Exile.
It appears the Big Ugly Bill with Mike Lee's scheme to sell public lands that fall within the former putative state of Deseret, which he acts as if he represents, will occur today or tomorrow.
Call your people in Congress today and inform them you are opposed.
If you live in Wyoming, inform them that they better start putting in their resumes for post Congressional punditry right now, as you'll not vote for them for anything ever again. They aren't representing you if they vote for this.
The DOGE lead cuts on USAID, which ended up in eliminating the entity for all practical purposes, have lead to at least 300,000 deaths around the globe.
And now Robert Kennedy, who is a quack in terms of medicine, vaccines, and diet, has announced that the United States won’t contribute anymore to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, until the global health organization has “re-earned the public trust".
Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard suggested giving Japan a warning about the atomic bomb.
US forces completed the occupation of Luzon's Cagayan Valley. The island is accordingly nearly fully under US control.
The I-165 was sunk east of Saipan by a US PV-2 Harpoon.
The USS Bunker Hill was struck by a kamikaze resulting in the death of 373 men.
Dr. Emil Hacha, age 73, the former president of the German sponsored "Bohemia-Moravia Protectorate," died in the Prague prison hospital while awaiting trial.
Edward Stettinius resigned as Secretary of State to take up the post of ambassador to the United Nations.
Barrasso and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, did not oppose the original proposal, though Republican senators from Montana and Idaho did. But Wyoming’s congressional delegation heard concerns from a range of constituents. State Rep. Andrew Byron, R-Hoback, is among the Teton County residents making their voices heard opposing the proposed federal public lands sale.
Byron overnighted two letters to Barrasso and Lummis on Friday and emailed their chiefs of staff . By Saturday afternoon, he was on the phone with Barrasso. He said he has yet to receive a response from Lummis and her office.
Byron said Tuesday that he and Barrasso had a productive conversation, but the senator “downplayed” the concerns brought to him. Although Barrasso didn’t reveal his position on the public lands sale, Byron said Barrasso didn’t share his sense of urgency.
They're disregarding the voters.
Send them home if they don't correct this.
They're counting on us forgetting this, and there's some outside incentive, or fear, for them ignoring us. We need to be the bigger incentive, and they need to fear for their positions and reputations.
When Mike Lee isn't busy promoting taking public lands from the public, he apparently launches into all the dimwitted far right stuff he conceivably can.
And makes absurd statements about murders.
Utah, make this guy go home, or at least get him out of Congress.
I felt at the time, and I still do, that the Obergefell decision was an absolute disaster. It was legally deficient in its reasoning, which was pathetic. Justice Kennedy's text failed to grasp the existential nature of marriage, but perhaps that was understandable as Kennedy, currently 88 years old, was in his 20s and 30s in the 1960s. Indeed, he turned 30 in 1966, by which time Americans were well on their way to forgetting what the biological purpose of sex is, and what the nature of marriage is.
Kennedy's opinion embraced a sort of Age of Aquarius sense of "love" being the reason for marriage, at its core root. Love is an aspect of marriage, hopefully, and there's a lot to that, but sex is as well and the type that leads to children, at least frequently. Indeed, the entire institution and everything about it is oriented in that direction.
That has very little to do with homosexuality in that unions between the same gender don't result in children. I know the arguments about adoption and the like, but that's fairly far from the point as well. Indeed, in a way, that gets into the following topic about IVF that we covered recently.
Something that the generation that came of age after World War Two really brought into the culture is sort of the opposite of the Rolling Stone's skifflesque You Can't Always Get What You Want. That generation pretty much got almost all of what they wanted, and still are. That sense of entitlement resulted in cultural self centeredness in which you are entitled to be what you want to be and everyone else has to darned well accept it and the consequences.
The problem was and is, however, that Obergefell, as it strayed so far from the law, and so far from where the culture then was (it's a horrible example of the old trying to get ahead of the culture) that it was bound to spark a massive reaction. And it did.
The populist right rage that developed soon after was already burning, but Obergefell poured gasoline on the fire. The culture had lost much of the conservative wisdom on the nature of sex and marriage already, and had gone through Chesterton's fence with a bulldozer in this regard. A culture that had accepted, prior to the early 1950s that sex was properly in marriage, and properly between married men and women, had gone to pretty much accepting that sex was entertainment and marriage was a celebration of love rather than a loving (hopefully) childrearing, economic, natural unit. People basically forgot what their natures produced and men in particular figures that they were entitled to play around with Fran Geraud, and women figured they had to endure it. And that's where we remain today. A culture that basically thinks the Hawk Tuah Girl is amusing rather than a tramp.
But once that moral decay had reached the point where people who could excuse their own conduct could imagine themselves to somehow still be good Christians suddenly were confronted with homosexuals making the same intellectual arguments, and that being adopted by the Supreme Court, it was just too much.
It was also clear, in spite of what Kennedy thought, that Obergefell was going to open the floodgates of radical sexual behavior. Same sex sexual conduct, no matter what a person thinks of it, had been around for time immemorial, although it frankly even now is not really very well understood. But transgenderism had not been, or at least not in the same fashion. The groups backing the concept of transgenderism rushed into the field and gained ground enormously, which large numbers of people were not and are not willing to accept, including some homosexuals and included many feminists.
That this was going to cause massive civil disintegration was obvious. Disorganized groups on the right and middle that were already upset by the loss of industrial jobs and immigration now were faced with a massive social advance on the left which did not square with their basic understanding of themselves, and for good reason. To add to it, it was forced upon them.
None of this was necessary. Various states were moving towards various civil unions for homosexuals as it was. The slow march of legislation would have brought about a change, whether it was a good one or not, at a pace that would have been accepted. That's what happened to the disaster of no fault divorce. Instead Kennedy's opinion forced it all, and more than he had anticipated, all at once.
It destroyed respect for the Court and gave traditionalists of all types massive pause. It started the rush towards right wing populism which was already going on.
I'm really hoping this is true. Lee has shown a total disregard for the wishes of nationwide voter.
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