May 17, 1875: The 1st Kentucky Derby
Last edition:
Friday. March 26, 1875. Violence in Texas.
Labels: 1870s, 1875, 1940s, 1948, 1960s, 1968, Hawaii, Korea, Korean War, Personalities, South Korea, The Cold War
Saturday, May 17, 2025
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 84th Edition. The uncomfortably agreeing with the far right edition (on some things). Hegseth orders transgenderism out and a bill to outlaw pornography.
"Transgendered" troops to depart.
I'll be frank, I don't think transgenderism exists at all.
Gender dysphoria, however, certainly does. It's a psychological condition, and indeed, a mental illness, often a temporary one.
Moreover, "transitioning from a man to a woman", or vice versa, is impossible.
Whether or not that fiction should be allowed to medically occur for adults (for anyone not in their majority, it's child abuse), is another thing. I basically don't feel that it should be allowed, as its a manifestation of a mental illness that isn't served by being medically and surgically coddled, but I'll also fully admit there's more than one allowable medical procedure I don't think should be legal either. Plastic surgery, for example, for mere cosmetic reason for uninjured and the morphologically normal people is also wrong, in my view, and that's not the only such thing.
Nonetheless, the sudden, and it was sudden, post Obergefell societal trend towards treating this mental delusion as something that should be fully supported is not only stunning, but it's flat out wrong. It may be the only mental illness which has rising to be not only culturally tolerated, but for which the left makes cultural demands. As I predicated at the time of the Obergefell, making such demands would have a societal ripple that would be devastating, and it has been. There's a straight path from Obergefell to Donald Trump, as what it brought in was just a bridge too far.
So, here, I find myself agreeing with Secretary Hegseth's action, even though I'm not a fan of Secretary Hegseth.
By the way, there's a transitioned high school softball picture who has been blowing the doors off of her opponents with her pitches. Well, she's genetically a guy.
This is just wrong, and shouldn't be allowed to happen.
I'll also note that I may be one of the view Wyomingites in my region to have encountered a guy pretending to be a gal and seeking medical assistance for the delusion, with that person in uniform. Some time back I had some email correspondence with a full time National Guardsman on something, although I don't recall what. What I do recall is that he was "transgendered". Like a lot, but not all, "transgendered" men affecting the appearance of a woman, he looked very much like a guy, which of course what he genetically and morphologically is.
Gender studies also out.
In something that is sort of related, and sort of not, UW is eliminating its Gender Studies degree.
I've posted on the topic of pornography here from time to time.
UW looks to end embattled gender studies degree
I don't know much about gender studies other than its one of those host of degrees that came in during the 1970s and 1980s in the liberal arts that have always baffled me a bit. What do you do with it?
Having said that, I'm not as condescending towards the degree as I once was. I do, however, think that what US is doing makes sense. Folding the program into some other sort of sociology degree strikes me as making sense, rather than having it stand alone.
Sorority transgender pleading allowed.
In something else sort of related, and sort of not, the Federal Court has allowed for an amended complaint to be filed in a suit in which it seeks to address a man identifying as a woman being admitted to its house at UW as a sorority "sister".
Banning pornography.
And here's another item that come from the far right, and indeed from Project 2025, which generally scares me overall, but whose goal I find myself in agreement with:
I've posted on the topic of pornography here from time to time.
Pornography is a devastating scourge. It's wholly destructive, and about that there's no doubt
This bill will be interesting to watch. I suspect it will get no traction I don't know, for one thing, that Donald Trump cares one whit about pornography. After all, his wife became famous as a model for posing in a manner that I'd regard as pornographic. And a guy who rode the Lolita Express to Epstein's jail bait fantasy island doesn't strike me as a man of deep moral principles. And hte pron industry is powerful and will take this on in the guise of free speech.
It may ironically prove to be the case that deporting people to foreign concentration camps is something most Americans are willing to tolerate, but stopping young women from prostituting their images is not.
It may ironically prove to be the case that deporting people to foreign concentration camps is something most Americans are willing to tolerate, but stopping young women from prostituting their images is not.
Related posts:
Topic One.
Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to address it.
Topic Four
The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.
Secrets of Playboy
Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh
Last edition:
Labels: 2020s, Baby Boom Generation, Generation Jones, Growing up in the 1970s, law, mehr Mensch sein, Military, Old Age, The Practice of Law, The Second Trump Administration, Vietnam War, Zeitgeist
Friday, May 16, 2025
Wednesday, May 16, 1945. The Haguro sunk, U-boats surrender.
Okinawa.
The Royal Navy sank the Haguro ending the Battle of Malacca Strait. Admiral Kaju Saguira, age 49, was one of the casualties.
Fourteen U-boats surrendered to convoys in the Arctic.
The British liberated Alderney.
Heavy fighting occurred on Okinawa with the Japanese succeeding in knocking out some U.S. tanks.
Physicist Leo Szilard wrote a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer trying to convince him that atomic bombs shouldn't be used against Japan.
Last edition:
Tuesday, May 15, 1945. Germans fully surrendered, Chinese Army in retreat.
The Cost Meter. A Trade War Index.
Petroleum: $61.78/bbl (Wyoming crude become unecomic at $59.00/bbl).
Coal: Coal 99.40/ton
Coffee (USd/Lbs) 372.60.
Levis at Penny's: $55.65.
April 7, 2025
Petroleum: 60.80/bbl.
One of Trump's minions cited this, fwiw, as evidence that inflation isn't kicking in and things are fine. On the contrary, the price of petroleum is dropping on fears of a recession. A recession reduces oil consumption.
Indeed, because of the bizarre nature of tariffs, trading prices on some things in general may go down, while the price rises for Americans.
April 8, 2025
From the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
It's about $61/bbl this mooring.
cont:
$58.10. Below marketability in Wyoming.
April 9, 2025
Oil opening this morning:
56.03
April 10, 2025
Despite the strong relief rally on Wednesday, following President Trump’s 90-day pause of tariff hikes on most countries except China, the U.S. benchmark oil price is now lower than the breakeven for the shale industry to profitably drill a new well.
OilPrice.com
West Texas is $59.16/bbl.
April 11, 2025
U.S. reached a new record-high of $6.23 per dozen.
Oil is opening at 60.10/bbl.
May 2, 2025
Oil and Natural Gas.
WTI Crude 58.57 -0.67 -1.13%
Brent Crude 61.49 -0.64 -1.03%
Murban Crude 61.41 -0.93 -1.49%
Natural Gas 3.502 +0.023 +0.66%
A note, below $59.00, US crude doesn't move.
The inflation rate right now is 2.39% with the tariffs about to hit.
May 6, 2025
WTI Crude • 58.28 +1.15 +2.01%
Brent Crude • 61.39 +1.16 +1.93%
Murban Crude • 62.20 +2.24 +3.74%
Natural Gas • 3.594 +0.044 +1.24%
Coal: 98.50/ton
Coffee: 388.45
Levis: $55.65.
May 16, 2025
WTI Crude 61.95 +0.33 +0.54%
Brent Crude 64.88 +0.35 +0.54%
Natural Gas 3.345 -0.017 -0.51%
Coal: 99.00/ton
Coffee (USd/Lbs) 373.79
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Horse Shoeing
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Horse Shoeing: Thankfully, Chief is not lame this spring like he was last fall. That was worrisome. To prevent it from happening again, I think we better s...
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Lex Anteinternet: A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .The Thomas Crown Affair.
Eh?
Allow me to explain.
I posted this yesterday:
Lex Anteinternet: A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .: Cary Grant and Myrna Loy from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. O.W. Root @NecktieSalvage · 1h People think I am exaggerating when I ...
Last night, I tried to watch the Thomas Crown Affair.
I'm generally a fan of older movies, and often watch ones older than this. But I couldn't make my way through it. The appearance of the characters and the urban settings were just too much for me. The thing is, I"m pretty sure it was accurate.
All the office workers and businessmen are dressed in contempoary suits, some of which were quite nice and still would be today. The hats really stood out, with every man wearing a Trilby, something really identifiable with teh 1960s, but which when we look back on the 60s, is easy to forget.
The 1960s may have been the era of Haight Ashbury and hippies, but it was also the era of men still wearing suits and ties in the office. It isn't really into the 1970s that this began to change. The wide lapel loud color suit came out of the 60s, but it didn't show up until the early 1970s, which is really, culturally, part of the 1960s. Even so, men were wearing coat and tie in the office.
The other thing I encountered leading to this thread was a link from something on Pininterest, which lead to a set of photos that a high school teacher/photographer, took of high school students in his school in the 1970s. I'm not going to linke them in, as some of the photos he took were, in my view, a bit lacking in modesty (not anything illegal, but just something I wouldn't really think a person should photograph), but maybe that was his point.
It wasn't that I didn't recogize the photographs. I really did. That's the thing. All the boys and girls in tight fitting t-shirts.
I have my father's high school annual from 1947, and I've written on the appearance of the studends that appear in it before:
Standards of Dress. Attending school
This is a 9th Grade (Freshman) Class in high school, 1946. Specifically, is the Freshman class at NCHS in 1946 (the Class of 1949).Now, some will know NCHS who might read this, others will not. But in 1946 this class attended school in a city that had under 30,000 residents. It was a city, but it was a city vastly surrounded by the country, as it still somewhat is. This class of boys (there were more in it than those just in this photograph) were from the town and the country. None of them were big city kids. Some were ranch kids. I recognize one of them who was.. Some came from families that were doing okay, some from families that were poor.So how do we see them dressed? One is wearing a striped t-shirt. Exactly one. Every other boy here is wearing a button up long sleeved shirt. Of those, all but one are wearing ties.One of the ones wearing a tie is one of my uncles.Did they turn out with ties just for their photographs that day? Probably they did. I suspect so, but even at that, they all actually could come up with ties. And somebody knew hot to tie them. None of these boys appears to be enormously uncomfortable wearing a tie.
NCHS Juniors in 1946, this is therefore the Class of 1947.Here's a few of the boys in the Junior class that year. Here too, this is probably a bit different depiction of high school aged boys than we'd see today. For one thing, a lot of them are in uniform. As already mentioned in the thread on JrROTC, it was mandatory at the school. Based upon the appearances of the boys at the time the photograph was taken, this probably reflects relatively common daily male dress at NC. Most of the boys are in uniform. Of those who are not, most are wearing button up shirts, but no ties. A couple have t-shirts. Nobody's appearance is outlandish in any fashion, and nobody is seeking to make a statement with their appearance.NCHS girls, Class of 1947, as Juniors in 1946.Here are the Junior girls that year. As can be seen, NCHS had a uniform for girls at that time, which appears to have been some sort of wool skirt and a white button up shirt. They appear to have worn their uniform everyday, as opposed to the boys who must not have.Uniforms at schools are a popular thing to debate in some circles, and I'm not intending to do that. Rather, this simply points out the huge evolution in the standards of youth dress over the years. This is s cross section of students from a Western town. The people depicted in it had fathers who were lawyers, doctors, packing house employees, ranchers and refinery workers. They're all dress in a pretty similar fashion, and the dress is relatively plan really. No t-shirts declaring anything, as t-shirts of that type weren't really around. And no effort to really make a personal statement through dress, or even to really stand out by appearance.
I don't know that things had changed enormously by the mid 1950s.
Kids still new how to dress fairly formally, by contemporary standards, and girls are always shown wearing relatively long skirts and blouses. Boy nearly are always wearing button up shirts, not t-shirts. For something more formal boys still appear quite often in jacket and tie, or suit and tie. Consider the school dance here from the 1950s:
Not ties in a quick review, but still pretty cleanly dressed for the boys and very well dressed for the girls.
By the 60s, things were evolving.
And by the 1970s, they had really changed.
And not really for the good.
In the 70s, men still wore coat and tie to the office, but the trend line is pretty obvious.
If anything, youth dress hit rock bottom in the 1970s. It's intersting that office dress has hit rock bottom, right now.
And, like Atticus Finch noted, dress does matter.
Thursday, May 15, 1975. The Raid on Koh Tang.
A Marine Corps raid on Koh Tang island took back the Mayaguez, which they found deserted, while a Navy air raid destroyed the now Khmer Rouge run Cambodian navy.
Eighteen Marines were killed in combat and an additional 23 in a helicopter crash in the raid. Khmer forces were much larger than anticipated and resistance heavy. The helicopter passengers were not fully accounted for when the withdrawal occurred and it was later determined that three of the Marines (Joseph N. Hargrove, Gary L. Hall, and Danny G. Marshall) a shall) and two Navy medics (Bernard Guase and Ronald Manning) may have been alive when they were left behind on the island.
Sailing under a white flag, a Cambodian vessel brought thirty Americans to the destroyer USS Wilson.
It is really this date, and not the one that was declared several days earlier, that should be regarded as the end of the Vietnam War Era, as this was really the last combat in the US's involvement in the Indochinese War, of which the Vietnam War was part. It interesting came to an end somewhat in the way in which it had started in earnest, with Marines being deployed over a ship, as they would be because of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Last edition:
Wednesday, May 14, 1975. Hmong evacuation.
Labels: 1940s, 1947, 1950s, 1956, 1970s, 1973, 1975, 2020s, 2025, Hmong People, House Committee on Un-American Affairs, Immigration, Laos, Laotian Civil War, Movies, Personalities, The written word
Tuesday, May 15, 1945. Germans fully surrendered, Chinese Army in retreat.
Army Group Center, now completely disintegrated, quit all resistance with troops surrender to the Western Allies where they cold, and to the Soviets if they could not.
Axis forces surrendered at Slovenski Gradek.
A new Austrian republic was declared.
Fighting was fierce again on Okinawa.
Burmese nationalist Aung San lead his forces into support of the Allies.
Japan abrogated its treaties with the other Axis countries.
The Battle of the Malacca Strait began between the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Chinese lines were broken by the Japanese, and the Chinese Army was in full retreat.
"MGs of the heavy weapons companies of 1st Bn., 100th RCT, fire on hill #2 in the Mangima Valley Area, Mindanao, P.I. 15 May, 1945. Photographer: O'Neill."
Last edition:
Monday, May 14, 1945. Lingering actions.
Friday, May 15, 1925. Coolidge decides the Navy isn't a police force.
President Coolidge rejected prohibitionist Wayne Wheeler's plan to use the U.S. Navy to enforce the Volstead Act.
Coolidge believed the Navy was for national defense, not police duty.
Japanese editorials decried American plans to strengthen the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Gen. Nelson A. Miles, famous for his role in the Indian Wars, and whose name was given to Miles City, Montana, died at age 85.
Last edition:
Tuesday, May 12, 1925. President Hindenburg and Prosecutor Bryan.
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