Sunday, December 14, 2025

They know this is going to be popular, so they've very clearly received their marching orders. It's all Joe Biden's fault, like everything else. The truth is much more complicated.

The United States is the only first would nation on EArth that doesn't have national healthcare. It's part of what depresses the American standard of living and why, in spite of what we seem to think, we aren't exactly admired lifestyle and standard of living wise by any other advanced nation. Frankly, most of the rest of the developed world thinks we're a bunch of ignorant rednecks, a view that has a lot behind it, frankly. Donald Trump, in one of his demented rages, wondered the other day why Norwegians don't come here as opposed to Somalians.

Why on Earth would they?

Anyhow, the dirty little secret of the ACHA, termed Obamacare, which was Romneycare before that, is that it was probably supposed to be transitional in the first place. It was the best the Democrats could do under the circumstances, and the thought is that it would probably phase away, I suspect, into bonafide national health care. The Republicans took their typical approach to the advancement of social programs, which was to complain and do nothing. We've now had the ACHA for fifteen years.

The ACHA system really came under strain during COVID, and that in turn lead to the premium subsidies, a big advance towards a national health care system. Those are now coming off, which will cause a huge spike in premiums, followed by a massive loss of coverage, much of which will fall right on the backs of diehard Trump loyalist. By next year quite a few of those people will be thinking that Bernie Sanders is the greatest politician of all time.

The destruction of the ACHA is a goal of NatCons, who really don't like a government role in such things at all. Cassie Cravens did an op ed which edged up on really voicing their view recently, and while I really don't like Cravens' articles, I'll give her some credit for that one. It's really undeniable that welfare programs create a dependence that is existentially problematic.

That really dealt with welfare more than healthcare, however, and here a real distinction can be made. We'll look at that a bit below, but what we'd first note is that all the GOP howling about "it's Joe Biden's fault" can't cover up the fact that they did utterly nothing for fifteen years. They don't have any real plan at all.

Indeed, the real concept is that removing the subsidies will cause the ACHA to fail, reverting the situation to the status quo ante. That's what they want. Yes, that'll mean that a lot of people will be uninsured, but they really don't care. Somehow, the magic of the marketplace is supposed to work all this out.

It won't.

The law of unintended consequences works pretty strongly in areas like this, and the net result is likely to be large-scale populist outrage and a shifting towards the left. Trump's already screwed farmers in the country with his tariffs, and more than a few of them will go into the polling stations in November 2026 wearing MAGA hats and then vote for Democrats. People who start watching family members die due to no healthcare coverage, and that will happen, will react more strongly. When the Democrats come back into power, which will start in 2026, and complete in 2028, they'll likely create a national healthcare system based on Medicare.

In the interim three years the GOP is going to do nothing.

Doing something, frankly, is warranted and would not be all that difficult. A single payer system could be created but which would bid the system out decadally to carriers. The system wouldn't cover everything, just necessary medical. Yes, it'd be paid for with taxes, but taxes graduated so they wealthy would bear more of them, which they should in general now.

Every other advanced nation in the world does this.

A few thoughts, or reminders, on war.

The Trump administration is beating the war drum and in fact pretending that enforcing American laws on drug smuggling is the same thing as a war.

It isn't, in fact that's criminal in and of itself, but because this is the direction the administration is clearly going, there's some things that should be kept in mind.

The first thing is that if you treat something like a war, it might become one. That raises this:

Yeoman's Fifth Law of History. When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.
When nations start a war, they have a "war aim." But that aim rarely determines when a war ends. Wars are over when the party that is attacked decides that the war is over.

The Germans, during World War Two, thought that the war in the West was over when they knocked France out of the war, but the British did not believe that, so it did not end. In the East, the Germans thought advancing to the Volga meant victory over the USSR. The Soviets, however, had no such concept so the war went on. Conversely, the Imperial Russians in World War One gave up long before they were really defeated. They just gave up. Wars end when the party that was attacked decides that they are over.

Americans have long had the view that, because we're Americans, we're the toughest on the block and we'll win. The wars we've fought since World War Two have shown that isn't the case. Indeed, they've shown we're perfectly capable of being beaten, and moreover, our greatest weakness is that we get tired of war pretty easily.

Right now we're picking on Venezuela, which is not an admirable nation, but what if we go in? Are we going to occupy the country until it becomes a democratic state? What do the Venezuelans think of that. Some of them probably don't like the idea much, and they'll resist it. Are we prepared to be in the country for a decade, two decades, three?

Note also that in our last several major wars, and this would be a major war, the US has been very careful to pretend they aren't wars.

Yeoman's Fourth Law of History. War changes everything
This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars. I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything. No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation. People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.

We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated. Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.

It'd behoove us to remember that our association with wars of choice is not a happy one. For that matter, our association with wars in general isn't all that happy.

World War Two, nearly fondly looked back upon now, created so much social destruction that we've never really recovered from it. While I've done a pretty poor job of defining it, nearly every single social ill Americans face today was amplified, if not created, due to the Second World War. People like to imagine that the war gave us a generation of stalwart self sacrificing men, and there's a lot of truth to that. It also, however, gave us a generation of men who crawled into the bottle and never came back out, and who were never able to really recover from having had their youth destroyed and every single value of a decent society made a mockery of.

We don't think much about the Korean War anymore, but the Korean War acclimated us to the concept of getting into big wars without a declaration of war, something we'd never done before. That lead to Vietnam, which destroyed the American military and which helped create the drug problem we're dealing with now. The Vietnam War was directly linked to the widespread use of all sorts of narcotics in the US which we've never been able to get a handle on.

What the impacts are of simply killing drug smugglers on the seas are isn't known yet, but we're already suffering from the impacts of exposing too many people to militarized violence. It'd serve us well to remember that two of the most infamous killings of the 1960s were committed by Marine Corps veterans. The Oklahoma City bombing was committed by an Army veteran. People trained to kill, can kill more easily, particularly if they've already killed.

There are also real dangers to teaching an entire society that killing is the answer to problems. Sen. Tom Cotton is running around doing that right now, in regard to boat murders, but where does it end? If it's okay to kill suspected drug smugglers on the sea, why isn't it on the block?

That, unfortunately, feeds right into the paranoia that some on the very far right have been backing for years. In the US crime is at an all time low, and it's been declining for decades. Blowing up boats and getting young men, and women, used to extrajudicial killing isn't going help that trend to continue.

Every single human vice finds massively amplified expression during wartime, not just killing. Soldiers at war will invariably, to some degree, engage in rape, theft and drug and alcohol use. There are no exceptions to this whatsoever. The U.S. military already has internal problems with drugs and rape, the former being a problem that every military has had always, and the latter a feature of the increased number of women in the service. War will make every single vice worse, and then that gets taken home.

Yeoman's Fifth Law of History. When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.
When nations start a war, they have a "war aim." But that aim rarely determines when a war ends. Wars are over when the party that is attacked decides that the war is over.

The Germans, during World War Two, thought that the war in the West was over when they knocked France out of the war, but the British did not believe that, so it did not end. In the East, the Germans thought advancing to the Volga meant victory over the USSR. The Soviets, however, had no such concept so the war went on. Conversely, the Imperial Russians in World War One gave up long before they were really defeated. They just gave up. Wars end when the party that was attacked decides that they are over.

Every war the US has entered following the Korean War, which was a genuine emergency which we entered not knowing how it would come out, has been done with the concept that we were so dominant that nobody could defeat us. Our track record is pretty poor that way. In Korea, we were fought to a stalemate by the Red Chinese who had just come out of over two decades of civil war and which should not have been a match for a first world military. In Vietnam, we did even worse and while our battlefield performance was good up until 1968, after that the service started to crumble. We proved to have no staying power in Afghanistan and Trump surrendered to the Taliban.

The thing is here that we're dealing with criminal organizations, not real foreign armies, so far. We've beaten organized crime before, but through dedicated law enforcement. The thing we've never beaten, however, is the existence of organized crime that seeks to fuel illicit desires. That is, the mafia is a shadow of its former self, but drugs and prostitution, two of its main sources of income, are as prevalent as ever.

The Trump interregnum seems to think that if you kill the middleman, the smugglers, this problem goes away. It won't. It just shifts to new trafficking routes. It might think that going right after the source will do it. There's a little support for that view, as that's basically what Mussolini did to the mafia during his fascist rule of Italy, but we really don't know that. If you start hitting drug manufacturing in Venezuela, you pretty much have to do it in Columbia and Mexico as well. That's a pretty big task, particularly given our long border with Mexico.

And you have to accept that at some point, those you are trying to kill fight back.

We haven't really experienced that for a very long time, perhaps since the Punitive Expedition of 1916, but we're living in a much more fluid world than we did even a decade ago. The North Vietnamese were not going to hit back, even if they could. But we have already seen an upset Afghani hit back. And the conditions for doing just that are presently ideal.

The Trump Administration likes to pretend its ended nine wars. What it has done iis made a lot of enemies, and a lot of those enemies are pretty smart. Why wouldn't Iran make use of the current situation in the US? Why wouldn't Venezuela, or the drug cartels. Massive domestic reaction would occur, but that would practically be part of the point. Conditions are ideal for Iran to engage in a false flag operation in the US.

Conditions are also ideal for Russia to do that. Russia has a proven track record of manipulating US information and elections. It's just approved of the Trump admin's strategic plan, which would give us pause. Getting us bogged down in a South American war would really serve their interests, and would be frighteningly easy to do. The same is true for China, or North Korea.

Chickenhawks.

One of the most pronounced trends in my life has been watching men in high office commit the country to war when they never served themselves.

This isn't completely true, if I consider every President who has been in my office during my lifetime. Kennedy, for example, had certainly seen war. But after Jimmy Carter things really changed.

People have come to admire Ronald Reagan as some sort of superhero. He was quite hawkish and deserves a lot of genuine credit for bringing the Cold War to a successful conclusion. He was a cavalry officer in the Army Reserve prior to the Second World War, but served as an actor for the Army during the war.

Not exactly John Ford.

Be that as it may, his role was his role, but one thing I wish he'd never done was to introduce the snappy salute into the Oval Office. The President is a civilian, not a soldier, and that lousy habit has been around every since.

Anyhow, George Bush I had been in the Navy in the Second World War, and his son had been a Texas National Guard pilot. George Bush II, however, really brought Dick Cheney into prominence, and Cheney had been in divinity school during the Vietnam War.

Hmmm. . .

Barack Obama had, of course, never been in the service, but I wouldn't have expected him to be. He's too young to have lived during a time of conscription.

Neither Biden or Trump are, however. No service there. Trump had shin splints, we're told.

Trump seems to have a love hate relationship with war. On some occasions he appears to genuinely abhor it, but at the same time he's having people murdered on the seas. Some of that may have to do with an oddly narrow worldview. We know that he likes money and women. That seems to be about it.

He does seem to abhor drugs. That may mean the one thing he's okay killing over is that topic, although his recent pardon of a major drug runner raises a question about that.

Epstein

View those files yet?

No, you haven't, as they still haven't been released.

The Democrats have released some materials, however, from the Epstein materials, including a photo of Trump with some young women. Their faces are blocked out, so you can't really tell how young they are, or for that matter, who they are. Other materials are just weird, including photos of sex toys, and then this:

Demonizing people

We've really entered a period of full blown racist name calling like I've never seen in my entire lifetime. It's now openly the case that Trump and some of his cronies say things that are blatantly racist.

Nobody seems to be willing to put a stop to it by calling it out.

Bear Care.

One of the interesting things going on in MAGA land is that in Wyoming, where the MAGAs now control the legislature (we're always behind the curve) there's starting to be some real pushback. As the MAGAs pushback on the pushback, people's real views start to come out.

The Wyoming Department of Health, seeing that the Republican controlled Congress is going to let a huge number of Wyomingites lose their health insurance coverage, came up with an emergency coverage plan. It'd cover things like car wrecks and bear attacks. Because it covers bear attacks, they dubbed it Bear Care.

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which might as well be called the Leopards Won't Eat My Face Party, is opposed to it.

Well of course they are. . . leopards won't eat my face, right?

One of the big wheels in the WFC is John Bear, ironically, who was interviewed on his views, which demonstrate he doesn't really see a separation between church and state being what most would. That puts him, and therefore perhaps the WFC, squarely in the New Apostolic Reformation camp, something very much outside of the traditional Protestant mainstream, and even more outside of the Wyoming mainstream.

Anyhow, I think Bear Care is a good idea.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 110th Edition. Ballooning ballrooms and murder on the sea.

Labels: 2020s, 2025, 2025 White House Vandalization, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Eric Barlow, Kristi Noem, law, Mark Gordon, Pete Hegseth, Venezuela, White House, Zeitgeist

Going Feral: Hunter, 82, Still Bagging Wyoming Big Game With Ri...

Going Feral: Hunter, 82, Still Bagging Wyoming Big Game With Ri...: Charming story, but nothing remarkable about it: Hunter, 82, Still Bagging Wyoming Big Game With Rifle He Bought In 1968 The truth of the ma...

Hunter, 82, Still Bagging Wyoming Big Game With Rifle He Bought In 1968

Charming story, but nothing remarkable about it:

Hunter, 82, Still Bagging Wyoming Big Game With Rifle He Bought In 1968

The truth of the matter is that there isn't a big game rifle on the market today that is any better than the Mauser 98, introduced in 1898, and if you insist on going with a non Mauser action, the 721 action, used in the 700, was introduced in 1948.

Optics, however, have improved. But even at that, for hunting purposes, not as much as might be supposed.

And finally, if you can't hunt with an iron sight (not that you must, but that you are incapable of doing so), you need to retrain yourself as a rifleman until you can. Then go back to the scope.

We'll get into this more at some later time.

Thursday, December 13, 1945. Crimes against humanity.

Johanna Bormann, 52, SS concentration camp guard; Irma Grese, 22, SS concentration camp guard; Fritz Klein, 57, German Nazi physician; Josef Kramer, 39, German Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; Elisabeth Volkenrath, 26, German concentration camp supervisor were hanged for crimes against humanity

Last edition:

Wednesday, December 12, 1945. Conviction of war criminals.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Aircraft, Cartoons, J.R. Williams, Strike Wave of 1945-1945, U.S. Air Force, Unions

Interior Secretary Burgum asked public land users to flag ‘negative’ depictions of American history. Wyoming criticized the effort instead.

Interior Secretary Burgum asked public land users to flag ‘negative’ depictions of American history. Wyoming criticized the effort instead.: Environmental group’s public records request shows few residents took the initiative to respond, and those who did were critical and 'embarrassed' by the Trump administration’s effort.

Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump. Ignoramus* Watch Part 1.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Ignoramus, Latin for we do not know.*

Etymology of the word Ignoramus.

October 31, 2025.

Claims ‘chemtrails’ poison citizens spur Wyoming lawmakers to advance ‘geoengineering’ ban: Claims ‘chemtrails’ poison citizens spur Wyoming lawmakers to advance ‘geoengineering’ ban Nano particles released from Department of War jets are sterilizing soils, blocking sun, lawmakers hear from Wyomingites and YouTuber before backing bill.

What the f***?

"Chemtrails" for those who are unfamiliar with this, is a conspiracy theory. As Wikipedia summarizes it:

The chemtrail conspiracy theory /ˈkɛmtreɪl/ is the erroneous belief that long-lasting condensation trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually "chemtrails" consisting of chemical or biological agents, sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public. Believers in this conspiracy theory say that while normal contrails dissipate relatively quickly, contrails that linger must contain additional substances. Those who subscribe to the theory speculate that the purpose of the chemical release may be solar radiation management, weather modification, psychological manipulation, human population control, biological or chemical warfare, or testing of biological or chemical agents on a population, and that the trails are causing respiratory illnesses and other health problems.

Uff.

The fact that this passed committee suggest that every member of this committee needs to return to kindergarten save for Barry Crago and Karlee Provenza

So who is on it?

Bob Ide

Barry Crago (voted no).

Taft Love

Troy McKeown

Laura Pearson

John Winter

Dalton Banks

Bob Davis

John Eklund

Steve Johnson

Pepper Ottman

Karlee Provenza (voted no).

Mike Schmid

Tomi Strock

Apparently global warming coming up with some blaming that on chemtrails. How ignorant can a person be? It's amazing that they actually will acknowledge that its occuring, and man made, but has to be caused by some bat shit crazy conspiracy theory.

Don't vote for anyone on this list after this, save for Provenza and Crago. You can judge them on their merits otherwise, but they didn't fall for this whacky shit or tolerate it.

Simply amazing, and depressing.

November 7, 2025

We've dropped the infertility drugs to make lots of Trump babies I'm hoping by the midterms.

Dr. "Oz".

What the crap?

Also, at this event an unidentified man collapsed beside President Donald Trump.

Dr. Oz, did go to help the man, while Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran away from the scene. The video of Kennedy's hasty departure is impressive.

November 19, 2025

Esquire, which I don't read, but whose cover I saw declares this to be "The Age of Stupid and openly wonders if the US will survive it. It further declares that the US went from anti-intellectual, to anti-intellect.

That seems pretty correct to me.

The Atlantic has an article entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, noting "Social media has dissolved the mortar of our society and made America stupid. It's actually from 2022, and compares the US to the Biblical Babel.

So on this topic, I'm not alone.

Trump is spouting stupider and stupider stuff by the day. He insults people throughout every single day.

The country literally can't keep going this way. Stupidity will bring it to ruin, if not the entire globe to ruin.

There is some evidence, albeit not overwhelming, that thinking people have had enough.

Recently I linked in an Ezra Klein episode on Nick Fuentes. It's here:

Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem | The Ezr...

Well worth listening to, and absolutely frightening.

I'm noting that, as it wasn't until that episode that I appreciated the degree to which the current GOP, and the populist right, is being influenced by incels. Right after that, through synchronicity, it occurred to me recently how many right wing populists are basically misogynistic, racist, losers.

Not all of them by any means. There are many very right wing thinkers out there, and some of them are in the Trump camp.

Not too many of them are really MAGA anymore however.

There are, however, a group that spend all their time hating blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and women, because if all those people, they think, were "in their place", an easy life would be provided to them.

Well, bucko, the world was never like that. Get up, get out, and get a grip.

Trump feeds into these people's sense of worth. They love him, he desires love, and therefore, well . . .therefore.

This was oddly illustrated by this on Twitter, posted by one Richard Cooper, who seems to hate women, but who also, on his Twitter feed, like to demonstrate his hatred for women, by posting pictures of barely clad women.

"Just look at the degree on that chick" ~ No man ever
5:46 AM · Nov 15, 2025
13.3M
Views

Well, I don't know what sort of background Cooper has, but in the age of stupid, there are a lot of comments like this out there.

This one, however, actually went viral, as it sparked thousands of degreed women to post their own photos of their graduations with "look at the degree on that chick", including the extremely conservative The Catholic Engineer, whom I follow. I'm a very conservative Catholic, but The Catholic Engineer makes me look like a liberal in comparison. But she's very interesting, very willing to engage in debates, and she also is coincidentally a pretty woman.

The Catholic Engineer

@TheCatholicEngr

Adding this pic to the trend too cause it's cool

They shot Inception over here

Quote

The Catholic Engineer

@TheCatholicEngr

21h

'Just look at the degree on that chick'  x.com/RachelMoiselle…

10:23 AM · Nov 18, 2025

4,212
Views

She is some sort of aerospace engineer, which is pretty darned high test.

Anyhow, the entire concept that men don't like intelligent women is complete bs. It's long been established that generally people marry somebody of like IQ, save for the super wealthy who have lost their morals and marry bimbos. I'll note here that it would appear that our nation's (illegitimate) leader, who very clearly isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, doesn't appear to have selected all of his "wives" based on intelligence, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're not intelligent. Only Marla Maples seemed to be an exception, but of course I don't know much about any of the lineup. The current occupant of the lineup might be smart, who knows, but given his wealth and her (then fully on display) looks, it seems to be the classic trophy situation.

That's been one of the things that's been so baffling. Trump's not smart, and he behaves like a wealthy playboy, and that's stupid. There's nothing admirable about that at all, and in no prior era would anyone have thought so.

Anyhow, since the introduction of Trump into politics there's been the rise of basement dwelling incels. No, they don't control everything. There's really mad right wing conservatives who were and are upset with moral decay. There's the illiberal democrats of the National Conservative movement, many of whom are real intellectuals (and probably mostly married to really sharp women). There's the Neo Traditionalist who are trying to grope their way back to an imagined Hilaire Belloc golden age that never really existed, but which they wish did and hope might, again. There's the really scary Evangelicals of the New Apostolic Reformation who seek to make the nation a Calvinist republic. All of these are tied up together in a coalition, now seemingly starting to fray, that has been MAGA.

But an undoubted part of that is the Nick Fuentes group of populists. They're angry, they're nasty, they are anti semitic, anti women, and pretty much opposed to anyone who isn't a basement dweller. They believe the women, Indians, Jews, Blacks and, ironically in the case of Fuentes, Hispanics stole from them simply by being here. Educated women, blacks, Jews, and others have taken their jobs and maybe the girls they would have had, they believe, leaving them with no future. They found a voice in people like Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, and even people like true, but radical, intellectuals from the other camps, like Helen Anderson, who imagines that radical feminizatist still exist and are wiping out society, as she's written about here:

The Great Feminization

Helen Andrews

It's a short article. It's also incredibly wrong. I've lived through the era in which law went from mostly male to increasingly female, in terms of lawyer demographics, and it really hasn't made one darned bit of difference in the law.

As noted, things seem to be changing a bit. I'm hearing more and more people who ere MAGA adherents suddenly question it. People as MAGA as Marjorie Taylor Green are now openly at war with a mentally failing Donald Trump. A war is going on inside of MAGA about Tucker Carlson's bromance with Fuentes.

And now this. People reacted heavily to the "look at the degrees on that chick" comment, a comment which suggested, basically, that women had value only for their physical and secual attributes.

I actually went in and liked Turner's Twitter feed, as she's an evolutionary biologist, one of my favorite topics. I'm not exactly threatened by a woman having an advanced degree in that topic.

Indeed, looking back, and I now have a lot of back to look at, in my dating days, there was never one single girl I dated that wasn't really sharp. One went on to be a school teacher. Another I lost track of but she was the valedictorian of her high school class. One was working on a masters degree in geophysics and obtained it. Two were law students. And finally there's my wife, who is pretty darned smart.

Indeed, look at the degrees on those chicks.

But consider the stupidity of the nation right now. It's appalling.

We'll close out this edition of this sad trailing thread here.

December 13, 2025

First it was the screwball chemtrail stupidity, now this:

Lawmaker Questions Wyoming Adjutant General Over Presence Of UFOs

Salazar, we'd note, is a California transplant.

Footnotes:

*I'm using the word Ignoramus in its original English connotation, as derived from the Latin. I.e., an ignorant person.

Not a stupid person.

To willfully believe something stupid is ignorant, particularly when done by intelligent people. Some of these people are undoubtedly highly intelligent, and I don't know that any of them are stupid, but they're willfully voting for something that is just a weird silly conspiracy theory.

And that makes it all the more shameful.

Related threads:

The ascent of the ignorant.

The Agrarian's Lament: What an Eejit

Thomas More, counsellor of law and statesman of integrity, merry martyr and most human of saints: Pray that, for the glory of God and in the pursuit of His justice, I may be trustworthy with confidences, keen in study, accurate in analysis, correct in conclusion, able in argument, loyal to clients, honest with all, courteous to adversaries, ever attentive to conscience. Sit with me at my desk and listen with me to my clients’ tales. Read with me in my library and stand always beside me so that today I shall not, to win a point, lose my soul. Pray that my family may find in me what yours found in you: friendship and courage, cheerfulness and charity, diligence in duties, counsel in adversity, patience in pain—their good servant, and God’s first. Amen

"Be at peace. Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life; rather look to them with full hope as they arise. God, whose very own you are, will deliver you from out of them. He has kept you hitherto, and He will lead you safely through all things; and when you cannot stand it, God will bury you in his arms. Do not fear what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you then and every day. He will either shield you from suffering, or give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imagination." St. Francis de Sales

Lex Anteinternet?

This blog has been around since 2009. In the very first post, we asked the question: "What the heck is this blog about?"

Our answer to the question was: "The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?"

We also noted: "Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book."

All of this is still true, but the focus of the blog has changed somewhat. It now focuses on the era from 1890 to 1920 in general, rather than on the law and lawyers specifically, although that may be far from obvious. It's also become the location where we comment on anything we feel moved to comment on.

We hope you'll feel moved to comment as well. While we moderate every comment, so as to weed out Spam, we greatly appreciate the comments where they are offered, and hope to see more.

Thank you for stopping in!