GMC New Design flatbed truck.
This is a nice example, at least appearance wise, of a GMC New Design truck, the style of which is identical to the Chevrolet Advanced Design Truck.
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
John Dean began his testimony on Watergate in front of hte Senate Watergate Committee.
Now, boys and girls, I know that it seems almost impossible that there was an era in which joint committees in Congress could function, let alone when the GOP didn't accuse everyone of being a Nazi Communist Traitor to their country for questioning a Republican President's actions, but there really was.
In all seriousness, Congress in 1973 looks so much better than Congress in 2023, it's not funny. It's sad.
The Germans completed the eradication of the Jewish population of Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk) in Ukraine.
The "Battle of Bamber Bridge" occurred in the UK when white Military Police intervened in a pub which had stretched out drinking hours for black US troops and then attempted to cite one for improper uniform. Shots were ultimately fired and one of the soldiers was killed.
The Smith-Connoally Act was passed, which allowed the government to seize industries threated by strikes. It went into law over President Roosevelt's veto.
The men were undergoing training. A memorial service will be held for them today in Summerville.
Classified as a medium bomber, the Ventura is one of the numerous Allied warbirds that are now basically forgotten, in spite of having received widespread use. It was an adaptation of a civilian airliner.
Sarah Sundin notes, on her blog:
Today in World War II History—June 25, 1943: 80 Years Ago—June 25, 1943: Bob Hope begins his first major USO tour; he will spend 11 weeks touring England, North Africa, and Sicily.
In Laramie, it was noted, but the focus was on his visit that would occur today.
A week featuring a bizarre late week Russian drama.
Last week's edition:
Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:
Eh?
This found:
In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.
FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain). England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it. This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.
Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time. Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome. Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe. And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal. In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.
Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II. It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age. It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.
For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion. But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it. The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all. But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.
Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.
For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life. I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves. Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.
I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years. I need to get back to it.
Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.
Related threads:
Head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach engaged in an argument with Adloph Hitler over ending the war, which he urged. The 36-year-old German Army veteran remained in his position, but Hitler would never speak to him again.
Schirach was born to a father who was a retired German cavalryman and a mother who was an American expatriate. Indeed, three out of four of his grandparents were Americans, and he learned to speak English at home prior to learning to speak German, which he did not until age 6.
He was head of the Hitler Youth early on, but did serve as an infantryman early in World War Two, winning the Iron Cross. He then served as Gauleiter of Vienna and was associated with the deportation of the city's Jewish population. He'd be sentenced as a war criminal for that following the war, being released in 1966. He died in 1974 at age 67. His wife, who had been the daughter of Hitler's photographer, divorced him while he was in prison.
Schirach serves as a disturbing example of a German who did not come from Nazi oriented roots, but who was corrupted into it as a very young man.
Stage Door Canteen, with a huge ensemble cast, was released.
I've never seen it, but it seems to be well regarded, or perhaps fondly recalled.
The Nigerian National Democratic Party was founded. The party, which advocated for Nigerian independence, was the first in the then British colony.
In other colonial news, France's Chamber of Deputies debated whether to give the French West Indies to the US in payment of war dept. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré killed the suggestion, saying, "I never would permit such a proposal to be officially made to the French government."
President Harding was in Denver.
With a few comments from me on the linked in blog:
Where labs, chessies and golden retrievers come from:
A lot of Twitter is junk, but this comment hit me a bit:
The death of any man diminishes me but, beyond a quick yet sincere Requiescat for them, my main question now is how many public tax dollars were spent trying to rescue the super-rich from their super-dangerous escapades.
Not that they asked for it.
And not that there isn't an effort to rescue any who are, in the words of the hymn, "in peril on the sea".
But there's just something existentially different about this.
Many will say that nobody has a right to tell other people what to do with their money, but that is in fact wrong, and we do it all the time. There are plenty of things that are illegal that people spend their money on, and we aren't inclined to make them legal on this basis.
To have cash to such a surplus level that $250,000 can be spent for a single instance of amusement, no matter how profound the experience, raises moral questions of all sorts, and not just for those who are that well funded, but also for the societies allowing this to occur.
And the Titanic is the site of a mass loss of human life. To spend that amount of money to dive on what is essentially a grave is problematic.
There's a public duty to try to rescue those imperiled, irrespective of their wealth or lack of it. An interesting thing here is that the effort was undertaken when those in the know, already knew these individuals were dead. The U.S. Navy knew at the instant it occurred. Those on location did as well. It sounds as if those on location distributed the news within thirty minutes of it occurring.
I'm not saying that "expend any effort" shouldn't be attempted. That was done, and no doubt that cost at least the United States and Canada millions.
I'm saying that this shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, and that in this era of vast wealth, something should be reassessed.
Ninth Judicial District Judge Melissa Owens expanded her series of injunctions to preclude prohibitions on abortion pills, indicating that there's a strong chance that the Plaintiffs may win in this case on the basis, she says, that abortion can be regarded as health care.
While its difficult for me to see how infanticide is health care, this is another reason to point out what we already did in this thread:
Lawsuit filed over Wyoming's abortion restriction law. . . and a cautionary tale.
As we then noted:
Back during the Obama Administration, in a fit of right wing upsettedness and paranoia, Wyoming amended its constitution as follows.
Artice 1, Section 38.
Right of health care access
(a) Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make health care decisions for that person.
(b) Any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.
(c) The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people or to accomplish the other purposes set forth in the Wyoming Constitution.
(d) The state of Wyoming shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.
You'll recall, of course, when "Obamacare" was new, and before Americans had acclimated themselves so much to it that it could not be repealed, the Republican Party was full of stories about how government panels were going to make your health care decisions for you, like it or not. This inspired early Tea Party type movements to address this, this being one of them.
Of course, the amendment goes largely unused and in spite of quite a bit of debate on masks and quarantines during the height of the pandemic, the amendment has sat dormant until now, when it was predictably noticed.
So now this is on a trip to the Wyoming Supreme Court. Some judge is going to be asked to stay the new law until the Supreme Court can rule on it, a nightmare for whomever is tasked with this, and this isn't going to be pleasant for the Wyoming Supreme Court either. As a hot button issue in really polarized times, no matter what they do will make somebody really angry.
In my view, abortion isn't "health care" per se, and so this amendment ought not to apply. That will really upset people who place it in the health care category, but it really isn't. I hold the same view, fwiw, of cosmetic surgery for "beauty" purposes. Not to compare the two, but by example getting bigger boobs isn't a health care decision. Abortion for avoidance of a natural biologic process isn't either, at least until you get into the topic of the physical life of the mother.
I can't help but note, however, how this right wing constitutional amendment has now swung around as a leftward one. So now the article is being used by the left against the right. And there are other ways the same article could be. If a legislature, for example, determines to address transgender surgery or treatment with pharmaceuticals, which I'd guess some legislators would like to do, can they?
We noted in another thread how the prime mover on this amendment noted that he'd feel awful if his amendment was interpreted in the fashion it now risks being, that person being a strong opponent of abortion. While I admire his stance in that regard, he should feel awful. His paranoia on a non problem has helped create a real one.
TexasLouisiana whewThat's where we come fromTexasYeah LouisianaAlways on the runWell I'm just starting outI ain't never doneHey there neighborGet on in this houseLike sugarcane and cactusWe're both from the southTexasLouisianaThat's where we come fromTexasYeah LouisianaWe're both old and youngI'm the farmers daughterI'm a poor man's sonLove Stevie rayLittle Walter tooTurn it up BuddyI wanna jam with youTexasLouisiana tooThat's where we come fromTexasWhew Louisiana tooTogether having funTeacher used to tell meTwo heads is better than one
Blog Mirror: Christian nationalism and how it’s hurting Wyoming
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
City Park Church, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming
This is City Park Church, and was formerly, as noted below in the original entry, the First Presbyterian Church.This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park.The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.This century old church became the home of the former First Baptist Church congregation on February 28, 2020, and as noted in a thread we'll link in below, had been experiencing a lot of changes prior to that.The original entry here was one of the very first on this blog and dated at least back as far as January 25, 2011. While the architecture hasn't changed at all, with the recent change our original entry became misleading to an extent.
As Montesquieu pointed out long ago, democracy is the most demanding regime, given its demands for civic virtue. The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty.
[W]hat is bemoaned by the right is due not to the left but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to liberal economics. And it seeks to show that what is bemoaned by the left is due not to the right but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to the dissolution of social norms, particularly those regarding sexual behavior and identity. The “wedding” between global corporations and this sexual agenda is one of the most revealing yet widely ignored manifestations of this deeper synergy.
Its warning would be simple, recalling its oldest lessons: at the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited. For both of these reasons, we cannot be truly free in the modern sense. We can never attain satiation, and will be eternally driven by our desires rather than satisfied by their attainment. And in our pursuit of the satisfaction of our limitless desires, we will very quickly exhaust the planet.
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
[W]hat is bemoaned by the right is due not to the left but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to liberal economics. And it seeks to show that what is bemoaned by the left is due not to the right but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to the dissolution of social norms, particularly those regarding sexual behavior and identity. The “wedding” between global corporations and this sexual agenda is one of the most revealing yet widely ignored manifestations of this deeper synergy.
Elections provide the appearance of self-governance but mainly function to satiate any residual civic impulse before we return to our lives as employees and consumers.