Unique Whiskey Made From Ancient Grain Grown In Wyoming Called Emmer Debuts

Lex Anteinternet: Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else—this is no longer America. Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else—this is no longer America.

Lex Anteinternet: Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Mi...:   

Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else—this is no longer America.

 Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It

From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else—this is no longer America.

Lex Anteinternet: A Wyoming Party, and some other thoughts. We're on our own.

Lex Anteinternet: A Wyoming Party, and some other thoughts. We're ...: 

A Wyoming Party, and some other thoughts. We're on our own.

Jane Banner: Shouldn't we wait for back up?

Ben: This isn't the land of waiting for back up. This is the land of you're on your own.

Wind River. 

In the film Wind River, set on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Tribal policeman Ben and FBI agent Jane Banner are confronted with gunfire while investigating a crime and have the exchange noted above.

Wyomingites love that quote, and there's a lot to it.*

Not only is there a lot to it, its very much the case regarding politics in this state.  Our Congressional delegation doesn't support or represent us on many of the existential matters at play in the state.  Not one darned bit.

And they're not going to.  Just as in Wind River the two policemen, and an Animal Damage officer, were  under assault by those that they were going to have to take on, on their own, so are the residents of this state.

The other day I saw a lifelong member of Wyoming's Republican Party, who once held positions within it, decried. Wyoming's Congressional Representation as "bought and paid for".  This followed, by a period of a couple of years, a similar claim by a former significant Wyoming politicians that I somewhat know. Another person I know describe all three of Wyoming's Congressional delegation as "ass kissing sycophants".

There's something to all of that.

The vast bulk of their large campaign war chests comes from out of state money.  Compared to it, the money from  Wyomingites doesn't even amount to a drop in the bucket.  It's more like a drop in a 55 gallon barrel.  Wyoming public media, in a news story on the topic, reported:

JU: OpenSecrets reported that Rep. Harriet Hageman received $15,000 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Sen. John Barrasso has received over $70,000 from a private equity firm based in New York and California [from 2019 to 2024]. And Sen. Cynthia Lummis received over $100,000 from the Club for Growth, a conservative PAC [from 2019 to 2024]. In the face of more powerful organizations like those, how do individual or local donors in Wyoming make their voice more impactful? Or their donation more impactful?

Some group calling itself the Americans for Prosperity have been running non stop adds on social media thanking John Barrasso for his role in the Big Ugly.

Who are these people and organizations?  Wyomingites?

Not hardly.  Wikipedia says of them:

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), founded in 2004, is a libertarian conservative political advocacy group in the United States affiliated with brothers Charles Koch and the late David Koch.[6] As the Koch family's primary political advocacy group, it has been viewed as one of the most influential American conservative organizations.

Club for Growth is a radical right wing economic outfit as well.

American Israel Public Affairs Committee:  What does have to do with the average Wyomingite?

Not freaking much.

In a couple of place around town, there are billboard featuring all three of our Congress people with the Tetons in the background thanking all three for standing with "American Energy", by which they no doubt mean petroleum and coal, not wind, solar and nuclear (as we've recently learned locally).

The bigger problem is that the Congressional delegation flat out ignores the views of Wyomingites on some major issues, public lands being one.  Wyomingites are overwhelmingly opposed to the Federal lands going to the states, and are opposed to public lands being sold.  That well known fact hasn't done anything to keep our Congressional delegation from supporting those things, and it's done nothing whatsoever to keep the Wyoming GOP from backing land transfers.

Dr. John Barrasso, who after all is a East Coaster and looks like one, has his head so far up Trump's ass on a daily basis that he can examine Trump's tonsils from the backside.  He has no use for Wyoming anymore.  My guess is that he's in his last term as he knows that he's not going to be the Senate Majority Leader so being a fascist flunky will be his career achievement, and he's okay with that.

Who knows what's up with Lummis.  She's always been a Cheshire cat in the first place, with a sort of snarky smile. She goes her own way, and that way isn't yours.

Harriet Hageman is the most honest of the bunch. Sure, she's stuck in the Powder River Campaign, but her views, while not the same as most of hours, re honestly  and openly held.

Chuck Gray?  Gray is just using Wyoming, that's about it.  And his politics bend with the wind.  He's a far right winger Greenpeacer if you can make sense of that, and he's  hoping you can't and will yell at you until you are distracted.

Right now, the Wyoming GOP is the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is packed with people who are not from Wyoming, and how have brought their dumbass ideas with them and want to impose them on Wyoming.

They're succeeding in doing so. There's really no saving the GOP in the state. The old GOP, which was uniquely Wyoming in view, is dead, taking the path of the old Wyoming Democratic Party, which did as well, and which died first.

In its place we have the Dixiecrats and those whose one and only value is their pocket books.

They need to go.

But it would appear unlikely that they can be dislodged from the current GOP, put on plane, and shipped back to the their home states, like they should be.

The only two things the two failed parties agree on is that you should never vote for a third party.  That's how we got into this mess.

So maybe it's time for some new parties not beholding to the crap these parties are.

And why not local parties?

Let's start with something that should be clear to all, but really seems not to be.

There's nothing American or Constitutional about a "two party system". The founders, while they rapidly fell into parties, didn't approve of them at all.  A primary system, such as we and most other states have, is existentially anti democratic and existentially unconstitutional.  They're nothing more than state funded party elections that are geared to conspire against any person from a third party, or just an independent running.  Primary elections would make sense only if no party affiliation was noted on the ballot at all.  Get 1,000 signatures to get you on, perhaps, and you are on.

Moreover, it's really time to allow for recalls of Congressional representation.  If we had that, all three of our Congressional people would be facing a recall election right now.  John Barrasso, who earnestly believes whatever you believe as you believe it, and even more than you do, would now be leading armed raids into Utah against Mike Lee if that was the case, rather than spending all of his time kissing Trump's ass.

Suffice it to say, we're not being served well.

What would a party that actually reflected Wyoming's values look like?

Well, of course, in stating something like that, I'm inevitably going to post what a party that reflected my values, mostly, would look like.

• It'd protect public lands.
• It'd have a land ethic.
• It'd protect democratic values, as in voting.
• It'd realize that science isn't a fib, and that some things have to adjust because of scientific reality.
• It would have a tax system that accepted that out of state imports with huge amounts of cash should be taxed.

Frankly, it'd look a lot like what the GOP here used to look like.

It's be overall conservative, without a doubt, but conservative in a Wyoming sort of Way, not in a Dixiecrat sort of way.

Most Wyomingites who are from Wyoming, save those who had drank the MAGA/Charlie Kirk Kool aide, would likely vote for it.

We're sure not going to be saved by the Democrats. They'll do anything they can to wreck their own chances at the ballot box. And we're not going to be saved by the Republicans either.  The GOP has wiped out the real party and put in place a party that Nathan Bedford Forest would be proud of.

We're on our own.

Footnotes:

*I'll confess that I've done a lot of legal work on the Wind River Reservation, and it haunts me.  This is a really good move, and I've watched it twice in the theatre, but I can't get through it again.  May the perpetual light shine upon many there.

Lex Anteinternet: Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Argentina

Lex Anteinternet: Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Arg...:   Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Argentina, US Supplies Expected to Fall in 2026 In other words, screw US cattle producers t...

Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Argentina, US Supplies Expected to Fall in 2026

 

Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Argentina, US Supplies Expected to Fall in 2026

In other words, screw US cattle producers to benefit Argentina.

What horseshit.

Well, Harriet, Cynthia and Dr. John, are you going to do something about it.

Why do agriculturalist vote for Republicans anyway? Do we just like being screwed?

Blog Mirror: Making the ‘original energy bar’: The chokecherry patty

 Something not really addressed here is that chokecherry pits are poisonous.

Making the ‘original energy bar’: The chokecherry patty

Farm to school cafeteria: Wyoming students experience locally grown food

Farm to school cafeteria: Wyoming students experience locally grown food: In Fort Washakie, kids celebrate Farm to School Day with beef and corn from local farmers and lettuce from their school garden.

Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place

Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place: For some time, I’ve thought a great deal about how long someone needs to really know a place. To know its geography, for sure, but also to k...

Why you should eat meat

Why you should eat meat

 

Lex Anteinternet: Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Cante...

Lex Anteinternet: Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Cante...: 

Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Canterbury, in case you were wondering.

There hasn't been a legitimate one since, in absolute terms.

Lex Anteinternet: A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumers and does so again for 大豆

Lex Anteinternet: A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumer...: 

A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumers and does so again for 大豆

I had a draft post at the time of the last election I never published why farmers and ranchers routinely vote to have themselves shafted by voting for the GOP.  Democrats typically have farm policies that actually benefit farmers, including preserving the lands.  Republicans tend to be in favor of land rape to benefit the wealthy.

I really have no good explanation for it.

Well, no surprise, soybean farmers are getting pounded by Trump's tariff polich. D'uh.

Trump's trade battle with China puts US soybean farmers in peril

I love this quote from one soybean farmer:

“Overwhelmingly, farmers have been in President Trump’s corner,” said Ragland, the president of the soybean association. “And I think the message that our soybean farmers as a whole want to deliver is: ‘President Trump, we’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.’”

Well, I'm a type of farmer, a livestock farmer, and frankly Ragland, screw you and the John Deere you rode in on.  You are getting just what you deserve.

Trump bets the soybean farm on tariffs | Wall Street Journal

But, have no fear, socialized farming through the GOP will come to the rescue.  Trump is going to take $10B from the national sales tax, i.e., tariffs, to bail out farmers.

So, the American consumer is getting taxed, as in the end it's us who pays the tariffs, to bail out soybean farmers.  

Good old free enterprise at work there.

Farmers are getting stiffed by Trump's taxes, and will continue to get stiffed by them, and he hopes to balance the table by handing over money the American public handed over via tariffs. 

A better plan would just be to let soybean farmers go bankrupt.  

 

USDA Staffing Crisis: Farm Service Agency Staff Losses Put Farm Safety Net at Risk

Courthouses of the West: A Broken Profession

Courthouses of the West: A Broken Profession: 

A Broken Profession

This is a follow-up to something I posted here just the other day, taking the blog away from its comfortable place of depicting courthouses, into the nature of the contemporary practice.

Courthouses of the West: Things in the air. Some observations with varying ...: This blog is supposed to be dedicated to architecture, basically, although matters pertaining to the law do show up here.  Very rarely is th...

Here, I'm doing it again.

The CLEs above were on my mind to such an extent, and indeed they still are, that I've discussed them with several other lawyers I know.  Turns out some of them are on meds for anxiety.  I would never have guessed it.

There's something about this that really disturbs me,. although I don't fault them any one of them a darned bit.  Some of them seem to love their careers and are really good at what they do.  What bothers me, however, is that we seem to have developed a profession that has to heavily rely upon chemicals just to get by.

Just going back to the earliest of human mind altering chemicals, it's reported that between 21-36% of lawyers engage in problem drinking at hazardous, harmful, or potentially alcohol-dependent levels.  That's pretty disturbing, as that's between 1/5th up to a little over 1/3d of all practicing lawyers.  Some studies suggest that 36% of Minnesota's lawyers and judges drink at a dangerous level, and if that's not disturbing enough, some studies suggest that 41% of Canadian lawyers do.  Around 10% of lawyers have a drug abuse problem, but that probably includes a lot of them who have an alcohol problem.

Not good.

There's really no way to know how many lawyers are on anti anxiety medications.  Probably a bunch.  It's obviously much, much, better that people dealing with anxiety inducing situations seek medical help than crack open a bottle of Henry McKenna and poor yourself several shots.*  It's also better than smoking a joint or whatever else people are doing in the illegal drug categories, although obviously these days marijuana is sort of in a weird still illegal but not enforced much category.**

The laws approach to all of this has been to reach out to lawyers and offer "help".  But perhaps what should be obvious, but doesn't seem to be, is the profession itself needs the help.  If this percentage of its professionals, including its best and brightest, need chemical help just to get by each day, there's something existentially wrong in the profession.  All the CLE's on mindfulness in the world aren't going to fix that.

Footnotes:

*Henry McKenna is an Irish Whiskey named after lawyer and distiller, Henry McKenna.

**Marijuana is still a scheduled illegal drug in Federal law and students imbibing in it can risk admission to their State bars.  Likewise this can be true for people seeking a career in law enforcement.

Lex Anteinternet: We are in big trouble.

Lex Anteinternet: We are in big trouble.:  

We are in big trouble.

 

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming’s economic issues are more urgent than we ...

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming’s economic issues are more urgent than we ...: Wyoming’s economic issues are more urgent than we realize : On paper, the Equality State appears to have good annual growth, but pockets of ...

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Lex Anteinternet: Wednesday, September 15, 1915. Counsels leave Nor...: 

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Attention span deficit.

Something I hadn't expected, but which really says something about our times, is that the murder of Charlie Kirk is already, for the most part, in society's rear view mirror.

Yes, there's a lot of discussion about it still, but it's in the chattering class, which I suppose includes this website.  Otherwise, things have already moved on.

The speed at which news moves, and the lack of attention to it, is a very bad thing.

Of course, now that it doesn't really appear to be a politically motivated killing, it's lost its attraction as a story to some degree.

A fictional narrative

The story, as noted, is now in the domain of the chattering classes, but also the possession of right wing myth makers, which are really working on it.  The odd thing here is that the media has an incentive to downplay what is being learned about the killer, and to an extent, the MAGA myth organ does as well.

What we now know about the killer, Tyler Robinson, is that he was a homosexual living with another homosexual who was in the process of being mutilated to take on the appearance of a woman.  Unless this isn't clear enough, they were in a "romantic" relationship, which means they were engaged in sodomy.  The "transitioning" roommate was apparently shocked by the killing, but according to one family member, that person was deeply anti Christian and hated political conservatives.

Now, the reason that this isn't getting this much press as the "transgendered" aren't particularly associated with crimes of any kind, let alone violent ones, and homosexuals certainly are not, but this story is deeply weird.  A man trying to become a woman is deeply weird, and it is not the same thing as homosexuality.  One man screwing another man who is trying to take on female morphology is very weird as well.

We touched on this in a post about Robert Westman, who was an actual "transgender" figure who committed a mass shooting recently.  Indeed, he's the only "transgender" figure I know of to commit one, the overwhelming majority are white hetrosexual men.

Anyhow:

A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

I explored the topic pretty fully there, and I'm not going to repeat it here other than to note that finding a transgender person hating Christianity isn't surprising. Real Christianity holds that to be wholly immoral, even while real Christianity still loves the person. And such a person hating conservatism isn't surprising either, as conservatives hold a similar view.

Robinson wasn't the transgendered person here, but the whole story of this relationship would lend to the theory that he was pretty pliable as a personality.  The point is, therefore, this likely wasn't really an act of domestic terror in the conventional sense, so much as it was a person reaching out  under the influence of a sexual partner.  In an odd sort of way, this killing is more comparable to Dr. Carl Austin Weiss Sr.'s murder of Huey Long, which was over redistricting that impacted his father in law.  I.e., a personal connection is likely to have motivated it more than any overarching weltanschauung.

That's a story that's not really going to get explored, I suspect.  The right wing wants Kirk to be a martyr, the left doesn't want to talk about the mental health issues this really brings up.

Groypers?

I'd never heard of this term before, but apparently they are followers of Nick Fuentes.  As I don't pay any attention to Fuentes, I didn't know that.

Apparently they've drawn a lot of attention following Kirk's murder as there was some peculiar speculation that they were responsible for it.  They obviously are not, but that speculation was there, and I'm not sure why.

Fuentes, whose movement is outwardly anti homosexual, as well as anti a bunch of other stuff, has said some really odd things in this arena, one being that having sex with women is gay.  Eh?  Another apparently was that homosexual sex doesn't mean what it used to, as women aren't living up to their reproductive responsibilities.

Not in homilies

Apparently, at least according to Twitter, a lot of people are mad today as their parish priest didn't include a reference to Kirk's murder in their homilies yesterday.  

Why would they?

For Apostolic Christians, Catholic and Orthodox, yesterday was the Feast of the Cross, and homilies probably largely had to do with that.  Moreover the Catholic Church is just that, catholic, i.e., universal, and this is a domestic American matter that remains unclear.  Kirk wasn't attacked because he was Catholic, he wasn't, and the attack upon him may only have a tangential relationship with his Christianity.

Nonetheless, I saw one person who was irate at the Pope for having not mentioned it.

Spencer Cox

The guy who is really coming out looking good after all of this is Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox.  He's spoken multiple times and has been a calming voice every time.

This isn't the first time he's waded into these issues.  Following the killing at an Orlando gay bar some years ago he appeared at a vigil and stated:

How did you feel when you heard that 49 people had been gunned down by a self-proclaimed terrorist? That’s the easy question. Here is the hard one: Did that feeling change when you found out the shooting was at a gay bar at 2 a.m. in the morning? If that feeling changed, then we are doing something wrong.

Cox's comments are clearly against the stream of the MAGA mainstream. He was originally a never Trumper but claimed to have changed his mind and voted from Trump in his Presidential contests.  I suspect we'll be hearing more out of  Cox going forward, and he may very well be a Presidential candidate in 2028.

Ballroom Blitz

King Donny went from being outraged by the Kirk killing to bemoaning how it interrupted his might fine, in his mind, ballroom from being the focus of everyone's adoring attention.

That's pretty weird.

Also weird is how quickly this is going up.  It's apparently under construction right now.  Trump clearly wants it up before he leaves office, on the theory that will mean nobody will take it down.

The monstrosity will now be 40% bigger than originally planned.

Quite frankly, I thought this vandalization of the White House would not actually occur, as it would, in normal times, take quite a while to design and engineer a building. Indeed, I was frankly planning on just that.  I never thought the monstrosity would go up, as whomever is Present next won't be stupid or narcissistic enough to bother with a Trump "look at me!" ballroom.  It's really moronic.

But it's going up.

If I were President, which of course I never will be, my first executive order would be for the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the offending pile of dogshit within twenty foour hours of my being sworn in.  I'd have the resulting trash hauled and upmed in front of Trump Tower.  But that won't happen.  Trump is probably right.  A giant cancerous growth will be there forever.

Here is the oldest photo of the structure, and what it's actually supposed to look like:

Of course, as it might be noted, the building has been altered before, most notably the addition of the West and East Wings.  Those additions were made due to legitimate working concerns, however.

Again, if it were me, I'd be tempted to take it back to purse original.  It's just supposed to be a big house.

The architects for the vandalization are McCreery Architects, whose website has an image of the interior of the structure as its first slide.  The following slides show a lot of other impressive structures they've worked on.  They do seem to favor heavily classic styles, which is nice.  The site oddly doesn't have any text, but maybe if you need to hire a  heavy duty architect, you don't need text and the equivalent of architectural headshots works better.

A rational question would be why does this bother me so much?  Well, perhaps I just have an irrational reaction to all things Trump by this point.  But the ostentatiousness of the whole thing smacks of trying to be The Sun King.**Have we reached that point in this country?  I fear we have.

We've always had rich men, of course, but this is the era of fabulously wealth men.  It's not right.

Ah, sic transit gloria mundi.

Something we may wish to consider a bit. . . 

Maybe we have it too darn good (so we're self sabotaging).

It sounds absurd, but there's something to it.

The current Wyoming Catholic Register has an article pointing out that, in 1980, the year before I graduated from high school, 40% of the world's population lived in desperate poverty, an improvement from the mid to late 19th Century when it was 90%.

Now, just 10% does.

Big, huge, improvement.

By any objective measure, the condition of the world has massively improved. 

Why do we believe otherwise?

Evolutionary biology has a lot to do with it.  We evolved to live in a state of nature, and nature if pretty rough on everyone.  So we're acclimated to things not being quite right, and trouble being just around the corner.  Now, for most of us, that's not the case.

Gershwin wrote:

Summertime and the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'

So hush little baby, don't you cry

Well, it turns out that in summertime when the cotton is high and the fish are jumping, we're looking for a thunderstorm and worried about work on Monday.  

I know that I do.

And a super rich society, like ours, seems to make up its own problems.  

This is all the more the case when the gates are off the door, as they are.  Now, not only are there all our real and imagined problems, but we just go ahead and make new ones up.  Woman trapped inside a man's body?  Not if the Goths are at the city gates planning on killing everyone.  

Anyhow, it seems like we're busy, now that we are in the richest period of our existence as a species, making sure that real problems appear.  Apparently we missed them.

Footnotes

*Ballroom Blitz is an early 1970s, rock song by the band The Sweet.

**King Lous XIV.

Related threads:

A deeply sick society.Labels: 1960s, 2020s, AR15 Effect, Commentary, Health, Politics, Weapons, Zeitgeist

Last edition:  

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 101st edition. The Vandal in the museum.

Labels: 20th Century, Agnes Repplier, Americanism, History in politics, It was because of the Vietnam War, Politics, Populism, Red Scare of 1919, Red Scare of the 1950s, The Second Trump Administration, Zeitgeist

Blog Mirror: Wyoming Ranch Family Builds A 6,200-Cow Mega-Dairy On Eastern Plains

 

Wyoming Ranch Family Builds A 6,200-Cow Mega-Dairy On Eastern Plains

Going Feral: A lack of the land ethic in office.

Going Feral: A lack of the land ethic in office.: 

A lack of the land ethic in office.

Back when I was 18 years old and first registered to vote, I registered as a Republican.  The first President I voted for was Ronald Reagan.

Soon thereafter, relative terms, and certainly before I went to the University of Wyoming I changed my registration to Democrat.  Wildlands had a lot to do with that, maybe everything, almost, to do with that.  Sometime prior to the Fall of 1983 I'd concluded that the Democrats wanted to protect nature, where as Ronald Reagan's Administration, with James Watt as the Secretary of the Interior, most definitely didn't care about it.

I was a Democrat for a very long time, but I often voted Republican, following a family trait of really voting very independently.  If you aren't thinking about the person you are actually voting for, you aren't thinking.  I voted, I know, for our Democratic Governors, but I also voted, I know, for some Republican Congressional candidates.  Starting prior to the 2000 election I started to consider 3d parties.  Some time after that I became disgusted with the Democrats constant embrace of abortion and changed my political affiliation to none.  By that time a lot of Wyoming Democrats were feeling the same way and a lot of them drifted into the GOP, some so solidly that they're regarded as stalwart traditional Republicans now, which in a lot of ways, they are.

I also eventually came into the GOP.  

I was comfortable, if often upset, with the GOP up until it nominated Donald Trump for the Oval Office the first time, which absolutely horrified me and still does.  This term, which is illegitimate (Trump is a seditionist who has not had the ban from holding office lifted upon him by Congress), has been bad beyond my fears as to what it would be.  Trump is all about land rape on the land.

We're back to the 1970s, I fear.

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Condemns Effort to Roll Back Public Lands Rule

Posted by Nadia Marji | September 12, 2025

Trump moves to nix Public Lands rule; Alfalfa exports data dump

Also re-upping and freeing-up a piece on political violence and rhetoric

I still am registered as a Republican, but I constantly debate it. The Wyoming "Sweet Home Alabama" pack of carpetbaggers Freedumb Caucus has gained control of the Legislature and is busy driving through the state's culture like the Dukes' of Hazzard through Hazzard County in the Gen. Lee.  It's disgusting.  There''s some reason to believe that this is changing, but it isn't changing quickly enough.  Wyoming's GOP Congressional delegation supported the land raping proposal by the Senator from Deseret, Mike Lee, in spite of the majority of Wyomingite's being opposed to it.  "Your dumb" was the practical reaction to Wyoming voters from one of the three.

If you aren't a registered Republican, you aren't going to get to have a say in the primary, which is why I'm still there. Am I one of the RINO's that Chuck Gray cries about?  If the current GOP reflects the Republican Party, I am.  There's no alternative here, however.

This is all appalling.  

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?

A little unusual for here, but somewhat connected:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?: Post war news items were getting a bit weird. Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a frea...

Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?

Post war news items were getting a bit weird.

Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a freak show star for a brief period of time.

Life magazine featured a black and white cover photo of a UAW worker.  The contents of the magazine were:

Pg… 29 The Week's Events: U. S. Occupies Japan

Pg… 42 The Week's Events: Editorial: Peace in Asia

Pg… 45 The Week's Events: King Leopold's Family

Pg… 51 The Week's Events: Black Markets Boom in Berlin

Pg… 127 The Week's Events: Lilly Dache Packs for Paris

Pg… 63 Articles: Nijinsky in Vienna, by William Walton

Pg… 112 Articles: As We May Think, by Vannevor Bush

Pg… 103 Photographic Essay: United Automobile Workers

Pg… 57 Modern Living: House for Texas

Pg… 90 Modern Living: The French Look

Pg… 61 Art: Portrait of Sylvia Sidney, by Fletcher Martin

Pg… 82 Art: Hudson River School of Painters

Pg… 75 Movies: "Uncle Harry"

Pg… 97 Sports: Grownups Spin Tops

Pg… 138 Science: Plant Cancer

Pg… 2 Other Departments: Letters to the Editors

Pg… 12 Other Departments: Speaking of Pictures: Germany's Fantastic Secret Weapons

Pg… 16 Other Departments: LIFE's Reports: "Bottoms Up" in China, by Lieut. Thomas P. Ronan

Pg… 132 Other Departments: LIFE Goes Swordfishing

Pg… 142 Other Departments: Miscellany: Seabees Give Waves a Party

Life is often remembered as a great magazine in its heyday, but it featured some pretty vapid articles.  This issue's feature on The French Look informed readers that young French women had small breasts and often went braless, depicting a typical bra (on a young French woman), for those occasions in which les mademoiselles wore them.  Doing that in the US, UK, or Germany would have been regarded as shockingly indecent, although it was not uncommon in the Southern European Slavic and Romance language speaking countries, which in turn contributed to the American and British views that the Italians were really primitive, and the German view that the Yugoslavians were.

In case you wonder, I ran across the Life magazine item searching this date on Twitter.  I haven't pulled up the article.

I'm clueless on the truth or accuracy of that claim and not going to investigate it, but French living conditions were definitely different than American ones, with a significantly different diet. Most people and cultures today are significantly thinner than Americans are and in the 1940s the French had suffered years of near starvation conditions, so they were likely overall less bulky than Americans in every manner.  A 20 year old French woman in 1945 had lived her teen years in starvation conditions and had been on pretty thing rations throughout the 1930s.  She would have been smaller in every way.

Also, French clothing had been severely rationed during the Second World War and you can't wear clothes you just don't have.  Americans have largely forgotten, indeed never appreciated, the extent to which World War Two causes massive food and material deficits during the Second World War.

Added to that, Americans for some reason think of the French as being Parisians, which most are not.  Paris had been the center of the fashion industry since at least the mid 19th Century, but that didn't apply to most of the French.  About 50% of the French were rural in 1940, down from 64% in 1920, but still a very large percentage.  As late as 1960 about 40% of the French were rural.

This oddly ties into this topic as rural life isn't like urban life, including in terms of the clothing people wear.  Starting in the late 19th Century French and British artists began to glamorize the agrarian life and left a fair number of romantic, but fairly realistic, paintings of it.  Some British paintings of rural life show farm women working fields in the hot summer months flat out topless, something you would not associate with either the UK or British farming today.  French paintings can be a shock to run across while as they're often very well done and beautiful, they also make it relatively apparent that French farm women in hot months were wearing light cotton blouses with nothing underneath them.

European agriculture was much slower to mechanize than American agriculture.  The Great Depression had an enormous retarding effect on the mechanization of American agriculture and this is even more so for European agriculture, which remained largely equine or bovine powered before the end of World War Two, another thing contributing to starvation as horses were conscripted for the German Army and cows and bulls just shot and ate them.  Here, however, this is significant as French men and women were working the fields largely in the same way as they had in 1918.

Brassiers are actually a French invention, makign their appearance in the 1880s, as we've discussed before, and they received a boost due to World War One, as we addressed here:

As early as the 1880s, a French women involved in fashion had introduced the brassier, a total alternative for the corset.  It was not widely accepted, but due to World War One it was soon to be.

At the Great War in 1914 nearly every woman would have owned corsets.  By that time, the majority of them would have had one the less restrictive type.  And then the war came.

Women employed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1917.  All of the clothing here, except for the women who appear to be employed as domestics by the railroad, would have been highly problematic for their occupations.  They're wearing, it might be noted, a lot of loose clothing, which is likely in part due to their bulky undergarments.

As we've already noted, World War One pulled thousands of women into work they weren't already doing.  A fair amount of that work was industrial.  Lots of women went to work everyday wearing corsets of the less restrictive type, but all corsets were singularly unsuitable for the work that thousands of women were doing.  The bra was.  Not insignificantly, Crossley patented her brassier on November 13, 1914.

New York National Guard bandsman Edwardina Lavoie, 1917.  This photograph demonstrates a woman wearing what is likely a male uniform which would have required a least a partial change in the development of ladies' undergarments in the form of more modern underpants, another thing that was coming in at this time.  No wearing bloomers with breeches.

As noted, things don't change overnight.  So, maybe, young women coming of age in Paris in the 1940s who had an okay income or who had parents who did, might have a more advanced clothing standard then, say, a young woman growing up in rural Normandy, even if that young woman had moved into Paris during the war. 

And, shall we noted this, in 1914-1918 Americans had been absolutely charmed by the French, and American men had been charmed by French women.  But those men were largely rural and they were meeting women who were largely rural.  In 1918, 20% of American homes had full indoor plumbing, meaning most did not. By World War Two most Americans homes did, although quite a few very rural ones did not.  Most Americans were no longer rural by 1945.  

In 1940 only 5% of French homes had indoor plumbing.  The percentage for Italy was lower.

5%.  

Perhaps not too surprisingly, therefore, lots of American troops were fairly horrified by the French, contrary to the way we like to remember it, when they started landing on French soil in 1944.  The French, to put it mildly, smelled.  And if the French smelled, the Italians smelled worse, with Italian women wearing cotton dresses in hot weather in which their upper lady bits flopped out, combined with omitting shoes and going around in bare feet.  They were hopelessly primitive, in American eyes (which as noted is how the Germans found the Yugoslavians).

Anyhow, if you don't have indoor plumbing, you aren't going to be able to easily frequently wash your clothes and if you can omit something, you probably are going to.

Additionally, if you live in those conditions, and those of the 30s and early 40s, you are probably 40% underweight, smoke cigarettes constantly, have a large percentage of your caloric intake depending on alcohol, and you smell bad.

That's okay if everyone you associate with also is underweight and unwashed.

Things weren't like imagine them to be back then.  Glamorous French women? Sure, on their own terms in the conditions in which they found themselves.

Life today is now a sort of special issue magazine featuring photographs.  It's very large size format always existed, but it was originally a weekly and was so until 1972.  It's big competitor was Look, which ceased publication in 1971.  That both of these magazines took a hit in the early 1970s is really interesting is at long predates the Internet, which would otherwise be blamed for it.

Anyhow, Life was always a photo magazine, of which there were several others.  It was a serious one, but right from its onset in 1936 (interesting to note it came out during the Great Depression) it frequently featured cheesecake, running racy photographs of actresses and semi undressed women on the guise of discussing clothing or fashion.  Some of the photographs even today are shocking if you are not anticipating them.  In 1953 it went full pornography for the first time running a nude of Marilyn Monroe which would be the same photograph used as the very first Playboy centerfold in 1953.  The excuse, and probably the actual motivation, for that is that by doing that it was attempting to save the career of Monroe, who would be scandalized if her nude, taken in the late 1940s before she was a well known and up and coming actress, appeared first in a pornographic magazine, but still there's the only difference between the two publications of the image is the purpose the magazines served.

Anyhow, this is interesting in that Life and Look were general publication magazines that were outright flirting with cheesecake very early on, showing an (unfortunate) evolution on community standards.  We've looked at this in the past, but this is certainly good evidence that whatever was going on in the culture was going on before World War Two and before the 1950s.

The Allied Control Commission decided to transmit to all neutral states a request for the return to Germany of "all German officials and obnoxious Germans".

Sweden resumed allowing foreign warships to enter its territorial waters.

MacArthur ordered the dissolution of the Imperial general headquarters and imposed censorship on the press.

The Shangdang Campaign began in the Chinese Civil War between the Eighth Route Army and Kuomintang troops led by Yan Xishan in what is now Shanxi Province, China.

The Indonesian Navy was founded.

The USS Midway was Commissioned

José Feliciano was born in Lares, Puerto Rico.

Related threads:

Clothing: It was because of World War One.

Labels: 1910s, Clothing, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Men, Standards, The roles of men and women, Women, World War One, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Last edition:

Friday, September 7, 1945. Green River Railroad Bridge Fire. A final and unnoticed parade.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Armor, Douglas MacArthur, Harry S. Truman, It was because of World War Two, Japan, Railroads, The Post War Economy Myth, Transportation, Union Pacific Railroad, World War Two, Wyoming (Green River)