This includes the excellent essay The Idiocy of Urban Life, which I've occasionally cited here under its original The New Republic name, The Cows Revenge.
Announcement confirming that Trump wine and cider is now stocked at Coast Guard BX's.
Sigh.
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
Oligarchy is now where we are at.
Last edition:
Lex Anteinternet: Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump. I...: Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King Jr. Ignoramus, Latin for we ...
Yes, this is off topic, but frankly we've reached the point of such blistering ignorance in Cheyenne that this really can't be ignored by the residents of the state.
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.
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:
You really don't have to vote for people who voted yes on something so stupid.
I've posted a fair amount on this story.
Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem.: Comparative air photos posted by CBS News. Put up under commentary and fair use exception. I've never seen the East Wing of the White ...
One of my old friends, whose become a hardcore right wing populist, while also interestingly being a hardcore corner crossing advocate (the two are in fact mutually exclusive), posted this on his Facebook feed:
The President, and "your President" decides to renovate the Whitehouse, with donations and on his own dime mind you, and he is “Destroying Democracy?” Some of your hypocrisy cancels your outrage. I’m so sick of this crap. It’s just another reminder that the other side has nothing to offer Americans other that staged outrage over bull. TDS much??
Some on the far right have completely swallowed that this is "staged outrage". The irony is that the exact same people were outraged about everything that Joe Biden did, and Barack Obama did. Some of that outrage was because they were told to be.
And here's the next thing. The ballroom is probably not going to be completed before Trump leaves office. Frankly, as the matter is now in litigation, there's going to be some delay. If a judge is really upset, which is unlikely due to the way courts work, there's precedent for returning the structure ot the status quo ante before anything goes forward, which would in and of itself likely take years.
That's unlikely of course, but there's going to be a district court ruling and then an appeals court ruling. All that will take six months on a project that would normally take several years to complete.
But that's not the point.
The next President, unless its J. D. Vance, is going to take this down, it it gets built If its a Republican like Thomas Massie it'll gleefully be torn down. If its a Democrat, it's also coming down.
Let's make it clear.
The ballroom, if its built, or however much of it that's built, will be taken down and erased from the public memory.
At that point in time, will those who support Trump in whatever he does state: The President, and "your President" decides to renovate the Whitehouse, with donations and on his own dime mind you, and he is “Destroying Democracy?”
Not hardly, even if no public funds are then used. They'll be outraged about how its "destroying" the legacy of a "great" president.
So why does this bother me?
Well in part because I'm an agrarian and this entire project is an insult to agrarians.
Ballrooms are the high school basketball courts of the super wealthy A place where the extremely wealthy can meet and mingle and do those things Trump noted, have drinks in the foyer, etc. The kind of place where you can talk shop and meet with the rich and powerful, and heads of state. Maybe have the Saudi king over, or rub elbows with guests like Prince William. . . or maybe Harry and Jeff Epstein. It's a public building, no matter whose tribute is used to pay for it, but you can't book your wedding reception of bar mitzvah reception there.
Because you are a peasant.
The entire concept of a massive ornate public building like this is that you peons will love it because you love to bask in the glory of your benighted leaders. And those benighted leaders, having been born into wealth, really believe that. You love them as they love themselves, and you are happy to serve the glorious benighted.
That's the antithesis of the American concept.
Here's what the White House grounds should return to, and I'm not joking.
And in fact, for the most part, it should be.
Sometime last week I was somehow the recipient of a real estate brochure entitled "Land".
I didn't get around to looking at it until today, even though I knew what it was going to be. Agricultural land turned into the playgrounds of the rich.
That should end. People who hold agricultural ground, or even large blocks of ground, should have to make their livings from it and nothing else. The wealthy holding such ground hurts those who would make a living in this simple manner.
We live in a new Gilded Age. That age gave rise to the Progressive movement and swept into office people like Theodore Roosevelt. Something like that needs to happen again.
Yes, I'm outraged over the East Wing coming down for a ballroom, and the very concept of a ballroom outrages me. I'm outraged that common people have fallen for outright lies and believe everything Donald Trump tells them. I'm outraged that the extremely wealthy are running the show on everything while, at the same time, our Gilded masters tell us to hate the poorest of the poor. I'm outraged that Congress will not do its job. I'm outraged that our military is being ordered to murder people in the Caribbean. And I"m outraged that our local politicians tell us to support this crap when they do so, in at least 2/3s of the instances, as it keeps them in their elected jobs.
This has been a very revealing series of events however, and we can take some things away from it.
The first thing we have learned is how utterly desperate Donald Trump is to amount to something. He started too late in life and his character is too fixed in order to achieve that, absent late in life inspiration of an existential type which would require him to make a profound change in his behavior. Born into wealth and a playboy by character, he's desperately trying to buy and build himself into seriousness and relevance. In the back of his mind, or frankly maybe in the forefront, he knows that he's a fart in a windstorm. After he's out of office, and no amount of far right fantasizing is going to keep him there, his successor, right or left, will begin the process of trying to repair the damage Trump has done. If its a right wing leader, like wannabe NatCon J. D. Vance, it'll be National Conservative far right, but less insane than Trump. It probably won't be Vance however, but somebody from the political center, particularly if the Democrats get their act together and dump their own wackadoodle far left, which there are signs they will, or from the actual libertarian populist right.
My prediction, early though it is, is that the next President will be Tammy Duckworth, maybe on a Duckworth Klobuchar ticket. I can see, however, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul taking a run at Vance's dreams and keeping them from happening.
Vance would keep the Trump monument to himself up and pretend to like it, as he only is where he is now due to Trump, but as soon as somebody who wasn't a Trump sycophant is in the Oval Office, it's coming down. That will be symbolic of the entire Trump legacy, destruction that will ultimately come down, and have to be rebuilt.
Trump want to see himself as a great man, a sort of Napoleon being crowned, but knows that he's more like Napoleon on Elba. He's not going to get there. He's really extremely pathetic.
Also sad is the degree to which it has been demonstrated that a life of extreme wealth is corrosive. Trump's entire life of largess already showed this, but he really does believe that the White House needs a huge overblown rushed ballroom as he's seen those of failed monarchies in Europe. The republics, or in one case dictatorship, that inherited that stuff still uses it as it's a human instinct not to rip things down. That's why the Brandenburg Gate, which should have been blown to rubble in 1945, is still standing. Yes, it's a monument to German militarism, but it's big and already there so we keep it around. That's the reason the Eiffel Tower is there, even though its a giant ugly radio tower, or why the "egg beater" thing in Casper Wyoming is still there. We just can't bring ourselves to rip things down, no matter hideos they are, or how symbolically problematic.
This will come down.
It'll come down in part as it just won't work with an 18th Century large house built on a budget. It wasn't constructed to be a palace, but just a big house.
Which brings me to my next point.
Perhaps the West Wing, after actually going through the proper process, ought to be taken out as well.
No attachments to the structure are really consistent with its original concept. It isn't supposed to have a lot of offices and the entire concept of the First Lady needing room for anything is absurd. The First Lady is simply the President's wife, or Trump's case in regard to the monarchical role to which he aspires, the current concubine, or in the American Civil Religion context, his current wife.
Maybe it ought to be just scaled back to its original footprint.
Some would object that that would mean that it wouldn't have enough room for its purpose Well, No. 10 Downing Street has less room than the White House. And if more space is really needed, they can find it somewhere else in Washington D.C. Nixon actually did that with the nearby Eisenhower Building.
The drift towards an imperial presidency started with Theodore Roosevelt, who is a person I admire, but whom I admire more than I once did. TR, like Trump, tended to act unilaterally, the difference being that Roosevelt was a profoundly intelligent and moral man, where as the opposite is true of Trump. The East Wing started off in his administration as the fairly modest East Terrace, which looked nice and wasn't an overblown Sun King structure like the proposed ballroom will be, but it nonetheless got the modification trend rolling.
It would be TR's cousin Franklin that really got the modern Presidency established, however, and that due to the emergency of the Great Depression and World War Two. Franklin Roosevelt did not rule as a dictator, although people liked to accuse him of that at the time. Ironically, a President that the Republicans hate to this very day is the one, in some ways, that Trump has tried to emulate, even to the extent of wishing for a third term, which he cannot legally occupy. Franklin, of course, redid the East Wing, which was done in part due to the bomb shelter that was constructed underneath it.
The West Wing also dates back to TR's time in the White House with the construction of what was supposed to be a temporary structure. That structure was expanded in 1909 and ultimately came to be the White House office space. I don't doubt that they need office space, but as noted, maybe it can just be somewhere else.
And in fact, for the most part, it should be.
Donald Trump is a delusional eejit.
A headline:
Donny obviously knows nothing about how cattle prices work.
Cattle prices are high, as the herd is down. It's a supply and demand sort of thing. Not a profiteering type of thing. And it isn't just the price at the supermarket that's up, replacement cattle are up too.
And this, from his wee brain:
The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,
Prices have been going up for years, and this dates back to Biden. It has nothing to do with tariffs.
Republicans don't care a whit about agriculture as a rule. Trump's going to hurt us.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Something not really addressed here is that chokecherry pits are poisonous.
Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Canterbury, in case you were wondering.
There hasn't been a legitimate one since, in absolute terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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
