A message in the clothing.

I remember many years ago see a cartoon depicting young people with, basically, mid 20th Century style winter farm clothes that had the caption "It is to be wished that the fad of dressing North Dakota will soon pass", or something to that effect.

The satirical cartoonist accidentally sort of anticipated the fad, if it is one, of dressing Hipster.

I saw this couple recently at a City Brew.


Clothes are meant to send a message, whether we mean them to or not, and we normally mean them to.  What's the message here?

This was, I note, on a Sunday.  My gess is that the young, probably dating, couple had just come from church.

Lex Anteinternet: An existential wakeup call.

Lex Anteinternet: An existential wakeup call.

An existential wakeup call.

Just the other day, I ran this:
Lex Anteinternet: Intellectual disconnect. With everything on fire, ...: The weather report for today from the Trib: A headline from Cowboy State Daily: ‘It Was Armageddon’: Eastern Wyoming Community Evacuated By ...

Now, from Cowboy State Daily, we learn this: 

Wildfire Burns Harriet Hageman’s Family Homestead, More Evacuations Ordered

By any measure, this is tragic.  And the story is well written, and sympathetic.  Indeed, it provides some details about Hageman that I was unaware of, including the size of her very large family  I didn't realize that she was one of six siblings.

That frankly explains why she's a lawyer.  The law was, and to some extent still remains, the occupation that agricultural parents often want to see a child go into, often due to the erroneous belief that lawyers don't really work.

That's not the point here, however.  At some point in her post high school life Hageman turned to the very hard right, or at least seemed to, and has been part of the Wyoming position that's all in on unaltered fossil fuel production.

The degree to which agriculturalist refuse to accept the science on this in Wyoming is itself really remarkable. Farmers and ranchers depend on the land being sustainable, worry about drought and heat, and then go on to dismiss what they're seeing with their own eyes.

The article notes that the Hageman's tragically lost their early home on the ranch, with this one currently belonging to a nephew.  I believe that nephew may have appeared in her campaign ads.  It also related:

About 8,000 acres of Hugh Hageman’s 25,000-to-30,000-acre spread burned, taking away some of the pasture needed for his 1,000 head of cattle.

“It’s devastating,” said Hugh Hageman when reached by Cowboy State Daily late Friday.

I'm sure it is.

Reality calls up on us to recognize it, not hide from it.

This ought to be the state's Pearl Harbor moment.

Lex Anteinternet: Intellectual disconnect. With everything on fire, will people wake up?

Lex Anteinternet: Intellectual disconnect. With everything on fire, ...

Intellectual disconnect. With everything on fire, will people wake up?

The weather report for today from the Trib:

A headline from Cowboy State Daily:

‘It Was Armageddon’: Eastern Wyoming Community Evacuated By Wildfire

Some headlines from today's Trib:




And a common political theme in Wyoming, albeit here from a doomed attempt at displacing the current incumbent Senator, with the incumbent right below him:


Wyomingites claim, and very often really do, have a deep love of the wildness of our state and nature.  And yet, at the same time, the economy of the state, and its reliance upon extractive industries, causes a deep loyalty to the fossil fuel industries, beyond that, very ironically, which those industries have themselves.

Speak to any of the more knowledgeable and powerful people within the coal or petroleum industries, and you will not tend to get debate on anthropocentric caused global warming.  They accept it, and frankly accept that they're going away in their current forms.  They will debate how rapidly they can go away, with quite a bit of variance between that.  Many in the industry are realpolitik practitioners in regard to energy, accepting the decline as inevitable, but cynical about how fast it can occur.  Some, however, are nearly "green" in their view, and see a rapid phase out.

It's at the wellhead level, and the coal shovel level, that you have those who can't accept it.  The same people will look forward to elk season, but can't imagine that what's happening is happening, and that it's bad for the elk.  But then many of the same people imagine themselves being outdoorsman while planted on the back of an ATV.

Politicians, some genuine, and some not, emphasize the wallet end of this.  "America needs", "America depends", etc.  Well, it's passing away.

Passing away with it may be the town of Heartville Wyoming, but not due to economics, but due to catastrophic fire.

Human memories are flawed, and that's where we get into false debates and the The Dunning-Kruger effect.  The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. The flipside, interestingly enough, is the Imposter Syndrome, in which highly competent people imagine that they are not.

Combine the Dunning-Kruger effect with poor memories, poor education and dislocation from your native place, and you get what we have here. 

Add in economic self interest, and well you really get what we have here.

I'll hear all the time that the weather today is the same as it always was.  BS.  My memory on these things is good, and I can recall that 100F days were so rare when I was a kid that entire years went by in which we didn't experience them.  Nor did we experience constant year after year fires like this.  Indeed, as a National Guardsmen I was sent to two fires, back when resources were so thin on this topic, as they weren't really needed, that this was routine for the Guard.

Two fires in six years.

I've never heard of a Wyoming town being evacuated for a fire until now.

Yes, fires have always occurred, as the naysayers will note, but not so often and not like this.

And to add to it, whether Wyomingites want to believe it or not, coal in particular is on its way out.  It simply is.  500,000 people can sit in a corner of the country saying "nuh uh", but that's not going to make it change.  It's been on the way out for a century or more:

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

Petroleum is less vulnerable than coal, in part because of the often forgotten petrochemical industry.  A friend of mine who was a geologist and and an engineer was of the view that the consumption of petroleum for ground transportation ought to be phased out simply for that reason, to save it for petrochemicals.  But big changes are coming here too.  Electric vehicles are coming in, like it or not.  The switch to green, and all that means, some good and some bad, is coming.  

Denying that and maintaining that the rest of the country must pretend its 1973 isn't going to change that.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, July 26, 1924. Camping and plowing.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, July 26, 1924. Other around the world f...: Argentinian pilot Pedro Zanni and mechanic Felipe Beltrame began their rather belated attempt to fly around the world. Larry Estridge became...

The weekly magazines were out.

The Saturday Evening Post with a girl who had a scouting uniform of some type, or perhaps was wearing an oddly colored representation of  Navy white shirt, with red instead of blue.


Country Gentleman had a classic of a draft team.

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay : The Big Horn Basin usually gets three cuttings of alfalfa a summer. Mid July, right b...

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay: The Big Horn Basin usually gets three cuttings of alfalfa a summer. Mid July, right before the fair and barley harvest, is a good time to kn...

Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XXII. The Populist Party v. The Democrats and the Co-opting of American Populism. The sic transit gloria mundi et reductio ad absurdum edition. Hawk tuah.

Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XXII. The Populist Party v...:

The 2024 Election, Part XXII. The Populist Party v. The Democrats and the Co-opting of American Populism. The sic transit gloria mundi et reductio ad absurdum edition. Hawk tuah.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrÚd with their bones.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.

July 17, 2024

The Republican National Convention is into day three as of the time of this writing.  It's a populist party now, and as others have been pointing out, it's shedding values, as all populist movements do, as rapidly as it once claimed them.

Populist movements are famously shallow, having no real political thesis behind them other than that the "will of the people" is right, because it must be.  For this reason, they're also nearly universally co opted in the end by other movements.  The American Populist movement of the late 19th Century was absorbed by the Progressive movement, which had a real thesis behind it.  American Populist who hadn't been absorbed by first the Republicans of the Theodore Roosevelt era or by Democrats following the rise of Woodrow Wilson, ended up various far left wing movement of the 20s and 30s, including American Socialism and Communism, which again had a deeper thesis.  The Communist road had already been laid for Populist in Russia, where populist movements against the Crown in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries ended up in revolution, with the revolution being co opted by the Bolsheviks, who again had a real thesis, and would absorb and destroy populism in their country.  In the German Weimar Republic street level populsits, and they're always street level, would gravitate towards the KDP and the NADSP, with the Nazi's, which had a heavily populist element which again was amazingly think, winning out in the end.  Post war debates on whether the Nazi Party was socialist or fascist miss the reality entirely, it was populist, making it the most successful populist party, in terms of gaining control of a major nation, of all times.

Because populism is shallow, in the end it only reflect the thin surface of a populace's culture, and often the worst elements of it, once it is allowed to establish itself.  German populism yielded to insane racial theories and hatred and worshipped with fanatical loyalty the German Volk in the form of a single man, Adolf Hitler.  Southern populism of the 20th Century had, as a claimed feature, a deep love of culture and Protestantism, but it also featured a profound prejudice against anyone who was not a white Protestant.

And so we've arrived at that point.

Donald Trump's rise was adopted by and backed by Christian Nationalist, who just held a convention within the last two weeks.  Open about their desire to establish the United States as an exclusively Christian (Protestant) nation, they've seen Trump as a Cyrus the Great who is their divinely appointed ally.  In the wake of last week's assassination attempt by a young registered Republican who, in numerous ways, demonstrated that he didn't know diddly about marksmanship, rank and file and more elite members of the movement have declared that Trump was saved by Devine Providence.

That may in fact be true, but it's worth remembering that Adolf Hitler was the target of 42 known assassination plots, more than one of which went right to the edge of success.  It's also worth remembering that God does in fact work in mysterious ways, and God's acts don't necessarily corelate with human desires, and life may in fact be preserved for reasons we don't really grasp, but which do not necessarily equal our political goals.

At any rate, the Republican Convention in fact with numerous prayers offered by Christian clerics, including Catholic ones, who should be cautious about Christian Nationalism.  But it's worth noting that it also opened by a prayer from a conservative Sikh female lawyer.  I'm not saying that's not admirable, but the hardcore Protestant backers of a man who last year said that he would keep out of the country people who did not adhere to "our religion" are now scrambling to suggest that this isn't contrary to their view.

And beyond that, an opening speaker was one Amber Rose, about whom I know nothing other than that she has a pornographic past and present, and who does not seem to stand for anything that MAGA populist claim to is revealing.  Essentially, she evokes the very type of "wokeism" that actually did give rise to the movement in significant ways, as people instinctively reacted to what they knew to be contrary to common sense and morality.

The point, therefore, at which a populist movement is absorbed into something else has been reached.  The "conservative" element of populism has been boiled out.  Now the Republican Party and the Populist movement stands for one thing only, Donald Trump.  Almost anything that a person thinks Trump stands for is now suspect in additional.  We already know, for example, a movement which was deeply opposed to abortion in a party that had been deeply opposed to abortion, has abandoned that plank, as Trump is wishy washy on the whole thing.

Not that there weren't signs of this already.  

Nearly coincident with  the conference on Christian Nationalism, the "Hawk tuah Girl" rose to temporary fame regarding her TikTok interview on engaging in fellatio.  Deeply antithetical to Christian morality, she showed up shortly thereafter featured in Daisy Duke's al la Playboy helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now.  This past week, as already noted, the RNC gave a prime speaking slot to a pro-abortion feminist and self-proclaimed slut whose claim to fame is having sex with rappers.  It turns out, accordingly, that lots of rank and file MAGA adherents don't really have a concern for traditional morality, indeed, they're okay with immorality as long as its fairly conventional, or in the case of same sex marriage, with Don Jr. claims Don Sr. has always been in favor of, in spite of what he said post Obergefell, it's become conventional as our memories only stretch back to last week.

Hawk tuah.

Well, this isn't that surprising.  Much of the "Christian" and "moral" nature of the current populist was paper thin.  Donald Trump is a serial polygamist who took rides on the Lolita Express.  Lots of ardent populists saluting Christian Nationalism have long ignored Matthew 19:9.

Sic transit gloria mundi et reductio ad absurdum.

Last edition:

The 2024 Election, Part XXI. The Refusal to Face Reality Edition.


Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer up your pants.*

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A littl... :  Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a littl...