Showing posts with label 2016. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2016. Show all posts

Monday, January 11, 2021

A Conspiracy Thesis about Conspiracy Theorist. Qanon is the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

There's been a lot that occurred since I started this thread, which wasn't very long ago.

I didn't really know anything about Qanon until after the recent drama.  It's hyper bizarre conspiracy theory is something that's so wacky, I frankly didn't pay much attention to it.  Still, I've now, over the last month, heard a couple of people spout off comments that clearly originate from it.  

You'd think that following the recent insurrection it'd be dead as a doornail.  Nope, it's most diehard adherents still think that President Trump is going to arrest Joe Biden and that the Democrats will turn out to be a child pornography ring or something. That's not going to happen, and people who believe that this point are in full blown self delusion. But there are people who meet that description.

So how on earth did this oddity get rolling?

I have a theory. . . 


And frankly, I think the source of all this nonsense is pretty obvious.

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.  Which means that all of the people who are spouting its theories, in whole or in part, are dupes of Russian intelligence.

This is one of those topics where a little knowledge of history makes things pretty plain, but which also means that when you look around the world and what's going on, it's just baffling. Isn't this really obvious?  Well. . . of course it is, but you have to have a sense of history in order for that to be the case.

Okay, let's set out the evidence.

Russia has a long history of having one of the best deceptive services in the world.  Indeed, the playbook that's being played here has been played before.  Here's the cover of the first edition.


Eh?  You don't recognize volume one of the Qanon playbook?  Well more on that in a moment.

Imperial Russia had an extensive intelligence network.  It had to, as it was constantly faced with revolutionary movements that contested the idea that one man, the Czar, actually owned the entire country.  Indeed, the absurdity of that monarchical theory in the modern age is what gave rise to extreme counter movements.  Extremist governments produce extremist reactions.  To counter that, the crown needed secret policy.

When the Revolution came in 1917, its claimed that those policemen didn't transfer over to the new regime. Well, I'm skeptical.  The Red Army would have failed in the Civil War if some of the better Imperial Russian officers didn't throw in with the Reds.  It's not uncommon at all to find in biographies that so and so "had noble roots" even if serving the Communists.  I'm guessing that a lot of Ivan's and Igor's in the secret police went right into the Cheka.  

At any rate, and irrespective of whether that occurred or not, the Soviets certainly knew a lot about secret policing and spy craft as they'd been victims of it themselves.  There's the old phrase about how to "catch a thief". Well, in a lot of instances, the best spies are made up of people who spied on you. Turning spies is an ancient part of spycraft.

The Soviet Union developed the best deceptive spycraft set of skills in the world following the Civil War.  It's truly impressive.  Part of that involved disseminating propaganda and controlling or infiltrating institutions.  And part of that involved agents and sleeper agents.

It's well know that the Soviets had thousands of sleeper agents in the West.  The USSR only fell in 1990 and it isn't as if the new emerged Russia called them home.  They just stayed where they were, and as the KGB continued right on into service, under a new name, serving the new regime, the contacts largely just stayed there.  If you watch The Americans you might charmingly believe that the sleeper agents just became normal people when the USSR fell, but it almost certain did not.

Vladimir Putin was a loyal member of the KGB.

At any one point in history its' been difficult to tell what the goal of any Russian government is.  Russian is, as Churchill noted, "a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma".  A lot of the time, however, the goals of the Russian government are simply to be a menace to everyone else.  Russia has preserved a culture of political paranoia that is only matched by the one that Germany had prior to 1945.  Believing that everyone else is out to get them, they seek to disrupt everyone else.

Only a fool would believe that the KGB didn't have plans to massively disrupt Western governments by any means possible.  People like to imagine that means blowing things  up and the like, and no doubt those sorts of plans existed. But to get to that point would have been regarded as a Soviet foreign intelligence service failure.  Before ever getting there, influencing politics and disrupting political processes would have been resorted to. They probably in fact were more often than we might like to imagine.

Well, in actuality we don't have to imagine it to much, as we can read the Venona Files.

More on that in a moment.

Putin has stepped right into the role that Brezhnev and the like occupied in earlier eras.  He's not a Communist, apparently, but he's not a trustworthy nice guy either.  And its very clear that a principal go of his is to disrupt the US.

And the evidence is overwhelming he's doing it.

And Qanon is Russian work.


If it wasn't originally, and my guess is that it actually was, it is now.

Now the book above.

The book pictured above is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most anti Semitic lies ever perpetuated on the Earth. It came out of Imperial Russia prior to the Russo Japanese War and prior to the 1905 Revolution, and spread.  The best evidence is that it wasn't a product of the Imperial Russian secret service, but people have speculated about that in the past.  It certainly circulated in Russian circles before breaking out in the West.  Henry Ford paid to have copies made of it and to have them distributed.

The lies it tells about the Jews are lurid and absurd, but there are still people who believe them.

And here's the interesting part. . . those lies read a lot like what Qanon is putting out now.

Too much alike, in fact, for that to be mere coincidence.

While the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are absurd, the lesson the Russians would have learned about them is that distributing an absurdity in a free society works.  It worked with this racist tract from the early 20th Century, why wouldn't it work again.

Indeed, it's easier to distribute absurdities like this now, than it was in the early 20th Century. Then you had to find somebody to print them and distribute them.  Now all you have to do is to get it on the net.

And the Russians are proven masters of that.

And that's what's going on here.  Qanon is almost certainly one of the variety of Russian efforts designed to destabilize Western democracies.  It's likely an official effort of Russian state security, and it probably mostly comes out of troll farms within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire, but it likely also has some help in some ways from sleeper agents who where here before 1990 and still are.

So now, in 2021, this effort not only had some role in persuading some voters in the 2016 election (denying this is now acting contrary to the facts), but it set up the atmosphere for an insurrection last week.  And not only that, the theories have been tolerated to the point of near endorsement by the sitting President of the United States.  The country looks pathetic as a result.

So what can be done about this?

Well, something has to be done.  You'd think that after last week people would have woken up on this but there are plenty who have not.  This morning (January 11) in checking Twitter you can find that "Insurrection Act" is trending and that some now believe its been invoked and the world is going to be shocked by an arrest of Joe Biden on January 20, and that all the facts will come tumbling forth.

That's not going to happen.

The facts have come tumbling forth.  There's nothing there at all and a lot of people have been duped.  But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion duped a lot of people and there are still people who believe them.

Something definitely needs to be done, and right away.  Part of that involves prosecuting and holding to account those who set things up for last week, and that includes politicians who endorsed these things for their own cynically self serving reasons.  Some of the newly elected to Congress are so deluded as to probably believe the lies they've been telling, but very few are.  Being able to tell them and get away with it is not an option.

And something needs to be done about the underlying root cause of all of this, and quickly.

A modern democracy can't carry on with a large percentage of people believing in obvious deception, no matter what the source.

And the party's ultimately responsible need to be revealed, and soon.

The Venona files were compiled as early as the 1940s, but the government didn't release them until after 1990. There were reasons for that, but it did mean that many of the guilty escaped punishment for being complicit with Soviet espionage, and it further meant that for fifty years deceptive covers about some individuals who were involved with it were allowed to circulate.  I can't help but feel that the Federal Government knows a lot about Qanon right now.  We don't have the luxury of fifty years this time.  And efforts like this track back to somebody, or somebodies, and they need to pay some price for that.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Did we discuss Merrick Garland in 2016?

Yes, we did.

So what did we have to say?

Here's our first entry:

Monday, March 14, 2016

Monday at the Bar: Down to three potential Supreme Court nominees

Rumor has it that President Obama is down to three potential Supreme Court nominees, those being Merrick Garland, Sri Srinivasan and Paul Watford.  All have been vetted successfully by the Republican Senate before.

While the Senate leadership has indicated that it intends to stick to its guns and refuse to consider any pick prior to the next President taking office it has to be the case that the election, which has taken an unpredicted and odd course, may start to change some minds.  Most Republican Senators are undoubtedly of the view that a Trump nomination will go down to defeat against Hillary Clinton in the fall and everyone is aware that a Clinton nominee will be much more liberal than any of these three.  Backing down on their pledge not to consider a nominee would look bad, but the impact would not be as bad as suffering with a liberal appointee in the next Congress.

Obviously, by that time, the Republican leadership in the Senate had already issued its pledge not to consider President Obama's nominee.  

A few weeks had passed, by that time, since Justice Scalia had died.  But it was only March and much of 2016 was left to go. Things were developing in the race, however, as our next entry pointed out.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Merrick Garland nominated to the Supreme Court

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, age 63, to the United States Supreme Court.

I don't know anything about Judge Garland, and indeed rarely do we know anything about a Supreme Court nominee prior to his nomination.  He apparently has a reputation as being a moderate to liberal Federal Judge.  He is a Harvard Law graduate (yet again) and he clerked for the legendary Judge Herbert J. Friendly prior to clerking for United States Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan.  Brennan was a liberal Supreme Court Justice and we will likely be hearing about that if the confirmation process begins.

His remarkably older than recent nominees, which is interesting.  At age 63 this will be his one and only chance to make the Supreme Court.  He also has more experience, apparently, on the Federal bench than any other prior nominee.

Other than that, I can't comment much on him.  I would note that this is yet another instance of the Ivy League law schools having a seeming lock on the high court, which I don't think is a good thing, and its also another instance of the only people being considered being people who are currently sitting on the Federal bench in a lower appeals court.  Having said that, given the political dynamics in play, President Obama had to either nominate a sitting judge or a non controversial politician.  An attempt to do the latter seems to have been made with the vetting of Nevada's current governor, who declined to be considered.

On the politics of this, this now puts the Senate to the test.  If it declines to consider Garland it gambles on the Republican Party taking the Presidency, which is looking increasingly unlikely.  Garland is likely to be less liberal, maybe, than anyone Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, may make.  Additionally, given the extreme contentiousness of the current political season there is some question, although only sum, on whether the GOP shall hold the Senate.  I think it likely that it will, but if it fails to then the next nominee will definitely be a more liberal judge. Indeed, it is not impossible that the next justice, under that scenario, could be President Obama, following in the footsteps of President Taft.

Of course, backing down from the pledge not to consider a nominee would have political consequences, the most likely one being that it would become fodder for the Trump campaign, which is currently under siege from the Republican "establishment" and which would argue that the GOP was betraying the base.

I thought, at the time, as is clear that the gamble the GOP was making in not taking up Merrick Garland's nomination was really risky. As it turned out, it was brilliant strategically. By waiting President Obama out, the Republicans were able to secure a conservative replacement for Justice Scalia, although certainly not one of his intellectual weight.  It was a gamble that paid off for them.  It's essentially the same gamble that Ruth Bader Ginsburg made in the latter stages of President Obama's second term, betting on a Democratic administration, which didn't pay off.

What I also thought, but which I didn't put down in these posts, but might have elsewhere, is that it was Constitutionally questionable for the Senate not to take up the Garland nomination.  The Senate's job is to "advise and consent".  It didn't do that.

Indeed, in retrospect, Democrats could have filed suit and sought a Writ of Mandamus requiring the Senate to hold hearings.  But it would have been to no avail.  All that would have occured, had they won, was to convene hearings sometime that Summer which would have lead, I suspect, to a non confirmation.  That would have been quite politically awkward for the GOP, and it might have had the impact of swinging the election to the Democrats.

Contrary to what people seem to believe, things like this aren't that unusual.  I've known one well qualified nominee to the Federal bench who didn't get on as the Senate didn't take up his nomination for political reasons. Granted, that wasn't to the Supreme Court, but to a Federal District Court, but nonetheless these things occur. They simply waited that nominees President out until there was a new one.  That's exactly what the Republicans did, very openly, in 2016.

It doesn't appear that they'll do that here, but the Democrats don't really have a good argument that the GOP should wait.  In 2016  they argued against it.  There's no Constitutional requirement that waiting be done.  

The real question, therefore, is whether lifetime appointments of this type make sense any longer. The better evidence is that they don't.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Today In Wyoming's History: February 13, 2016. Justice Scalia passed.

Something that was posted on on our companion Today In Wyoming's History blog a year ago today:
Today In Wyoming's History: February 13:

 2016  Antonin Scalia passes on.
The full entry appears there.  Or  here, if you follow the link below the link, as it was originally posted here and then linked on to our other site.

So, an entire year has gone by, with lots of drama associated with it.  And the drama just keeps on keeping on, it seems.

Both of the nominees to fill this position have been good justices. The GOP held up President Obama's nominee, however, as they correctly surmised (probably) that approving that nominee would tilt the court to the left for decades.  It was quite a gamble on their part, but they read things correctly and were not only not punished at the polls for their actions, but probably gained a significant number of votes by doing it. Democrats have cried foul but in reality not approving Supreme Court nominees is not novel, and indeed treating them very badly isn't novel either.

Now the Democrats are threatening to hold up President Trump's nominees. But they seemingly fail to grasp that they don't have the votes to do that, they can only delay it. And there's no good reason to believe that achieves anything politically. They ought not to try that, but they likely will.

And so the drama goes on.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Exercising the 1950 Soviet Option. Democratic blundering just keeps on, keeping on.

Senate Republicans, as we recall, held up, or actually prevented, the vote on Barack Obama's final Supreme Court nominee.

Now some Democrats are taking a similar position in regards to Trumps nominees of all types, and at least the New York Times has declared war on Trump's nomination of Justice Gorsuch.  Consider their editorial of February 1:
So what can Democrats do? 

First, they need to make sure that the stolen Supreme Court seat remains at the top of the public’s consciousness. When people hear the name “Neil Gorsuch,” as qualified as he may be, they should associate him with a constitutionally damaging power grab.

Second, Democrats should not weigh this nomination the same way that they’ve weighed previous ones. This one is different. The presumption should be that Gorsuch does not deserve confirmation, because the process that led to his nomination was illegitimate.
Wow.

So is that the approach the Democrats should take?

Only if they're as dense as a box of rocks.

But, so far, the Democratic leadership has been showing itself to be rather granitic in outlook.

Gorsuch isn't what many feared.  Hes a solid textualist and quite frankly an excellent nominee.  Fans of democracy, which Democrats and Liberals generally, frankly, are not (they prefer a Liberal, Imperial, Court), should rejoice.  Gorsuch himself notes that a good Justice should never like all of his own opinions.  Basically, his view is that the law is to be applied as written, and if people don't like the law, they ought to get in touch with their representatives and change it.

You'd think people in favor of the franchise would think, yeah!, nifty!

Well, the Democrats don't think that, as truth be known, they don't really trust voters to "do the right thing" as they see it. No, they trust the courts to tell people what they ought to think and make it the law.  Right now, they truly believed they were on the verge of an extreme liberal revolution in which the Court would hold there are no genders of any kind, there are no borders, etc., and we were on our way to a genderless, self defined society.

Well, we aren't.

And that's what they think was "stolen" from them.

And now the plan, at least on some nominations, is to sit around and do nothing.

Which was the Soviet Union's plan when the United Nations met to consider the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.

The USSR had a Security Council veto.  But it walked out of the UN in protest of action being considered and more particularly as Red China was not admitted, at that time, to the UN. And, accordingly, the UN adopted a resolution to enter the war on South Korea's side, the one and only time that's ever been done by the UN.

The USSR could have stopped that, by showing up.  It didn't, as having a snit seemed like the thing to do over its view about Chinese admission.

Which is what the Democrats are now doing.

If they don't act, as a minority, the result will be. . . .well the result will be that the Republican Senate will give Trump everything he asks for without any Democratic input.

The Republican, or at least Trumpist, dream.

Why would they do that?

Well, why would they pit two elderly white candidates against each other, one of whom was detested on a wide scale, insult Catholics and Jews, and all that?

Should they make sure that the "stolen" seat remains in the public consciousness?  They should, by showing up. But they also ought to keep in mind that the public isn't that impressed by the Court.  Generally, the public thinks it knows best and the Court doesn't. The public also thinks that a collection of elderly jurists is unlikely to know what people under, oh, . . .let's say 60, think about what they want to the country to look like.  In other words, most people don't think Justice Kennedy is a cool hipster.  Maybe they think that about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. . . . 

So, in a fight over Gorsuch, what the Times implicitly suggests, is that the public ought to be reminded of all the decisions that have taken votes away from legislatures in the name of redefining society.  And that will appeal to the Times' readers, as they fear the American electorate.

But maybe the Democrats ought to consider that it really isn't 1973 anymore.  And maybe they ought to get outside a bit, if only to the zoo or park, where nature is.

The anti democratic court was likely the deciding factor in the 2016 Presidential election.  The Democrats don't seem to realize that.  For the first time since the late 1960s, really, Catholics voted somewhat as a block. Hispanics, most of whom are culturally Catholic, defected from the Democrats in surprising numbers.  45% of women, including vast numbers of young women for whom 1973 doesn't stand out to their demographic any longer like 1776, 1793 or 1917 does to some demographics, did so in larger numbers.  The anti democratic Supreme Court was responsible for a lot of that, and those voters, who want to keep a say and who have a more realistic view of life and nature than the Court, and the Democratic Party, acted accordingly.

The Democrats pointing that out is a good idea. . . . for the Republicans. 

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Looking back on '16. . . 2016 and 1916

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne*?
CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely ye'll be your pint-stoup!
and surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak' a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,
sin' auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
sin' auld lang syne.
CHORUS
And there's a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak' a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.

Robert Burns

As anyone who has the occasional misfortune to stop in here knows, I've been detailing the events of 1916, at least since March when Pancho Villa crossed the border near Columbus New Mexico and shot the town up.

And, I always tend to track current events, but this I've bee tracking them in greater detail due to the election.

And what I can say is that 1916 and 2016 are both years that go down as, well. . . messed up.

Let's start with 2016.

The big news this past year was the General Election in  which 150 of the pundits, including myself (a pundit-lite) got everything wrong.

I started predicting long ago, maybe as far back as 2015 here (and certainly orally) that this election would be a coronation of the pantsuit princess, Hillary Clinton.

I was way wrong.

And I never in a million years thought that Donald Trump would be nominated.  I didn't take him seriously, and then I convinced myself it just wouldn't happen.

Well it sure did.

I've spilled a fair amount of electrons already doing election post mortems, but  at the end of the day what I think is the case is that the country experienced a massive populist revolt in both parties and acted to crush them.  The GOP is cautiously waiting to see what that's going to mean for it. The Democrats are pretending, Black Knight style, that it just didn't happen.  But it sure did.  Overall, the country took a big step towards a populist idea that isn't really a fully conservative one and which is one that the liberal left can't even recognize and therefore refuses to do so.  If this continues to play out in the direction that it started to the country will truly be headed in a new direction, although as with all such things the direction always takes you to a place somewhat different from where you figured it would.

Nobody really knows where this will end, but it is both scary and, perhaps in an odd way, reassuring. For the longest time the Democrats have gleefully been pretending that a revived highly left wing future was inevitable.  It isn't, and we should be relieved.  Progress, that is true progress, of every type should be welcome to everyone.  But the progress that the Democrats have been backing isn't progress but a vision of the world deeply hostile to nature.  They deserved to be whacked as a result.  That doesn't mean the GOP doesn't, it has its own deeply hostile views.  But its whacking, I suspect, is just about to commence.  A lot of that is going to be, I suspect, economic.

George F. Will recently ran an article in which he claimed that the world that Trump promises to return us to, when "America was Great", is the world of 1953.  He based that argument on the correct notation that 1953 was really the last time that the US had a "make everything" economy such as Trump is promising.  And that world of 1953 was based on a glitch.  Europe had engaged in two world wars the first half of the 20th Century that had destroyed its economy, and in the end much of Europe itself, and Asian economies were really a nonentity until the mid 1950s.  No wonder we were the world's economic engine. That world isn't returning, so we're really not going back to that, no matter where we are really going.

The Wyoming legislature, along with Utah's, once to actually go back to the economy of 1916.  1916 was the year that the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 was passed, the World War One oil boom was on, and coal was king.  And they seemingly believe that they can make this occur by legislative fiat over the wishes of the people of Wyoming combined with Trump being President.

One thing that the recent Wyoming efforts to grab the Federal domain have pointed out is how close Wyoming came to being something like Texas where all the land is privately owned and getting access to anything is based upon paying for it, or knowing somebody.  We were really lucky.  The Stock Raising Homestead Act was a good thing, to be sure, but it was already creating problems by the late 1920s and when Franklin Roosevelt acted to bring about the repeal of all three homestead acts in the 1930s he did the entire nation, and the West in particular, a huge favor.  Indeed, it was an economic and environmental favor.  We really dodged a bullet but the legislature seems intent on loading the gun and shooting us again.  The legislative effort to grab the land that has been going on against the wishes of the state's residents is shameful.  Here, however, the fact that Trump was elected probably operates against this trend as he and his appointments have not been in favor of it.

The state legislature will have a bunch of new faces in it this session.  Quite a few of the old hands left for one reason or another and this has actually continued after the general election as at least one member resigned post election.  It appears that the legislature will be even more conservative than the norm, which is pretty conservative, but also somewhat green. As this session is a general, not a budget, session, that could be interesting.

Not that it wouldn't be interesting if it was a budget session.  The price of oil seems to have more or less stabilized and the oilfields are a bit more active than they were six months ago. But anyway you look at it the boom is definitely over and if the bust isn't, something like a bust is.  The state has been struggling for months to deal with the decrease in funds and that's likely to be a major topic in the general session.

Globally the strategy of emphasizing local forces in the war on ISIL with western air support, which I was critical of, has proven fairly effective and ISIL is clearly on the decline as a quasi state force. At the same time, however, its guerilla arm, loosely made up, to say the least, is as active as ever.  2017, I fear, is likely to not be much different than 2016 in those regards.  The year closed out with one such attack in Berlin.  But it was far from the only one.  Included now in this equation are those who claim adherence to ISIL without any real ties directly to it.

All in all, therefore, we can say that 2016, while it wasn't the worst year ever, surely wasn't the best in quite a few ways.

So what about 1916?  If we were living a century ago how would we have found that year?

Well, probably not great either.

I didn't start to track day by day events in 1916 until March, when the anniversary of the Punitive Expedition and the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, occurred.   I have since then, however, and its clear that 1916 was not a great year.  Our intervention in Mexico put us in a state of near combatant in the Mexican Revolution and seemed to achieve fairly little by the year's end.  The year saw its own Presidential Election in which Wilson was able to campaign on "he kept us out of war" only to get elected and then seemingly start to contemplate entering that war more and more.  In Wyoming a series of devastating fires had terrible consequences right up until the end of the year.  The bright spot seemed to be the aforementioned Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 here, combined with a boom in agriculture and petroleum caused by World War One.  All in all, while there were some positive things about the year, a lot of people were likely glad to see 1916 go.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

2016 exits, and 2017 begins

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world
Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur.



I know that years, as a measurement of time, are somewhat arbitrary in their calculation.  Why not have them run from June 1 to May 31, for example?

Well, we don't.  And being a calculating species, the calculations mean something.

I can honestly say that while I doubt it would be apparent to many people who know me, unless they know me very well, 2016 was one of the hardest years of my adult life.

It started off, I suppose, sometime mid winter, maybe even in December 2015. I've completely lost track of it but some time ago we had to move my mother from what I'd call a nursing home into an assisted living facility.  I thought she's like that better, and maybe in the end she did, but that was hard.  Anyhow, sometime in the middle of the winter things really began to change.  Her already impaired memory rapidly began to decline.  And then her health followed.  This was followed by endless trips to the emergency room until an honest doctor informed us the end was really here and we could just best prepare for it.  At that time, we supposed it to be days, but it became weeks, as her tough old physical self refused to go where her mind had already gone.

 
My mother, as a young adventuresome soul.

My relationship with my mother had been strained since some point in my early teens but one of the odd twists of fate that occurs in life is that my father, who stuck with her in a way that truly did honor to their Catholic marriage vows, died just as an earlier condition of her began to stabilize.  He was 62 years old at the time, nine years older than I am now, and that had been a hard thing for him. That left me and my mother in that relationship and in a lot of ways it repaired itself as a result.  Later that left me and my wife with dealing with the devastating decline in her health and mental status and we carried the ball on that, helped by my father's fantastic siblings, for years.

She finally passed away in April.

You will hear people guiltily proclaim such things to be a relief. I don't know that I've felt that in any sense so much as a vacuum, and its hard to describe.  I'm an only child and now the framework of my early life is gone in a temporal sense.  In a other worldly sense it seems more real than ever, however.  To some degree the burden of my mother's illnesses has gone and the mother I had back before I was 13 is strangely present.

In another, however, I feel like I lost both parents this year.  I hadn't really realized it but the need to take up where my father had left off when he died kept me from fully feeling the impact of his loss even though we were very close.  Filling his shoes at home was a huge job, and I never did it adequately by a long shot, but it took up a lot of the space that grief would have filled.  Now that its gone, the grief came in late with it. 

 
Me and my father at the local fish hatchery, about 1966.

January through April, therefore, was a nightmare.  Weeks thereafter weren't much better as we dealt with all the things that a death brings along.  It was a hard winter and spring.

Death didn't stop there, however.  Just before my mother died, her brother Mark died.  I didn't really know Mark and I'm not sure if I ever met him.  He was the sibling of my mother's that I knew the least about. She was quite close to her brothers and sisters but for whatever reason Mark is one that I just heard less about.  I only talked to him once in recent years and at that time it was quite clear that he was very confused, not a good sign, so old age was catching up with him.  My mother, in a state of decline, reacted not at all to it really, which I suppose was a good thing.

Locally, just as my mother started to decline one of the male relatives in my extended family did as well.  He was really the last of my father's generation or near generation of my collection of local male relatives left alive. My Uncle Bob died some time ago as had my Uncle Bill.  My Uncle Frank is very much alive be he is quite a bit younger than my father.  Joe was a contemporary of Bill's and like him a World War Two veteran.  With him, it seems to me, the last of the giants of my youth have passed on and those of us left behind can hardly measure up to them.

As if that wasn't enough two more death visitations hit before the year ended, indeed within the last few weeks. One was the death of the husband of a high school colleague of mine.  This is the second time she's lost a husband. This one passed when a blood clot developed following knee surgery, and therefore it was unanticipated.  A true tragedy that left her with two distraught teenage daughters.

The second was the odd news that my grandmother's estate in Quebec is winding down.  It's been open since the 1970s. That seems nearly impossible in the American context but it had something to do with providing money from the sale of her house in Montreal to support an uncle in a nursing home.  He's still in the nursing home so something must have been worked out, but its odd to think of.  This year, as my mother became increasingly ill, she was asking about her own mother and if she was still alive.  Now, in an odd way, her mother's estate has come back to visit us after her daughter passed on, the third of her daughters to do so.

In the spring my son graduated from high school.   That is of course a happy event, but it's hard not to be a bit self reflective about it, particularly in a year like this.  I'm not going to go into it in depth, but what it does bring to me how very, very fast we grow up and into adulthood, and for that matter how fast adulthood passes us by. At age 53 the horizon of my time here on Earth is clearly visible. That doesn't bother me all that much but it does make me realize how very poorly I compare to my father and his role as my father.  I wish I'd been that good of father to my children, but I haven't been and I'm well aware of it.

Some of that is occupational and some of it isn't.  I've come to be very much aware of that this past year as well.

Occupationally I've worked now for nearly 27 years as a trial attorney, and I'm using the term advisedly, i.e., "trial attorney".  Plaintiff's lawyers have appropriated that term as if they're the only trial attorneys that there are, but that's complete bs. There's no trial without a defense and plaintiff's lawyers are no more or less trial lawyers than defense litigators are. For that matter, I've long thought that the real trial lawyers out there are the state's prosecutors and the public defenders, both of whom are in trial all the time.

Anyhow, civil litigators, which may be a better term for trial attorneys, don't make the best spouses and parents, I think.  It's a really stressful occupation and it follows a person home everyday.  Additionally, and as I've tracked continually on this blog, civil litigators travel constantly and this means that you aren't there a lot.  I've missed birthdays of my children, spouse and late mother, via travel.  I was out of town in a trial when my daughter became quite ill as a young child and I was in trial when the outside water line froze.  All this means that my wife had to do double duty quite a few times, including times when my mother was quite sick, and that's a hard and unfair thing.  Additionally an occupation that trains you to interrogate and argue and which regards those as virtues will impact your personality at least to some degree, and probably not universally in a good way.  Looking back on it, it's pretty clear to me that my own father was much more patient and caring than I have been in the same role.  He wasn't a lawyer and he was always there.

Of course, it's easy to pin the blame on something other than on ones self, and maybe that's just it, frankly.  Probably my father was just flat out a better person than I am.  I certainly cannot be one of those people who laments the faults of his father, to be sure, as mine are much more manifest than his.  My personality may be such that I would tend to exhibit a lot of these traits no matter what, who knows?

Anyhow, given the passing of my remaining parent and the arrival in adulthood of my son, these defects have been quite glaring, in my view.  I have pondered those a fair amount.

I noted travel above and this year has had some unique travel incidents that added to the general gloom of the year.  In January 2016, just after the turn of the year, I had my 2007 Dodge D3500 develop a critical exhaust problem which required me to seek assistance immediately, which in this case meant driving all the way back to Casper in sub zero weather without stopping and, moreover without slowing down too much.  Quite the adventure that only those with diesel particulate filters would be familiar with.  The exhaust system of that now old truck had to be rebuilt.  In late summer I went to my mother's old house to pick up my son, who now lives there while attending college, so that we could go to Cody.  I had a pretrial hearing that morning and he was coming along.  It was early, early, and as he didn't come to the door, I briefly waited and then decided to go to the door and knock. Even though I have never done this before, I forgot to set the parking break and left the truck in neutral.  As I was at the front door, I heard a rolling sound and . . . to make a long story short it rolled down the block as I ran after it until what was going to happen was obvious.

 
 Sigh. . . .

And what was going to obviously happen is that it was going to hit a house.  Yes, a house.  But, oddly enough, or perhaps not, it executed a nice backwards right turn and swung off to the side of a sides street, hitting a tree and bouncing into a Subaru, which it destroyed.   My truck was pretty badly damaged but workable and I drove it to Cody that day, but not before I was made a little late by a really long delay as a real jerk of a policeman investigated the thing.  It's the second time a member of my family has had to interact with Officer Crabby who is, frankly, an asshole to deal with even when you fully admit its your fault.  He needs to retire. . . to Syria.

Anyhow, that was a bad deal but I have a lot of vehicles and so it wasn't a huge inconvenience when I was down to my Jeep, which I drive most days anyhow.

It was inconvenient when, a couple of weeks later while my Dodge was in the body shop I hit an elk with the Jeep.  Uff.

 
Ouch.

It had to be hauled into town. We were lucky that I was driving really slowly at the time, but it sure did the damage. So, at that point, I had a Jeep and my Dodge D3500 in the body shop.  Before the Jeep came out, sure enough, my wife's Tahoe went in for some fender damage it sustained in a parking lot.

No sooner had the D3500 come out of the shop and the check engine light went on.  This meant it had to go into the garage, which it did. While there it was determined that it needed a new clutch, which isn't cheap for a big truck of that type.  Went it came home it went back out in the field, hunting, next weekend and the check engine light came back on with an exhaust warning.  Usually the diesel particulate filter will burn off but it wouldn't, so it had to go into the deisel shop for that.  It was there for a long time while they worked on the exhaust and when I got it out they warned me right away that it might need new injectors but they didn't do them as they were pricey.  Well, I didn't even make it home before the light went back on. Sure enough, I needed new injectors.

To cap it off, early this month I drove to Pinedale in arctic weather and the light went back on. Fortunately, this time, it was something really minor and was back out of the shop within a day.

At some point in this vehicular saga my wife suggested that maybe I should consider looking for a new truck.  I bought this one new in 2007.  I'm really disinclined to do that as I like the truck and if I were to do it I'd have to buy a really pricey one to get the same thing I have now, a 1 ton manual transmission truck.  I'm down to Dodges, really, which is okay as that's what I like anyhow, but it's clear the options for manual transmissions are dwindling.  That actually argues for getting a replacement now, while I can, but I drive the Jeep most days and have a foolish notion in my head that at age 53 I won't ever need to buy another vehicle.

Indeed, I started the year off hoping to finish improving the Jeep to where I want it to be, which would have required adding an external tailgate rack to it and adding a winch but I gave up on that due to all the vehicle expenses.  Maybe next year. And with all the money that's now gone into the D3500, I'm keeping it.  It only has 140,000 miles on it and I figure it's good for at least another 140,000.  Besides, somewhere in this mix I'd bought new tires for it and I hardly have any miles on them.  I do regret not switching out to higher walled tires, however, as I've always found that this truck doesn't have the clearance it should.  Now that it's old, and I've done a lot of work to it, however, I'm going to definitely get higher walled tires next time around.

That's because I get that truck stuck in the snow nearly every year and have this year, while elk hunting, which of course I did this year. This is so routine for me, however, that it's not in the list of unfortunate events.  I do that every year.

Which was on one of the few days this year I was able to go hunting.

 

I've complained about this already, and if you ask my wife she'll tell you that I'm wrong, that I went hunting every weekend during big game season, but that just isn't true.  It isn't true as, for the first time in my life, I didn't draw an antelope tag.  I also didn't draw a deer tag, but of course I could and did go general.  I drew elk tags, however.

This is a matter of some frustration and part of it is my fault. I could have and should have put in for landowners tags for antelope, but I didn't.  I didn't as I wanted to be able to range over the entire area, not just the place the landowners tags pertained to, which is ironic as last year I shot an additional antelope on that very land.  But neither my son nor I drew.  Very disappointing.  And frankly it makes me a bit miffed, which I generally am not, on how licenses are apportioned.

We went general deer, but that was frustrating as Rob's goons followed us all over to make sure that we didn't step foot on private land, which I will remember next general election when he's running for reelection.  We never did, but we could have gotten a deer but for that.  But we also could have gotten one if I hadn't been so busy.

Now, a person with work in an area that's having a big down turn cannot or should not complain about being busy and I'm really not, but that was part of it.  I didn't have the time to devote to it this year like I normally do. That was a big part of my lack of success for elk as well, which I've already lamented. Added to that, when the weather finally turned to where t he elk hunting got good my son was in finals so that meant I was doing it as a solo project. That's not easy, but it also was an odd thing I hadn't really experienced since I was his age.  Indeed, it made me look back at that period when I was in university and he was here.  I kept wondering why he wasn't getting out for big game. Well, now I know, too late to appreciate it.

Being busy has, this year, added to my waist line. My weight routinely varies by about five pounds and I haven't gained weight, but I have gained girth.  This doesn't make me fat, but going into 2017 I need to do something about that.  My trousers are tight and I don't like that.  This is due, again in part, to being really busy.  If you are getting up early, working all day, and coming home tired at night you likley aren't going to get a lot of exercise.  And I'm not one of those people who feels comfortable going to a hotel gym.  Wait, I'm not one of those people who feels comfortable going to any gym.  This has never been a problem for me as I'm not a heavy eater, but when you are not getting a lot of exercise during the day it can start to become one.  This year I need to loose a few pounds, which is not all that easy to do really.

Somebody who has lost a few pounds is my son, which is due to the effect of living outside the house.  My wife is a good cook and its always easy to eat more of anything if you aren't the one cooking.  Now that he's living outside the home, in my mother's old house, he's cooking for himself and he's not bad, but like a lot of single adult men, you just don't feel like whipping up three big squares a day.  One will do, and that tends to be a single course meal generally.  I well recall it from when I moved to Laramie and lived on my own, although I have to say that we weren't exactly doing much fancy eating at home at that time anyhow.

As noted, he's now living in my mother's old home here in town while he attends college, which is working out well.  However, the house itself turned out to be one of the years events.  

My mother loved her house and when she became ill I kept it.  I feared, and I am certain that I am right, that if I had sold it it would have killed her.  I rented it out for awhile but for much of that time it was empty as a busy person has little time to be a landlord.  Well, neglect on my mother's part of certain things and the long passage of time of all kids mean that certain things needed to be worked upon, and one of those things was, the plumbing.  In a major way.

 
The plumbing line, in the basement.

This was totally unanticipated and not a very pleasant experience.  Fortunately insurance paid for a lot of the work. Thank goodness for insurance.

And then there was politics.

That may seem to be an odd thing to add to all of this, but I think a lot of people felt a bit out of sorts this year due to the election. The General Election turned out to be truly surreal and we're still feeling it.  The Presidential election turned out to be a sort of revolution with the voters saying no to the establishment of both parties, and for good reason, but in a sort of scary way.  Nobody ever knows where revolutions end up once they start, and we don't know yet.  Some turn out really well, such as the American Revolution.  Some turn into freaking disasters, like the French Revolution.  As the revolution isn't over, we don't know where it ends up.

Even locally it was bizarre and it continues to be. Odd gaffs kept one candidate from being reelected but didn't keep another from being elected.  Candidates and even reelected politicians resigned on an untimely basis messing up the polls and the results of the polls.  A body of the Wyoming legislature launched off on one of their occasional "don't tell me what you want, we know better than you" efforts, which hasn't fully played out yet.  It was a truly odd year.

It strikes me that all of these things are simply life.  It's just that they all occurred in a single year.  But then, they probably weren't all that bad.  The truck didn't go through a house, by the Grace of God.  The elk didn't end up in the window of the Jeep.  Insurance covered the plumbing.  So, all in all, it was probably a better year than I imagine.  

Still, I'm hoping for a better 2017.

Best Post of the Week for the Week of December of December 25, 2016

2016 exits, and 2017 begins

An introspective entry.

Friday, December 23, 2016

The Massive Decline in Violence (shout out to 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit)

The purpose of this blog has been, and remains, to explore all things, technology, culture, society, etc, of the approximate 1890 to 1920, more or less (adding, probably, something like 50 years on either side of that).  I stray from that a lot, as any reader very well knows, but I tend to come back to it.

Recently I've been running 1916 is century delayed real time so often that a person could be excused for thinking it was the 1916 day by day blog, or something like that, but it isn't.  I've been doing that do the centennial of the Punitive Expedition.  Once that story basically concludes the near day by day entries will slow down as well, to the likely relief of everyone who stops in here, but some of the newly added features that are basically slice of life type entries will likely keep on keeping on, maybe.

Anyhow, in keeping with this, I've found that there are a couple of other sites that run 1916 in delayed real time, one of which is Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit.  I like it, and I post quite a few of the entries here that are posted on the centennial of their happening as links there.  But I read those entries over there was well.

Recently one of the moderators of that Subreddit posted an end of the year item noting that the murder rate in 1916 in the US was 145% of today's.

145%.

Now, this shouldn't surprise the readers here, but I still wonder to what degree we fail to appreciate that violence has really declined.  Massively, in fact.

We have run a lot of items on this before, including, Violent society? andPeculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.  So this should not  be a surprise to readers here.  But what an impressive statistic.

And how interesting in terms of how we look at the world we live in. In terms of violence, in spite of spectacular examples to the contrary, this is about the best era there is to live in, unless of course you are a victim, in which case, no doubt, that's no comfort at all.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Today In Wyoming's History: December 19: A Very Blustery Day

Today In Wyoming's History: December 19:

2016  A recorded gust of wind reached 88 mph on the base of Casper Mountain, a new record 14 mph higher than any previously recorded gust in that location.  Clark Wyoming reported a blast of 108 mph.  It was a very blustery day.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Stabbed In The Back. . . . a self deluding thesis

First of all let me note the following.

Russia is not our friend (Romney, who was widely derided when he was the Presidential candidate for noting that, was close to correct, to a degree).  

And the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails, their attempt to do so on the Republican ones, and their general behavior in these regards is so abominable that it must be addressed.  Indeed, while I haven't researched it, I wonder if it technically amounts to a causi belli, although it will not come to that.

Anyhow, some history.

By the fall of 1918 the German war effort was shot. They were incapable of winning the war.

Everything the Germans had calculated on, and gambled on, had failed.  The United Kingdom did not collapse due to a submarine blockade before the United States effectively fielded an army in Europe.  The Micheal Offensive did not break the Allied lines and take Paris, throwing France out of the war.  The introduction of poisonous gas had not proved to be a battlefield tide turner, or even particularly effective.  The surrender of the Russians under Lenin did not turn out to release a flood of men and supplies as German avarice required the deployment of German assets to keep on at nearly full strength.  Backing the Communists in Russia had helped turn the tide in the East but then had gone right to the German navy yards were it was having the same effect as it had in Russian ones.

They had lost.

They still hoped to secure a satisfactory diplomatic resolution, and in fact they actually did, but it wasn't the one they hoped for.

And soon, psychologically, they refused to accept it.

Which is just what the Democrats are doing about the 2016 election right now.

What German society did is well known.  By November 1918 they had no choice at all but to accept Allied terms. Those terms, in spite of the way they have been repeatedly portrayed, were not really all that harsh. A big part of this is that Germany had slid into a revolution at home, which strangely gets underplayed in the English language histories.  Just as in Revolutionary Russia, in Revolutionary Germany idle sailors betrayed their employers and became an unruly dangerous uniformed mob. As things disintegrated at home the Germans had to deploy its army on its own territory against its own people, a situation which would keep on keeping on after the war with the Allies ended.

By the late 1920s, however, they'd convinced themselves they hadn't actually lost the war at all, and certainly not through their own actions.  It was somebody else's fault. And that somebody became, in their imaginations, the Jews, a fairly absurd proposition anyway you look at it. But an absurd proposition that was used to launch the political career of a figure who emphasized the very worst elements of German culture and who attacked the best elements of it.

What does that have to do with the Democrats?

Well, the Democrats lost this election through their own ineptness, just as the Germans lost the Great War through their own fault and miscalculations.  I would have thought they would have won, but not because of their great campaign, but because Trump seemed to be incapable of winning. The Democrats, as we've explored already, ran a person well out of her own time, who wasn't likeable, emphasizing, where they emphasized anything, failed positions, while insulting some of their base.

Now, and here's where the stab in the back comes from, we know about some of those insults due to leaks.

It is now known that the Russians penetrated the Democratic National Committee and swiped their emails.  That's a criminal act, but we also know that t he Russians tried the same with the Republicans and failed as the Republican firewall worked. Why didn't the Democratic one work? 

And the Russian release of information, it's worth noting, did not release anything that wasn't true.  It's hard to complain, or should be hard to complain, about the truth of your own views being released.  If DNC operatives detested the Catholic Church, for example, they detested us.  The Russians letting us know that doesn't mean it isn't true. Rather, they were embarrassed by the truth.

But not so much, apparently, that they now feel they need to change at all. They don't.  They've propped up the same old, same old for their leaders and they, or at least those organs that support them, are crying about the Russians. "Stabbed in the back".  Donna Brazile and Leon Panetta were both on over the weekend  on the news shows addressing the email situation and neither of them would acknowledge that the problem, for their campaign, wasn't that emails were stolen, but what the stolen emails said.  Brazile went so far as to claim the emails were "weaponized" but if they were weapons, they were handgrenades with the pins pulled out before they were tossed out the cyber window. The real problem with them is that they let voters see how the Clintonites actually thought.

I think that its time to put Putin and his cronies in a corner.  We can't pretend that it isn't a crime, and frankly it creeps up on being nearly an act of war. 

But that doesn't mean it actually influenced the election.  I highly doubt that, to say the least.  At most they tended to confirm what the confirmed already thought.  That doesn't excuse it, but nor will there be any excuse for the Democrats to run repeat elections in 2018 and 2020, which right now is exactly where they are headed.