Mexico's revolution was spreading.
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Mexico's revolution was spreading.
200,000 people attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in Kokomo, Indiana.
333 soldiers of the White Army surrendered at Ayan on the Pacific Russian coast, ending the Russian Civil War.
Turkey affected prohibition.
The French occupied the Dortmund railway station, leaving only a single rail line functional between the Ruhr and the remainder of Germany. In Germany, rioting broke out in Brandenburg over hyperinflation.
A sporting event occurred: The Baltimore Marathon of 1923
I'm putting this edition of the Casper Daily Tribune up for one reason.
The article on the Boy Scouts.
It notes its explosive growth at the time, and that there was a troop in Mills. There's no troop there today.
Indeed, church troops, which this article notes, have really dwindled, although they still exist. I know that in the 30s, St. Anthony's Catholic Church and St. Mark's Episcopal Church both had troops. They no longer do, although St. Mark's retains a cub scout troops.
According to the short search of it I did, today the local troops are:
Contact: Devin Hutchinson
Phone: (307) 337-1185
Email: devin930@hotmail.com
Boy Troop
Online Registration available for this unit.
Meets on Thursday nights at the church.
Girl Troop
Contact: Richard Summerton
Phone: (307) 259-8878
Email: rlsummerton@gmail.com
Boy Troop
Online Registration available for this unit.
Meets on Tuesday nights in the basement of the Elks Lodge.
Contact: Craig Dutcher
Phone: (307) 258-9379
Email: craigdutcher@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.wytroop94.com
Boy Troop
Online Registration available for this unit.
Troop 1094 is dedicated to provide an educational program for boys and young adults to build character, to train in the responsibilities of participating citizenship, and to develop personal fitness. Our Troop camps during most months of the year, participates in several community service projects, and meets every Tuesday evening for regular meetings.
Girl Troop
Boy Troop
Online Registration available for this unit.
Great Troop! Great fun! Meets on Monday nights at the church.
A few things to note.
Two of these are associated with a church, that being the First Christian Church. Way back in antiquity when I was briefly a Boy Scout, even though I'm Catholic, that was the troop I was in. I think this was solely because somebody we knew was in it, and I was invited. In retrospect, I'm surprised that my parents didn't suggest I look at the St. Anthony's troops, which was still around at the time, although its members were no doubt mostly alumni of St. Anthony's school.
The George Vroman legion troop actually meets at College Heights Baptist Church, based on that address. So is it a church troop? That's not clear, but probably not. That Legion post meets at the National Guard armory, so it doesn't have its own meeting site, which might explain it partially.
Two of these troops are associated with service organizations, the Elks and Rotary. Service organizations are on the decline as well, although both of those seem to be doing well in Casper.
Most of these troops have a girls troops associated with them. The introduction of girls into what had been the Boys Scouts happened a few years back, and when it occurred it took all the LDS troops out of the organization. They'd had a big presence in it. The move also irritated the Girl Scouts, for obvious reasons.
I don't know if It's helped the Boy Scouts or not. They've certainly been in decline, but I suspect that the introduction of girls hasn't helped. Mostly what it probably has served to do is to create one more way in which it's impossible for boys to be with men in a formal way. Scouting was reeling under homosexual rape/seduction scandals at the time, although I'm sure that some would object to that characterization, even though there really is no other way to accurately describe it given as it was obviously male on male. I'm not claiming, of course, that male on underage female, and for that matter female on underage male, sexual abuse does not occur. Indeed, in the last year there's been a host of female on underage male abuse reported nationwide from public schools, school teachers in general being the number one sexual abusers of the underage. Something, suffice it to say, is really amiss in our society, as it is likely that all of this reflects a big increase in this conduct, not merely the discovery of it.
At any rate, the introduction of girls into the organization wouldn't seem to be directly related, but in a way it was, designed to show that Scouting was cleaning up its act and becoming inclusive. It could have addressed that in another way, as it really undercut the basic nature of the organization.
As noted, my connection with Scouting is thin. I was only briefly a Boy Scout. I shouldn't, therefore, really care too much about its decline, but still, it says something about the evolution of American society over the past century, and whatever it says, it isn't really a good thing that it's a shadow of its former self.
Scouting no doubt has a lot to compete with these days. However, the irony of that is that when it was first formed, it did to, and in some ways was formed expressly for those reasons.
Yes, the "Big 4-0".
Roman numeral wise, that is.
Because we're not stoned enough already.
Headline from The Denver Post:
Gov. Polis tells Bill Maher he’s “excited” about medical ‘shrooms after voters pass psilocybin legalization
And also:
Colorado voters decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms
Colorado becomes the second state after Oregon to establish a regulated system for substances like psilocybin and psilocin.
Because Americans aren't stupid enough already, and Denver isn't enough of a giant doped up smelly dump.
Seriously, the march of intoxicants in this society ought to be an alarm bell going off. Something is really screwed up and the only thing a lot of people, and governments, can think to do is to keep people stoned.
A walk thought Denver's capitol city should show anyone, including Governor Polis, how messed up Colorado is as an example of this. Truly, and I'm not a teetotaler, if there's one thing that could have been done to help keep the country from getting where it now is, that we could go back and do, not repealing prohibition would be it.
Panem et circenses?
It seems so.
Bias?
Colorado Springs shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich is a registered member of the Mormon church, spokesman confirms
So what?
I note this as this does seem to be the sort of headline that imports next to no useful information but which reporters, because of a bias, believe it does. It's impossible not to read this and think that the suggestion is that Anderson Aldrich shot up a gay club because he's a Mormon.
I'm rather obviously not a Mormon, but I'm confident that the LDS church does not advocate this sort of thing in any sense.
This is, I'd note, just a stone's throw from suggesting that all members of any conservative religion that generally holds conservative social views is a menace to society, a suggestion I've seen in news articles more than once.
Bias confirmation
Most folks here no doubt don't follow it, but there's a thing called "Catholic Twitter", which is made up of Catholics, on Twitter.
The main thing about Twitter is the gross exaggeration of any one topic until it's at the screaming level. Most of the people on Twitter don't take Twitter all that seriously to start with, and they shouldn't, and any one topic that's on it is not likely to be all that important or reflective of what is going on in the real world.
Anyhow, below is a part of a conservation that got rolling and rapidly morphed into "blind my eyes to the evidence". How it got started I'm not sure, as it involves the now actually relatively old story of Catholic cleric's abusing some sexually.
It's worth noting that this story is horrific in general. But at the same time it was a minority of clerics, and most of this story is now really old. To the extent that it remains a real present story it is is because the Church has a lot of older leaders, much like American society in general, who haven't done a good job of confronting this, in part because they seem to have ignored it and don't quite get the story.
Anyhow, one Priest noted.
Fr. Schneider is correct. Most of the abuse that occurred was male on male, and most of that was on post pubescent males who were legally minors.
Let's take a diversion here for a moment.
Just recently a French Cardinal publically confessed and condemned himself for what was translated as "an affair" with a 14-year-old female back many years ago when he was a priest, not a bishop.
That's horrific.
The headlines, however, rapidly went from "an affair" to "rape", or at least the Twitter ones did.
Here's the thing. Under the applicable French law, she was over the age of consent and could do just that. So the act was icky, gross, immoral, inexcusable, but not illegal. It wasn't rape as the law of that land, at the time, defined it.
FWIW, as that surprised me, I looked it up. The age of consent in France is now 15.
I always think of the age of consent being 18, but by and large in most of Europe, Ireland I think aside, the age of consent is lower than 18, with ages in the mid-teens not uncommon. I'm not going to post them all, but that's interesting in part because Europeans like to criticize the US for having legal pathways to "child marriage" while they have legal pathways to what we'd regard here as rape.
Anyhow, this is an example of following the evidence.
And the evidence generally is that most priest abusers were engaging in homosexual abuse, as legal line or not, "post pubescent" is a legal, not a physical, line.
Occam's Razor holds that the simplest answer is generally the best, because it's generally correct. The simplest explanation here is that most of the abusers were homosexuals.
Indeed, they pretty clearly were.
No, that doesn't make all homosexual men abusers, but if you put anyone in a situation in which they have no legitimate means for an outlet, problems arise. The real question, therefore, is how did enough homosexual men end up in the priesthood (and in Boy Scout leadership positions) for this to be statistically observable.
I've posted on it before, but my view is, on the priesthood, that this occurred as it gave homosexual Catholic men a place to professionally hide. That seems to be where the evidence leads. They weren't there because they were homosexuals per se, but because it gave them a socially acceptable excuse for not being married and, even more than that, not exhibiting any interest in women.
Well, of course, the Twitterverse couldn't accept that. The competing explanation, violating the principal of pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, was that the abuse was male on male only males were around, and therefore they were the only targets of opportunity.
That explanation leaves a lot lacking. For one thing, males aren't the only humans around. The French example, which has become two examples, demonstrates that, and an example in our own diocese of many years ago demonstrates that as well.
And while all male environments do give rise to this, it's not quite in the same fashion. Those examples tend to be instances in which not only are only males around, but their virtually cloistered for long periods of time. Groups of straight conscripts, for example, don't start engaging in male on male sexual contact as there aren't women around. Indeed, studies have shown that in areas where there are only males for long periods of time, what tends to happen is that their testosterone levels plummet on their own, and they're simply less interested.
But because we must maintain this fiction socially now, we can't entertain the possibility that the abusers were homosexuals. We can't even really engage in the possibility that a small number of homosexuals are abusers.
The Zeitgeist.
What about the Boy Scouts?
I haven't researched it, but I'd guess that those abusers were attracted to those leadership roles specifically for the target of opportunity situation. So that situation was different yet. The difference, therefore, is that in the priest example I suspect homosexual men put themselves into that situation to avoid suspicion as to their inclinations, and then yielded in crossing a line which they should not have, and which in the US is illegal, but in the same country, at a time when pornification of child models was common, isn't surprising. In the Boy Scout example, that was probably a group of men who were abusers in the first instance, but with homosexual inclinations.
And no, that doesn't mean all homosexuals are abusers.
Less government?
The State gave out $6,600,000 in rent relief, funded by the Federal Government, last month.
This program has stopped now, but its interesting in that there's been so much howling in the state about Federal money. As other examples have shown, people can howl about the dangers of Federal money and take it at the same time.
Credit Cart Sales and Firearms
A recent headline read:
So what?
In the United States, you have a right to keep and bear arms. We all know this. But that really doesn't mean that private companies can't track it.
They're already tracking everything else.
If we really don't like this, what we ought to do is simply ban credit cars, which are inherently inflationary to start with.
Misplaced Complaints
A lot of people are complaining about Elon Musk buying Twitter and treating it like a toy.
Well, he's super rich and for him, it probably is a toy. He's probably loving seeing people complain as they dance to his tune. And that probably explains why he let Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene back on Twitters.
Just ignore it.
Twitter really doesn't matter. I noted this all the other day here:
Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is busy making changes to it internally. This, in turn, has resulted in a lots of righteous anger about his behavior.
Here's the real question.
Who cares?
We have a Twitter Feed. You can see it on the bottom right-hand corner of this page. That doesn't stop the fact that Twitter is basically stupid.
A person can't say anything worth saying in as few of words as Twitter restricts you to. All Twitter really is for us is redirection to this blog. Does it work? Who knows. But as far as weighty conversation, not happening.
Indeed, the fact that people seem to think its weighty shows how dim the American intellect has become, as if there wasn't plenty of proof for that otherwise.
Now, I have some feeds that I follow I really like. Some do nothing other than what this one does, direct you to other things Some are basically photo feeds, much like Instagram.
But as far as news or anything worth reading, not going to happen.
Some people seem to think that Musk shouldn't be allowed to own Twitter or, if he does, he shouldn't be allowed to wreck it. Well, why not? He owns it. If you are uncomfortable with that, as many are, the real argument is that a person shouldn't be allowed to amass the size of fortune that Musk has. Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, and he's made more money, showing I suppose that being born to a wealthy family is a good way to get richer.
It also shows how screwed up American immigration laws are, as Musk apparently lives in Texas. Why was he allowed to immigrate here? No good reason at all, and in a society whose immigration laws made sense he'd be back in South Africa, or perhaps someplace in what's left of the British Commonwealth.
His personal life also shows how Western morality has declined. Musk has ten children by three women, the first six by his former wife Justine Musk, then two by Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian singer who goes by the absurd stage name Grimes, and finally twins via Shivon Zilis. If nothing else, this proves that vast amounts of money will get the male holder of the same money and sex, but it's not admirable and that this sort of conduct is no longer the type that is regarded as scandalous, although it should be.
None of which is a reason to get all in a twitter about Twitter. If he wrecks it, well, he bought it.
Who cares?
A bigger topic regarding Must, really, is should a just society allow one person to have so much of the planet's resources.
Scary
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