Uff
I had this entry nearly ready to go when I lost about 50% of it.
Fortunately, as there is no deadline, and not many readers, that really doesn't matter.
Still, its the pits. You always think you've done some brilliant writing when something like this happens.
Still, maybe that means I ought to wrap this excessively long post up.
The Missing
When I started this edition of this series, Gabby Petito had not yet gone missing. When she first was reported missing, I wrote a post on something that sort of riffed off of it, and I still might, although in further consideration, it's now so nuanced there may literally be no point.
When I last updates this, she hadn't yet been found. Now she has been, and we know that she was murdered, and it seems rather obvious who the killer was. Her boyfriend, if that's what he had been at the time, or her fiancé, which maybe he had been but no longer was, or in fact maybe was, has been by far the most likely suspect and he was stil missing as well when I lost the text. It would appear that he fled into a Flordia swamp, probably having taken off in a desperate attempt to avoid prosecution, and maybe with the intent to end his own life. We'll probably soon know. Assuming that's so, his returning home with her vehicle, but not her, puts him in the category of all time stupid criminals, again assuming guilt, which we are told we should not assume. And indeed, we should note, that there are other possibilities.
Women are murdered by men all the time. It's a fact and, unfortunately, in spite of the desperate desire to avoid reality in our society, it's a "natural fact". Men are bigger, stronger, and more violent. They are bigger, stronger, and more violent than women for natural reasons. None of this excuses this reality, but it does partially explain it. So why did this horrible event garner so much public attention?
What isn't a "fact" however, is that husbands are the always and obvious suspect. Looking at the data has gotten a little difficult, but at least some figures, and I heard them recently independently repeated, hold that husbands figure in about 8% of female deaths. It's easier to find older figures, although not really old, on murders by boyfriends, i.e., men that women are linked with romantically but not married to, which is actually right at about the same percent. More recent figures tend to link the two together, which isn't statistically or existentially valid, in my view, which puts things at a higher percentage rate. You can double those figures for a relatively common one, although I've seen one that's at 25%, which I question.
While the headlines tend to suggest, based on these statistics, that "romantic partners" are the most likely killers for women, they actually aren't. That would mean, even accepting the high rate, that 75% of homicides of women are conducted by killers who aren't romantically linked to them. When we consider that it is the case that the majority of murders are committed by people who know their victims, this presents a much different overall picture of things.
To add to that, however, I strongly suspect, but have no data to prove it, that homicides by "boyfriends", "partners" (a term I hate), and husbands are different in character.
Anyhow, this story had, and has, a tremendous following. Part of that is because it was and is a mystery. And a very public one was the couple had a YouTube following which meant that they were being followed by fans. That's a lot of it. Under any similar set of circumstances, this would have sparked national interest.
Part of it too is that she was young and cute. That's party of it too. Undeniably so. That sparked the following headlines.
710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, were reported missing in Wyoming over the past decade — the same state where Gabby Petito disappearedIf Gabby Petito Was A Person Of Color, Would Anyone Have Cared – Sadly, Probably Not
There's a lot to that, which doesn't reduce the tragedy.
710 is a horrible number. It doesn't get much attention, it really ought to.
Well, as this plays out, let us hope that she's passed on to Perpetual Light and that the suffering she seemed to be enduring wasn't too awful.
Shacking up is not the same as being married.
What I started to type an item about when this first got rolling was the way that the news stories on this ignored the fact that Petito was engaging in conduct which when I was young would have been regarded as shocking and ill-advised, although even by that point, it might have occurred anyway, somewhat as an act of flaunting standards. I noted even in typing it out that as I was drawing attention away from the tragedy, I felt hesitant and guilting about noting what I was noting.
Here's the gist of the last, or second to last (maybe) encounter with the couple that's known about.
After the van was pulled over, the officer said Petito was “crying uncontrollably” and told him she was struggling with her mental health. Petito was placed in the back of the officer’s car, the report said, while he spoke to Laundrie on his own.
Petito said she had hit Laundrie in the arm to get his attention as the officer was trying to pull them over, which caused the van to swerve into the curb, the report said. But Laundrie said he thought Petito was trying to grab the wheel while he was driving, resulting in the swerve. The officer said Laundrie's account "was not consistent with Gabrielle's statement" and reported he saw scratches on Laundrie's arm.
The couple had spent the past four or five months traveling together which was creating tension, the report said. “The time spent created emotional strain between them and increased the number of arguments,” the report said.
Female Dresses and Undress
I've been getting a bunch of Twitter sidebars, i.e. suggested reading, that have to do with entertainment recently, which is odd as I don't follow the entertainment news.
The entertainment news follows female fashion, and what women "wear", if that term can be used loosely. As a result, there were a few from the VMA awards of well known, apparently, female entertainers who basically were not dressed. One was Megan Fox, and another was some well known, apparently, female singer. I didn't click on either, but even from the little box, you could see that Fox might as well have been completely nude, for all she wasn't wearing at the VMA's, and the female singer was dressed, or rather undressed, in an antiquarian style, by which we would mean the way that the over fevered brains of old time set designers imagined members of the harem to be dressed, or not dressed, basically.
Why do women betray other women this way?
It's an interseting cultural phenominon. In an era when we're still in the aftershocks of the Me Two era in which women justifiably compalined about being treated like sexual objects, popular female figure display themselves as, well, sexual objects.
I've noted it before and will again. Women will never achieve full equality with men in society as long as some women prostitute their image. It demans and degrades them all.
There was also a Met Gala, at which a selection of notables appeared. One was AoC who wore a full lengthy stylish dress with "Tax the Rich" emblazed on it in red. And of course, Billie Eilish was there wearing a weird 1950s style move dress that flowed on and on which also was cut so that her ample, well you can figure it out, were prominently displayed. It was her "Holiday Barbie" dress. She's clearly riffing off of Marilyn Monroe at this point. Hailee Steinfeld was there, not looking like Hailee Steinfeld, which is really unfortuante as people really ought to look like who they are.
What to make of all of that.
Well one thing you can make of it is that Eilish continues to play from Madonna's playbook. She's now a figure, and a full figured figure at that, whose public image is fully seperated from her voice and singing talent, if she has any. And she's also clearly angling, as Madonna once did, to be a latter day Marilyn Monroe, and pulling that off more effectively than Madonna did.
Oh well, at least she's not stick thin, so perhaps, at least in her case, this trend isn't a bad one.
AoC's dress caused a Twitterstorm, predictably, even though we all know it isn't really her dress.
On dresses, a local art museum has a display of the dresses of a cross dressing man on display.
He was well known around here for years, long before there was any suggestion that people tolerate such things. People by and large did, however, and for at least two decades. His wife donated them for dispaly as she didn't want his legacy to be forgotten.
I'm not sure what the legacy is. As odd as it may seem, what I most recall about the times I ran into him, generaly in grocery stores and the like, is how out of time and style the dresses were. That may sound odd, but that was my reaction. It wasn't that he was wearing a dress, but rather that they were not good looking dresses. More like the dresses worn by elderly women who dance in polka groups, which also strike me as not very good looking.
Anyhow, I don't know quite what to make of putting a person's clothes on display. Is this really honoring him? I suspect, no matter how society may have altered or claimed to have altered its views on this, it was probably an ordeal for him during his life. It just seems a strange act to me. And an average person's clothes don't really make for art or history. What they do give, in some context, is a chance for people to virtue signal, however, which isn't really a meaningful thing in and of itself.
Blurred Lines
Speaking of dress and undress, Emily Ratajkowski claims Robin Thicke grabbed her bare boobs during the filiming of the video for "Blurred Lines". The headlines climed this was a "sexual assault".
I'm sorry, but somehow the "Me Too" dog just doesn't hunt here. The entire song is about improper sexual conduct, and in one of the two versions of it that was committed to video, Ratajkowski walks around with some other model topless apparently. If the entire thing is about immoral and illicit sexual attraction, do you really expect Thicke to treat you like a something other than you were portraying.
That's really dense.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Dimly connected to this post, the other day I watched the 1953 classic Gentlemen Prefer Bonds.
Really.
Now, musicals aren't my cup of tea and even though I have a pretty good knowledge of old movies, I have a pretty good knowledge of certain types of old movies, and not this type. I'm not really a Marylin Monroe fan and her image grew so large, like Jmes Dean's, I"m inclined to ignore it really.
Well, this movie caught me off guard.
Frankly, it started off being just as vapid as I expected it to be and I nearly turned it off, but as it went on I found it amusing.
And then shocking.
This is one of the most cynical movies I've ever seen. I'm stunned that it was a hit in 1953.
Where the film really comes together is near the end, when Monroe's character explains to the father of her fiance that she doesn't intend to marry him for his mother, but rather, speaking to her future father-in-law "I'm marrying him for your money". She goes on to ask him if it isn't true that men want a beutiful woman for a bride, which he confirms. She goes on to say that for a woman, "money is like that".
This is just after the legendary scene in which Monroe sings "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has been sung. And if you see the entire scene, it's shockingly cynical.
I don't believe that everyone shares the sentiments of this film by quite some measure, but there's more than a little to it.
Straight Lines
If you wish to be perfect,go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
She auctioned the medal and donated the money. The medal was bought by a Polish chain store, which gave the medal back to her.
Everyone did the right thing.
Maybe that's why there's been so little news about it.
Lawyer jokes.
I'm really tired of it
This applies to lawyer jokes.
Like most lawyers, I don't get upset at lawyer jokes in general, although the late Gerald Mason, at one time the president of the State Bar, was so upset about how they impacted the image of lawyers that he had a campaign urging lawyers not to repeat them.
Mason was an earnest man. I never met him personally, but those who did generally liked him, but he was very earnest. From the far western part of the state, he was a sincere and observant Mormon who worried about the addiction rates displayed amongst his fellow lawyers. For that reason, he hosted the state's only dry State Bar Association Annual Meeting, at least before the Cyber variants brought in during COVID 19, which I’m guessing aren't completely dry. Anyhow, Mason coined the phrase "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" as he was proud to be a Wyoming lawyer.
That was before the Uniform Bar Exam, however, which caused the shipping of legal work out of the state to Colorado.
Anyhow, Mason hated legal jokes and didn't want us to tell them. We ignored that and his other suggestions, although for quite some time the state did use the "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" moniker.
Anyhow, recently I've had more than one occasion in which nervous litigants have been with me and the suggestion has been made, when there's an obvious accident or something, "you should give them your card, hah, hah".
I don't like it.
I don't like it as I'm not an ambulance chaser, and I'm not a plaintiff's lawyer, or at least I never thought I was. A partner of mine recently pointed out to me that "we're trial lawyers" which, even though I've been a trial lawyer, and I am, for over 30 years, never dawned on me.
Clearly, I'm an idiot.
I guess in my mind I've always made the sharp distinction between lawyers who defend cases and those who prosecute them, in civil court, even though I've prosecuted some myself. Now I don't have that luxury.
And I don't have it for more than one reason I'll not go into here. So I'm finding myself, I suppose, like a Confederate veteran in 1870, after the war is over, when somebody says "you fought for slavery", and you realize, well, you did.
Like those guys whom that dawned on, I'll probably not be going to the United Confederate Veterans Association meeting like the guys who always knew that they were fighting for slavery, or those who can still pretend they were fighting for Virginia.
I still don't like being reminded, however.
Proud
My pride in general has been taking a bruising recently as well, for a variety of reasons, some of which would make other people proud. I'm kind of like that host of Vietnam veterans in the late 1960s and early 1970s who hurled their medals at the White House or Pentagon.
It's a strange feeling. And I don't even have Country Joe and the Fish to provide an anthem.
Opinion Today: Monica Lewinsky wants to talk about cancel culture
So reads a headline in my New York Times newsfeed.
I can't really see how being willing to . . . um. . Bill Clinton elevates a person to the level of social critic. Lewinsky is entitled to go on and live her life, but in order to really be a public figure after, well you know, and other things, she'd really have to break away from that entirely to be interesting or relevant. Frankly, if you come up in the news due to a scandal like this, and you have some things on your ledger that are at least a little icky otherwise, you really have to probably make a big leap in order to merit being taken seriously on the public stage, or even be on the public stage.
Forgetting old knowledge
Given that, this has been a frustrating thing to watch for me.
I don’t envy the Border Patrol their job at all. It’s a tough job that lines a person up for constant criticism. Right now, just to be a policeman anywhere in the US is to subject yourself to a fair amount of daily criticism even if you police in a region that has nothing to do with any of the events of the past couple of years, but the Border Patrol really gets the heat simply for doing its job.
Within the past couple of days the President has expressed a conclusion of guilt on the Border Patrolmen who were depicted on horseback and the Vice President claimed it reminded her of the days of slavery. Those views are frankly not consistent with what we claim to be our view about guilt or innocence of a person as we’re convicting the Border Patrolmen without really knowing what they were doing, unless you do know what they were doing, in which case they are not guilty of anything.
The Border Patrolmen who were depicted were using split reins. I use spit reins. Split reins are really something that working stockmen use, and I was surprised to see them use them, as even a lot of people who ride “western” don’t use split reins as they don’t’ know how to use them. Riders who use split reins “neck reign”, rather than direct rein. FWIW, cavalrymen, back in the day, were taught to direct rein. I know how to do both, but I’ll neck reign by default, as that’s where I started off.
Riders who neck rein only use one had to rein, keeping the other free. That in fact is what the border patrolman in question was doing. If you look at the photos carefully you’ll see that in the one dramatic photo he has his hand way out, and he’s practically out of the saddle in order to grab a person by the shirt. He’s not whipping anyone.
Indeed, when you use split reins as a crop, the only thing you are getting the attention of is the horse. Most ranch horses, in reality, are really rough stock, not anything like the horses that people in towns ride (I used to laugh when my son would say that he was a “poor rider”, as he was riding horses that would have been regarded as widow makers to most people in town). Every now and then a rider of a ranch type horses will whack the rear end of the horse with the long reins. You don’t have enough rein to actually inflict pain, but it gets their attention.
The reins aren’t long enough to hit anyone on the ground either. Keep in mind that they’re attached to a bit of some sort, and the horse that uses them reins from the touch of the rein on the neck. If you have that much rein, you are going into some big weird curve and aren’t going to do what you meant to do, assuming the horse doesn’t revolt and throw you off. Indeed, the thing with split reins is that the rider needs to know how long or short they need to be, as if they’re too short the horse will protest, and if they’re too long, he won’t stop. Every horse is a little different on this.
Horses are a long domesticated animal, and it's actually very difficult to get one to run into or over a person. There are accounts of policemen charging crowds, for example, in which the horses leap over the people who have fallen as they generally won’t mow down a person. I’ve seen men turn horses that were bucking or upset lots of times simply by stepping out in front of them and putting out their arms. I personally have been bucked off horses and had a horse roll on me when it fell, but I’ve had one try to mow me over, and I’ve been around a lot of horses. I can’t say the same, for example, about cattle, which have tried to stomp me flat and which actually have picked me up with their heads and thrown me around. Horses can be dangerous, bud the real danger is getting thrown or kicked, not run down.
All of this is actually what makes horses good for crowd control. A trained horse won’t kick a person, and they won’t run over them. But they are very large and look larger if you are on the ground. As late as the Bush War in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe of the 80s, it was demonstrated that even armed men pretty much miss hitting horses when they’re running at you as it's scary.
All the Border Patrolmen were doing, in my observation, was trying to keep the border from being illegally crossed. That’s their job. Depriving them of horses will make it that much harder to do that job, which is pretty hard to do as it is, and it’ll deprive them of a patrolling asset that they need (and which the border customs agents, who also once used horses, no longer have as an asset, since the 80s I think).
Anyway, I’m pretty disgusted by the way the officers are being treated. They’re being compared to slave masters for simply trying to keep our border from being any more porous than it already is.
Trump is suing Twitter to force Twitter to restore is account.
It's a private company. They don't have to restore anyone's account.
Trump is suing Congress over subpoenas
The January 6 commission has been issuing subpoenas on figures associated with Trump. Trump is suing to stop it. It's almost as if that material might be embarrassing or something.
We're all for individual rights except when we aren't.
A Cheyenne attorney and former congressional candidate has declared YouTube’s ban of anti-vaccination content from its platform to be illegal censorship and in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
YouTube isn't the government, and we always hear around here that we're for individual rights.
We also hear that we're for property rights, and we're a right to work state. A local politician appeared recently to support nurses who stand to be canned for not getting vaccinations, even though it's their employer's right to require them to do so.
And the legislature is going into session in order to take on a Federal mandate, in the name of individual rights, that would require employers with more than 100 employees to require those employees to be vaccinated.
All this is really confusing if we take any of this rights stuff serious and if we have also sworn an oath, as legislators (and lawyers) have to the Constitution. The supremacy clause is well established, and we seemingly have no problem with the Federal Government requiring hard hats and steel toed boots of some workers. We also have no problem with vaccination requirements for school attendance, unless its for COVID 19, then we do. We don't have a problem with employers telling employees how to dress. There's no consistency here.
There is opportunism, however. I'm sure some of the legislators going back to Cheyenne are completely sincere in their beliefs, but in this odd election season, there being no break from the past election, you have to wonder.
Justin Trudeau sorry for skipping first National Truth and Reconciliation Day
As The Guardian notes:
Canadian prime minister took family holiday on day to underscore bitter legacy of Indigenous residential schools – ‘I regret it’
It's hard to imagine how politicians get in this situation, but they continually do. Somebody will have a strict mask order, and then go dine out. The Canadian PM virtues signals all the time, and then on the first Reconciliation Day event he goes on vacation.
Of course, the reality of it is that really reconciling isn't easy to do. It's one thing to apologize for the sins of your ancestors, but that doesn't really accomplish anything. Both Trudeau and I hail (him more than me) from people who decamped from Normandy in the 17th Century and went to New France, where their mere presence helped displace the native population, although in the French example, much less than the English example, as the French genuinely saw the natives as fellow souls to be saved, whereas the English, corrupted by the legacy of King Henry the Vandal and Queen Elizabeth I saw things in a more mercenary manner.
Be that as it may, neither Justin or I can really apologize to anyone impacted at the time or for anyone impacted at the time. They're all gone. This would mean, of course, that you have to look out at the people in the real world today, and in regard to indigenous populations, there's plenty to be done.
For the most part, however, people aren't going to do it. It's easier to lament the sins of those long gone and the plight of those long departed, than to look around and do something about anything now.
And then. .
One guy who definitely isn't going to be apologizing for anything is Donald Trump. He's not a truth and reconciliation kind of guy. Indeed, he's still boosting the election was stolen line, and its pretty clear that he's out for revenge against anyone who didn't back him whom he thinks should have.
One of the guys that Trump apparently had a bit of an axe to grind about was the late Gen. Colin Powell. Powell was the child of Jamaican immigrants and was born in Harlem. He's a huge success story, which you have to accord even if you don't agree with every policy he supported when he was Secretary of State. In response to the news of his death, Trump stated:
Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO, if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!
Okay, I'm not one of those people who take the line that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but Trump can't help but be a jerk. The mistake that Trump apparently is referring to Powell's endorsement of the "weapons of mass destruction" line at the time of the second war with Iraq.
Powell later apologized for being in error on that. Frankly, in my view, that line never justified the war in the first place, as "weapons of mass destruction" principally meant chemical weapons which are darned near worthless in the real world, as well as missiles, which lots of nations have. But Powell's view stemmed from intelligence reports which were inaccurate, as he later acknowledged, and you can't fault a guy for believing erroneous stuff your own intelligence sources tell you.
And he was certainly a remarkable person. He was the son of immigrants who rose up to be one of the most important figures in the country. And like so many immigrant's children, he served the country in time of war whereas, like so many of the native born, our last couple of leaders can't say the same.
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