The SIG M17/M18 Controversy.

A Soldier fires an M17 handgun at targets during the Victory Week Pistol Competition, or Regional Combat Pistol Championship, June 4. The top 10% of firers at the event earned a bronze Excellence in Competition marksmanship badge. (Photo Credit: Nathan Clinebelle)

The M17 and M18 pistols, manufactured by SIG, which are versions of their P320 handgun, are really taking the heat.

They have been for awhile, but this local incident really ramped things up:

Air Force Division Grounds M18 Handguns After Airman Dies On Wyoming Base

Let's first say, anyway you look at this, this is a terrible tragedy (but see below).

But is anything really wrong with the pistol.  SIG says there isn't.

Sig Sauer pushes back on criticisms over safety of M17 and M18 pistols

Let's start with something first.  

SIG, or expanded Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, is one of the premier firearms manufacturers in the world.  In this context its party of a trade union with the German firm of J. P. Sauer und Sohn GmbH in order to work around Swiss laws that would largely prohibit the export of military weapons.  SIG did export some prior to the industrial union, with the excellent Stg 57 in export variants, being a prime example, but in recent years SIG has seriously moved into the export arms market in a way that it had not before, following the well blazed trail of Mauser and Fabrique Nationale, both of which at one time occupied the stage of supplier of small arms to the world at different points.

The US was never part of that market until Robert Strange McNamara vandalized Springfield Armory and foisted the AR15 upon the military against its will.  That had the impact of making the US a commercial small arms purchaser in a way that it had not been since the American Revolution, and we've paid for it every since.  It's completely true that the US had purchased commercial arms prior to that, with it notably going to commercial sidearms after Colt's perfection of cap and ball revolvers, and it interestingly relied upon commercial firms for machineguns, but when Springfield Armory was around, it always had an excellent in house backup.  After that, the US became entirely reliant upon civilian suppliers.

A lesson there, interestingly enough, is that to some degree being a commercial supplier of small arms to the US military has been historically a really bad deal for commercial firms.  Being the manufacturer of the M1917 rifle during World War One nearly killed Remington right after the war, and relying on sales of AR15 models to the service has actually been sort of a bad economic bet for Colt.  The lesson probably is that really relying on military sales to the US is risky.

The old model that Colt used, which was basically "here's what we have, it's really good, buy if you want it" is probably the best one.

Advertisement for Colt double action revolver.

And that's particularly the case as there hasn't been a single US handgun the US military has purchased since the M1873 was replaced by the M1892 which hasn't drawn criticism.

The M1892 is a nice double action revolver, but its .38 cartridge, ideal for police use, was anemic for combat, something that the Philippine Insurrection rapidly demonstrated.  M1873s were brought back into service (more on that in a minute) and .45 Colt New Army's were purchased as M1982s were pulled.  That was a stopgap measure until the Army could adopt an "automatic" pistol, which it did after leisurely testing in the form of the M1911.

The M1911 is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time, so its surprising that at first there were plenty of Army officers who hated it.  They regarded it outright dangers as it was too easy to fire and it was found that excited cavalrymen would accidentally shoot their horses in the head during charges.  Criticism of its short trigger pull lead to a new version of the pistol, the M1911A1, coming out during hit 1920s, simply to make it a bit harder to shoot, but as late as World War Two old cavalrymen were clinging to double action revolvers, which had no safeties at all, but which featured a long heavy trigger pull.

By that time the M1911 was beloved and for good reason.

The M1911 took the services all the way into the late 80s.  In 1985, the Baretta M9 was chosen to replace it, when it really didn't need to be replaced.  Indeed, the Army had to be forced to make a decision, which it was resisting, by Congress threatening to turn the project over to the Air Force, which had been responsible for the adoption of the AR 15.  That caught Colt flat footed as even t hough they'd been the supplier of most military handguns to the military for over a century, they weren't really expecting the Army to move forward with the entire project.

There were three reasons in reality to find a new handgun.  One was that no new M1911s had been purchased since the Second World War, so they were all getting internally rebuilt.  New pistols needed to be ordered. The second one was tha ti was felt that the .45 ACP round was too stout for women, who now were in roles where they needed handguns. That was moronic, as women can shoot any handgun a man can.  The third was that the US was foisting the 5.56 on our NATO allies and by adopting a 9mm pistol, we were throwing htem a bone, as every other NATO member save for NOrway used a 9mm pistol.

Which is something we shoudl have paused to think about right there.

The US, until after World War Two, had never been a supplier of small arms to other nations in any signficiant degree. Even after World War Two we were't a supplier of new arms, but our suprlus arms.  IT wasn't until after teh Vietnam War that this changed.  The big suppliers of military arms to the Western World were Germany and Belgium.  The Browning designed Belgian handgun, the High Power, was to some degree the handgun of the free world.  It had a proven track record.

The Baretta was a reengineerd P-38.  The P-38, like the High Power, and the M1911, is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time.  Given that, the M9 is a very good handgun.

US troops at first hated it.

Marines with M9s.

They hated it because they didn't want it, and soon attention was focused on breakages in the slides of the early Italian manufactured pistols.  Baretta stated there was nothing wrong with the gun, and in fact, there wasn't.

It never really fully replaced the M1911, as if you really need a pistol, the M1911 wins hands down every time.  But as 9mms go, it was a really good one.

Well, then came the Glock.

Glocks are frankly nothing special and a lot of real pistol aficionados do not like them.  But they used a striker instead of an external hammer.  There are some advantages to that, but for the most part, the advantages are more theoretical than real.  Frankly, anyone carrying a striker pistol would be just as well off with a hammer fired one and never notice the difference if they actually had to use it.

Anyhow, the service determined that it needed a striker fired pistol because everyone else was getting one.  Not too surprisingly, some in the service dithered on the project as it wasn't really needed, but them some senior officers who didn't know what the crap they were talking about threatened to directly procure Glocks, which would have been a horrible idea.

Tests were held and the P320 chosen.

Disclaimer here, I have one.

I have one, oddly enough, due to a Ducks Unlimited event.  I didn't go out and look for one.  

Having said that, it shoots extremely nicely.  I can see why people like/liked them.  In a heads up contest between the M9 and the M17/18, I think the SIG wins every time.

And now we have this issue.

Is it one?

I don't really know.  I hope that its figured out.  SIG, which also won the Army contest for new rifle (M7) and machine gun (M250), is taking piles of ill informed heat right now.

Let's take a look at the problem, some potential causes, and some fixes.

First, let's start with this.

Is there really a problem?

Sounds fantastical to even ask that, but the chatter about the SIG fits into a long US service tradition of claiming that the prior firearm was perfect and the new one plagued with flaws.  Sometimes its even true, or perhaps a little true. Sometimes, it's bunk.

The history of Army handguns certain fits that, however.  The Army was really long in replacing the M1873 and soldiers came to immediately hate its replacement. Was the M1892 bad?  Well, not as a design, it was far more advanced than the M1873, but the cartridge really was a bad choice.  The criticism was warranted.

What about the criticism of the M1911, which actually lead to it being redesigned a bit?  Not hardly.  The M1911 was a great pistol from day one and its defects, so to speak, were ones of perception on the part of those who were used to old heavy trigger double actions.

And the M9. Well, I'll admit that I was one of its critics.  But the M9 is a really good handgun.  The frame cracking was a freakish event and not something that proved to be an overall problem.  The eral problem is that its a 9mm, but that doesn't have anything to do with the design itself.

And, if we expand out and look at the history of US rifles we'll find the same thing.  When the M1 Garand was adopted there were some legitimate problems wtih its gas system, which lead to that being rapidly resdesigned.  Still, that didn't keep pleny of critics of faulting the rifle as inferior to the M1903 and soldiers actually were very conscerned that stoppages they experienced in stateside training, which apparently were due to the ammunition being used for a time, meant the rifle was defective.  Combat would rapidly prove that to be false, but it received that criticm at first.

The M14 received criticism for having some supposed problem with its bolt and action, which critics of the rifle will reference even today.  One civilian produced variant supposedly featured reengingeering to address the prblem, whatever it is.  It's difficult to find out hwat hte supposed problem was, and in actual use, ti seems to have been completely unnoticed.  Some M14s, for that matter, featured M1 Garand lock bar rear sights which drives some competitive rifleman absolutely nuts. Anyhow, the rifle didn't have faults, but it received criticism for having them.

The M16 of course, did have real faults, and still does, all of which are attributable to its direct impingment gas system.  However, the Army made the faults worse by suggesting the rifle never needed to be cleaned, wich was absurd, and by using fouling powder in early cartridge production.  AR15 fans and the military seem to have gotten largely over this, but at first the rifle was really hated, and I'll admit that I didn't like it.

The point is that there might not be anything wrong with the M17 at all.  What we could be seeing is an element of operator error.

Or, in some cases, worse:

Airman arrested for death that prompted Air Force-wide safety review of Sig M18

I have a thread on the M18 story, but I've been waiting for this:

Airman arrested for death that prompted Air Force-wide safety review of Sig M18

Something about the entire "it discharged all on its owned from its holster" story sounded like a fable.

I started this post before the news above broke, but I kept expecting something like this.  Frankly, murder or manslaughter wasn't what I was expecting, but some sort of operator error, or I'll confess suicide.  

But here's the deal, once something gets a bit of a bad wrap in American society, particularly litigious American society, it's hard to unring the bell on the story.  

And the story here, dare we say it, involves a lot of service users. . . . 

Now ,why would that be significant?

Well, frankly, because service users are amongst those who are the least likely to be paying attention to what they're doing and screw up.  Being in the Armed Forces or a police department doesn't make you a gun fan.  It doesn't even really make you all that knowledgeable on weapons, quite frankly.

SIG might be right. There might be no problem here at all.

And if there is one, it might be an introduced one.  That is, users messing with their sidearm accidentally or intentionally.  Some police forces actually issue sidearms just to keep their policemen from doing that with firearms they own.

But let's assume there is a problem. What would it be?

The M17 features a really complicated striker design and the pistol was designed not to have a safety. Those two things alone may mean that the design has been somewhat compromised by complication and the addition of a safety it wasn't designed to have.  That might, somehow, be defeated the need for a trigger "command".  It's important to note that if the pistols are firing on their own, they're defeating the safety, but then the safety only prevents the trigger from being pulled.

That is, I'd note, a much less effective safety design than that on the M1911, but we'll get back to that.

Anyhow, the safety isn't going to stop block the striker.  It doesn't work, say, like the safety on a M1903 or G98, which does.  It just keeps the trigger from being accidentally pulled.

Another possibility is that something about the holsters is playing a weird role  It seems unlikely, but its not completely impossible.

If I were a SIG engineer, and I'm not an engineer at all, I'd look at trying to develop a safety that hold the striker, if possible, and it might not be.

Okay, let's assume that it's all just hopeless, there's something wrong with the SIG and it can't be fixed.  I'm not saying that's the case, but what if there is.  Clearly a different handgun is in order.

Some have suggested just going back to the M9, and that's not a bad idea. The problem might be that after decades of use most of the M9s are in rough shape.  I doubt that, but it's possible.  

Well, so what.  Just sort through the ones in the inventory and weed out those in bad shape.  Issue the ones that aren't, and adopt the newest variant of the M9, which is nearly universally regarded as a very fine weapon.

The only reason not to do that is it has a hammer.

M'eh.

The other possibility. . . oh my. . .dare we say it. . . is to bring back the M1911.

Marine Corps MEU-SOC, the M1911 that proceeded the M45.

There's no reason not to, and in fact the Marine Corps did for awhile.  There's nothing the M17/18 and M9 can do that the M1911 doesn't do better.

Pioneer Day. Pie & Beer Day. Public land sales, part 1. The historo-religious motivation for some (but certainly not all) of the backers.

Flag of the putative State of Deseret.

Church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact - religion and politics should not be mingled.

Millard Fillmore

Those who believe that politics and religion do not mix, understand neither.

Albert Einstein

It was 170 years ago that Brigham Young and the first group of Mormon pioneers came to the Salt Lake Valley in search of religious freedom… and, finally, a land of their own in which to practice it.

Mike Lee.

In this thread, we're going to tread, which will be part one of two, where we shouldn't.

Religion and politics.

Well, religion, politics and history.

And in the context of public land.

Eh?

Well, exactly.

Albert Einstein was exactly correct.  Those that believe politics and religion do not mix truly do not understand either.  Indeed, they should mix.  A person who holds a religion should let him inform  his views.  If a person doesn't, they're not very sincere about their religion, or have a weakly developed intellect.  If a person strongly believes that something is wrong, such as abortion, and their religion informs them on that, well, they can't really walk away from that, a la Joe Biden.  By the same token, however, a person should not be foreclosed from advancing their views for other reasons, nor should a person demand that another person except their views solely because of their religious views, unless they clearly put it that way.

The thing a person ought not to do, however, is to advance a position for religious views, while keeping that view hidden.

Particularly if it forms the primary basis for the view.

And we look here first, at the transfer of public lands.  Later on we'll look at the US support of Israel in warfare this past year.

Yesterday was Pioneer Day in Utah, a state holiday.  

Like Wyoming Day here, probably almost nobody gets it off.  The day commemorates the first entry of Brigham Young and his group of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.

That's interesting in that, essentially, it's sort of a species of religious observation.  There are no doubt other such observations in the US, but they're rare.  Wyoming Day commemorates the day that Wyoming became a state.  Utah became a state in 1896, after Wyoming.  Pioneer Day, however, celebrates an event occurring fifty years before that, and which is inseparable from the LDS religious migration.  Unlike the often cited landing of the passengers of the Mayflower, which is often erroneously to be an exclusively a religious migration, nobody in that 1847 team of travelers was not a Mormon.¹ 

There have been two big backers of the concept of Utah grabbing Federal lands in Congress, Celest Maloy and Mike Lee, both of Utah.

Routine analysis of this notes that the grab the land movement is strong in Utah in general. Their state took a recent run at it in court, and their legislature has been in favor of it, even if certain districts in Utah are not. Congressman Jason Chaffetz found out the demographic differences when he went down the same path as Lee a decade ago.

While its changing, over 50% of Utah is a member of the Latter Day Saints.

No surprise there.  

Nor is it a surprise that Lee is, and that Maloy is.

Nor is there something shocking or wrong with that, just as there isn't anything wrong, right wing pundits aside, with the next Mayor of New York City (probably), Zohran Mamdani, being Shi'a Muslim.

But the argument here is that their religious convictions are informing them, and other Utah politicians, to seek to remove Federal ownership from Federal land, as well as the history of their faith.

Which takes us to the Mormon War and the Utah War, with the former name sometimes being used for the latter (indeed, we've done that here in the past).

The actual Mormon War was the period of violence that occurred in Missouri when members of the LDS church were there. 

Which probably requires some background to make sense.

The Latter Day Saints are not a Christian religion, although if you ask them, they'll most certainly maintain that they are.  The fact is, however, they aren't.  The LDS is a polytheistic religion holding that there are many gods and many worlds.  We simply happen to live in a world in which God the Father, as Abrahamic religions worship, is actually a man who became a god after having lived his life in another world.  The Mormons believe that Jesus Christ was the product of a Devine man (God) and a Devine mother and that Jesus Christ is their elder brother, since he was the firstborn in the spirit world.   Perhaps in order for that to make sense to non Mormons its important to note that Mormon's believe that all the souls in our world already exist, and that when a child is born, a preexisting soul is embodied in that person, with the souls memory of his pre birth existence blocked.  Mormons do admit that Christ became God before his birth.  Mormon's also feel that if you live as a Mormon and adhere closely to the tenants of the LDS, you too can become a god, and will have your own world in the afterlife.²

That sort of sums up their beliefs today, sort of, although no doubt very unfairly.

What's that have to do with public lands?

Bear with us.

Joseph Smith started out is religious career in the Second Great Awakening as a fairly conventional protestant evangelist.  Indeed, his evangelical career started after the dates for the events he claimed made him a profit, which raise the question of why he was a regular protestant at first and didn't mention his later claims at the time.  By the early 1830s, however, he'd relocated to Ohio along with his early adherents and was espousing a new set of beliefs, some of which we've summarized above, but which also claimed that Native Americans were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel and that giant battles featuring armored men and elephants had taken place in North America.  He also had Jesus Christ visiting the continent, and blacks as descendants of a union between Cain and an ape. Most controversially, however, his new religion strongly advocated polygamy.

Sexual libertine behavior, which Smith personally displayed, was not unknown at the time, and there were "free love" movements even then, although they were not linked with religion.³  Smith, whose own sexual behavior exceeded the bounds of what he espoused for his followers, was unique in doing so.  It was all too much for the residents of Ohio, and it proved to be too much for the residents of Missouri, to which he relocated with adherents in 1838.

Violence ensued and Smith himself lost his life over the matter of sex, when breakaway members of the LDS accused him of advocating polygamy in order to dally with women, a fairly fair charge.  Smith reacted with destruction of a press that made accusations against him.  He ended up in jail, and a riot of upset locals ultimately resulted in storming the jail.  He was shot through a jail door he was attempting to block.

The LDS suffered a schism right at the time, with one branch of it evolving rapidly back into a conventional protestant church. The main branch, however, took off for the West and started settling in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847, at which time the region was in Mexico.  The first really largescale American settlement of that type (Spanish settlements up into the West dated back to the 1600s and were well established, but not in what is now upper Utah), they became a major presence right away.

The Great Salt Lake Valley is a long ways from Missouri, and it was even a greater distance if you had to walk or travel by horse, but the entire oddity of Mormon beliefs remained bothersome to most Americans, particularly Second and Third Great Awakening Americans for whom even Catholics were way too much.  And it wasn't just Americans.  John Stuart Mill in his great book On Liberty briefly pondered the practically of the British landing troops in Texas in order that they could march to Utah and stamp out the religion.

On Liberty came out in 1859, and was no doubt written prior to that. While Mill concluded that such an expedition was impractical, by 1857 the United States and the Mormons were actually at war.  The war ended in 1858 with concessions on the part of the LDS combatants, but like a lot of people who've lost a war (consider the American South) a sort of lost cause element to it remains, even though the Mormons did not seek to separate from the US.  They did seek, however, autonomy.

Early on the LDS hoped for a huge state in the southwest, which they called Deseret.

Utah Territory in blue, State of Deseret dashed lines  By derivative work: Mangoman88 (talk)Blank_US_Map.svg: User:TheshibbolethWpdms deseret utah territory legend.png: User:Tsujigiri - Blank_US_Map.svgWpdms deseret utah territory legend.pngFile:1855 Colton Map of Utah and New Mexico (first edition, first state) - Geographicus - UtahNewMexico-colton-1855.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16103609

The US didn't see eye to eye on that.  Be that as it may, they heavily settled throughout the region of what was imagined to be Deseret and are strongly represented throughout it today.  And the name "Deseret" lives on, preserving its memory.

Early on, Mormon pioneers often viewed land communally.  The LDS church today owns 1.7 million acres of land, operates some of the largest agricultural businesses in the US.  It owns major blocks of land throughout the US, including in Wyoming and Nebraska.  The fact that it a gigantic landowner is often missed.  It's reasons to purchase land are varied, and it makes no effort to hide that it does this.  Part of this is done for a sort of agrarian charitable reason, but there are other reasons as well.

Mormons tend to have large families, although this is not always the case by any means.  The extent to which their families are abnormally large, moreover, is exaggerated as in the American WASP culture any number of offspring over two is regarded as freakishly large.  I am, of course, from a Catholic family and got this all the time growing up, even though I'm an only child.

Having said that, the more traditionalist a Catholic family is, the more children there tends to be in it.

The reason differs considerably however.  Catholics would point toward the marriage vow itself and how it notes that it includes the question “Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?”  I've heard one Catholic cleric, Fr. Hugh Barbour, note the purpose of the marriage is to bring up children willingly for the worship of God.  

Catholics, like most Christians, believe that human beings cooperate in the creation of souls through the marital act.  Mormons, however, do not believe that.  They believe that there are a finite number of souls and that they exist in already, and that the marital act causes those souls to inhabit a body.  One the full number is run through, the end of time occurs.  By having large families, in their view, they are assisting in bringing that about.

Which brings us back to Mike Lee.

Not all Mormons are traditionalist by any means.  The Mormon church itself has been fluid over the years in regard to its beliefs and has abandoned polygamy and certain other tenants which brought them disrepute in American society.  There remains, however, a conservative element that is sympathetic to the original views and while it embarrasses the larger LDS church, it's usually not to hard to find examples.  Polygamy, for instance, persisted in being widely accepted in Mormon communities for well after its official abandonment, and of course, it continues on in Mormon communities today, even though it is definitely a minority view, and definitely condemned.

But amongst those like Lee, the history of Deseret and deeply held LDS beliefs heavily inform his views.  He was willing to abandon Montana from his land grab, but Montana had never been part of Deseret.  Everywhere else he held on.

Grabbing the land from the Federal government would sort of reverse a position that early Mormon pioneers had to abandon, and it satiates a fear of the Federal government that remains in some quarters today.  Additionally, the "more land for housing" view makes some sense for those who imagine very large families.  Lee himself was one of seven children to a father was president of BYU, although Mike Lee only had three children himself.

In the background of it all, however, are changing times.

Even now you will hear reports on how fast the LDS faith is growing. But it isn't.  Having had a dramatic late 20th Century and early 21st Century increase, its numbers are now really dropping off and its in decline.  The late 20th Century and very early 21st was sort of the golden age of Mormon expansion, and it altered the culture of the faith a bit.  Outside of the "Jello Belt", that region of the west, and predominantly in southwestern Wyoming, southeastern Idaho, and Utah, where Mormons are a majority or at least very strongly represented in the population, Mormons were a little reluctant to identify too strongly with their faith, lest they run into a prejudiced reaction.  At least two Mormon lawyers I knew would make excuses for their Mormonism, usually on the basis of "not being a Mormon" and "marrying into the faith", even though they were really in the LDS and at least one of them was born into it.  When I was a kid, Mormon kids routinely identified themselves as "Jack Mormons", i.e.., those who only weekly observed their faith, even though they were not.

By the early 21st Century things really began to change, and particularly did after Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee for the President.  Mormons had sort of arrived and come out of the shadows.

It didn't really last long, however, as a variety of forces began to work against it.  One was that the industrial nature of Mormons had made Utah into a really attractive place to live. Utah's towns and cities are beautiful and well kept, something that is frankly often not the case for a lot of the West.  Compared to Salt Lake, Denver is a dump.  Towns like Morgan Utah make small Wyoming towns look pathetic.

What that means, however, is that Utah has attracted a lot of non Mormons and Salt Lake shows it in particular. Salt Lake has the temple, to be sure, but it also has a young non Mormon community, some of which outright flaunt their non Mormon status.  Hence the title of this entry.  July 24 is Pioneer Day, but it's also Pie & Beer Day in which hipsters celebrate with, well, pie and beer.  It's become sort of a big deal.

And as Mormons have moved into the mainstream, the mainstream has sort of pushed back.  Regular Mormon families are moving more towards the conventional American midstream in terms of belief, than the other way around.

What this means for it long term cannot yet be known, but Mormon birthrates are also dropping off dramatically.

When things start changing, the reaction often is to grasp back towards the past to try to drag it into the future.  In the West, the Ghost Dance provides a spectacular late 19th Century example of that.  What Lee and Maloy are doing does as well.  It's probably not so much part of a deliberate plan as an instinct.

It's an instinct that a lot of Mormons in Utah and elsewhere outright reject, which shows that its always dangerous to assume that any one group can be really narrowly defined. And we're not saying that this is an overall Mormon world view on the topic.  We're only noting what we think we're seeing in Lee, Maloy, and Utah's elected government.

And we'd note this is probably a fading, if presently strong, effort.

One of the Salt Lake newspapers has started a series on this, noting basically what I just did (I actually started this tread prior to the paper).  This doesn't cover it all, however.  It'd explain none of what we see in Wyoming backers like Harriet Hageman.  We'll look at that next.

Footnotes.

1.   Most of the passengers on the Mayflower were not Puritans.

2.  There's a lot more to the LDS faith than this, including that the Book of Mormon is "another testament", but I'm not going to go into it here as I only hope to touch on what's relevant to the topic.  In shorty, this isn't a discussion on Mormonism itself.

3.  Such movements must have been extraordinarily risky for secular women, but they were oddly common, and not just in the US.  There were a variety of them, and it was a feature such varied movements pre Stalinist Communism and Russian Orthodox Khlysts.  

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 70th Edition. Inside Wyoming Political Baseball

Gray and Hageman play political checkers.

Credible rumors have it that Harriet Hageman is going to run for Governor in 2026 and Chuck Gray for Congress.  A deal, it's rumored, has been worked out between them and their minions.

Hmmm. . . 

Well, it makes some sense.  Hageman ran for Governor before and lost, in part because the far right split between Hageman and Carpetbagger Mega Donor Foster Friese, who introduced the Dukes of Hazard style politics into the state, complete with freezing Daisy Dukes, unsuccessfully.  Now with the far right ascendant, Hageman can figure, with good reason, that she can achieve the Governor's office and eclipse her late father in Wyoming politics.  

And Gray, for his part, has no real connection with Wyoming whatsoever.  It'd make lots of sense that he'd prefer to relocate to Washington D.C. and plot his next move.  That move probably was a run at the Governor's mansion but there's enough uncertainty in that for him to hesitate if something else was available, and if this is correct, there is. That's place him at the eye of the populist hurricane, where he'd probably rather be, over being in the office he's currently in, which deals with a lot of very important, but fairly boring, stuff.

Of course, politics is fickle.  By 2026, if Trump is still in office, the public may be really mad over a major tariff caused recession, or perhaps whatever Putin has on Trump, if anything, is finally revealed as Putin and his bodyguard of dispossessed North Korean flunkies go down in flames in the Kremlin.  Or maybe age or dementia will have caught up with Trump and J. D. Vance will be in office such that real bonafide major social changes will have come into play such that comfortable right wing and pseudo right wing Wyomingites in Wyoming now a-bed shall come to hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks for a variety of reasons, including that certain conduct they hold themselves blameless for shall be anathematized.

More probably, a growing current rumble that out of state populists now running the show in Wyoming politics are out of touch with real Wyomingite's views on public land may spark a sagebrush level revolt and a legislature shift.  This has happened twice before in Wyoming's politics, once in the 1890s and once in the 1990s, in the first instance due to an attempt by the out of state megawealthy to drive out local small ranching and in the second time due to an effort, following the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1980s, to turn ownership of wildlife over to agricultural interests.  In the first instance the Democrats actually took control of the legislature and Governor's office, albeit only briefly, and Republicans who survived that change their tunes.  In the second instance there was a huge backlash against the GOP which very much hurt it, including arguably the career of Congressman Hageman's father.  Similar actions and impacts have been going on for the past several years in Utah.

What will occur, of course, is yet to be seen.  The ability of human beings to predict the future is notoriously bad, in politics as in everything else.  Just a few years ago the Republican Party was regarded as headed into inevitable oblivion and nobody could have seen the developments that rescued, and changed it.  Two years is a long time.

Nickel and Diming

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus puts its cards on the table in the form of its "five and dime" plan for the 2025 legislature, and unfortunate plan name as around here, an expense related slur is to "nickel and dime (something) to death.

Indeed, the agenda, which is frankly more modest than I would have expected for a group that's spent years calling everyone the "uniparty" and which has threatened to ride in like cossacks, burn villages, and save everyone's cats, doesn't seek to do all that much in context.

It's almost like now that they have to govern, they're reticent to try to much.

Thier agenda for the 2025 legislature is below:

ELECTION INTEGRITY: Require Proof of WY Residency & US Citizenship When Registering to Vote

- WHAT: Create clear statutory authority for the Wyoming Secretary of State to promulgate rules requiring voters to prove WY residency and to ensure that non-citizens cannot register to vote in WY.

- WHY: No requirement exists for voters to prove their WY residency or US citizenship status. This simple fix will better secure our elections and bolster confidence in our election system.

Not too surprisingly, this is sort of horseshit.  You have to verify your address, already, every time you vote. We've been doing it for years.  Now we have to present a photo ID as well.  

Oh, I'll do it.  I'll present piles of stuff showing that I'm an actual Wyomingites and didn't move in from somewhere as a Freedom Caucuser.

The real threat here is that the rules our Secretary of State (from California) comes up with are so onerous that it discourages voting.  The irony is that the "Wyoming" Freedom Caucus has, at least up until this year, pretty much been "I moved here form somewhere else and now nothing about Wyoming but I watched Gunsmoke on Me TV Caucus".  Some of  them might have a little bit of trouble proving residence.

IMMIGRATION ACCOUNTABILITY: Invalidate Driver Licenses Issued to Illegals by Other Jurisdictions

- WHAT: Invalidate driver licenses issued to illegal aliens present in WY.

- WHY: An estimated 9 million + illegal aliens have entered the US since 2021. Nineteen states and D.C. issue licenses to illegal immigrants– Wyoming does not. This simple bill will help WY crack down on illegal immigration and to ensure consistency in our statutes and rules.

Bill previously written (SF0120, 2024)

Wyoming has no legal authority to invalidate another state's driver's licenses, and the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution makes that illegal. 

People who have taken an oath to the Constitution, by the way, like the legislators, can't back this without violating their oath.

STOPPING THE WOKE AGENDA AT UW: Prohibiting D.E.I. in Higher Education

- WHAT: Prohibit the University of WY and Wyoming’s Community Colleges from engaging in discriminatory hiring or continuing education requirements that place moral, historical, or other blame on a person or group of people on the basis of immutable characteristics.

- WHY: It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of any immutable characteristic. As the Equality State, WY should be proud to codify additional protections against discrimination. With continually declining enrollment rates at UW, dumping “woke” DEI programming will attract the free thinking cowboys and cowgirls we want attending our university.

There isn't a "woke" agenda at UW.  That's insulting, and its not true.

For some reason, Freedom Caucusers really like to take shots at education.  The rise of home schooling in this same period is notable. Wyoming has excellent public schools that another one of these agenda items would wreck, but there's an obvious flat out distrust of education.

Indeed, the "woke" college thing has become a real populist whipping boy.  Most UW students are there as they're local or taking advantage of a good school that has a reasonable tuition.  The school is hardly "woke".

At some point, quite frankly, it will be worth asking members of the WFC what their education actually is.  I'd be interested in hearing it.  Anyone who is highly educated will encounter somebody at some point who just doesn't trust education.  If you become educated you'll learn, for example, that the Earth is billions of years old, that we evolved from other prior primates, and that none of this is a threat to a rational faith.  For some, that's threatening in the extreme.

PROTECTING OUR CORE INDUSTRIES: Ban woke investment strategies for the State of Wyoming’s trust fund.

- WHAT:: Prohibit the State of Wyoming from investing in funds that prioritize “environmental, social, or governance” standards over funds promising the highest financial rate of return.

- WHY: Wyoming should not invest tax dollars with entities who do not seek the highest rate of return and who are out to destroy and eliminate our core industries.

Bill previously written (SF0172, 2023)

Investing in the "highest rate of return" means you will invest in things that aren't necessary in line with our core industries, some of which are a bad economic bet right now.

The "environmental" aspect of this relates to something set out immediately above.  Lots of industries, with staffs of educated men and women, are concerned about environmental matters including global warming.  The WFC tends to believe that Wyoming's economy is and always will be based on coal, and therefore climate change is a big fib.

CUTTING TAXES: Real Property Tax Relief

- WHAT: Provide a 25% property tax cut to residential property owners with a backfill to local governments.

- WHY: The people of WY have been crushed by years of skyrocketing property taxes.

Bill previously written (SF0054, 2024)

Populism in Wyoming is heavily populated by out of staters who moved in here, causing property taxes to rise.  Now they're going to cut what they caused, with no way to pay for anything. 

Property taxes fund schools and local government.  There's real reason to believe that WFC members don't care that much about schools, which teach nasty stuff like evolution, and given that there are so many members of the WFC that moved in from somewhere else, some have a "I got mine" view.

This bill, if it passes, would gut schools and demolish local improvements and services.

A better strategy would be to impose a tax on the value of the last house you sold, no matter where you sold it, and leave the current property taxes alone.  So if you sold your house in California for $1M and moved here, perhaps we ought to get $250,000 of that here, in part just for putting up with your presence.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 69th Edition. TDS, Vance in the wings. Our geriatric oligarchy. Immigration spats. Banning puberty blockers. Mjuk flicka and the Mantilla Girls.

Labels: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, mehr Mensch sein, National Conservatism, Old Age, Populism, The rich and the poor, The roles of men and women, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Zeitgeist

Thursday, December 18, 1890. No booze for the faculty.

And, according to the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, on December 18, 1890, the trustees passed a resolution that required all faculty to abstain from alcohol to get or keep their jobs.

Reconsidering Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

This isn't the first time this has been done.  Earlier it was done as the criteria for receiving the medal changed and many pre World War One medals were downgraded.

to;

 

July 10, 1890.

Wednesday, April 28, 1899. Discussions in the Philippines.

The US demanded the unconditional surrender of the Philippine government, which was refused.

Discussions were being had, however.

Last prior edition:

Tuesday, April 27, 1899. The Battle of Calumpit

1890s, 1899, Iowa National Guard, Kansas National Guard, National Guard, Nebraska National Guard, Philadelphia, Philippine Insurrection, Philippines, Spanish American War, Utah National Guard, Vladivostok Russia

Observations on a murder.

Earlier this week Robert Maher Jr., age 14, was murdered by Dominique Antonio Richard Harris, born in 2008, and Jarreth Joseflee Sabastian Plunkett, born in 2009.  The killing seems to have been planned for several days prior to the assault in the Eastridge Mall that lead to Maher's death.  Plunkett did the actual killing, with Harris slamming Maher to the ground beforehand.  

The technical origin of the fight was that Maher had called Plunkett and Harris "freaks" during Spring Break (something that didn't exist when I was in school) and that enraged the two of them.  He called them that has they went into a porta potty at a local park together, which is odd, but insulting them wasn't very smart.  This raises the specter of the Matthew Shepherd killing, which had elements which never really seemed to be accurately reported.  More likely, however, in the exaggerated juvenile maleness of the rootless and (I'll bet) fatherless mid teenage boy, that was an implied insult that had to be addressed.

Maher never seems to have gotten in a single punch in the assault.  The two assailants, who had stolen their weapons along with Red Bulls and candy that day, acted in such a fashion that, whether Harris intended it or not, gave Plunkett the opportunity to viciously knife him.

There's no reason here, we'd note, to use the classic "alleged" assault language. The two teenage boys killed the third. They're going to be tried as adults. They ought o be put away, forever.

But what else does this event tell us?

Casper's a rough town.

One thing that I saw soon after the murder was a comment by somebody on Facebook noting how they have moved from New Mexico, where their son had been knifed in a fight, to Casper under the belief that this was a quite safe town.

In another context, we've already spoken about immigrants into the state being delusional about it, and this is one such instance. Casper has never been a nice town.

Casper was founded in 1887, and it was violent from day one to some degree.  It was, however, originally a rial stop in cattle company, although it always had its eye on oil.  It was the jumping off spot for the invaders in the Johnson County War, which at least gives it a bit of a footnote in that violent event.  Casper's first murder occured on Saturday, September 20, 1890, when bartender John Conway shot and killed unarmed A. J. Tidwell, an FL Cattle Company cowboy in Lou Polk's dance house, following a round of fisticuffs.  The blood has been flowing ever since.

Casper really took a turn towards the wild side of life starting in World War One.  1917, as we've addressed here before, is when the Great War Oil boom really took off, and with it came a lot of men and a lot of vice. One of the things that created was Casper's infamous Sandbar district, in which prostitution was carried out openly and prohibition flaunted.  Repeated efforts to close it down utterly failed, until finally a 1970s vintage urban renewal project (yikes, the government taking a hand!") destroyed it.

With the booze and the prostitutes came murders (and no doubt disease) but it went on and on.  By and large, however, as odd as it may seem, people just acclimated themselves to it.  You got used to a town having a red-light district, and as there were some legitimate businesses in it, you'd go into it for legitimate reasons.  As a boy, we walked into the Sandbar in the early 70s to go to the War Surplus Store, which nobody seemed to think was a big deal. The America and Rialto movie theaters were just yards from the district, and the district's bars lapped up out of it into downtown Casper, with some of them being places were to walk around, rather than past, if at all possible.

Casper had quasi ethnic gangs when I was young, and at least in the schools that I attended, that was a factor of attending them.  You were careful about it.  It was impossible to get through junior high and high school without having been in a fight.  Most fights were hand to hand, but a teacher was knifed when I was in junior high breaking up a knife fight, so not all of them were.  In high school we all carried pocket knives and none of us were supposed to.  They were for protection.  While I was in high school, one of our classmates, who had been held back more than once, was killed outside a bar in a shooting, the result of a fight he provoked, which resulted in an ethnic riot at the school in which shots were fired.  The father of one of our classmates was killed by our classmate after he turned his molesting attention on her sister, having molested her for years.  Neither of these crimes resulted in prosecution.

The point is, for those who are shocked by the arrival of violence in Casper. . .well, it's been here since 1890.

The abandoned males

I keep waiting to hear the circumstances of the murderers' family lives and have not read any yet.  I'm sure it'll come out as the story advances.  While It's dangerous to speculate, there are reasons to suspect a few things, one being the killers likely had no fathers in the picture.   We're going to hear at some point that they were raised by their mothers, or in irregular homes.  I could of course be wrong, but I'll bet not.

Fatherless males are a major societal problem.  Fatherless males that are raised in an environment of sexual license are an even bigger problem.  Indeed, they're often fatherless for that reason in the first place, and they'll go on to spawn further fatherless children, who grow up in poverty and with little societal direction.  A minority will find that structure in the Old Law, the law before the law, which reaches back to tribalism in the extreme.  It's in the DNA.

The Old Law demanded death for transgressors too, something modern society has moved away from in large measure.  I've already heard it suggested that Harris and Plunkett should receive death, but due to their ages, I think that not very likely.  It'd be ill-advised, no matter what.  But tribalism spawns more tribalism.  The real personalities are lost of both the assailants and the victims.

Blog MIrror: The American Springfield Krag–Jørgensen Rifle

 

The American Springfield Krag–Jørgensen Rifle

February 24, 1874. Honus Wagner born.

 

Baseball great Honus Wagner was born in Pennsylvania.  

A shortstop, he played professional baseball from 1897 to 1917.  Following retirement as a player, he managed the team he had played for, the Pittsburgh Pirates, for 39 years.  He passed away in 1955 at age 81.

Two of his brothers were also professional baseball players.

Last prior:

February 22, 1874. Birth of Bill Klem.

Choosing to lose.

Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic candidate for President.  He was honest, and Catholic, which made him unelectable.

Kamala Harris says when she talks to parents on the campaign trail, one of their top concerns is that their daughters won't have access to abortion in college

Charlie Spiering, summarizing a recent Kamal Harris interview.

I come from a sufficiently well-educated family such that my grandmother, Agnes, on my mother's side, had attended and graduated from university.

If you consider that she was born in 1891, that's quite the feat.

Now, I'll admit that my father was the first one to attend university on his side of the family, but his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, had all been successful businessmen at a time at which you didn't need a college education to be one, or even a high school education for that matter.  My father's father, who I never met, was universally regarded by those who knew him as extremely smart.

Indeed, I once was stopped on the sidewalk by an elderly lawyer who knew my father and his father, who asked about the family.  My son must have been in high school at the time, and the odd question "is he extremely smart. . . " like all of the members of the family.

I often, frankly, feel that I'm on the bottom end of the family intelligence pool compared to my own father and my kids.

No real college parents anywhere have, as one of their top concerns, that their daughters won't be able to commit infanticide, unless they've drunk so deeply of the left wing Kool-Aid they're perusing brochures from The Young Pioneers.

Democratic campaigns for the Oval Office, or Democratic campaigns in general, are not smart.  

They're about as dumb as can be.

From 1914 until 1980 the Democrats were masters at coalition building.  The party kept hardhat workers, urban Irish Catholics, Hispanics, and the entire South together, which was frankly quite a feat.  It supported unions and working class families, and generally was pretty pro farmer.  It had a left wing, but it also had a conservative one as well.  Starting in 1968, when it embraced American battlefield defeat to a degree, and then in 1973, when it took the bloody abortionist hand, it took a turn toward the left, and as it did that, it dumped democracy like a hot rock in favor of an imagined Platonic body of robed elders who would tell the people what to do, and they'd like it.

Absolutely everything about the current Democratic message is wrong, including some things that shouldn't be regarded as wrong, but which are in the current political atmosphere.  One thing that's definitely wrong is the concept that infanticide is a winning ticket.  It isn't. The Democrats have read single issue matters on ballots here incorrectly.  Maybe in that'st the only thing on a ballot, you get the voters only concerned about that to come out.  Otherwise, people aren't going to vote that way.

Moreover, if Harris is really being told this by the parents of college women, it's because she's talking to the most liberal parents imaginable, and they're going to say crap like that no matter what.  Moreover, the college educated are largely voting for Biden already.  Biden/Harris need to get votes that they don't already have.  The college educated have largely already left the GOP.

What's left of the electorate that is in the GOP is made up of the working class, small business owners (some college educated), and residents of rural regions (including quite a few well-educated ones in those areas).  They don't believe "diversity is strength", they aren't interested in tolerating non "Judeo-Christian" religions, or gender mutilation, and they feel that their lives and livelihoods are threatened by out of control illegal immigration.  They love their regions, but they're largely incapable of believing in climate change in spite of the evidence.  They quit listening to scientist and social scientist of all types because they were lied to about some things, and therefore don't believe any of it.  They listen to Evangelical pastors who tell them what they want to hear, and who make their massive departures from Christian doctrine irrelevant by not mentioning them (ever hear any of them criticize Trump for living in an adulterous relationship, which by conventional Christianity he is?  Or of an Evangelical Church refusing to marry two people who have been married before?)

When I first started practicing law, a firm partner, a true Christian gentleman, told me about litigation that "this isn't a nice game".  It isn't.  Politics is even less so, and you have to be smart about it.

There's 0 reason that the Biden/Harris ticket needs to mention abortion at all.  Where that's been an issue, they had no role in it. And they're driving Democrats away right now who are Catholic, which includes the Hispanic voters they imagine they'll be gaining.  And their absolute incompetence on the border is in fact a good reason to vote against them.  A competent ticket would shut up on abortion and would make a very serious effort on the border.  

Obama, it might be noted, had a very controlled border.  And while he was President before Dobbs, he didn't say much about abortion either.

He won twice.

Pointing out that more IRS agents punishes the wealthy, not the middle class, would help too.  Pointing out that Trump has been a personally immoral man, might as well.  Pointing out that he was the one who surrendered to the Taliban would as well. 

And parking Harris somewhere would be a good idea, if not dumping her entirely.

And that's where you have to say thing that re uncomfortable.

Al Smith was the Democratic nominee for President in 1928.  He would have won, but he was Catholic.  Yes, that meant a lot of the electorate was bigoted, but it also meant that the Democrats weren't smart in running him.

They would be now, but Smith wouldn't be a Democrat any longer.  He'd likely be an independent.  He wasn't willing to compromise on his Catholicism, like Joe Biden has, and he wasn't a liar of any kind either.

Kamala Harris is like Al Smith in one fashion.  She reminds bigoted voters who they hate.  She's a lawyer (regular people hate lawyers), she's the child of two immigrants (MAGA people don't like immigrants), one of whom was Indian and the other Jamaican, making her a "person of color" (a lot of MAGA people really don't like people of color, let alone immigrant people of color), she's married to an entertainment lawyer (oh, oh) who is Jewish (again, MAGA people like Israel, but Jews. . . ) and the children of the couple are from his first marriage, meaning she has low parent street cred.

Are any of those items a reason not to vote for Harris?  Absolutely not.  Her policies are a reason not to vote for Harris.  But will some MAGA people vote for Trump for these reasons? You bet they will, and in a race this close, in a handful of states that matter, that's a problem.

I don't know who would be a better VP candidate.  Amy Klobuchar strikes me as one who would be better in every fashion.  If you could find an American Christian Levantine politician (and there definitely are some) they'd be absolutely perfect, particularly if the choice was a woman.  But what I am saying is that in a race with democracy itself on the ticket, choosing to go with a candidate this old for President, and a VP who is so disliked, is just dumb.  And emphasizing the aspects of your campaign that the populist right hates, even if they do so wrongly on some of them, and the nervous middle aren't comfortable with, isn't very smart either.  Having the disliked person, even if the dislike is immoral, who people fear might end up President isn't very smart, either.

This isn't a nice game.  Sometimes choices have to be made in the candidates and the strategy that aren't very palatable.  A lot of Republicans will do what Cynthia Lummis admitted to doing in 2016 as to Trump, and "hold her nose and vote".  The Democrats should hold their noses and make some smart choices.

But they will not.

I had always thought my grandfather on my mother's side died at age 58. . .

but it turns out, he died in 1958.

He was, therefore, about 67 years of age.

Still not ancient by current standards, but not 58 years of age, either.

That was, FWIW, the same year my parents married.

His wife, my grandmother, died at age 89, however, which is a little younger than I remembered.  It was in 1979, which is later than I remember, which means that my recollection didn't make mathematical sense, either.  I was in high school at the time, but I don't recall it that way.

That also means that she lived long enough to see one of her children die, which I knew, and two of them fall into severe illness accompanied by mental decline, which must have been hard in the extreme to endure.

Blog Mirror: This Day in History: Annie Moore, first at Ellis Island

 

This Day in History: Annie Moore, first at Ellis Island

Going Feral: Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Albert Nelson

Going Feral: Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Albert N...: 

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Albert Nelson

He was Wyoming's first game warden, hired in.1899.

While contrary to what is sometimes suggested, he occasionally had deputy game wardens in his three-year stint, his statewide, hands on, role was a monumental task.  He received funding at the amount of $1,200 per year, from which he had to pay himself and deputies who received $3.00 per day.

Last edition:

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Theodore Roosevelt

Today Is International Cat Day

 Truly, a day worth celebrating:

 A calendar for 1897. Featuring a calico cat and an artist, the way we typically think of the late 1890s. . .right?

Thursday, February 15, 1923. Forbes quits from long distance, Veterans gather, Greece compounds the injustice.

Gathering at USS Maine memorial on the 25th anniversary of its sinking.

Charles R. Forbes, the Director of the U.S. Veteran's Bureau, resigned the position from his self-appointed refuge of Europe, following suspicions that he had been selling surplus supplies at huge discounts to contractors for kickbacks.  His confrontation with Harding on the matter had resulted in a physical altercation, with Forbes reportedly begging Harding to be allowed to depart for Europe prior to resigning.

The Scottish born Forbes had lived a colorful life, having been a Marine Corps musician at age 16, an engineer, a soldier in the Army charged with desertion and ultimately discharged as a Sergeant First Class after only eight years of service, employed in the construction field, and a Lieutenant Colonel in World War One.

He'd be prosecuted for conspiracy to defraud the Federal Government and end up serving 20 months in prison.  He'd live until 1949, dying at age 74.

Greece expropriate additional dwellings from the Albanian Cham Muslims in order to free up dwelling space for expelled Greeks from Turkey, thereby compounding the injustice.

Albanians had nothing to do with Greece's situation and the event signals out how Greece, in some ways, set the table for the disaster it was experiencing.  Turkey was being barbarous to the Anatolian Greeks, but the Greeks had not been kind to the Anatolian Muslims.

And this also demonstrates how something that began in World War One with good intention, independent nation states comprised of free peoples, was morphing into expelling minorities from lands they'd occupied for eons.

Margaret Lindsey Williams, working on her portrait of President Harding.