Today In Wyoming's History: October 17, 1969. Creation of the Milward L. Simpson Fund

Today In Wyoming's History: October 17: 1969  The Milward L. Simpson Fund created at the University of Wyoming "to further, foster and advance education and learning in the field of political science at the University of Wyoming."

Today In Wyoming's History: September 5, 1969. The 116th Engineer Battalion (Combat), Idaho National Guard musters out.

Today In Wyoming's History: September 5: 1969  The 116th Engineer Battalion (Combat), Idaho Army National Guard was mustered out of Federal service after active duty in Vietnam. This marked the sixth time in 70 years that the battalion served on active duty.  The Idaho National Guard unit is the only Guard unit, Army or Air, to officially serve in theater during both the Korean and Vietnam wars.  During it's tour in Vietnam six unit members lost their lives, over 100 were wounded, and two members received Silver Stars.

Woodstock, Day 4. August 18, 1969

By the early morning hours of the forth day of Woodstock, the crowd was tiring of the event and began to leave at first light.  Still, some remarkable acts played as the crowed dwindled.

Oddly enough, Roy Rogers was originally thought of to play the final number, which was to be Happy Trails, but he declined.

Johnny Winter.  I don't think very many remember the young Winter as performing at Woodstock, but he did, along with his brother Edgar.

Blood Sweat & Tears, who went on at 1:30 a.m.

Crosby Still, Nash & Young.  I've never cared for this band in any sense, and their Woodstock performance is no exception.

Paul Butterfield Blues Band. This band had been a blues band at one time but no longer was. Still, they opened with the blues number Born Under A Bad Sign which was most famously performed by Eric Clapton, who did not play at Woodstock.

Sha Na Na. This 50s revival band went on at 7:30 a.m.  It's odd to think of them even playing at Woodstock and its particularly odd if its considered that their hyped up nostalgic performance was revising music that was only a decade old.  Almost nothing about their performance seems to fit the era in which they were performing.  They preformed twelve songs in 30 fast minutes.

Jimi Hendrix.  Hendrix was the closing act as he insisted on the position, which unfortunately put his epic performance at the point at which the crowd had very much dispersed.  He played for two hours, playing nineteen songs, much longer than the few songs that are generally shown when Woodstock is recalled, and started off with his rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, one of fifty times he was recorded playing the national anthem.  A lot of his songs were played back to back with no interruption between them whatsoever.  His last song, Hey Joe, was played as an encore.

Hendrix had sought this position as it was the position of honor in a performance, the best band gong last.  He may well have deserved that honor in spite of the diminished crowd.  His rendition of
The Star Spangled Banner ended one of the newscasts nightly news that day, as I can recall watching it and asking my father what the event was.  The performance was genuinely epic, which is all the more amazing as Hendrix had been at Woodstock the entire time up until his performance and had not slept at all.

Woodstock, day three

On day three of Woodstock, the following bands played:

Joe Cocker, whose With A Little Help From My Friends cover, is one of the best remembered numbers from the concert.  He went on at 2:00 p.m.

Country Joe and the Fish, who uniquely played twice during the concert.  Their first performance was not scheduled.

Ten Years After.  Ten Years After was one of the most notable of the British blues bands and some regard its performance at Woodstock as the best performance of the concert.

The Band

Woodstock, day two.

We've already noted the commencement of the giant Woodstock music festival in 1969. This day was day two.

On this day the music opened at 12:15, and the following acts played:

Quill

Country Joe and the Fish, whose performance is well known for the Vietnam Rag.

Santana, whose performance was one of the best and whose drummer, 20 year old Michael Shrieve, was the youngest musician to preform by some accounts.

John Sebastian, who was not on the bill but actually in attendance but who was asked to play to make up for dead space by the promoters.

Keef Hartley Band

The Incredible String Band, who had refused to play due to the rain the prior day.

Canned Heat

Mountain

The Grateful Dead

Creedance Clearwater Revival  CCR later wrote Who Stopped the Rain concerning the concert.

Janis Joplin

Sly and the Family Stone, who also had one of the best performances of the event.

The Who

Jefferson Airplane, who concluded at 9:40.

Woodstock. August 15 through 18, 1969

If, as we've defined it, the 1960s as a decade began on March 8, 1965, when the Marines waded ashore at Danang, Republic of Vietnam, and ended on August 9, 1974, with the resignation of President Richard Nixon, then the mid point, and the high point, in more than one way occurred on August 15 through 17, at Woodstock, New York.

Original anticipated Woodstock lineup, which proved to be somewhat inaccurate.

Woodstock was a giant undertaking, and one for which nothing whatsoever went right, by any measure.  It's both justifiably celebrated and somewhat inaccurately remembered, as any giant event of this sort would be.

Intended from the onset to be a very large music festival, of which the 1960s featured several, it grew totally out of control and the producers soon lost control of the event, making it a free concert in the end.  It became more than that, and in some ways came to define the 1960s counter culture movement.

It may very well also mark the high point in Rock and Roll music. At this point in time, Rock and Roll still very much showed its blues roots and the music, while not as serious as a rule as the blues, reached its high point in being serious music.  Outlandish clothing had already come in, but after this point Rock and Roll would start to be highly gimmicky, something it has never recovered from.  Within a few years it would no longer be as serious, or be taken as seriously, as it was at this point.

On this day, the following acts played:

Richie Havens, who went on at 5:07 p.m and played for nearly two hours, and who was early on stage as Sweetwater, the opening act, had been stopped and delayed by the police.  Havens was a folk musician.

Sweetwater.  This band was a large ensemble, which some Rock bands of this period were, and is little remembered today. Being omitted from the Woodstock movie and the band's sort career no doubt contributed to that.

Bert Sommer.  Sommer isn't well known today, but he received the first standing ovation at Woodstock for his cover of Simon and Garfunkel's America.

Tim Hardin

Ravi Shankar, who played through the rain.

Melanie, was 22 years old at the time and who went on after the Incredible String Band declined to play in the rain.  She was invited as Woodstock's producers had an office in the same building which she did and was better known in Europe than the United States at this time.  One of three female acts at Woodstock, she later wrote her first hit song, Lay Down, Candles In The Rain, based on the concert.  Her career would later be virtually defined by her 1972 song Brand New Key, which was a song that came to her when she broke a vegetarian fast to have a hamburger at McDonald's after a twenty seven day fast.

Arlo Guthrie

Joan Baez, who was six months pregnant at the time and who concluded the first day's acts at 12:25.

Label Appendix to Growing Up In the 1960s

This post only serves the odd feature, for this blog, for adding in Labels for Growing Up in the 1960s.

The reason is that the labels would otherwise exceed the allowable limit.

July 24, 1969. Apollo 11 voyagers return to earth.

Standards and non standards.

On my news feed, there's a story I didn't read, with the headline:

Jennifer Lopez Turns 50.  Her scandalous love life exposed.

How odd.

I don't know, nor do I care, if Lopez has a "scandalous" love life, I'm just amazed that any press anywhere acknowledges that such a thing as a "scandalous love life" exists.

Yesterday some pop tart was celebrated for revealing that she's a "pan sexual". There's no such thing as a "pan sexual", and frankly,  as we've otherwise noted here recently a couple of times, the various terms that are used in this area to describe behavior are probably generally wrong.  That's another topic, but in an era when the standard of morality is set by television and varies, but not much, between such slop as Friends, The Big Bang Theory or Two Broke Girls, how could Lopez actually be scandalous? 

I guess I'd have to read it to find out, but unless she's hanging out with Putin, Kim Jong-un and procuring for that Epstein dude, it'd be hard to figure out how any current entertainment reporter could find a scandal, let alone recognize one, that was high enough to meet the current bar.

Speaking of 1969. . .

the band ZZ Top has now been around for fifty years.

That's right. The band formed in 1969.

July 20, 1969. The first moon landing.

Buzz Aldrin on the moon, Neil Armstrong visible in the reflection on his helmet shield.

On this day in 1969 human beings landed on the moon for the first time.

I've just posted another item on the 1960s that has a much less celebratory tone to it. This achievement, and it was indeed that, really stands out as the best of the 1960s.

The 1960s, by which we really mean the 1960s after 1964 and extending to about 1973, were a traumatic era full of turmoil around the world.  The years 1968 and 1969 were particularly that way.  So this 1969 event stood out, even at the time, as an example of what human beings could achieve if they wanted to.

It still stands for that.

I'm old enough to have a personal recollection of this event.  I was six years old at the time.  My recollection has come to be that mother turned the television on at home, something that was almost never done during the day prior to my father coming home from work, save for her daily viewing of Days Of Our Lives, so that we could watch it on our black and white Zenith television.

But that recollection is off.  The first moon landing occurred at 10:56 p.m, which would have been very late at night where I lived.  We must have watched it on the television that next morning.

And so we did.

It was amazing even then. And as a small kid at that time, we all were fascinated by the moon landing. But then so were adults.  It was a big deal, and we knew it was.  Some of us had astronaut toys at the time.  For awhile, I had a pennant that a friend of my mothers brought back as a gift from the Houston NASA facility.  It was an achievement that stood apart.

Indeed, it still does as a first. There's been nothing like it since.  It was frequently compared, at that time, to Columbus making contact with the New World, something that didn't draw people into debates about colonialism or the like at the time.  It was an enormous achievement and it had the feel of an enormous achievement for mankind.

Which it was.

Of course, it was one that we'd been headed towards for some time, which is worth remembering.  Endeavors just don't happen, they have to be worked on.  That rocket technology might take us to the Moon, and beyond, was obvious as soon as they became something serious in the early Twentieth Century.  Rocket technology really received a boost, however, due to World War Two, as explored in this blog entry here:

The Moon Landings—The World War II Connection

And after the war, the weapons capacity of rocketry kept development going, as is well known.

But none of that had to lead to space exploration.  Mankind simply decided that it would.

And it perhaps there's a lesson for us here.  This took place in the Cold War, with the Cold War constantly in the background. That a greater goal would be developed in that background surely means the big problems of today, especially that present scientific and technological challenges, can be handled now.

Today In Wyoming's History: June 29, 1969. The End of the Experience.

Today In Wyoming's History: June 29: 1969 - The Jimi Hendrix Experience played their last concert on the last day of the Denver Pop Festival.  After this, Hendrix would play with The Band of Gypsies, whom he felt more kinship with, being composed of personal musical fellows with a similar blues background. 

June 28, 1969 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. This entry isn't about that . . .

even though it starts out by mentioning it.

Sigmund Freud. Wrong about most stuff and a central character in this drama.

Rather, it's about social evolution, and about evolution itself.

Okay, to start out with I suspect that this anniversary will be mentioned a lot this week as things that come in convenient numbers, like 50 or 100, get mentioned. We've been doing that a lot ourselves, with things 100 years old, and occasionally 50 years old.

And the Stonewall Riots do matter, although perhaps not as much as noted. But then rarely does a singular thing like a riot really mark a shift in anything, so much as serve as a punctuation mark along the shift. That's not always the case, of course.

At any rate, on this date in 1969 there was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.  Greenwich Village then, as now, was a center of homosexual activity (which I'm putting that way for lack of a better way to put it).

The ostensible object of the raid was because the establishment was a bar but it had no liquor license.  Indeed, the conditions at the bar were pretty bad in general and it operated not only under the law, but below that which any legally established facility would have in terms of its physical plant. It had, for example, no running water and glasses were simply washed in a tub.  It was also owned by individuals who were in the Mafia.

Indeed, they'd only owned it since 1966, when they'd bought what had been a supper club with the intent to convert the establishment into a gay bar, which they did.  It operated more openly, if illegally, in that role than any other New York establishment.

On this day in 1969 the police raided the establishment as they did about once a month.  Normally when they raided they were paid off, and the establishment was normally tipped off about the raids in advance, but this doesn't seem to have occurred in this instance.  Arrests that normally would have been minor and somewhat perfunctory went badly, all the patrons were taken to the police station, and things descended from there into two days of rioting.  

It's the rioting that's the real story.   It commenced at the police station where the police handled the entire matter badly and it went into two days of riotous protests.  It was the first instance of homosexuals having openly protested in that fashion and it cracked a dam, of sorts, on that activity and therefore also in some homosexuals being open about their homosexuality, although by even the late 1950s there were those whose homosexuality was well known, if not discussed, in public life.

A lot of this fits into the times. . .1969. But not all of it does.  Events at the establishment showed both the evolution of thought in general but also the remaining gritty nature of New York in which organized crime played a very large role and there was a definite, even expected, element of police corruption.  There's some speculation, in fact, that the Mafia owners of the establishment failed to notify those present as it hoped to be able to blackmail wealthy patrons, although that's only speculation.  The fact that the Mafia had chosen to open a gay bar and run it illegally says a lot about the position of such an institution at the time, as the Mafia of course made most of its money by way of vice.  It can't help be noted that owning an illegal establishment catering to a disapproved conduct would have presented blackmail opportunities.

At any rate, what's really remarkable is how arrests gone wrong descended into a riot, which basically showed that at least locally views about homosexual conduct no longer reflected an older view that has supported its being regarded as illegal, although we'd note again that the police were not raiding the Stonewall for that reason and that in fact police conduct of the entire matter, from the raid in the first place, to arresting everyone inside the bar, to groping female prisoners in some instances, set the stage for the riots.

And all that takes us to Naomi Wolf.

For those not familiar with Wolf, Naomi Wolf is a "liberal progressive author" who has published frequently on feminist topics, often to the horror of her fellow feminists.*  I don't really have a problem in general with Wolf, in part because I've never read any of her books, I'm not going to, and therefore I'm not sufficiently familiar with them to really have a problem.  But I've read her comments on this or that, not all of which I agree with by some measure, but some of which I do and I'd note that part of the reason that she takes flak is that as a feminist she makes contra feminist statements which feminist don't appreciate.**

Anyhow, she's basically published on topics related to feminism up until now, but following the general trend, she recently attempted to publish a book on homosexuality entitled Outrages:  Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love in which she completely blew it on the story of the criminalization of homosexual conduct in 19th Century Britain.  The BBC got after her about that, as well it should have, and then that lead to the book being yanked, at least temporarily. 

Which takes us back to one of our own earlier threads, where we got things right. . . .

Homosexual conduct was made illegal in the UK, and in much of the US, but not in the way that people think it was.  Rather, it was never the case, as some believe, that "being" a homosexual was illegal because homosexuality itself has existed as a definition for only a little over a century. Rather, homosexual sex was illegal but then so were a lot of other types of sexual conduct or conduct that involved sex.  If you get right to it, the general societal view as that sex was properly something limited to married couples and that marriage was an institution that was a human norm for deep seated reasons and which involved, for part of that reason, children.

Well get back to Sigmund Freud and his role in this in just a minuted.

But first, back to 1969.

By the time of the Stonewall riots the United States Supreme Court had already made big dents in state's abilities to regulate conduct between adults in this area.  Griswald v. Connecticut, had already held that there was a right to privacy.  Griswald held that a blanket ban on contraceptive pharmaceuticals violated a right to privacy, which is frankly a highly dubious result for a Supreme Court opinion.  If a blanket ban on pharmaceutical contraceptives violates a right to privacy, than a ban on any pharmaceutical and substance of any kind also does.  What Griswald really reflects is that a liberal United States Supreme Court was taking the view that sex itself was some sort of Constitutionally protected super right and that all laws restraining it were likely unconstitutional.  That would have been a shocking proposition for the drafters of the Constitution, who were completely comfortable with a lot of laws that limited sexual activity to married couples, but that's what the Supreme Court of the 1960s was basically doing.

Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Appointed by Dwight Eisenhower, Warren presided over a court that was highly active in expanding civil rights.  Under Warren, however, the court ultimately would not only revive Reconstruction era doctrines to enforce the civil rights of blacks in the South, a  highly laudable goal, but would vastly expand the incorporation  of the Bill of Rights, something that people from the left and the right howl about today as it has had numerous unforeseen consequences.  While in my view Warren was correct about this, in his later years the Court expanded its sweep even further and began to create rights that fairly clearly hadn't actually been contemplated in the Constitution. Warren, it might be noted, could never be a Supreme Court justice today. He was an active Mason and was, ironically, the driving force behind Japanese internment during World War Two, during which time he was the Governor of California.  A person has to speculate over whether that role later was influential on his expansion of civil rights in a remorseful reaction to something that was very clearly morally wrong.

A host of cases that were coming up in the wake of the Sexual Revolution would go on from there and effectively gut the state's ability to really regulate effectively in this area.  While in 1960 it remained the case that every state had a law against sodomy, it was also the case that the court in this era had already hinted that it would preclude their enforcement under any circumstance, which became clearer by the early 1970s.  Supreme Court action was probably never really necessary to make that clear and it would theoretically take until 2003 for the Court to make that clear in regards to homosexual conduct.  It's all significant, however, in that the Warren Court of the 1960s was pretty clearly willing to extend a host of rights in regard to sexual conduct that it was largely creating out of whole cloth, having a "living Constitution" view of the the law.  What the Warren Court started in the 1960s the Burger Court continued, even though it was certainly more restrained than the Warren Court.  It was the Burger Court, for example, that issued the opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, who presided over the Court and voted in the majority in Roe v. Wade.  Burger was much more conservative than Warren, but not as conservative as the Chief Justices who followed.  Like Justice Kennedy, he may not have been able to see the logical consequences of some opinions as he notably supported the ongoing criminalization of homosexual acts in a Supreme Court decision in a five to four 1986 decision that upheld a Georgia law on that topic, although by that time the Court's earlier decisions in this area made the decision nonsensical in some ways and forced Burger to rely, to a degree, on Natural Law, something the Court has otherwise been reluctant to do in modern times.

As for the social mores in 1969, by that time the Boomer generation was already, in its liberal end, challenging all of them and the Warren Court was falling in line, as the Courts will sometimes do with the Zeitgeist of their eras.  Courts perceived as trailblazers are often slightly behind whatever is actually blazing a trail.  1968 saw the Hayes Production Code fall as Hollywood sought to recapture the salacious it had been forced to abandon in the 1920s and there was an immediate switch in film making towards more violence and more sex. By 1970 an x rated film with homosexual content, Midnight Cowboy, would win best picture.  By the late 1960s, Playboy magazine had lost all aspects of being something sold in brown paper bags but was sold openly in the grocery store check out line, a status it would lose again in the 1980s.  And in 1969 California passed the first no fault divorce law in the United States, a law signed into law by conservative hero and divorcee Ronald Reagan.  Clearly, as Bob Dylan would have it, "the times, they are a changing".

Ronald Reagan after being elected governor of California.  Reagan is a conservative hero, and probably deservedly so, but in this area he did a decidedly liberal thing that would have enormous long term consequences in the United States.  Like John Wayne having never served in the military during the nation's largest war, conservatives have managed to ignore the fact that Reagan has a bit of a built in conflict here as he was divorced from his first wife himself.

And indeed the raid that gave rise to the 69 riot didn't have enforcement of New York's sodomy laws in mind and it would have been very unlikely to have been a successful raid if it did. Whatever else the Stonewall was, it wasn't a place where that was going on.  It allowed dancing between homosexual couples, and homosexuals and transvestites openly hung out there, but that's about as far as it went. And none of that activity was illegal.  It had a host of other laws that provided the pretext.  A clear element of social embarrassment was involved in being arrested in a raid of that type, however, which gives rise to the blackmail speculation as well as to forming the basis for the riots.

Which is why Stonewall became a marking point in this social evolution.

By the 1960s the laws on all sexual topics, save for one singular area, were on their way out and largely already unenforced.   That fact meant that the time was ripe for a social reaction of the type that the riots reflected, which was all the more the case because of the ongoing Sexual Revolution which was challenging marriage itself.

The Stonewall Riots are a milestone in the development of what became a movement, and that movement is still going on.  In 69, when the movement can more or less said to have emerged more openly, the point was that those who engaged in homosexual activity didn't want to be subject to prejudice because of it.  The movement emerged at a time when all of the walls on traditional conduct were under assault and many were torn down completely, quite a few with highly negative results that are only now being appreciated.  By some point in the 1990s the movement had basically been a success and the real legal prohibitions that homosexuals were subject to were gone, which marks very rapid progress. At that point, however, it changed from a movement seeking tolerance to once seeking normalization and acceptance, both societal and legal.  It largely achieved that with the Obergefell decision which, remarkably, did not result in a hiatus in its goals, as Justice Kennedy in his naivety seem to assume it would.  It has gone on not only to seek full scale societal acceptance, but absolutely demands it. At the same time, it's gone from a movement that was actually fairly limited to homosexual conduct, to one that has embraced all forms of sexual conduct, arguing that there is no norm at all.

Indeed, in that last most recent phase, while hardly noticed by the public its reached the point where many within the early scope of the movement are at odds with the most recent developments.  Homosexual men and women don't all embrace the categorization of "gay" that they are now all tagged with, and they don't all embrace the concept of "transgender" at all.  The new "Asexual" movement hat has tagged a ride along chaffs many in the other camps.  And the rather obvious fact that the entire LGBQT movement has become extremely trendy has meant that rather obviously a lot of people who now wear the badge of being LGBQT are frankly not, something not lost on those who genuinely have attractions outside the norm.

All of which goes back to the point that we made earlier, is any of this really real?

Clearly those who genuinely have same gender attraction would be baffled, and probably offended, by that comment, maybe, but there's no good reason to believe that in fact the actual nature of this is something that's been grossly misunderstood and overplayed.  That a minority demographic of human beings have such attractions is real, and can't be doubted, but it may well be that the current understanding of it is fairly far off the mark.  As our earlier entry noted, there's some who feel that defining people by their sexual attraction is not only a disservice to them, but it's actually fundamentally scientifically wrong.  Further, they'd argue, that by doing that it actual amplifies a behavior by emphasizing it, making, if you will, people "gay", and even "homosexual", by simply insisting that this is what such a person must be because of the attraction they feel. This is a matter of controversy among homosexuals themselves, not all of whom want to be forced to adopt the definition of being "gay" and what that means and others who insist they must do so.  There isn't very good biological evidence for the position that the hard definitions now in current vogue reflect basic human nature.  Indeed, there isn't any.

Leaping back to our earlier post, it must be remembered that the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are actually only a little over a century old and they reflect a psychological characterization of the time which held that all homosexual conduct and all sexual conduct directed towards oneself (which is what heterosexual actually means) was a psychological malady. Indeed, at about that same point it was assumed that excessive focus on sex by conventional males lead to heterosexual conduct as originally defined (we're not going to get too graphic here) that if unchecked evolved into homosexual conduct.  Indeed, that view isn't entirely gone as I've heard it posed fairly recently, and there actually seems to be some evidence to support it, that a strong attraction to pornography (some would use the word addiction) of the depicting female type, leads to more and more graphic pornography and then with some, pornography that's homosexual in character.  I'll note that I've heard that stated, but I haven't researched it and I'm not going to.  Indeed, this thread doesn't address the "cause" of anything.

But what it does address is defining a "cause" which is actually what the surviving term in its original sense, homosexual, does.  All the other current related terms in this set of movements are related to that history of the definition. And that history is one that's sufficiently ironic to call it into question.

Originally, the conduct was universally seen as immoral along with a host of other sexual acts outside of marriage.  It wasn't regarded as a category of anything, however, until Freud and his fellow travelers defined it as such, creating the concept that it was a deep seated psychological malady.  That process of creating that concept, contrary to what Naomi Wolf supposed, is what created the late 19th and early 20th Century treatment under the law and in society.  The condition went from being one that was thought of as a moral failing, but except in really pronounced exceptions one that didn't otherwise define the essence of a person, to one that did in every way.  That in turn created the conditions that people are aware of that existed in the early 20th Century that people presume, inaccurately, existed prior to that.  In the late 1960s as the lid came off of every type of sexual conduct, it came off of homosexuality as well but it was the only one, at that time, that was defined as a psychological malady.  That changed in the early 1970s when homosexual psychologists caused the DSM to be redefined to take that definition out.

But what's notable about that is that a large amount of the DSM and psychological treatment of sex has always been raving baloney in the first place.  So maybe what ought to really be questioned is the entire history of psychology and sex.  Indeed, that questioning has been taking place to some degree and almost everything Freud thought has gone down the tubes as a result, as he thought everything was about sex.

And it turns out it isn't.

Which doesn't mean that all of this doesn't have a psychological component.  Of course it does.  Everything about people has a psychological component. But what it may very well mean is that that component has been pretty badly misunderstood ever since Freud and his buddies first started defining the terms.  The earlier understanding that held it was simply something on the range of human conduct might turn out to be much more accurate.

If that seems to be arguing that society at large has finally grasped the truth here in the modern era, it hasn't.  It may mean that in this area the terms shouldn't really exist at all.  That doesn't mean that a small minority of human beings don't exhibit all of the traits that are unfairly lumped together here for classification.  That is, there are a minority of people who are attracted, in varying degrees, to members of their own gender.  There are some people who desire to dress in the clothing characteristic of the opposite gender (which doesn't necessarily mean that they're attracted to members of their same gender, although some are). There are people who have very little sexual attraction to anyone in their own species at all. But there are also men who are hyper attracted to women, and women who are hyper attracted to me. There are also attractions outside of all of these which we'll not go into as they stray into areas that almost nobody wants to be associated with, but those attractions also exist.

But perhaps outside of that last vaguely referenced area, which needs to be a defining trait for criminal law reasons, and which seems to be an indisputable psychological malady, all of these things are departures from the mean average which is the disputable norm and there would appear to be no good reason whatsoever that anyone should accordingly define themselves accordingly.  A tendency towards an act, in other words, probably ought not to devolve to being a person's entire identity.

Over Father's Day weekend I happened to be in Denver.  I seem to manage to be in Denver every time that some public presentation associated with a movement is going on (I've managed to be in Denver over "4/20" at least three times).  On this occasion, there was a Pride parade going on.  I didn't see it, but there were a fair number of people downtown who had marched in it or turned out to view it, and were self identifying in some fashion as being part of the demographic the parade recognized.

I'm sure that quite a few of the people in the parade were members of the demographic.  I'm also at this point pretty sure that quite a few people in such parades aren't members of the demographic by an inherent inclination, but are identifying as part of it as they like to be part of movements.  Some were just exhibitionist, which has nothing at all to do with having same gender attraction and which has everything to do with being an exhibitionist.  The most notable example of that was a young woman with black lipstick and heavy eye liner wearing a t-shirt you could see through.  That doesn't make her a lesbian. . . that makes her an exhibitionist.  For all the viewer would know, that's all she was.

But the most notable for this conversations were two very attractive young women who were wearing t-shirts that said "All Gay All Day".  Why would anybody be all anything, other than human, all day?  That's not much different from a t-shirt being worn by a male that stated he was attracted to women all day.  If a person defines themselves as "all" anything "all day", it ought to be something really deep, rather than glandular, in nature.

Now, I get the point of their t-shirts but what I'll also note is that they were otherwise decently dressed in the conventional fashion.  Whether their self declared attraction was real or not, what they weren't doing is affecting a "I'm a" so much as as a "I have this" in terms of this attraction, and that's the point here.  It may really be the case that on a society wide basis we're still afflicted by psychological malpractice from the 19th Century that causes society to insist on defining a people by their sexual attractions.  There's something about that which is really odd.

If that's the case, the views that predated the psychological definitions may actually be closer to the biologically correct one.  And if that's the case the ultimate irony is that much of the societal view and the legal views on sexual conduct that predated 1) the psychological intrusion first and 2) the Sexual Revolution secondly, are more correct.  That doesn't argue for a re-criminalization of homosexual sex, that should never have been criminal in the first place, but it would argue for a serious approach to sex in society and the law and what it means. And what it means for most people is that procreation results in creation and a deep seated human bond that the libertine standard bearers of the Sexual Revolution, following (not leading) Hugh Hefner and his juvenile pack of pornographers, failed to grasp.  That actually makes things simpler, rather than more complicated, as that refocuses such topics on where they ought to be, which is the protection of children, and the true dignity of people and in particular women, who are now prostituted in society in various ways to an unprecedented degree, something that all of the turmoil and upheaval in this area of the 1960s and 1970s forgot.

That would also mean that almost all of the recent, and we take a long view of recent here, developments in society, save for the decriminalization of various things which should never have been criminal in nature in the first place, are based on a faulty understanding of things influenced by a science that turns out to be pseudo scientific.  And if that's the case, basing societal institutions and norms on them, or more particularly changing societal institutions and norms of very long standing, and even simply basing societal and demographic labels based on them, is likely to be an error as well. 

And that's something that hardly anyone has bothered to contemplate.

______________________________________________________________________________

*Wolf is really quixotic in a lot of ways and she holds some extremely liberal and quite conservative opinions simultaneously.  Part of the reason, however, that I think she meets with opposition is that she's very attractive and presents that way.  In other words, she has always held major babe status and that likely strikes both of some her opponents and some of her proponents off guard.

**She's also been wildly off on statistical data before and what the current controversy might demonstrate is that in the age of the Internet you can no longer get away with that.

3.6 %. The lowest U.S. Unemployment Rate since 1969.

That rate is not only stunningly low, it's disturbingly low.

Traditionally economist have regarded 7% as "full employment".  If we keep in mind that at any one time there's a certain percentage of the available workforce that's idled by choice, that makes sense. That's not throwing stones at anyone, its just that some folks choose not to work. That's different from being unemployed.

Now, some will tell you that some of those people have given up looking for work, but anyway you look at it, the current unemployment rate is bizarrely low.

3.6% is so low, it's actually problematic, or it could be.

Usually when unemployment reaches this sort of unemployment rate, bad things begin to happen.  For one thing, it's usually a sign of a "super heated" economy, and very soon prices and wages begin to rise and inflation sets in. 

Indeed, that is what happened the last time the rate was this low. That was in 1969 and the reason it was that low is that the Vietnam War was at its height.  We had 500,000 men in Vietnam, a huge military deployment elsewhere around the globe, and a massive amount of military and social expenditure going on. At first, the government actually welcomed inflation, as it reduced the value of the loans it had to pay back to afford all of that, but by the early 1970s it was totally out of control.  It took Ronald Reagan coming into office and intentionally throwing the country into a severe recession to fix the economy, and we've lived with that fixed economy since then.

This could wreck it.

Indeed, if we look at other historical low unemployment rates its disturbing.  3.2% was the unemployment rate in 1929. . . and we know what happened to that super heated economy.  During World War Two the unemployment rate was below 2%, but that was due to our being in the largest war of the 20th Century and the government was forced to put in wage controls to handle the resulting labor shortage.  It wasn't even possible to leave some critical defense work if you occupied such a job.  The Korean War dropped the unemployment rate down that low once again.

The oddity now is that there's  no wars going on. . . or at least nothing like the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and so far inflation hasn't really gotten ramped up.  Indeed, while its debated, some claim that the American middle class remains in wage stagnation, although there's pretty good evidence that's not true.  So, so far, so good.

But also, this can't keep going in this direction. 

Assuming that it's not a statistical glitch, and that it doesn't straighten itself out on its own rapidly, this will be inflationary at some point absent external forces.

Of course, those external forces may be at work right now.  It could be automation that's keeping inflation from getting rolling. As labor shortages develop, some of those shortages might be getting filled by machines, which might in turn keep the inflationary drive of wage hikes from occurring.  That would be good in the short term but when this trend reverses, and it will, it won't be. The robots will keep their jobs. . . or just be unplugged until they're needed again.

An external force that would seem to be available would be job exportation, always a hot topic. That may still be going on as well, in the form of globalization.  If it is, what's surprising here is that there' hasn't been an effort to translate that into a similar economic regime south of the Rio Grande.

Or maybe it is.  Mexico's unemployment rate right now is 3.2%, even lower than the American one.  That's up from a nearly incredible 2.9% the prior year.  The Canadian unemployment rate, in comparison, is a more normal but still really good 5.8%.  Anyhow, the combined Mexican and American rates go a long ways towards explaining why Central Americans are hitting the road and going north.  Would that the Central American governments were more stable, perhaps this would translate into a rise for them as well.

Interesting economic times at any rate.

Particularly as current American politics have gotten so odd that a really low unemployment rate doesn't seem to translate into the normal political conversation.  From national politics, you'd think we were in a fairly severe recession, but we're not.

What? No scenes of wild December 31, 1918 New Years Celebrations. And none for 1968 either. And New Year's Eve 2018-2019.

 Yup, it's December 31 all right.

Nope, couldn't find any.

And I was surprised.

Cameras were obviously in fairly common circulation by then, although frankly the defeated Germans were the masters of snap shots as they already had a lot of personally owned cameras, whereas that would have been unusual for soldiers from other countries. Still, press photographers were common already, as were military photographers and photographers from organizations, such as  the Red Cross.  

I'm sure somebody took photos, but I didn't find anything for this New Years Eve.

I'm sure celebrations were held too, but I didn't find any record of them.  Indeed, outside of one of the Casper newspapers, even the papers didn't really note it.  The Saturday Evening Post did run a Leyendecker illustration for the New Year on its issue from the last week of December that was New Year's themed, but oddly enough I couldn't find a copy of the cover either.

Anyhow, I'm sure they occurred, and I'm sure relief over the end of the war featured in a lot of those celebrations in the U.S. and the Allied nations.  

Of course in a lot of the U.S. that celebration would have been dry, or if not dry, it would have featured the anticipated last of the suds.  Prohibition was coming in strong and it had the force of public sentiment behind it.  Indeed, in the same Casper paper I noted the first of the counter waive on that movement appeared with a notation that Tennessee was already becoming the center of bootlegging, and openly so.  Anyhow, in a lot of homes the celebrations may already have been dry, in contrast to the way New Years has become, and for many establishments in many states it would have to have been.  

It wouldn't have had to have been in Wyoming, but the press was pretty steady in its drumbeat to bring Prohibition on, so the seeming tide of history seemed pretty clear.

But I'm sure a lot of people gathered and celebrated at homes, or in bars and restaurants that evening.  Lots of Americans, over one million, were still overseas, and they likely celebrated in barracks rooms, with those on occupation duty in Germany probably restricted to post, I'll bet.

Of course, some took note of the changing of year from posts in Russia, where I'll bet that change, which would probably not have been observed by locals at all, most still acclimated to the Old Calendar, was probably a little somber.  Troops stationed near British troops, as some were, I suspect celebrated a bit more.  Those in the Navy no doubt celebrated however that's done in the Navy, which I'm not familiar with but as the Navy is long on tradition, not doubt something occurred.

Of course, if you were a German, except perhaps, ironically, if you were in the Occupied Zone, this was a pretty bad New Years, and not just because your army had been defeated in a four year long war that killed huge numbers of your countrymen. The country was in revolution and falling apart, at war with itself and facing a rebellion in Posen.  It was bad.  Your trip to Mass, if you were in southern Germany or western Germany, was probably pretty somber.

Which it also would have been in you were anywhere in what became Poland or any of the Baltic States, all of which were aflame.  And while this was New Years in Russia, probably few observed it both because the peasantry, which most Russians were, were still on the Old Calendar for observances but also because a massive civil war was raging in the country.

And so ended 1918.  But it's reached continued on. Even until now.

I didn't bother to look to hard for anything from 1968, for which I've been running some dates.  I'm not going to do a  continual1969 retrospective.  1968 was run specifically as it was such a pivitol year in history but I'm finding myself no more informed on that than I was before I started doing that, and my inquiries here and there as to why it turned out to be remain unanswered.  It was, with turmoil in the United States, France, Germany and elsewhere.  Something was going on, but what?  I was around for the 1968 to 1969 New Year but don't recall it, I think, and if I do its from a child's prospective.  Had I been older in 1968, I think I would have been glad that year was over but dreading 1969.

Which is sort of how I feel about this New Years.

It's not like 2018 has been a super bad year for me by any means whatover. Quite the contrary by most measures.  But it has been stressful on a personal level and it featured near its end the terminus on something that I had long hoped would have worked out which did not and the fixation of something to the contrary thats has a real element of bitterness about it.  I'll continue to deal with that in early 2019 until I become fully used to it (the most likely thing), accept it (ditto), or become just very bitterly disgruntled about it.   

And politically the past three years or so  have been about all I can take on the nation's politics, which just seem to get wackier and wacker, and which have spilled over a bit to the local.  There's really serious things to be done that haven't been done.  Maybe 2019 will surprise me and people will start to get to work on them, but right now a person predicting that would have to be doing it based on sheer unsupported optimism.

Oh well.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!

Chorus.-For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint stowp!
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o'kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,
Sin' auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

And there's a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

The United States Unemployment Rate fell to 3.7% in September.

That's the lowest rate since 1969.

It's below full employment. That is, statistically, it's so low its way lower than statistical full employment, which is usually regarded as 7%.

In 1969 1/3d of all Americans were employed in manufacturing.  And there was a large scale draft on due to the Vietnam War and the Cold War.  The economy was radically different. Fewer, far fewer, women were employed, far more Americans worked in manufacturing jobs that gave them a good middle class income. 

You can argue this a number of ways.  To some extent, undoubtedly, the economy of 1969 was better than the one now, even if you subtract out the impact of conscription.  A family was much more able to get by on one income than it is now, so overall spending power has declined.

Still, down to 3.7%?  No matter what you think of whose in charge and why this is going on, that's really impressive.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

In an anticlimactic footnote to the Siege of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese Army raised the flag above the outpost that had been abandoned by the United States on July 5.

Khe Sanh bunkers

The entire affair became symbolic for many for the state of the Vietnam War. The US had occupied an interior position, much like the French had at Dien Bien Phu, and then held it against what turned out to be a giant feint in order not to suffer the same humiliating defeat that the French had earlier.  In the meantime, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive and the combined impact of everything made the NVA and VC look to be a much more potent force than they really were.  Having said that, the NVA assault on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh was an impressive feat involving moving a large number of men, including artillery, through the jungle without being detected.

The siege commenced on January 21, 1968 and ran all through the Tet Offensive and into the Spring with President Johnson ordering that the base not be allowed to fall after the base was quickly surrounded.  Air support to the surrounded base was massive.  Ground fighting on the neighboring hills was sometimes intensive. 

The 1st Cavalry advancing in Operation Pegasus.

In March of that year Operation Pegasus was commenced, over Marine Corps objection, to relieve the base, which the Marines asserted was not in need of relief.  By mid April the 1st Cavalry Division had reopened the highway and declared the base no longer surrounded.  On April 15 the Marines followed on the Army's Operation Pegasus with Operation Scotland II to clear the area around Khe Sanh. That operation continued into February 1969, but in the meantime the Marines withdrew from Khe Sanh in July, 1968.

Marine Corps memorial service for fallen American and South Vietnamese servicemen on June 19, 1968 the day the abandonment of the base commenced.

Operation Charlie, the withdrawal from the base at Khe Sanh was commenced on June 19, 1968 and was conducted at night.  Hill 689, near Khe Sanh, was occupied for a few days after Khe Sanh itself was evacuated.  On this day, the NVA occupied Khe Sanh. While the military declared the ongoing occupation of Khe Sanh pointless in the conditions that followed Tet, the Press was not kind to the US military after the occupation was learned of. Less well known is that the Khe Sanh plateau continued to be patrolled by the Marines, lending credence to the changed American view on the importance of the base, if not the overall American assessment of the strategic situation in 1967 and 1968.

Khe Sanh was actually reoccupied in 1971, a fact that's rarely noted, by the ARVN and the US in Operation Dewey Canyon II and subsequently used for a jumping off point for the ARVN in the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 offensive.  That latter offensive turned disastrous for the ARVN in Laos and the base was abandoned for good on April 6, 1971.