Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XI. The Winter of Disconte...: January 4, 2023
Harriet Hageman announced her bid to be reelected with the release of a video:
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Thursday, January 11, 2024
The 2024 Election in Wyoming. Will anyone rise to the challenge, and is there even a point?
Saturday, February 25, 2023
Thursday, February 25, 1943. Around the clock bombing.
The Western Allies commenced "round the clock bombing" of the Third Reich.
A few things about this are worth noting.
It was essentially a massive upgrading of another theater, this one the skies over Germany, in which the Soviet Union, which lacked a heavy strategic bomber capacity, and which was not strategically placed to join in it, was absent. The Soviets were of course also absent from the Battle of the Atlantic.
While it can't be expected that they would be in either, the fact that the Western Allies carried on these significant efforts benefited the USSR as well as the Western Allies, something that Soviet and now Russian recollections of the war choose to forget.
Also controversial is the extent to which the raids were actually effective. German production went up during the war, so the question is whether strategic bombing depressed it from being higher, or simply disrupted it in other ways. The latter certainly occurred, but to what extent the former did is an open question.
The 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian), came into existence. The unit was made up of Latvian volunteers, and conscripts, who harbored the naive hope that serving the Germans would lead to post-war Latvian independence.
While naive, and inexcusably associated with the SS, this is an example of the "war within a war" nature of the Second World War. The Baltic States, along with Ukraine and Poland, would particularly be associated with various armed efforts against the Soviets, some of which were completely independent of association with the Germans, while some, outside of Poland, were. Many of the partisan type movements, which this obviously was not, carried on fighting for some time after the war.
Of note, Latvian resistance to the Soviet Union remained fairly strong up until 1949 and remained a factor the Soviets had to consider into the early 50s. The last violent acts by Latvian resistance forces occurred in the 1980s and the last Forest Brother, Jānis Pīnups, who had deserted from the Red Army during World War Two when wounded and left for dead, came in from hiding in 1995.
Regarding the Baltic States and the SS, during the war Estonia also contributed volunteers to "foreign legion" SS units, that being the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) The Latvians would contribute a second one, that being the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian). Because the units contained conscripts, the US regarded them as not complicate in the criminal nature of the SS after the war.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Wyoming. Twenty-five Years of Wolves.
Today In Wyoming's History: January 12: 1995 Wolves retintroduced to Yellowstone National Park.It's odd to think that something I had a minor involvement in, in the form of a legal commentator, is now sufficiently far in the past that it's history.
It's also odd to think it's only 25 years ago.
Twenty five years ago I wasn't married, but I was about to be. Our marriage would take place that upcoming March, so we were engaged and only a few months out from getting married. I'd have placed wolf reintroduction further back in time from that for some reason.
That I would is an odd thought in and of itself as the article I co authored on the topic was published in the spring of 1990, five years prior. For some reason I'd have placed the actual reintroduction around 1993 or so, but why that sticks out in my mind I'm not sure. That year in general sticks out in my mind as my father died that April. It wasn't a great year. Not every one is.
I'd first experience wolves myself in 2000. I was hunting near the park in a very warm year and I'd drawn both a sheep tag and a moose tag, something that you really don't want to do. Hunting moose, by myself south of the park, I heard them howling at night. I saw them early one morning when I was hunting one side of a swamp, and they were hunting the other side.
In 2011, when the photograph taken above was snapped by me, on a cell phone, they were in Natrona County. Their presence where I took that photo was a very open secret at that time, but I didn't know they were there until I took the photo. A couple of years went by, that photo is only eight years old, and a pack had established itself in the farming district just outside of Casper. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife had to intervene in that as it was a heavily agricultural area and livestock losses were inevitable, but the wolves reportedly remain on the east side of Casper Mountain.
In 1990, when wolf reintroduction in Wyoming was a hot topic, I recall seeing speakers on it and I've already written on that. But one thing I knew then and recall thinking was baloney was how the propaganda on wolves de natured them, if you will.
Wolves would never leave the park, it was claimed. Wolves wouldn't harm anything. Tales about wolves and their nature, including their killing of humans in times past, were all fairy tales.
In actuality, it was obvious right from the onset that wolves would leave the park. What wasn't appreciated was how rapid their advance would really be. It's been blistering in real terms. Twenty five years ago only seems like a long time if you are fairly young. It's less than half of my lifetime and it's not a long time.
That provides a good reason not to reintroduce wolves to Colorado. A natural reintroduction is always better than a forced one. The process in Wyoming wasn't smooth and it took about 20 years to work it out. Part of the reason for that was that the level of trust was very low, made low in part by their advocates telling fables that immediately turned out not to be true.
Indeed, as I felt then, and as I still feel now, it's not the wolves that cause the problems. It's their advocates. The advocates don't really have to live with them the way that a declining number of people who really live outdoors do. Most of those people aren't really opposed to wolves themselves, but rather the fantasies of the advocates.