Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 8. Trump's Party, Getting Vaccinated or not, or definitely, but for what, Goodfellas, Prince Harry the Wuss, Rude Hearing Examination, Indian Names on Vehicles, Gas Stations, or not, Bankrupt Boy Scouts, Voting Restrictions, Hidden Meanings, and other news of the day.

Trump's Party?  The Long Goodbye?

There's been a lot of debate about where the GOP is headed, post Trump, and it appears we don't know, as the post Trump era has not arrived.  By all signs, he remains firmly in control of his party.

The former President delivered a speech at CPAC.  It was really long.

Trump predictably insisted that he won the election, but in terms of the popular vote he's lost every election.  Indeed, it'd be well worth remembering for conservatives that he lost the popular vote in 2016.  That year he entered his Administration with the House and the Senate in GOP hands. He lost the House in 2018, and while the House made gains in 2020, the Republicans didn't take it back and directly lost the Senate due to his actions.

Given all of this, the GOP appears set to ride the Trump horse into 2022. We'll see how that works, but this week's past Senate vote on the COVID 19 relief bill suggests that the Democratic era of cooperation with the GOP, more hoped for among moderate Democrats than real, may have more or less come to an end.  This may give the GOP a chance to really assert its conservative and populist issues, but the overall problem right now is that a party with Trump at the head, even though he's firmly in control inside the GOP, appears weaker and weaker nationally.  If the GOP doesn't pick up seats in 2022, it'll be due to Trump.  Right now, conservative columnists that stuck with him, and the columnists are normally the sounding boards for political ideas, are almost completely without credit, leaving only those who opposed him, who are now outside the GOP folds, with any credit at all, but no audiences.

On audiences, for much of Trump's presidency I'd hear from his supports, "he speaks just like us".  This struck me as a couple of times I started, and then abandoned threads on the bizarre nature of New York political speech.  Trump is a New Yorker.  So is Mario Cuomo.  It's odd to think that they're from the same state as Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller.  It's almost as if at some point all New York politicians determined that they had to watch Goodfellas for speech cues.

That other New Yorker

New York City.

Mario Cuomo is in big trouble right now, of course, as well.

Cuomo is in the class of New York politicians that the New York based press loved, but outside of New York, he was really hard to take.  Of course, in the American fashion, the same forces that adored him have now turned on him like a pack of wolves.

I haven't followed his decline but it all has to do with "inappropriateness" and women.  I don't know if he's guilty or not, and I'm not going to investigate the whole thing as its not worth my time to do so, but its interesting how he went from hero to goat overnight.

Prince Harry, wuss

Prince Harry. . . oh wait, King Edward VIII, and earlier royal wuss.

This will be inappropriate Prince Harry and his wife Meaghan are in the news once again as they were interviewed by Oprah.

I can't stand Oprah in the first place as she's too emblematic of false pop culture.  It'd figure that she'd interview the royal whiners.

I figure that every family has its problems, and the British Royals are no different.  Maybe their existentially set up for this due to a long history of narrowed genetic lines and a whacky institutional role that leaves them with less and less of a role very year.  Their last period of real relevance was during World War Two and now its really hard to figure out what they do, and why they need to do it, if they do.

Be that as it may, Prince Harry had some merit until he married Meaghan, but now he just seems to be a full time drama queen.  Enough already.

Getting the Amy Coney  Barrett treatment?

Representative Haaland, who got yelled at by Sen. Barrasso.

Senator John Barrasso was front and center in the news concerning Deb Haaland's confirmation as Secretary of the Interior, and not in a good way.  Various Native American spokesmen felt that she'd received the Amy Coney Barrett treatment, so to speak, in being singled out due to her ethnicity for abusive treatment.  Sen. Barrasso interrupted her at one point and yelled "I'm talking about the law", which was apparently a reaction to what he thought were efforts to dodge questions he posed.

This wasn't as bad, however, as the statement by Louisiana Senator Joe Kennedy who called her a "neo socialist, left of Lenin, whack job".

Haaland is the first Native American nominated to the post.  In reaction to her getting rough treatment Native Americans in Montana purchased a billboard advertisement supporting her.  Senator Barrasso really can't stop her appointment and probably ought to back off a bit unless he's absolutely certain that the GOP is taking back Congress in 2022, which he can't be certain of.

Rebranding a Jeep Brand?

A Jeep before they were called that. The short lived Bantam 1/4 ton Army truck, the very first, and extremely tiny, Jeep.

The Cherokee nation wants Jeep to quit calling the Jeep Cherokee the "Cherokee" and it will probably do so.

There are and were a lot of automobiles named after Indian tribes and it was meant as an honorific, not an insult.  Jeep probably has no choice but to do this, but the fact of the matter is that it's better to be remembered as a Jeep name than forgotten, which is what is generally the case for Indian tribes.  I can't say having your name on the side of an automobile leads to a lot of deep thought about your culture, but it might lead to at least some.

The term "cancel culture" is big in the zeitgeist right now, and this does indeed seem to be a legitimate example of it.  At least it isn't a "woke" example, like the flap over UW's "The world needs more Cowboys" campaign of a couple of years ago.

Banning the pumps.

Gas station obviously built in the day before they were a topic of controversy.

Petulma California banned the construction of new gasoline stations in an effort to address climate change.

I don't know that this does anything  It sounds more like a city zoning matter ("we think gasoline stations are ugly") than a legitimate ecological effort.  It's not like people won't be able to buy gas.  Indeed, present owners of gas stations in Petulma are probably jumping for joy. . . as are lawyers who will soon be suing arguing that this is an unfair and unconstitutional restraint of trade.

But those why might  be engaging in a little Schadenfreude right now would be well advised not to.  I'm constantly hearing that electric vehicles "won't work here" as if cars are built for Wyoming, or that "Americans love to travel too much . . . "  Auto makers are now making it plain that in 2030. . . and that's just nine years, the day of the petroleum fired vehicles is going to rapidly end.  In that way, Petulma may be on to something, but not in the right fashion, as charging stations are going to be going up all over California, not gasoline stations.

Navy requiring sailors to re take their enlistment oaths

One of the things the recent insurrection brought to light is that there are a disturbing number of servicemen who have have brought radical politics into the military.

This has actually been known for sometime and was a pretty big story in military backchannels the past few years, but the general public seems to have been unaware of it.  Now its getting some daylight and the services are openly taking steps to do something about it.

You can trace a lot of this back to at least 1973, and maybe a full history of it would have to go back to 1940.  Traditionally, the US has had next to no standing military at all, with the Navy being the exception.  Indeed, American culture prior to World War Two had a strong anti military sentiment to it.  Career soldiers were usually looked down upon by civilians, including the officers.  You'd not guess it now, but the Frontier Army was completely disdained by most Americans, including those who lived in the West, except times of real conflict.  Cowboys, for example, had no use for soldiers at all.  

This view carried on right up to 1940.  Dwight Eisenhower's father in law, John Doud, tried to get him to leave the military at the time of his marriage to Mamie, as he regarded it, like most executives did, as a dead end career for the lazy.

I'm not endorsing that view, but I'm noting that it was a fact.  Indeed, it was so much a fact that heroes of some big wars, prior to World War Two, had spent part of their careers out of uniform prior to them, even if they were professional soldiers.  U.S. Grant and William Sherman provide such examples.

By and large, the nation relied upon the state militias, later the National Guard, for national defense if a bit war broke out.  The two big World Wars of the 20th Century changed that view and we went into the Cold War with a large military made up of conscripts.  When that became unpopular due to the Vietnam War, we went all volunteer once again.

There's a lot of merit to an all volunteer force. . . if its small, but we've never really achieved that.  The current size of the U.S. Army is 475,000, which is actually a very large force.  The Navy and the Air Force each have about 330,000 personnel.  The Marines number 182,000.  In contrast, for example, the Marine Corps in 1939 amounted to just about 20,000 personnel.

The population of the country is bigger, the pay for servicemen is better, and its much harder to get in than it used to be, of course.  But the country has also gone into a period of real hero worship regarding servicemen which is unwarranted.  People act as if every soldier is a saint and thank everyone whoever was in, including myself, "for your service".  

It's not the case, of course, that the military is a reservoir of the far, far right, like the Reichsheer was or something.  But there are a lot of things going on with the modern military that really need to be addressed. This is one of them.  Social experimentation is another one.  It may be that the military is recruiting some of the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and creating the wrong situation.

Before this seems too extreme, one of the insurrectionist who is most commented on right now is the dopey women who was an Army veteran.  There are so many things wrong with this that it requires another thread.  Less noticed is that one of the figures was a female Army captain, serving out a period in which she's anticipated to be released, who has a psyops assignment.  That's really bad.

Dopey Virginia

So Virginia jumped on the dope bus and also legalized marijuana.

Are we not suffering from enough mental checking out already?

This trend is obviously going to keep on keeping on right up until lawyers file suit for health problems associated with weed, which will be coming.  At that time, some Schadenfreude will be pretty justified.

Boy Scouts file bankruptcy plan

It would pay the survivors of abuse $6,000 each.  The Scouts are selling some of their art collection to fund this.

We've discussed the Scouts here recently, but there seems to be so much institutionally wrong with the organization right now that a person can really wonder what of it will survive.  Much of what happened to it can't be discussed in the current political climate as no matter what a person says, it's going to be taken the wrong way.  Given that, the organization keeps headed off in a direction which appears to be the wrong way itself.

More voting restrictions bills.

Voting, the way that Victor David Hanson imagines it happed up until November 2020.

Most recently in Georgia.

These are suddenly a hot topic in GOP circles even though there's no evidence of any voting fraud.  To a certain extent there's at least a little bit of a resentful backchannel feeling that making it easy to vote mostly makes it easy for Democrats to vote, a feeling not wholly without merit in the past.  Republicans, for whatever reason, tended to go to the polls. The more numerous Democrats did not.

The irony is, however, that as the Republican Party has aged, it now tends to be the party that doesn't show up in person.  These efforts therefore probably hurt the Republicans more than they help them.

Trumps take the vaccine. . . 

but say nothing about it, back in January.

There's a really anti vax sentiment in certain sections of the GOP.  President Trump questioned the vaccines early on while also boosting dubious or even dangerous COVID 19 treatments.  He himself received the best of care when he was infected and there's reason to believe that he would have died if he hadn't received them.  He urged people to get vaccinated later, in complete fairness, but he didn't get them publicly.  The reason probably has to do with not wanting to offend part of his base.

There are no medical or scientific based reasons not to be vaccinated.  The lingering suspicion on the vaccines is wholly unwarranted.  This goes back to an unfortunate, and lethal, movement that got started some years ago based on non science and boosted by people who didn't know what they were talking about.  Now its hard to overcome.

The only legitimate reasons not to take the vaccine are medical and moral.  There are those who would need to avoid the vaccines for medical reasons, although they'll be few in number.  Some people hold religious objections to all vaccinations, and while I find that poorly grounded in sound theology, those who hold those views hold them and that must be respected.  Often those same people eschew medial treatments of all kind.

Early on there were some Catholic Bishops who objected to the vaccines based on their stem cell lines, given the connection with abortion, but that was rapidly put down as an objection by the Vatican.  Now there are some who are objecting to the Johnson & Johnson line for the same reason.  That has yet to be fully resolved but that vaccine has just come out and, if a person has that objection, they can get one of the other ones.

People have generally been pretty good sports about this, but at some point people who are refusing on grounds lacking a solid base are going to be faced with the question of whether they pose an unfair risk to everyone else and society in general. That may sound heavy handed, but having lived through earlier really strong public vaccination efforts, no matter what a person might think about it now, there will likely be little sympathy as more and more people are vaccinated.  I suspect that back when I was a kid plenty of children were vaccinated at school without any real involvement by their parents, and parents in the era would have disdained any parent who didn't have their kids line up for shots.  People had lived through horrible diseases and they'd had enough.  The Army didn't ask your permission to vaccinate back in the day either, as the ironically kinder and gentler Army of today does, which leads to this. . . 

You may have freedom on conscience but businesses have the freedom of the marketplace

You used to see the "No shirt, no shoes, no service" signs up at restaurants all the time.  Soon you are going to be asked for your proof of vaccination to get on an airplane, or a ride at Disneyland.  Freedom of conscience on this issue will mean that you have the freedom to stay home and watch television.

I've frankly been amazed that more employers haven't required vaccinations.  Universities require vaccinations for a host of diseases and they will on this one as well.  Public schools are going to soon, almost certainly.  Which brings me to this. . .

HPV?  Oh, that's okay, as it involves sex.

It really says something about how messed up American society is right now that lots of people who won't get vaccinated for a disease that you pick up simply by being around somebody else who has it, and who even believe that the vaccination is part of some big plot, but they don't think twice about lining their teenage daughters up for the HPV vaccine.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, so yo have to be having sex to get it.  If you subscribe to what was once conventional morality, prior to the days of Playboy, Friends and The Big Bang Theory, your chances of getting it would be next to nil.  Now, of course, thanks to Hugh Hefner, Playboy and Cosmopolitan's charge against morality and ultimately biology, the disease is out there and lot of people basically forced into destructive sex are exposed to it.  

I've only known one person who has refused to have a child vaccinated for it and I don't have an objection myself to anyone receiving it.  I find it interesting, however, that people wills hove a kid as young as 9 to get a vaccination for disease that's perfectly possible to avoid based on the assumption that they can't control themselves from engaging in an act which at least takes some effort of the will, mentally, to engage in, as well as an exchange of bodily fluids in a sexual act, but they'll not get vaccinated for something you can get just walking down the street.

What's that Tat mean?

A Wyoming legislator has been explaining his tattoo.  It turns out to be a "Three Percenter" tattoo.

He's a Libertarian and says that he had no idea of the meaning of the tattoo, which I wouldn't have known either.  Apparently it has "1776" and the Roman numeral "III" and is supposed to mean that only 3% of Americans at the time of the Revolution supported it.

In actuality, 1/3d, that would be 33% of the Americans at the time supported the Revolution, 33% opposed it, and the remainder waited to see which way it went or had no strong opinion.  Unusual for revolutions, prominent figures in commerce strongly supported it.  Frankly, if only 3% had supported it, that would be nothing to celebrate as that would mean that it was a completely illegitimate revolution.  Even the fact that only 33% supported it is more than a little problematic in that regard, frankly.

I'll be frank that I'm not a fan of tattoos at all.  It's not like I'm going to argue for banning them or something, but the more people that get them, the less they mean.  And I suspect that this phenomenon of people not knowing what a tattoo means is probably incredibly common.  People put Chinese or Japanese characters on their body being told they mean one thing, and not gasping at all how the writing in those languages work.  I suspect that more than one message of that type is a joke by somebody who does speak those languages.  People tattoo phrases and symbols from religions as well not knowing that those symbols carry a lot more meaning, and indeed obligation, than a person might suppose.

Tattoos have now become a massively common part of our society.  It's curious. As we have come to stand for less and less, people obviously reach out to try to grasp something.  But people don't grasp onto those things that really have meaning, as then you have to comport your life accordingly.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 7. One more won't hurt me. . .

or so conservatives must think.

Senator Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy was actually largely correct in his accusations, once you see what they really were, and who they were actually made against.  He very clearly had an inside connection with somebody with intelligence inside the government.  My guess is that it was J. Edgar Hoover.  At any rate, while he was correct, he became personally so distasteful that he permanently damaged his cause and even later books that have shown the validity of his accusations have failed to repair his reputation or that of his cause.  He was loved at the time, of course, until he wasn't. There's a lesson here.

Donald Trump has been invited to speak at CPAC in Orlando, this Sunday.

Why would they do this? This will confirm Democrats and Independents, and traditional Republicans, in their choice not to go with the GOP this year, further decrease its influence, and make it harder for those who hold populist views seriously without it looking like simply Trump worship.

People like Victor David Hanson like to speak of "Trump Derangement Syndrome". While that may be worth talking about, the fact is that Trump didn't win the popular vote by any measure either time he ran.  He's not a popular man with the majority of Americans and by inviting him, the issues that concern populist Republicans are being fused to Trump in a way that will guaranty their electoral decimation in upcoming elections.

This is a serious matter.  Populists do have a collection of valid concerns and valid points about them. But Trump's effort at overturning the election and failure to distance himself from extremist are tarring all of them and the entire movement with the same brush.  The tighter the grip Trump has on any section of the GOP, the less likely it is to win anything at the national level going forward, and the more likely that the result will be a permanent shift of the American political center to the left.

McCarthy may have been right about most of the things he was complaining about in the 1950s.  But he was easy to dislike and has become permanently disliked. There's a lesson from history here and we all know what happens to people who fail to listen to history.

Nonetheless, what is clear at this point is that the traditional conservative wing of the party is now in full retreat.  Mitch McConnell, who only a couple of weeks ago sounded like he wanted to have Trump arrested, has stated he'd vote for him if he ran in 2024.  And right now, quite frankly, it looks like such a run is really likely, something that even a few weeks ago would have been regarded as highly unlikely.  As it remains unlikely that Joe Biden will run again, that would likely pit Trump against Kamala Harris, if . . . 

Doesn't anyone notice how old these people are?

If, that is, Trump hasn't passed on simply due to old age, or become mentally feeble due to the same reason.  

It's bizarre to see how even at this late state of the Baby Boom generation, people remain seriously entrenched in the seeming view that only they can lead the nation.  A person would have had good reason to believe that Joe Biden would have been the last Boomer President.  Now, that's not all that certain, as nothing in this political climate is very certain.

Restricting Balloting.

There's a lot of GOP effort being expended to address, proponents claim, chances of "election fraud", even though there's next to none of it occurring.

In Wyoming, legislators have a couple of bills floating on  the topic.  Senators Barrasso and Lummis have signed on to a Federal bill that will fail which will basically prevent States from making the reforms they did to address the still ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic.  The law proposes to eliminate unmonitored ballot collection boxes (one of which I saw in Rawlins just last week) and to require states to send absentee ballots only to those requesting them.

This is another issue that will come to haunt the GOP. There's no evidence of widespread ballot fraud at all, and this plays into the Democratic claim that the Republicans are seeking to restrict the vote.  While this will play to the Trumpite base, it won't play to the traditional wing of the party, which is now simply leaving it.

XX Chromosomes and Scouting

The first group of female Eagle Scouts received that status this week.

First of all, that's great for this group of young women. Achieving Eagle Scout status is hard to do, and they deserve praise for their accomplishments.

But it's also sad in a way in that its a further erosion of, well dare we say it, manliness.

Girls can be girls, but boys can't really be boys anymore, even virtuous boys, which was what the Boy Scouts were all about originally.

Let's be honest.  Because human nature remains human nature no matter how woke some may be and wish for everything to be, there are fundamental differences between men and women, and boys and girls, at every level.  Scouting recognized that, and hence that's why there was a Boy Scouts and a Girl Scouts.

While I note that I'm not an adherent every time I cite them, and then I go on to cite them, Strauss and How, in their generational theory (there's a category link to it below) argue that the character of men is different in different cycles as a whole (not necessarily individually) due to the views of women in any particular period.  So, for a lack of a better way to illustrate it, in some eras women want a bunch of touchy feely wimps such as featured on This Is Us.  In others, they want Ethan Edwards from The Searchers.

This makes sense from a evolutionary biology prospective, as women's role in elemental societies is, well, more societal than men's.  But rather crudely, if you live in a society that's about to be attacked, you want guys who are capable of handling that.  If you live in one where there's no risk of being attacked, you might now want guys who are looking for fights.

There's a lot more to this than that, but we live in an oddly emasculating era which has superseded a highly masculine one.  If Strauss and How are right, generational succession goes from Hero, Artist Prophet to Nomad.  They also figure the categories of generations by years a bit more differently, which is to their credit, as they would have the Baby Boom Generation ending earlier than some others do.   You can read all about that elsewhere, but they also have a concept of cyclical crises and periods of stability that impact generations, with women generally being the cultural influencers that impact male character patterns, if not necessarily individual males, at any one time.

Okay, so what?

Well, we are living in a very female influenced era culturally.  One that has even seen the intrusion of women into roles that are not only traditionally male, but arguably biologically male, from an evolutionary biological prospective and even attacks on the concept of gender itself, biologically unsounds though that may be.  And part of what occurs, when this occurs, is that men, and before that boys, really have no refuge in which they can be just guys.

This doesn't mean there's some previous era in which everything in regard to male/female roles was perfectly defined, although in a lot of ways that changes much less than people like to imagine, and perceptions of change have more to do with economic changes in broad economies at any one time then the do with actual changes in cultural views.  And it doesn't mean that there should be some sort of strict segregation between boys and girls at all times. Indeed, at least in my view, strict segregation at the primary school level actually tends to encourage vices, and the societies that practice that usually see the results later on in men and women who never learned about the others in their formative years with resulting permanent impacts on their characters.

But it does mean that there ought to be at least some places where boys can go just to be boys, and to learn, well, many things.  And the same is true in the opposite direction for girls. And indeed, for girls, it still is.  There's been no male penetration into deeply female roles or organizations in any meaningful sense.  Find a boy in the Girl Scouts and chances are high that you are going to find an odd storty behind it, and one that is probably vested in that person's parents.

Find a girl in the Boy Scouts, or now just the Scouts, and what you'll find is high achieving girls.  You'll also soon fine less manly boys in the same organizations, which have been having troubles recently anyhow, and soon just fewer boys in general.  Some will remain, but they won't be the same group that would have been there otherwise, and those who are there, aren't going to learn the same lessons they would have otherwise.  Overall, everyone will suffer for that.*

They forgot what society they lived in

People like Mike Lindell, that is.

Lindell is the founder of the My Pillow company. I don't know anything about the pillows and not that much about Lindell, other than his personal story is really a classic rags to riches type tale.  

In the U.S., that's enough to cause people to love and hate you, which is something to keep in mind.  He's also a vocal Evangelical Christian, which also will draw praise while drawing some dislike as well.  None of that, however, is what he's now in trouble for.

Lindell has been sued by Dominion Voting which is sick and tired of its voting machines being slammed.  Lindell made claims that Dominion rigged the election for Joe Biden, a statement for which not only is there no evidence, it's demonstrably false.  Dominion is a business and they don't like their product being hammered by falsehoods, no deeply believed by those who are asserting those falsehoods.

People like Victor David Hanson like to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome which they claim causes people on the left to be completely irrational about Donald Trump. An argument can be made that some of that did in fact exist during the Trump Administration, particularly early on. The problem is that the same term can also apply to Trump's diehard supporters.

One of the things about Trump is, quite frankly, that while he had real accomplishments he has major character defects.  He's boorish, crude, and has had a history of questionable behavior with women.  He's also a prima donna and narcissist who simply can't stand the thought of public criticism or losing.  

In normal US politics that would doom a person, but it didn't with Trump.  A lot of his base supporters originally didn't care about any of that as long as he acted as a wrecker.  Over time, he's developed a personality cult that nearly worships him, in spite of all of his obvious faults.  People in that category suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome as well as they can't be objective at all about Trump.

This doesn't apply to every Trump supporter by any means.  But it applies to some.  Guys like Lindell and Patrick Coffin seem to have simply fallen off the reality wagon and are willing to endorse all sorts of conspiracy theories about one thing or another.  Coffin, who used to be an objective conservative religious voice now hosts people who see Bill Gates conspiring to create a pandemic in order to create a new world order.  Lindell boosted the Dominion nonsense.  

Lindell is now one of several figures getting sued by Dominion. Dominion no doubt doesn't hope to be reimbursed by them for their losses, whatever those may be, but is out to repair its reputation through litigation. The litigation will achieve that.

Dopey New Jersey

The Garden State has legalized weed.  Because that's what people in New Jersey really need to be, stoned.

Not that New Jersey is by any means alone in this, to be sure.  It's just following the pack.  

It does say something that in early 21st Century America, however, one of the biggest movements of the day is one that allows people to be oblivious.

Exit Franco

Francisco and Ramon Franco, 1925, in North Africa.

A statute honoring Francisco Franco's role as a commander in the Rif War, put up in 1978 was taken down this past week.  Apparently it was the last one, which is remarkable in part as it was put up in the 1970s.

Franco had his supporters in Spain during his long dictatorship, as well as his supporters elsewhere.  All that now seems definitively in the past.  Having said that, this has been a strange trip.  Franco had his supporters in the west during the civil war period that proceeded World War Two, and even had some after that.  Indeed, quite a few.  During much of the 30s he was, however, disdained by the American left including the popular media.  World War Two certainly increased that disdain, and for good reasons, as he crept up on joining Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the war.  By war's end, however, he was courting the west.  His regime died with him, which he was aware would occur, but he retained sufficient support for a monument to his command in the Spain's colonist Rif campaign was still erected, which is pretty amazing really. And we just passed the 40th anniversary of the attempted 1981 Fracoist coup, which of course failed.

Nobody in Span is going to try a Francoist coup now.

Streaming

Paramount movies has announced it will provide movies for streaming 45 days after their initial release.

Sign of the times.

Footnotes

*And, no, I wasn't an Eagle Scout.

I was in Scouting so briefly that I usually say I was never a Boy Scout.  In actuality I was, but as noted, very briefly.

Two Neighbors: 'Gun nut' has a warning in the U.S., Trudeau breaks out the soy milk in Canada.

A disclaimer right off the bat.  This is not a "pro gun control" post here on Lex Anteinternet.  

If you read it all the way through, that'll be plain.

This is an op ed from the Star Tribune.  It probably frankly will get this guy a lot of hate mail.  But it's worth reading.

Sexton: 'Gun nut' has a warning

This past week I ran an item noting that the Biden Administration has indicated it's going to try to implement some gun control measures.  I'm sure it will, but I also doubt that they'll come into effect.  If they do, they'll be a lot of howling and screaming, but one of the parties that will really deserve the blame for this, the National Rifle Association, will be one of the ones howling the most.  Sexton nails the reason why.

Advertisement for a semi automatic Remington rifle from prior to World War Two.

Sexton is really bold in spelling something out that's going to have to be addressed:

By my twenties I had a sizable collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. Some people I knew had a “pre-64” Winchester, a rifle renowned for its quality. Or they had a Browning Auto 5, a beautiful shotgun. A friend had ten of those in various gauges.

But gun nuts today are a different breed entirely. When they talk about guns they don’t get into describing graceful lines, tight grain wood or immaculate bluing. At gun stores today what I hear praised is firepower that comes out of black plastic and steel. And these weapons are not for hunting, they’re assault rifles sometimes called “modern sporting guns.” The kind of sport they’re good for is not spelled out.

I can indicate what sort of sport they're good for.  For one thing, rifles of the AR type are now necessary for those who shoot service rifle competition.  The M14 type rifle was necessary for that before.  At some point the ODCMP changed the rules, and they really had to, to require the AR type rifle to be used as it was embarrassing to have the M14 kicking the butt of the rifle that replaced it, the M16, and the justification for the service rifle competition, which is a serious discipline, is to promote military style marksmanship in the civilian population, so that it's useful in time of war.

They're also a plinker, frankly, and they're useful for that.  I.e., they're easy to shoot and they have low recoil so they're something that a person can spend hours at a range, or wherever, shooting and never really feel like they beat you up.  And that's legitimate.  Where they are of very low utility is in the game fields (which will be discussed below) as the 5.56 isn't a really great hunting cartridge and in my view shouldn't really be an approved big game cartridge and, moreover, the AR is actually a pretty lousy firearms design.  Just the other day I discussed the Army's long running effort to dump both the cartridge and the AR.  It's frankly pretty junky, in spite of its present civilian reputation.*

Before a person goes to far on this, such competitions aren't unique to the United States.  Switzerland, for example, has an equivalent. So does Norway.  It is a sport, and a fully legitimate one.

But here's the problem.

Something has happened, and the NRA participated in spades, in which this sort of use was no longer focused on, and hunting use was no longer focused on, but it became the full-scale campaign based on fear and frankly an unreasonable fear. The thesis was that everyone lived in a state of constant unyielding peril where a gun battle was about to break out any moment.  And over time that developed into an undercurrent that suggested that it wasn't just a gun battle, but basically the Battle of Stalingrad that was about to break out.

Free Syrian Army soldiers in Syria.  To read the pages of the American Rifle man and other firearms stuff now days, you'd think this is what daily life in Parker Colorado is like.

Now, let me be perfectly clear.  I support the right to keep and bear arms and my view of that right and ownership of firearms to protect yourself is pretty supportive of it.  I still think what Jeffrey Snyder stated in A Nation Of Cowards is right on the money.  I also think that John R. Lott proved  his point with More Guns Less Crime.  I do believe that there are people who need to carry a handgun to protect themselves, and moreover, a person has to judge that for themselves, rather than have some governmental agency judge it for them.  And unlike Sexton, I don't question that there are reasons for civilians to own ARs of any type.  If I were a resident of Dayton or Detroit, I might very well want a military style rifle to defend myself in some circumstances.

None of that is the point.

What the point is, is the culture of the topic, and that's a developed one, and that's where Sexton has a point.

The NRA really became involved in opposing gun control with the Gun Control Act of 1968.  If you looked at the covers of its magazine, the American Rifleman, you'd rarely have realized that at the time, however, and mostly would have seen firearms that were used in hunting, or competitive shooting, or which were historical in nature featured.  You'd have had to read the journals editorial section to be aware of that, for the most part.  In the 1970s and 1980s its big writer was Finn Aagaard, a former professional hunter in Kenya and a dedicated hunting rifle expert.**  Rifles like Mauser 98s and Winchester Model 70s appeared.

Military arms or military type arms rarely appeared on the covers and when they did, they tended to be collector items.  In 1968, for example, a female marksman, dressed in a dress, a heavily engraved large revolver, and the firearms of George Washington made the cover.  In 1980, quite awhile later, hunting rifles and shotguns, and sporting pistols made the cover.  The only military cover, if you will, featured a pistol target shooter at Camp Perry, the big annual service arm competition.  The same was much the true in 1981, except that year a marksman at Camp Perry and revolvers from the Union Army in the Civil War made the cover, so there were two military themes, if you will.  In 1982 a combat type arm didn't make the cover at all.

The legendary rifle range at Camp Perry, Ohio, in 1913.

Indeed, I don't know when the AR15 type rifle first made the cover, but it may have been in May, 1985, when the Vietnam War Memorial was pictured.  I'm sure there was discussion of it as early as the 1960s, and I'm also pretty sure early on its noted stoppage problems were discussed in the journal.*** 

Anymore, while I wasn't able to pull it up to really determine the numbers, the AR is constantly on the cover. And so are politics.  Now politics have been on the cover at least as far back as the Reagan administration, as he was friendly to the NRA. But leading up to 2016, the NRA went full scale into the Trump campaign.  Indeed, back in the 70s and 80s, the NRA still acknowledged it when Democratic politicians were friendly to their positions, but starting with the Obama campaign, the organization unleashed unyielding vitriol no matter what positions were actually being taken.  With Trump it reached a state of near hagiography.

The evolution in its content was pretty significant over this time.  In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, you could expect to find their position on gun control in their magazine, but  it was clear that the readers of the magazine were mostly those who shot on ranges or in the game fields, and with arms of fairly conventional types.  Advertisements reflected that as well.  Now, however, article after article features the AR and its near fellows and a casual reader would assume that the magazine was geared towards those who expected to find themselves in combat in an American street.

Troops of the U.S. Army in Manilla, 1945.  The way that some gun magazines read today, you'd think that the readers expect to find themselves fighting here.

Coincident with this, and perhaps in part due to their earlier positions, American streets have become safer and safer.  Some large American cities such as New York could be regarded as credibly headed towards anarchy in the 1970s, but this simply is no longer true.  Murders in New York are at all time lows and almost all involve unique circumstances that the average person is pretty unlikely to get caught up in.  And the NRA can claim credit for being hugely successful at rolling back the tide on gun control, which needed to be rolled back.

But by embracing a vision of the world in which everyone is about to find themselves in combat its encouraged a view that's fed into an increasingly militarization of a section of the American populace.  This past summer we saw, here in our city, people packing military type weapons on the streets for several days ostensibly to "protect" store owners from rioters who didn't exist.  The only gathering that occurred at the time was one made up of young people and people who like gatherings during the George Floyd episode.  A person quietly taking a handgun to work or their store, or something like that, may have made sense.  Patrolling the streets as if its Hue, 1968, really didn't.

At the same time that this has occurred something really weird has happened in American culture concerning the worship of all things military.  Indeed, this is feeding back into the military itself, something we'll address some other time.

On this, however, I'd note that when I was growing up almost every male had been in the service.  All of my in town uncles had been and so had my father.  It was so common, you nearly assumed that every male had been, and indeed because of World War Two and the Korean War, this was nearly true.  The Vietnam War was on for my entire early youth, and that speaks for itself.  That war was huge by modern standards, although small in comparison to World War Two, requiring as many as 500,000 American servicemen to be stationed in the country at one time at its height.  And as earlier noted here, I served in the National Guard.

I note that as it simply wasn't really common for civilians to display any element of hero worship over servicemen at the time.  Nobody said "thank you for your service" and usually you didn't even mention it to anyone.  Indeed, in the wake of the Vietnam War, you really hesitated to, as there was an anti military feeling in the country in the 70s that went on for a long time in the 1980s, irrespective of a lot of Americans continuing to serve in the military.  

I don't know when it started, but I think it might be tacked back to the "Greatest Generation" tag that baby boomers started to use for their parents after they felt sufficiently guilty about kicking them around for decades.  The generation that fought the Second World War suffered enormously, given that they also had to content with the Great Depression, but the hagiography that's attached to them since the book of that name came out has really been over the top.  Frankly, neither the World War Two generation or the Baby Boomers deserve any special prizes for societal virtue, although once again, the generation that fought World War Two suffered uniquely.  The one that fought World War One suffered uniquely too, and the Civil War stands out by itself as something disasterous.  Anyhow, after Tom Brokaw decided to start praising his own parents generation, all of a sudden "thank you for your service" started showing up everywhere.

That spilled over into feeling pretty badly about having kicked Vietnam veterans around following their return from the war, although the extent to which that has been over portrayed is pretty significant. Be that as it may, it did occur and for some time popular entertainment depicted every Vietnam vet as a psychopathic nut.  That swung around in the 1980s when Reagan entered office and popular entertainment started depicting every Vietnam vet as an underappreciated hero.

Marines in Hue in 1968.  Goats one moment, heroes the next.

It was also Reagan who started the habit of giving service members a snappy salute, and he had of course been in the Army Reserve prior to World War Two (at a time when the Reserve was in fact very small) and in the Army during the war, although never in a combat role.  Some would and did belittle that, but I'm not going to as service of any kind is real service and, moreover, its more service than John Wayne had, who is commonly oddly regarded as some sort of military hero.

Ronald Reagan greeting Margaret Thatcher and wearing a G1 flight jacket.  Reagan typically saluted the Marine guards when he came on or off Marine One, and the same for servicemen when he came on or off Air Force One.  For some veterans of the day, including my father, it was incredibly irritating.  For that matter, the latter day change in service regulations that allows veterans, myself included, to salute for certain things is incredibly irritating to me, and I don't do it.  The recent habit of Presidents wearing service flight jackets also seems to go back to Reagan, who after all had been an actor and who knew a lot about presentation.

Anyhow, this all gets into the law of unintended consequences, but the Cold War ended in 1990 and the service started shrinking.  Fewer and fewer people served just as at the same time praise of servicemen grew louder and louder.  The wars that followed the Cold War were fought by volunteers and National Guardsmen, who are volunteers, and not by conscripts as had been the case for World War One, World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam.  And as that happened, the praise of servicemen turned into hero worship, and that has now turned into something else.  And that has fed into what Sexton has noted, and what has gone on in regard to firearms noted above.

Just as fewer and fewer American males had any sort of military service, forces in the culture kept telling them that they should be expected to fight at any moment.  Men who had never been issued a military rifle, who had never been made to memorize the Rifleman's Creed, or forced to march to the Jody Call of "This is my rifle, this is my gun", or who had never marched along chanting to the imaginary "Captain Jack" about meeting him with rifle in hand at the railroad tracks, or who had never been made to chant the lament "I used to date the high school queen, now I carry an M16" were told they absolutely need to have a M4 carbine to defend their house.  Indeed, by this point quite a few of those men are two generations removed from an era when military service was nearly universal.****

Indeed, by way of an example, during my long service in the National Guard I served with a large number of Vietnam veterans and, as this is Wyoming, lots of them were shooters or hunters.  I didn't know a single one who claimed to own an AR15 and they almost all detested the M16.  One experienced combat veteran I was friends with was a dedicated hunter, and he hunted with a full military M1903 Springfield rifle with iron sights, as that's what he'd hunted with as a kid.  A long ways from the pages of the American Rifleman which maintain that everyone needs to use the AR15 and its clones for everything.

Also by example, we were pretty careful in telling anyone we were Guardsmen at the time.  Nobody was going to thank us for our service and there was a better risk that some girl we might be trying to ask out would be turned off right away, or at least give us a lecture.  Nobody was going to walk around town with a "molon labe" t-shirt.  I don't even remember seeing unit shirts.  Some of us had artillerymen's t-shirts, as that's what we were, which means that nobody ran around pretending to be a sniper.  Indeed, the entire time I was a Guardsman I met an actual sniper once, in South Korea.  He didn't seem to be particularly impressed with himself as a sniper.^

Now that's all changed, and not for the better.

Some years ago I happened to be at a youth event in which a group was taking up space we needed.  I casually walked up to them to discover that they were a group of civilians that were getting yelled at by an instructor drill sergeant style.  These people, mostly male but including one woman, had paid this fellow to instruct them in the use of combat arms.  They apparently also expected, as part of that, to be yelled at as if their instructor was a DI.

Now, there is a shooting game that does just this, and its legitimate. But that's not what these people were doing.  They'd paid to be yelled at so that they could pretend in their minds they'd been trained like combat soldiers.  Training combat soldiers takes months, not a few hours, but that's what they were doing.  Why did they think they needed that?

Once again, I don't belittle training people how to use defensive handguns.  I'd rather people know how to do that if they're going to carry than not. And I don't belittle people who take part in competitions based on the combat use of firearms, the same which date back at least to the 1970s.  But training civilians to fight like soldiers as they imagine that they're going to need to fight like soldiers is odd.

But there are a lot of people who have been encouraged in that belief.

And that gets us back to where we are now.

On January 6 some of the people who had been encouraged in that belief stormed the Capital.  Prior to that, on November 4, some of the people who had been encouraged in that belief were elected to Congress.  No matter how many people have been encouraged in that belief, there's a lot more people who don't see things that way at all, and now they're really scared.^^

And they're going to react.

It's common for gun owners to point to Nazi Germany or Communist Russia as examples of the dangers of gun control.  I don't really know if the examples are valid, particularly that of Nazi Germany, as it was actually Weimar Germany that had brought gun control in, and that story is really complicated and tied to the Versailles Treaty.  It's probably true of Communist Russia following the Civil War.  A better example might be the Irish Republic, however.  

The Irish Republic came into existence through the use of firearms, which the British prior to World War Two really didn't restrict.  The Irish sure did following Irish independence, however.  Ireland had seen their use in civil combat and acted to pretty much completely control their ownership in order to stop anything like that happening again, Ireland's independence by that means notwithstanding. 

The NRA has been hugely successful in rolling back gun control  Coming out of World War Two and all the way into the 1970s, the majority of Americans supported an outright ban on the ownership of handguns.  If you'd asked me in 1981 what I thought would occur, I would have told you that the days of control of handgun ownership were right over the horizon.  And the NRA has been a factor in lawsuits and the support of judicial appointments that have done a lot to roll that frontier back.  Much of that was achieved before the Trump Administration, however, and in actuality at least as far back as the 2008 election Democrats had quietly dropped gun control as something they were really pushing.

That got them no credit and instead the NRA not only continued to lambast President Obama, who had done very little in this area, but it backed Donald Trump full scale. At the same time they went from an organization that publicly focused shooting sports very strongly to one that really emphasized the defense role of weapons in cities.  As this occurred, fewer and fewer Americans served in the military and more and more, mostly men, became fascinated with what they think the military is about, or at least imagined themselves as soldiers.  And then, from 2016 forward all of this was encouraged by a political atmosphere that portrayed party of the country as the enemy of the other, and that suggested we were near a life and death struggle over the fate of the nation.

And that's going to have an impact. And that impact will be what those who struggled in the NRA in the 70s and 80s feared the most.  The Democrats have no need to fear the NRA anymore.  It's not going to give them any credit and the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump is fractured and potentially headed into two parties. The element of that party that's most likely to howl over gun control is probably headed towards political irrelevancy.  The Wyoming GOP will probably pass bills that attempt to preclude the Federal law from being enforced, but unlike Canadian provinces, states can't nullify the Federal law and this will, in short order, just look pathetic and further distance the state from any political influence.

Normally, of course, the question would be asked, "what can be done?".  Probably nothing.  Only the courts can really stop anything that's passed now, and they might, but they very well might not.  Congress might not, as noted, pass anything.  The impact of things in Congress is slow.  Some states certainly will, however.

If courts hold things up, and if Congress fails to do anything quickly, this is the breathing room, and there's previous little of it, that those concerned about Second Amendment rights will have.  And what that means is acknowledging that firearms have a role in personal safety, but a civil war isn't going to break out.  It'd be well worth remembering that, in American history, backing insurrection has been a bad bet in every sense, particularly politically.

And then there's our neighbor to the North.

I hadn't really intended this post to include Canada, but right after I started the Canadian Liberals (a party, not a category) which control the Canadian government via a minority government (they don't have an absolute parliamentary majority) introduced its second major gun control bill in two years.  It's grossly overbroad.

Canada doesn't have a "gun problem". For that matter, the United States doesn't have a "gun problem" either.  The United States is developing an odd alt right mindset problem in one large section of its population which is excessively focused in some quarters, on the concept of a Stalingrad right around the corner, even though it hasn't happened and its not going to.  Indeed, most of those M4 Carbine replicas do nothing more than gather dust.  Canada has developed a far left fuzzy thinking problem.  They're practically mirror images of each other.

Canada is sometimes imagined as "The Great White North", but in reality modern Canada is the Great Urban Belt.  90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US. border.  That makes the US a mirror in a way, but what also tells you is that Canada's population density is basically sort of like that of the US coasts.  Canada has a huge landmass, but people largely don't live in it anymore.

Up until the 1950s they did. 

Canada was once a highly rural and highly conservative society. There's a reason that Canadian troops in World War One and World War Two were good soldiers, just as Australians were. They came from a largely rural background.  

Now, none of that is true.

And what we're seeing in pretty soy boy PM Justin Trudeau's gun control package is a reflection of that.

Just as the alt right wing of the US political spectrum sees a civil war right around the corner for which everyone needs to be armed, the Canadian left sees everything other than going to a children's soccer match as excessively dangerous.  Neither side in these respective camps is capable of seeing the views of the other.

Indeed, Canadian liberalism, a post World War Two development, features the elitist "I know what's good for you" arrogance that all such upper middle class liberal movements do.  It's not that htey don't understand the views of rural and western Canadians, it's that those people shouldn't have those views at all.

Indeed, there are regions of Canada where it makes a lot more sense to be carrying a firearm on a daily basis than in the United States.  While 90% of Canadians may live 100 miles within the US border, 10% don't, and there are still rural Canadians.  In much of the rural United States the most dangerous things a person might encounter would be snakes (which are dangerous) and wild hogs (which are also dangerous). Canada, on the other hand, has really big bears, and they're certainly dangerous.

Given that, what Canada proposes to do is, well, stupid.

This all stems from a 2019 event in which an unhinged lunatic in Nova Scotia impersonated a police officer and killed 22 people over a 13 hour period.  Guns control wouldn't have prevented this.

The killer had some sort of odd fixation on the police, although the murders started with his attacking. but not killing, his common law spouse on the day of their "anniversary" (how a common law couple can have an "anniversary" isn't really clear).  Following that, the killer dressed as a policeman and went around for a prolonged period of time killing people.

The firearms the killer had were all illegally held and, moreover, he was reputed to be basically a long term criminal who had never been caught.  The police were criticized for failure to properly react.  Faced with this, soy boy Trudeau is sponsoring a bill which would have done nothing whatsoever to address what actually occurred.  

This gets into the Liberal Party's flipside, but interestingly similar, world outlook as compared to the American alt  right.  The American alt right sees the world happy on the edge of societal collapse and a world in which it'll be dog eat dog and combat in the street, so everyone needs to be armed.  The Liberal Party sees the world on the edge of being on the edge of blissfully slipping into a My Pink Pony episode in which nobody needs arms of any kind.  Each is equally way off the mark.

Indeed neither seem to have a fundamental grasp of the nature of firearms at all.  

Canada already has a pretty extensive gun control regime right now, although unlike the United States', it can flip over night and it can, moreover, be trumped by provincial refusal.  Indeed, the latter happened when a prior Canadian liberal government instituted the "list", requiring everything to be registered. Alberta simply refused to comply.  Ultimate the following Canadian Conservative government reversed the law.  Lots of Canadian gun owners are hoping for this to occur again.

Current Canadian law has a host of semi automatic rifles that are restricted and licensed in a special fashion, and prohibits the carrying of a sidearm without a local permit.  The new bill would ban the semi automatics, propose to buy them back and for those who would not surrender them (and if post compliance with Canadian firearms laws is any indicator, that would be a huge percentage of the owners), they could license them in a special category where they basically were restricted in how they sued them and couldn't pass them on to anyone else.  In other words, the semi autos would be temporary "rack queens" until their owners died.

The bill would allow Canadian cities to restrict handgun any way they wanted to, right up to and including banning them.  Some Canadian cities, notably Vancouver, have already said they would.

This would actually achieve next to nothing, but it shows the skewed mindset of the Liberals, which is remarkably similar to that of the American alt right.  The American alt right sees Stalingrad right around hte corner and is arming up.  The Canadian liberals seem to think that Stalingrad is right around the corner if they don't ban it.

Neither is correct.

Truth be known there's very little Canadian firearms crime and there's really nothing about that crime that Canada does have that can be distinctly tied to long arm type.  In the rare instances of terrorism that Canada experiences, Canada's experiences show the same features as terrorism anywhere else. Terrorist will get the means.  Mostly what this is about, therefore, is the Liberal government figuring that such weapons are disreputable, as they feel all weapons are disreputable.

Indeed, a video put out by a Canadian minster shows that. She relates how she grew up on a farm and her father carried a rifle or shotgun in his truck for hunting.  But not one of the banned weapons which "are only good for one thing".  They actually are good for more than the "one thing", but this does relate back to the American AR emphasis over the past decade which suggests we need to arm up for that "one thing".  As we've noted elsewhere, however, mechanically there's little existential difference between these arms and semi automatic sof a century or more ago.

The pistol part is even more revealing.

Canadian pistol carry restrictions are frankly absurd as it is. T here's a lot of Canada where a sidearm would be pretty handy.  In the vast Canadian outback, for one thing, they certainly would be, for one thing, due to the fauna.  But beyond that, Canada has its share of murders in remote areas where there's no protection other than yourself.

Indeed, the new law is very illuminating in this fashion.  Vancouver proposes to ban handguns as there are criminal gangs in Vancouver that use handguns.  The thing that Vancouver is missing on this is that there are criminal gangs in Vancouver.  If you are a member of a criminal gang, the legality of your sidearm is unlikely to be a matter of real consideration.  And Vancouver has criminal gangs as its a port city, and every port city on Earth has criminal gangs as they are port cities.

But beyond that, the new law proposes to remove carry permits from local officials to a national office, no doubt because rural western Canada, which doesn't care for any of these laws, is more willing to issue carry permits that hte Liberals would like.  It isn't that they're a problem, it's that the Liberals don't feel you need a permit.

Nobody really has a right to tell anyone when they're imperiled and when they are not, and self defense is an existential right.  The central authority isn't going to see it that way, however, as it'll be a big police authority.  Big police departments (as opposed to small ones) don't think anyone needs to protect themselves as that's their job.  Simple logic tells you that for the most part the police really can't protect you as you call them after something has happened.  If the police could protect people in advance, the entire Nova Scotia incident would not have occurred.  But in giving police the controlling authority, they'll use it. When it doesn't work, they'll ask for more.  And when that doesn't work, they'll ask for a bigger budget and more police.

How this spins on is already evident in the United States. Plenty of big city police departments are so heavily armed and equipped they look like military units and they behave like them too.  That's caused over policing in the United States and we're in the midst of a major backlash. Canada will get that too, ands oon the local RCMP units will look like the Canadian 1st Infantry Division.  Not a good trend.

So here we have the irony.  The US might get more gun control because, in part, a certain section of the firearm's world has been glorifying the military nature of some weapons, and scaring people into thinking everyone needs to carry a gun no matter what.  Canada is probably going to get more firearms as the Liberal government thinks that it can order everyone to live in a cartoon fantasy land.  

Reality has left the building.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*The AR, and more particularly I suppose the military variants like the M16 and M4 Carbine, have a fan aura that surrounds them and which is particularly pronounced with weapons of the Vietnam War.

The M14 which the military started off with and which neither the Army or the Marines wished to abandon, was well regarded by the soldiers who carried it.  If you read the Internet gun stuff now, however, you'll read how it was a horrible weapon.  Oddly, therefore, it's peculiar that it never really went away and it still hasn't.  Every time the service needed a serious rifle. . . to include even the Navy, it reappeared. The only one who were really keen on leaving it was the Air Force, which is really focused on a different sort of fighting.

Servicemen I knew who served in Vietnam hated the M16, but now all sorts of fans love it.  Servicemen who served after the Vietnam War, to include me, hated it too.  Indeed, all sorts of complaints about it have come out of Afghanistan.  No matter, if you read the American Rifleman it's billed as "America's Rifle".  Bleh.

The M60, on the other hand, was a machinegun which people who carried it, including me, really liked and trusted.  But if you read the Internet stuff now, it's just awful.

**Aagaard was a Kenyan, in that he was born in Kenya, of Norwegian parentage.  He'd grown up in Kenya, served in the British Army while there, and gone on to be an African professional hunter. When the country obtained independence it enacted a series of laws that were really more directed at its colonial legacy than anything else, and Aagaard accordingly lost his profession there.

If he was bitter about it, it didn't show in his writing.  He relocated to Texas and was a writer there.

***Part of the propaganda for the AR has been to rename it the "Modern Sporting Rifle", but there's nothing modern about it.  It's been in service since 1964 or so and its design is based completely on World War Two technology.  Nothing about it pioneered anything new, and even the cartridge wasn't a new one designed for it.  Put in proper context, it's basically a World War Two generation weapon firing a 1950 vintage cartridge.  In comparison, the M14, which it replaced, was a 1930s vintage rifle, in terms of design, firing a 1900s vintage cartridge.

****While it technically ended two years later, conscription really ceased in 1973, which means that the youngest of the former conscripts are now 65 years old.  The last servicemen to see Cold War service are now 49 years old.

^He was identifiable as a sniper as he was carrying a standard M14.  I asked him about it and he noted he was a sniper, but that he didn't carry his M21 in training so that it wasn't damaged.

^^It's worth noting that in the 1960s and 1970s when radicalized left wing groups such as the Black Panthers also trained with military weapons and wore military gear there was no sympathy for them among conservatives at all even though, quite honestly, African Americans are one of the groups of Americans for whom the Second Amendment is the most valuable.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 6. Cruz goes to Mexico and I wonder why I should care, Electrical infrastructure, Not renaming National Monuments, McConnell v. Trump, Idle princes, Slammin' Spammy

Cruz vacation plans and why should I care?

News reports were having it that Senator Ted Cruz went to Mexico on vacation during the Texas cold snap.

So what?

Cruz returned, indicating at the time that he had gone down only to facilitate the trip for his daughters, but the vigilant press reported that in fact he'd planned to stay originally and that this trip was pre booked prior to the emergency brought about by the weather.

Let me be frank.  I don't like Ted Cruz as a politician.  When he ran in 2016 he came through this state asserting that he wanted to transfer the Federal lands to the state, which would be a disaster for Wyoming and which indicates that he was taking advice from somebody on the far right wing edge of the GOP.  I figure that you don't get bad advice like that, which the overwhelming majority of Wyomingites oppose, unless that's the company you keep.  That view was cemented by his self serving challenge of the election results on January 6 and his prior bizarre offer to argue Trump's case in front of the United States Supreme Court as if he's some sort of legendary jurist.  

But he's entitled to a vacation as much as anyone else.

Heck, for that matter, under the conditions Texas has been in the past week, why wouldn't somebody want to go to Cancun?

Cruz really can't do anything about the power emergency in Texas.  Texas can, but it can't overnight.  Part of what Texas could do is to cease the 1930s vintage system in which Texas is its own power grid.  There are not doubt technical things beyond that, but that would be a good start.  But Ted Cruz can't do that.

Ted Cruz did go to President Biden, as did the Governor of Texas, and ask for the Lone Star State, whose AG sued over the Biden election just a few weeks ago, to certify Texas as a disaster area, which Biden did. That's about all he could do.  And he did that. Sitting around freezing in Texas isn't going to accomplish a lot more, no matter what critics like Robert Reich think.

What this probably confirms is that Cruz pushed his political future off the rails back in January.  That this was going to obviously occur isn't news, but its' starting already, just as the 2022 election is.  In a world in which Mitch McConnell is struggling to regain control over the party and people like Cruz were attempting to co-opt it, just like a roll of the dice in an Avalon Hill game, nobody can game for the weather.

But I don't want to read about where Ted Cruz goes on vacation for the next four years, and frankly, why wouldn't he have gone to Cancun? Get a grip.

Um. . . he's a Republican

Donald Trump Jr. criticized the "Democratic Governor of Texas" over that state's response to the weather emergency.

Problem is, he's a Republican.

This is similar, we'd note, to Ted Cruz last year criticizing the "green" power infrastructure of California.  Yes, that Governor, who is in major political trouble right now, is a Democrat, but you ought not to throw rocks at glass houses. . . 

At least Cruz, when this was point out, admitted he had no response to it.

The Zeitgeist is not forgiving.

Infrastructure

It might be worth noting, when this rubble all falls to the ground post cold snap, that the US has an infrastructure problem.  In the 2016 election everyone promised to fix it.  Clearly, it hasn't been fixed.

Old stuff needs to be repaired.  For a nation where people seem to be buying new stuff as its new constantly, that fact seems to escape us.  Americans buy new houses not because they really need a new one, but because its new.  People replace appliances as there are new ones.  Lots of modern stuff flatly can't be fixed anymore as nobody fixed it anyway so its not built to be fixed.  Had a television repaired recently?  Of course you haven't.

So the concept of maintenance seems to have completely escaped us.

For a nation that likes new so much, the fact that we aren't building new high tech infrastructure or even really looking at it is bizarre.  Yes, we're bringing new power generation technologies on line, and we're replacing old ones, whether people like it or not, but we haven't really rethought it.

In at least my view, power grids are like computers.  Back in the day, places that had computers, which were few, had giant banks of them. Then the towers came. Then the laptops.  There's now more computer muscle power in your phone than there was on board any of the Apollo craft.

What this may mean is that they day has arrived for smaller, not larger, electric power grids, but ones that are also interconnected, like the Internet.  

No Changing The Name

Devil's Tower, for at least the time being.

Cynthia Lummis has introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate that would preclude the government from changing the name of Devil's Tower National Monument.  Senator Barrasso has signed up for it.

Lummis was last in the news largescale when she followed Ted Cruz into voting against the Pennsylvania vote on the very day of the January 6 insurrection. She's been hailed by Trump supporters locally just as Cheney has seemingly been condemned, although letters to the paper suggest that at least the rank and file who are willing to pick up a pen support Cheney fairly overwhelmingly.  This is going to be an issue in the 2022 election for Cheney, and given the chatter background, she's in good shape.

Lummis isn't as far as having any influence on anything right now.  Paybacks, as the old phrase goes, are a bitch, and as a freshman Senator in the first place she has no pull on anything without somebody giving her some. She's not on the right side of Mitch McConnell right now, as he is clearly a Trump enemy and she's welded to Trump given her tactical decision to abandon her earlier expressed disdain for him and now praise him.  We don't know what's going on in the background, but chances are strong she's on the "we'll get back to you on that" list in regards to the GOP in the Senate right now, and on the "Cynthia who from where?" list as far as the Democrats are concerned.

The press has openly speculated about "what now" in terms of Wyoming's political influence in the Senate. The answer is pretty obviously none whatsoever.  This bill is extremely unlikely to go anywhere for that reason right now, but it will serve to keep her name in the press on an issue where most Wyomingites will agree with her.

As for the name, there's real confusion on how it came about.  It seems to have first been suggested by the Army following Custer's survey of the Black Hills, which it is located in.  It seems that the translation given may have been incorrect, however, as various native groups do not seem to have called it that. The Lakota called it Bear Lodge, and in 2014 they petitioned that the batholith and nearby community be renamed that. The Cheyenne also used a name associating the feature with bears.  Other native names associated it with eagles and noted its resemblance to a buffalo horn.

There is precedence for returning such topographic features to their native names, with Mount McKinley being the prime example.  Nobody calls the tallest mountain in North America that any more, and everyone knows it now by Denali, its original and restored native name.  As a Wyoming native, I don't think I'd object to the feature being restored to a native name, as its pretty clear that the present name was due to a translation error in the first place.  I.e., the original intent was to translate, into English, the native name, but the translator got it wrong.

No matter, this is one of those issues that's tailor made to create a flap.  Lots of people are going to get their backs arched up on it, and a lot of those people will be people who live here now, but actually aren't from here originally had have low connection with the state and its geographic and topological features.

Detestation

Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, President Trump, and Vice President Pence.  Not a single one of these guys, other than Trump, likes Trump anymore, and probably only Pence ever did.

Mitch McConnell reportedly detests Donald Trump and always has.

Politics is full of marriages of convenience.  While it may not be a really good example, Admiral Canaris was reportedly plotting against the Nazis the entire time he was very ably serving them, for example.  Stalin and Bukharin had been buddies, but for a lot of the latter's period before his fall, he was really a dedicated opponent, even though from the outside world you'd never have known it.  Eisenhower was a very able assistant to MacArthur when MacArthur was chief of staff, but they really didn't like each other.

McConnell is a master tactician, and he put up with Trump as he could use him to advance the causes he really cared about.  He used Trump, and Trump needed him. The question is where this all is at now.  McConnell is trying to put things back in order in the GOP, which would restore a conservative alliance between the various spectrums of conservatism.  Trump doesn't seem interested in a conservative GOP without Trump as the central figure in it.

Betting against McConnell would be a mistake.

Prince Harry chooses not to resume royal duties

I just wish he'd go home.

I'm not super keen on the Royal Family anyhow, although in recent years the Queen has risen considerably in my scale of approval.  Prince Harry, when he was still somewhat of a guy, was okay, but since he married Meghan Markle, the present Duchess of Sussex, he's become a real wimp. 

I may be wrong, but I thought that Meghan had to renounce her American citizenship when she entered the Royal family. So why are they here?  They aren't citizens and they hold not necessary skills that the U.S. can't fill on its own.

This is one more example of how U.S. immigration laws are really whacked.  There are probably engineers in Syria who aren't working as they're on the wrong side of the regime we could really use, and instead of them being here, we're housing a soy boy prince and his whiney bride.

Stupid Spam

"Kamala's Backdoor".  

I started getting that one almost as soon as the new administration came in.

I really wonder who bites on all of this stuff.  For a long time there was one I'd get almost daily about a secret that President Trump was revealing even though the Pope wanted him to keep it a secret. Really?  

By the way, Hormel sponsored a B-25 during World War Two that was named "Slammin' Spammy".  It's nose art featured a M1917 helmet wearing pig throwing a bomb.  Hormel is, of course, the processor of the real SPAM, the canned chopped ham.