A Casper institution:
I used to occasionally order food through the drive through window when I was a sophomore in high school. The cafeteria was being rebuilt at the time.
One of my aunts loved the place. A cousin and I used to take her there for lunch. She's passed, but sometimes we still will eat there.
Lex Anteinternet: What's Wrong with the United States? We're really...: Can you imagine this scene today? The older man (who in context is probably in his 50s) would be staring blankly into space, while the youn...
Let's revisit this topic just a bit.
I went to university in the 1980s. Prior to entering university it was emphasized to me that I'd need to learn a foreign language. I checked it out, and that was in fact quite correct. The courses of study I was looking at, which were scientific in nature, all required foreign languages in order to graduate.
In junior high I took French. The options were French, Latin, or Spanish. French was my choice as my mother spoke French and I had a cultural connection to it. In high school I took German, as my father knew it and I had a cultural connection to it. In university, as a science major, I took German. Two semesters of basic German and one of German literature, in German. I.e., the whole class was taught in German.
It's not too much to ask.
I've never regretted a moment I've dedicated to languages outside of the mother tongue.
My father took German in university and already spoke it and Latin. My mother majored in French, which she already knew how to speak, but she knew Latin as well.
A century ago a university student wouldn't have made it out of university without a command of Latin and Greek.
For that matter, a university student, no matter what they would have taken, would have had a familiarity with the Middle English classics.
These things are not unimportant. Part of the reason we are in the fix we are today is that the occupant of the Oval Office speaks gibberish, like an uneducated moron. Many Americans who are ostensibly well educated cannot get by, even in a rudimentary fashion, in a foreign tongue. In this regard, the average illegal immigrant from south of the border is much better educated linguistically and culturally than the average American.
Exposure to a foreign language, even if you forget it, is illuminating as the culture of the language will come to you to some degree. This presents a strong argument for Latin returning as a requirement for university, as we're all latent residents of the Roman Empire and don't know it, through its culture. Electing a Presiden twho speaks GibberyDoo is good evidence of how far we've fallen. Like the Vandals smashing the mosaics to see if the animals were trapped in the floor, we're smashing the country and the culture as we're equally ignorant.
That can be stopped, and should be.
And we wonder how Trump got elected?
The illiterate are ignorant, and blisteringly ignorant people vote for stupid stuff.
I had a very strange experience the other day, which I need to be indistinct about.
It had to do with homeschooling.
Twice in recent weeks I've run across a topic that's in the legislature, that being the legal requirement, which the Wyoming 2025 Legislative assembly is about to wipe out, that home schooling parents submit their educational plans to their local school districts. The requirement is there to prevent parents from basically not educating their children.
Not educating children is what homeschooling is all about.
This wasn't always the case, but it's become the case.
Some background.
My father was the first male in his family to graduate from high school. He might have been the third member of the family, as I don't know that much about my paternal grandmother's early life in that fashion. She probably graduated high school in Denver however, likely from a Catholic high school. His older sister graduated from a high school in Scottsbluff.
My father went on to a doctorate.
My paternal grandfather, who left school to work at age 13, had such an advance knowledge of mathematics that he helped his children with their high school calculus homework, which is revealing for two reasons, one that is amazing on his part, and secondly all of my father's siblings took calculus in high school.
I didn't take calculus in high school
My father could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin. My paternal grandfather also could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.
My mother did not graduate from high school She was not given the opportunity to. She earned an Associates as a an adult. Her mother was university educated, as was her father. They all spoke two languages, English and French, and had a command of Latin.
Growing up in my family household was like getting a post doctorate in some things, history and science in particular. I read so early that I was on to adult books before I left grade school and had the odd experience of a junior high librarian not wishing to check a history book as she feared it was too advance. I read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire before I left junior high.
I was in fact educated on a lot of stuff at home. . . but I was sent to school.
There's an interesting pattern here. Some of my friends of my age had college educated parents, but not all of them did. But all of my friends attended college or university. Not all graduated, but they did receive some post high school education. One of my closest friends had a father who did not graduate from high school. He joined the Army in his senior year to fight in World War Two, following in the footsteps of a father who had fought in World War One. My friend has two bachelors degrees.
And there's another thing here. Even those people I knew from my generation, and the prior one, who had parents that didn't graduate high school, had quite literate parents. If I ever went into a house that didn't have a lot of books somewhere, it was shocking. I can only really recall one. The home of my friend noted above was like a library. My parents house and that of all of my aunts and uncles were packed with books. In my parents house you could find a few books that were in German or French. A friend of mine who did not graduate from high school, but none the less went off to university, recalled his grandparents house being packed with books in . . . Gaelic.
My paternal grandmother absolutely insisted that my father go on to get an advanced degree, something he briefly though about not doing. His unmarried sister near in age to him was sent to university as well. I was given no real choice but to go on to higher education myself.
And this was common for people my generation, and the preceding one. Farm and ranch family in particular often had a manic dedication to higher education.
Home schooling has been around since time immemorial, I suppose, but when I was a kid, what it probably meant, where I live, is that the kid in question was living on a really remote ranch. Even then, most ranching parents made a dedicated effort to avoid that. More than a few had a teacher who lived at the ranch, paid for by the school district. The county I live in had four rural remote public schools, of which only one is still in operation. The neighboring one had some so remote that if you run across them on really rural roads its a shock. The teachers at these institutions were admired in a way that's hard to describe. Anything going on in the area always included them.
I didn't know a single homeschooled kid growing up.
Next to home schooling, of course, is private schooling. When I was young the only private school I ever heard of was the Catholic school. It was a big downtown school. It's moved from downtown, but it still exists. Catholic education had long been a thing in the US and apparently Catholics are supposed to send their kids to Catholic schools if they can, but I didn't go to it (it was full), nor did our kids.
When in high school I learned that there was a Lutheran grade school, to my enormous surprise, as I walked by it every day. After high school I learned that there was a "Christian" school, by which I mean a school attached to one of the sort of due it yourself evangelical Protestant groups. It started in 1978, so I would have been in high school when it commenced operating. The ministers for that church, at the time, were drawn from the congregation, and I later met one who was ironically adverse with its tenants as he was a geologist who accepted the truth of evolution, which the church did not.
A church that thinks evolution is a fib, probably doesn't have it taught in its schools.
Which is the point, really. The goal of a large amount of modern homeschooling is to keep students as ignorant as possible, which is conceived of as limiting tehir "exposure" to corrupting elements.
I've been exposed to a few homeschooled kids over the years and frankly a lot of them were rather weird and very socially awkward. Having said that, I've met one kid, and know of another, from a homeschooling family who were not that way, and one of which went on to a really high dollar career.
Now, with that comment, let me note that education isn't about getting rich, or shouldn't be. It's about the Allegory of the Cave. The problem here is that those exposed to the sunlight are seeking to drag the ir offspring back into it, deeper in the cave, and into chains.
The simple fact of the matter is that Americans were much more literate prior to the 1990s than they are now. They read. They read even if they hadn't graduated high school.
And they read a lot, and a lot of it is much more advanced than what people claim to read now. Even people who mostly read novels often read things much more advanced than people do now. I recall one parent of a family friend being a fanatic fan of C. S. Forester, whose novels were just that, but noen the less dealt often with the Napoleonic Wars, something a lot of current Americans probably don't know occured. One fellow I knew in the National Guard loved Louis Lamour, so much so that he read The Walking Drum, which is set in the Middle Ages, about which he was able to speak intelligently. Another fellow, who had been a career Marine, was reading War and Peace.
Everyone read the newspaper. You'd frequently see periodicals in people's houses, including unfortunately Playboy on occasion, but the latter had sufficiently good interviews that my high school newspaper teacher used those as examples and adopted them for the pattern of a series in that high school journal. Less unfortunately, you'd see Time, Newsweek and Life in people's houses routinely. And everyone read the local newspaper, by which I mean everyone.
The National Geographic seemed to be in the home of every household that had children, including ours. Our collection went back into the 1940s, from my father's parents home.
Cartoons didn't make much of an appearance in our house, and I"ve never developed a taste for most of the cartoon journal type of cartoons, like Superman, but what I do recall is when they showed up, it was often Mad Magazine, which actually is really adult oriented, and not in the juvenile way "adult" is often used.
The point is, when people claim people were "more educated" in the past, including populists who are not today, they tended to be, but in ways that people now just don't really quite grasp. They often had lower levels of educational achievement, but because they lived in a literate world, they were societally educated.
You can go into a lot of homes today and find that the occupants read. . . nothing.
Instead, people consume only what suits them.
In almost all of the 20th Century, it wasn't really possible to hear only the news you wanted to. Even if you limited yourself to radio, prior to the introduction of television, you were going to get a wide range of news. Newspapers were, as noted, almost a requirement for most households. When television came in, at first, it was highly local but the news was national and there was no avoiding it. You weren't going to get right or left wing propaganda from anyone.
That's all passed.
Americans aren't reading. What media they consume is self reaffirming, like Protestant sermons from the 1600s. People are listening only to like minds, and the nation is becoming more and more ignorant.
Which is why we have Donald Trump in office. No literate nation would elect him to anything.\
Note that this doesn't mean the population is dumb. Ignorant and dumb are not the same thing. But we suffer from the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect in a major way. We're listening, basically, to ourselves, and making excuses for our failures, and justifying our appetites.
And it puts the entire globe in danger.
I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article. That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit. I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.
Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:
Miss March holding her own centerfold?
No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.
The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing. Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt. She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph. Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar. Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy. Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.
So why am I posting this here? Cute story?
I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does. But we're posting this for other reasons.
Gerard is apparently a famous Playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted. The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy. That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.
And that's the reason we're noting her.
She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family. By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life. If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be. She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.
In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.
Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico. She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.
At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age. Camuglia was born in March 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that. Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.
Blanton went on to success. Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.
The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy. In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker. It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.
What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be. Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through. Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.
I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either. Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links. That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew. There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people. Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.
Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".
Related threads:
The Republic of Mali invaded the Republic of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) in a border conflict over water rights.
The United States Senate unanimously (93 to 0) ratified the Geneva Protocol, the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare", almost 50 years after it had first been signed signed in Switzerland on June 17, 1925, and became effective on February 28, 1928.
Hmmm. . . .
The Safe Drinking Water Act was signed into law.
Probably wouldn't happen today.
ANZUK, a military unit created in 1971 by agreement of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, was disbanded after slightly more than two years of having been in existence.
No surprise, given the Vietnam War and the "winds of change".
The Towering Inferno premiered. I recall seeing it in the theaters with a friend on a Saturday afternoon, even though I was 11 years old. It was awful.
Frankly, they shouldn't have let us in the movie at all. I'm sure we walked down and watched it, but it features a totally stupid 1970s example of full frontal that serves no purpose other than to be a toss out to the Playboy ethos of the era, which no 11 year old, or 21 year old, or 61 year old, should have to put up with.
It also, fwiw, runs down the National Guard, in the 1970s post Vietnam War style.
And the plot is moronic. One of the 1970s scare movies.
Last edition:
Gilligan's Island premiered on CBS.
UPI critic Rick Dubrow commented: "It is impossible that a more inept, moronic or humorless show has ever appeared on the home tube."
As a kid, I'd often watch the show, already in syndication, when I got home from school.
Rebels in the Congo rounded up of all foreigners trapped in Stanleyville and Paulis.
The "High National Council" was installed to function as the legislature for South Vietnam.
Last edition:
I was somewhere the other day (I can't recall where) when a young woman walked by wearing "elephant bells", i.e., bell bottom jeans with very wide flairs.
They were popular when I was quite young. By the time I was in high school, elephant bells had largely passed, but a few girls, usually ones who were a little edgy, still wore them.
I was surprised, as I didn't know that you could still get them, but then a few days later I was driving home and saw another young woman wearing a pair of white elephant bells and a multicolored, very 60ish, sweater. She had long blond curly hair and it really suited her. She was also walking into a tattoo parlor, so I hope she was careful.
Are they coming back?
It was Memorial Day for 1974. Two days earlier President Nixon had issued this proclamation:
By the President of the United States Of America
A Proclamation
The defense of freedom and the search for peace cannot be separated. Together, they are an essential part of the American ideal. During the past two hundred years, our Nation has endured sacrifice in battle for the sake of this ideal. Americans died valiantly at Saratoga, King's Mountain, and Yorktown because they would not buy peace at the price of liberty. Americans died at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg because a peace that cost the division of the Nation and the enslavement of a people could not be accepted.
We have occasion to show special gratitude this Memorial Day to those who fell in the cause of freedom in the longest and perhaps the most difficult war in our history. Because of their efforts, and the efforts of all our fighting forces, we can celebrate a year in which no American serviceman has fallen in the defense of his country.
During the past year, we have made progress toward the creation of a stable world order based on respect for the dignity and the larger interests of all nations. We have made this progress in part because America has pursued its tasks from a base of strength—not only military and economic strength, but strength of conviction and strength of purpose. We have been steadied in our resolve by the example of patience, self-sacrifice, and courage of our servicemen and women during the difficult years now past.
To our valiant dead we can pay no greater tribute than to emulate their dedication to a world free from the threat of force and the rule of fear. To them we dedicate our prayers for a new generation of peace and a new spirit of community among all the peoples of the world.
Now, Therefore, I, Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate Memorial Day, Monday, May 27, 1974, as a day of prayer for permanent peace, and I designate the hour beginning in each locality at eleven o'clock in the morning of that day as a time to unite in prayer.
I urge the press, radio, television, and all other information media to cooperate in this observance.
I direct that the flag of the United States be flown at half-staff all day on Memorial Day on all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels of the Federal Government throughout the United States and all areas under its jurisdiction and control.
I also call upon the Governors of the fifty States, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and appropriate officials of all local units of government to direct that the flag be flown at half-staff on all public buildings during that entire day, and I request the people of the United States to display the flag at half-staff from their homes for the same period.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fifth day of May, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred ninety-eighth.
RICHARD NIXON
A bomb went off in the car of lawyer Reyes Martinez at Chautauqua Park killing Martinez, his girlfriend Uma Jaakola and her friend Neva Romero were all killed in the blast.
Two days later, another car bomb went off in the parking lot of a Burger King which was closed for the evening, killing Florencio Granado, Heriberto Teran and Francisco Dougherty. Antonio Alcantar Jr., who was standing outside lost his leg.
No suspects have ever been arrested. The victims are known as the "Los Seis de Boulder", or "The Boulder Six". All involved, save for Reyes Martinez, were Hispanic activists protesting the conditions at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The FBI concluded that the bombs were made by the victims themselves and accidentally triggered, a thesis their supporters reject.
Monuments have been placed to them at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was inaugurated as President of France.
I had just turned eleven. I have no personal recollection of any of these events.
Last prior edition:
There ain't no such thing as free lunch.
El Paso Herald-Post, 1938.
There really isn't.
For some reason, the concept of "free" lunches and "free" breakfasts has bothered me for decades. I don't know why, really, but it always has.1 Generally, it's because I'm well aware that "free", in this context, means the financial cost is passed on to somebody else, and nine times out of ten in my experiences the bearer of the cost does so involuntarily.
I don't believe the common unthinking populist phrase that "taxation is theft", but in this case, the free meal is really darned close to it. I've railed here in the past against "free and reduced costs" meals at the local schools, as they aren't free or reduced costs, it's just that property owners pay for negligent parents failing to provide for their kids.
Yes, that's harsh, and that's not what brings me back to this topic, but it's the truth. I'm not opposed to helping the needy, but here nine times out of ten (that phrase again) some tragic "heroic" single mother is packing Young Waif to school hungry because Dudley Dowrong departed the scene after donating his genetic contribution, and now the people who are responsible are picking up the tab. That's okay on a limited basis, but as soon as those whose occupation is Buying Cotton pick up on it, they become to regard it as a right, and soon in fact it becomes one.2 3
Which, again, isn't what brought me back here.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant.
Just like the meanderings in Guthrie's classic, what I’m here to write about isn't school breakfasts, but office lunch's.
For a reason that I'll omit, I suddenly find myself in the role which made an old Denver lawyer friend of mine supremely crabby when he had it assigned to him, and now I see why. I'm management.
In the new assignment, which snuck up on me, I was instructed I needed to cut expenses that weren't mandated or necessary. And what I found, of course, is that mandated and necessary are in the eyes of the recipient. Put another way, one parent's free and reduced lunch is another's absolute Constitutionally enshrined right.
The expense I rapidly cut was sending our runner to buy groceries for the break room.
Oh, I know what you are thinking, coffee, tea, and the like.4 5
No, I mean real groceries. Soup, relish, hot peppers and hot sauce.
In the over three decades of my current employment and having worked with lots of professionals, I've noted that there's only been a small handful that actually ever ate their lunch at work. There are a few, but it isn't many. Staff people who do, and there are a small handful that have, always packed their lunches, or went to one of the downtown shops to buy lunch and brought it back. Professionals, I'd note, mostly left the office for lunch. Some went home to eat there, often to take care of chores while they were doing it, and some ate downtown. A few, however, ate in the breakroom every day.
I've never done that. When I was younger, I actually walked home to where I then lived, ate a quick light lunch, and returned to work. It helped keep me 30 lbs lighter than I now am. Most of the time now I just don't eat lunch, so if I'm in the office, I'm working. This is against the wise council of my father, who felt that leaving the place of work every day at noon gave you a necessary break. He ate downtown every day with a small group of his friends.
I admire that.
Anyhow, of the professionals that have eaten lunch in the office over the past three plus decades, there are only two that have acclimated to the company buying them lunch or elements of their lunch.
I don't know how this happened.
Long suffering spouse suggest that it was probably started so that there was food for people in an emergency, and I can see that. You're trying a case, and it ran long in the morning as Dudley Dowrong was on the stand for a long time, trying to remember if he has six kids by eight women, or eight kids by six women. So you run back to the office, and you forgot lunch, and don't have time to go buy it. Have some soup, from the company stores.
Well, I wouldn't. I hate soup, for which there's no excuse.
My guess is that is how it started, but it expanded somehow. So for a long time I'll see somebody who hasn't tried a case for eons ordering soup to be picked up by the runner. And in another, a person who brings a gigantic lunch from home everyday spices it up with relish and condiments he had us pick up, that only he uses.6
Quite frankly, this has always pissed me off.
Basically, at that point, you are making every single person who works with and for you buy you lunch. Yes, it's not a major cost, but over the years that means you've taken hundreds or thousands of dollars in food from your coworkers by fiat.
So, with my new found authority and mandate, I ordered it stopped.
...came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts.
Rudyard Kiping.7
It went badly.
Interestingly, the person I thought might complain did not. The whining from another person was incessant, however.
I'll be frank that I really don't like the passive-aggressive snide type of hostility that some people will exhibit. I prefer that people know that I'm mad when I'm mad, and they almost certainly do. In this instance, after days of it, I blew up in front of the front office starting off with "you're pissing me off".
I yielded, however. People who feel they have the right to impose their lunch menu items back on everyone else now can.
If they dare.
Footnotes:
1. Without knowing for sure, I wonder if its because people who grew up when I did always had it impressed upon them as children that providing a meal for somebody was a big deal. If we received lunch at a friend's home, we were always asked if we had thanked the host for doing so. We were implicitly made to understand that food costs money.
Moreover, snacking just didn't exist where I lived as a kid. People didn't have snacks out, ever. One boyhood friend of mine who is still a close friend had a family that bought 16 oz glass bottles of Pepsi, and the lack of snacks situation was so strong that it always felt like a huge treat to have a bottle of Pepsi there when I was a kid.
2. I'm not one of those who currently feel that everything is wrong with public education, and indeed public education here is good. But this is one cultural difference that may in fact make a difference.
At least with Catholic schools here, there are those who attend who because parishioners have donated the tuition to make it possible. I don't know the lunch situation, but I'd wager this is also the case for some food served there. That's charity, but it's voluntary. Providing free or reduced cost food in public schools is legally enforced involuntary charity, which the recipients of, at least by way of observation, sometimes come to feel is a right.
3. "Buying cotton" is Southern slang for doing nothing.
4. I almost never drink coffee at the office, and never tea, but these are office staples. Likewise, a water cooler in a century plus old building makes sense. And some food, like soda crackers, or something does as well. But food that's used by one person. . .
5. Oddly, soda isn't viewed this way.
Years ago, we had a Pepsi supplied pop machine and, in going through a similar episode, the then managers determined to send it packing. Restocking it with soda was costing a fortune.
That move was detested by the staff, but not by the professionals. Why? Probably because the staff drank the soda and the professionals simply didn't.
6. If you drown your leftovers every noon with buckets of hot sauce and jalapeños, there's something wrong with them in the first place.
7. What Kipling failed to mention here is that the "free lunch" was packed was salty fare. Heavily salted ham, etc., was set out for the taking, but the one beer lunch accordingly became two or three.
As an aside, a depiction of this is given in Joe Kidd, in which the title character walks into a bar early in the movie and picks up ham, bread and cheese off an open plate.
Related threads:
I had a Stingray. They were the greatest boys bicycle ever.
An item by a German expatriate living in the UK on what Germans call what most Americans call "hot dogs"
Note the presentation.
I'm surprised that in Frankfurt, Wieners are regarded as a delicacy. When I was a kid, we had them all the time, and I liked them. I particularly liked "hot lunches" at school, which we rarely got, when we were served steamed hot dogs.
I still like the recollection of how those tasted.
Now days, I only eat hot dogs if I'm at a baseball game. That's about it. Otherwise, I never do. I probably had too many fried hot dogs as a kid.
Yes, my mother fried them. But she was an awful cook.
Anyhow, my grandfather was a meat packer and this article caused me to think of what we called these sausages. We called them "hot dogs" the American standard word, but my father would call them Wieners. His father was of 100% Westphalian extraction and had grown up speaking German. My father could speak it too, but sort of kept that to himself, like many other things in his very quiet personality. Anyhow, maybe that's why my father used that term for the little mild sausages.
The packing house did make them. Apparently they made a lot of them during World War Two, as the Army ordered them. When the war ended the contract for them was suddenly canceled and it turned out to be a big problem for the packing house, as the Army wouldn't order them with the added red dye that is what actually causes them to be that color. That was an unnecessary added expense, in the Army's view.
But not for civilians. The hot dogs turned out to be hard to sell to grocery stores as they weren't the expected pink. Without it, they're white.
I love sausages, FWIW. It's probably one of the things that will get me in the end, but then I don't have the American expectation of living perfectly fit until I'm 120 years old. But I'm not keen on Wieners. Brots, yes, other sausages, you bet. But these aren't my favorite.
Maybe they would be in Frankfurt.
There was of course headline news this day in 1924:
But it's the clothing ad that drew my attention:
As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city.
Robert Cardinal Sarah
On August 6, 1979, Newsweek came out with a surprising cover depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill. The caption was "Where Have All The Heroes Gone". I can remember laying on the couch in the living room looking at the issue. I would have been about fifteen.
That was right about the time the nation was getting ready to see Carter square off against Reagan, and if the author of that article thought the choices were uninspiring, I have to wonder what he'd think now.
Anyhow, in reading about the contest between Reagan and Carter I was compelled to ask my father, "What's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?", trying to figure out what it was, and what I was, in that context. I'm actually surprised, in looking back, that I was asking this question at that age, as in my mind, this was earlier. And in fact I may very well be remembering this inaccurate, as to when I asked this question and what brought it about.
I do recall his answer. He informed me that "the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats".
It was an interesting answer. He didn't say that the Republicans were conservative or that the Democrats were not. He said the Republicans were more conservative than the Democrats, implying that they were sort of in the middle.
I decided at the ripe old age of 12, or so, that I was more conservative, and therefore I was a Republican.
When I registered to vote six years later, I in fact registered as a Republican, which is what I thought I likely was. It didn't last a real long time, however, as by age 20, I was registering as a Democrat.
Conservation was the reason why. Even by my late teens I as clearly a conservationist, and I teetered on the edge of, and crossed into, environmentalism. While I didn't see myself being on the political left, those around me did. I recall one friend of mine in junior college, who had known me since high school, remarking in a conversation about the Vietnam War protests that if I'd been college age at that time, I'd be in the protesters, a comment that really surprised me as I was in the National Guard at the time, and I was a defense hawk, part of the reason I'd originally registered as a Republican. The now late mother of a friend of mine loaned me The Monkey Wrench Gang on the basis that I'd like it, and while I was surprised by that when I read the cover about a group of fictional who were basically environmental terrorists, I in fact did like the 1975 Edward Abby novel. It probably didn't hurt that I had a crush on the daughter of that lender, the sister of one of my friends, and that entire family were obviously environmentally centered, eccentric, Democrats.
It wasn't a facade, however. I wasn't a DINO, if there is such a thing. Going through my undergraduate years and through law school, and into at least my first decade of practicing law, I remained a Democrat. It was rural issues that did it. The Democrats were for preserving the wilderness, at a time that the Reagan Republicans never saw a tree they didn't want to cut down. The Democrats were for keeping Wyoming's wildlife a public resource when a Republican legislature wanted to give it to landowners in a bill, I'd note, that our current Congressman's father promoted. The Republicans always saw wild lands as something to be exploited, the Democrats normally saw them as something to be preserved.
Ultimately I left the Democratic Party for the Republicans as I couldn't stomach being in a party that embraced death so closely. I wasn't alone. Really significant Wyoming Democrats, like Ray Hunkins, who had campaigned as Democrats, left the party and became Republican politicians. The overall impact was a good one, however, for the state's GOP. It took a party that was already highly independent and frankly middle of the road on most things, and made it more so. It was a Wyoming Party.
Those days are dead and gone.
It's hard to describe where we are politically in this country today, and that's in no small part because it's hard to explain where we are culturally. The absolute insanity of social movements in the Western World, unleashed since the annus horbillus of 1968, but with roots dating back at least to the 1790s, has created as sort of cultural hellscape which now, very late in the day, average people are reacting to, but reacting in way that expresses their ignorance of their own culture and existential nature. It's been a long time in the making.
Some thirty years ago I was at a not very well done bachelor's party, no not one of that type, that I hosted for a friend getting married. At the party was a young man who had just been admitted to a university in New York. He was pretty impressed with getting into it, and had already taken up calling New York City, "the city", even though he knew just about as little about NYC as I did.
At the party he raised the question of whether the United States was existentially a liberal, or conservative, nation. In thinking about it there in my late 20s, when I was somewhat more liberal than I am now, I thought the country basically existentially liberal.
I'm not certain that I think that now. But then, back then, in the late 1980s, being liberal didn't mean I had to pretend that biological truths weren't just that, truths.
Educated people, including educated conservatives like me, as that's basically what I am, are to a large extent baffled by the phenomenon of Donald Trump. How, we wonder, could anyone vote for a person like him, particularly after he attempted a coup to overthrow the 2020 election?
The Judicial Coup of 2015 has everything to do with that, as we warned that it would, in 2015.
We educated people, including we social conservatives, had acclimated ourselves to accepting that an unelected body of jurist could decree social liberality on the society, and everyone had to accept it. To a large extent, frankly, we grew comfortable with being conservatives of varying stripes, but not getting much of what we wanted.
Obergefell was clearly a bridge too far, and it was right from the beginning. And what liberals promised, that "this would never mean", very rapidly turned out to be a whopping lie.
The contempt that's come for evolutionary biology and basic nature out of the American left, and indeed, the European left, since 2015 has been epic. But it didn't start in 2015. It started well before, with major events marking the path. May 9, 1960, the entire year of 1968, 1969, 1973. What marked it all, during the very period in which the left embraced everything in nature outside of ourselves, was the rejection of our natures. We didn't see ourselves as men in nature any longer, but like gods, outside of it.
What the left apparently they didn't grasp is that no matter what the educated conservative "establishment elite" was willing to accept, the rank and file, instinctively conservative middle, wasn't, and isn't, once things went too far.
For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.
If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
1 Timothy, Chapter 6.
At the same time, however, a combination of two of the oldest malevolent forces in the world had already united to make any reaction abhorrent. Ignorance had combined with greed.
People like to spout a lot of babble about the settlement of North America, and the United States, that is just that. People imagine that hardworking benighted immigrants came in and built a new land out of the sweat of their brows. Yes, there's an element of truth in that, but the larger truth is that they were massively assisted by their governments, which removed the native population by force at public expense, and then sold or gave the land to the settlers for no value or grossly undervalue. It's impossible to look at what occured and not regard it as deeply immoral, and claims to the opposite as deeply hypocritical. When Wyoming politicians today proudly declare that they're fourth generation Wyoming rancher who built their enterprises from nothing but their own hard work, they're deluding themselves. Their ancestors were, as a rule, dirt poor people who benefitted from what was effectively a government hand out, in part, and in part from a program that made that possible by what today would be regarded as ethnic genocide.
There's really no two ways about it.
Nonetheless, in being honest about it, we can also be honest about the fact that the beneficiaries of those programs did not have in mind killing people.
They also largely didn't have in mind getting rich.
The goal was to have a family, and provide for it.
We recently spent a lot of time on our companion blog looking at the laws and social conditions prior to the fateful legislature of 1977. Those laws were geared towards that end. And, prior to the 1970s, the laws in the country largely were. Laws on "domestic" topics were geared towards the preservation of the family and the protection of children.
And before Ronald Reagan, the tax structure and the structure of the Federal Government was aimed at regulating excessive accumulation of wealth and reigning in big business. It was widely held, and correctly, that people needed protection against large business and that vast accumulation of wealth could result in the wealthy paying their own way. The wealthy were not worshiped, and big business was not seen as the little man's friend.
A figure like Donald Trump was not regarded as admirable.
Reagan came in and changed that, selling the public the lie that as the wealthy got wealthier everyone else did as well. It made some sense, until you thought it out. And to a certain degree its true, as the wealthier a society becomes, the wealthier everyone in it is. But it only goes so far, and it didn't go nearly as far as its backers claimed. Moreover, the advance of technology, accelerated by World War Two and the Cold War, marched on irrespective of tinkering with the tax rates, and that is likely what made the reason difference.
Something that didn't withstand the tinkering was the assault on education. The Great Depression, followed by World War Two, followed by the Cold War, had emphasized the need for science and engineering like nothing else. World War Two, in turn, flooded universities with servicemen after the war, making college educations common. But with Reagan came a reduction in support for science and engineering. University remained important, but degrees suffered value erosion. Degrees like law, which could be societally beneficial, or destructive, evolved towards the latter, as a Reagan era emphasis on greed set in.
Just as societal structures started to break down due to the battering rams of the left, therefore, they were replaced by a lack of education and an emphasis that everything was about money. It was not a combined intentional attack. The left would not have made everything about money, and the right would not have broken down societal structures, but the combined assault of both had that effect. This left an American, and Western, culture with no existential values and nothing to measure individual self-worth other than economic success. Like the concurrent assault of Germanic, Slavic, and Eastern tribes in the Middle Ages, the damage on the American metaphorical Rome was too much to bear.
Rome, of course, had the Church. And as Rome fell, the Church stepped in, preserving what was worthwhile of the existing culture, and educating the Barbarians. The United States is not, however, Imperial Rome. When Rome fell, which was over time, the Roman culture could look towards the Church and realize that it held existential truths Roman civilization did not. As the American culture falls today, it has instead the adulterated American Civil Religion, a light and reduced content variant of original strict Protestant sects that reflected the product of the Reformation. And people retain their native instincts, although not in a restrained or educated fashion.
This has left the reeling street level populist reacting against things they know are wrong, but mixing them with ignorance and confusion. That it's absurd that some claim there are more than two genders is self-evident, and wrong, and that steps like Chloe's law must be taken to combat it is apparent. What is not is that this depraved state of affairs stems from one that divorced sex from marriage, or the concept that marriage is natural, and not a set of highly advanced sexual dates which allow for discarded partners. Hence, you have some railing against sexual mutilation, who practice chemical sterilization, or who are serial polygamists themselves.
And the substitution of money as the supreme value over family remains in the same class, with some seriously believing, as some have asserted since the 1980s, that God basically endorses their occupations as surely he must. It can't be the case, they think, that their occupations could do harm. Therefore, you have those who, like James Watt, can't grasp the thought that natural resources must be conserved, and that this is conservative, let alone that there are things that are being economically exploited which may very well destroy the ability for us to exist. In their heart of hearts there are those on the populist right who believe that the use of fossil fuels is Divinely sanctioned, just as there are those on the left who believe that altering our psychological and physical natures is some sort of existential, if not Devine, right.
This sort of thing has put us in the untenable position we now find ourselves it.
It ought to be possible, in other words, for a thoughtful conservative to oppose infanticide, genocide, and ecocide. That is, it ought to be perfectly possible to oppose abortion, gender mutilation, Russian aggression in Ukraine while supporting conservation and indeed be concerned about the environment. That would, in fact, be thoughtful conservatism.
There's no need, and indeed no sense whatsoever, in feeling that because you are worried about gender disorder, that you need to support Putin in Ukraine, or hail a serial polygamist as somebody who presents as a modern Cyrus the Great.
But where to go from here, especially for a thoughtful conservative.
It's clear at this point that neither the modern Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to do anything to solve this. They are both too far corrupted in an existential sense. The Democratic Party is virtually at war with Human Nature and the Devine, while the GOP is at war with intelligence, Science and thought. Between the two parties, the Democrats have revived a belief in democracy they lost in 1973, however, whereas the Republicans view everyone who doesn't agree with their Caudillo as a class enemy.
The populists know that something is deeply amiss with the assault on human nature. The progressives know that there's something deeply wrong with the assault on science and nature. Progressives sense that a worship of money is wrong, whereas the Republicans are outright worshiping it. Populists sense that a worship of yourself as a demigod is perverse, but only embrace that up to the point that it's not personally inconvenient.
National Conservatives and their fellow travelers claim they're the answer. C. C. Peckhold, a university professor who seems to be in this camp, gives about as good of a justification of this as can be given in an episode of Catholic Answers live that's well worth listing to, but also a little disturbing in some ways as well. Like Patrick Dineen, he's big on "order".
What he seems to be missing, in so far as that interview goes, is that corporate capitalism has imposed its own order. He regards "liberalism", as in the classic meaning of this word, to be the problem, and seeks a "post liberal order", and is one of the contributors to the Post Liberal Podcast whose blog we've linked in our companion site as its interesting. What they miss, however, is that what they are seeking is effete, which to a large degree is what took down "post liberalism", by which them mean the pre liberal ancient regime, and that it was also corrupt, as concentration of order encourages corruptness. Indeed, that's what we have now, to a degree, concentrated in capitalism.
Only in a Distributist Agrarianism, by whatever name, is the solution to this found.
