Observations on a murder.

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

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

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

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

But what else does this event tell us?

Casper's a rough town.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The abandoned males

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

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

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

Friday, March 31, 1944. Japanese command disaster.

Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleets, Admiral Mineichi Koga (古賀 峯一) was killed when his plane, a Kawanishi H8K ("Emily") flying boat, crashed during a typhoon between Palau and Davao while he was overseeing the withdrawal of the Combined Fleet from its Palau headquarters.  His second in command, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome (福留 繁) went down in a separate plain off of off Cebu and captured by Filipino guerrillas.  As a result of that, Koga's battle plans associated with Palau and the defense of the Marianas, Operation Z, were captured by the Allies.

Fukodome, left, Koga, right.  1944.

Koga's death was kept secret until May, due to difficulties agreeing to a successor.

Fukudome survived the war, although he was tried for war crimes and found negligent association with the killing of two American airmen in Singapore. He was generally cooperative with the Allies after the war.  His prison sentence was brief, and he was an advisor to the Japanese government on the establishment of the Japanese Self Defense Force.  He died in 1971 at the age of 80.

Operation Desecrate One concluded.

The Red Army took Ochakov.

Generaloberst Georg Lindemann took command of German Army Group North, which had been commanded by Model.

Operation Ukrainian Committee was carried out by the Polish Home Army.  It saw the elimination of the small collaborationist Ukrainian Central Committee, which was active in recruiting Ukrainians for the SS Galicia unit.

The Central Committee was headed by a Ukrainian military refugee who had lived in Poland since 1923.  In a way, this shows the complicated nature of the war in the East, and of the post-war East, the "Bloodlands", in general.  Poland had claimed large chunks of Ukraine after World War One, and while it didn't keep all that it claimed in Ukraine and Belarus, it kept a lot of it.  Ukraine and Poland fought a war immediately after World War One over the issue.  Ukraine and Poland's struggle against each other, however, would soon be consumed by their mutual struggle with the Soviet Union, which would result in Poland being absorbed into the Communist state, but Poland avoiding it.  Poland then became a place of refuge for Ukrainians struggling against the USSR.

With the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1940, Poland was put in a desperate situation and ceased to exist, according to their enemies.  The Polish civilian death rate was the highest in Europe during the war, with regular Poles subject to German murders.  Ukrainians had suffered massively from the USSR's genocidal policies aimed at it in the 1920s and 1930s, and accordingly many Ukrainians aw the Germans as liberators.  The Germans saw no future for an independent Ukraine, but Ukrainian organizations sprang up under the belief that the Germans would grant them the same, with Ukrainian partisan movements also developing, some of which supported the USSR, and some of which opposed the USSR and the Germans, as well as the Poles on Ukrainian territory, the latter being a revival, more or less, of the Russo Ukrainian War in a weird way.

All of this continues to have overtones to the present day, with the Poles supporting democratic Ukraine in its war against Russia, but not really having forgotten the earlier Polish Ukrainian bloodletting.  Russian claims that Ukrainians are Nazis, which they are not, recalls the earlier pro Nazi movements in wartime Ukraine, not all of which have really been disavowed by modern Ukrainians.

The Disney short Donald Duck and the Gorilla was released.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, March 30, 1944. Operation Desecrate One

1940s, 1944, Adolf Hitler, boats and ships, Catholic Legion of Decency, Disease, German Army, Imperial Japanese Navy, Operation Desecrate One, Palau, Personalities, Red Army, U.S. Navy, Von Manstein, World War Two

Monday, March 24, 1924. Aid for the German poor.

The House of Representatives voted to appropriate $10,000,000 for food for poor women and children in Germany.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, March 23, 1924. Noise.

1920s, 1924, Cartoons, Fascism, Italy, Mussolini

Tuesday, March 18, 1924. The high water mark of the Irish Mutiny.

Forty armed Irish soldiers assembled at a hotel in Dublin to plan the next move in the Irish Army Mutiny.  A possible coup d'état against the Irish government was on the table.  

Loyal Irish troops surrounded the hotel and there was a standoff.  The result was that the young Irish government responded by securing the resignation of Irish Army Council members, along with that of Defense Minister Richard Mulcahy.

The mutiny was of the oldest type, an army rebelling for itself.  Mulcahy would go on to a long career in Irish government, including as Minister of Education.

A soldier bonus bill was passed in the US.

St. Mark's is a major downtown church in Casper today.

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Casper Wyoming

This traditionally styled Episcopal Church includes the office buildings for the church a meeting room, kitchen and a day school, so the interior space used for services is smaller than the large exterior might suggest.

The view featured on the bottom photograph could not be seen until recently, as a large house once stood in what is now an open area. The church is across the street from the former St. Anthony's Catholic School, which has moved to a new location across town. The church was built in 1924.

It's stunning to think it was built for $120,000.

The Douglas Fairbanks film, The Thief of Baghdad, was released.

Alice Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was caught by the paparazzi on the streets of Washington D.C.

Wednesday, March 5, 1924. An attempted caliphate.

Following the Turkish Assemblies abolishment of the caliphate, Hussein bin Ali, King of the Hejaz and Sharif of Mecca, was proclaimed the Caliph of all Muslims by Muslim leaders in Mesopotamia and Transjordania.  Global Muslim reaction was mostly negative and it didn't take.    This date is somewhat disputed, and it could have taken place a couple of days earlier, or later.

Last prior:

Tuesday, March 4, 1924. Waltzing Matilda.

Leap Day

Pope Gregory XIII, 1502 – 1585

Which is notable mostly because it simply is. We only get them, and don't notice them much, every four years.  Other than teasing people born on the day and miscalculating their actual age, not much will occur.

The added day, of course, come about due to the calendar adjustment that went into effect with the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in October 1582. The added day was to keep the calendar from getting increasingly inaccurate.  The entire Christian world didn't adopt the new calendar all at once, in part due to the Great Schism and the start of the Protestant Reformation, but over time, it's taken over nearly completely for the entire globe.  About the only remaining use of the prior Julian Calendar is in some parts of the Eastern Orthodox world for their liturgical calendar, and even that is no longer universally true.

Pope Gregory actually met with a lot of opposition to the new calendar, FWIW.  Members of the general public were really upset at first.  Spain, Portugal, Poland-Lithuania and the Italian states nonetheless adopted it nearly immediately.  France, some of the Dutch Republic, and the Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss Confederation did in 1587.

Denmark and Norway, then one state, and the rest of the Dutch Republic didn't fall into line until 1700-1701, by which time the Julian Calendar was seriously out of whack.  The UK didn't adopt it until 1752.  Sweden came around in 1753.

You would think a day as odd as Leap Day would be associated with some interesting customs, and it actually is, or more accurately was.  In Wyoming, there once was a custom of appointing a teenager to be Governor for the day, honorific of course.  I don't think that occurs anymore, but I guess we'll see today.  If this does occur, I have not taken note of it recently.   Wyoming Public Media reported it has having occured as recently as 1940, FWIW.

One political thing that does happen is the U.S. Presidential Election.  It's always in a Leap Year. . . so we get to enjoy one more extra day of campaigning.

A tradition in the English-speaking world is that women can propose to men on this day, which, in some versions of the custom, extends to the whole year. This tradition was surprisingly wide spread in societies speaking English, and is attributed by some to the Irish Saint, St. Brigid, who predates the Gregorian Calendar by quite some measure.   She died in 525.

Anyhow, supposedly she licensed women to propose to men every four years, which is likely just a story.

"Taking" a person, then, was a much more serious matter, even though it should be equally serious now.

Even when I was a kid, however, there remained the odd custom, apparently limited to English-speaking countries as noted, that in Leap Years girls could "ask out" a boy, it being implicit that otherwise that was a right/burden that fell to males.  It still, in fact, largely does.  This appears to have been the remnant of a custom in English-speaking countries, no doubt only lightly observed, that on Leap Day, this day, women could propose marriage to men, that also being a prerogative which then, and largely now, was reserved to men by custom.

Frankly, this is vaguely threatening.

How much of a deal this really was, I don't know, but it was enough of one that late in the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century it generated cartoons, not all of which were kind, and it generated cards, most of which were, although more than a few of them were somewhat aggressive. The cards suggest that women were using them, so in fact some women did avail themselves of the licensed role reversal and propose.

Less threatening.

As odd as this may seem now, it may have made some sense at the time.  Another thread we have in draft deals with the economics, in part, of marriage in the age, but things were, quite frankly, tighter.  As that thread reveals, a lot more men went through life unmarried than do now, and far more than we might suspect.  More than a little of that was probably economic hesitation.  For women, however, unlike men, being unmarried was a societal strike against them and often a personal lifelong disaster.  If they were waiting for a proposal, this was a societally licensed way to deliver it.

Whatever was going on with this, it seems to have flat out ended in its original form right about the era of the cards we see here.  What happened?

I don't know, but what I suspect is that World War One dramatically altered the marriage landscape.  Indeed, we dealt with this briefly in regard to Catherinettes;

In France, for St. Catherine's saint's day, the Catherinettes were out on the streets:

From John Blackwell's Twitter feed on the topic.

We noted this custom in 2020:

The day is also St. Catherine's Day,, the feast day for that saint, which at the time was still celebrated in France as a day for unmarried women who had obtained twenty-five years of age.  Such women were known as Catherinettes. Women in general were committed since the Middle Ages to the protection of St. Catherine and on this day large crowds of unmarried 25 year old women wearing hats to mark their 25th year would gather for a celebration of sorts, where well wishers would wish them a speedy end to their single status. The custom remained strong at least until the 1930s but has since died out.

We should also note that the plight of unmarried French women, and British ones as well (and probably German ones) had grown worse since 1914.  Due to the combat losses of young men in the Great War, their marriage prospects in an era when being an unmarried woman was somewhat grim, had greatly declined.  The youngest of these women had been 21 when the war ended, meaning that they were of marriageable age when most young men were fighting in the war.  As the war killed men in that demographic, it meant that some would never marry.  The war also meant that the surviving men had disproportionate options.

I'm sure there's a study of this somewhere, but it can't help be noted that it must have had long-lasting social impacts, and it probably also explains the significant number of "war brides" brought home from France by US servicemen after the war and occupation, as well as the same population brining home some German brides, and Russian brides.

This of course is from a different culture yet, the French, but it addresses the same topic, with the French taking it up annually, and more cheerfully it looks like.

This custom apparently has largely died, but interestingly milliners are trying to revive it, as it was associated with outlandish hats.  Having said that, French single women over 25 were still out on the streets with wild costumes and hats in honor of the day, whereas the somewhat maudlin English Leap Day cards don't seem to have made it past World War one.  It's hard not to draw that line in the case of the Leap Day cards.  1916 was a Leap Year, and then 1920.  By 1920 there were a lot of single women in English-speaking countries (and in France too) who were going to be single for life, the war having made that a fact.

Before we leave this topic, it's interesting to note that in Medieval Times, after the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, in some European countries this was Bachelor's Day for the same reason. I.e., Bachelors were subject to proposals.  It actually was a matter of law in some countries.  In some places it became the custom for men of means to be required to buy any suitor whose proposal he turned down twelve pairs of gloves so that she could hide her embarrassment at not having an engagement ring.

While on this, FWIW, as we've noted before, while spinster status was regarded as a disaster earl in the 20th Century, what exactly constituted it is misunderstood. As we have noted in another thread:

The median age for women was 21.6 in 1910. The same year, the median age for men was 25.1.

At the time the author wrote this entry, 2010, the median age for women was 25.0.  The median age for men was 26.7.  Data suggested that it had crept up a little over 1.7 years for women and 1.3 years for men.

Okay, that is a difference, but is that what you were expecting?

I doubt it, unless you are quite familiar with these statistics.

So, over century, the average age for "first marriages" has gone up a little under four years for women, and a little over 1.5 years for men.  Not that much of a climb.

That deals with the averages, of course.  Looking at my own grandparents, I think one set was married in their late 20s or early 30s, while another in their early 20s.  My parents were in their 30s.

Related Threads:

Of interest, I note that some other blogs we link into this site also noted Leap Day or Leap Year, with some noting the same items we noted above.

Leap Year

Leap Year Once Viewed as Opportunity for Women

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Wednesday, February 20, 1924. Non au plan Dawes.

"Let 'em have their fling" Washington Post, Feb. 20, 1924.

The French military objected to the draft Dawes Plan on the basis that it would return the Ruhr's railroads to German control.

The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created in the USSR for Russian ethnic Germans.  The capital city was the ironically named Kosakenstadt, which is now called Engels.  Ethnic Germans had been a feature of the Russian demographic map since Catherine the Great, who was of course German, had invited them in. They were not all of one uniform background, however, as they varied by religious confession considerably.

The German invasion of Russia in 1940 resulted in the Republic being eliminated.  Ultimatly the German population of the USSR was subject to heavy repression, with many people deported to work camps for being ethnic Germans. Some ethnic Germans of military age joined the German forces.  While the heavy repression ended following the march of time and the death of Stalin, remaining German populations in Russian heavily immigrated to Germany starting in the 1980s, before reunification, even though by that time they tended not to be even able to speak German.

Gloria Vanderbilt, socialite, actress and fashion figure was born.  As I don't know much about her and frankly care even less, that's about all I'll note.

The President met with the Good Roads Association, something that relates to something we posted yesterday.

He also met with the Gold Star Mothers.

The worst immigration argument

Victory Farm Volunteers registering in Lane County. Oregon.  Lovina Wilson, farm labor assistant, routes the first three children, and that is what they are, to register during the Mobilization Day program at the Frances Willard School in Eugene. The enrollees in the photo are, left to right, facing table front row: Glenn Cash,13; Howard Cash, 11; and Don Mickelwait, 13.  This photo was taken in 1946, right after World War Two, demonstrating that wartime manpower shortages were ongoing.  This would be, quite frankly, more than a bit much today, as these individuals are way to young to seriously work on a farm, unless they are working on their family farm, and they were frankly way too young then.  Note the boys are wearing white t-shirts, with nothing emblazoned on them, and that girls are in the crowd as well.

There are a lot of varieties of this argument I keep seeing:

If you’re out here talking sht about immigrants but still going to the grocery store to feed yourself, that’s clown sht of the highest order. 

Stop being lazy & get your hands in the dirt or shut the fck up.

From, of course, Twitter.

This is baloney.

To distill the argument, it is that the US must dare not get control of its border with Mexico, or at least not a fair degree of control, as the US is dependent upon those illegally crossiong for food production.

That argument is first and foremost baloney, as it somehow makes the assumption that the huge number of immigrants arriving from Central and South America are in fact arriving in order to work on farms. That isn't happening.  They want to work, no doubt, but the migrant farm system is well established, and they aren't seeking to get jobs in cabbage fields this summer and then go back home.

In reality, most are economic migrants or migrants from Central and South American failed states.  The US is racing towards becoming a failed state itself right now.  Our government isn't working, and we're about to elect an imagined Caudillo who will have to turn on migrants like a health inspector turns on expired milk.  

But economically, the farm sector isn't employing them.

Lots of other things are, such as the construction industry, local small businesses, and back door employment, which explains who we got in this mess.  Democrats imagined, wrongly, that all future migrants are Democratic voters.*  Republicans imagined them all as somebody who was going to mow their lawn for cheap.  Turns out that they are none of those things.**

In reality, they take entry level manual labor jobs which, frankly, would go to Americans who need them, but for the price depression impact this has.

Which gets to the next thing.

The "agriculture depends on migrants" argument is, really, that American agriculture is habituated to cheap farm labor because the Federal Government, with apocalyptic visions of the future after World War Two, created a cheap food policy.

Frightened that Depression Era conditions would return after World War Two, and then frightened that conditions were going to go into the waste bin due to the Cold War, from 1945 on the government has done everything it can to keep foods as cheap as possible.  Americans bitch about food prices, but they spend about 9% of their budget on food, and it generally keeps going down.  The U.S. Government has tracked food prices since 1929, and it's the lowest ever, generally.  From 1929 to 1952 Americans spending on food consumed generally above 20% of a family's income.  In 1932, it was 22%.  In 2008, in contrast, it was 5.6%.

That's great, for family budgets, and it has ancillary impacts on a lot of industries.  Cheap food means that people can go to good restaurants (where you are actually a lot more likely to run into an illegal alien than in a cabbage patch) and have a really good dinner for pretty cheap, and then sit there over dinner and bitch about food prices.  This hasn't always been the case.  When Americans "ate out" well into the 1970s, they probably meant that they went to a diner for lunch.  Growing up, trips to restaurants for dinner were so rare that they only occured, normally, when it was some sort of special occasion, like a birthday or anniversary.  To take a date to a restaurant was a big deal, even when I was a college student.  You were trying to really impress a girl if you took her out for a meal, and later you assessed the damage to your finances that had ensued.

Even fast food joints to some extent expressed this.  We would often hit the burger joints on the weekends, but not daily.  By the time my son was in high school, however, high schoolers hit the nearby fast food joints every day.  Indeed, when I was in high school I ate in the cafeteria, the first time I'd eaten routinely at school.  I didn't particularly like it, but that's what there was.  When our high school cafeteria was condemned during my first year of high school, and prior to their building a new one, I briefly ate downtown, but it was too expensive, and I took up just brining a bad sandwich I'd made myself at home and sitting in the football stadium to eat it.

Glory Days indeed.

Now, fast food fare is absurdly cheap.  Quite a few people I know hit Dirty Ron's Steakhouse every morning for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a cup of Joe on the way in to work, and frankly, they're not bad (and no, that nickname aside, that establishment is not dirty at all).  And I've met working adults, including professionals, who go to Subway, or whatever, every day for lunch.  "Value Meals" and the like are incredibly cheap.  All of this because of a "cheap food" policy.  Part of that policy is related to legal farm migrants, but they are not flooding across the Rio Grande or the desert and claiming asylum.

Nor, frankly, is an ongoing "cheap food" policy a good thing.

The cheap food policy has helped make Americans increasingly fat while driving smaller agricultural entities out of business.  It's contributed to the concentration of everything, and not in a good way.  It's made food prices unrealistically low, while divorcing Americans from the reality of the actual cost of things.  It should end.

Part of that would be, quite frankly, to end the modern version of the Bracero program that has depressed the value of farm labor.  When it came in, in 1943, it made a little bit of sense, maybe, perhaps.  But eighty years later, it doesn't.  Americans will work any job, contrary to what is claimed about them, but at wages that are realistic.  Immigrant farm labor wages won't attract them, as the wages are too low.

In an era in which thousands of Americans are out on the streets without jobs, and in which there are rural areas that are basically depopulated save for the injured and left behind in smaller towns, lying between the consolidated farms, and in which we have urban areas and reservations that are hardcore reservoirs of poverty, if people were paid real wages, there's a ready-made source of labor.  Sure, they aren't the best jobs in the world in some ways, but they are jobs.  And they're also jobs for middle class younger people, who have a demonstrated interest in topics of the soil.

The numbers involved are not small. The US takes in 3,000,000 migrant farmworkers per year.  Ending a program such as this would result in a big impact to farm production, and it'd jump food prices for sure as the positions were, and they ultimately would be, filled with American residents.  It'd frankly also spur mechanization, which I'm not particularly keen on, as right now there are very expensive agricultural implements that are not employed as migrant farm labor is cheaper.

But ultimately, the principal of subsidiarity should come into play here for lots of reasons.

None of the reasons involve the thousands crossing the US Southern border, who are people facing an existential crisis that must be addressed.  They aren't the migrant farmworkers however.  That's a completely different topic.

Footnotes:

*Democrats have long assumed that Hispanic immigrants are natural Democratic voters, without learning the lessons of demographics or history.  

Immigrants tend to be Democratic voters early in their demographic's migration history.  Irish immigrants were.  Italian immigrants were.  This frankly had a lot to do with patronage.  But as they became established, this became much less the case.  To declare yourself "Irish" today doesn't mean that somebody should automatically assume you are a Democrat.

And that's true even if you have 100% Hibernian heritage, or to take the Italian example, if you can trace your lineage back to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus' third cousin, once removed.  Truth be known, in a species in which Joe Cro Magnon pretty quickly asked Lucy Neanderthal out on a date, those straight lines of lineage don't last very long.  To declare yourself "Irish" today, in the US, might merely mean that you think the Irish drink green Budweiser with corned beef sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day.

Moreover, Hispanics in the US have and retain (although they are rapidly losing it) a very distinct culture which is existentially Catholic and conservative.  This is so much the case that the radicals of the Mexican Revolution, in the form of the Constitutionalist, sought to stamp it out, much like their semi fellow travelers the Bolsheviks went after Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917.  And they had a similar success rate, which means lots of Mexican Hispanics, which is what most Hispanics in the US are often only semi observant, but culturally Catholic still.  Given that, the darling issues of the Democratic Greenwich Village set, which forms the central corps of Democratic thought, are deeply at odds with what most Hispanics believe. And this only becomes more the case when Hispanics from outside of Northern Mexican ancestry are considered.  So, not too surprisingly, they're turning Republican.

They are also due to the border crisis itself.  Hispanics along the border whose ancestors settled there two hundred years ago, or in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, or even in earlier recent migrant waves, are not really of the same culture, no matter how dimwitted Americans are about it, as those now crossing and the flood is wrecking their communities.  Americans may see Hondurans and Guatemalans, as well as Venezuelans, as being the same as people from Chihuahua, but people from Chihuahua who live in Eagle Pass do not.

**And they are people, which oddly seems forgotten, except as an argument over the crisis.  Democrats thinking they were mindless sheep who could be herded into the voting booths and Republicans thinking they were something akin to slaves is inexcusible.

Monday, January 28, 1924. Plaintiff Shoeless Joe Jackson, Petition for release, Teapot fallout, Federals seek to retake Vera Cruz, Lenin boxed and warehoused, Far Right Figure gives extreme speech about election, the last King of Sine

Shoeless Joe Jackson's suit against the Chicago White Sox for back pay went to trial on this day in 1924.  The trial was held in Milwaukee.

A delegation headed by Illinois Sen. William B. McKinley and former servicemen present spooled petition to Otto Wiedfeldt, the German Ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. to release Hooven Griffis.

Hooven Griffis?

Yes, he was part of a party of men that had sought to kidnap Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, notorious WWI slacker, from a hotel in Germany, take him to Paris and turn him over to authorities so he could be court-martialed for desertion.

The party was caught.

The headlines all speak for themselves.

Mussolini addressed 10,000 Blackshirts in the Palazzo Venezia predicting a complete election victory and stating that they were "ready to kill or die".

Vanity Fair, December 1923.

Hmmm. . . sort of a lot like what we're hearing now.

Mahecor Joof was crowned as the last King of Sine in Senegal, where he'd be allowed limited power until his death in 1969.

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part X, Declarations: 

October 15, 2023

Hamas v. Israel

Egypt has completed a concrete barrier to block Palestinian entrants from Gaza.  Their border is very small, so they will be able to enforce it.

Qatar has refused to take Palestinian refugees.

Why have I linked this in, well to demonstrate part of the problem.

Bernie "I knew Lenin when he was just a baby" Sanders has called Gaza an "open air prison".

It isn't, but if it is, the guards aren't just Israeli, they're also Egyptian, and quite frankly, the Arabs in general.  

Nobody wants the Palestinians, as by this point, to put it charitably, they're acclimated to living off the dole and are inclined to violence. They're like the residents of Northern Ireland at one time, on spades.

We went into the complicated history of what is now Israel the other day, but to unfairly summarize it, the problem was created by this.

Ottoman Palestine.

Jewish immigrants legally started migrating to the region when it was an Ottoman province, and then when it was a British League of Nations Mandate.  When the Jewish population became noticeable, in a region we might note that not only had an Arab population, but an Armenian population and a Greek population, the Palestinians began to worry and demanded that it stop.  They turned to violence in the 1930s/

Prior to this time, it isn't as if it was an independent country and indeed, as the map above shows, is borders weren't really what they are now.  Israel had been an independent kingdom in ancient times, but it had been conquered by numerous ancient empires and kingdoms during its history.  Rome put an end to Israel, as we discussed the other day, until 1948.  Like much of the pre World War One Arabic Middle East, it was ruled under Ottoman rule by various tribal families.  

The period after the Great War was transformational due to the high levels of Jewish immigration, and World War Two made a push towards a restoration of Jewish Israel inevitable.  After over a millennium of being murdered for no reason whatsoever, the Jewish people wanted a homeland of their own. And, by that time, they had the population base in Palestine to demand it.

The Palestinian Arabs simply couldn't accommodate themselves to the thought, and the non-Palestinian Arabs couldn't either. They made a bad bet.  Had the Palestinians imply gone along with it, quite frankly, by now the demographic impact of their higher birth rate would mean that Israel would have a majority Palestinian population. But they didn't, and in becoming refugees they became wards of the world.

Today, inside the Palestinian Authority, they suffer high unemployment, particularly in Gaza, which is an unnatural economic unit. The Arabs, and Iran, support them, but they've largely gotten over Israel by now and they don't want the Palestinians in their country. They'd rather back them economically than let them in.

But, if there's a solution to this, they probably need to.

Following World War One, largely due to Woodrow Wilson's view of how the world should work, everything pushed towards nation states.  Due to the Great War, Germany and Russia were pushed out of Poland. Finland, the Baltics States, and the various Slavic states that hadn't been independent, became independent.  Ireland became independent.  Colonialism started to become a dirty word.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed and Middle Eastern kingdoms, imperfectly drawn, sprang up. 

And populations were somewhat moved.  

After World War Two, this was very much the case again, although mostly due to the Soviet Union seeking to redraw is territory on ethnic grounds.

None of this is pleasant, but the solution to this may be here.

Israel isn't going to go away, and is not going to let itself become an Arab dominated state.

The Palestinians aren't going away either, but their territory, and they aren't getting Palestine back, isn't viable.  They've never, moreover, really had any sort of independent state in the first place.

They are also a Mediterranean people, which means that they are largely a Sunni Muslim (some are Christians, but they're disappearing as a demographic as Islam is hostile to them and for that matter the Israelis aren't keen on them either) Arab coastal people.

Qatar is a coastal, Sunni Bedouin Arab nation.  So is Saudi Arabia. So is Kuwait.  So is Dubai.

All of these countries have a labor shortage.

A solution, and perhaps the only one, is to resettle the Palestinians in those countries.  Not in one country, which will create all kinds of problems, but across them.  

They will not mix in immediately, but they would in fairly short order.  

Jews whose ancestors emigrated from Ukraine, Poland, etc., 75 years ago do not look back and wish romantically that they could reclaim lost occupations and lands. Frankly, in 75 years, if this was done, Palestinians wouldn't either.  For that matter, in a fairly short period, they'd be fairly mixed with the local Arab population in any event, their identify less of a thing, and their futures better.

Of course, nobody is proposing this, even though many are secretly thinking about it.  Simply pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza has come up as an Israeli solution before.  The Egyptians fear a lot of Palestinians heading their way, and they cannot accommodate them.  That Qatar would reject their entry at this point shows that a lot of Arab states have this on their minds.

And the Palestinians, clinging to a pipe dream, probably wouldn't want to do it either.

Related threads:

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?

People seem shocked to learn that Egypt isn't letting Gazans in.

Saturday, September 29, 1923. Mandates and Floods.

April 25, 1920. Settlements that didn't settle.

April 8, 1920 More Strife

The Secondary Waves of the Great War.

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?

Lex Anteinternet: Some additional observations on the Hamas v. Israe...: 1.  "Was this an American intelligence failure?" Why does the press keep asking this really stupid question?  Hamas didn't att...

Some additional observations, yet again.

It was inevitable that the war in Israel would spill over to the United States in terms of internal politics.  That this makes it different from every war since the Anglo Irish War, which also did, makes it unique. North America does have a fairly large Ukrainian ex pat population, and a fairly large population of descendants of Ukrainians, but they're largely out of view, and therefore out of mind. Because of that, people like Matt Gaetz can choose to suggest that we leave Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians, but he can't say the same thing about Israel.

But we now also have a large immigrant Palestinian population in the US, and a significant one in Australia as well.  Other Palestinian populations are in Europe. This has given us the shocking, to most people, example of people demonstrating either for Palestine or against Israel, depending upon how you think of it.

Which leads me to this:

I think people will not believe the reports of what happened in Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Beeri. Even though Hamas posted photos and videos on their own Telegram channel. Because these are ISIS tactics. Beheaded babies and burned corpses. Yes, I saw the photos.

I don't care if you are of Palestinian extraction or not, although I frankly feel that this adds fuel to the fire that the further away from the prevailing culture an immigrant population is, the harder it is for the "melting pot" (the antithesis of the currently popular but demonstratively false concept of "diversity is strength" ethos) to work.  It can, but it's harder.  At any rate, people had no sympathy at all with German immigrants and German Americans who were in support of the Nazis during the Second World War, and Hamas deserves no sympathy either.  It doesn't matter if you are of Palestinian extraction or not.

I'd also note that one member of Congress of Middle Eastern extraction keeps a Palestinian flag outside of her door, and as of yesterday, still was.  Frankly, no Congressman should keep any flag other than that of the U.S. or perhaps their state outside their door.  

None.

This causes me to recall my father, who never liked people using hyphens in their name to identify themselves as something other than American.  Half German and half Irish by descent, he didn't like, for example, when people called themselves "Irish Americans", a trait he shared with Theodore Roosevelt.

This also says something about preserving old fights, something many cultures and peoples do.

Palestinians are upset, in part, about something that took place running from the late 19th Century to the mid 20th Century, that being the return of Jews to what is now Israel, as well as the history that followed.  The spreading of Jews around the ancient world started as long ago as 586 BC but it got rolling in the modern era in the 60s and of course we can famously date it to 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple.  The Zionist movement began the return starting in 1897 with the creation of a modern Jewish state an expressed goal.  Palestine, part of the Arab world, but in a region that already had a Jewish and Greek population, was the old Israel, territory wise.  Its population was also not uniformly Islamic, having an Arab Christian population, which it still does, and which is hated by Hamas along with the Jewish Israeli population.  The Jewish population of the country doesn't necessarily get along that well with the Christian population either.  The Palestinian identity itself is hard to define, as the region was so mixed up to the point of Israeli independence.  The term apparently wasn't used in modern times, ironically, until 1898, although some argue that Palestinian nationalism was around as early as an 1834 rebellion against Egypt.  Like other regions of the coast Middle East during the Ottoman period, the region was inhabited by nomadic Bedouins, still not identified as Palestinians, and then more urban and agricultural people, something true of Lebanon and Syria as well.

For this reason It's occasionally suggested that the Palestinians are not a real people at all, and to some slight extent, and it would be slight, that would have been almost sort of true at one time.  Having said that, the people who inhabit Lebanon historically are a different ethnicity.  So the Palestinians are a real people, or came to be, and certainly are now.

Palestine, like the entire Middle East, east of Egypt, was an Ottoman possession prior to World War One. For that matter, things west of Palestine technically were as well, although the oddities of colonialism and international politics meant that the British controlled Egypt and the Ottomans really controlled nothing, at that point, further east.  World War One brought Palestine under British rule, as a League of Nation's mandate, and brought Syria and Lebanon under French rule the same way.  Jordan came to be administered by the British as well, through the Hashemite ruling family, as did Iraq.

Allenby entering Jerusalem.

Palestine always proved to be problematic for the British and between the wars there was increasing tension between its Jewish and Arab populations, in part brought about by the fact that the British had made promises in the Balfour Agreement which supported, more or less, the concept of Palestine becoming the home for a future Jewish state.

At the time of Balfour's declaration, the Jewish population, even with two decades if immigration, was pretty small and the declaration wasn't really very specific.  From a British prospective, they were really dealing with a sparsely populated land. At the same time, however, they made promises to Arabs through their leaders to support outright Arab independence in the Middle East.  The two sets of promises were not necessarily irrconcilable, but they weren't necessary easy to deal with on the ground.

The additional problem really was that the land was not the United Kingdom's to give and indeed, in 1917, when made, it was still an Ottoman possession.

Between World War One and World War Two the British had to live with this, which wasn't easy.

By the 1930s Palestinian populations were getting seriously agitated with the direction in which things seemed to be going.  In 1936 this lead to a revolt against the British in which the Palestinians demanded independence and an end to open ended Jewish immigration.  To an extent, because of the involvement of the local populations, this may be regarded as the first Arab Isreali War, or perhaps a proto war, a sign of things to come.  Interestingly, Bernard Law Montgomery had a signficant role in putting it down.

Perhaps because of this, during World War Two, while the British did have armed Arab formations, they were reluctant to really use them.  Also during World War Two, the Grand Mufti of Jersusalem came down on the side of the Germans.  The nature of the conflict as an ethnic one was clearly drawn.

World War Two created the drive towards an independent Jewish Israel as an unstoppable one, with refugees flooding ino the coutnry. The British saw the handwriting on the wall and looked for a way out of the region, which they succeeded in doing in 1948.  Before that, an attempt at imposing a sort of two state solution was made.

Israel delcared independence in 1948 and the Arabs opposed it. In spite of an advantage of arms on part of the Arab armies, and in spite of having established military units of some standing, and in the case of the Arab Legion, partial European leadership, Israel won the war.  The war had huge demographic consequences as 700,000 or more Palestinians became refugees and were later unable to return to the lands they'd abandoned or been forced out of. That's the root of the Palestinian discontent today.

The ultimate cause of Palestinian dispersal is mixed, some of it being due to fear, some of it being due to force, and some of it being Israel preventing their return by operation of law.  I'm not claiming it was just.  But an added factor to it was that the neighboring Arab states did not accommodate a permanent resettlement of the displaced, hoping instead to see Israel defeated in a series of subsequent wars. By the early 1960s the population was radicalizing and in 1964 the Palestinian Liberation Organization formed.  The PLO ended up going to war with one of its host nations, Jordan, in 1970 in a war which looked as if the PLO might overthrow the Hashemite kingdom and claim it for its own. Jordan prevailed in the Black September war and the PLO relocated to troubled Lebanon.  In 1982, it was driven out of that country, which had been created in the first place as a separate political entity for Christian Syrians, and it relocated to Tunis.  Ultimately the PLO came around to the political solution that's in place to day, with the Palestinian authority being a quasi independent Palestinian satellite territory, of which Gaza is part.

After the War of Independence.

What was never foreseen is that Hamas, which is more radical than the PLO and its political expression Fatah, would become the dominant political entity in the Palestinian parliament.  It is.  Backed by money brought in from the outside, and notably Iran, it thrives on the fantasy of driving the Jews out of what had been Palestine.

Israel has been independent for seventy-five years now.  Almost everyone who fought for or against its independence is now dead.  The youngest displaced Palestinians are 75 years old.  The land that they were displaced from has been in other hands for 75 years.  The legacy of this however goes on and on with both sides focusing on a narrow aspect of the history.  Israelis, and the country's supporters around the world, imagine an early Israeli history like that glamorized by Leon Uris which ignored the realities of Palestinian displacement. Palestinians remain bitter about being displaced, a bitterness which is aided by their untenable situation in some parts of the Palestinian Authority but fail to appreciate that they made a bad bargain in 1948 by insisting on taking all of the country. Part of that bad bargain is that there is no reason to believe that had the Arabs won in 1948, the result would have been murderous and certainly would have resulted in the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine, just as Europeans were expelled from Algeria (and their Berber allies murdered) and the Europeans from Libya. For much of the post 1948 period, and for Hams to this day, Arab goals have been been to expel the Jewish population rather than to live with it, although over time, Egypt and Jordan have relented. Hamas also fails to appreciate that they're as boxed in by the Arab neighbors who claim to support them as they are by Israel.

Impacting the entire matter, both sides, now 75 years into this, rely upon economic aid from the outside.  Israel, while often gaining the admiration of Americans for such things as "making the desert bloom" has consistenly relied on US aid from its independence, something that frankly does not make a great deal of sense in an era when US ecnomic fortunes have declined and there is no good reason why a capable foeign nation of this vintage is receiving US aid.  Ireland, for instance, was simply independent when it became independent.  Included in the aid is military aid, even though Israel is itself an arms manufacuturer.  The close economic link to the US makes the US a participant in the Middle East in a way that it would not otherwise be, which in turn has an impact on domestic politics.

Hamas depends entirely on aid from donors and regional states, with Iran being a signficant one.  Oddly enough, the relocation of Palestinians to the US is beginning to also have an impact on domestic U.S. politics.

Seventy-five years is not a long time in historical terms, but the reality of this is that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that is fighting for a fantasy against living people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, for the most part, against the Palestinians.  The murderous fantasy is helping to keep a real solution, if there is one, from occurring.  No sane people would enter into a bargain with a group whose goals are essentially genocidal. Also helping to prevent it from occurring is the fact that the Arabs are a group of people, not one people, and the other Arab nations really don't want the Palestinians on their land.  Egypt is not going to open up the border with Gaza and let them in. Jordan was happy to take the West Bank early on, but it's not clamoring for it back now.  Israel, by having the Palestinians within some sort of border, neatly keeps them from being within other Arab borders.

People have talked about a two-state solution for a long time, but no such solution can come about when one party will not think of it.  Hamas won't, and now surely Israel will not either.

So now what?

That's hard to say, but what seems certain is that Israel will go into Gaza and will be unwilling to let the enclave repeat this recent murderous history.  Hamas will cause the Palestinians to suffer for holding on to a pipe dream and allowing murder to be perpetrated in their name.  The Palestinians will be seemingly unable to grasp this and howl in rage and despair, rather than taking the example of other 20th Century displaced persons, such as the Germans and Poles, and build new lives in their new situation.  Of course, unlike the Germans and the Poles, there isn't much for them to build with, but by the same token, there was never much of a Palestine in the first place.  Other Arab nations that import labor, such as Saudi Arabia, are unlikely for their part to take in the Palestinian displaced population, even though they share, albeit more remotely than we might suppose, an ethnicity.