As I wrote here the other day, I went in for a colonoscopy.
I'm almost a decade past the point where you are supposed to get one. Just too busy, I guess, to have made it in back then, or in between, when I should have. Having said that, a couple of my contemporaries I know very well only made it in recently as well.
In my last post on this topic, I discussed the statistics of colon cancer. What I learned in my colonoscopy was that I have a polyp that was too big to be removed, and now I'll have to have surgery to address it.
The doctor is nearly certain that its not cancerous, but it has to be removed. He also basically indicated it would turn to cancer if it wasn't removed, at some point. Not yet, basically, but some day.
Which puts me in that statistic in a way.
Lesson learned.
Another lesson learned, however, is that this also puts me in the class of people who'd die early on for sure but for modern medicine. A sobering thought. We all imagine ourselves living until 102 worry free, but that isn't the case for most of us. Lots of us make it further now than we would have, thanks to modern medicine.
Today in World War II History—August 1, 1942: The American Federation of Musicians begins a yearlong strike . Permanente Hospital opens in Oakland, CA, for employees of Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond.
So reports Sarah Sundin's blog.
She also reports that the Japanese set up a puppet government in Burma on this day.
I had no idea of the yearlong American Federation of Musicians strike over royalties by recording companies. Union members were not allowed to record for a commercial recording company, although they could appear on the radio. The strike took several months to have an effect due to a backlog of recordings, but it ultimately did, and the full strike lasted until 1944.
The strike did not affect vocalists, who continued to record. This resulted in an increase of vocalist's popularity, and it became one of the contributing factors to the decline of the big bands.
Dealt with elsewhere, the Permanente Hospital item reflected a shift in how healthcare was being provided to workers that would accelerate during World War Two, giving rise to the current insurance based American healthcare system.
In the current debate, discussion, etc., or whatever it is on violence in the United States, we continually hear that the country has a "mental health crisis".
Vagrant sleeping on the street in Denver, a common sight.
Nobody seems to doubt this, and indeed it seems true.
We hear a lot of other common things stated by Americans about the United States, including that it's the "greatest nation on Earth". But does a great nation have a massive mental health crisis.
What's going on?
Well, it should be apparent that the crisis is an existential one. If we have a massive crisis, it's because there's something massively wrong in the culture itself. Other nations have lots of firearms in circulation without having what we're experiencing, and that alone tells us something.
And we also know that, contrary to what we often hear, our society is getting less and less violent, but at the same time our mental health is getting worse. But mental health getting worse isn't a good thing by any measure.
And here's another fact of this crisis. From at least an external view, nobody whatsoever is going to do anything about this, really.
And here's why.
What is going on is that we've erased a set of standards that governed our society that were nearly wholly based on a Christian world view, on everything. In their place we've erected nothing at all, other than a concept that whatever pleases you, you should do, even though every indicator is that this in fact doesn't make for a happy society at all. Most recently we've even tried to erase biological lines written into our DNA, and simultaneously flooded our society with new intoxicants of all types, as the old ones apparently were sufficient. Lines that at one time, if they were crossed, resulted in some sort of institutional intervention, no longer do. Those in society crying for help aren't going to get it, as our new libertine society simply holds that their crying is simply an expression of their soul, rather than a desperate cry for help.
To add to it, we've wiped out meaningful and productive labor for an entire class of individual, which was often all that kept them tethered to something. For many more, we've erased the change that tehir employment and daily endeavors are their own, rather than some board of directors living far away who care little about them. And the dream of working on the land, the most elemental dream of all, is just about dead in the United States.
And, added to that, the erasing of the natural bonds of family in an aggressive way means that entire generations of children are essentially raised in conditions that no human being has been since some prior variant of our genus started to become really intelligent.
Mental health crisis?
Yes, indeed.
Are we going to do something about it?
Probably not more than doping up as many people as we can and sending many more to bogus therapy.
When in trouble, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Unknown.
Everyone has heard the news, of course, a leaked draft of a United States Supreme Court opinion would, if it becomes the final opinion, definitively overrule Roe v. Wade.
Which means that the Supreme Court has not overruled Roe v. Wade yet, and it very well may not, and if it does, it frankly likely will not in the form of the draft opinion, even though the draft is a good draft and this is the approach, absent one based on natural law, that they should take, in context.
Well, anyhow, a firestorm of predictable protests has broken out. So let's look at the controversy, such as it is, and the supposed issues and features of it.
A surprise that isn't a surprise.
Let's start with an obvious one.
Every legal analyst in the universe has known that Roe v. Wade was going to be overruled, so this is no surprise whatsoever. The huge surprise would be if it wasn't. This has been suspected for years.
So why the shock and amazement?
. . . a Lander resident, said she wasn’t surprised by the leaked draft, which was publicized Monday. But she was “a little surprised at the audacity of the claims that (Roe v. Wade) has been so wrong all along,” she said.
Casper Star Tribune.
Well, I really don't know, quite frankly, but part of it is simply manufactured. Indeed, for that reason I think the leaker is most likely from the political left, not the right. Since the leak, the press has taken up the theory that surely the leaker is from the right, and this is an effort to keep doubtful judges from straying. Knowing that protests would result with Roe was overruled, no matter what, the opposite is much more likely. The release was likely from the left, as part of a last ditch effort to keep Roe in place.
As part of that, quite frankly legal scholars have found the text of Roe to be wanting right from day one. Hardly noticed now, quite a few on the left questioned it for decades, and even such figures as Justice Ginsberg stated that the text was pretty much crap. The Court nearly overruled it at the time of the Casey decision, and apparently was set to until Justice Kennedy changed his mind out of a fear of what it would do to the court. Kennedy is my least favorite modern justice so that he'd become a limp noodle at this point only cements my opinion of him, quite frankly, but as he's done on to retirement, and the justices appointed after him were not of his mindset, that Roe would be reversed isn't a surprise at all.
Scary democracy.
Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.
From the draft opinion.
So, after the tulmet and shouting, what does that draft, if it becomes the law, really do?
Well, if you listen to folks like Chuck Todd, Cossacks will be arriving at your house next Thursday to rifle through your drawers, steal your children, eat your lunch, and shave your cats.
Not so.
It does one thing, really, and only one. It returns the issue of legislating and regulating on the topic of abortion, to the voters, through their legislators.
That's it.
Basher: All right chaps. Hang on to your knickers. [He triggers the bomb, and the safe door cracks open.] [Laughing, Basher dances into the vault – and the alarm goes off] Basher: Oh leave it out! You tossers! You had one job to do!
Ocean's Eleven
And everybody loves democracy, and therefore the left in particular is excited about that, right?
Obviously not. So much so, that even legally trained Democratic politicians are willing to tell some huge whoppers about it.
The court's decision does one thing and one thing only. It returns this issue to the states, which means it returns it to the voters.
That doesn't deprive anyone of anything, if the concept of deprivation is even operable here. It doesn't tell women what to do about anything whatsoever.
Our nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.
* * *
Our decision returns the issue to those legislative bodies and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power
Justice Samuel Alito.
Well, that's just a sham, right because men control the vote, right?
Not so at all.
Women are registered to vote in the U.S. at higher rates than men. In recent years, the number of women registered to vote in the U.S. has typically been about 10 million more than the number of men registered to vote.
Rutgers.
And here's the thing, it's been shown that in states that will act to restrict abortion, like Oklahoma for example, the female electorate in those states supports those moves. That is, more women favor restricting abortion than not.
That's the way democratic societies are supposed to work.
Indeed, while there are indeed rights enshrined in the Constitution to protect minorities against majorities, they are few in number, and they should be. They must be limited to essentials to guard against demonstrated abuses, or they inflict abuses, or, and here's the thing, they can also address essential existential rights to protect them.
Well, that's what Roe did, right?
Not so much. Indeed, right at all.
What a conservative court could do, and didn't.
To listed to the press, you'd think that what the Supreme Court determined was that abortions should be illegal, which is completely false. But that's why this decision is not a "conservative" one, it's a libertarian one.
We've noted before that there are no real "conservatives" on the Supreme Court. If there were, a much different result could be reached.
At one time, the Supreme Court openly took the position that there was a natural law, and that the natural law deserved consideration in matters. It didn't always dominate, however, and a really good example of that is a case we've discussed here before, The Antelope. In that pre Civil War case the Supreme Court outright held that slavery was against the natural law, but not against the law of the United States, and therefore the law of the United States won out.
As abortion, however, involves the killing of a human being, no matter how a person may wish to camouflage that, a very different result could be reached.
Indeed, perhaps one thing the long build up to this debate may have served to do is to destroy the bogus arguments about the topic of abortion that had existed at one time. Early on there were plenty of people who claimed to not know when human life began, but hardly anyone takes that position anymore. Current abortion supporters either just don't address this at all, or are outright in their view that a mother has the right to off her child up to a certain point.
In order to take that position, except in the case of the life of the mother, a person is really limited, if they think it through, to a position of atheistic conveyance. That is, there's nothing beyond us and our immediate goals dominate. That argues, we'd note, not only for abortion, but also pretty widespread killing in general. Certainly euthanasia should be allowed, if we believe that, but we probably ought to kill most felons too, as it would be a lot cheaper and convenient if we did that, rather than warehouse them in prisons. And for that matter we probably ought to do in those with serious mental defects.
That very few really are for mass killing tends to demonstrate that few have really thought this through. It's much easier, frankly, just not to. If you do, this is the only place to go. Once we start killing for convenience, the old phrase "well. . he needed killing" begins to have pretty wide application.
Anyhow, a contrary natural law position is that all humans have a right to life that can only be forfitted to protect a person or society from the putative decedent inflicting bodily harm. Ie., generally, there's a right to self-defense, but that's where the line is drawn in an individual killing another person. And there's no reason that a really conservative court couldn't hold that the infant's rights and the mother's are co-equal, and therefore at a bare minimum she could not kill the infant save in the instance of the infant being set to inflict certain grave bodily injury.
And indeed, frankly, in the history of our laws, and in keeping with the concept of being secure in our persons, that's the opinion that would make the most sense.
That isn't the one the court decided. Not even close.
The Supreme Court has never taken away a right
This argument is based solely on the idea that the unborn child has no rights at all, that's the only way you can get the argument to work.
Even then it's a bad argument, although its the stare decisis argument. Essentially it holds that no matter how badly the Supreme Court messes something up, once they totally screw it up, it must be preserved as a screw-up for all time and eternity.
If this was the case, the Dred Scott decision, which held that a slave owner had a right to the return of his slave even if they crossed into a free state, would still be admired as a brilliant legal decision. Indeed, it should be noted, that holding wasn't much different than Roe. One party had a right, and the other didn't.
The Civil War and the post-war amendments took care of that situation, of course, not the Supreme Court itself. But the point is obvious. If some people had a right, for example, to a "separate but equal" education, and then that was changed, yes, you were taking away a right that had previously been extended, but one that needed to be because the prior decision was wrong.
This decision doesn't even go that far, of course. It just tosses things back to the states.
It jeopardizes other "rights"
This is the one argument, and the only one, that actually makes some sense, although only somewhat.
Because the fanciful creation of a fictional right by Roe utilized a discovery of a right that didn't actually exist within the "penumbra" of the Constitution, it created a method to extend such rights where they also didn't really exist in print. That created a frankly dangerous situation in that Roe was easy to cite as a basis for finding those rights existed.
Having said that, the impact here is much more limited than might be claimed. The claim that it's going to lead to a lot of state legislation regarding marriage, for example, is constrained by Loving v. Virginia, which predates Roe. So no matter what may be claimed, it's not the case that states can now outlaw interracial marriage, as some have suggested might now occur. That wouldn't occur anyhow, but the holding in Loving and what it means is in no way impacted.
What it might mean for same-sex marriage, however, is in fact much less clear. The reason for that is that the holding in Obergefell was frankly made up just like the holding in Roe, and everyone pretty much knows that. Indeed, Obergefell may be the last of the post 1970s decisions that really simply invented something out of whole cloth, and the process used to arrive upon it was nearly identical to that of Roe's.
Indeed, the near term history of it was as well. Like Roe, following it gained widespread acceptance while, at the same time, it was clear that it wasn't universally accepted, and it had the impact of simply preserving a debate rather than deciding one. Long term, therefore, it might very well be expected to have the same history. Given that, its frankly the case that it would be better if Obergefell was in fact overruled and this returned to the states right now. That won't occur, however, as it would be too traumatic for the court.
This likely might mean, however, that coming attacks on state's rights to regulate marriage, which has always been the legal norm, might be arrested. I.e., we may not see any polygamy challenges soon, which we could have expected otherwise.
The other thing we keep hearing is that this may mean that the Supreme Court will send the issue of the regulation of contraceptives back to the states. This is also unlikely.
The Court determined this issue before Roe as well, in 1965's Griswold v. Connecticut. The raising of the issue is a stalking horse, but it's not a wholly illogical thing to bring up. Rather than Roe being a foundation for Griswold, it's actually the other way around.
The thing here that's of interest is that contraceptives have become so accepted that their health hazards, known to a much better degree in 2022 than they were in 1965. That's not really on point, but it's interesting in that if the same pharmaceuticals were being released for the first time today, as they were then, I'm not sure the FDA would actually approve them for public safety reasons. At any rate, this decision, if it becomes law, has no impact on the 1965 opinion and no matter what the arguments on this topic are, or may have been, its doubtful this will change in any fashion, even if legally it probably really ought to revisit the topic.
That brings up "abortion pills". It's been claimed that this may mean, and it very well might, that states will outlaw these, or outlaw them coming by mail.
On the last item, that's a curious one, and particularly creepy one, which will simply note.
The thing here is whether or not court's will rule that this is simply an area dominated by the Federal Government through the Commerce Clause. Generally that's the case with pharmaceuticals and state's don't, and probably can't, regulate them at all. That issue is sure to come up, and the direction even the Supreme Court takes on this may very well be surprising to those panicking now. It should be noted, as will be below, that the entire concepts of abortion pills as legitimate pharmaceuticals is more than a little Orwellian and not much different than imagining small arms ammunition to be the same thing, but nonetheless, this is not nearly as predicable as some may imagine.
But what about. . .
Because so much of this is patently obvious, supporters of abortion resort rapidly to stalking horse arguments, the classic one being "well what about instances of rape or incest".
No normal person even wants to discuss rape and incest, so this argument sends a person into silence as a rule, but we'll point out here that at least as to rape, ever single living human being on the planet is undoubtedly a descendant from that event at some point. I know one very gentle soul who knows for a fact that, in his case, he is, his grandmother having been employed as a maid and suffering a rape from her employer. His "grandfather" was not, but rather a man who married her while she was still pregnant.
Here's the thing, a person is no less a person because of a rape. That's a hard truth, but a truth nonetheless. Yes, carrying a child due to rape must be awful, but nonetheless, killing a person because of it doesn't make the event less awful.
Interestingly here, I'd note, rape is one of the original common law felonies and was in fact punishable by death at one time. Seemingly nobody makes the argument that rapist should be executed, but then that argument does not have an equivalency here.
Incest is an even more horrific crime against the individual and nature, but the same arguments pertain.
In both instances, however, it would be noted that the number of abortions due to these events is incredibly small, something like 1% at most. So the argument that widespread bloodshed should be allowed because of the 1% is knowingly disengenguine. It's much like the logic that allowed white communities to wipe out entire black ones in the South due to an allegation of rape. One person, that is, was accused, typically falsely, but the entire black section of town is torched.
That in fact gets to two other arguments, one involving distance and the other involving race.
Another argument that's revived in this debate is the old one about somebody having to travel for miles and miles to another state to procure an abortion. First of all, that assumes abortion is legitimate to start with. But just as an argument, it's a dog that doesn't hunt anymore.
By and large, in states that will outlaw abortion, it's already the case that it's fallen out of favor to such an extent that people already experience this. So that won't change much. The other thing is that an argument that made some sense as an argument in 1973 doesn't anymore.
Indeed, in 1979 the Nitty Gritty Dirt band issued a song about wistful thinking of traveling that included this line:
Voila! An American Dream Well,
we can travel girl, without any means
When it's as easy as closing your eyes
And dream Jamaica is a big neon sign
That song involved a person dreaming of travel, but the "we can travel . . . without any means" became pretty much true in later years and almost was then.
The truth is, in the modern United States, this is already a feature of the landscape of this issue and, while people really hesitate to note it, the American culture of 2022 is so much wealthier than that of 1972 that things like travel are much less an impediment to anything than they were then. Indeed, the concentration of poverty in some urban areas of the United States actually reflects that, as the urban poor have migrated to them, rather than being stuck in urban areas that they were previously in by default.
That bring up the odd "particularly minority women", by which pro abortion people fall back on one of their oldest arguments, which is that abortion is necessary to off African American babies.
This treads on being a racist argument on their part, and it at one time very much was. Early proponents of any type of birth control often based their arguments on controlling the black population.
There's no overt effort to do this now, but the racist nature of the argument nonetheless comes through. It suggests that there's just something different about blacks and for abortion . . .
An interesting aside to this is the degree to which the WASP culture in the US is sort of a post children culture in and of itself. There are a lot of cultural aspects of that which are outside this debate, but regarding children as almost sort of a virus is part of it. Which gets to this
"Healthcare"
There's suddenly all sorts of claims and for that matter press about abortion being "healthcare".
Something that frustrates a natural process isn't healthcare, and that's obvious. The natural process is what is seeking to be prevented. It's the antithesis of healthcare. This is no more healthcare than it would be if you stopped into your doctor, and he just suggested killing you if you had a cold. Yes, it'd stop the cold alright, but sure wouldn't be healthcare. Accelerating death or actually causing it never is.
It'll impact the fall election.
Finally, this is really a different topic, but it comes up again and again. How will this impact the fall election?
The hope of Democrats is that it brings out hordes of enraged Democratic voters who will help them keep slim majorities in the House and Senate.
It won't.
If anything, recent history has shown that no matter what the issue is, Democratic voters tend to stay home and watch reruns of Dawson's Creek or something rather than go vote.
Well, with Omicron now becoming dominant, time for a new installment.
Israel is recommending a second booster. It was the first country to recommend a booster shot in general.
The CDC warns that the Omicron may see 140,000,000 new cases in the United States in the next couple of months.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has stated that it is a moral duty to be vaccinated. The Catholic Bishop of Cairns, Australia, decried the role of ignorant and divisive parishioners in spread vaccine myths.
In a rare instance of some unity in politics, former President Trump stated in an interview how pleased he was that President Biden mentioned his administration's role in developing the vaccine. Trump went on to state that healing of the nation's divides needed to occur and urged people to get vaccinated, while also stating that he though mandates counterproductive.
December 31, 2021
An additional 200+ Marines have been discharged for refusing orders to take the vaccine.
Israel has approved a 4th booster shot.
January 10, 2022
Listening to the weekend shows, it's become clear that the new Coronavirus strategy is now "learn to live with it". Going forward, it's going to be treated with annual (if not more frequent) vaccinations and treated upon infection.
Perhaps this was inevitable, but it also represents a global public health failure. In the developed world, large numbers of the population refused to acknowledge the disease as fundamentally different and overall the world in general failed to act to prevent the spread of the disease in the Third World. If there's a bright spot, a big if, it seems to be evolving towards less lethal.
Which doesn't mean it isn't lethal. This will mean we'll have a period of years in which the unvaccinated and those who were vaccinated but who slip into disregard will in fact get killed by the disease until vaccination becomes general.
January 14, 2020
The US Supreme Court ruled that OSHA lacks the authority to impose mask mandates on conventional workplaces under the existing laws and regulations applying to it.
January 22, 2022
The state has hit an all-time new high for new infections.
February 3, 2022
The Army is discharging soldiers who refused to get the vaccine. The discharges are for misconduct, so they are in fact bad conduct discharges, which will therefore carry some lifelong negative implications.
The Secretary of the Army also replied to Governor Gordon, and some other Governors, that this applies to National Guardsmen in spite of their letters of protest.
New Zealand is reopening its boarders.
Justin Trudeau and his family apparently have COVID. His infection is coincident with a massive trucking industry protest over new rules applying to unvaccinated truckers.
February 11, 2022
The United States has sustained 900,000 deaths due to COVID 19.
A spike in deaths has occurred since January, principally due to the Omicron variant in the unvaccinated. The US has the highest reported deaths of any country on earth, which is due to the resistance to getting vaccinated.
The American death toll now exceeds the number of deaths due to the Spanish Flu, which is a reported 675,000, although in reality due to the lingering effects of the disease, it was higher than that. Put in context, however, given the population at the time, that would equate to approximately 2,000,000 Americans today.
Put back in context, it's clear the US is going to exceed 1,000,000 deaths due to COVID 19.
Leonard Thompson, age 14, received the first successful injection of insulin in history. He'd only shortly before received an unsuccessful one, in the first example of an insulin injection, which he had an allergic reaction to.
It's all too easy to forget that it was only 100 years ago that a disease like diabetes, now very treatable, simply terminated the lives of those seriously afflicted with it.
It's also too easy to get that this lifesaver comes at the end of a needle, something that similar treatments also do, and yet they continue to be resisted today.
President Harding opened a farming convention, promising Federal help to farmers for loans for such things as equipment purchases.
Not surprisingly, just as now, human reminders of the recent war abounded at such things.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was sending out a reminder that waterfowl season was drawing down.
It was a dry New Years Eve. . . at least officially for Americans and most Canadians who, if they were following the law, had to ring in the arrival of 1922 with some non-besotted beverage. I'm sure many did.
Miss Texanna Loomis, December 31, 1921. She was a radio engineer.
And there was a lot to celebrate that year. For Americans, the Great War had officially ended, although the fighting had obviously stopped quite some time prior. For the many Americans with Irish ancestry, it appeared that Irish independence was about to become a de jure, rather than a de facto, matter. Americans were moving definitively past World War One, and in a lot of ways definitively past a prior, much more rural, era and country.
Not all was well, however, as the economy was doing quite poorly. There was hope that would soon change, with that hope being expressed in a regional fashion on the cover of the Casper Daily Tribune.
Also, on the cover of the paper was the news that the County had taken over ownership of the hospital. It'd run the hospital until 2020, when Banner Health took over it, converting it back into a private hospital after almost a century of public ownership.
we've reached the point where things are beginning to sound like satire from the 1960s.
I haven't reviewed Dr. Strangelove, or the film Failsafe, here yet. I'll have to get to that. Dr. Strangelove was a satirical version of the same work, both being based on the novel Failsafe. It's a tribute to Stanley Kubrick that the satirical version is remembered more than the straight drama.
For those who don't recall it or who haven't seen it, the plot is based on an Air Force general, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, going insane and launching the B-52s under his command on an unauthorized first strike, with nuclear weapons, on the USSR. Once the bombers have passed their "failsafe" point, where they cannot be recalled, he makes his plot known.
The Dr. Strangelove version involves some heavy satire of 1950s and 1960s Cold War conspiracy theories. These theories really existed at the time. One of them involved fluoridation of water, which some people really believed was a Communist plot, rather than a health move to strengthen teeth and reduce tooth decay, which was its real motives. The film is full of really hilarious lines that related to this, including:
General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works
And;
Gen. Buck Turgidson: General Ripper called Strategic Air Command Headquarters shortly after he issued the go code. I have a phone transcript of that conversation if you'd like me to read it.
Preisdent Merking Muffley: Read it.
Turgidson: Ahem... The Duty Officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact that he had issued the go code, and he said, uh, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in, and nobody can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them. Otherwise, we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation." Uh... "My boys will give you the best kind of start, 1400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now." Uhuh. Uh... "So let's get going, there's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural... fluids. God bless you all." And he hung up.
Turgidson: Uh, we're... still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
Muffley: There's nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
Turgidson: We-he-ell, uh, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!
Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
Muffley: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
Turgidson: That's right sir. You are the only person authorized to do so. And although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.
Over the weekend, I read an op-ed by a candidate challenging Cheney for her seat, which contained the quote; "Biden’s vaccine mandate violates our constitutional rights to bodily integrity and to decline medical treatment."
Bodily integrity?
Now, I know what the candidate means. And I'll further note that the candidate represents Federal employees in regard to the vaccine mandate for Federal employees. What she means, essentially, is that requiring a person to get a vaccine amounts to something like a 4th Amendment violation to be secure in your person.
But it doesn't sound that way.
Part of the reason I fear that people won't put it that way, as they don't want to extend the rest of the argument, which is one of radical libertarianism which most people are pretty uncomfortable with. Indeed, I'm getting a little bit of a scent in the wind that this is really about to start drifting the other way.
Radical libertarianism holds that a person is free to do whatever they want with their bodies with no societal restraint. I.e, you can be a drug addict, drink yourself to death, whatever. Generally, the only limit is "as long as you don't hurt others".
Truly radical libertarianism doesn't have the latter aspect to it. I.e, in the anarchical form you can hurt others, they just have the right to hurt you back.
Most people aren't for that.
Of course, generally the argument isn't posed this way at all, but candidates are very careful, for the most part, not to take the other step lest they go down a road that is too Kubrikesque.
What the candidate didn't say, we'd note, is that the candidate feels the vaccines are dangerous, or alter people's DNA, or contain microchips, or anything of that sort. We know that they aren't any more dangerous than other vaccines, and we know that they don't alter your DNA in some scary chimera, and we know that they aren't part of a Bill Gates plot. I've heard all of those things said. The most outlandish one, I'll note, is the claim that everyone who receives the vaccine will be dead within one year, a frankly absurd assertion.
The candidate didn't say anything about the candidate being vaccinated, either.
The candidate doesn't want to be associated with anything like that, of course, while still wanting the votes of people who feel that the vaccines shouldn't be mandated for any number of reasons, ranging from strong 4th Amendment beliefs, to strong religious beliefs to having fallen down into the conspiracy theory hole.
Which is emblematic of the entire political season.
Right now a lot of Republicans are being very careful not to say that they support insurrection while also being very careful not to say that they are condemning what happened on January 6. They don't want to alienate the populists (whom ironically in many places include a large number of former blue collar Democrats). We saw this in the race in Virginia. The winning candidate walked a fine line between accepting Trump's endorsement and keeping him at more than arm's length.
The ultimate problem is how far you can go down that path before you've walked right into the conspiracy swamp without realizing it. Plenty of conservative Germans did that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, only to find that while they never held conspiratorial beliefs about Jews themselves, they had walked into a dictatorship that marched into a Second World War. While that sounds extreme, of course, it's clear by this point that Donald Trump began to work on a coup to retain power prior to the November election and he's working on fixing the 2024 election. The Republican Party hasn't won the popular vote for the Presidency in 22 years and now quite a few in the trenches are will to listen to theories that this is due to nefarious reasons, rather than it simply being due to the fact that, like it or not, the nation has evolved to the point where most of its citizens live in large cities.
All of which is a bit off point for where I was going.
I truly wonder if the candidate isn't vaccinated. I have no idea, but my guess is that the candidate, like most, but not all, in the candidate's profession, have been, particularly where the candidate's spouse is appreciably older than the candidate and therefore more at risk.
Which of course gets to the flipside of radical libertarianism, which is that governmental bodies can and always have required people to do stuff they don't want to for the public good. The question is where you draw that line.
Wherever its drawn, I suspect its being redrawn right now, and not where those up in arms in this are would have it. Wherever the Ritterhouse trail comes out, it's pretty clear that the nation is seriously reconsidering the libertarian expansion of firearms laws that has occurred over the past 20 years, and they're going to start retracting. If that's correct, and I suspect it is, there's going to be a subtle shift here too.
Picking up long-distance trends, even if they're four years out, is not easy to do, but it looks like the direction of the wind is in fact changing.
In the meantime, while I know its purely accidental, people ought to be careful about putting something into print that shows the same litigation driven instinct that caused us, when exercised on the left, to get to the anti-democratic point we're now at, and it'd be good to have these things proof read by somebody with a deep cultural knowledge. I'm sure I'm not the only one who recalled Jack D. Ripper when I read the op ed.
And really, it'd be better just to be flat out honest and plain. Whatever the reason for opposing the mandates is, just say it. If it's that you don't believe the disease is risky, say that. Or if you don't care if some die due to their decisions not to get vaccinated, say that. If death is the price you're willing to pay to draw a line on individual freedom, say that.
But whatever is said, surely this isn't what the GOP race next year is really about. And people ought to be really honest about that as well.
And they ought to be honest about their individual beliefs. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the two state Senators feel that Trump tried to stage a coup, that they'd support mandatory vaccinations in nearly any other context, and that they'd have voted for the infrastructure bill (which I wouldn't have) had it been offered by a Republican.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
They say that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I suspect that's not true.
I think it's paved with personal compromises. Things we say but don't mean, mean but don't way, put up with when we disagree, and conduct we engage in as the world or others feel we should. Pretty soon, we're goo far in to muster up the energy to change our courses.
Ready or not, and probably not, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has entered the state and infections are rapidly rising, concentrated among those who have not received a vaccination.
The state health officer has asked for Wyomingites to mask back up indoors in areas of moderate to high transmission, which includes Laramie and Natrona Counties.
In Colorado, certain counties have been pointed out as areas of rapidly rising infections as well, including Denver County, where the recent Major League Baseball game and a concert are now regarded as superspreader events.
As a background to all of this, it's very clear that the global population is nowhere near the "herd immunity" level which is necessary to render COVID 19 extinct. Perhaps this isn't too surprising, given the monumental nature of the effort necessary to achieve it, but what is surprising is that the developed world hasn't achieved it and the United States is clearly lagging far behind. This, too, comes at a point in time at which it nearly looked as if success had been achieved.
In the US a strong feature of the ongoing pandemic is a refusal of a certain part of the population to receive the vaccination that prevents it, this making the disease cross over from one which lurks ready to strike anyone to one which at this point is a preventable disease. Preventable disease itself has become the hallmark of modern American medical situations, in that most of the diseases that are real killers in the US are actually ones that are preventable.
Future historians and sociologist will study this in depth to attempt to determine what happened here. We'll leave that for the time being, but what we would note is that the culture of the pandemic has really changed. For the vaccinated the refusal to get the vaccine is absolutely baffling. Many of those not vaccinated cite personal freedom as the basis of their views, but personal freedoms have always yielded in the United States to public emergencies with examples simply too numerous to mention. Given this, at this point, many public entities are simply done with allowing for personal choice and have determined to make life difficult for those not getting vaccinated, up to and including firing those who refuse to receive vaccines. The Federal Government is an all out effort to vaccinate its servants who remain unvaccinated, and President Biden is about to order the military to be fully vaccinated, something it amazingly has not implemented yet.
While it's a grim prognostication, in my view it's too late. Whatever the hesitancy is caused by, we're going to be in for a third wave of the pandemic. Many of the victims this time, indeed most of them, will be vaccination hold outs. If the US achieves herd immunity, which is unlikely, it'll be through the rapid spread of the Delta variant of the disease among that population, which would be a tragic and lethal way to achieve it. Having said that, and seemingly unnoticed by the unvaccinated, a growing bitter resentment against them by the vaccinated is really building with the distinct view that the unvaccinated are being lethally selfish. With that being the case, there are now open comments in some quarters about simply letting the unvaccinated go ahead and risk death without sympathy from anyone else. There is also building support for private employers to require vaccinations of employees.
The great added problem all of this is creating is that there is now a very real risk that the disease will evolve a vaccine resistant strain, setting everything back. If that occurs, and my guess is that this is now inevitable, all the progress to date will be lost, and we'll return to the strict restrictions, and stricter, that were only recently lifted. There will be enormous resistance to doing so, but a disease that's now killed 600,000 Americans will be in the gate to double that death toll, potentially, and the next public health crisis that results will be at least as severe as the current one. My guess is we're mere weeks away from such a strain emerging somewhere.
In terms of the "somewhere", there are still vast reaches of the globe were very few are vaccinated and wish to be. This is also a massive problem. Whereas in the United States the disease is circulating among those who, for the most part, could avoid it if they wished to, in the Third World it's circulating at a largely unknown rate among those who would avoid it if they could, but can't.
As noted, this will be a source for a great amount of study in the future. How did a country which was a scientific and medical leader in the mid 20th Century end up one in which medicine was so disregarded? Reading about it will be fascinating for future students of human behavior and history. Living it, however, and seeing those dying in it, is quite a bit different.
August 1, 2021
The producers of a Clifford The Big Red Dog movie have pulled its release due to the Delta variant surge.
August 2, 2021
Dr. Fauci warned of more pain and suffering ahead, but didn't foresee shutdowns on the basis that there were sufficient numbers of vaccinated people to avoid them.
Senator Barrasso argued the CDC should be sued and found liable for malpractice, and urged people to get vaccinated.
August 3, 2021
And here we have a current, sobering, look at how the globe is doing in terms of vaccination progress.
Senator Lindsay Graham reports he has a break through case of COVID 19.
As can be seen, the US, in spite of vaccine resistance, is doing pretty well. It needs to do better. Canada, which was having problems with vaccination rates for a while, has pulled head of the pack in terms of major nations. Not noted on this chart, some small countries and ones with very unified governmental structures have achieved 100% vaccination. The US, given the amount of vaccine it has, could rank right up there with Canada, but the curious political season, etc., has frustrated that. Nonetheless, the US just hit 70% initial vaccination, so it's getting there, and the recent outbreak of the Delta variant has seemed to spark an increase in first time vaccinations.
In the Third World, however, vaccination rates are a disaster due to lack of vaccine. And given that, new variants of the disease are undoubtedly evolving.
August 4, 2021
As posted on another thread, the CDC has reimposed the moratorium on evictions.
August 5, 2021
Governor Gordon announced that he will not impose a mask requirement on schools this upcoming school year, leaving any such move to local districts.
Outside perhaps of Teton County, there is no political will for such a requirement, and therefore it will not occur.
Local hospitalizations have climbed back to the rate they were at this past January.
Japan is expanding its Covid restrictions. China is reimposing its Draconian closures on some areas within its borders.
August 11, 2021
The University of Wyoming has reinstated a mask mandate.
Hawaii has reinstated restrictions. Oregon is imposing indoor mask requirements.
August 17, 2021
Governor Gordon has indicated Wyoming will not being intervening in COVID in any fashion in spite of the increased numbers.
While not put this way, the politics of events are such that the state simply isn't going to act no matter how bad the spread of the Delta variant becomes. While there's a chance one or two counties might, it's only a chance.
The Governor's office itself was shut down recently due to a COVID infection. The question does remain on whether some agencies with a high degree of independence might act on their own, but so far there is no hint that they shall.
In contrast, a single case has sent New Zealand back into a lockdown.
August 18, 2021
Wyoming's COVID death rate returned to the level it was in February.
New Mexico has put a mask mandate in place.
Pope Francis urged the unvaccinated to get vaccinations. This came in the form of an advertisement for the US Ad Council backing vaccines.
Given this, perhaps it should be noted that Cardinal Raymond Burke, a highly respected and conservative Catholic Bishop, has been hospitalized for COVID 19. Cardinal Burke has been a critic of the vaccination efforts for various reasons and has somewhat gone from a respected critic of Pope Francis to a slightly sidelined critic whose views on some things bordered on becoming extreme.
August 21, 2021
Vaccination rates in Wyoming are now dramatically rising. So are infections, but this seems to have gotten the message through to a lot of people on vaccination.
August 28, 2021
Teton County has imposed a mask mandate.
September 1, 2021
Hot Springs County's schools are going virtual for thirteen days due to a COVID spike.
The National Guard is assisting clinics in Billings, Montana, due to a spike there. The Idaho National Guard has been called out in that state for the same purpose.
Anti-vaxxers shut down a mobile vaccination clinic in Georgia.
September 2, 2021
Governor Gordon indicated Wyoming will not impose a mask mandate.
As a practical matter, there simply exists no political will to do this in the state at this point in time.
On a personal note, I now know one (unvaccinated) individual who has died of the Delta variant and another (unvaccinated) person who is going to, ages 60 and 40 respectively.
September 3, 2021
30% of the patients at Casper's Wyoming Medical Center are in the hospital due to COVID 19. Most are under 65.
The school district will require individuals out of work due to COVID to take the time from their sick leave.
September 5, 2021
The hospital in Sweetwater County opened an additional wing to handle the influx of COVID 19 patients.
September 9, 2021
President Biden has asked OSHA to mandate that employers with over 100 employees be mandated to require those employees to have COVID 19 vaccinations. He's also signed an executive order which will require Federal contractors to have COVID 19 vaccinations.
Over 100,000,000 Americans will be covered by the orders.
Governor Gordon, probably sensing more the wind where he lives than giving expression to his own opinions, or at least I suspect, noted the following:
Governor
Gordon Statement Opposing Biden Administration's Vaccine Mandates
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon has
issued the following statement in response to today's announcement by the Biden
Administration mandating COVID-19 vaccinations:
“The Biden Administration’s announcement to mandate COVID-19
vaccinations or weekly testing for private businesses is an egregious example
of big government overreach.
Our Constitution was written and fought for to protect our liberties as
American citizens. This administration’s latest pronouncement demonstrates its
complete disregard for the rule of law and the freedoms individuals and private
companies enjoy under our Constitution. In Wyoming, we believe that government
must be held in check.
I have asked the Attorney General to stand prepared to take all actions
to oppose this administration’s unconstitutional overreach of executive power.
It has no place in America. Not now, and not ever.”
This puts Attorney General Bridget Hill in the position of filing doomed litigation, or litgation that will be moot by the time it is taken up, but as a posturing matter, this no doubt really doesn't matter.
The Northern Arapaho Tribe, taking the opposite approach, is mandating that its employees be vaccinated.
Los Angeles' school district, the second largest in the nation, is requiring vaccinations for indivdiuals age 12 and up.
September 10, 2021
Laramie County's school district has mandated that students wear masks indoors.
September 11, 2021
France has banned unvaccinated U.S. tourists from entering the country.
The CDC released a study that the unvaccinated were 4.5 times more likely to get COVID 19 and 11 times more likely to die.
September 15, 2021
The legislature is apparently considering a special session to consider the Administration's COVID 19 mandates.
This would really be an odd exercise as the one that the legislature would be likely to be the most upset about, the OSHA entry into vaccination requirements, hasn't come into effect yet and is extremely likely to be tested in court before it does. Anything the legislature does will come up against the Supremecy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and therefore be ineffective, if it goes into effect, and put the state into a fight with the Administration where it can't win, but where it can end up spending money that it doesn't have. It'll also serve to really fire up polarization in an area, and era, in which everything is already extremely polarized.
September 17, 2021
The University of Wyoming is extending its mask mandate through the fall.
The Pfizer accounted that its vaccination is safe for children 5 through 11 years of age.
The number of Americans who have died of COVID 19 has supassed the number who died from the 1918 Influenza, a number which must be tempered i consideration if we take into account that the country had about 1/3d of its current population at the time, meaning that the 1918 flu was still far more devestating, at least so far.
The school nurse in the Pine Bluffs school district resigned after that district's board determined to continue to allow children exposed to COVID 19 to attend school, as long as they wore masks. Citing the act and its impact on her professionally and personally, she resigned.
September 22, 2021
Governor Activates Wyoming National Guard to Provide Hospital Assistance
September 21, 2021
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Wyoming’s hospitals have sought additional support to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in hospitalized patients. There are approximately 200 people with COVID-19 in Wyoming hospitals today, which is near the peak number the state has seen during the pandemic. Governor Mark Gordon has activated guardsmen who have stepped forward to provide temporary assistance to hospitals throughout the state.
Governor Gordon has called approximately 95 Soldiers and Airmen to State Active Duty orders, assigned to hospital locations at 24 different sites within 17 Wyoming cities. They will serve to augment current hospital and Wyoming Department of Health staff to help ease workloads imposed upon them due to large numbers of COVID-19 hospitalizations.
“I am grateful to the members of our Wyoming National Guard for once again answering the call to provide assistance in our hospitals during this surge,” Governor Gordon said. “Our Guard members truly are Wyoming’s sword and shield, and their commitment to our state is something for which every Wyoming citizen can be thankful.”
Guard members’ responsibilities will include: assisting in environmental cleanup in hospital facilities; food and nutrition service; COVID-19 screening; managing personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies; and other support tasks. Some will also be trained to administer COVID-19 tests.
“The Delta variant has overwhelmed the medical institutions of states across this country. Our state is no different with most hospitals at or near capacity,” said Col. David Pritchett, director of the joint staff for the Wyoming National Guard. “The Soldiers and Airmen of the Wyoming National Guard are proud to jump back in to provide much needed assistance to our communities as we continue to battle the effects of COVID-19.”
The orders for guardsmen will be 14-30 day rotations, with the potential to extend beyond that, up until Dec. 31. The numbers and locations of guardsmen may change based on hospital needs.
--END--
September 24, 2021
In the reverse of the seeming norm, a lawsuit has been filed in Montana seeking to overturn a law there which probhibits employers from mandating vaccinations and masks.
October 8, 2021
120 American children have lost at least one parent due to a COVID 19 death.
October 9, 2021
Casper's ICU is full.
More Americans have died in 2021 of COVID 19 than in 2021 at this point.
A female student in Laramie was suspended for refusing to wear a mask and then arrested as she refused to leave school grounds.
News anchor Cheryl Hackett was terminated from KCWY for refusing to adhere to her employer, Gray Media's, vaccine mandate. She is the second person in a Wyoming Gray Media outlet to be terminated for this reason in a week.
October 13, 2021
October 13, 2021
Governor
Gordon Further Prepares Legal Challenge of Federal Overreach on Vaccine
Mandates
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon is taking
action to oppose President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The Governor and
the Attorney General continue to prepare the State’s legal challenge to the
threat of the Biden Administration’s proposed vaccine mandates, when they are
finalized. It should be noted that the Biden Administration has yet to issue
any specific policies that can be challenged in court.
“Four weeks ago, when the President issued his announcement
regarding vaccine mandates, I immediately instructed Attorney General Hill to
prepare for legal action to oppose this unconstitutional overreach,” Governor
Gordon said. “Attorney General Hill has begun that mission and is continuing to
strengthen alliances, improve potential arguments, and consider appropriate
strategies.”
Governor Gordon noted that a
joint letter from 24 attorneys general explained that the
President’s edict is broad, inexact, and utilizes a rarely-used provision in
Federal law that allows it to be effective immediately.
“This coalition of Attorneys General is well-prepared to fight the
Biden Administration in courts when the time is right, and I am committed to
using every tool available to us to oppose federal rules, regulations, and
standards whenever they overreach. We are prepared to act promptly once these
mandates are finally issued,” the Governor said. “Wyoming will not stand idly
by to see any erosion of the constitutional rights afforded our citizens and
their industries.”
As the state prepares for its legal battle with the federal
government, Governor Gordon stressed that as a conservative Republican, he
continues to stand for smaller government that is closest to the people.
Governor Gordon reiterated, “Government must resist the temptation to intrude
in private sector interests.”
“It is neither conservative nor Republican to replace one form of
tyranny with another,” he added. “Doing so is antithetical to our American form
of government, even if it is for something we like. I will stand firm against
unconstrained governmental overreach regardless of where or when it occurs.”
-END-
Politically Governor Gordon has nearly no choice but to take this approach, and of course he's faced with a special session of the legislature as well, something he may be trying to avoid. But the legal prospects for such a suit are small.
October 22, 2021
Russia is experiencing a record COVID surge.
More Wyomingites are presently hospitalized due to COVID 19 than at any prior point in the pandemic. Deaths have also hit an all time weekly high. Almost all of the new victims are unvaccinated.
One in five of the prisoners in the Wyoming State Prison presently are infected with the disease.
October 24, 2021
The unvaccinated can expect to get COVID 19 every sixteen months, according to a recent study.
October 30, 2021
Wyoming has joined ten other states in a doomed effort to litigate the question of whether the Federal Government can require employees of its contractors to be vaccinated.
The rule hasn't gone into effect It will in December. It's unlikely this issue will be resolved by December, but when it is, it'll be resolved in favor of the Federal government.
There seems to be a widespread belief in the United States that the government has never compelled people to do stuff that they'd rather not do, and that this is deeply ingrained in American history.
This is quite contrary to the truth.
The first muster of Colonial militia. You were in it because you were a male sixteen years of age or older. No conscientious objection. No moral exceptions. No exceptions at all. If you were a man, you showed up. Professionalism, in the depiction, probably exaggerated. Cat. . probably not.
Now, this obviously comes about due to the recent actions by the Biden Administration to compel wider vaccinations. What you believe on the justice of that is up to you, and I'm not commenting on it. That's up to you.
Rather, I'm commenting on the myth, and it's a real fable, that the government, or more properly governments, cannot compel you to do something of this type, and never has before. That's wholly incorrect.
Indeed, even in the category of vaccinations and quarantines, the nation has a long history of government compulsion. At one point during the Revolutionary War George Washington issued an order compelling his soldiers to receive dangerous live small pox vaccinations.
Compelled them, that is.
And that vaccination method actually was dangerous. Some people contracted small pox from it and died. He reasoned the danger to the health of the army outweighed the danger to anyone individual, and the soldiers were vaccinated.
And since that time there's been over two hundred years of the government compelling members of the military into various health regimes. I myself have been vaccinated by the U.S. government twice for small pox and once for yellow fever, even they didn't ask my opinion on it at all.
Okay, you are likely saying, that's the military, and the military is subject to a separate provison of the constitution, but. . .
Well, all sorts of government bodies have compelled vaccinations of children for decades. Parents protested, but the vaccinations occurred anyhow. This is why diphtheria, for example, doesn't really exist anymore.
And the government has compelled quarantine orders as well, up to and including simply imprisoning some infectious people for the balance of their lives. Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary" provides one such example. She was employed as a cook until determined to be highly infections and then put in a sanitarium for the rest of her life.
And going back to the military, it's well established that the government can compel you to serve in the military even if it means you'll get killed. Contrary to what people probably believe, the United States government has been much more muscular about that than other English-speaking countries. The Australians and Canadians, for example, didn't conscript during World War One at all. They both did during World War Two, but it was only at the very end of the war, when manpower needs exceeded those willing to volunteer for overseas service, that such soldiers were made to serve overseas. The US, in contrast, conscripted right from the onset of World War One, something the British didn't even do at the onset of their involvement, and we conscripted prior to our entry in World War Two.
Registering for the draft, 1917.
Indeed, up until after the Civil War, every American male served, by compulsion, in their local state militia no matter what. You had no choice. You were in it. And if that meant they mobilized you to go fight the British, or the Mexicans, other Americans, or Indians, your opinion on it wasn't asked.
The government can, beyond that, compel you to provide other services. Conscripting people right off the highway to fight forest fires, for example, is something that's within living memory of Americans today. I personally know one person who was compelled to do just that.
Drilling rig crew in 1941, before OSHA required them to wear hardhats, steel toed boots, and fire resistant clothing.
And, right now, the government compels all sorts of people to wear hard hats, fire resistant clothing, and the like. It compels children to receive some sort of education, no matter what their parents might think about it. It compels everyone to pay for all sorts of things, from school lunch programs to nuclear arms, no matter what they think about that.
So why is this belief so common?
I don't really know, but part of it is that we don't know our own history. Even regular histories often claim that the Civil War conscription act was the nation's first, totally ignoring that there was universal male compulsion to serve in the militia at the time, which is a type of conscription.
And part of it simply is that the current population is young enough to have forgotten all the various compulsory acts noted above.
When I was first a student in school, for example, we were vaccinated at school. This was the late 60 and early 70s. Since then this has just been rolled into regular health care provided by family doctors, so hardly anyone under their late 50s remembers a time when you were lined up and given shots at school, or a sugar cube with the polio vaccine. And it wasn't once either, it was more than once.
And you have to be my age as well to recall when people still really remembered the "draft" as a real thing. I can recall the draft being eliminated in the early 70s, and Jimmy Carter restoring draft registration in the mid 70s. People actually worried about being drafted, even though the Selective Service Act wasn't actually operating in that fashion. It was a real thing. Perhaps it was a real thing because so many of us had fathers, uncles or even older brothers who had been drafted. An uncle, for example, "volunteered for the draft" in the late 1950s, serving in the Army just before I was born. My father volunteered for the USAF in the early 50s, but he was subject to recall until the early 1970s when I recall his being released from the Individual Ready Reserve, something he'd been kept in for nearly 20 years. When I served in the Guard, we were frequently told about how this worked in regard to our "obligor" period of six years, which every American male had, and also told that irrespective of our Guard service fulfilling our obligor duties, we were still subject to recall as veterans.
Indeed, the government doesn't really make us do much, directly, in terms of service anymore. And that has a real impact on things. Since the conservative Reagan administration of the late 70s and early 80s, there's been a really strong and growing societal belief in indivdiual liberty being predominant over collective needs. We'll note the 60s below, but if we look at it over the long haul, collective security predmonated in the 10s, waned as a societal goal in the 20s, and then roared back from 1929 through the early 1960s. This was all in response ot external threats, but it's very clear that Americans in most of the early 20th Century were pretty willing to have a strong government role in lots of things up to and including telling people what to do in order to meet a collective goal. Starting in 1976 this really started to retreat and has been in retreat every since. The current view of indivdiual liberty is much stronger than it was prior to that time.
What the government none the less still does does do is to make us serve in all sorts of additional camouflaged ways, through taxes and regulations.
The Great Depression had the impact of making the generations that lived through them really comfortable with both. Tax rates were high all the way into the 1980s, and it wasn't until then that people really groused about it. The regulatory state came in during the 1930s and has never gone away, but again it really wasn't until the 1980s that people complained about it. By and large, Americans were really comfortable with big government and its role all the way up until the mid 1970s. Something happened then.
What that something is, isn't clear, but the disastrous Vietnam War may have been part of it, combined with a Baby Boomer generation that at first rebelled against the government telling it to do anything. Indeed, the same basic impulse that lead the counterculture to assert that nobody could tell them what to do as it was contrary to "Freedom", as an extreme left wing ideology, isn't really very far from the same impulse on the far right. They're basically the same concept. If the government and the culture can't, for example, tell you not to smoke dope or drop LSD, well it can't tell you not to get vaccinated. Kris Kristofferson was completely wrong when he wrote "freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose", but those lyrics as a counterculture anthem sung by Janis Joplin probably ring truer for the right, than the left, today.
As part of that, this is also the era in which Roe v. Wade became the Supreme Court imposed law of the land. Roe represented an evolution of legal thinking, albeit a poorly drafted and intellectually muddy one, but one that held that a person had a certain sovereignty over their own body that couldn't be violated by the government. This was really a wholly new, post World War Two concept, as prior to that the law really didn't have the view that being "secure in your person" extended to a sort of radical sovereignty over your own body. Indeed, much of the law that existed prior to Roe in this regard still exists, which makes the reasoning of Roe all the weaker.
It can't be denied, however, that Roe opened up the floodgates to all sorts of "my body, my choice" type of arguments. Prior to the mid 20th Century the law regulated all sorts of individual conduct in this area. Cohabitation was generally illegal, if not widely enforced, there were considerably more restrictions on marrige than there are now, and we're not referencing the shocking racial ones of the time. Many acts in thsi area, i.e., sexual acts, that are unaddressed by the law now, where then. All of this was regarded as a perfectly valid topic for the law. Radical sovereignty over ones own person is actually, therefore, a very new concept in American law and American's concepts of the law.
All of this creates an interesting situation in which it may simply be the case that American society reacted to decades of strong government influence at the same time that the Supreme Court started to have a liberal sense of libertarianism. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so the combination of the two brought about a rigth wing libertarianism that relied in part o a left wing judicial libertaranism, the latter of which never sought to to inspire the political former.
And, of course, the strong identification of the "individual" has always been there in American culture, even if it's very much a myth in a lot of ways. Daniel Boone, braving the frontier, all by his lonesome, remains very much part of us, even if he didn't brave the frontier by his lonesome.
Now, again, I'm not telling people what to think in regard to vaccines here. I'm not even telling people that they should submit to them or not. Rather, what I'm trying to do, and likely failing at, is placing the argument in context.
It just isn't the case that it's an American thing to be free of the government telling you exactly what it demands of you in an emergency, at least it hasn't been for much of our history. The government has been doing that since the time the Congress was the Continental Congress. So that part of the debate shouldn't be in the debate at all, or if it is, what it should be the case is that it should be recognized as part of the societal revolution that came about in the 1960s and 1970s.. And if it is discussed in an historical context or a libertarian context, it should be remembered that such debates have wider impacts.
That is, if it really is against something, either Natural Law or Constitutional Law, to tell you to get a vaccination, to what else does that apply and are we comfortable with that? What else can the government not really tell you to do, and how much of what it is telling you to do now, can it really not? Is this really a call for the application of traditional American concepts of liberty, or is it an advancement of libertarianism? And do we want that.
Or should we be debating something else, or framing this debate differently.
Anyway its looked at, we may be seeing one of the great societal shifts in views at work. After the Civil War the United States Supreme Court massively expanded the ability of the government to act in every aspect of American life, but then, following the end of Reconstruction, it went in the other direcdtion and restricted it. It remained restrictive in its views until the Great Depression, when it went roaring in the other direction. In the 1950s through the 1980s the Court became very liberal and acted to forciably expand what it argued were rights, and while sections of the public very much reacted to it, by and large that was accepted. It nonetheless helped spawn the Tea Party movement and right wing populism and libertarianism which has been very much in the news recently.
But disasters tend to operate towards central governmental power. There was early resistance to the expansioin of government power in the 1930s but by the 1940s that resistance had more or less evaporated. The heat of the Great Depression and then World War Two caused that. There was very little concern abotu the large role of the government in the 1950s and 1960s even as resistance to the Vietnam War occured in that latter decade. The real reaction to long government expansion, as already noted, only came in the late 1970s and 1980s.
What about now? The legislature is about to convene in a special session and lots of state attorney generals will be suing over the Biden orders. Many individuals feel that the orders violate individual liberty, with many having concepts, as noted above, that really only date back a few decades. At the same time, in some regions of the country, support for government action on all sorts of things is stronger than it has been at any point since the 1930s.
As we write this, the state legislature is getting ready to go into a special session. A result of that special session will be to reinforce the widespread view that the Biden Administration is acting unconstitutionally. History's example here, however, suggests caution.
The convening of legislatures following the 1860s election which sought to exercise state sovereignty over Federalism in reaction to Lincoln's eletion and the coming restrictions on the expansion of slavery brought about instead the Civil War and its immediate end. I don't mean to suggest that vaccine requirements and slavery are in any way similiar, but the example of a state attempt to restrict Federal authority resulting in violence first and a massive expansion of government authority tells us something.
The same example could be given by way of the 1950s and 60s efforts to oppose Federal civil rights expansion, which resulted in a reaction in Southern states that was far from successful.
Opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal not only didn't succeed, but was effectively crushed with even the Supreme Court coming around to his views, providing another example.
Somebody should put a "Proceed With Caution" sign up in Cheyenne. And a review of American history would be a good idea prior to October.
