Have some of you seen any daylight recently?

 

This is amusing.  Chloe Winters is not unattractive, but the married Galwegian dresses like what she is, a market gardener.  It's a dirty job.  Her only adornment, normally, is a cross denoting her Christianity.

The fact that she's getting hit on for gardening videos. . . well it's just sad.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comments on Culture. A Galwaywoman's comment on men and women, Rubio's comments on Western Civilization, and Hegseth hosts a Christian Nationalist.

A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are.

The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is one of the agricultural ones that we link in here.  Ms. Winter is a married Galway greenhouse farmer (that's how I'd put it) in her very early 20s (maybe actually 20) who took up greenhouse farming when a close friend of hers died.  Galway is very rural Ireland and Galwegians are very rural Irish.  I've actually heard them referred to as "Bog Irish" by other Irish.  The county is one of the few areas of Ireland where there are bonafide Irish Gaelic speakers and it has its own accent, which Ms. Winter very thickly has.

This entry was surprising, in a way in that its very anti first wave feminist, but in a really genuine way.  It may actually be fourth wave feminist.  If released in the US (I believe most of Ms. Winter's followers are Irish), it'd create some sort of firestorm in some social medial communities.

Having said that, she isn't wrong.

And her vocabulary and manner of speech is delightfully Irish.

Two different right wing cultural views emerged from Trump servants so far this week.  What's interesting in part about them is that many commentators aren't able to realize that they actually express radically different world views, which shows how poorly people are informed and educated in some things.

The State Department, which still calls itself the Department of State, posted a photo of Marco Rubio with this entry, summing up his recent deliveries to European figures:

The United States and Europe belong to a civilization that stretches over continents, crossed over oceans, and persisted for thousands of years: from Athens to Rome to America.  

Western Civilization must embrace its noble legacy if it is to reverse its decline.

This flat out puts Rubio in the National Conservative movement and is their thesis to the core.  It doesn't say anything, you'll note, about religion at all, it's all about culture.  You can perhaps read more into that if you want, any many would, but this is pretty much the Dinneen/Dreher/Reno thesis.

You can pretty much rest assured that its not the Trump thesis. Trump just isn't smart enough or interested enough to grasp something like this at all.

Rubio has endorsed Vance for 2028, but it's probably an endorsement of convenience.  By doing this, Rubio has raised his flag in the National Conservative camp.  This, moreover, may actually be what Rubio believes.

Rubio is drawing a lot of attention, and getting a lot of excitement, in Reaganite and other genuinely conservative camps.  He's not a populist.  The big question is whether he can overcome the stench of having been associated with Trump.  A secondary question is whether contemporary American culture, less than half of which is all that conservative, sees itself in this fashion very deeply.

In contrast is Pete Hegseth, who will never overcome the stench of Trump.

The Department of Defense posted this item about its activities this past week:

We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service.

We are One Nation Under God.

 

First of all, the Department of Defense has no business whatsoever having monthly prayer meetings.  The United States may be One Nation, Under God, but this basically is a forced acknowledgement of a certain type of Christianity, that being a minority branch of it by far, over every other religion.  Yes, I'm a Christian, and a member of the original Christian faith, but not every soldier is, and no doubt there are soldiers who have no religion at all.  

Moreover, this is Doug Wilson, who appeared here in an earlier discussion.  He's a Calvinist who holds really extreme views.  You can be rest assured that considerably less than half of the American population wants a Puritan Calvinist regime in the U.S. Indeed, a couple of people responded to this Twitter post with:

Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale 13h

Doug Wilson routinely mocks the pope and the Catholic Church.

It’s beyond shameful that  @PeteHegseth  allowed him to lead taxpayer-funded anti-Catholic worship services.

Hale a Democratic Catholic blogger who has a pretty good blog dedicated to Pope Leo that you can also find on our blog lists.  He served in a prior Democratic administration and I'm still waiting for him to explain how an insider Democrat reconciled that with the Democratic Party's support of abortion.  That's an side, but that issue is one of the ones that keeps people like me from being Democrats, even though we aren't voting for very many Republicans any more.

Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson 13h

Listen. Doug Wilson is one of the most disgusting revanchist monsters on Earth. He doesn’t think women should vote, wants slavery back, and believes the U.S. should be a theonomy—Government by God. He runs a cult in Moscow, ID.

This is wildly unconstitutional & deeply immoral.

I don't know who Stewartson is, but describing Wilson as a revanchist is correct.  Monster might be a bit much, but he doesn't think women should vote and does think that the U.S. should be a Calvinist theocracy.  I don't know what he thinks about slavery and I'm not going to look it up, but Wilson is articulate and extreme.

And that's why Hegseth's actions here are really disturbing.  Rubio is trying to stake a claim for Western Civilization as special, something the National Conservatives hold and which a lot of people disagree with.  Hegseth is here advancing Christian Nationalism of a type that holds a very peculiar view on the United States' place in the world. 

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 118th Edition. Why are the women discounted? The corruption of wealth. Hanging around in a cult will make you a weird cultist. New links and the fallen. A gift of cash on the floor of the legislature.

Labels: Distributism, Epstein Scandal, Seven Deadly Sins, Sex, Standards, Taxes, The wealthy, Yeoman's Twentieth Law of Behavior, Yeoman's Twenty-fifth Law of Behavior, Yeoman's twenty-third law of behavior, Zeitgeist

Mail Order Brides: When Wyoming Men Outnumbered Women 10-1, They ‘Imported Wives’

Newspaper ads soliciting potential spouses.  Somewhat amusing, I suppose, is the German working girl "anxious" to meet a mechanic, followed by an advertisement from a 36 year old mechanic looking for a "working girl". The typesetter had to have arranged that order intentionally.  

This is a topic that tends to fascinate people as a relic of the past:

Mail Order Brides: When Wyoming Men Outnumbered Women 10-1, They ‘Imported Wives’

The truth of the matter is, of course, that since the Internet arrived, mail ordering spouses has returned.  Witness the discussions on Reddit:

I am "mail order bride" ask me anything

20f Mail Order Bride, husband is 53 AMA

I'm 26 and married a mail order bride from Cambodia and I could not be happier - AMA

This, from a Thai in the AFA Reddit threads probably explains a lot of it currently:

If you want to get out of Thailand, you marry a foreigner. It's a better life for me, and my family as I bring them over. So my parents, my sisters and I are all here in the US now.

I met Paul online through a mail order bride agency when I was 16. We talked, and he flew here when I was 17 to meet me, and he met my family. He got the approval from my parents, and when I turned 18 we got married and he brought me to the US.

I have a nice house, a man who cares and takes care of me, and a good job. I don't think I would have this back in our home country. I'm glad for Paul, and everything he's done for us. So, I am happy.

Icky aspect of this aside. . . well maybe the whole thing is icky, this probably defines things in a way, then and now, for mail order brides.  Economic desperation.  Perhaps more then, a bit, than now, but both.

Men meeting their "mail order" spouse to be at Ellis Island.  These women were from Armenia, Turkey, Greece and Romania, and likely were all Eastern Orthodox.

This is a popular story for things like romance novels.  It's the topic of at least one movie, 1974's Zandy's Bride, which was based on a 1942 novel called The Stranger.  I suspect it was way less common than generally supposed, but I don't know.  Added to that, some of what we regard as "mail order" were actually very long distance courtships by correspondence.  I.e, they knew each other that way, which is apparently at least somewhat the case for modern mail order brides as well.

Gree, women entering the country to marry correspondent fiances.

The photos that were put up here, and the advertisement, show an aspect of this that was really significant at the time, and seems to be forgotten (including by current mail orders) that being religion and culture.  The Greek women, at least three of whom appear to be very young, were escaping poverty, but they were marrying into their own culture.  Pretty rough, but they were at least marrying somebody who spoke Greek and who was Greek Orthodox.  Likely all the women in the first photograph were marrying somebody from their own culture as well.  The advertisement, however, provides less of that, but some of it.  Some men were just looking for somebody to marry.  The Jewish man was looking for a Jewish woman, however.  The German working girl, on the other hand, wanted a "mechanic" (somebody who worked with machinery) and a comfortable small home.  Two men wanted widows for some reason, which would probably make sense if I knew the context (perhaps they wanted somebody who was used to be married and whom they didn't have to romance).  Even where culture wasn't referenced, chances are they would likely be ofose cultures.

Of course, if you go further back, you can find more peculiar examples, such as the French "King's Daughters" who were sent to Quebec.  Up to 1,000 of them were sent between 1663 and 1673, which followed prior private efforts starting in the 1640s.   The King's Daughters were actually vetted for their future role, and were held to scrupulous standards based on their "moral calibre" and physically fitness. Authorities in Quebec actually sent some back that were found not to be vigorous enough, which presumably was disappointing for them.

What all of this says we could debate.  Contrary to what some people like to assert, it's never been the case, ever, that regular people didn't marry for love.  They always have.  The thing is that modern people often have a hard time recognizing that in the conditions of earlier times.

Catholicism brought in the requirement that there be consent on the part of both parties in order for their to be a valid marriage, and after that marriage ages jumped to the current norms.  Chances are pretty good that the way most couples relationships developed looked a lot more like what's depicted in Flipped, set in the 1950s, than Dirty Dancing or something.  I.e, the ultimately married couple knew each other from childhood.  That still occurs, of course, particularly in some communities.  Doug Crowe's ribald A Growing Season references that being the case in ranching communities of the 1950s, and I'd seen the same thing as late as the 1990s.  But where women were in short supply, desperate times always called for desperate measures.

Photograph from Montana, 1901.  Clearly the man with the cat was the most eligible Batchelor.

Something that should be noted is that there was a pretty high incentive for women to marry prior to the 1920s, or even prior to the 1940s, in comparison to currently.  Obviously marriage remains, but to be a "spinster" prior to the mid 20th Century came with a massive set of problems for the woman and her family.  The classic Pride and Prejudice deals with this repeatedly as the failure of the Bennet sister to marry is creating an impending financial disaster for the family and Charlotte Lucas accepts a less than desirable proposal because, in part, she's a burden on her parents. Those concerns are subtle in the film, but they were real.  The "German working girl" in the advertisement above was likely looking at serving out a life's sentence as a domestic servant if she couldn't find somebody to marry.  Most women who weren't married lived at home, and when they aged into their 30s they were looking at taking on that role for increasingly elderly parents.

All of which raises the question, do you have a couple that met in your background this way?  It'd be almost impossible to know, I'd think.  Having said that, in thinking of it, my chances of being descended from a King's Daughter are fairly high and, while not really the same thing, one of my aunts who did a family genealogy claimed that one married couple we descend from did not speak the same language when they married, although her information was notoriously unreliable (the husband was Scottish, the wife Irish. . . I think they both clearly would have spoken English).  On my wife's side, my father in law told me once that one set of his grandparents were both from Ohio originally, but that they had not met there.  Somehow the bride was sent out to marry the groom, and they married.

Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

 

Today, of course, is Christmas Day.

Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace tradition now for almost four decades, a scary thought in and of itself.  I'll admit that I've grown very weary of it and have been now for quite a while.  It involves going to lunch with my coworker professional colleagues and it usually involves having drinks, a delay in ordering, more drinks, etc.

We always go to Mass on Christmas Eve.  Indeed, even as a child my family always went to Mass on Christmas Eve, although not Midnight Mass.  I've never been a night owl and I just don't want to be up that late.  That's the same reason I don't like to go to alte Easter Vigil Mass either.

I am, rather obviously, an early riser.  That's about the sole reason this blog even exists.  Almost everything on here is written very early in the morning.

Anyhow, as I was noting, I've grown really weary of the lunch.  It's clear to me that it's a big deal for some of my colleagues, but in noting that, what I further note is that the more secular they are, or the more convivial, the bigger the deal it is.  And for some it's a rememberance of those who started the tradition, in a decade that is now long past, and which is from nearly another world, the world of men at work without women as colleagues.  I'm not going into that here, although I will in the future.  I've never lived in it, and I don't imagine that world nostalgically.  My best workplace colleagues are women.

For me, with a sense that things must be on time and on target, I get really worried about things dragging on too long to get to Mass on time.  It's never happened, although for the first time yesterday it nearly did.

Things have been really odd recently, for reasons I'll not go into.  I realized right about noon that people had left, save for me and the one coworker I'm really a friend of/with/to.  I noted to her that everyone had left and perhaps we should too.

When I arrived it was rapidly clear something was gravely wrong.  The whole meal had that feeling, and at the end of it, a massive argument broke out/resumed between two individuals who had been engaged in it prior to our arrival.  Indeed, in reality, it was the culmination of an argument that had broken out in a heated fashion after the company Christmas Party (which this was not) and which, in retrospect, has been burning hot and cold now for months and months.

The whole spirit of the country is like that right now.

Around here, where it should be extremely cold right now, it's nearly summer temperature warm. That's not only weird, it's a massive warning sign.  This morning Doug Burgum is posting on "clean coal".  That's moronic and anyone with the slightest bit of sense knows that this has to stop.  Donald Trump, for his part, posted his typical stupid comments oozing anger and this:

I note this as part of what I think I witnessed was both the nation's politics and the nation's political atmosphere bleeding into daily life.  You can feel it everywhere. This must be what it was like to live in Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s.  The nation's gone insane, and a certain percentage of the nation is now angrily insane.

But it's more than that.  Part of it is, I"m sure, the inability to endure big changes and big expectations, combined with gross misunderstanding.  Part of it also is the anger that idol worshippers have when they realize their hero is human.  Maybe some of was the march of time on both parties.

Like several other things I've seen like this recently, I was so ill prepared for what I saw that my reaction time to it was just insufficient to deal with it.  It happened, nad was over, before I could do anything to stop it. And looking back, I should have stopped what I should have seen coming weeks ago. 

I've wearied and I'm not the man I used to be.  I'm too tired to put up with and endure such things. But why bring this up at Christmas? There must be some really hurt feelings today, and there must have been going into things.  For me, who has had to take up roles I never anticipated, it's a bitter failure and now a delicate matter to repair.

One thing I think I'm going to repair is the tradition.  It came out of the all male workplace past, and that day is over.  The tradition can remain in the past. The present and the passage of time overcame it.

More and more, the Mass part of Christmas, Christ's Mass, is the important part to me.  It always was really, but I managed to take the wrong road, the American Road, when I was young, even though I knew better.  The field, vette and prairie is what always appealed to me, and the book.  The courtroom not so much.  I've been dealing with the fact that its now too late to change that.

Or at least its too late to change the past.  Enduring the present and future of that, and the office, well not so much.  Sometimes the messages are clear.

"The man's done enough. Leave him alone."  Field of Dreams.

Hegseth announces troops in combat jobs will have to meet highest male physical standards

Not quite no women in combat. . . but you can see it from there:

Hegseth announces troops in combat jobs will have to meet highest male physical standards

I always find mindself in an odd spot, vis-à-vis Hegseth.  I'm obviously not a fan of the Trump Administration, or of Hegseth, but I think moves like this are in fact in the right direction.

Odd that this comes up when it does, by the way.

Related threads:

Women and combat

Labels: Donald Trump, Evolutionary Biology, hunting, Men, Military, Pete Hegseth, The Madness of King Donald, The roles of men and women, Women, World War Two

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 88th Edition. A predictive issue and other ramblings. Order coming on women in combat roles. Trump's bolt shot.

Labels: Christian Nationalism, Military, National Conservatism, Predictions, The Madness of King Donald, The relationship between men and women, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, You heard it here first, Zeitgeist

Yes, it's bad behavior. Immoral, and criminal. But at what point is it nature?

Labels: Army, Commentary, Men, Military, nature, The relationship between men and women, The roles of men and women, United States Marine Corps, Women

Killing people and breaking things. . . and women in the service.

Labels: Army, Men, The roles of men and women, trends, War, Women, Work

What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

Additional Labels for :

What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

Monday, September 8, 1975. Leonard Matlovich on Time and the UFW.

Discharged Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich appeared on the cover of Time in his Air Force Class B uniform with the words "I Am a Homosexual", for which he was discharged, on the cover.  The decorated Vietnam Veteran had come out just before with his status and it seems he had not become a practicing homosexual until after the war.  He'd begin a protracted legal battle with the Air Force for reinstatement, which was offered to him originally with a promise that he discontinue homosexual activities, but he declined that.  At the time, an exception to the rule prohibting homosexuals in the military existed which would have allowed that.  Ultimately he'd accept a financial settlement.  The rule itself was removed.  It'd be somewhat revived in a different form in 1993 under the Clinton Administration's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Matlovich was raised Catholic but had converted to Mormonism.  He was subsequently excommunicated from the LDS for homosexuality.  He died in 1988 at age 44 of AIDS.  His actions made him a public figure in the homosexual rights movement, which was just beginning to become a thing at the time.  The DSM classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 and was only removed that year due to a paper published by a homosexual psychologist.

I can recall the issue of Time and it was quite shocking at the time.

Matlovich is probably largely forgotten now.   The story is interesting in light of subsequent developments, mentioned in part above.  Homosexuality was not expressly prohibited by military law for most of the U.S. military's history, but then homosexuality itself was not used as a term defining what it currently does until the late 19th Century.  Servicemen were discharged for sodomy, without it expressly being in the military's legal code, as it was seen as a moral abomination, but not as a sort of character defining conduct.  This occurred as early as the American Revolution.¹   It wasn't until 1921 when it became an expressed military crime.  It wasn't until World War Two however that the Service actively worked to bar homosexuals from the Service, making that policy one that had a much shorter period of being in existence than generally imagined.  Interestingly a two man panel of psychologists who worked on mental profiles for enlistment just before the war did not recommend excluding homosexuals.

The prohibition was lifted in 2011.

Part of the reason that all of this is interesting is that I'd predicted that the Trump Administration would restore the prohibition on women serving in combat, which was lifted in 2013 (I don't think it should have been).  So far, that has not been done, but the Administration has barred "transgendered" from serving.  That frankly makes a lot of sense as a "transgendered" person cannot carry on that status without pharmaceutical assistance, something that obviously doesn't pertain to homosexuals.  Anyhow, there doesn't appear to be any Trump administration move to restore the ban on homosxuals in the Service, which perhaps shows how far views have evolved on this matter.  The prior Service policies clearly reflected widely held societal views.

Farmworkers in California working for Bruce Church, Inc. voted to join the United Farm Workers, in the first such instance of that occurring.

Footnotes:

1.  It's been speculated on whether or not Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian officer who introduced Prussian drill and training methods in the Army during the Revolution may have been a homosexual, although it wouldn't have been understood in that fashion at the time.  There certainly seems to have been reason to suspect that and homosexual conduct was common in the Prussian and later Imperial German officer corps.  That's interesting in and of itself as it was common for officers to enter the service in their mid teens and serve in consistently all male environments, which would argue for a environmental origin to the orientation.

The same is true, it might be noted, for the pre World War Two British officer corps, which was additionally impacted by the odd British education system which tended to warehouse the male children of the well off in all male boarding schools.  At least a few well known British officers have been speculated about in this fashion.

In the U.S. military this environment didn't exist, and it's pretty difficult to find examples of well known servicemen who are suspected of having been homosexuals.  Unlike European armies, the U.S. Army did not discourage officers from marrying, although it was often financially impossible for junior enlisted men to do so.  Most U.S. officers in fact married at the usual ages, and long serving enlisted men often did as well.  Getting out of the service after a single three year enlistment was common for enlisted soldiers who wanted to marry.  Of course, like all armies, prostitution was rampant near U.S. Army posts, even on the frontier.

Related threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

Labels: 1950s, 1960s, 1968, Catholic, Christianity, Economics, homosexuality, mehr Mensch sein, Men, pornography, religion, The relationship between men and women, The relationships of men with each other, trends, Work

Last edition:

Friday, September 5, 1975. Attempts.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Crime, England (London), Gerald Ford, London England, Provisional Irish Republican Army, United Kingdom

A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

Let's start with a couple of basics.

You were born a man, or a woman.  We all were, and you can't change that.  If you are a man, no amount of surgery or drugs is going to make you bear life and bear all the consequences of the same, from hormonal storms on a monthly basis, to monthly blood loss, to a massive change of life, mid life.

Thinking that you can, and even wanting to makes you deeply mentally ill.

And a society that tolerates that attempt, is deeply sick.

An account I follow on Twitter notes the following:

22 years old Was 17 years old when Covid hitI wonder when he started going down the trans path

It's worth asking that question, and we'll touch on it in a moment. 

Part I.

Robert Westman,¹ who tried to be Robin Westman, but failed.  The photo alone shows you can't choose to be a woman if you are man, and that he was accordingly deeply mentally ill.  "You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows"  Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan.

Robert Westman, mentally ill young man, raged against the reality of life that had tolerated his perverted molestation of himself and lashed out against the existential nature that doomed his molestation to complete failure, and a deeply sick society now will wonder why.  Moreover, even his final act shows how deeply he failed in his effort. Women nearly never resort to mass violence in frustration.

That's a male thing.

And so we start, again by finding myself linking back to some old threads on this blog, unfortunately.  This was the first time I tackled this topic. 

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

And I did again here:

Lex Anteinternet: You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence an...: (Note.  This is a post I thought I'd posted back in November.  Apparently not, I found it in my drafts, incomplete.  So I'm posting...

The first time was intended to be the magnum opus on this, and indeed it likely still is.  It's still worth reading:

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

And on that, I'm going right to this:

Who does these things?

It's pretty apparent that you could go to the average gun owner, and actually equip him with a machinegun, and he'd never do anything with it.  It's also apparent, from a recent mass killing in Casper Wyoming, that if you arm some people with medieval implements, they'll use them for murder.  That's correct; recently in Casper Wyoming, there was an event that fit this pattern that was committed with a bow and arrow and a large knife. Grisly, to be sure, but telling.  It isn't something new in the arms that's causing this, it's something new in the mind. But what?

I'm not qualified to be a psychologist at all, but I am trained to observe human behavior and to analyze it, and there are certain things that seem quite connected here, but which are ignored.  These are the things that need to be looked at prior to our doing anything, as the solutions are to be found here.

What we're seeing in many of these murders is that the killers are mentally unstable in a truly insane sense. The attempted assassin of a politician in the US seems to fit this category.  Others, and here's where the New York Times article is helpful, are not so much insane, but they fit into a category of people who, by some means, are subject to a personality disorder that renders them socially marooned, and it would seem, it renders them also incapable of empathy, but fully capable of despair.

Some of these individuals are quite smart. The recent killer in Newton Connecticut, apparently afflicted with Aspergers Disease, seems to fit this category.  The killer in the Denver theater shootings also very clearly had some sort of personality disorder and was very well educated and intelligent.  Others are not so smart, but a consistent strain of some sort of very pronounced personality disorder runs through these stories.  The killer in the Casper Wyoming murders was self-diagnosed with Aspergers, and based on his personal history, I suspect his self diagnosis was correct.

Does this mean that everyone who has these conditions is a time bomb waiting to go off?  Absolutely and clearly not.  And, if we assume (perhaps quite incorrectly, however) that incidents of these conditions are not increasing in frequency (which they very well may be), what that tells us is something else.  If we've always had people who have been so afflicted, but haven't had this particular set of problems, something else has changed. What could it be?

First, before moving on in this, however, what is it about these conditions that make them unique. That's important. What we know is that the conditions make these people socially awkward. In some cases, they divorce them of empathy.  That seems to be all the more to the conditions that we can discern, that's relevant here.  But, as the vast, vast, majority of people who have these conditions also have moral standards, and usually go on to live fully productive lives, it tells us something is also wrong at the societal level, and not as much the individual one.

And also this:

Maybe the standard was destroyed

There's been a lot of commentary the last few years about the lack of prayer in school, and as recently noted on the Ramblings of a Teacher blog, there's been an email and Facebook item circulating that promotes the return of daily prayer to public schools.  Like the author of that blog, I think that idea misses the mark.

What I do think, however, is that we've seen an evolution from a loosely recognized general standard, which was frankly religion based, into the concept of "tolerance" for other ideas, which has now slipped into complete moral relativism that lacks any standards at all.

This is, I think, fairly demonstrable by history and the result isn't good.  A brief look at that history is instructive.

This is not to suggest that the country had a uniform Christian history and that this suddenly fell apart recently, that wouldn't be true.  And it wouldn't even be true to maintain that the country has been uniformly religiously observant throughout its history.  What would be true, however, is that a loose set of Christian standards was generally recognized, even by those who were not religious, or even a-religious, and even though the degree to which people closely identified with religion has changed varied enormously over the country's history.

Early in the nation's history the country was almost uniformly Protestant, although there was more than one Protestant church that was present in the country, and the doctrinal differences between them were in some instances quite pronounced.  It would be false to claim that they all had the same theological concepts, and indeed some of them had radically different theologies.  Indeed, even those several Protestant faiths that were present in North America had acted to strongly repress each other here, on occasion, and had been involved in some instances in open warfare in the British Isles..  Catholics, and Jews, were largely absent from the early history of the country, except with Catholics nervously present in some very concentrated regions.  The Catholic presence in the country really became pronounced first in the 1840s, as a result of the revolutions in Europe and the Irish Famine.  This actually created huge concern amongst the Protestant sections of the county, who were often very anti Catholic.  This started to wane during the Civil War, however.  Jewish immigrants came in throughout the 19th Century, some from Europe in chief, but many from Imperial Russia, where they sought to escape Russian programs.

The purpose of this is not to do a treatise on religion in the United States, which would be a massive work and which, at this point, would pretty much cease to be illustrative of anything relevant to this discussion, but rather to note something else.  Even though the degree to which the American population was adherent and observant of their Faiths, and even though the country has had, at various points, very strong doctrinal differences in the population, to the extent that it impacted public policy, the country had a culture that loosely recognized a very loose set of Christian principals as social principals.

This was so much the case that everyone, even members of non-Christian faiths, and even those who were members of no faiths at all, recognized what the standards were.  Interestingly, up until quite recently, people who chose to ignore those standards, and in any one era there are plenty of people who do, often recognized that they were breaching the standard and sometimes even that doing so was wrong.  To use a non-violent example, people generally recognized that cheating on a spouse was wrong, even if they did it.  Most people were a little queasy about divorce even if they divorced and remarried.  Nearly everyone regarded cohabitation out of wedlock as morally wrong, even if they did not attend a church.  Sex outside of marriage was generally regarded as wrong, and indeed even the entertainment industry used that fact as part of the risque allure when they depicted that scenario.

The point of this isn't to suggest that various topics regarding marriage and non marriage are somehow related to this topic. Rather, the point is to show that there was more of a concept of such things at work in society, and that's just an easy one to pick up on, as the changes in regards to it have been quite pronounced.  But, if the argument isn't to be extremely strained and fall flat, other examples would have to be given.  So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

The point of this is that, even though there were multiple Faiths, and people of no faith, there was a general concept of a set of standards that were almost universally accepted and they had roots that went way back into the country's early history..  Included in that set of beliefs was that you didn't harm others.  It isn't that people didn't do it, it's that they knew it was wrong to do it.

Starting in the 1960s, however, American society really began to break a global set of standards down.  The concept of "tolerance" came in. Tolerance means to tolerate, not to accept, but over time the two became confused, and it became the American ideal to accept everything.  Even people with strong moral beliefs were told that they must accept behavior that was previously regarded as morally wrong, or even illegal in some places. There are many present examples of this that a person could point to.  The point here is not that toleration is bad, but rather that confusing tolerance with acceptance, and following that a feeling that acceptance must be mute, probably isn't good.  Toleration sort of presupposes the existence of a general standard, or at least that people can debate it.  If they can't openly debate it, that' probably is not a good thing.  If self declared standards must be accepted, rather than subject to debate, all standards become fairly meaningless as a result.

The overall negative effect this has on a society would also be a major treatise in its own right and I'm not qualified to write it..  Most cultures do not experience this, as most are not as diverse as ours. Whether any society can in fact endure an existence without standards is open to question,  and the very few previous examples that creep up on that topic are not happy ones.  It is clear that most people do in fact continue to retain  bits and pieces of the old standard, and perhaps most people are very highly analogous to our predecessors who lived in eras when standards were very generally held, and there were decades of American history that were just like that.  But for some people, who are otherwise self-focused, and with problems relating to other people, the weak nature of the standard is now potentially a problem.  Unable to relate, and in a society that teaches that there are no standards, they only standards they have are self learned, in a self isolation.

But what are they learning then, and how?

No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment.

Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace  And, frankly they still are.  That's quite a burden on both, however, as a society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot of the school and the workplace.  Truth be known, there was never an era when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be done there.  Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect.  It's even more unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be taught there, save by individuals through their own examples.  But is there even a workplace to go to? 

There is a school to go to, that much we've made clear.  And as evident, I'm not keen on the trend in some quarters to blame schools.  I doubt very much that the average public school of 1912 was teaching a lot more in the way of a set of standards than the school of 2012.  Kids came into school with one, and as noted, it was re-enforced.  And I'm not keen on expecting schools to teach what parents and society simply earlier did.  I don't even know if that's possible, but it doesn't seem really reasonable.   At any rate, what about after school? That is, after graduation?  What do people graduate into?

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

So what do they do with their time?

As noted, there was once an era when even the severely socially disabled generally worked.  People didn't know not to encourage them to work and having to work was presumed as a given.  Not all work is pleasant by any means, but the irony of this is that many of these people were well suited for fairly meaningful work.  Some men silently operated machine tools day after day in a setting that required a lot of intelligence, but not very much interaction.  Others worked in labs. Some on rail lines, and so on. This isn't to say that everyone who had these jobs fit into this category, which would be absolutely false.  But my guess is that some did.  And some ended up as career privates in the Army, a category that no longer exists, or similar such roles.  They had meaningful work, and that work was a career and a focus.

Now, for some of these individuals, this is all gone. The expectation of work probably isn't, but the ability may very well seem to be. So what do they do?

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Nibelungenlied is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckinpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

All of that is still valid, and in particular, I think, we need to consider again:

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

Over the coming days and weeks pundits will ponder this event, and mostly spout out blather.  The explanation here may have deeply disturbing aspects to it, but the underlying root of it is not that complicated.  Robert Westman fell into the trap that ensnares some of the young in our society and hoped to completely change his nature by changing the outward morphology of his nature.  He was mentally ill.

A just society treats compassionately the mentally ill.

We do not live in a just society.

By and large, we just turn the mentally ill out into the street to allow their afflictions to grow worse until those afflictions kill them. Go to any big city and you'll see the deranged and deeply addicted out in the street.  This is not a kindness.

Gender Dysphoria is a different type of mental illness, but that's what it is.²

And its deeply delusional.

To put it bluntly to the point of being crude, no man, no matter what they attempt to do, is going to bear children and have the risk of bearing children, bleed monthly, and be subject to the hormonal storms that real women are subject to.  And, frankly, men generally become subject to some, if varying, degrees of drives that are constant and relenting, and never abate.³ 

No woman, no matter what she attempts to do, is going to hit a certain age in their teens have their minds turn to women almost constantly, as men do, in a way that women do not understand, and frankly do not experience the opposite of themselves. 

Indeed, no man really wants to be a woman, or vice versa.  What those engaging in an attempt to pass through a gender barrier seek is something else, and what that more often than not in the case of men likely is to drop out of the heavy male burdens in an age in which it increasingly difficult to meet them.  In spite of everything in the modern world, women remain conceived of as more protected, and therefore not as subject to failure for not meeting societal expectations.

Being a man has never been easy.

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man

And now I've reached that age

I've tried to do all those things the best I can

No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam

Good Times, Bad Times, by Led Zeppelin.

I don't think lectures on what it means to be a man occur anymore.  I  know that I've never delivered one, but I didn't need one to be delivered either.  The examples were clearly around me, including all the duties that entailed.  We knew, growing up, that good men didn't abandon their families, and provided for their families, and were expected to protect women to the point of their own deaths.  Women weren't expected to protect men, at all.

Some men have always sought to escape their obligations, of course, and we all know or new those who did.  Most aged into disrepute over time.  Others got their acts together.  

You can’t be a man at night if you are a boy all day long.

Rev. Wellington Boone.

And some have always descended into madness.  But society didn't tolerate it, and it shouldn't have to.

So what do we know about Westman?

Not that much, but what we do know is revealing:

• He killed himself after his cowardly murders.
• He'd developed an inclination towards violence.⁴
• He once attended the Catholic school whose students he attacked,  leaving in 2017 at the end of Middle School.
• He started identifying as a female in 2019, age 17, and his mother signed the petition to change his name.⁵
• After middle school attended a charter school and then the all-boys school, Saint Thomas Academy, which is a Catholic military school. ⁶
• An uncle said he barely knew him.⁷
• His parents were divorced when he was 13.
• He worked at a cannabis dispensary, but was a poor employee.⁸

What can we tell from this?

Maybe nothing at all, but the keys are that in spite of they're being Catholic, his parents divorced, and his mother thereafter tolerated to some degree his drift into delusion, while at the same time there's evidence they were trying to correct it.  After school, he drifted into drugs, which is what marijuana is.

Blame the parents?  Well, that would be too simple.  But societal tolerance of divorce and transgender delusion is fostering all sorts of societal ills.

It's notable that he struck out at a childhood school.  That may be all the more his violence relates, but probably not.  His mother had worked there.  He was likely striking out at her too.  And he was striking out an institution that doesn't accept that you can change your existential nature, because you cannot.  He likely was fully aware of that, which is why he acted out with rage at it, and then killed himself.

There may, frankly, be an added element to this, although only recently have people in the secular world, such as Ezra Klein, began to discuss it.  Westman may have been possessed.

Members of the American Civil Religion don't like to discuss this at all, and frankly many conventional Christians do not either.  Atheist and near atheist won't acknowledge it all, of course.  But Westman's flirting with perverting nature may have frankly lead him into a really dark place, and not just in the conventional sense.

Part 2. What should we do?

Well, what will be done is nothing.  Something should, however, be done.

The topic of gun control will come up, which brings us back to this:

You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)

We're going to hear, from more educated quarters defending the Second Amendment, that firearms have not really changed all that much over the years, society has. This is completely true.

But we're at the point now that we need to acknowledge that society has changed.  And that means a real effort to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill needs to be undertaken.

When the Constitution was written, Americans were overwhelmingly rural.  Agrarianism was the norm everywhere.  People generally lived in a family dwelling that included everyone from infants to the elderly.  Normally the entire community in which a person lived was of one religion, and everyone participated in religious life to some degree.  Even communities that had more than one religion represented, still had everyone being members of a faith.  Divorce was not at all common, and in certain communities not tolerated whatsoever.⁹ 

Westman was mentally ill.  Transgenderism is a mental illness. He was a drug user.  Cannabis is a drug.

In 1789 the mentally ill, if incapable of functioning, would have been taken care of at home by their families.  Transgenderism would not have been conceived of and not tolerated.  Alcohol was in heavy use.  Marijuana was not.  The plethora of narcotics now in circulation were not conceived of.

Yes, this will sound extreme. Am I saying that because a tiny number of transgendered might resort to violence they shouldn't own guns?  Yes, maybe in a society that simply chooses to tolerate mental illness, that's what I'm saying, although it also strikes me that the people who have gone down this deluded path might be amongst those most needing firearms for self protection. So, not really.  I am saying that attention needs to be focused on their mental state.

Am I saying that marijuana users shouldn't own guns?  Yes, that is also what I'm saying, along with other chronic users of drugs, legal and illegal.

And as we choose to simply ignore mental illness, perhaps the time has come to see if a would be gun owners is mentally stable and societally responsible before allowing them to own guns.  People in chronic debt, with violent behavior, with unacknowledged children in need shouldn't be owning firearms.

Of note, at the time the Second Amendment was written, none of these things was easily tolerated.

Part 3. Getting more extreme.

Knowing that none of this will occur, I'll go there anyhow.

Societal tolerance of some species of mental illness should just end. There shouldn't be homeless drug addicts on the street and gender reassignment surgery and drugs should be flat out illegal.

For that matter, in the nature of extreme, plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons should be banned.  Your nose and boobs are fine the way they are, leave them alone.

No fault divorce should end, and for that matter people who have children should be deemed married by the state, with all the duties that implies.  Multiple children by multiple partners should be regarded as engaging in polygamy, which should still be regarded as illegal.

Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial. It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.

St. John Paul II.

Yes, that's rough.

Life is tough for all of us.  Ignoring that fact makes it harder on all of  us.

Part 4. Doesn't this all play into Dementia Don and his Sycophantic Twatwaffles?

Unfortunately, it does.  I fear that this may prove to be the Trump Administration's Reichstag moment.

Indeed, this event is like a gift to people like Stephen Miller who will now assert that this came about due to the liberal policies of Minneapolis, and moreover, as proof that outright attacks on transgendered are needed, the same way the Nazis asserted that dictatorship was necessary in Germany after the Reichstag fire.

Isn't that what' I'm stating?

I am not.

I think we need to address mental illness as a mental illness, and do what we can to treat it.  And rather obviously, what I've stated above doesn't square with Second Amendment hardcore advocates.

And as part of that, we need to get back to acknowledging that the mentally ill are mentally ill, rather than "tolerating" it.  

And we need to quite tolerating "personal freedom" over societal protection, right down to the relationship level.  A married couple produced this kid.  Once they did that, they were in it, and the marriage, for life.  That included the duty not to make dumb ass decisions for their child, like changing Robert's name to Robin.

Part 5.  What will happen?

Absolutely nothing.

People on the right will argue its not the guns, it's the sick society.  People on the left will argue that the society isn't sick, except for the guns, and the guns are all of the problem.

Nothing, therefore, will occur.

Well, maybe.

If anything occurs, it'll be that Dementia Don will use it as an excuse to send the National Guard into Minneapolis.

Footnotes

1.  His name was Robert, not "Robin". The free use of female names for men afflicted by this condition and the press use of "she" for what is properly he, is part of the problem.

2  By gender confusion, I"m referring to Gender Dysphoria, or whatever people are calling it, not homosexuality.  Homosexuals don't fit into this discussion at all.  For one thing, homosexuals are not confused about what gender they are.

3.  This does not advocate for license, although some men argue that it does.  Inclinations are not a pass for immorality.

Anyhow, I'd note that even honest men in cebate professions acknowledge this.  Fr. Joseph Krupp, the podcaster, frequently notes having a crush, for example, on Rachel Weisz.

4.  Again, some women grow violent, but its a minority and, when it occurs, tends to be accompanied by something else.  There are exceptions.

5. I don't know all of the details of his personal life, of course, but that was inexcusable on his mother's part.  I'll note, however, that by this time his parents were divorced and no woman is capable of raising children completely on her own.  Again, I don't know what was going on, but this screams either extreme "progressive" views, or a mostly absent father, or extreme fatigue.

6.  I didn't even know that there were Catholic military schools.  

Military schools have always been institutions for troubled boys, and this suggests that there was an attempt to put him in a masculine atmosphere and hopefully straighten him out. The school had both a religious base and a military nature.  Both of his parents must have participated in this.

7. The modern world fully at work.  People move for work, careers, etc., with the result that nuclear families basically explode, nuclear bomb style.  People more and more are raised in families that are the immediate parental unit, or just one parent, that start to disintegrate the moment children turn 18.  This is not natural, and is part of the problem.

8.  I don't know of course, but I'd guess that in order to be a poor employee at a cannabis dispensary, you have to be a really poor employee. There are bars with bartenders who don't drink, but I bet there aren't any dispensaries with employees that aren't using.

The impacts of marijuana use are very poorly understood, but as it becomes more and more legal, that there are negative psychological impacts for long term and chronic use is pretty clear.

9.  Contrary to widespread belief, not only Catholicism prohibits divorce.  The Anglican Communion does not either, and at that time particularly did not tolerate it.  Divorce occurred, but it was not common.

Also, and we've touched on it before, the United States at the time of its founding was a Christian nation.  It was a Protestant Christian nation, but a Christian nation.  Protestants of the 19th Century would not recognize many Protestant denominations today at all, even if they are theoretically the same.  A 1790s Episcopalian, for example, would be horrified by many Episcopalian congregations today.  In contrast, a Catholic or Orthodox person would find the churches pretty recognizable, save for the languages used for services.