What's Wrong with the United States? We're really ignorant, and its getting worse.

Can you imagine this scene today?  The older man (who in context is probably in his 50s) would be staring blankly into space, while the young woman looked at TikTok videos.

21% of adults in the US are illiterate. 54% of American adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level. 

And we wonder how Trump got elected?

The illiterate are ignorant, and blisteringly ignorant people vote for stupid stuff.

I had a very strange experience the other day, which I need to be indistinct about.

It had to do with homeschooling.

Twice in recent weeks I've run across a topic that's in the legislature, that being the legal requirement, which the Wyoming 2025 Legislative assembly is about to wipe out, that home schooling parents submit their educational plans to their local school districts.  The requirement is there to prevent parents from basically not educating their children.

Not educating children is what homeschooling is all about.

This wasn't always the case, but it's become the case.  

Some background.

My father was the first male in his family to graduate from high school.  He might have been the third member of the family, as I don't know that much about my paternal grandmother's early life in that fashion.  She probably graduated high school in Denver however, likely from a Catholic high school.  His older sister graduated from a high school in Scottsbluff.

My father went on to a doctorate.

My paternal grandfather, who left school to work at age 13, had such an advance knowledge of mathematics that he helped his children with their high school calculus homework, which is revealing for two reasons, one that is amazing on his part, and secondly all of my father's siblings took calculus in high school.

I didn't take calculus in high school

My father could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.  My paternal grandfather also could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.

My mother did not graduate from high school She was not given the opportunity to.  She earned an Associates as a an adult.  Her mother was university educated, as was her father.  They all spoke two languages, English and French, and had a command of Latin.

Growing up in my family household was like getting a post doctorate in some things, history and science in particular.  I read so early that I was on to adult books before I left grade school and had the odd experience of a junior high librarian not wishing to check a history book as she feared it was too advance.  I read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire before I left junior high.

I was in fact educated on a lot of stuff at home. . . but I was sent to school.

There's an interesting pattern here.  Some of my friends of my age had college educated parents, but not all of them did.  But all of my friends attended college or university.  Not all graduated, but they did receive some post high school education.  One of my closest friends had a father who did not graduate from high school.  He joined the Army in his senior year to fight in World War Two, following in the footsteps of a father who had fought in World War One.  My friend has two bachelors degrees.

And there's another thing here.  Even those people I knew from my generation, and the prior one, who had parents that didn't graduate high school, had quite literate parents.  If I ever went into a house that didn't have a lot of books somewhere, it was shocking.  I can only really recall one.  The home of my friend noted above was like a library.  My parents house  and that of all of my aunts and uncles were packed with books.  In my parents house you could find a few books that were in German or French.  A friend of mine who did not graduate from high school, but none the less went off to university, recalled his grandparents house being packed with books in . . . Gaelic.

My paternal grandmother absolutely insisted that my father go on to get an advanced degree, something he briefly though about not doing.  His unmarried sister near in age to him was sent to university as well.  I was given no real choice but to go on to higher education myself.  

And this was common for people my generation, and the preceding one.  Farm and ranch family in particular often had a manic dedication to higher education.

Home schooling has been around since time immemorial, I suppose, but when I was a kid, what it probably meant, where I live, is that the kid in question was living on a really remote ranch.  Even then, most ranching parents made a dedicated effort to avoid that.  More than a few had a teacher who lived at the ranch, paid for by the school district.  The county I live in had four rural remote public schools, of which only one is still in operation.  The neighboring one had some so remote that if you run across them on really rural roads its a shock.  The teachers at these institutions were admired in a way that's hard to describe.  Anything going on in the area always included them.

I didn't know a single homeschooled kid growing up.

Next to home schooling, of course, is private schooling.  When I was young the only private school I ever heard of was the Catholic school.  It was a big downtown school.  It's moved from downtown, but it still exists.  Catholic education had long been a thing in the US and apparently Catholics are supposed to send their kids to Catholic schools if they can, but I didn't go to it (it was full), nor did our kids.  

When in high school I learned that there was a Lutheran grade school, to my enormous surprise, as I walked by it every day.  After high school I learned that there was a "Christian" school, by which I mean a school attached to one of the sort of due it yourself evangelical Protestant groups.  It started in 1978, so I would have been in high school when it commenced operating.  The ministers for that church, at the time, were drawn from the congregation, and I later met one who was ironically adverse with its tenants as he was a geologist who accepted the truth of evolution, which the church did not.

A church that thinks evolution is a fib, probably doesn't have it taught in its schools.

Which is the point, really.  The goal of a large amount of modern homeschooling is to keep students as ignorant as possible, which is conceived of as limiting tehir "exposure" to corrupting elements.

I've been exposed to a few homeschooled kids over the years and frankly a lot of them were rather weird and very socially awkward.  Having said that, I've met one kid, and know of another, from a homeschooling family who were not that way, and one of which went on to a really high dollar career.

Now, with that comment, let me note that education isn't about getting rich, or shouldn't be.  It's about the Allegory of the Cave.  The problem here is that those exposed to  the sunlight are seeking to drag the ir offspring back into it, deeper in the cave, and into chains.

The simple fact of the matter is that Americans were much more literate prior to the 1990s than they are now.  They read.  They read even if they hadn't graduated high school.

And they read a lot, and a lot of it is much more advanced than what people claim to read now.  Even people who mostly read novels often read things much more advanced than people do now.  I recall one parent of a family friend being a fanatic fan of C. S. Forester, whose novels were just that, but noen the less dealt often with the Napoleonic Wars, something a lot of current Americans probably don't know occured.  One fellow I knew in the National Guard loved Louis Lamour, so much so that he read The Walking Drum, which is set in the Middle Ages, about which he was able to speak intelligently.  Another fellow, who had been a career Marine, was reading War and Peace.

Everyone read the newspaper.  You'd frequently see periodicals in people's houses, including unfortunately Playboy on occasion, but the latter had sufficiently good interviews that my high school newspaper teacher used those as examples and adopted them for the pattern of a series in that high school journal.  Less unfortunately, you'd see Time, Newsweek and Life in people's houses routinely.  And everyone read the local newspaper, by which I mean everyone.

The National Geographic seemed to be in the home of every household that had children, including ours.  Our collection went back into the 1940s, from my father's parents home.

Cartoons didn't make much of an appearance in our house, and I"ve never developed a taste for most of the cartoon journal type of cartoons, like Superman, but what I do recall is when they showed up, it was often Mad Magazine, which actually is really adult oriented, and not in the juvenile way "adult" is often used.

The point is, when people claim people were "more educated" in the past, including populists who are not today, they tended to be, but in ways that people now just don't really quite grasp.  They often had lower levels of educational achievement, but because they lived in a literate world, they were societally educated.

You can go into a lot of homes today and find that the occupants read. . . nothing.  

Instead, people consume only what suits them.  

In almost all of the 20th Century, it wasn't really possible to hear only the news you wanted to.  Even if you limited yourself to radio, prior to the introduction of television, you were going to get a wide range of news.  Newspapers were, as noted, almost a requirement for most households.  When television came in, at first, it was highly local but the news was national and there was no avoiding it.  You weren't going to get right or left wing propaganda from anyone.

That's all passed.

Americans aren't reading.  What media they consume is self reaffirming, like Protestant sermons from the 1600s.  People are listening only to like minds, and the nation is becoming more and more ignorant.

Which is why we have Donald Trump in office.  No literate nation would elect him to anything.\

Note that this doesn't mean the population is dumb.  Ignorant and dumb are not the same thing.  But we suffer from the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect in a major way.  We're listening, basically, to ourselves, and making excuses for our failures, and justifying our appetites.

And it puts the entire globe in danger.

The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The top half of the March 1967 centerfold depicting the 19 year old "Fran Gerard".  This photo was taken from Cynthia Blanton's webpage, where it appears in this fashion (i.e., you can't see her nude) and is put up here under the fair use exception.  No doubt if the full centerfold was spread out, Camuglia's happy smile would not be what attention was drawn to.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.: I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either o...

Sort of going down the rabbit hole, I suppose, on this one, but the story is so illustrative of certain things, most of them pretty sad, so it's worth an additional, illustrative, look.

Cynthia Blanton replied to the post here, which was extremely nice of her to do, on her being a doppelganger for Francis Anna Camuglia, the March 1967 Playboy "Playmate", who appeared in that role as Fran Gerard.  It turns out that my comment that they were close in age was not only correct, but there's an added freakish element of. The two young women were just eight months apart in age and, while Blanton had not met Camuglia, they had even been schoolmates in the same California high school, Granada Hills High School, prior to Blanton's family moving only shortly before March 1967.  

Camuglia's obituary simply notes that she "attended" the school, which causes me to suspect, with nothing to back it up, that she might not have graduated.  Her life would likewise suggest she didn't graduate.

The high school still exists, but is a charter school now.  It was nearly new then, having opened in 1960.  It seems to have consistently been a well regarded high school.

Camuglia was just a teenager when she appeared in Playboy and only barely out of high school.  And not only was she only 19 when the photos ran, give the nature of production, she was 18 when they were taken.  

One year younger would have made this child pornography.

Not that this would prove to be a deterrent for Playboy.  At least two of the Playboy "Playmates" were 17 years old when their photographs were taken, and the magazine knew that at least one of the girls had that young age. They waited to run that girls' 17 year old nude photographs until she turned 18, which would not have made it legal, but rather likely to be undiscovered.  Another seems to have lied about her age, although seemingly this could have been checked up on.  One girl was specifically run as a recent high school grad who was the "youngest" playmate and getting her high school wish to be a centerfold, when in fact she was 17.

Early on, Playboy was under a serious European threat for advancing pedophilia, although oddly enough from its cartoons.  It turns out, however, that it did in fact go as low as it could go, age wise, for nudes, and even lower than legally allowed.

To add to the sadness of this, Camuglia's first husband had divorced her, or vice versa, just a month prior to these running.  When he married her he was 37 years old. She was 18.

I don't know the reasons for the divorce, or the marriage.  What did an 18 year old see in a 37 year old. I don't know what he saw in her, but her physical attributes were no doubt undeniable. The marriage lasted only seven months and he disappears from the record.  A person has to wonder if the Playboy spread brought about the divorce, although that's pure speculation.  The odds wouldn't have been good for its survival at any rate, given the odd age disparity.

Her next marriage was in 1970.  She would have been 22 years old at that time.  Her second husband doesn't seem to be mentioned on her headstone, however, which suggests that she was not married at the time of her death.

Her father died in 2010, and her mother in 2016.  Their devotion to each other, and their children, is noted on their headstones.

Undoubtedly another Playboy photograph, but as she more likely actually appeared.  Fran Camuglia didn't actually wear glasses.  This was taken from an entry on Find A Grave and is likewise put up under the fair use exception.

I don't know where this all goes, but its a sort of morality play on bad decisions, combined with a lack of societal safe guards, and declining public morality.  It's perfectly legal for a 37 year old to marry an 18 year old, but it's almost never a good idea.  I'd guess her parents opposed it, and we don't know the story behind it.   Really short marriages of much older men to teenagers have historically tended to be explained by pregnancy or mistaken belief in pregnancy, and the 18 year old Camuglia could fairly easily pass for an older young woman.  Male interest in her can easily be explained by her obvious, apparently, physical assets, something which has apparently caused her to retain a fan base forty years after her tragic death.

It's hard to believe that this story wouldn't have worked out better if Playboy hadn't been around to exploit young women.  I'll spare repeating all the details that were given in the documentary on the magazine, but they're horrific.  Suicide wasn't limited to Camuglia.  Murder was visited on at least one Playmate and visited upon a person by one.  According to the documentary one young woman associated with the magazine died at a party and her body simply disappeared.  One suicide scrawled her opinion on Hugh Hefner graphically on a wall in the apartment where she killed herself.  A host of "bunnies" was  used by men at an event physically in a way that traumatized them.

What, if anything, Camuglia endured we don't know.  Maybe only having her 18 year old body be the object of, well, for forty decades, which would be odd enough, and which would also contribute to psychic loss.

In 1967 when Camuglia appeared in the magazine, in middle class society the magazine was both accepted and regarded as dirty.  It claimed for itself that it managed to become the Stars and Stripes of the Vietnam War, and as grossly exaggerated in Apocalypse Now, it was so accepted by that time that Playmates appearing in the way that movie stars had in World War Two and Korea in the combat theater occurred.  Pinup girls didn't appear overseas in the earlier wars, even though they existed.

At the same time, however, the magazine remained a "dirty" magazine and there were legal efforts as late as the 1970s to try to address its obscenity, although they failed.  Being n the magazine branded those who did it in ways they could not escape.  Whatever happened to Camuglia, she apparently couldn't escape it.

Well, may God rest her soul and may the perpetual light shine upon her, and all who endured such tragedy..

Related thread:

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

Labels: 1960s, 1967, 1970s, 1980s, 1985, Commentary, Growing up in the 1960s, Growing up in the 1970s, Playboy Philosophy, pornography, Teenagers, The relationship between men and women, Women

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit.  I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.

Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:

Blanton with the top part of the "Miss March" centerfold. This is directly linked to her blog.  I'm using the fair use and commentary exception to copyright, but I don't own the rights to post this and will immediately take it down if asked.

Miss March holding her own centerfold?

No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.

The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing.  Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt.  She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph.  Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar.  Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy.  Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.

So why am I posting this here?  Cute story?

I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does.  But we're posting this for other reasons.

Gerard is apparently a famous Playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted.  The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy.  That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.

And that's the reason we're noting her.

She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family.  By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life.  If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be.  She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.

In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.

Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico.  She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.

At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age.  Camuglia was born in March 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that.  Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.

Blanton went on to success.  Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.

The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy.  In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker.  It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.

What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be.  Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through.  Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.

I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either.  Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links.  That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew.  There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people.  Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.

Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".

Related threads:

Secrets of Playboy

Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.

Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.

And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.

Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944.  This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions.  Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine.  The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture.  This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.

This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text.  And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.  

If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.

This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time.  Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.

This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.

At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.

That's a phenomenal observation.

And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it.  That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't.  It's been wholly destructive.

We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe.  Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.

Lauren Bacall, 1943.

The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did.  La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s.  But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.

Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s.  Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage.   Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm.  Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.

Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology.  That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.

Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell.  Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex.  It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was.  That really started to break down during the 1940s.  I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.

From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions.  This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is.   The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.

Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong.  Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it.  Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.

By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile.  There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.

Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution.  I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.

And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.

We've lost a lot here. A massive amount.  And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality.   And we're still slippping.

QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.

Related threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, Commentary, Daily Living, Food, Friday Farming, Medicine, Men, nature, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, trends, Women

A headline from Fox News:

 Playboy model Crystal Hefner admits she was never 'in love' with late husband Hugh Hefner.

Gosh, what a shocker. 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. At War With Nature and the Metaphysical

At war with God. 

We are at war with God.

Joseph Stalin, caught in tape commenting to Molotov.

I don't pay any attention to the Grammy's anymore.  I never much did. Anymore, however, nobody pays much attention to them.  The same has become true of all the other big awards in entertainment that once meant so much.  Now, heavily politicized in a PC fashion, they're really not very interesting and people pretty much ignore them.

Therefore, I ignored the flap over Sam Smith's performance when it came out, even though with Douthat commented on it I started to take a little note.  But then I noticed something else.

It's no secret that a certain segment of Western, liberal, society is at war with our existential nature, which calls into mind, for a believer, Stalin's quote.  And well it should. Communism claimed at first to act in accordance with man's nature, but soon saw it that it couldn't force the nature that it wished for, so it decided to make a new Communist man that was the antithesis to real men in some ways.  It failed.

That's what we have going on now.

Sam Smith is a homosexual.  While Pope Francis is certainly correct that making homosexuality illegal, as it actually is in much of the world, is wrong, celebrating it is nonsensical, just as celebrating hetrosexuality would also be.  It is a deviation from the genetic norm. In spite of that, however, and particularly post Obergefel, now a person can hardly even point that out.

And as people who were well attune to development and trends pointed out, the Obergefel decision was going to inevitably lead to a full scale assault on normality and nature itself, which has busted out in the transgenderism craze.  It was claimed that this would not occur, but with the guardrails down, it pretty much had to.  Not surprisingly, he collaborates with German songwriter Tim Petras, a man who was chemically and probably surgically mutilated as a very early teen, and who goes by the name of Kim Petras and affects a female appearance.

In Smith's performance, he affected a Satanic visage and gave what can only be called an open embrace of what that entails.  Perhaps fully unwitting, Smith has exposed openly what most in his camp have hidden, perhaps for the better.

And by so doing, he joins Stalin in that category. For all his defects, Stalin was a genius and his comment was not only open, I don't believe it to be metaphorical.  At least he had the courage to admit what he was up to.

Of course, like all such efforts, it failed.

It's worth noting that this argument still prevails even for those who claim not to believe or doubt.  Most of the general fundamentals of Christianity in regard to men, women, and what they do and interact, are not only Christian principles, they're principles of every religion, and exhibited in every natural society.  That's why, we'd note, that Communism works no better in North Korea than East Germany.  It's contrary to human nature, as is what these performers are exhibiting.  

You can be at war with nature, but you won't win.

It's interesting to note. . .

Related to the above, that in the commentary in Playboy documentary that aired one of the models flat out stated that she believed Hugh Hefner to be possessed, and that a girl who was a centerfold or "bunny", I can't recall which painted something essentially stating the same thing prior to her committing suicide.

It was really Kinsey, and his bogus report, that started us down this road, although I've blamed Hugh Hefner, justifiably, a lot.

During World War Two, Alfred Kinsey, with colleagues, was busy studying the sexual habits of perverts who were incarcerated, resulting in a text entitled Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, which would have been better entitled Sexual Habits of Incarcerated Perverts Who Couldn't Be Drafted.  It's one of two examples of 1940s "studies" being really results driven.  I.e, a report that isn't a study, but a conclusion being justified subsequently by a report, the other being SLAM Marshall's Men Under Fire.

Both texts have done a lot of damage.

Taken objectively, it turns out that really gross perverts act perversely, which didn't stop Kinsey and his associates from actually arranging some acts that should be regarded as solicitation, or prostitution, or just weird.  Anyhow, their conclusions were erroneous, as is now well known, but so damaging and influential, they're still regarded as persuasive.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of men and women actually had very limited numbers of, as we like to say now, "partners".  Most men and women had no sexual experience at all of the really intimate type until they were married, and it was universally regarded, irrespective of not everyone keeping the standard, that sex outside of marriage was morally wrong.

Enter perversion fan Kinsey and this began to weaken, followed by Hugh Hefner.  Not too surprisingly, we are at where we now are, at war with nature.

99 Luftballons

The entire Chinese balloon flap has been very interesting.  I'm sure that we're not going to know the truth of it for many years.

What we know is only the basics. The Chinese have been flying spy balloons over the United States, and in this case, although barely noted, over Canada as well.  The choice of the two nations together may be simply atmospheric, perhaps that's how you get a balloon over the continental US, or it may be strategic, that flies it over and through NORAD.

It would not appear that the NORAD, American or Canadian response has been stellar. This was apparently, if we're being told the truthy, and we very well might not be, the first time a PRC spy balloon was detected, which if true is a shocking admission of a major NORAD failure.  And the entire story of waiting it so long to shoot it down doesn't pass the smell test at all.  This thing could have been dropped anywhere from the Aleutians to Wyoming harmlessly, but wasn't.  The story about not wanting to damage stuff on the ground simply isn't credible.  They were probably more likely to hit a boater where they took it down than they were to hit a human over much of its course.

Which means somebody is probably fibbing.

We now know that U2s accompanied the balloon nearly its entire route over the US. The high altitude spy plane was spying on the balloon, likely picking up anything it emitted, and perhaps messing with its own emissions.  That alone may be sufficient justification, justification that can't be admitted, for not dropping it until we did.

Chances are good, I'd note, that U2s are flying near the one now in the Southern Hemisphere.

The big question is why are the Chinese doing this?

Well, one reason is that they got away with it so far, and it did a good job of testing NORAD.  We overflew quite a few places with U2s until we simply couldn't, and it was never our intent to test air responses in doing it. We probably also intruded on Soviet waters with submarines for various spying reasons, and the Soviets and Russians probably still do that in some locations.

Nations spy.

But spying in this manner is really interesting.

They may have been able to pick up a lot of electronic data from the ground that a satellite simply couldn't.  And, importantly for a nation that is preparing for war with the United States, and it is, testing NORAD made sense.

A new Cold War?

This question came up on all the weekend shows. Are we in a new Cold War.  Nobody would say yes.

Well, we obviously are.

One analysis, that the level of trade was too high to support that claim, is nonsense. We didn't have a lot of trade with the Eastern Bloc countries, as they had nothing we really wanted to buy at the time.  China has been different, and intentionally so. The real model is the trade level between the Western combatants in World War One, prior to the war.  It was enormous, none of which kept the war from happening.

And this war will go hot.

Are the Chinese going to attack Taiwan?

Probably. 

Well, rather, they will probably try. 

I'd give it about 70% chance of happening by mid-decade.  I.e., we're close.

It'll also be an epic fail.

Crossing the Taiwan Strait will prove beyond them, their casualties will be massive, and their government will fall.

Liars.

Fox news crew with the network.

To nobody's really surprise, unless they chose to be completely self-deluded, Fox News personnel privately acknowledged that they knew Trump hadn't won the 2020 election.  Indeed, privately, some, notably Tucker Carlson, blasted him.

In spite of this, they just keep on keeping on.  If Fox had any honor, all of these people would go, and go right now.

But they won't.  And they'll just keep shoving the crap they're shoveling.

Lying about being Jewish

It's interesting that there is now some political cache, apparently, to being Jewish.

We've long had Jewish politicians in the United States, and even before that.  Francis Salvador, for example, served in the South Carolina provincial legislature at the time of the Revolution and hew as Jewish.  But it can't be doubted, additionally, that being Jewish was once a serious hindrance to obtaining higher office.  While Salvador was undoubtedly an exception, by and large successful 19th Century Jewish politicians in the US, and there were some, came from districts where their constituents at least partially had the some background.

Exceptions started in the 19th Century, however.  Portland, Oregon had back to back Jewish mayors starting in 1869.  Washington Bartlett was the Jewish Governor of California starting in 1887.  And so on.

Be that as it may, Jewish Americans being quiet about their religious identity, in some instances, was pretty common well into the 20th Century.  Indeed, most Jewish actors in American films changed their names, if they had a name that might identify them as being Jewish.

Now that's changed so much that we apparently have two freshman members of Congress claiming Jewish identify when they have none. George Santos is one, and now Anna Paulina Luna is another.  Luna claimed to be raised as a Messianic Jew and that she’s part Ashkenazi Jewish, but has now converted fully to Christianity.

In actuality, she's always been a Christian and one of her grandfathers, a German immigrant, served i the German Army during World War Two.

What's up with this?

Last Prior Edition:

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLIV. Pope Francis writes Fr. James Martin, S.J.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXVIII. The juvenile or nearly so femme fatale edition. Plus, the example of monarchy, Robbing trains, Expats and politics, M&M's, Tucker Carson and Carson Tucker.

Prince Andrew stripped of military titles and duties

I don't really know what his duties actually were, but whatever they were, he no longer has them.  Nor does he have his military titles any longer.

This, of course, because he's been sued by Virginia Giuffre who alleges that he sexually abused her, when she was a minor, age 17, and part of the creepy sexual net that Jeffrey Epstein had going.

By all accounts, Giuffre lead a horrific early life, having been a sexual abuse victim before that period even.  Following prior horrors at age 14, she was reunited with her father, who worked at Mar-A-Lago. . . yes that Mar-A-Lago. She was found there by Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein's procurer.  She claims she was supplied by Epstein to Prince Andrew.

We should be careful not to assume that Giuffre is telling the truth.  Her story has changed over time, and she also claims that Epstein supplied her to Alan Dershowitz, which I find unlikely for some reason.  Anyhow, she does show up in a photo with the Prince, and the fact that he wasn't able to get the lawsuit she's filed in New York dismissed was apparently the last straw for the Royal Family.

Anyhow, this story is interesting for a couple of reasons.

One thing is, I think, that it shows the Royal Family, indeed all Royal Families, just need to go. They're beyond being an anachronism. What purpose do they really serve?  Wrapping the whole thing up with the UK, which itself is becoming a bit frayed at the margins, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II seems like a fitting and dignified ending to an institution that, frankly, has frequently been undignified.

On that, followers of certain lines of thought on Reddit will frequently find really radical traditionalist arguing for the return of monarchy pretty much everywhere, often stating that it establishes as set of (Christian) values for a nation.  Apparently, such people are wholly ignorant of real monarchies.

If Prince Andrew did bed Virginia Giuffre, and I don't know that he did, it would have been wrong on every level, but it would have been pretty much par for the course for the male members of royal families throughout history.  Finding a King, for example, that didn't have courtesans in addition to a wife is, well, difficult.  The upper classes always knew this.  The peasantry didn't, all the time, except when they did, and then they tended not to care too much, as monarchy was relatively irrelevant to their real lives.

What would Alfred the Great think?  Well, while Alfred married once and had all legitimate children, he probably would have found Andrew's conduct rather the norm for princes.

Other creepy groomers

I've never heard of Sondra Theodore, but apparently she was one of Hugh Hefner's various concubines, oops, um, prostitutes, . . . um, oh, uh "girlfriends". That's right, girlfriends.

Oh heck, concubines.

It's sort of the Epstein story, and sort of not.  Basically, he started . . . well. . .when she was 19.  He was 50.

That's creepy, but she was an adult.  She can't really complain that much, as basically, well, she was prostituting herself to Hefner, like many others. She was an adult, albeit a young one, which Giuffre was not.

It does get creepier, however, as apparently Hefner, one of the architects of the destruction of the moral society, used her as a procurer for additional concubines. . um, prostitutes, or whatever, um bedmates, for her perversions.

Should we feel sorry for her?

As a human, certainly.  Indeed, we should pray for her redemption, which hopefully has arrived.  And, in the Catholic tradition and moral thought, even for Hefner's, which in no way reduces the path of destroyed lives, and indeed destroyed souls, he left in his disgusting wake.  We may be in a period of reckoning, but we have a long ways to go before Hefner's damaging legacy is in the historical dustbin, as opposed to Hefner himself, who is, and his instrument of destruction, the print edition of Playboy.

Speaking of self-promotion through photographic concubinage. . . 

Not Theodore, or Jenner.

Kylie Jenner reaches 300,000,000 viewers on Instagram

That's a lot of  views.

They aren't viewing her for her vast intellect, although I don't doubt that she has one.

More particularly, that's a lot of cheesecake views.  Jenner is, really, a modern pinup and a famous one.

At least she isn't 17.

Or 19.

But the image she portrays isn't exactly of a mature women either, now is it.

This cast of characters

May we say it?

Ooo, ick.

Hefner, Trump, Cosby, Prince Andrew.  

Blech.

All men with reprehensible relationships with women to some degree, although in fairness Prince Andrew, at least so far, has the least icky, assuming the latest accusations do not prove to be true.

And all celebrated and powerful, and to some degree, save for Andrew, still celebrated.

The Train Robbers

Thieves are robbing Union Pacific trains in Los Angeles to such an extent that . . .

 the railroad is considering ceasing to serve the city.

News footage shows the rail line littered with the packages of thousands of stolen items.

Let's admit it, Los Angeles is simply beyond repair.

California darned near is.  The Golden State, after decades of financial problems and after decades of unrestrained population growth, ended up just where you'd think a locality featuring those things would.

Los Angeles, as we recognize it, dates back to a Catholic mission founded there in 1771, which was founded by St. Junipero Serra.  Like all things moral, he's under attack in California today, which is part of the reason that California in general is the titanic mess it is.  In 1841 it was made the capital of Alta California.  It was one of California's premier cities for decades.

World War Two victory parade featuring Californian George S. Patton.

Hollywood is one of its suburbs.

It's all a mess now, as is California in general. And because California is an overgrown bloated festering sinkhole, its population with means, which is much of it, is leaving the state.  In the last census, California lost population.  This is a problem for the rest of the country, as its fleeing residents tend to bring California with them, wherever they go.

Expats and politics

In  the state's politics, I frankly wonder to what extent that we're hearing the voice of expats.  More specifically, a lot of the current political tone doesn't resemble the sort of tone Wyoming used to have.

Wyoming's politics have traditionally been unique.  They've been conservative in a quasi libertarian way but not populist.  The state had a strong, if minority, Democratic Party up until the 1990s.  The ethos of the state tended to be "I don't care what you are doing as long as you don't ask me to approve of it".

Things have really changed.

The state's politics always tend to show some influence of recent migrants when they swing in, in numbers.  Usually they swing back out, in numbers as well.  It'll be interesting to see what happens as oil starts to wind down here, which it will, but at any rate, you would think we'd be seeing some result of that exodus now. 

Of course, we're really not for a variety of reasons, one of which was COVID.  While I hate to admit it, the pandemic brought in a population that sort of followed in the wake of and added to the strong southern influences that oil booms have tended to.  This has brought in the new populist politics and it's taken over the local GOP.

Or maybe it's just the times.

The state has always featured a lot of near state immigration.  You don't have to go too far to find people who are from the neighboring states.  But it is the case that in recent years things have been different.  You'll run into people who will proudly proclaim, "I'm from California and . . . " emphasizing how they left the state where they made their money and lives, and fled it to come here.  

Economic boosters often fail to realize what this sort of thing can mean.  People like to complain about what Colorado has become, for instances, but Colorado campaigned to become that.

One interesting undercurrent to this is that the state has experienced its third wave of Hispanic immigration, or fourth really.  The first Hispanic immigrants came into the state from New Mexico in the 1840s to work for the Army as builders near Ft. Laramie.  They stayed and farmed, but for some reason their farms on the Mexican Hills near there didn't establish a permanent population.  

The second wave did, however, with that brining in a group of New Mexican Hispanics who worked in the rail industry and shepherding in from the 30s through the 50s.  Their descendants are still here.  The next group came in during the 70s during the first big wave of illegal immigration, although not all of them were illegal by any means.  Many of them left, but some stayed.  And then there's the current wave that has been going on for the past fifteen years or so.

This population is demographically significant, and there's no reason to believe that its Republican.  It'd be a natural Democratic demographic, but the Wyoming Democratic Party has become so small that it tends to be populated only by WASP leftists anymore, who can't really seem to actually see Hispanic voters.  They instead tend to imagine the entire world as if it's Greenwich Village for some reason.  This will become obvious, again, when the Democrats finally start to nominate some candidates for the 2022 election, as they'll all be white, probably, and at least one of them will surely check all the current WASP Left boxes.

A smart Democratic Party would pick up where Lynette Grey Bull left off and try to test the field a bit with a candidate who reflects a broader base.  Fremont County, due to the Reservation, retains a real Democratic Party.  If that party reached out to the now statistically significant Hispanic community, which probably is a little scared with all the rhetoric it may be hearing from the more hard right elements of the  GOP, it might be able to capture a surprising number of voters.  The candidate would have to cross over to capture moderate Republicans as well, but the GOP might aid it in doing that. A party that claims Liz Cheney is a "RINO" is doing a good job of that already.

Cement structures at Ft. Laramie, built by migrants from New Mexico.

M&M's

The Mars candy of fame, which was battle born, has caused a flap by changing the footgear of its cute cartoon version of itself.  Or at least the footgear of one of the cartoon figures.

Forrest Mars Sr. got the idea for M&M's from Smarties, a British candy that was popular in the Spanish Civil War for the same reason that M&M's are, their shell keeps them from being a gooey mess.  The first big customer for the 1940 introduced candy was the U.S. Army.

At some point in the last few decades, the company introduced advertising that featured talking cartoon M&M's.  A female M&M was among them, wearing go-go boots.  Now she's going to wear tennis shoes, in an effort to update the character and be more inclusive.

Of course, in an era when everything is deemed to have a massive sexual and political meaning, this has caused a flap.  It's been commented on by, who else, Tucker Carson.

American soldier giving candy to French girls, July 4, 1944, when candy had no overt gender or political message.

Journalism?

I had to look up Tucker Carson to try to figure out why he's such a big deal.  I still don't know, although his bio read is a little wild.

Journalism, and by that I mean journalism everywhere, has always had its personalities and wild characters, so much of the "decline in journalism" commentary is actually wrong.  It's a return to its status quo ante.  After all, it isn't as if the drawing that Frederic Remington submitted of a Spanish officer detaining a stripped Cuban woman was drawn from life.

In this, however, I think the Press has followed the same track as the law.  By the early 20th Century the institution was disgusted with its own conduct, as the law was with it, and worked to reform itself. By the teens, it was already doing better than it had in the late 19th Century. By World War Two it very much was, and when television came on, and we had only three networks, the news was presented in a very dignified manner.

Well, cable television and then the internet ended that, and we returned to the days when you bought your journalism from somebody who you know is reliably likely to have a more extreme version of your own opinion.  The Carson's and Maddow's are good examples of that.  And it dovetails the decline in legal professionalism perfectly.

Pitty poor Carson Tucker, an individual with the same names, but in reverse order.  He's a baseball layer with the Arizona Complex League Guardians.

Carson's father was, for a time, a gonzo journalist, of which this is the symbol.

Oh no, it can't be that. . .

The Birth of A Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 cinematic piece of trash.  It came right as the second Klu Klux Klan was experiencing a nationwide revival.  The film can't be blamed for racial violence in the 1910s, but it certainly contributed to the rise of the KKK in that era and to an atmosphere that set the background for events like the Red Summer of 1919.

On the very day I published this:

Lex Anteinternet: Disaffection and Violence: I've written here repeatedly about the cause of American incidents of mass violence, noting in each that actually we live in the most...

The Tribune had an article with this headline:

No, there's still no link between video games and violence

Yeah, bull.

One of the strongest tendencies in American society is to believe that license, of any type, can't possibly be the source of excess, of any type.

It is, and it's demonstratively so, keeping in mind that the impact of things is collective for the most part, and very rarely individual.

Sure, it's absolutely the case that individual video games are not likely to inspire most of the viewers to act out violently.  But most of the viewers will be impacted, and some will be impacted enormously.  We've already conducted an experiment on this for a 70 year period and we know the answer.  

The test set was pornography.

We've dealt with this ad nauseum (or I'm sure that's how our limited audience probably feels in part) but that is in fact the test we've conducted and we know the results.

In 1953, as readers here know (and probably with they weren't reading about again) Playboy Magazine came out with its first edition.  By 1963 it was firmly established as the okay, unless you were in your early teens, American men's magazine, quite an accomplishment for a publication of a type that heretofore was sold in brown paper bags in the dingy part of towns.  By 1973 it was a major American publication, taken seriously and interviewing Presidential candidates.  By 1983 it was in trouble, but not because men had grown tired of naked over endowed women, but because it had been copied and its followers had taken its photographed prostitution further down the road.  Penthouse and Hustler were cutting into it, as they were more "graphic".  Now the magazine is in a great deal of trouble financially and its copiers are no longer in print at all, having moved to the Internet, but that too is significant. The Internet is a sea of pornography.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

But during that time period its frankly the case that pornography crossed over into the mainstream.  In the 1950s, a film like Some Like It Hot was regarded as salacious. It features Marilyn Monroe, Playboy's first centerfold, but it doesn't feature any nudity at all.  Spring forward and you can nearly be guaranteed that any major movie featuring a young woman, no matter how gigantic her star status, and there's a really decent chance that the film will show her nude simply to do it. 

We know this had a big impact on a lot of thing, some of them being the most basic of all.  The spread of pornography helped fuel social change that helped increase the divorce rate and helped lead to the massive increase of "single mothers".  It resulted in the phenomenon of pornography addiction which, ironically, has in turn lead, according to respected sociologists, in a decrease in sex itself and a decrease in satisfactory male/female relationship. 

It also lead to violence.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this was hotly debated, but it really isn't much now.  It's clear that early exposure on the part of some to Playboy and its fellow travelers lead to a permanently debased view of women to those victims.  Some just went on to lesser lives, but it's also clear that what it did to some is to fuel an increase for more and more "graphic" pornography and, in turn, to violent pornography to eventually acting out violently.  At least one serial killer has related this in his own case.  And its certainly well established that an addiction to pornography on the part of some leads them to other acts, the least of which might be hiring prostitutes to preform what they've been viewing in other media.

So our point about video games?

Arguments about video games have and are taking the exact same trajectory.  Early on Playboy argued that it was just good clean smutty fun.  It turned out not to be, to the enormous determent of women, causing massive sociological and even medical problems we haven't worked out way out yet.

Men and women au natural, but not in the way that Hugh Hefner and his fellow travelers would have it.

Now, sex is different than violence, sort of, in that it taps right into one of our most basic instincts and violence. . . . oh wait.

Actually, not so much. . . at least in the case of men.

Men are more violent than women. There's no doubt about it.  Modern social engineers may like to pretend that there's no psychological or biological difference, but there most definitely is.  Violence is frankly built into men, undoubtedly in a evolutionary biology sense, in a way that its not built into women.  Most men won't act inappropriately violent, of course, but that men seek recourse to violence in any setting in which violence can arise cannot be realistically doubted.  There's a deep seated, and as noted, basic biological reason for this.  Indeed, those who have studied it note that men have a different violence curve, if you will, being more likely to get suddenly made and violent, than women do, who generally rise slow in anger and who have anger very slowly retreat.  Indeed, men are often very baffled by the retained anger of the women they're close to, not experiencing it in the same way as women do at all.

It's no accident that the sort of crimes that have been focused on here recently such as in the thread above are committed by males.  I know of only one instance recently of the contrary.*  Women can and do commit violent acts, to be sure, but they tend to be of a different character.  A self defense argument, for that reason, for a woman in defense of the charge of First Degree Homicide is a lot more likely to be regarded as credible than it is for a man.  We see those form time to time in the form of the "I just couldn't take it anymore. . . .".  Doesn't work that well if a guy says it (and frankly it doesn't work very well as a defense for a woman either, and isn't a legally cognizable defense in and of itself anywhere).

A culture of justified violence, or a subculture of one, does have an impact on a society or some of its members.  That's why some governments, movements, or political parties, embrace it.

By the late 1920s and 1930s the propaganda associated with the KKK had been so successful that it was able to use its violent imagery openly for other purposes.  Oddly enough, the KKK was a strong proponent of Prohibition.  Why this is the case isn't clear to me, but an element of it may have been that beer was strongly associated with Catholic Irish, whom the KKK detested.

Indeed, that's why even now, in spite of the absolute horror it represents, the stirring imagines of some hideously evil causes are still visually attractive.  And if they are now, they were even more so when they were first released.

Common German portrayal of member of the SS.  The SS was a branch of the Nazi Party itself, like the SA, and while the means by which it acquired members varied, an element of it was trying to appeal to young men with very manly looking portrayals.  Indeed, the Nazis were very deeply into visual portrayals of all types, including uniforms, and were very effective at it. They were much less effective in terms of written propaganda, which was often disregarded, and quite ineffective in terms of music, with the Germans retaining a fondness for music that the Nazis didn't really approve of.

And indeed, this is the very nature of visual propaganda, to stir emotions.  If that can't be done legitimately, it can be done visually.

French poster of Che Guevera from the 1968 uprisings.  Guevera was a detestable butcher who deserves to be remembered in that fashion, but even now this iconic depiction is the way he's commonly remembered.

And doing this visually not only means doing int artistically in posters, something that would frankly appeal very little to most people today as you don't normally go somewhere in which posters are routinely encountered, but in terms of images.

North Vietnamese poster of the Vietnam War depicting an actual female combatant heroically circa 1972.  In reality by the end of the war the NVA was down to teenage troops and even had to take recaptured deserters back into service.  Only a tolerance for the utter destruction of any human life, including that of the North Vietnamese, allowed North Vietnam to prevail in the war.

The moving pictures ability to inspire and be used as propaganda has long been known.  Nazi cinematic propaganda was so effective that it won an Academy Award for cinematography prior to World War Two for the film Triumph Of The Will.  That a body that has never been sympathetic to fascists of any stripe, and which frankly prior to World War Two contained a number of barely closeted Communists, and which indeed was so left leaning that even highly Catholic film maker John Ford could release a pretty lefty The Grapes Of Wrath, really says something.

Which takes us to "Slam" Marshall.

I've dealt with S.L.A. Marshall before here.  He was the bulling U.S. Army historian who came up with the complete crock that soldiers in combat don't shoot their weapons (in reality, they shoot too much).  While Marshall's thesis was a dud, and he should be another recipient of the Defense Boobie Prize for Strategic Doltery award, it was widely accepted and the military, among other things, has invested in video game technology for years and years now.

The purpose of those games is combat environment desensitization and familiarization.  That's the purpose of a lot of military training.  To get you used to the really bad stuff.  It's why soldiers of every army spend a lot of time practicing war, in part.  Combat is distracting and the Army, every army, wants its soldiers to be able to do their jobs.  In the case of the U.S. military, video games have been part of that for quite some time.

So do video games have a link with violence?

Undoubtedly.

Will video games make everyone who plays them violent?

No.

Will they impact every player in some fashion?

Undoubtedly again.

The same is true, we'd note, of what we've otherwise noted here, and we can and should expand on that.  Viewing pornography doesn't turn everyone who views it into a rapist.  But it's part of the pathway for a lot of rapist (the correlation is in fact quite high).  Watching episodes of Friends won't lead everyone to think that they need to shack up with a girlfriend, but it will have that bar lowering impact on some, maybe most, who view it.**

Add to that, the impact of movies.

In the current era the rating system has been reduced to what is basically a joke.  In an era in which "basic cable" includes all the violent and pornographic fare that a person could possibly imagine, ratings effectively do nothing whatsoever.

As an example, the other day I was flipping through the movie lists on television, which I'll occasionally do to see if there's something I'm inclined to watch on.  There usually isn't, which sends me off to a book or perhaps this machine (which is another topic).  However, in this instance I saw a brief snippet for Red Sparrow, which in reading it portrayed the film as a late Cold War spy thriller. I like some films of this genera, so I hit it.

It isn't what I was expecting.  It certainly wasn't The Third Man and its not The Americans either.  It's basically a violent pornographic movie featuring Jennifer Lawrence, famous for The Hunger Games, which I haven't seen. Ostensibly with a theme somewhat related to that of The Americans, but involving Soviet agents trained to seduce their targets as it turns out, it's really just violence and sex and, for its young probably mostly male viewers, a chance to see Jennifer Lawrence naked.***  The accents are, by the way, horrifically bad.****  Anyhow, after about five minutes of this and it being plain that it isn't a spy thriller, but a porno flick, I turned it off and moved on.*****

But that's the point.  When the motion picture rating system came in during the 1960s, I'm pretty sure that this film would have been rated X.  And the blue content of the film doesn't serve a point, like the violence in the highly violent 1969 film The Wild Bunch does. That '69 Peckinpah film sought to strip away the good bad guy image of Western criminals that was so common in prior films and American culture, and shock the audience by showing us that we (again, probably mostly men) are attracted to the violence of those men because they are violent, not for some higher redeeming reason.  Now, with films like John Wick and the like, we don't make that pretension much, at least not in what we might regard as lower films.

As part of that, and as noted above, cinematic portrayals of American troops have reached the near Marvel hero movie of the week level. 

Portrayals, particularly American ones, of soldiers have usually portrayed them heroically, with some films made in the 1960s being a notable exception.  Any portrayal of war tends to glamorize it no matter what, and no matter what the intent, however.  Indeed, one Vietnam War era reporter noted in response to a question that it was impossible not to glamorize war, no matter how horrific it is.

Make no mistake about it, being in a war is not glamorous.  It's horrific.  People who experience war are about as negative about that experience as it is possible for a human being to be, and in ways that are completely impossible to explain.  Even being in the military, for a lot of people, is far from glamorous even if nothing actually occurs during their service.  But irrespective of that, it's impossible, for some deeply elemental reason, not to have portrayals of war come across as glamorizing it.

Even real attempts to avoid this generally fail.  Platoon, for example, is hardly a pro war film, but lots of young viewers watch it with fascination and it remains the most popular of the Vietnam War films.  How many movie viewers (again, almost certainly mostly male) have watched the 1st Cavalry helicopter assault scene of Apocalypse Now again and again.  Apocalypse Now may be an anti war film, and a critique of the Vietnam War, but its Robert Duvall's shallow minded Col. Kilgore who is reduced to a meme with "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and "Charlie don't surf" being the catch lines that people (men, again) like to repeat.  And telling again, if you prefer Full Metal Jacket, the scenes that are likely to be remembered are R. Lee Emery's portrayal of a drill sergeant, which is very effectively and accurately done, and the line most recalled is likely to be the Vietnamese prostitutes "Me so horny. . . " line.^

Indeed, in regard to anti war movies, in my view, only two are really effective in that genera, that being one I've really criticized here from time to time, The Deer Hunter.  Whatever its faults, The Deer Hunter is a very effective anti war film if you can stand to sit through the entire thing, with its concluding scene being hugely tragic.  Perhaps Paths Of Glory might be another, the most unromanticized portrayal of World War One I've seen.  Not even All Quiet On The Western Front can compare. 

Lesser movies in recent years have really taken the American soldier as hero depiction the next miles.  The Baby Boom generations depictions of their fathers, having recovered from depicting them as dolts in the 60s, definitely took a turn in this directly with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, both of which are excellent and realistic and which certainly don't seek to glamorize war.  Those movies are first rate, but after that there are a lot of war films, particularly very recent ones, which are simply action pictures, think Fast and Furious, in military garb.  Twelve Strong and Lone Survivor, the last of which isn't bad, are examples of this.  The soldiers perform physical feats and combat feats which are frankly impossible, and they adhere to the strict American movie rule that all American soldiers are crack shots and all our opponents are horrible shots.

The point isn't that any one of these films causes violence.  Most people, and again these movies are watched a lot more by men than women, could sit through anyone of them and not be impacted.  But they do have impact, in concert what we've noticed above, for the marginalized.

And that's where any one item isn't the cause of anything, maybe, but the sum total of them are.  Sure, playing World of Improbable Heroism II all day won't turn most people into violent loners.  An entire day sat in front of photographs of nameless young prostitutes (which is almost certainly what most are) uploaded to the net won't turn a person into a rapist.  A steady diet on the television of violent super American military heroics or Jennifer Lawrence stripping in the name of Soviet glory won't make a person into a debased lone wolf either. . . well it probably actually will, but maybe not one who acts on it.

But put this all together, and then put it in front of young men who have nothing. . . no friends, no work, no girlfriends, no meaningful existence, no skills of any value. . . and sooner or later, you're going to get some very bad results.^^

Could society act on this?  Of course it could.

But will American society act on it?

Probably not.  Doing so would be hard.  It would require deep thinking.  It might likely mean restoring old standards, in full or in part, that we abandoned in the 1960s and all the responsibilities that went with them.  And it might mean banning, limiting  or curtailing things that most Americans make frequent access too, rather than just a few, such as violent and sex based entertainment and depictions.  It would mean asking a lot of hard questions about "progress", the nature of men and women, the illusion of perpetual growth and the illusion of limitless benefits of technology.

Yes, it would require a lot of deep thinking about really deep topics.

And deep thinking isn't what we're into.  We're into simple solutions and blaming the machine. And, frankly, at the end of the day, no matter what Americans say about "Me Too" this or that, or instilling values that uplift people, we'd generally rather see Jennifer Lawrence naked and violent and are willing to pay the price for that, as long as we personally aren't the ones paying.

Even though we are.

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*It might be worth noting here that one woman who is commonly depicted as a cool killer likely really wasn't, that being Bonnie Parker.  Parker is a sad case and she obviously tolerated murder, but there's no real reason to believe that she ever committed one.

The only woman that I personally know, and only barely at that, who committed a homicide was a young woman that I vaguely knew who was repeatedly molested in the worst fashion by her father.  She ultimately committed what clearly amount to First Degree Murder but was never prosecuted. That's worth noting here, however, as its demonstrative of the anger curve noted above.

**Indeed just recently I heard, on NPR, an interview with a young man who was distressed that his adult life doesn't match that depicted in How I Met Your Mother.  I didn't watch that television drama, but what he noted, and what is obvious from even the short snippets of it I've seen, is that it depicts 20 somethings hanging out with a tight group of friend in bars.

There's really some truth to that, quite frankly.  Young people still do hang out at bars and much of young life remains as traditional as ever in regard to socialization.  Indeed, the bigger change has really been for older people, particularly middle age and older professional people, for whom casual socialization has massively declined.  But at the same time, something that has also altered is the economic demographics of that and how that works.

Dropped out of the picture pretty completely are those who aren't either students or those who aren't relatively well employed.  For those without a post high school education or who aren't fairly well employed, economic means for everything are pretty limited and people are quite isolated.  An additional aspect of that is that the economics of earlier eras simply forced people out of the house and into work, whether they lived in their parents homes or not, and as there wasn't all that much to do that wasn't labor related at home, home conditions also lent themselves to getting out of the house and into some sort of society.  It might be noted that even terrorist in the pre television days were rarely pure loners but were part of some sort of society.

***"Honey pot" type espionage traps by the Soviets were a real thing, to be sure, but the technique aspect of that is almost certainly less sophisticated and less debased than portrayed (to the extent I saw it) in Red Sparrow or, for that matter in The Americans. The Americans is very well done, but frankly in my view it pushed that aspect of the plot line a lot further than was justified.  At any rate, according to something I recent read, the recent Maria Butina episode may have involved this angle, apparently reluctantly on Butina's part.

****As in worse that Bullwinkle cartoon bad.

*****The degree to which things have really descended, cinematically, is well demonstrated by this film.  The 1960s film Barbarella nearly destroyed Jane Fonda's ability to be taken seriously as an actress and while Brigette Bardot was only ever partially taken seriously in the first place, her more revealing films of the period reduced her quickly to a character.  Lawrence's career, in contrast, will continue on without a blip in spite of having now appeared in this film.

^Note that in Full Metal Jacket, irrespective of its status as an anti war film, none of the important characters get killed, the American military wins, the Communist lose, and the tiny Vietnamese prostitutes are available at all times.  This is remarkable in regard to a war which we lost and the Communist won.  Only in The Deer Hunter do we lose, the Communist win, and the Vietnamese, including the prostitutes, are treated tragically with real human functions.

^^As noted above, this thread isn't on gun control at all, and I've barely touched on firearms here whatsoever.  That's because the factors noted above are the underlying cause of what we've been exhibiting here.

But here's where this links back in, in a weird sort of way.  The same sort of exaggerated glorification of the military and combat that's occurred in the last two decades has also occurred in regard to combat firearms.

Technologically, as we've noted here in depth before, firearms have changed very little for a very long time.  The basic technology that pertains to semi automatic firearms has existed it more or less present form for nearly a century.  The AR type weapon that seems to figure so prominently in the discussion in the media has existed since the early 1960s.  The AK type weapons that's also mentioned has existed since 1947.

We dealt with the rise of the status of the AR in a prior detailed thread.  The reason we note it again here is that the odd status that this old weapon has acquired in the popular imagination, including the imagination of the disaffected class we're speaking of here, contributes to part of the overall odd zeitgeist.