Cliffnotes of Zeitgiest Part XXI. The Missing. States of female dress, Joking, Pride, Horses, Justin Trudeau sorry for skipping first national truth and reconciliation day, and heroes.

Uff

I had this entry nearly ready to go when I lost about 50% of it.

Fortunately, as there is no deadline, and not many readers, that really doesn't matter.

Still, its the pits.  You always think you've done some brilliant writing when something like this happens.

Still, maybe that means I ought to wrap this excessively long post up.

The Missing

When I started this edition of this series, Gabby Petito had not yet gone missing.  When she first was reported missing, I wrote a post on something that sort of riffed off of it, and I still might, although in further consideration, it's now so nuanced there may literally be no point.

When I last updates this, she hadn't yet been found.  Now she has been, and we know that she was murdered, and it seems rather obvious who the killer was.  Her boyfriend, if that's what he had been at the time, or her fiancé, which maybe he had been but no longer was, or in fact maybe was, has been by far the most likely suspect and he was stil missing as well when I lost the text. It would appear that he fled into a Flordia swamp, probably having taken off in a desperate attempt to avoid prosecution, and maybe with the intent to end his own life.  We'll probably soon know.  Assuming that's so, his returning home with her vehicle, but not her, puts him in the category of all time stupid criminals, again assuming guilt, which we are told we should not assume.  And indeed, we should note, that there are other possibilities.

Women are murdered by men all the time.  It's a fact and, unfortunately, in spite of the desperate desire to avoid reality in our society, it's a "natural fact".  Men are bigger, stronger, and more violent.  They are bigger, stronger, and more violent than women for natural reasons.  None of this excuses this reality, but it does partially explain it.  So why did this horrible event garner so much public attention?

What isn't a "fact" however, is that husbands are the always and obvious suspect.  Looking at the data has gotten a little difficult, but at least some figures, and I heard them recently independently repeated, hold that husbands figure in about 8% of female deaths.  It's easier to find older figures, although not really old, on murders by boyfriends, i.e., men that women are linked with romantically but not married to, which is actually right at about the same percent.  More recent figures tend to link the two together, which isn't statistically or existentially valid, in my view, which puts things at a higher percentage rate.  You can double those figures for a relatively common one, although I've seen one that's at 25%, which I question.

While the headlines tend to suggest, based on these statistics, that "romantic partners" are the most likely killers for women, they actually aren't.  That would mean, even accepting the high rate, that 75% of homicides of women are conducted by killers who aren't romantically linked to them. When we consider that it is the case that the majority of murders are committed by people who know their victims, this presents a much different overall picture of things.

To add to that, however, I strongly suspect, but have no data to prove it, that homicides by "boyfriends", "partners" (a term I hate), and husbands are different in character.

Anyhow, this story had, and has, a tremendous following.  Part of that is because it was and is a mystery.  And a very public one was the couple had a YouTube following which meant that they were being followed by fans.  That's a lot of it.  Under any similar set of circumstances, this would have sparked national interest.

Part of it too is that she was young and cute.  That's party of it too.  Undeniably so.  That sparked the following headlines.

710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, were reported missing in Wyoming over the past decade — the same state where Gabby Petito disappeared

If Gabby Petito Was A Person Of Color, Would Anyone Have Cared – Sadly, Probably Not

There's a lot to that, which doesn't reduce the tragedy.

710 is a horrible number.  It doesn't get much attention, it really ought to.

Well, as this plays out, let us hope that she's passed on to Perpetual Light and that the suffering she seemed to be enduring wasn't too awful.

Shacking up is not the same as being married.

What I started to type an item about when this first got rolling was the way that the news stories on this ignored the fact that Petito was engaging in conduct which when I was young would have been regarded as shocking and ill-advised, although even by that point, it might have occurred anyway, somewhat as an act of flaunting standards.  I noted even in typing it out that as I was drawing attention away from the tragedy, I felt hesitant and guilting about noting what I was noting.

Here's the gist of the last, or second to last (maybe) encounter with the couple that's known about.

After the van was pulled over, the officer said Petito was “crying uncontrollably” and told him she was struggling with her mental health. Petito was placed in the back of the officer’s car, the report said, while he spoke to Laundrie on his own.

Petito said she had hit Laundrie in the arm to get his attention as the officer was trying to pull them over, which caused the van to swerve into the curb, the report said. But Laundrie said he thought Petito was trying to grab the wheel while he was driving, resulting in the swerve. The officer said Laundrie's account "was not consistent with Gabrielle's statement" and reported he saw scratches on Laundrie's arm.

The couple had spent the past four or five months traveling together which was creating tension, the report said. “The time spent created emotional strain between them and increased the number of arguments,” the report said.

Antonio Planas, NBC News.

Now, one of the officers involved claims the couple seemed to be in a "toxic relationship".

A couple traveling near Grand Teton in Wyoming now claims they gave a hitchhiking Laundrie a lift in the area when he asked to go to "Jackson", but let him out when he freaked out as they were going to "Jackson Hole" which, if true, would have shown a blistering lack of geographic knowledge around the area.  He was also acting really weird.  Putting two and two together, this would suggest that at first he was attempting to flee on foot, or maybe that he'd left her injured or sick back at their van and was taking off.  He wasn't acting normally.

Petito was 22 years old.  Laundrie was reported to be her fiancé, and then not. Early on it was suggested in reports that they were cohabiting prior to their long trip, but then later reports suggested nothing of the kind.  Of course a very long van ride is a type of cohabitation.  The highway patrol noted that they seemed stressed, which is probably an easy observation to make, as a trip like that even between really good and long friends would be stressful.

Or not.  I can imagine easily making such a trip with my friends of long-standing, including my best friend, my wife, and not finding it particularly stressful.

The modern trend of playing at the incidents of marriage is really foolhardy.

That's treading where most would fear to go.  This couple shouldn't have been one, and they shouldn't have been on the road together.  Something went badly wrong, and a lot of things may have gone wrong.  She was young and cute, and shouldn't have been out there at all as she was, which at the end of the day was with a man she wasn't married to and who didn't look after her as a decent human would, most particularly a decent man bound to her for life, no matter what was going on.

Female Dresses and Undress

I've been getting a bunch of Twitter sidebars, i.e. suggested reading, that have to do with entertainment recently, which is odd as I don't follow the entertainment news.

The entertainment news follows female fashion, and what women "wear", if that term can be used loosely.  As a result, there were a few from the VMA awards of well known, apparently, female entertainers who basically were not dressed. One was Megan Fox, and another was some well known, apparently, female singer.  I didn't click on either, but even from the little box, you could see that Fox might as well have been completely nude, for all she wasn't wearing at the VMA's, and the female singer was dressed, or rather undressed, in an antiquarian style, by which we would mean the way that the over fevered brains of old time set designers imagined members of the harem to be dressed, or not dressed, basically.

Why do women betray other women this way?

It's an interseting cultural phenominon.  In an era when we're still in the aftershocks of the Me Two era in which women justifiably compalined about being treated like sexual objects, popular female figure display themselves as, well, sexual objects.

I've noted it before and will again.  Women will never achieve full equality with men in society as long as some women prostitute their image.  It demans and degrades them all.

There was also a Met Gala, at which a selection of notables appeared.  One was AoC who wore a full lengthy stylish dress with "Tax the Rich" emblazed on it in red.  And of course, Billie Eilish was there wearing a weird 1950s style move dress that flowed on and on which also was cut so that her ample, well you can figure it out, were prominently displayed.  It was her "Holiday Barbie" dress.  She's clearly riffing off of Marilyn Monroe at this point.  Hailee Steinfeld was there, not looking like Hailee Steinfeld, which is really unfortuante as people really ought to look like who they are.

What to make of all of that.

Well one thing you can make of it is that Eilish continues to play from Madonna's playbook. She's now a figure, and a full figured figure at that, whose public image is fully seperated from her voice and singing talent, if she has any.  And she's also clearly angling, as Madonna once did, to be a latter day Marilyn Monroe, and pulling that off more effectively than Madonna did.

Oh well, at least she's not stick thin, so perhaps, at least in her case, this trend isn't a bad one.

AoC's dress caused a Twitterstorm, predictably, even though we all know it isn't really her dress.

On dresses, a local art museum has a display of the dresses of a cross dressing man on display.

He was well known around here for years, long before there was any suggestion that people tolerate such things.  People by and large did, however, and for at least two decades.  His wife donated them for dispaly as she didn't want his legacy to be forgotten.

I'm not sure what the legacy is.  As odd as it may seem, what I most recall about the times I ran into him, generaly in grocery stores and the like, is how out of time and style the dresses were.  That may sound odd, but that was my reaction.  It wasn't that he was wearing a dress, but rather that they were not good looking dresses.  More like the dresses worn by elderly women who dance in polka groups, which also strike me as not very good looking.

Anyhow, I don't know quite what to make of putting a person's clothes on display.  Is this really honoring him?  I suspect, no matter how society may have altered or claimed to have altered its views on this, it was probably an ordeal for him during his life.  It just seems a strange act to me. And an average person's clothes don't really make for art or history.  What they do give, in some context, is a chance for people to virtue signal, however, which isn't really a meaningful thing in and of itself.

Blurred Lines

Speaking of dress and undress, Emily Ratajkowski claims Robin Thicke grabbed her bare boobs during the filiming of the video for "Blurred Lines".  The headlines climed this was a "sexual assault".

I'm sorry, but somehow the "Me Too" dog just doesn't hunt here.  The entire song is about improper sexual conduct, and in one of the two versions of it that was committed to video, Ratajkowski walks around with some other model topless apparently.  If the entire thing is about immoral and illicit sexual attraction, do you really expect Thicke to treat you like a something other than you were portraying.

That's really dense.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The really beutiful Marylin Monroe at the height of her career.

Dimly connected to this post, the other day I watched the 1953 classic Gentlemen Prefer Bonds.

Really.

Now, musicals aren't my cup of tea and even though I have a pretty good knowledge of old movies, I have a pretty good knowledge of certain types of old movies, and not this type.  I'm not really a Marylin Monroe fan and her image grew so large, like Jmes Dean's, I"m inclined to ignore it really.  

Well, this movie caught me off guard.

Frankly, it started off being just as vapid as I expected it to be and I nearly turned it off, but as it went on I found it amusing.

And then shocking.

This is one of the most cynical movies I've ever seen.  I'm stunned that it was a hit in 1953.

Where the film really comes together is near the end, when Monroe's character explains to the father of her fiance that she doesn't intend to marry him for his mother, but rather, speaking to her future father-in-law "I'm marrying him for your money".  She goes on to ask him if it isn't true that men want a beutiful woman for a bride, which he confirms.  She goes on to say that for a woman, "money is like that".

This is just after the legendary scene in which Monroe sings "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has been sung.  And if you see the entire scene, it's shockingly cynical.

I don't believe that everyone shares the sentiments of this film by quite some measure, but there's more than a little to it.  

Straight Lines

If you wish to be perfect,go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Somebody whose lines aren't blurred are those of Polish javelin thrower Maria Andrewjczyk, who put her Olympic silver medal up for auction.  She is a devout Catholic and did it to donate the money to the parents of a child who desperately requires surgery.

She auctioned the medal and donated the money. The medal was bought by a Polish chain store, which gave the medal back to her.

Everyone did the right thing.

Maybe that's why there's been so little news about it.

Lawyer jokes.

I'm really tired of it

This applies to lawyer jokes.

Like most lawyers, I don't get upset at lawyer jokes in general, although the late Gerald Mason, at one time the president of the State Bar, was so upset about how they impacted the image of lawyers that he had a campaign urging lawyers not to repeat them.

Mason was an earnest man.  I never met him personally, but those who did generally liked him, but he was very earnest. From the far western part of the state, he was a sincere and observant Mormon who worried about the addiction rates displayed amongst his fellow lawyers. For that reason, he hosted the state's only dry State Bar Association Annual Meeting, at least before the Cyber variants brought in during COVID 19, which I’m guessing aren't completely dry.  Anyhow, Mason coined the phrase "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" as he was proud to be a Wyoming lawyer.

That was before the Uniform Bar Exam, however, which caused the shipping of legal work out of the state to Colorado.

Anyhow, Mason hated legal jokes and didn't want us to tell them.  We ignored that and his other suggestions, although for quite some time the state did use the "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" moniker.

Anyhow, recently I've had more than one occasion in which nervous litigants have been with me and the suggestion has been made, when there's an obvious accident or something, "you should give them your card, hah, hah".

I don't like it.

I don't like it as I'm not an ambulance chaser, and I'm not a plaintiff's lawyer, or at least I never thought I was.  A partner of mine recently pointed out to me that "we're trial lawyers" which, even though I've been a trial lawyer, and I am, for over 30 years, never dawned on me.

Clearly, I'm an idiot.

I guess in my mind I've always made the sharp distinction between lawyers who defend cases and those who prosecute them, in civil court, even though I've prosecuted some myself.  Now I don't have that luxury.

And I don't have it for more than one reason I'll not go into here.  So I'm finding myself, I suppose, like a Confederate veteran in 1870, after the war is over, when somebody says "you fought for slavery", and you realize, well, you did.

Like those guys whom that dawned on, I'll probably not be going to the United Confederate Veterans Association meeting like the guys who always knew that they were fighting for slavery, or those who can still pretend they were fighting for Virginia.

I still don't like being reminded, however.

Proud

Country Joe and the Fish.

My pride in general has been taking a bruising recently as well, for a variety of reasons, some of which would make other people proud.  I'm kind of like that host of Vietnam veterans in the late 1960s and early 1970s who hurled their medals at the White House or Pentagon.

It's a strange feeling.  And I don't even have Country Joe and the Fish to provide an anthem.

Opinion Today: Monica Lewinsky wants to talk about cancel culture

So reads a headline in my New York Times newsfeed.

I can't really see how being willing  to . . . um. . Bill Clinton elevates a person to the level of social critic.  Lewinsky is entitled to go on and live her life, but in order to really be a public figure after, well you know, and other things, she'd really have to break away from that entirely to be interesting or relevant.  Frankly, if you come up in the news due to a scandal like this, and you have some things on your ledger that are at least a little icky otherwise, you really have to probably make a big leap in order to merit being taken seriously on the public stage, or even be on the public stage.

Forgetting old knowledge

President Biden has condemned the ostensibly poor treatment of the illegal Haitian border crossers and Vice President Harris stated that the scenes remind her of slave scenes.

This reminds me of the degree to which modern Americans are, by and large, blisteringly ignorant of animals and hence disconnected from reality.

I’ve been around horses my entire life and very much admire their utility.  Frankly, they’re a very underutilized resource in the modern world simply because most people aren’t very familiar with them on workaday basis anymore.  You can do a lot with horses in a law enforcement scenario that you can’t with anything else, including crowd control and also, FWIW, in looking for the missing (dead or alive).  I always think of this when something like the Petito missing persons situation comes up.

Given that, this has been a frustrating thing to watch for me.

I don’t envy the Border Patrol their job at all.  It’s a tough job that lines a person up for constant criticism.  Right now, just to be a policeman anywhere in the US is to subject yourself to a fair amount of daily criticism even if you police in a region that has nothing to do with any of the events of the past couple of years, but the Border Patrol really gets the heat simply for doing its job.

Within the past couple of days the President has expressed a conclusion of guilt on the Border Patrolmen who were depicted on horseback and the Vice President claimed it reminded her of the days of slavery.   Those views are frankly not consistent with what we claim to be our view about guilt or innocence of a person as we’re convicting the Border Patrolmen without really knowing what they were doing, unless you do know what they were doing, in which case they are not guilty of anything.

The Border Patrolmen who were depicted were using split reins.  I use spit reins. Split reins are really something that working stockmen use, and I was surprised to see them use them, as even a lot of people who ride “western” don’t use split reins as they don’t’ know how to use them.  Riders who use split reins “neck reign”, rather than direct rein.  FWIW, cavalrymen, back in the day, were taught to direct rein.  I know how to do both, but I’ll neck reign by default, as that’s where I started off.

Riders who neck rein only use one had to rein, keeping the other free. That in fact is what the border patrolman in question was doing.  If you look at the photos carefully you’ll see that in the one dramatic photo he has his hand way out, and he’s practically out of the saddle in order to grab a person by the shirt.  He’s not whipping anyone.

Indeed, when you use split reins as a crop, the only thing you are getting the attention of is the horse.  Most ranch horses, in reality, are really rough stock, not anything like the horses that people in towns ride (I used to laugh when my son would say that he was a “poor rider”, as he was riding horses that would have been regarded as widow makers to most people in town).  Every now and then a rider of a ranch type horses will whack the rear end of the horse with the long reins.  You don’t have enough rein to actually inflict pain, but it gets their attention.

The reins aren’t long enough to hit anyone on the ground either.  Keep in mind that they’re attached to a bit of some sort, and the horse that uses them reins from the touch of the rein on the neck.  If you have that much rein, you are going into some big weird curve and aren’t going to do what you meant to do, assuming the horse doesn’t revolt and throw you off.  Indeed, the thing with split reins is that the rider needs to know how long or short they need to be, as if they’re too short the horse will protest, and if they’re too long, he won’t stop.  Every horse is a little different on this.

Horses are a long domesticated animal, and it's actually very difficult to get one to run into or over a person.  There are accounts of policemen charging crowds, for example, in which the horses leap over the people who have fallen as they generally won’t mow down a person.  I’ve seen men turn horses that were bucking or upset lots of times simply by stepping out in front of them and putting out their arms.  I personally have been bucked off horses and had a horse roll on me when it fell, but I’ve had one try to mow me over, and I’ve been around a lot of horses.  I can’t say the same, for example, about cattle, which have tried to stomp me flat and which actually have picked me up with their heads and thrown me around.  Horses can be dangerous, bud the real danger is getting thrown or kicked, not run down.

All of this is actually what makes horses good for crowd control.  A trained horse won’t kick a person, and they won’t run over them. But they are very large and look larger if you are on the ground.  As late as the Bush War in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe of the 80s, it was demonstrated that even armed men pretty much miss hitting horses when they’re running at you as it's scary.

All the Border Patrolmen were doing, in my observation, was trying to keep the border from being illegally crossed.  That’s their job.  Depriving them of horses will make it that much harder to do that job, which is pretty hard to do as it is, and it’ll deprive them of a patrolling asset that they need (and which the border customs agents, who also once used horses, no longer have as an asset, since the 80s I think).

Anyway, I’m pretty disgusted by the way the officers are being treated. They’re being compared to slave masters for simply trying to keep our border from being any more porous than it already is.

Trump is suing Twitter to force Twitter to restore is account.

It's a private company. They don't have to restore anyone's account.

Trump is suing Congress over subpoenas

The January 6 commission has been issuing subpoenas on figures associated with Trump.  Trump is suing to stop it.  It's almost as if that material might be embarrassing or something.

We're all for individual rights except when we aren't.

A Cheyenne attorney and former congressional candidate has declared YouTube’s ban of anti-vaccination content from its platform to be illegal censorship and in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

YouTube isn't the government, and we always hear around here that we're for individual rights.

We also hear that we're for property rights, and we're a right to work state.  A local politician appeared recently to support nurses who stand to be canned for not getting vaccinations, even though it's their employer's right to require them to do so.

And the legislature is going into session in order to take on a Federal mandate, in the name of individual rights, that would require employers with more than 100 employees to require those employees to be vaccinated.

All this is really confusing if we take any of this rights stuff serious and if we have also sworn an oath, as legislators (and lawyers) have to the Constitution.  The supremacy clause is well established, and we seemingly have no problem with the Federal Government requiring hard hats and steel toed boots of some workers. We also have no problem with vaccination requirements for school attendance, unless its for COVID 19, then we do.  We don't have a problem with employers telling employees how to dress.  There's no consistency here.

There is opportunism, however.  I'm sure some of the legislators going back to Cheyenne are completely sincere in their beliefs, but in this odd election season, there being no break from the past election, you have to wonder.

Justin Trudeau sorry for skipping first National Truth and Reconciliation Day

As The Guardian notes:

Canadian prime minister took family holiday on day to underscore bitter legacy of Indigenous residential schools – ‘I regret it’

It's hard to imagine how politicians get in this situation, but they continually do. Somebody will have a strict mask order, and then go dine out.  The Canadian PM virtues signals all the time, and then on the first Reconciliation Day event he goes on vacation.

Of course, the reality of it is that really reconciling isn't easy to do.  It's one thing to apologize for the sins of your ancestors, but that doesn't really accomplish anything.  Both Trudeau and I hail (him more than me) from people who decamped from Normandy in the 17th Century and went to New France, where their mere presence helped displace the native population, although in the French example, much less than the English example, as the French genuinely saw the natives as fellow souls to be saved, whereas the English, corrupted by the legacy of King Henry the Vandal and Queen Elizabeth I saw things in a more mercenary manner.

Be that as it may, neither Justin or I can really apologize to anyone impacted at the time or for anyone impacted at the time. They're all gone.  This would mean, of course, that you have to look out at the people in the real world today, and in regard to indigenous populations, there's plenty to be done.

For the most part, however, people aren't going to do it.  It's easier to lament the sins of those long gone and the plight of those long departed, than to look around and do something about anything now.

And then. . 

One guy who definitely isn't going to be apologizing for anything is Donald Trump.  He's not a truth and reconciliation kind of guy.  Indeed, he's still boosting the election was stolen line, and its pretty clear that he's out for revenge against anyone who didn't back him whom he thinks should have.

One of the guys that Trump apparently had a bit of an axe to grind about was the late Gen. Colin Powell.  Powell was the child of Jamaican immigrants and was born in Harlem.  He's a huge success story, which you have to accord even if you don't agree with every policy he supported when he was Secretary of State.  In response to the news of his death, Trump stated:

Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO, if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!

Okay, I'm not one of those people who take the line that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but Trump can't help but be a jerk.  The mistake that Trump apparently is referring to Powell's endorsement of the "weapons of mass destruction" line at the time of the second war with Iraq.

Powell later apologized for being in error on that.  Frankly, in my view, that line never justified the war in the first place, as "weapons of mass destruction" principally meant chemical weapons which are darned near worthless in the real world, as well as missiles, which lots of nations have.  But Powell's view stemmed from intelligence reports which were inaccurate, as he later acknowledged, and you can't fault a guy for believing erroneous stuff your own intelligence sources tell you.

And he was certainly a remarkable person.  He was the son of immigrants who rose up to be one of the most important figures in the country.  And like so many immigrant's children, he served the country in time of war whereas, like so many of the native born, our last couple of leaders can't say the same.

Blog Mirror: Practicing During Covid

This article is an absolute classic. The best written work to come out of the pandemic.

Practicing During Covid.

"Do you personally know anyone who has had COVID 19?"

So reads an item that's constantly popping up on my Facebook feed right now.

I don't know the original source, but I suspect, without knowing for sure, that this started off as one of those Covid denial things you see around.  I.e., not that many people "really get it" or "it's not that bad".

I replied the first time, as I know the person who was circulating it.  I haven't to the several ones I've seen since then.

But yes, I know a lot of people who have had COVID 19.  I started counting it up in my mind and then simply stopped when I could think of twenty people I know who've had the infection.

Indeed, I know people who had it the very first month that it became a news story and hardly a month has gone by where I haven't learned of somebody else who has had it or, has it.

Offhand, I can think of two people I know who died of it, and one of them definitely didn't die a good death.  That, moreover, was brought about due to a situation in which one person insisted the other come to his office, which was the one time the person broke a self-imposed quarantine.  He died on a ventilator.

I know another whom I suspect had COVID 19 playing a role in his untimely death, due to the impacts it has one some people who get it. And I know another whom I suspect has been severely physically impaired by the disease. 

I got vaccinated as soon as I was able to and all of my family did as well.  But I know people who haven't.  They all have their own reasons for that.  But we're entering a very new phase of this.  The Delta variant is as infections as the chicken pox and the Lambda variant, which just broke out in South America, appears to be more able to break through.  

This virus isn't following the normal path.  Normally, virus evolve towards being less lethal.  We're not seeing that.

Does anyone really know somebody who hasn't had the disease?  I doubt it.

The bigger question may be does anyone out there not know somebody who died?

Casualties of the COVID Recession Part II

November 7, 2020

We start this entry off with some good news.  The unemployment rate has fallen to 6.9%

For years, 7% was regarded as statistical full employment.  So, in spite of some parts of the country reeling under the Coronavirus pandemic spiking in their region, unemployment is going down.

The ironies and oddities of this story are almost too thick to cut.  President Trump just went down in defeat in the General Election in part due to his handling of the pandemic.  While pollsters lost a lot of credit this election, it's generally been the case that going into the election it was felt that the strong economy, pre pandemic, would have carried him through the fall.  Assuming that's true, the economy did prove to be remarkably sound, as he maintained in the campaign, as it rebounded quickly, but just too late to aid him, maybe.

Additionally, part of the rebound is undoubtedly due to pandemic fatigue and that local Governors, who have been in control of individual state responses, do not have the political wills to shut anything back down.  Trump never wanted to.  That may have had a really pronounced human cost, however.

Anyhow, the economy appears to be recovering.

November 15, 2020

Guitar Center, a national musical instrument retailer, is filing for bankruptcy.

The company's debt problems have been long term and, therefore, this can't be directly tied to the pandemic.  Indeed, I'd have thought that the sale of musical instruments might have increased while people have been stuck at home.

November 17, 2020

Governor Gordon announced $500,000,000 in budget cuts. The move still leave the state in a deficit spending situation.

While almost all departments, including the University of Wyoming, received cuts, there were things that notable did not, including the Governor's clean coal program and the lawsuit regarding coal access to ports. These were probably left intact in hopes that they'd pay off in the future.

The remaining $300,000,000 deficit is attributable to K-12 education costs, which are constitutionally protected.

This deserves a separate thread, which will be posted later.

December 10, 2020

Not really directly related, but something that's related to something getting a lot use in the current era, the Federal Government launched anti trust litigation against Facebook.  48 states are also parties with the Federal Government in the action.

December 13, 2020

UCLA economists predict a gloomy economic winter followed by a roaring post vaccine spring in which the economy will go from bad to good, and remain good, for a period of years.

January 6, 2021

The price of oil hit an eleven year high following a Saudi Arabian agreement to cut their production of oil.

European stock markets climbed yesterday where as American ones fell following early indications that the Republicans had probably lost the Senate.

January 20, 2021

FedEx is cutting 6,300 jobs in Europe. The jobs are being lost as FedEx consolidates its purchase of a competitor, TNT.

January 30, 2021

Toys R US closed its last two stores in the United States.

July 22, 2021

We probably ought to start a new one of these, as we aren't in a recession anymore, but as this was the last general economic thread, we'll start here.

Ford has ceased production of its new Bronco line of 4x4s due to material shortages.

General Motors has ceased production of trucks for the same reasons.

Across the nation, at the same time, small employers of certain types are reporting that employees laid off during the pandemic are not returning to work.

July 27, 2021

Airlines are concerned about a lack of aviation fuel.  This has been caused by supply chain issues and an increased demand due to fire fighting requirements.

August 4, 2021

The CDC has reimposed a moratorium on evictions due to the pandemic.

The prior moratorium was statutorily imposed.  It's quite questionable whether or not the CDC  has the authority to unilaterally impose a moratorium.

Prior and related threads:

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally.

Casualties of the COVID Recession

Lex Anteinternet: Heavier Rain

Heavier Rain

Storm Clouds

Gathering Storms.

Pandemic Part 6.

 

May 13, 2021.

The best possible news, in a really existential sense:

The fully vaccinated may quit wearing masks indoors and outdoors according to the  CDC.

May 25, 2021

A Year in a Pandemic: COVID-19 in Wyoming

May 27, 2021

In surprising news, the Biden Administration is now opening up the investigation on the source of SARS-CoV-2.

Claims that the source was a Chinese lab have been there all along, but they've tended to be concentrated in certain demographics that hosted a variety of other extreme claims about the disease and were largely discounted early on.  Now, however, the Administration is joining other governments from around the world to demand greater Chinese accountability on what occurred and there's some renewed scientific suspicion that the disease source may in fact have been a Chinese laboratory.  That suspicion was heightened this past week with it was revealed that workers at the lab sought medical attention in November 2019, well before the first reported outbreaks of the disease.

The Administration actually used Anthony Fauci to first break this story prior to the CDC doing son. That was an interesting approach, and it's likely because Fauci is widely respected.  It then went more public with it shortly thereafter.  By taking this approach it's fueling the conspiracy theory fire, which it has to know, and so it no doubt has to be careful.

A few things about this.

The Administration isn't saying it is from a Chinese lab.  It's saying it doesn't know the source, and this is a potential one. That's a change in position, but it isn't an endorsement of that view.   The disease, the government is stating, may have a natural origin, we just don't know what the origin is.

If it does come from a Chinese government lab, the next question is why on earth would they be doing that?  The only logical conclusion is that they were working on a weaponized variant of the SARS virus, but if so its an atypical biological weapon, so that isn't really very clear.  No other logical explanation is immediately available, which also doesn't mean that there isn't one.

If they were working on a weaponized SARS virus, as noted, it'd be a weird weapon.  Most work on biological weapons is on diseases like Anthrax.  The reason is that the thought is that you can infect an enemy group extremely rapidly, and they die very quickly, and then the area is safe to go into.  You don't want anything that's even somewhat slow spreading as your own troops will get it and the entire thing will last for months.  Ideally, you want your enemies dead in a few hours and the spread over even quicker than that.

That's for the typical battlefield application, however.  If you are looking at a different type of weapon, a more economic or impairing one, the considerations may be different.  I.e., if you want to cripple a nations economy, or simple cripple a nation, including its fighting men, a slower rolling disease would be better.  In that scenario, you get the infection rolling just a little before you go to war.  Just long enough to get an epidemic rolling, then you strike.

That such a disease can impair an economy was proven by this pandemic, to be sure.  This wasn't during wartime, however, and that's significant as the next nearest example, the 1917 Influenza, didn't shut down anyone's war economy.  It may have played a role, however, in frustrating the 1917 German spring offensive, and it definitely took the Australian army in Europe out of the war for its last final months.

That you could do this is pretty clear.  The U.S. Navy had a huge problem with SARS-CoV-2.  And the US economy was really impacted, although frankly not as much as thought, and largely due to the obviously peacetime efforts to contain the disease, the latter factor which wouldn't exist in time of war.

That China is preparing for war with the United States isn't a secret, it's well known. That doesn't mean it will occur, although there are plenty of defense analysist that believe it's a certainty.  The reason is that the US is all that stands between China forcibly reincorporating Taiwan, which is a declared Chinese goal.  The US, moreover, also interferes with Chinese nearby marine aspirations, including ones that involve the Philippines, Japan and Vietnam.  And the US operates against Chinese interests around the globe.  China sees itself as a great power, but in the late 19th Century, early 20th Century mold, and is behaving accordingly.  It has a definite near time goal of incorporating Taiwan into itself, and hasn't ruled out military force to do it.  Indeed, it figures its necessary.  And it figures it needs to be done soon, lest Taiwan outright declare its independence while it can still be assured of US assistance should things go badly wrong.

In that scenario, a biological agent spread through unfortunate and unknowing human hosts would be an effective means of messing with an enemy.  It wouldn't defeat them, but it would distract them.  And if you can even impair one aircraft carrier sufficiently, that may be a battle winning strategy in and of itself.

Was the lab working on this?  Who the heck knows.  They may very well not have been, and odds are they were not. We just don't know. And they may have been trying to synthesize the disease in order to be able to better know it, and hence be better situated to combat all SARS variants in the future.  Communist China is simply so secretive, you can't really tell what's going on, and that's the problem.

May 29, 2021

Two Denver County Sheriff's deputies, one of whom worked in their jail, died of COVID-19 within ten days of each other.

One of the two was a die hard opponent of vaccinations, and it seems likely neither were vaccinated.  As noted, one frequently made comments in opposition to the vaccine.

June 4, 2021

Over 600,000 Americans have officially died of SARS-CoV-2 at this point.

The US is donating 25,000,000 vaccines to the US lead COVAX program that seeks to vaccinate internationally.

June 11, 2021

A bill that would prohibit businesses from requiring proof of vaccinations for the most part passed committee with only Cathy Connolly voting against it.

June 28, 2021

A new variant of the disease that surfaced first in India is rapidly advancing globally and will soon be the dominant variant.  

Sydney Australia is on hard lockdown.

July 7, 2021

The Delta variant of the disease is causing heightened concern across the country and has put the disease back in the local headlines.

The good news is that the vaccinations are effective against it, and they now are known to last much longer than at first supposed. The bad is that the new variant transmits easier, a typical evolution event for a virus, but atypically it also is deadlier. With increased summer mobility, officials in low vaccination rate states are concerned. Additionally, as part of this, low vaccination rate Wyoming has the highest death rate per capita due to COVID-19 than any state in the country.

The Delta variant has been causing havoc globally and appears set to in the United States.  South Korea, which had handled its initial outbreak very efficiently, is now experiencing a new surge.

July 12, 2021

Israel has approved a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and Pfizer is working on approval of a third dose in the U.S.

In new that probably ought to get more circulation, given human nature, it's now been shown that erectile dysfunction is associated with having had Covid.  Not only that, having had the disease impacts the production of sex hormones in males and females, leaving some women with symptoms of menopause and some men with much reduced testosterone.

There's been a huge amount of resistance to the vaccine in some quarters, with some people simply refusing to consider it.  We now know that up to 1/3d of those who come down with the disease are left with psychological or neurological problems, and we now also know that it contains the risk of effectively making somebody more or less biologically neutered.  A person has to wonder if getting the news out would impact vaccination rates.

July 20, 2021

Casper's Banner Medical Center (the hospital) will be making vaccination for COVID 19 a condition of employment starting in October.

July 22, 2021

The staff of the local hospital issued a distressed message that hospitalizations are reaching early pandemic infection rates once again, and urged people to get vaccinated.  Officials in Cheyenne issued statement that on the eve of Frontier Days they were concerned about the same thing.  The new infections are concentrated in the Delta variant.

July 24, 2021

The Delta variant is now the dominant variant in the state.  Infections are the highest they've been since January, when the pandemic plateaued in the U.S. The majority of those infected have not been vaccinated.

Republicans in Congress have been attempting to boost vaccination rates, but it appears the effort is having little impact.  Indeed, a statement by Mitch McConnell, if Facebook is any guide, simply resulted in the usual counters to vaccination which would suggest at this point people have stopped listening to the debate.

Assuming that the lack of vaccination does not cause a vaccine resistant strain to develop in the unvaccinated population, which is a real risk, this will ultimately have a peculiar demographic effect.  Hospitalization rates and death rates are rising, but its among a distinct demographic.  Some have poked a bit of fun at this, claiming its "Darwin at work", but there is an element of self selection at work that actually is, at this point, killing those who were convinced early on that the vaccines were a bad idea due to what really were politically motivated strains of thought.

July 29, 2021

The CDC has issued a mask rcommendation for vaccinated individuals who go into places with high transmission rates.

Prior threads:

Worried.

Pandemic, Part 5

Pandemic, Part 4

Wow. Modern Medicine

Pandemic, Part 3.

Pandemic, Part Two

Pandemic

"All along the watchtower".

There must be some kind of way outta here 

Said the joker to the thief 

There's too much confusion 

can't get no relief

Bob Dylan, "All Along The Watchtower" (made famous by Jimi Hendrix).

Let's make no mistake. There have been odd, really odd, political seasons in American history in the past.

Indeed, every election since at least 2008 has been somewhat odd.  It was that 08 election when long dormant strains in American politics began to come alive and develop.  If we want to a lot of what's going wrong right now, going back to 08 is sort of where we have to start.

Anyhow, with the last Presidential election having gone right into the next election, or rather elections, the country just isn't getting a break.  It could use one.  Not getting one means that people don't get the chance to sit back and consider things in a little less heated fashion.  Much of what's going on right now is an argument about what has already happened, not what is happening or going to happen.

And of course an electronic news media that not only feeds off of all of this, but which is now specifically tailored to deliver to you the outrage of your choice, makes it all the worse.

And that's distressing, as well as non productive, to say the least.

Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time.

Anon.

When I was a kid, and people looked back on World War Two, which they did more frequently then than now, one of the things I'd frequently here about Mussolini is that "he made the trains run on time".  

Apparently this phrase is incredibly common in the English-speaking world, which makes me wonder about its origin.  Anyhow, it was supposed to provide the basis for the Italian people turning to Il Duce and it even provided a bit of an excuse of the reign of the Italian fascist, who after 1943/44 seemed more and more buffoonish.

Not that Hitler was immune from a similar comment, that being "he put people back to work", it often not being noted that if you conscript all the men of military age and don't let women work, all while rebuilding an army in order to launch a war, yes, you'll have a low unemployment rate at least temporarily.  I.e., that's not really a great defense for Hitler.

By the way, before moving on, Mussolini didn't really actually make the trains run on time.  Perhaps his real domestic success was in really clamping down on the Mafia, but then fascist regimes don't really tolerate criminals other than fascists, so that's not the greatest point either.  

And on Hitler and the economy, Hitler's autarkic economy never really worked and would have undoubtedly ultimately collapsed on its own, had May 1945 not collapsed it first.

I note this as the political ads are starting to come out.

There's are ads circulating right now that noted that under the Trump Administration the borders were much more under control (they were) and oil and gas was doing great (not really correct).  I'm sure you've heard the arguments, however.  Border secure, economy doing great, etc., and now under Biden this isn't true. As with most such arguments, that's far too simplistic to be an accurate analysis, and it also fails to really appreciate the mixed nature of economies. 

There's some truth to it however, particularly in regard to the border.

Which raises this question.

Is it a defense for Mussolini if he made the trains run on time?

Would it be for Hitler if he ended German Great Depression unemployment?

Is it okay that Stalin and Mao murdered millions in order to modernize their economies?

Pretty clearly, everyone would answer no to all of these, even though I've heard all used as an excuse.

So why isn't thinking like that okay?

Well, higher values, of course.

Mussolini may have clamped down on the Mafia and created the illusion of trains running on time, but he launched his country into bloody wars of colonial expansions that killed large numbers of foreign people, large numbers of Italians, and which allied Italy with the Nazis.  You can't excuse that.

Hitler may have ended German unemployment, but only because he was building a war machine that was to be used to obtain Lebensraum which would require the murder of entire cultures.  You certainly can't excuse that.

And you really can't excuse an effort to bypass or corrupt the democratic process in a democracy.

Respecting the democratic process is the first tenant, above all others, in a democracy.  That  means sometimes you lose, and not only do you lose, you lose to forces you really don't like.  That, in the end, doesn't matter. You regroup, argue, and campaign.  You don't endorse non-democratic actions.

And you really can't say, "vote for me" because Mussolini made the trains on time and that was good for railroad passengers if the same guy bombed Ethiopians and was a pal with Hitler.

Before somebody tries to claim "the election was stolen", of which there is no evidence whatsoever, the ads in question don't make that point. They make a straight connection, with that connection being "Trump was good for Wyoming and therefore Cheney shouldn't have voted to impeach him".  It's that argument that has a logic fail to it.  He may have been good for Wyoming, and its certainly the case that some of his policies were highly successful.  But you can't fault Cheney for voting her conscience that way.

A person could note, I suppose, there's only so much that you can state on a 60 second television commercial, and that's quite true. But I don't think that's what the advertisers are trying to say. They're flatly stating that Trump was good for Wyoming and that excuses all.

Which should leave us with this.

Where are we really at in American politics?

Something's not right. What do we do to fix it?

If the hat fits, wear it.

Anon.

But if it doesn't, you really ought not to.

My late father used to say that in order to be a candidate in Wyoming, you had to be portrayed doing three things. 1) flyfishing somewhere; 2) in a field with a shotgun; and 3) riding a horse.

That has remained remarkably true over the years, but it's just begun to change a bit. At some point you still need to be shown handling a firearm, although in recent years the people handling them look as if they've never fired one before in their lives and are scared to death.  And you still need to be shown fishing.

You might be able to get away without mounting old Red Wing now days, and quite a few politicians now omit that, but not all do, by any means.  But you do need to be shown wearing a hardhat with some rugged dudes.

Now, the thing about hardhats is that they're like cowboy hats.  If you don't wear one regularly, you'll look like a complete poser.  

Indeed, some people manage to wear cowboy hats for year and years and still look like posers.  That's because if your hat doesn't run a serious risk of having blood, rain, snow and cow shit end up on it, you'll look like a poser.  Frankly, that's the look that Foster Friess always had.  I'm not saying he was a good or bad guy, but you knew that the hat was going to retain its prefect shape and cleanliness for eternity.  Foster wasn't just about ready to castrate a calf wearing that hat, and he probably, therefore, should never have put it on.

At one time, a guy who knew that his hat wasn't going to be exposed to the mud, blood, beer, and cow poop, always wore a Stetson Open Road.  Open Road's were the rural and Western variant of the Fedora, really. They still make them.  Former Governor Sullivan always wore an Open Road.  My grandfather wore an Open Road to the packing house.

Funny thing was, some of theose Open Roads ended up looking like they were working hats, and they tended to become one over time.

Anyhow, this is all true of hardhats as well.  If you haven't actually ever worn one at work, in order to protect yourself, just don't go there.  You won't look natural doing it, and you can't fool those who do it every day.  

For the wages of sin is death.

Romans 6:23

The Bible warns us that "The wages of sin is death".

Lying is a sin.

Why do I note this?

Well, part of the deal is that lying is a big deal from a Catholic prospective.  While not all lying is at the mortal sin level by any means, it's been seriously debated by Catholic theologians if every single lie is sinful.  Two of the current candidates are Catholic and at least one other (I don't know his religion) has made an outward association with Christianity a major platform of his campiagn.  All of this means that such canidates ought to have a diehard dedication to telling the truth, even if it really hurts them.

Now, some would say "well, truth is subjective".  Bull, it's no such thing.  

But as we're all flawed, we don't always know the truth and sometimes we believe things in error.  Everyone does this.  There's no fault in that.

But with some candidates, every year, I really wonder on some things if they've suspended to a degree their own personal knowledge for political gain, the legendary fault of the ambitious.

Another reason that I'm noting this right now is that the GOP is making a late effort to get people to be vaccinated.  Part of this involved Mitch McConnell, perhaps the American politician with the least appealling personality in modern American politics, trying to urge people to get vaccinated.

That caused a flood of Facebook comments of all types, right, left, and loud.  Everything from rabid anti vax comments to calling Mitch a bastardly bastard of bastardness, to people who were practically wishing that the unvaccinated would get COVID 19 and die.

And this has become pretty common.

We are experiencing, right now, one of the oddest epidemiological events in the country's history, which is the politicization of a vaccine.

Actually, let me correct that, we have experienced it.

Now, I'm not going to haul off and demonize everyone who hasn't received a vaccination for COVID 19.  I am going to urge any unvaccinated person who reads this to receive the vaccine, but I'm not going to claim that they're stupid or something.

Indeed, what I'm seeing saddens me greatly.

I'm old enough to remember a time in the country's history when scientists were real heroes.  When kids were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, "scientist" was one of the common answers, right up there with astronaut, another common reply when I was a kid.  Both of those answers who what was in the common public mind at the time.

I've posted on this before, but the reason had a lot to do with World War Two.  When we went into the war we overnight became a nation dedicated to science.  We pretty clearly weren't going to train an army to overrun our enemies Japanese, German or Soviet style.  You can't send an army of voters with parents who are voters to their deaths that way.  Given that, technology was the only remaining answer.  If we weren't going to scream "Banzai!" and charge into battle, we'd just find a better way to kill those who were without getting ourselves killed.

Science.

The ultimate scientific expression of the war was the atomic bomb.  We went from the concept that maybe we could just risk fleets of airmen and bomb our enemies into submission to one in which we'd risk a single crew and obliterate our enemy.

Science again.

That's an extreme example, of course, but that's how we viewed it. And that's how we've viewed warfare ever since.

During the Cold War we lived in fear of Soviet science. Maybe they'd catch up and we'd have a real problem.  Scientists became our heroes.  And, at the same time, they wiped out polio, smallpox and came up with penicillin.  

Something's happened since then.

Well, a bunch of somethings, and ironically on the left and the right.

The Cold War ended, of course, but it was changing even before that.  Some scientists in the 1960s and 1970s took up the habit of warning us every week that we were all going to die immediately due to some environmental crisis. It was scary and it prompted movements and legislative changes that needed to be made.  The Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, etc., all came out of that.  But some of those who gave those warnings sort of reveled in it and, when the wolf doesn't come, eventually you not only stop listening to the warning but have disdain for the person giving it.

The whole thing had an interesting right/left participation.  On the left, some people came to view anything technological to be bad, with certain exceptions, ranging from nuclear power to pharmaceuticals to anything not "100% natural" in food. Some of these folks became opponents of vaccinations in general. At the same time, on the right, people became skeptical of warnings that seemingly everything we did was bad for us, or the planet. This also created a degree of skepticism concerning medicine.  

Retrospectively, it's hard to see how this situation could have been avoided.  Like most things that creep in, the point at which it begins to really get to be a problem is very much missed until its a full blown problem.  The real sign, probably, was when in the couple of years prior to the onset of the Pandemic, we started reading stories about children dying because their parents had avoided routine childhood vaccinations.

Then we had the Presidency of Donald Trump.

Love him or hate him, or something in between, it's pretty clear that Trump is a nearly unique American political figure.  I don't think he's wholly unique, quite frankly, like some claim. There may be one prior President whom he resembles fairly strongly in some ways, at least one Depression era political figure whom he does.  At any rate, he's pretty unique.

When the Pandemic came on in the mid-winter of 19/20, his initial reactions weren't really bad, contrary to the way people want to remember it.  He rapidly clamped down on travel to China.  His initial follow up actions, in spite of what people wish to do, also weren't really beyond the pale, as this was such an unusual event.  In retrospect, there was nothing that could have been done to keep the disease from entering the United States, and it likely already had by the time we were even aware of it being a problem.

But the arrival of a completely unexpected crisis creates problems of every type.  Trump was headinig into his fall 2020 campaign and, up until that point, he'd had a really strong economy, but continued to be plagued with a very strong opposition.  He'd received a minority of the popular votes in 2016 and there was every indication that his position hadn't improved in four years.  Then, out of the blue, a completley unexpected crisis hit.

Handling unexpected events is hard for any politician and his initial actions in minimalizing it were probably also understandable.  But overall, the crisis wasn't managed well for a long time and Trump himself continually disregarded the advice of the nation's top medical figures or even offered contrary views.  It fostered a certain politization of the disease that took root and has never gone away.  Trump himself was vaccinated, of course, but he ended up so completly at odds with his medical personnel that he couldn't really take credit for the rapid development of the vaccines, which was mostly under his watch.

Added to this, the entire episode fit into the spirit of the times in which people have become increasingly polarized on everything and there's come to be a massive level of distrust for figures in authority.  In order for this not to have occured, Trump would have had to vigorously endorsed the vaccines as soon as there was any hope for them, and he would also have had to vigorously supported those states which locked down hard.  

Now its too late.

Still, there's no real reason for people who probably really don't hold these views on their own to claim them if they aren't.  But there are clearly those who held opposite views and held their tongues for all this time.  Now it's a bit late.

Maybe it would have made no difference.  Trump was uniquely the pinnacle of focus for his followers and unless he'd vigorously followed the early recommednations, once the solidified, and taken an attitude that was uncharacteristic of him, things may have simply developed as they did.\

And so be it.

Now, the pandemic isn't presntly a big issue in the state's politics.  It sort of was earlier.  I can't help but wondering how many of the candidates really hold views that they're holding close to their vests, or which they're holding back from the forefront of their own minds, as they fear they'd be politically unpopular.

Indeed, I'm worried at this point that the Detla variant of COVID 19 is giong to take off here.  If you check Facebook (which I don't recommend) you'll again see all sorts of claims from the right wing "the news is just a conspiracy" to the left wing "it's going to only kill Republicans and that'd be a good thing".

And this is among ourselves.

If this becomes an issue, I hope the candidates, some of whom are extremely well educated, are really honest about their views.

This pertains to other matters too, I'd note.

There's always been the problem of people running for high office lying.  But I'd wager this year a lot more are than normal.  Just looking at the Wyoming race I'd guess that at least several of those running against Cheney personally regard the January 6 insurrection was just that.  However, of the current crop of candidates there's only one who is unwilling to fully endorse the view that the election was stolen.  That requires at least some explanation other than "Trump was good to us".

And this applies to another issue that's near and dear to Wyoming which is pretty much directly avoided being discussed, but which is now obvious to everyone.  It needs to be addressed, but doing so is too difficult for politicians, apparently, to admit, or at least Republican ones.  So we're pretending like it doesn't exist.

Sooner or later everything comes out in the wash and the truth won't allow itself, on any issue, to be perpetually ignored.  When that occurs, people tend to lie about being on the wrong side of an issue.  With the Internet, changing tunes is pretty much really impossible to escape notice of, however.  And the issues people are dealing with are now so big, there's really an obligation to be upfront about what you really know and believe. Everyone claims they want to be a leader, but there's a lot of following going on at some levels.

Which leads me to another thing.

Down below on this blog there's an item about turning the clock back.  Chesterton is correct on that, of course, but there's a caveat to it.  You can turn concepts and how they are applied back, or bring them back, where they have merit. But one thing you can't do is to turn certain existential matters back and have them exist in the same exact situation as they once did.  In other words, Thomase Wolfe is right when he states "you can't go home again. . .and stay there".

Listening to political dialog in the state I fear that this isn't grapsed or admitted.  The irony is that there are real things that we can turn back to, if we wish to conceive of them in that fashion, but that would require thinking out of the box and looking at things in a real longterm, existential, manner.

One of the things that keeps coming up in the current race, and by the time we're done every Republican candidate is going to say something along these lines, is that they "saved coal" or we "need to save coal".  That ship, however, has sailed.  Maybe it was a coal fired steamship, but it's gone.

The irony of coal is that it's been doing the Minnesota Long Goodbye for a really long time now.  The further irony is that most Wyoming politicians know this.

Talk to any member of the legislature you really know, and who will therefore speak with you honestly, and you'll find that most of them will fully acknowledge that coal is in the ICU, on life support, and the funeral plot is purchased.  Nobody will say that openly however as they don't want to be accused of being "anti coal".

For that matter, this is the same view that coal insiders tend to have, if you talk to them.  The petroleum industry tends to be the same way.  On television politicians may be discussing "saving" the fossil feul industry, but in the boardroom in the big companies they're talking about a post hydrocarbon world.

Indeed, if you've read the American Association of Petroleum Geologists monthly magazine, The Explorer, over the past few years you'd note that the AAPG never took a hard position on climate issues, which are driving part, but only part, of this, but instead wanted a voice for what they knew about paleoclimates.  Not getting one, they resigned themselves to things changing forever, which is where they are at.  And not just them, in the last issue they announced a merger with the primary geophysical engineering society.  Both of them are facing a world in which they acknowledge a deminished role for their occupations. . . and they aren't fighting it.

Given all of this a recent political ad about "saving Wyoming's coal jobs" is really coming from an odd direction.  No jobs have been saved, and the proposed legislative solutions to this have either come to naught or have failed.  A bill to require the owners of coal fired plants to attempt to find a seller for them before closing them, assuming it was Constitutional (which it might not have been) didn't pass and wouldn't have achieved anything if it had.  Repeated funding of the doomed lawsuit to attempt to force Pacific coast states to accept coal for shipping was another such example.

Nobody is willing to say this openly as it taps into a logic failure that's very common, which exists in these two variants:

1.  I like things the way they are and therefore they must be maintained this way and we can stop things from changing and should for this reason, and reasons to the contrary are invalid as I don't like them, or;

2.  I make my money from something that's going away and that must be stopped as that's how I make my money.

People don't quite think of things that way, but that's sort of how it actually is.  You really can't, for example, go to a coal miner and tell him his job is doomed and expect him to vote for you.

Well, maybe you can.

The electorate claims to want to be 

I had a paralegal once who had a very well done skillfully executed tattoo of "Prudence" and "Justice", two of the four Roman cardinal virtues rendered, of course, as female dieties in Roman mythology.  Somehow Veritas, truth, didn't make the cardinal list.

And I can see why. Purdence may be, to the Romans, the "mother of all virtues", but Veritas is a pain in the ass.  No, you can't smoke safely.  No, you can't drink alcohol constantly and get away with it.  No, you can't hit on every woman around you and not expect paybacks.  No, you can't mess with human nature and not get the existential dope slap.  

Veritas is always hanging around telling you thinks you don't want to hear.

Be that as it may, we all really want to know the truth, if only as part of a dedicated effort to seek to wholly avoid it.  But we also know, as a truth, we really can't.

So you have to wonder what would happen if a candidate was bold enough to do this?

As I was attempting to wrap up this over long post, recently retired Senator Mike Enzi died.

Enzi had to be releived to have left office when he did.  Not having to stand for reelection, which he would easily have won, meant he was spared the January 2020 insurrection and the drama that followed it.  We can be certain that he wouldn't have followed Ted Cruz in voting like Cynthia Lummis did, but we don't now what he would have otherwise have done.  My guess is that he would have voted to impeach, like Cheney, and now be subject to all sorts of personal attacks.

I note Enzi here as he was The Quiet Man in terms of being a Senator.  He didn't show up on television as a spokeman for the Administration. . . any Administration.  He just quietly did his job.  I don't know what he thought on a lot of things, but he retained his dignity and worked behind the scenes.  

As part of that, I didn't hear him making loud statements that really lacked a lot of detail to them, and I didn't see him taking extreme positions that subjected him to attack or had to be clawed back.  Our senior Senator for most of the Pandemic, he wasn't out there making a lot of statements on it.  I'd bet even money that he was vaccinated as soon as he could be, and would have stated that if anyone had asked. As far as I know, nobody did.

Enzi was a businessman originally from Thermopolis who was in the Wyoming Air National Guard during the height of the Vietnam War.  The Wyoming Air Guard actually flew missions in and out of South Vietnam, so it had unacknowledged wartime service.  I don't know about Enzi himself.  He moved to Gillette after university to go into the family business, and then later ran for mayor of Gillette.

I last saw him in a restaurant eating dinner quietly with his wife.  Nobody bothered him.  He didn't bother anybody either.

Enzi was as conservative as they come.  I don't doubt that if he was in office now, people would be accusing him of being a "RINO".  His business background was real but quiet.  He was an effective mayor and then state legislator, but not one who staged protests on the capitol grounds.  He wasn't a voice on the radio, a member of a group noted for its local activism, or backed by a monied import.

He died as the resuls of a bicycle accident at age 77, yesterday.

In some ways, it feels like the entire state's politics, and maybe those of the country, have died of trauma as well.

 

All along the watchtower. 

Princes kept the view 

While all the women came and went 

Barefoot servants, too 

Well, outside in the cold distance 

A wildcat did growl 

Two riders were approaching 

And the wind began to howl, hey