2024 Election Post Mortem, Part I. What the heck happened?

And so the finger pointing, blaming, and name calling has begun.

The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be close.

It wasn't.  And that means something.  How did the nation elect a convicted felon who hung out with a procurer and who is a creepy serial polygamist, who also is likely sliding into dementia, as President of the United States?

Well, there are a lot of views out there.  We offer ours, including some things we noted early on.

1.  It turns out that we were correct that Biden shouldn't have run in the first place, and that Harris shouldn't have stepped into the breach.

Biden was supposed to be a caretaker President.  "Go with the Joe you know" only made sense as long as it was just one cup of coffee.  People didn't want a refill. Biden was supposed to carry on for four years while the nation got back on its feet from a traumatic Trump presidency and figured out where to go next.

Biden's diehard insistence on running again doomed that, and in some ways, the Democrats chances in 2024.

Biden, in his defense, was dealt a bad hand right from the onset.  Left with an economy impacted by COVID, he had to deal with it, and he did a good job.  The inflation that caused was not of his making, and he actually pulled off a soft landing.  In the future, he's likely to be regarded as having pulled an economic rabbit out the hat.

And his rallying to the cause of Ukraine is singularly responsible for the country not being overrun by the Russians.

But people are stupid about economics, and stupidly believe that once inflation slows, prices return to the pre inflation norm, which actually required deflation, which generally causes a depression.  That tar baby is now Trump's, as Trump won't be able to pull that off either.

More than that, however, Biden's advanced age was showing, whereas its seemingly not as noticeable with Trump.  It was real hubris of Biden to run for a second term, and he shouldn't have done it.  That set the Democrats behind.

When he finally stepped out, I noted that the time that Harris shouldn't step in.  She did.  She actually also ran a much better campaign than I initially thought she would.  Frankly, I don't know that I can blame her for running, or blame the Democrats for running her.  She proved to be too easy to tag with the issues that had hurt Biden, however, which did not make up the reasons that I thought she should not have run.

2.  It's actually the social issues, stupid.

El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.

Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.

El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.

No Country For Old Men. 

We warned prior to 2016 that Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell had awakened a latent sleeping giant.  It did.

People keep analyzing the race in terms of the economy, which I myself partially did above.  But the big issue, to put it bluntly, is that Obergefell shocked many people into confronting the moral decline of the nation, something that had been going on for a very long time.

Sexual immorality in the US really commenced its roll in the late 1940s, as we've discussed before, and started to accelerate in 1953 with the launch of Playboy, and then really took off in the 1960s with the pill and the Sexual Revolution.  The irony of all of this, however, is the public tolerated it, although not always very comfortably, as it fit into conventional immorality.  That is, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community basically tolerated a boys will be boys attitude at first, and then accommodated itself to other trends later, as long as things roughly worked out the way they were supposed to in the end, although they have not been working out for quite some time.  Once Obergefell came along, however, the public was asked to accommodate something else, and it hasn't, and for a host of reasons.  Transgenderism, which really doesn't exist, came hard on the heels of homosexual marriage, and it was just too much for large sections of the country.

At one time, it might be noted, it was a common assertion that the Babylon Berlin atmosphere of 1920's Germany had brought about the Nazis, in part, as they seemed to stand against unconventional immorality.  In truth, homosexuality was present in the early Nazis, but the movement did a good job of plastering over it so it was ignored, if known, just like Trump's flagrant immoral conduct with women is at least somewhat known, if ignored.  It allowed people to believe that that the Nazis would foster a return to pre 1914 moral standards, while ignoring that they would inflict new horrors.*  A lot of that has gone on in the populist movement as well, which sort of imagines that the country will sort of return to an imagined 1950s, or an imagined 1970s.

The Democrats didn't even try to do anything about this, but rather embraced the matters that the Trump populists and their fellow travellers opposed.  That's a big part of what occured.  Americans proved to be willing to go pretty far with changes in Christian morality before they started regretting it, which they did, but to be kicked into a new room with a bunch of very unconventional behaviors was more than they could bear.  It not only spawned a massive counterreaction, but it spawned radical new theories about the nature of what was going on, much of them false, and sort of a modified variant of a Great Awakening, that we haven't seen the end of yet.**  This reaction, moreover, wasn't limited to the US, but has been scene all over the Western World, caused by similar events.

You have to know the times you live in.

3. What we repeatedly said about abortion being a hill to die on was correct.

Hell Courtesan by Kawanabe Kyōsai.

Part of the solid evidence of the Democrats being marooned in a post Vietnam War liberal past is the absolute adherence to swimming in a sea of blood.

I warned earlier that grasping tight to abortion was a critical mistake for Democrats, but they saw it as a great issue, one that would turn women out to vote in favor of infanticide.

Instead, what it did was to force truly adherent Christians to vote against them, even if not to vote for Harris. I was one of them.  I voted for the American Solidarity Party.  I would have anyhow, but in a state that was close, this cost the Democrats votes.  It may very well have cost them the election.

Ironically, and the Democrats failed to grasp it, Donald Trump's wishy washiness on this helped him.  Lots of Evangelicals and even Catholics could rationalize voting for him as he seemed to be against abortion, sort of.  Hadn't his court brought Dobbs around?  And Republican women who otherwise adhered to the American Civil Religion could rationalize voting for pro abortion ballot measures while voting for trump, essentially voting for the things they were comfortable with from the 1970s, like abortion and birth control, while voting against homosexuality and transgenderism.

Indeed, the entire religiosity of the Trumpites is much like this, although not of the National Conservatives. They're okay with cheating men, up to a limit, premarital sex, and divorce, as long as the plumbing matches. They aren't okay with homosexuality.  Truly religious voters were never supportive of abortion, which Harris leaned deeply into.

Democrats should have known that and figures out a way to deal with it.  Even simply taking the same position as Trump, let the states deal with it, would have leveled the choice for many.  Or they could have just remained completely silent in the election on abortion and transgenderism, which would have caused some votes to swing their way.

If the Democrats don't modify their position on abortion, they're not going to do better in 2028.

4.  What we noted as long ago as 2016 about ignoring rust belt issues is still true.

We noted a long time ago that Trump's 2016 victory was brought about in part due to a massive discontent over immigration issues and American jobs going overseas.  Both Democrats and Republicans were complicit in this for years.

The problem here is that this festering sore has become infected, and crossed from discontent into malevolence.  Basically, its much like small town Germans thinking that a local Jewish butcher was odd, to thinking he's in league with evil. This has been downright scary.

Democrats woke up to the problem of decades long mass illegal immigration, but too late.  Now, it appears, we're about to engage in a mass immorality.

This one was a hard one for the Democrats.  Biden screwed up early in his administration on this issue.  Harris was tarred with it.  It would have taken a different candidate to distance from it, perhaps, quite frankly, a Hispanic one.  There are solutions, but some of them are quite out of the box, very pre 1940, and a bit drastic.

Likewise, Trump introduced his absurd tariffs concept.  The idea is underdeveloped and economically flaccid.  But Rust Belt people don't care as in their minds if electric vehicles don't come in from China, 1965 Chevrolet Impalas will come back. This won't happen, and this will rapidly prove to be incorrect.

5.  Demographics change.

Roman Catholic Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe (Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe), Dallas Texas

Dedicated in 1902 as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, this cathedral was renamed the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe in 1977, when another aging Dallas church dedicated to the Lady of Guadalupe was torn down. This cathedral has the second largest parish congregation in the United States.

Democrats in the 1960s abandoned white Southern racists in favor of the minorities of the time, much to their credit.  Up until that time, African Americans had been Republicans.  Democrats remembered that Italian American and Irish Americans had been, and were, theirs.

But they failed to notice that Roe v. Wade shattered the Catholic immigrant retained vote of earlier eras. For some reason, they didn't grasp that retaining abortion and embracing transgenderism and abortion would come to offend  large groups of American, and even immigrant, Hispanics, who had a similar Catholic morality.  And they didn't grasp that at the pew level, this was also true for the Black Church and many African Americans, who came to resent having their cause compared to ones based on sexual orientation or practice.

They also forgot that minority adherence to patronage only lasts as long as poverty does.  Once a demographic moves into the Middle Class, it begins to disappear within a generation or two.  Irish Americans and Italian Americans were once solidly Democratic.  This hasn't been the case for a long time.  Hispanics have been moving out of poverty, and so have African Americans.

And Hispanic Americans, which are a diverse group to start with.

This left the Democratic party a party of old Boomers, and the white upper middle class, and lower upper class, white, effete, elites.  They're aren't enough of them to win an election.

Footnotes

*The Nazis ended up sending homosexuals to the death camps.  They were highly resistant to women working, and only relented on it as the war began to go very badly.  They'd also encourage pregnancy, including out of wedlock, by German women, which was definitely contrary to traditional Christian morality.

This is of note, not because there will be death camps, but because Germans voting on morality issues didn't get what they bargained for at all.  Americans doing the same in the 2024 election are likely to find they may be surprised.

**As an example, while at the county courthouse to vote early, I encountered an elderly man wearing a MAGA hat who was informing people that transgenderism "wasn't invented here", whatever that would mean, and that this was a reason to vote for Trump.

October 31. An Observation.

Today is Halloween.

It's also Reformation Day.

Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form.  It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.

Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation.   There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form.  The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it in exchange for a promise to pray for the donor's dead.

Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do.  The legend was that he did it on this day.  No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are.  Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.  

At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it.  It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.

Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years.  Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction.  The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.

With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country.  The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay.  They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today.  Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.

So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024.  Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.

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

Boy Scouts no more.

 

The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America

Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.

Article in the Tribune. 

Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?

I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts.  I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.

Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true.  I was briefly.  Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts.  I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why.  Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them.  The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself.  That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group.  Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.

Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.

We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.¹   Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts.  The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.

The original organization had no place for girls.  Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations.  The two didn't mix.

And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues.  Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them.  Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men.  Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.

There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it.  One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out.  Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it.  Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.

Signs of decline were there even then.  Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been.  Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it.  I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization.  Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.

I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't.  I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful.  Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded.  Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc.  Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them.  Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way.  It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.

The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with.  The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture.  It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.

In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem.  The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.² Out with the old, and in with the new.  The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation.  It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.

Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.

People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted.  One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers.  No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts.  A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.³ 

We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers.  The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month.  I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old.  If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.

Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent.  It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened.  That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes.  It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.

This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts.  Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't.  Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.

There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women.  Probably our biology has a lot to do with it.  The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.

The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then.  The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons.  Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.

Footnotes:

1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting.  The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't.  The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.

It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own.  Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.

As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male.  I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming.  Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to.  As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.

2.  Only if troops adopted it, however.

3.  Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after.  The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.

Related threads:

Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?

No place for boys. . .

Exit the Boy Scouts Stage Left. Boys, Men, the "Masculinity Crisis" and the "BSA" as an example of it.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 7. One more won't hurt me. . .

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8. The LDS severs ties with the BSA.

Blog Mirror: What Scouting Has Lost

Observations on a murder.

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

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

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

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

But what else does this event tell us?

Casper's a rough town.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The abandoned males

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

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

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

What Western European cultures are fascinated by, and what the rest of the world is not.

Terry Mattingly's Get Religion blog, which have linked in here on the side, states something that we've already stated, but in a more in-depth article.

Or maybe it's something we've posed as a question.

Christianity is not a European religion.  Indeed, Europeans, in the form of Romans and Greeks, at first opposed it.

Christianity, and certainly the original form of Christianity, Apostolic Christianity, of which all the Orthodox and Catholics are part, came out of the Middle East and in fact it never left it.  The first Catholics, which is to say the first Christians, were at the very first all in the Roman province of Palestine.  Pretty soon they were in Syria, where they were first called Christians, and Egypt.  In the Apostolic Age Christianity, which again is to say Catholicism, made it all the way to India, and of course it also made it to Rome.  Rome was the early site of the head of the Church, because it was the center of the most powerful secular entity in the world, the Roman Empire, but other localities were major diocesan seats as well.  The last Apostolic Christian church in North Africa prevailed until the 1400s, the same century that the Moors were expelled from Spain, and the same century that the Church was established in Sub Sarah Africa.  Catholicism was so strong in Angola that pre Revolution slave rebellion in the Southern English Colonies of North America saw a Catholic Angolan band rise up and bolt for Catholic Florida.

So why, some of us have asked, is there so much attention on homosexuality in today's Church?

Seem unconnected?  It isn't.

Homosexuality is relatively rare in the world, but it is most common in European cultures.  There are a number of reasons for this.  For one thing, the Western world is rich, and it's used its wealth in pecular ways impacting living arrangements.  Basic aspects of adult life common throughout human history and in every culture have been badly warped in post World War Two, or maybe post World War One, or maybe as part of the Enlightenment, European cultured world.  While consumption of food, working, and the basic reproductive nature of humans is the same at an elemental level for people everywhere, and at all times, in the rich society of post 1945 Western Culture, there's an entertainment element to all of it.  People do these things to be "fulfilled", which in the end often tends to mean that their reproductive organs pretty much play the same role as a Nintendo joystick.  People have completely lost the connective and reproductive aspect to sex itself, which naturally leads to all sorts of bored playing with it.  We have, in this context, all become characters on MXC.

Additionally, as the West developed it got into warehousing of men, and sometimes women, for various reasons.  In the movie version of Pasternak's classic, Dr. Zhivago, the Orthodox Priest, in taking Lara's confession, warned her that sex was strong and that "only marriage can contain it".  As we've built societies that postpone marriage by operation of social pressure and economics, we can't be surprised that premarital sex became common.  Likewise, as we warehoused young men in various fashion. . .all male schools, all male institutions, etc., a certain percentage seek relief where they can find it.  Like most disordered behavior, the initial inclination probably isn't really very strong, but once people find relief in it, that takes over.  People don't take up drinking a quart of Jim Beam all in one setting.

So at this point the rich West has a pretty messed up relationship with sex in general, and for that matter, with nature and life in general.

And it's in a rocketing decline.

So why so much attention to the Fr. James Martin's of the world?  Why does the Papacy address this small demographic rather than, so far, addressing the effective schism of the German church, which has gone even further?

Mattingly notes:

"The Church of Africa is the voice of the poor, the simple and the small," wrote Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, the former head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. "It has the task of announcing the Word of God in front of Western Christians who, because they are rich, equipped with multiple skills in philosophy, theological, biblical and canonical sciences, believe they are evolved, modern and wise in the wisdom of the world."

Mattingly also notes:

Catholic debates over LGBTQ+ issues are crucial, he [ Rev. Chris Ritter] said, "because if you want to spot low-fertility, low-faith cultures in Europe and elsewhere, you look at how and when they legalized and legitimized same-sex marriage. That will give you a good idea of what is happening. … Just look for large numbers of secular old people."

And that gets back to what I noted the other day. The West, in every fashion, is in decline.  By mid-century that will be more obvious than it is now, and that's not long.  In our feebleness, we've become self obsessed and lost a grasp of the existential.

This won't last forever.  Our self extermination by confusing entertainment with living is assuring it will not.  And, by extension, the unique tragedy of homosexuality, and the related plagues that endorsing rather than sympathizing with that tragedy has brought on, won't last long as major issues much longer either.  Society really doesn't need to be wringing its hands so much over this.

For that matter, we can suppose it won't be long until the occupant of St. Peter's Chair was born in Africa once again. . .and that will not be a bad thing.

On being blisteringly dense and contra-natural

 Chilean couple, 1940, no doubt a lot more natural than "all natural" folks today, in every sense.

I'll have to start this again with a quote I had here the other day from Cardinal Sarah

The dying West.

I'm afraid that the West will die. There are plenty of signs. No more childbearing. You are invaded, still, by other cultures, other peoples, who will progressively dominate you by their numbers and completely change your culture, your convictions, your morality.

Cardinal Sarah

I guess because I'm a big reader, I'll get advertisements for books and also book reviews in email form.  One that I get is the New York Times book reviews, which I've come to barely notice.  A big part of that is because as the Times itself has declined, and it very much has, its book reviews are focused on whiney self-indulgent narcissist who write whiney self-indulgent narcissist memoirs that nobody reads and which are soon forgotten.  Stuff like the struggles of a middle class homosexual 1st generation Pakistani American in the big city whose extended Islamic family doesn't get him. M'eh, get over yourself, dude.

Anyhow, I got more than one email on Molly Roden Winter's new memoir, More on her sexual immorality.  The first time I disregarded it as it was a New York Times review (of course), but the second time I did take brief note of it.

Basically, she and her husband, who do have children, like to f*** other people than their spouses and for some reason their licentiousness is to be shared with others, making them both not only sexually reprehensible, but exhibitionist as well.  They'd define this as being "polyamorous", but that description does violence not only to nature, as we'll see, but to "amour".  Polylicentiousness would be a better description, but licentious would simply do, although they apparently (I haven't read it) keep their affairs down to one person at a time.  Indeed, one item I found she wrote in an op ed was about her sneaking out to her "boyfriend" during COVID and lying about it to her mid teen son, whom she must think is really dense, so she can screw her paramour in his household while his wife, whom he is trying to get pregnant, is out.  

Like all books in this area, this will be read only by people, probably mostly women, who want either 1) a peak into somebody's Fifty Shades of Grey lifestyle or 2) are thinking of cheating on their spouses and want to learn what that's like while being encouraged to do so.  I'm not going to bother with that, but instead make an evolutionary biological and medical observation.

Setting aside morality, this sort of conduct can only occur if you've carpet bombed your system into sterilization and have a platoon of antibiotics ready to come to your rescue.

In other words, while the promoters of this sort of thing like to claim it as sort of natural, it's the opposite.

We've dealt with it elsewhere, but the bargain of our species was that the male in a couple got the female. . .you know. . . that way, for his life, and she got food and protection, which she couldn't provide once she had a child or children.  Slice it anyway you want, but that's the evolutionary basis of monogamy and that's why our species exhibits it.

People will talk about affairs etc. and the degree to which they've been historically common in our species, but they really miss the history of it.  By and large, while they do occur, amongst the masses, which were most people, who lived close to the economic bottom line, or who were aboriginal, or pastoral, or nomadic, the Old Law provided that such offenses were punishable by death, by and large.

People like to claim, "oh that was just for the women", but that's simply not true.  Yes, women adulterers were killed, as we all are well aware.  The underlying logic of it, as brutal as that was, is that a man shouldn't be forced to raise the offspring of some other man, and death put an end to the chance of that occurring, and perhaps to the offspring as well as the offending woman. 

Grim.

But death was the common punishment for men as well, and it was typically directly meted out.  The man discovering the offense very often simply killed the other guy, and that was regarded as okay.

Indeed, as late as 1973, the Texas Penal Code provided:

Homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife, provided that the killing takes place before the parties to the act have separated. Such circumstance cannot justify a homicide where it appears that there has been, on the part of the husband, any connivance or assent to the adulterous connection.

In other words, if husband came home and found Jim Bob Diddler in bed with his wife, he could kill him.

And we should note that yes, that's completely contrary to Christian morality.  You can't run around killing people, even those in bed with your wife.

But the old, pre-Christian, law allowed for this.

Black Buffalo Woman.

Indeed, a famous example of this is given by the example of Crazy Horse, whose early affections had been towards Black Buffalo Woman.  In spite of his known feelings for her, she married No Water while Crazy Horse was on a raid.  In 1870, he carried her off while No Water was out on a hunting party.  The next day, No Water caught up with him, shot him in the face with a revolver (hitting his nose) and breaking his jaw, his shot being misdirected due to a third party attempting to intervene.  Crazy Horse was laid up due to his injuries for months, but had escaped death.  The blood feud was ended by No Water giving Crazy Horse a horse in compensation for his injures, which must have been galling to No Water knowing that Black Buffalo Woman and Crazy Horse had spent one night together, but which was deemed justified in light of there being questions about Black Buffalo Woman's long term marital intent.  Crazy Horse was stripped, in turn, of his position as a Shirt Wearer.

No Water in later years.

I've known, FWIW, of one killing here which was pretty much under those circumstances and I personally know a fellow, who was an FBI agent, who came home to find a coworker of his in bed with his wife.  In the latter case, he gave the guy one hour to clear out with the stated intent that when he came back in an hour, if they were still there, he was killing him.

His instructions to his spouse were to clear out as well.

They did.

Anyhow, Ms. Winter's behavior is only possible, as noted, due to chemistry. We've used chemistry to defeat our biological functions, but not our psychological and psycho-biological ones, and at least for the time being, we're not close to doing so.  Indeed, if we do, it'll be the end of the species.

Let's go back to Black Buffalo Woman.

Several months after Crazy Horse's attempt at taking her, she gave birth to a light skinned child.  That must have been all the more galling to No Water, as Crazy Horse was light skinned as well.  Indeed, while people aren't supposed to speculate on such things, his light feature and aquiline nose have lead to some speculation that he descended from a French trapper a generation or two prior to his birth, and I'll just go out on a limb and say it's likely so.¹   Anyhow, this gives a biological example of why this is so deep in our DNA.  No Water wanted his wife and knew what the relationship between men and women meant.  He already had three children by her.  Her departure with Crazy Horse was a massive act of betrayal as well as resource disaster.  Some nine or ten months later, he likely ended up burdened with the child of another man, but sucked it up and carried on.

And here's a second reason.

Disease.

Whatever the multiple partner of this type has been common in any form, venereal disease has been absolutely rampant.  There's really no exception.  Indeed, that's probably all the more we need to say on that.

Now, on this, a person might wonder for a second about polygamy.  I'm not a defender of polygamy, but polygamy and polygamous behavior aren't the same at all.  The wives of a husband in a polygamous society are his, not for sharing.  Pretty obviously, if they were shared in any fashion, with our without his knowledge, the disease spreading opportunity is really enhanced.

This shows, once again, how prophetic Humanae Vitae really was.

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. 

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

What was warned of here has now happened on a large-scale, with not only men regarding women as mere instruments of satisfaction, and vice versa, but a modern Western society obsession with our lower regions, even basing entire "lifestyles" on it.

None of which is capable without a complete chemical sterilization of our natural systems in a manner that we'd not tolerate on any other topic.  It's unnatural on an epic level.

Footnotes

1.  One of Crazy Horse's two wives, Helena "Nellie" Larrabee (Larvie), was half French.  

History has strangely not treated Larrabee well, seemingly because she influenced him to basically settle down.  That's really unfair, quite frankly.

Related Threads:

I know how.

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

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