Microscopic Pandora's Box.

 Oh great, we're doing so well with microscopic things that are natural and reproduce.

The world's first 'living robots' start to reproduce

Scientists say a breakthrough using microscopic animal-machine hybrids could lead to self-replicating technology

This is a disaster in the making.

I'll be frank that I don't put much credence in diets. . .

and think that a lot of them are basically bunkus.*  And history has demonstrated that a lot of the current thought in any one era on diet in general is probably wrong.

Ice Cream cake, 1937.  I frankly didn't know ice cream cakes existed in 1937, but they obviously did.  Most Americans weren't overweight at this time, for reasons that will be noted below.

There's constantly some new diet fad going around as well as some new theory about what people should eat.  Almost every study on diets demonstrates that people will lose weight on the at first and then regain it.  Up until something I will link in below explored that, the latter was not obvious to me, but what seems to be fairly obvious is that most diet theories are pure bull.

And yet Americans are absolutely fascinated about diets.  No matter where you live or work, you are going to hear constantly from people about some new diet they are on.  Not only are they on it, but now it's popular to combine the diets with the latest pseudo-science about taking this and that, which sound more like solutions to difficult plumbing or automotive problems than they do to losing weight and eating healthy.

A lot of dieting advice and dietary advice is amazingly similar to the same sort of stuff that people used to spout about automobiles all the time.  Car worn out and tired?  No problem, just pour a quart of Amazing Berserkoil into your engine!  It'll detoxify, clarify and contains essential oils that your car will love and admire!

I'm not a nutritionist and have no training in this area at all, but what has always seemed completely obvious to me is that dietary topics ought to be governed by evolutionary biology.  I.e, you are evolved to eat in a certain way, and if you don't eat that way, you're going to have some negative consequence develop.  You are also evolved to engage in certain activities, and if you do them and eat the way that you were evolved to, you'll probably be just fine, health wise, in so far as your health is governed by food intake, and quite a bit of it is.

But that doesn't fit the most recent buy this, eat that, craze.

So it'd be rare indeed for me to link in anything regarding diet. But having recently heard this, this makes scientific sense to me (which very few diets, including the currently popular "Keto" diet do):

Akin, who is known principally as a Catholic Apologist, but who also has a keen interest in a very large range of topics and a command of a blistering number of them, discusses diets and weight loss in general, but as this video makes plain, he's an advocate of what has come to be known as "Intermittent Fasting" and an opponent of processed foods. There's more to it than that, but that's basically what I want to point out by linking this in. To at least that extent (and I'd disagree with him on a few things mentioned in here), I think he's right.

The reason for this has to do with science.

Basically, it seems to me, you are most likely evolved to eat fairly lean meat and simple vegetables and grains because that's what your ancestors did for thousands upon thousands of years.  Do that, and dietary wise, I suspect you'll be just fine.

Illustration of Lapps hunting from 1565, the same way they hunted in 565, and in 1565BC, and so on.  Everyone, in one form or another, lived this way, and you are still supposed to.

I'll credit that in some instances this is a bit altered beyond the very simple (but perhaps hard to apply) extent that it may seem when putting it forth in that fashion.  Evolution does occur, and there are people who are very, very long associated with agriculture. . . although not to the extent you may think and indeed all people are more associated with agriculture than some believe.  People were making bread out of simple grains before they cultivated wheat, it turns out, for example.  And Mediterranean people who cultivated wheat very early on also were big on fish hunting (or, yes fishing).  Pastoral people who took up raising livestock continued hunting and even in Palestine during Christ's time it's known that the Jewish people and their neighbors not only raised livestock, they hunted and fish hunted (yep, fishing).

Now, what additionally also seems to me to be pretty self-evident is that it's usually been the case that the "three squares a day" combined with sitting on your butt all day is not the historic norm.  Nor is "processed food" at all.  You aren't actually evolved to eat a lot of processed food and three big meals a day.  Nor are you evolved to even eat two big meals a day.

Take all of this into account, diet wise, and you are likely good to go, diet wise.

Now, depending upon your individual metabolism you may be able to get away with it, even if you have a sedentary job.  But most people won't be.  And perhaps that's where I depart from Akin.  Akin's commentary in the video states that exercise doesn't matter much in terms of weight loss or gain (he doesn't say that exercise isn't otherwise important), but I frankly very much disagree.  Indeed, I think the lack of exercise that modern American life entails, combined with the advance of processed food, and combined with the constant presence of food, and further combined with the giant proportions that served food now features, combines to make people rather large.  I.e., lack of exercise is an element of that, but a pretty important one.

Indeed, I come by all of these opinions not only because I tend to look at a lot of such things through an evolutionary biology lens, but because I also have some personal experience with all of this, making me a bit of a control set.  So I'm pretty convinced as to all of this.

I've never been obese, but when I was a kid and an early teen I was on the chubby end of things.  I was always pretty active, but I also lived in an environment in which there were three meals a day (as a kid should get) and deserts and soda were also pretty much always available.  My mother never drank soda, but she did drink a lot of sweet tea.  She was an awful cook, but both of my parents liked ice cream quite a bit so we always had ice cream on hand.  My mother had a nearly hyperactive constitution but my father was inclined to carry a slight bit of extra weight as here both of his parents, and myself by extension and genetic inheritance.

One summer when I was 16/17 years old, however, I obtained a job in which I drove for a city garage chasing parts every day.  This was in the pre air-conditioned era, and what that meant was that I reported to work really early and worked a full day.  As a result, I wasn't eating much before I left the door and by and large I simply quit eating at noon.  I was Intermittent Fasting before it had a name and without any particular intent.  I was also pretty active in this role as a parts chaser.

By the end of the summer I'd lost a lot of weight.  Indeed, going into the summer I was at or near my current weight, which is 165 lbs more or less (I slide up and down a bit).  By modern standards that puts me right at the upper level of an "ideal weight" for my height or slightly overweight.  As I've explored before, by the standards of a century ago, that's overweight.  At any rate, however, going into that summer the extra pounds I was carrying included some flab, which isn't good.  By the end of the summer, however, I'd lost ten to fifteen pounds through no effort of my own.  By that time, as I'd lost the desire to eat lunch anymore, I kept loosing until I was around 140 lbs, maybe (probably) less.  When I went into basic training the next year, I likely reported around 135lbs.

In basic training I gained weight up until I came down with pneumonia, at which time I really lost weight as I couldn't eat but was still active.  When I came home from Ft. Sill I weighed 123 lbs, which is really light.  Having said that, photographs of me early in basic training suggest I was getting pretty light at first anyhow.  But, that 123 lbs actually reflected a late Advanced Training weight gain after I got out of the hospital.

Significantly, however, after that first summer the weight I put on or retained was muscle and not fat.  In college, I came up to 145 lbs, the weight I was at when I got married, but again I was really active and my gain in that time came on in muscle.  Since then, through having a sedentary job and what not, I've gained the extra fifteen pounds, or perhaps less on a day-to-day basis, but I'm much more heavily muscled than I was when I was 16.

Now, from time to time for one reason or another, I've gotten to where I'll skip breakfast or lunch, or both.  Doing this on odd occasion is pretty routine for me, but I'll sometimes do it for days in a row.  I just don't always feel like eating breakfast for no particular reason, and I've never regained the desire to eat much lunch.  After I left for college I lost my taste for sweets and I never buy candy for the house, although my wife is the opposite, and she does.  When I left college, I also quit buying soda.

Indeed, in my college years, as I already noted, I lived on a very primitive diet. All wild game and mostly vegetables, for much of the year, that had come from my parents garden.  On that diet, you won't put on weight.  And as noted after I married beef came back into our diet (which I do like), but some desserts, which I very rarely bought or made for myself when single (cherry and apple pies, from our own cherries and apples excepted, and when in season), reappeared.  So its no wonder that I added fifteen pounds, and within a few years.  But I'll drop down to 155 fairly readily when I don't eat lunch for days in a row.

All of which gets to this point.

This time of year is a dietary nightmare.  It's a nightmare in part because the people who are the Keto Schmeato All Bean Burrito Diet are going to be bothering you about that, or whatever the latest dietary fad is, and it's a nightmare as there's a constant flood of food that you don't need to eat going by you constantly.

Indeed, this thread was started some time ago, and I'm just finishing it off now because of this.  I'm hearing about the diets. And this will mean, in part, I'll hear about people who claim to be "fasting" but still eat enough at noon to put me out for the rest of the day, but it's also the case that in my office its freakishly the case that seemingly 3/4s of the office has late in the year birthdays. That means that in November and December there's enough cake going through the office to feed all of Europe for a year, at least calorie wise.

And to add to that, people just start bringing in food at random.  Indeed, there's one person who seemingly does this constantly from their home, and it's all sugary food.  This is surplus from that person's own larders which means that the same is buying, but not eating, lots of cake, candy and the like.  All of which makes it pretty hard to resist, as it's simply there.

And then for some reason cake like cookies, from a newer cookie company, are showing up in the house here.  We're tiny people, and we can't really eat cookies the size of large pizzas, and particularly not sugary ones.  My wife and my daughter love these cookies, but my daughter is so active that she'll burn through the calories no matter what.  Like most modern Americans, however, my job principally entails, active lifestyle wise, sitting on my butt.

Of course, some would say "go to the gym", but I hate that sort of public display.  And frankly, I don't have the time or don't imagine that I do.  And that's the sort of urban Cow's Revenge activity that I really don't like.

All of which caused me, when I got on the scale last night, to be shocked that I've ballooned up to 170 lbs. 

Well, it's not like I don't know what to do.  And it doesn't involve Keto or the Orange Blossom Special Cleanse or something like that.

But it would be a lot easier on a "natural diet", but which I mean one that I shot, caught and grew myself.

I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays. . .

as I'm busy, but I took Thanksgiving weekend off for a variety of reasons. Also, for a variety of reasons, it's the first time I've had four days off in a row for several years.

I avoided checking my email, which I'm better at doing than other people that I know.  I don't have my email set up to give me automatic alerts, for example.

Cell phones. The worst thing to happen to humankind since. .. well ever.  These are our old cell phones.  I found them in a drawer when I was looking for something the other day.  They're expensive, so you save them, which you probably don't need to do.

So in checking my email this morning, and my calendar, I see that I have emails from lawyers for every day of the four-day weekend, save for maybe Thanksgiving itself.

There's no doubt about it.  Cell phones and computers have become the enemy of sanity.  

I know that some of those folks were simply working on Friday, which isn't a holiday weekend for everyone.  I had intended to but decided not to.  But Saturday and Sunday?

There's a point at which stuff like this has to stop.  I'm glad to see that for the first time, pretty much ever, Walmart and some other big box stores closed on Thanksgiving itself and will close on Christmas.  Some restaurants were open, however. Grocery stores were as well.  Friday, of course, was "Black Friday", which I've worked many times myself, and Saturday was "Small Business Saturday".

We're reading, of course, about inflation ramping up, which the administration seems to have no handle on whatsoever.  The weekend shows had Democrats on explaining how the "Build Back Better" bill won't contribute to it, which is baloney.  If anything starts to depress it, it'll be the arrival of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which isn't good.

Really building back better would take a fundamental look at which what we've built, which is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week, cubicle economy, and dismantling big chunks of it.  Right now workers are voting for that with their feet.  

Maybe some pondering on that is in order.

@#$@#$! The United States Supreme Court comes to the predictable, and correct, decision in Mahanoy Area School District, v. B. L., a Minor

I'm a bit surprised by the amount of attention that this decision has engendered, but the times seem like that.

Mahanoy Area School District, v. B. L., a Minor

I've mentioned this here before, but B. L. a vocal minor, posted a "vulgar" Snapchat when she was miffed over her school's cheerleading team, in spite of her status as a cheerleader.  She didn't make the varsity squad, and replied with some vulgarities about that. She made it the following year.  

In response to such rude behavior, she was suspended from her less august cheerleading position for a year.  

Her overprotective parents sued.

This was an out of school declaration and she suffered a government sanction for it, no matter how minor.  Pretty clear this was a violation of her right to free speech and pretty clear the school was doing what it had to do, in the context of its duties.

So, the result?  M'eh.

The surprising thing, to my view, is that there was a dissent.  Relying on a more traditional reading of the law, and perhaps on more traditional times, Justice Thomas thought the doctrine of in loco parentis applies and she got a constitutionally sanctioned dope slap.

So what can we take from this.

Well, your out of school free speech rights are pretty broad, which we already knew.

They really should be broad.

And modern technology has allowed the spontaneous rude behaviors of juveniles, both the juvenile in age and in mental outlook, to spread far more than it used to, or should.

And some parents are willing to sue over nothing. Cheerleading?  Seriously?

Oh well.  

I'm sure, of course, that this will receive a lot of press of a varied nature. Some will hail this example of parental protective largess as a great civil rights victory, which it really isn't. On MSNBC it's probably being wildly celebrated as if BL is Malcolm X and a new dawn of libertine progressive culture had taken root in America.  In contrast, Newsmax is probably using it as proof that Blues Clues makes people homosexual. 

Again, m'eh.

Well, I hope she does well in the future, doesn't take her parents excess to much to heart, and that she isn't inspired by all of this to become a lawyer.

Is it just bad male behavior, or. . .

is it the predictable tide of the Sexual Revolution going back out to reveal what the flood wrecked?^[1] 

Public domain snipped of Gone With the Wind.  In the film Butler is portrayed as a womanizing cad, but a charming one, who become entangled with Scarlet O'Hara, who is a scheming, not very nice, person.  It's not often noted, but the two central characters of the film are extremely flawed, while the really admirable ones meet with bad ends. 

Not that evidence of wreckage was really needed.

Consider this.

Starting some years ago, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, dob 1952, was revealed to have engaged in an entire string of really icky behavior concerning women, ranging from rape, to pressuring them in sexual matters, to simply being gross.  He's now in prison.  Weinstein's behavior in regard to women was well known inside the industry and even the subject of at least one on stage joke at an awards ceremony before it all broke.

Following Weinstein, or more or less contemporaneously, Bill Cosby, dob 1937, legendary family friendly comedian was revealed to have engaged in serial rapes, basically drugging women and then, well. . .   Apparently rumors about Cosby, who was a pal of uber creep Hugh Hefner, had been circulating for years before they finally broke out into the full media and prosecution results.  They resurfaced when made the target of a routine by another black comedian.  Frankly, the frequent hanging out at the Playboy Mansion, something not consistent with being "America's Dad", should have clued somebody into something.

Andrew Cuomo, dob 1957, appears to be going down in flames, career wise, after a string of accusations have been made against him. They're not, so far, like the Cosby and Weinstein accusations, however.  He's mostly accused of inappropriate touching and behavior.

Matt Gaetz, dob 1982 who doesn't  have the appearance of being the mostly manly of men, is now accused of taking a 17 year old across state lines for immoral purposes.  Just in the past few days an associate of his plead guilty to procuring.

Al Franken, dob 1951, a few years back, saw his political career ruined overnight when it was revealed that he'd engaged in unwanted contact, but not sex, with a string of women.

Now, Tom Reed, dob 1971, a New York politician, has faced accusations that in 2017 he unhooked the bra of a female lobbyist and ran his hand up her thigh, accusations that he at first denied, and then admitted but attributed to alcoholism, which he says he's now defeated.

We'll see, I guess, how Bill Gates does, now that its shown that the super rich philanthropist didn't have just philanthropy on his mind.

Now, also consider this.

Weinstein's behavior, however, isn't all that different from that of Harry Cohn's (1891-1958) who was the long time head of Columbian Pictures.  Cohn pretty much demanded sex from actresses and caused Jean Arthur to retire from acting from a time due to his attacks on actresses.  Not every actress yielded to his advances, however, with the tough as nails Joan Crawford actually stopping by his office and telling him to "keep his pants on" as she was having lunch with his wife and sons the following day.

Natalie Wood, it was revealed after her death, was raped in a hotel room by "a big star" when she was 16 years old.  Her mother told her to keep it a secret, which she did, as revealing it would wreck her budding career.  It should be noted that while there is speculation on who the rapist was, there's no real evidence of that person's identity at all.

John F. Kennedy's conduct with women was so flagrant and abysmal that we have to hardly even go into it.  Frankly, it's not only gross, but if it broke today, he'd never survive politically. His worst conduct was with Mimi Alford, who was an intern, age 20, whom Kennedy made a mistress, but whose actions today would, at least in regard to their initial encounter, would be regarded as rape today. Oddly, he remains a national hero in spite of his behavior generally being well known.

Bill Clinton, dob 1946, survived a series of sex related scandals, one of which is so famous we need not go into it.  Having said that, Clinton's White House behavior was mild in comparison to Kennedy's.

And of course, as we all know, the Teflon Don, dob 1946, survived some accusations as well.

What's the point of all of this?

Well, I guess this depends a bit on how you interpret the evidence.  One simple thing that you can gain from it is that men have been taking advantage of women for a really long time.  After all, we've been looking at things a century past and we just passed the centennial of the inauguration of Warren G. Harding.  Harding was a popular President at the time with a wife that pushed his career (he'd never really wanted to be President).  He also had a long running affair for much of his married life that only  avoided being a scandal, his mistress had German sympathies and may have been a spy during World War One, as the Republican Party bought her off and sent her packing.  That didn't stop Harding from taking on besotted Nan Britton as his mistress. The mid 20s Britton was employed as his secretary and became pregnant, later writing a kiss and tell book with the sordid details of their affair, which included Harding posting Secret Service guards at the door and taking her into a closet for, um dictation.

So, once again, we can take this evidence and conclude that men have been acting badly in this department for a long time.

But something is different about this here maybe.

It's hard to define, but it's the sense of shame that goes with all of this, which is only now just returning.

Thomas Jefferson pretty surely kept Sally Hemmings as a bedmate after his wife died and until he died.  People gossiped about it, but in an era when private lives were truly private, it never really came out into the full light of day until many, many years later, and was only really confirmed, pretty much, after DNA testing became available (there's a string of thought that it could have been Jefferson's brother, but that's probably wrong).  Jefferson and Hemming's relationship was really close to that of a common law, but very weird, marriage and probably the interracial nature of it kept that from every actually occurring, together with the scandal that would have attached to it at the time.

It's interesting, by the way, to note that when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictions on interracial marriages it did so in the case of Loving v. Virginia, giving Virginia bookends on this matter.  I.e., Hemmings may have been an enslaved mistress, or an enslaved wife, but the relationship was illegal and slavery massively immoral, with the Supreme Court ultimately striking down the illegality of interracial relationships many decades later through a case arising in Virginia.

Anyhow, I don't want to sweep under the rug the icky nature of this.  Hemmings may have been Jefferson's late wife's half sister, but she was also a slave, and there's a lot that can be said about the nature of a slave and her "owner" in this context, that I'm not going to as others have and it doesn't really have to be said anyhow.

The point is, Jefferson kept this a secret and it would have been a scandal at the time, and not simply because of their racial diversity, but because they weren't married in addition.

Hamilton's affair, which did break out into the open, was a major scandal that his reputation has never fully recovered from.  It was, we would note, weird, and it was the set up for blackmail.

Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child by Mary Halpin did cause a major scandal as he was running for office, but his opponents political scandals also did.  Cleveland managed to overcome what should have been a career destroying event and went on to be a well known and well liked President.  In the background of that were two different version of the event which were extremely different.  Cleveland ultimately admitted to the paternity of the child, but his supporters managed to portray the incident as resulting from "youthful" indiscretion, when in fact Cleveland was nearly 40 years old when the event occurred, which wasn't a lot younger than his age at becoming President.  Halpin alleged that the child was the result of a single encounter  which amounted to rape after Cleveland had pursued her relentlessly.  Her story after the birth of her child, who went on to live in obscurity and who seems to have become a physician, was extremely tragic, which in part probably helped to discount her veracity at the time, but which would not now.  The story here probably is that this even would normally have destroyed Cleveland's political career, but the nature of his opponent and his ultimate stepping up to the plate, combined with a societal presumption that Halpin was a bit nuts (which she probably wasn't), ended up  weighing in his favor.  Conventional morality was challenged, but certainly not discarded.

In contrast, a long running affair of Franklin Roosevelt's was simply kept quiet by everybody who knew about it, and John F. Kennedy's really creepy moral depravity was wholly buried by everybody who knew him while he lived even though the rumors regarding it could barely be contained due to his flagrant tomcat behavior.

In the Old Testament we're told of the story of the two lecherous elders who make an accusation against a young woman bathing in her garden, in an effort to pressure her into sex.  They're cross examined separately by a profit, who reveals their lies, and they accordingly go on to be stoned to death.

That's the age old ancient standard in the West, and that's pretty much the one we're returning to.  

It isn't the universal global standard.

The Old Testament also provides that men who saw a comely widow in a conquered land, whose hatband had died in battle, could be acquired by a victorious Jewish man, but only have he observed an entire series of concessions to her and her family that were so extensive, it has to be wondered if anyone ever pursued such a conquest.  They included her right to honor the fallen husband and to mourn for him, as well as concessions to her family.  In contrast, Muhammed simply advised his combatants that they could take conquered women as slaves.

That standard was pretty much the global one.  Romans feared conquering barbarian tribes in their late history for a wide variety of reason, but standardized rape was one of them.  Arab tribes raided as far as the Atlantic and hit Ireland for female slaves in raids that had no other purpose. The Vikings took female slaves for obvious purposes wherever they went.  Even into the 20th Century national armies for some non Western nations conducted themselves in this fashion.  And beyond that, armies that fought for nations whose leaders had severed the ties with Christianity also did, the Red Army being the most notorious in this area, and being guilty of the largest mass rape of all time and the largest rapes per capita since ancient times, something that the reputation of that army still has to contend with.

This is not to say that no soldier from a Western nation ever behaved this way through 1945, or later, but it was much rarer and in contrast to the Soviet example, soldiers who were caught were prosecuted, and perpetrators generally tried to keep their conduct as secret as they could, so much so that some of the odder historical examples remain uncertain matters. Did Custer take a Cheyenne girl as an effective sex slave or not? ^[2].  Russian officers, in contrast, actually stood by while mass rapes of Germen women occurred  and egged their soldiers on, with the deaths of the repeated female victims being common^[3]. 

And then came the Second World War.

And we're not simply talking about Russian sexual assault on entire cultures, including their own, or of Japanese sex slaves.^[4]. 

We've presented this thesis before, although we're certainly not welded to it.  Something about World War Two impacted global morality and culture everywhere.  Having said that, in this area, things were undoubtedly evolving prior to the war.

Indeed, so much so that I've had some doubts on my thesis here, although not so much that I've discarded it.  I think it's still valid.  But what is undoubtedly the case is that when photography became less cumbersome, which is right about World War One, an evolution in the objectification of women really started.  There was already at that point pornography, but it wasn't hugely widespread. The war had a role in spreading it, however, through in part cigarette cards and other photographic distributions.  Advertising didn't stray into it rapidly, however, nor did popular depictions.

Movies seem to have started the acceleration of the evolution.  When movies really started to break out following the war, there were no restrictions on what they depicted at all, and film makers, including some really famous ones, picked up on that quickly.  Even Cecille B. DeMille, famous for such films as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, issued an early movie ostensibly on the suffering of the saints which is regarded as outright pornographic in its depiction of torture of female subjects.

The Hays Production Code of course took that all on, but by then there was something going on. The World War One era had yielded to The Roaring Twenties, which was in large part a huge sigh of relief for the Great War being over and the accompanying post war recession having ended.  Coming when it did, when women were living away from home in increasing numbers, and the farm economy of the United States, and indeed the entire Western World, was increasingly yielding to a rootless urban culture, it created a certain libertine atmosphere that lead naturally to exploitation of women.  For the feel of it, the most recent The Great Gatsby really does it well.

It's easy to say that this all came to a screeching halt with the Great Depression, and people do say that, but just looking at the evidence shows it isn't so.  Magazine covers leading up to World War Two are shockingly revealing in comparison to those of teh 1910s and 1920s, even when done by the same artists.  Some of the female figures on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post from the 30s, and then into the 40s, are pretty revealing really.  When looked at that way, it isn't a long trip from Norman Rockwell in the late 30s and the 1940s, to Vargas in the 1940s, to Playboy in the 1950s.

Move poster from 1942's Casablanca. Regarded as one of the best movies of all time, there's not a single sex scene in it, and for a movie based on protagonists who are dispirited and dispossessed, their actions are classically moral.

What is I suppose different is that even though popular culture as okay with exploiting the female figure, or just outright exploiting women, in the 20s, 30s and 40s, it wasn't at the point where it was willing to regard women purely as objects and it wasn't willing to give outright license to men.  Things happened, of course, and Hollywood was an absolute moral sewer right from the onset, but there was no public celebration of it like there would be later.  Indeed, a lot of the female leads in movies from the 30s and 40s, are of the femme fatale variety, and are more than a little scary in some ways.  It wasn't until Marilyn Monroe that we're really offered a female lead who is both beautiful and portrayed as dimwitted.  Lauren Bacall may have been beautiful, but she certainly wasn't portrayed as dimwitted, and always seemed close to being ready to hurt you.  Ilsa Lund in Casablanca is definitely vulnerable and torn, but she almost shoots Rick and Rick never takes advantage of her.

Indeed, while it may be a cheesy way to do it, Casablanca provides us a really interesting example of how things started changing in the 1950s. The movie was made in 1942 and we know that Rick and Isla had been a couple in Paris, but we aren't provided any sordid details at all, and indeed the way the film portrays that, we'd be better off believing that there aren't any, other than Ilsa's mistaken belief that her husband, Victor Lazlo, is dead.  When presented with the opportunity to lead Ilsa astray, he doesn't, instead rising to morality fully in spite of his own checkered past.  The film is practically a morality play. A huge hit from the following year, The Song of Bernadette, is outright hagiography about a real life saint, something that is almost impossible to imagine Hollywood filming now.

By the 1950s, however, we were getting the Seven Year Itch and by the 1960 we were getting The Apartment, the latter being a criticism of a male dominated culture of economic seduction.  Indeed, The Apartment, for all practical purposes, illustrates most of the negative conduct complained of above, all the way 

Wilder, as this poster notes, had already directed Some Like It Hot by this time, a film which not only would be regarded as mild by contemporary standards, but which couldn't really be made now as the gender bending  comedy of the film would be regarded as offensive.  In this film, however, he took a distinct turn as both of the protagonists are trapped in situations they don't like and made miserable by the sexual misconduct of others.

A person could, and by this point probably is, asking what the point of all of this is. To try to get there, we'll note that maybe what the Church was concerned with which caused it to convene Vatican II was correct, although I don't know that their reaction to it really worked. There's some evidence that it didn't fully.  At any rate, what seems to have occurred is a combination of things actually following World War One, not World War Two as we've earlier suggested, got rolling, some caused by the war and some by the onset of new technologies, that disrupted human society for the worse.  We've been paying for it every since.

The Great War took millions of men away from home for a prolonged period of time and exposed them all to death, and most to vice, in varying degrees.  It's no wonder that the Communists came up violently starting in 1917, and its no wonder that there was massive social disruption in continental Europe following the war.  An established sense of order was grossly disrupted in nearly everything.  At the same time, photography in particularly developed to the point that it was comparatively cheap and easy to use, where as moving images became fairly easy to make.  What had before been a fairly difficult process to make use of, which by extension means it was a fairly difficult thing to misuse, suddenly became the opposite.  Once the technology was around the only think that could be done was to regulate its misuse, but that's always problematic.

At the same time social changes that had been in the works for some time began to accelerate.  Young women increasingly were away from home for the first time in appreciable numbers.  Young men were away from home in much greater numbers.  In both instances the "leaving home" was not accompanied by the shove into the adult world which is otherwise extremely distracting and time consuming.  The Roaring Twenties came around with a hedonistic emphasis that the Great Depression only partially abated.  By the 1930s the covers of magazines routinely featured young women in ways that would have been regarded as scandalous in the prior decade, and which are often cheesecake by contemporary standards.

That's the state of evolved society at the time the US entered World War Two.  Like all American wars, people look back on them and claim the time prior was "an age of innocence", but it really wasn't, and indeed it particularly wasn't, although it was nothing like the current era in that regard.  World War Two's amplified the uprootedness that the First World War and the Great Depression had already caused and made it worse.  A popular illustration and photography industry that crept up on cheesecake constantly made it easy for illustrations to cross right over into pornography during World War Two.  Hugh Hefner, post war, merely picked up on a development that had already occurred, but repackaged it in a slick and socially acceptable fashion, while at the same time radically attacking conventional morality.  By the 1960s his assault had become massive, and by the 70s it was copied and expanded.

It was in that last period of time that women went from being portrayed as objects of desire, but smart ones, to simply objects.  

Its from that status that women now are struggling to get back and away from. And its the current status which creates a situation in which a Republican Congressman can be accused of having sex with a very young minor and defend himself not on the basis that it didn't occur, but that what she received wasn't payment.^[5]

And that latter fact is really remarkable, and evidence of the transition.  Jefferson's transgressions were kept secret by Jefferson, but whispered about by those who knew him. Hamilton came clean about his, but he was openly mocked by his political opponents due to them.  Cleveland survived his scandal but only by ignoring what became an open political topic and subsequently marrying a (rather young) bride.  Roosevelt simply kept his long running affair secret, taking a page out of Harding's book, but without the human byproduct that the latter incident produced.  Everyone around Kennedy operated to keep his dalliances secret, which was a monumental chore, given their nature.

Even as recently as Al Franken, with the rise of the "Me Too" movement, politicians faced with allegations of sexual immorality resigned, and quickly.

Now we're seeing that they don't.  Gaetz and Cuomo are not going quietly.  Cuomo isn't saying anything at all, but following Trump's lead, he's just ignoring the accusations.  Gaetz sort of isn't, actually noting how generous he was to his illicit lovers.

And now, following this, we have the story of Anthony Bouchard and his first wife, although in fairness the events in that tale took place some 40 years ago.  The remarkable thing there, however, is that Bouchard, in breaking the story prior to it being broken on him, by the British press, isn't apologetic about what in Wyoming would amount to statutory rape (it occurred in Florida, where seemingly nobody can determine what the law was at the time) and rather praises himself for stepping up to the plate to deal with the situation.  While he does deserve some credit, and maybe even praise, for not resorting to abortion, under prior retained standards his political career would be over.  There were some bridges that you could not cross and come back from, and that was one.  Now, nothing seems to be a bridge too far.

Women, on the other hand, are now calling on virtue and have been since launching the Me Too movement, although I don't that this is what they realize they are doing.  Indeed, I don't think that the prime movers in the movement are aware that this is what they are doing.

And hence the problem of the era.  You can't correct this sort of abominable behavior without a resort to an ultimate standard.   And ultimate standards are unforgiving things.  You can't go halfway with them, you have to go all the way.

Until you do, you are left participating in an element of hypocrisy, sort of in the Godfather II type manner where Michael Corleone notes to the Senator Pat Geary that "you and I are engaged in the same hypocrisy". And without that ultimate standard, there's always a way for the counter reaction of boys just being boys to come in.

In other words, I suppose, its not only demanding favors in the garden, it's averting your eyes to start with, and trying to make sure that you have privacy in the garden bath.

Footnotes

1.  I started this thread after the news on that Gaetz figure got rolling and that's what inspired it.

After that, however, some news/gossip, or whatever it would be, circulated a little more locally which gave me pause on the same topic as I slightly knew one of, well more than one of, the characters involved.

It's pretty revolting and gross actually, but it sheds some light, I think on the situation we find ourselves in.

Following that, moreover, we had the entire Anthony Bouchard flap here locally, which ended up being a national, and even international, story.

2.  There's certainly reason to believe he may have.  

In contrast, the commanders of the Corps of Discovery's commanders, Lewis and Clark, studiously avoided all such contact with Indian women even though the offering of them was somewhat of an odd cultural courtesy with some of the tribes they encountered in their trip to the Pacific.  They did not restrain their men, however, and as a result treating them for venerial disease was a constant medical problem for the Corps.

3.  Sometimes missed in this is that Russian women were likewise the victims of Russian soldiers on a pretty wide scale.

Rapes by Soviet soldiers make up a well known story but are usually given in the context of rapes that started once the Red Army entered Hungary.  At that point they did reach a really massive scale that continued on into Germany.  Missed in this story, however, is that Red Army soldiers engaged in this conduct, but on a less massive scale, inside of Russia itself and Russian brutality towards the German population continued on some time after the war.

Setting aside the Germans, for which there's a cultural revenge angle to this, by and large the Red Army had real elements of simply being an armed mob.

4.  Japan, as is also well known at least in regard to Korea, kept sex slaves for their troops.  Less well known is that women from conquered Southeast Asian regions were also forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.

5.  "I have definitely, in my single days, provided for women I've dated. You know, I've paid for flights, for hotel rooms. I've been, you know, generous as a partner. I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it is not."  Matt Gaetz.

Monday Morning Repeats. From the Week of June 11, 2011. Communications and Road Miles

This entry was actually the only post for June, 1911.  This blog used to have big intervals between publication.

Communications and Road Miles

Friday Farming: The Agricultural Depression of the 1920s.

It's a really popular thing to look back on the past in a rosy way and agriculture provides no exception.  Indeed, a lot of people look back to a romantic sort of imagined past about prior farming generations and what the economics of farming were like.

Indeed, back two decades ago now (my how time flies, eh?) there was a popular pundit of the quasi apocalyptical nature who was convinced that computers were all going to go belly up on the first day of the present millennium and we'd be thrown back into a sort of dark ages.  He still thinks that we'll be so thrown back, and indeed I think he secretly hopes for it, but one of the things he maintained at the time as that this would be worse than the Great Depression as so many people had farms to go back to, he believed, in the 1930s.

Well, maybe they partially did, but what' people like that fail to realize is that the depression for farmers started in the very early 1920s, not 1929.  

Lots of things played into this, including a vast cycle of over production in North America that commenced with Europe entering into World War One, a dry climatic period that came in the 1920s following a wet one in the 1910s, and the relentless onset of mechanization.

A couple of blogs dealing with the topic by folks more knowledgeable than I.

Agricultural Depression, 1920–1934

WHEN AGRICULTURE ENTERED THE LONG DEPRESSION IN THE EARLY 1920S

The dangers of absent minded "liking".

So, I have this friend that's a big fan of the Adams Family and uses one of the characters names as an email handle.

And I have an Instagram account.

Instagram sends you recommendations when people follow you. Follow you back.  

I rarely post on Instagram, but some folks follow me for some reason.

Most of those people I know, of course.  So its photos of their travels, family, kids, etc.  

And some of them are outdoor themed.  I have pages I've liked that are outdoor photos, hunting photos, gun dogs, and the like.

So when I got a recommend, with the same or a really close email handle to my friend, I just absent mindedly hit a "like" and forgot about it.

I was a little surprised, as my friend isn't very active on social medial. Hardly active at all.  And I sort of associate Instagram with people who like to take photographs, which I also don't associate with this friend. But, none the less. . .

Well, several days went by.

Instagram apparently recommends things you've liked to your friends, which includes my wife, who sent me a text later about "you might want to unlike (or whatever the word is) this page".

Well, sure enough.

The page I'd like, and hadn't looked into or vetted in any fashion, was run by somebody who has a distinct interest, maybe a exclusive interest, in boobs.

Now, I'm still not entirely certain it isn't my friend and in some ways it makes some sense.  Years ago I had to tell this fellow, who is otherwise an extremely nice person, hey, don't email me boob photos.  He didn't do this often, but he did occasionally, and always off of a work computer.  They were of the joking meme type, as in "Police Bust", which would be a topless model in some sort of police uniform.  Hah, hah . . . whatever.

But the link my wife sent me was more of the simple big boob type and that would really surprise me.

So, lesson here.  

Don't "like" absent mindedly.  At least check what you like, if you are going to like anything, least you find that your recommending something that you don't recommend.

Technology is truly ruining everything.

Down to five days

The state's largest newspaper that is.

A lot of papers of a century ago published on a five day schedule, often omitting Sunday and Monday.  But that was at a time when there were no statewide papers, there were two local papers, and the town's population was less than 1/3d of its present number.

It was also, however, a time in which there were no other sources of news.

Now there are, and that's a big problem for print.

The paper did announced that its on line edition will continue to be published seven days a week reflecting, it claims, a shift in reader preference.

It will amplify that preference.  Readers who still subscribe to the paper now will have to subscribe to the online variant if they want news seven days a week, which actually print subscribers can already do, as it includes the online paper.  But you can also subscribe only to the online paper, which many who were teetering on the edge of doing that for a variety of reasons, including simply the costs of the paper, will do. And that will include me.

Something from Forbes magazine to remember every time Apple updates the Iphone

Apple, a company I dipise, but whose product the Iphone I'm compelled by fate to use, recently updated the Iphone.

Of course they did. The (expletive delted here) at Apple who work in the phone department are constantly updating it when it doesn't need to be. So it has a new camera? Big freakin' deal.  It's a phone, not a Hazleblad.

Steve Jobs Was A Jerk, You Shouldn't Be

David CourseyFormer Contributor 

Tech

I write about technology and people, trying to get along.

Steve Jobs was a major, world-class jerk. A friend who knows about these things -- but not Steve -- wonders if he wasn't at least a borderline sociopath.

If you define that as someone who does evil things and doesn't feel remorse, the picture of a smirking Steve Jobs does begin to emerge.

Jobs was busy changing the world and minor annoyances like people's feelings didn't fit into his plan. If you had something he wanted, Steve could be charming. But Steve did things his way, almost for himself, building the things he wanted and if we loved them, that was good too. If not, it took a long time for Steve to accept that customers were right and he was wrong.

Sociopath or mere megalomaniac, Steve Jobs was a one-off, a hugely successful genius who changed the world to be how he thought it should be. That is something only Steve could get away with and we are better off for it.

People rallied around his genius and accepted his demands and abuse because Jobs really was smarter than everyone else in the room and 99.98 percent of the planet. Steve delivered on his vision and if basking in his reflected glow required joining a company with a bizarre culture that reflected Steve's personality, people still flocked to him.

Apple's reputation as a "mean"  and obsessively secretive company is a reflection of Jobs, not the people who work there. Lots of nice people work at Apple, but that doesn't mean they could persuade Steve to bring back the corporate philanthropy program that he killed

Giving up on the print edition

When the local paper moved to a location 150 miles away for printing, I knew that there's be delivery disruptions. . .

frequently.

The paper insisted they'd be rare.  But that was optomistic.

This winter has proven me quite correct.  There's been a lot of days when the paper simply didn't make it here.

And if it didn't make it here, I can only imagine what it must be like in areas to the north of here.  After all, there's more or less a straight shot between the city of publication and the city, ours, whose name appears on their masthead.

And its become very expensive.

As a subscriber, I'm entitled to use their on line version, but I haven't liked it. Or I thought I didn't.

But then I learned just the other day, from a friend who only subscribes to the on line version and reads it on an Ipad, that in actually a setting allowed it to appear larger.

Well, that version gets here reliably, electronically, every day.

And its cheaper.

So, with some reluctance, I'm going to go with that next time my subscription comes up.

Which frankly seems to me to make the paper less viable long term.  But with the expense, and frequent road closures, well. . .

Alone

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal

I usually don't comment on these random snippets, but there's a lot to this one. Particularly now as so many people pack cell phones around with them constantly and choose to never actually be alone.

Lex Anteinternet: It's broken. Or at least its frustrating

A man, woman, their horse, and dog. Tanana, Alaska, prior to World War One.

I published this item last week:

Lex Anteinternet: It's broken.: A few weeks ago, as I've noted here, my dog was bitten by a rattlesnake. He's better now, except he lost a bunch of fur on one ...

So, since then, it's become clear that the thermostat on the 97 1500 isn't working.  I sort of ignored it, but on a really cold day it became impossible to ignore.  The truck's running great now, but a truck needs a heater.

So I still have the 97 1500 and the D3500, which needs work, remains in Laramie.  It's becoming a problem.

The 97 1500 is now fixed, however.  I was going to get the truck back today and run it to Laramie this afternoon as I had a light day.  Yesterday I was in Denver all day, boarding the plane here at 6:00 a.m. and getting back here at 8:30 p.m.  I have a telephonic hearing at 11:30, and then I was going to collect the 1500 and deliver it.

I thought my 11:30 was at 1:30 p.m. so I double checked that this morning.  Turns out it was earlier than I thought by my assistant put in an appointment at 4:00 p.m.

She didn't check with me when she did that.  Recently, in an effort to be proactive, which I fully appreciate, she's taken up doing that, which is a legal assistant's normal task.  It is very helpful, at least for those acclimated to it.  I'm really not, however, and am rather used to setting my schedule myself.  That't inefficient, but as in prior years I didn't always have an efficient legal assistant, I grew used to doing that.

Not only was an appointment scheduled then, it's on an extremely complicated legal matter that takes hours and hours and hours to prepare for.  Assuming that I'm incapable of time travel and cannot go back to last week, this is a bit of a problem.

This is my fault, as I hadn't blocked the afternoon out on my calendar, being used to my long running habits in this area.  I'm really bad about doing that as I often keep items of my personal calendar in my head and don't put them on the my calendar.  Long acclimation to doing that has accustomed me to it, so I don't use my computer calendar the way I should for such things.

So much for running to Laramie.

I used the 97 Jeep, I'd note, just back from the shop on the electrical problem, to go to the airport.  It's left blinker now works. . . but the right one doesn't and the dash lights no longer do. Back to the shop for it.

My Iphone, upon which I checked my calendar this morning, as noted, was fixed by our great IT guy.  But now its age is showing and while riding the A Train back to the airport the screen kept going out.  This isn't good.  It's particularly not good for somebody whose train transit is on his phone.

And his airplane boarding pass too. . . .

No matter, it started working again, and surely won't break, right?

So I got back to the airport and was able to update my boarding pass to the 7:00 flight.  As soon as I hit the tarmac back home I texted home for Long Suffering Spouse to turn on the oven and put some frozen egg rolls in.  It would take me 25 to 30 minutes to clear the airport and get home.  Just about the right time for them to be cooked.

"Can't you pick something up on the way home?" came back the text.

Getting out of the airport parking lot was tricky, as they're resurfacing it. The guy working the parking lot booth teased me about it, which I don't mind, as I'm grateful that the people who work that booth are always really friendly.

Anyhow, seriously, at 8:00 p.m. the last thing on earth I want to do is to divert my path home, which doesn't go through the local fast food belt, so I can attempt to speak to the employee in Reformed Hittite, order a Gyros at Arbuckles, with a side of onion rings (which I really don't need, caloric content at 8:00 at night wise), and get home to find that what I got was the Cheerio Cooler instead with a bushel of onion rings. Why this appeared easier to Long Suffering Spouse than just turning on our high tech oven (which I can't stand) and putting in the frozen delectables isn't clear to me, but once I came in the door without a bag from Blimpos, Arbuckles, or Dirty Ron's Steak House she immediately went to turn on the oven for the egg rolls and got them out of the freezer. I simply took over the process and took care of it myself.  Some failure to communicate there somewhere.  Eating a salad prior to the egg rolls took care of the cooking time anyhow.

Monday night I watched a television show about the small number of families who retain cabins in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.  It's just six.  Once the living members of those families pass on, as they're all leased cabins, that will end.  Some of them live year around in the out, out back of Alaska.  No 1997 Jeeps or Dodges.  No Cell Phones.  Wood ovens.  Moose meat.  When I was really young, say 16 to 19, more or less, something like that really appealed to me, although I didn't do it, rather obviously.

And that was before the cell phone. . .

Right about the time my cell phone screen went out for the second time that television show came back into my mind.

Taking a second look at mental well being. A couple of thoughts...disabling the cell phone. Was, Lex Anteinternet: On taking and not taking vacations.

A week ago I published this item, based on something I'd heard about at a recent conference:

Lex Anteinternet: On taking and not taking vacations.: No travel?  Maybe you should. vacation (n.) late 14c., "freedom from obligations, leisure, release" (from some activity...

As noted, that was a conference on legal topics, but it touched on was a finding that taking vacations seemed to be the big key factor between lawyers being happy in their work, or not.

I can see that being a major factor, and something that lawyers (and all Americans) ought to really do. Other advanced economies don't see their workers skipping their vacations. It's a weirdly American thing.  Maybe its a weirdly lawyerly thing too, although I somewhat doubt that.

Anyhow, in terms of minor, or maybe major, things that people can do to improve their mental well being and improve their state of mind, another thing would be simply this.

Limit your cell phone use and turn off the email feature.

I've never use the email feature on my "smart", i.e,. oppressive, Iphone.  Never.  I know how to use it, but it's shut off.

The only exceptions to this is if I'm traveling in some context where I absolutely, absolutely, need to access my email.  On that extraordinarily rare occasion, I usually turn it on, get the email I need, and turn it right back off.

Now, I'm sure there are some who think the email feature on their cell phones is fantastic.  If they're lawyers they're the ones who are in the corner grinding their teeth and look like they haven't slept for a month. And the reason is, they never leave work.

I hate cell phones, while I'll acknowledge there are some good things about them.  All in all, and I'm not merely exaggerating my view in order to make a point, cell phones are a human disaster. They create all sorts of problems for us.  As a minor example, they've caused us to lose the ability to read maps in detrimental ways.  Just a couple of weeks ago I had an experience in which some complete idiot was obviously checking his Google Maps while on a state highway and actually nearly stopped his car on a busy lane of travel.  I was able to get around  him, but I was lucky. He's a moron who should have his cell phone taken away and his driver's license revoked.

But perhaps even more detrimental, on a society wide scale and at least in the field of law, is that people leave their email function on and here the "ding" that email has come in.  Most people will check it and they will respond.

Some time ago an older lawyer I know who has been very successful in the field of law told me that not once in his career had he worked at home.  I was amazed, as I will work from home, but frankly, only good internet connectivity allows me to do that.  As I'm nearly in my third decade of this line of work, I can recall a time in which this was not the case and I could't work from home.

Back in those days, when I had this situation occur, I went into the office, and that's still the norm for me.  I normally don't work from home, but I occasionally do. When I do, it usually means that I check my email for some reason from my home computer.  But to do that for work purposes there's certain distinct things I have to do in order to make that work.  I just don't automatically pick it up on my home computer.

And I don't want to.

I have built in some distance between my work and my home life in that fashion.  But it seems a majority of younger lawyers haven't.  And it shows.

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

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

On the very day I published this:

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

The Tribune had an article with this headline:

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

Yeah, bull.

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

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

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

The test set was pornography.

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

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

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

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

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

It also lead to violence.

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

So our point about video games?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which takes us to "Slam" Marshall.

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

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

So do video games have a link with violence?

Undoubtedly.

Will video games make everyone who plays them violent?

No.

Will they impact every player in some fashion?

Undoubtedly again.

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

Add to that, the impact of movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could society act on this?  Of course it could.

But will American society act on it?

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

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

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

Even though we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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