Tuesday, February 15, 1944. Destroying Monte Cassino.

B-17 over Monte Cassino.

A large scale air raid on the 400 year old Monte Cassino involving B-17s, B-25s, and B-26s reduced the abbey to rubble, but highly defensible rubble.  Not a single German defender was injured in the raid.

It was an example of the gross overestimation of the effectiveness of air power in this context, and a human tragedy as well.

The Soviets commence the first Narva Offensive.

The Japanese cruiser Agono was badly damaged north of Truk by the USS Skate.  It would sink two days later.

Catalina landing at Argentina, Newfoundland, after anti-submarine patrol.

The moment the fatal wounds were afflicted.

How did we end up with two ancient, disliked men being advanced by their parties?

Well, we ended up here as the Democrats quit believing in democracy, favoring rule by the courts, until the courts decided they believed in democracy, and because both parties lied to their rank and file, working class, constituents for a period of fifty years.

We've dealt with this before.

However, it can nearly be determined with precision.

The date of the wounds were:

• January 22, 1973

That's the date the United States Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision, replacing its judgment for that of state legislatures. As the dissent noted:

I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

And Democrats concluded they didn't really need to persuade voters anymore, the Courts would impose a new liberal regime on the besotted and benighted public without their participation.

And:

• July 17, 1980.

That's the date that the GOP nominated Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan would go on to use the Southern Strategy to draw in Southern (and Rust Belt) Democrats who had lied to as the post World War Two economic prosperity collapsed. Thing is, the GOP didn't really listen to their concerns, just as the Democrats had quit doing. 

Seven years in which we went from two functioning political parties and put them on the path to being pure machines, breaking what they claimed to serve.

Wednesday, October 17, 1973. The Arab Oil Embargo begins.

OPEC having doubled prices the day prior, Arab oil producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, now went further and cut production overall by 5% and then placed an embargo on the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, West Germany,  Japan, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Portugal.  Western oil producers Venezuela nor Ecuador refused to join the embargo.

This causes us to recall part of what we recently posted here:

Friday, October 12, 1973. President Nixon commences a transfer of military equipment that leads to a Wyoming oil boom.

Congressman Gerald Ford was nominated to be Vice President by Richard Nixon.  

Also on that day, President Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, the airlift of weapons to Israel.

 

M60 tank being loaded as part of Operation Nickel Grass

The operation revealed severe problems with the U.S. airlift capacity and would likely have not been possible without the assistance of Portugal, whose Azores facilities reduced the need for air-to-air refueling.  The transfer of equipment would also leave the United States dangerously short of some sorts of military equipment, including radios, something that was compounded by the fact that the U.S. was transferring a large volume of equipment to the Republic of Vietnam at the same time.

This would directly result in the Arab Oil Embargo, which had been threatened. The embargo commenced on October 17.  

U.S. oil production had peaked in 1970.  Oil imports rose by 52% between 1969 and 1972, an era when fuel efficiency was disregarded.  By 1972 the U.S. was importing 83% of its oil from the Middle East, but the real cost of petroleum had declined from the late 1950s.

The low cost of petroleum was a major factor in American post-war affluence from the mid 1940s through the 1960s.  The embargo resulted in a major expansion of Wyoming's oil and gas industry, and in some ways fundamentally completed a shift in the state's economy that had been slowly ongoing since World War One, replacing agriculture with hydrocarbon extraction as the predominant industry.

We often hear a lot of anecdotal information about this topic today.  

In this context, it's interesting to note that petroleum consumption is not much greater today in the U.S. than it was in 1973, but domestic production is the highest, by far, it's ever been.  Importation of petroleum is falling, but it's also higher than it was in 1973, but exportation of petroleum is the highest it's ever been, exceeding the amount produced in 1973.  If experts are balanced against imports, we're at an effective all-time low for importation.  In effect, presently, all we're doing with importation is balancing sources.

People hate this thought locally, but with renewable energy sources coming online, there's a real chance that petroleum consumption will fall for the first time since the 1970s, which would have the impact of reducing imports to irrelevancy.  Any way its looked at, the U.S. is no hostage to Middle Eastern oil any more.

It turned out that Europe wasn't hostage to Russian hydrocarbons either, so all of this reflects a fundamental shift in the world's economy.

Price has certainly changed over time.

Juan and Isabel Person were sworn into office as the elected president and vice president of Argentina

Judge John Sirica ruled that the Senate Watergate Committee was not entitled to have access to President Nixon's tape recordings, but that the U.S. Department of Justice special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, could subpoena them as evidence.

Motorola Corporation's engineer's filed for a patent on the DynaTAC, the first hand-held cellular telephone.  It would be issued two years later and our long modern nightmare would accelerate.

The DynaTAC would not enter production until 1983.

The Mets took game four of the World Series against the A's.  I surely would have watched that on the television with my father.

Friday, October 12, 1973. President Nixon commences a transfer of military equipment that leads to a Wyoming oil boom.

Congressman Gerald Ford was nominated to be Vice President by Richard Nixon.  

Also on that day, President Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, the airlift of weapons to Israel.

 

M60 tank being loaded as part of Operation Nickel Grass

The operation revealed severe problems with the U.S. airlift capacity and would likely have not been possible without the assistance of Portugal, whose Azores facilities reduced the need for air-to-air refueling.  The transfer of equipment would also leave the United States dangerously short of some sorts of military equipment, including radios, something that was compounded by the fact that the U.S. was transferring a large volume of equipment to the Republic of Vietnam at the same time.

This would directly result in the Arab Oil Embargo, which had been threatened. The embargo commenced on October 17.  

U.S. oil production had peaked in 1970.  Oil imports rose by 52% between 1969 and 1972, an era when fuel efficiency was disregarded.  By 1972 the U.S. was importing 83% of its oil from the Middle East, but the real cost of petroleum had declined from the late 1950s.

The low cost of petroleum was a major factor in American post-war affluence from the mid 1940s through the 1960s.  The embargo resulted in a major expansion of Wyoming's oil and gas industry, and in some ways fundamentally completed a shift in the state's economy that had been slowly ongoing since World War One, replacing agriculture with hydrocarbon extraction as the predominant industry.

We often hear a lot of anecdotal information about this topic today.  

In this context, it's interesting to note that petroleum consumption is not much greater today in the U.S. than it was in 1973, but domestic production is the highest, by far, it's ever been.  Importation of petroleum is falling, but it's also higher than it was in 1973, but exportation of petroleum is the highest it's ever been, exceeding the amount produced in 1973.  If experts are balanced against imports, we're at an effective all-time low for importation.  In effect, presently, all we're doing with importation is balancing sources.

People hate this thought locally, but with renewable energy sources coming online, there's a real chance that petroleum consumption will fall for the first time since the 1970s, which would have the impact of reducing imports to irrelevancy.  Any way its looked at, the U.S. is no hostage to Middle Eastern oil any more.

It turned out that Europe wasn't hostage to Russian hydrocarbons either, so all of this reflects a fundamental shift in the world's economy.

Price has certainly changed over time.

Juan and Isabel Person were sworn into office as the elected president and vice president of Argentina

Sunday, September 9, 1923. Greece takes it on the chin.

 

Greece accepted the humiliating suggestions of the Allied Commissioners. What else could it do, having just lost a war to Turkey and having undergone a quasi violent change in government.

Of course, this was a step towards World War Two.

Friday, July 9, 1943. Operation Husky commences.

Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, commenced with airborne landings by British and American airborne and glider troops.  The American forces were blown strongly off course by high winds which scattered them so badly that by July 14 half of the U.S. paratroopers still had failed to reach their rallying points.  British airborne forces likewise were badly scattered.  Ironically, the very widespread landings created Axis confusion and their professionalism allowed them to mount scattered but effective attacks.

British glider borne troops of the 1st Battalion, Border Regiment, 9 July 1943, just prior to take off. Folding bicycle in the foreground.  Note the shorts these men, experienced in desert combat, are wearing, even though they are completely unsuitable for it.

With the commencement of the Invasion of Sicily, the Western Allies had returned to the continent and resumed ground offensive operations against the Axis.  The break in action between the fighting in North Africa and Sicily had been a mere matter of weeks.  During that short break in ground action, although not because of it, the Germans had launched Operation Citadel.  Already running into men and material shortages in that action, the Germans would soon have to withdraw forces from the East in order to redeploy them to counter Operation Husky.

Often sometimes missed, it should be noted that the Western Allies had committed troops with Operation Husky to the European continent, unless Sicily is not regarded as part of it due to its island status, almost a year before Operation Overlord.

A German air raid on East Grinstead killed 108 people, many of whom were children, in a movie theater.  The bombers struck at 5:17 p.m.

Congress recessed for the first time since 1939, the last time the body had allowed for vacations.

Fish on Fridays, the Environment, and somewhat missing the point.

Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:

Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests

Eh?

This found:

In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.

FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain).  England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it.  This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.

Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time.  Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome.  Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe.  And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal.  In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.

Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II.  It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age.  It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.

For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion.  But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it.  The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all.  But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.

Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.

For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life.  I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves.  Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.

I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years.  I need to get back to it.

Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.

Related threads:

The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.

Secular suffering for nothing

Pancake Day.

Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe

Owens signalling intent?

Ninth Judicial District Judge Melissa Owens expanded her series of injunctions to preclude prohibitions on abortion pills, indicating that there's a strong chance that the Plaintiffs may win in this case on the basis, she says, that abortion can be regarded as health care.

While its difficult for me to see how infanticide is health care, this is another reason to point out what we already did in this thread:

Lawsuit filed over Wyoming's abortion restriction law. . . and a cautionary tale.

As we then noted:

Back during the Obama Administration, in a fit of right wing upsettedness and paranoia, Wyoming amended its constitution as follows.

Artice 1, Section 38.

Right of health care access  

(a) Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make health care decisions for that person.  

(b) Any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.  

(c) The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people or to accomplish the other purposes set forth in the Wyoming Constitution.  

(d) The state of Wyoming shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.

You'll recall, of course, when "Obamacare" was new, and before Americans had acclimated themselves so much to it that it could not be repealed, the Republican Party was full of stories about how government panels were going to make your health care decisions for you, like it or not. This inspired early Tea Party type movements to address this, this being one of them.

Of course, the amendment goes largely unused and in spite of quite a bit of debate on masks and quarantines during the height of the pandemic, the amendment has sat dormant until now, when it was predictably noticed.  

So now this is on a trip to the Wyoming Supreme Court. Some judge is going to be asked to stay the new law until the Supreme Court can rule on it, a nightmare for whomever is tasked with this, and this isn't going to be pleasant for the Wyoming Supreme Court either.  As a hot button issue in really polarized times, no matter what they do will make somebody really angry.

In my view, abortion isn't "health care" per se, and so this amendment ought not to apply.  That will really upset people who place it in the health care category, but it really isn't.  I hold the same view, fwiw, of cosmetic surgery for "beauty" purposes.  Not to compare the two, but by example getting bigger boobs isn't a health care decision.  Abortion for avoidance of a natural biologic process isn't either, at least until you get into the topic of the physical life of the mother.

I can't help but note, however, how this right wing constitutional amendment has now swung around as a leftward one.  So now the article is being used by the left against the right. And there are other ways the same article could be.  If a legislature, for example, determines to address transgender surgery or treatment with pharmaceuticals, which I'd guess some legislators would like to do, can they?

We noted in another thread how the prime mover on this amendment noted that he'd feel awful if his amendment was interpreted in the fashion it now risks being, that person being a strong opponent of abortion.  While I admire his stance in that regard, he should feel awful.  His paranoia on a non problem has helped create a real one.

Submersibles, Disasters, and Running for the Dog Whistles.

 

Missing Titanic Submersible Is Not The Only At-Sea Crisis We Should Be Talking About Right Now

More than 500 refugees are presumed to have drowned last week off the Greek coast.

From the Huffington Post, which I have little respect for simply because I found Ariana Huffington to be incredibly irritating.

But there's really a point here.

Or is there?

Some have already recast this story this way:

White privilege is corporate media's non-stop coverage of 5 people on $250,000 a person sightseeing submarine to see to Titanic wile ignoring that More than 500 refugees are presumed to have drowned last week off the Greek coast.

White privilege?  Bullshit.

I'm white, and I don't have $250,000 to blow on something like this. 

The entire term "white privilege is a left wing dog whistle.  Go into any big city, and you'll see plenty of stoned street people living in ignored abandonment, most of whom are white. Where is their privilege?

And it's worth noting that the refugees in question are "Syria, Egypt and Palestine" would be émigrés.  Up until some point during the Arab Israeli Wars, at least Syrians and Palestinians could in fact be regarded as "white".  At least this was certainly the case with Syrians, of which the Lebanese were a sub category, again until the ongoing protracted hatreds of Middle Eastern conflict changed that.  I have an entire set of partially Lebanese cousins and a late uncle who was half Irish and half Lebanese, who would have been surprised that everyone else in the extended family was part of some other (made up) racial demographic.

What Syrians, Egyptians and Palestinians largely are, is Muslim and poor.  In the American WASP imagination, being Muslim makes you a non "white", even if the distinction here is purely imaginary.  And quite frankly, at least to the American news media, which isn't really friendly to Christianity anymore, it's the latter category that really matters. They are poor.

So they aren't Europeans, which makes them not white to the benighted WASPs, and they are poor, both of which makes it really easy to ignore them.

The poor don't get much press.

The foreign poor truly don't get much press.

None of which this is really about.

Poverty and extreme wealth are.

I hope, as we all should, that those trapped in the submarine are rescued.  I also hope that the refugees are relived from their maritime peril.  But let't be honest.

There is something fundamentally immoral about a nation with so much wealth, at the very upper ranks, that people can spend $250,000 to go visit a maritime grave.

This statement would apply if they were Americans.

Except here, they actually aren't all Americans, as I thought they likely were.  

Most of them aren't.

Nor are they all "white", as the Huffington Post would define it.

They are Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and his son Suleman Dawood; Hamish Harding, a British businessman, pilot and space tourist; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver and Titanic expert; and Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of the sub business.

Now, with at least Rush, his being there makes sense.  And maybe Nargeolet is there for an academic or service reason.

Harding?  Space tourist?  Too much money by any definition.

The Dawood's.  Well, I''m not in a position to judge, nor really are probably very many others.

So this story takes a weird turn, from what was originally presumed.

So why do we find it fascinating?

And now what is the moral equation?  Do we complain, now, when we learn that two of them are really wealthy Pakistani's, or would that be beyond the pale?

Well, we are fascinated in part because it fits into the category of bizarre disaster that we are unlikely to endure ourselves.  It's the same reason that Chilean mine disasters are fascinating.  Mediterranean maritime disasters, however, are not, however, as they're part of a massive ongoing crisis that we'd rather not think about.

At any rate, a tourist business taking people to see a maritime grave for really high dollar is unseemly.

And any vacation frolic that costs $250,000 suffers from a moral deficit.

Pride and Unintended Consequences.

Yesterday, I ran this item, which noted the following:

Lex Anteinternet: On Pride Month, the nature of Pride, and compellin...: 

All of this fuels part of the counter reaction which is raging in our time.  People wonder how a late septuagenarian serial polygamist with weird bad hair can openly demand to be crowned Emperor and stand a good chance of having it happen, or how a thirty-something single Californian who has never held a real job but who spouts conspiracy theories and cloaks himself in the mantle of true conservatism can win office and be prayed over by college Republicans, or how individuals can be voted onto school boards with the intent to remove books.  Well, an administration that demands you accept the unnatural, a political party that requires you accept the new eugenics, and the stocking of books in school libraries that are openly sexually perverse are a big part of the reason why.

In other words, going from the widely accepted "look, we don't tell you what to do in your bedrooms, so just leave the same sex attracted alone, and they won't bother you", to "you must accept children being taught sodomy" and "you must let gender mutilation of minors occur" is a big part of that.  People on the left might claim that's the manifestation of Christian Nationalism (which it really isn't), but a lot of the reaction is just a species knowing what is biologically correct and reacting to being attacked. 

It wasn't the first time I noted this.

It's sometimes claimed, although I haven't researched it, that the moral descent of Berlin in the 1920s lead in part to people voting for the Nazis in the early 30s.  I.e., their revulsion over what they were seeing lead them to an extreme reaction, it's claimed.  At least one writer has noted:

It seems grotesque in retrospect, but Hitler posed as a moral crusader gallantly battling the forces of iniquity, corruption, and even deceit. Many Germans, horrified by the loosening of moral standards in Germany after World War I, were duped by his promises of moral rejuvenation. Hitler’s project resonated with many who were disgusted by the rampant hedonism and carnality of Weimar high culture and popular culture. Whether one views Hitler and Nazism as a Utopian and technocratic expression of the modernist project, or as an atavistic reaction against modernity, or as some blend of the two (“reactionary modernism” or “conservative revolution”), or as something completely unique, it is clear that Nazism promised a resurrection or awakening of the German people that involved a revival of morality that was in the process of decay and degeneration.

Hitler as Moral Crusader and Liar, Richard Weikart, abstract.

Extreme wealth in upper Russian society certainly contributed to the rise of the Communists in late imperial Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution.

The point of this is this.  While the Southern Populist ethics that have spread into the American middle class country wide (more on this soon) are full of hypocrisies, people do have a limit. Most people don't think night and day about politics, which opens the void to people like Rep. Ward of Casper, whose reaction to a Pride event in Casper lead to this headline:

Wyoming Lawmaker Calls For Boycott Of Businesses That Sponsored Casper Pride Fest

Ward's rise as a legislator in a state that she has almost no connections with stunned me.  She's of the extreme right and has a Weltanschauung that she's imported from the Rust Belt, where she previously lived and politiced. She's associated herself in politics with Christianity, but in a way that suggest she doesn't understand her claimed faith very well.  In Illinois, she showed up associated with some outrage over a school teacher who claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, which in fact they do.  In Wyoming's last legislative session, she made the claim that Christians are not their brother's keeper, and that the story of Cain and Able in the Old Testament really only meant that you just weren't supposed to kill your brother, but otherwise could let him suffer.

Middle Class Germans of the 1920s were heir to a long Christian tradition.  Upper class Germans were as well, and frankly lower class Germans were too, that latter class being the one most vulnerable to Nazi and Communist agitation.  Russia had a long history of Christianity, leading into 1917.  

Wealthy societies produce largess.  Largess produces self-indulgence, and a lot of the self-indulgence will, seemingly almost inevitably, turn into sexual narcissism and individual domination.  Disgust inevitably results by those who don't chose that path, which is, at the end of the day, most people.  But when a society becomes focused on it, those willing to stand most in the opposing spotlight, no matter how extreme they are, will take up most of the opposing light.  

Immoderation leads, inevitably, to immodesty, which leads, almost inevitably, to opposing immoderation.  When toleration becomes a demand for absolutely acceptance, in categories of extremes, those masses simply trying to get through their days will listen to the loudest voices.

Southern Populism gave us what the Southern Strategy took into the GOP.  Losing the moorings on genuine civil rights, amongst other things, gave us a warped left wing view that individualistic self definition is a right, no matter how destructive or delusional.  That latter left wing view is pushing the other, far right populist view, to success, at least temporarily.

"How can you represent. . . "

Elk Mountain.

Every lawyer has been asked that question at some point.  Usually it's "how can you represent somebody you know is guilty?"

Usually, amongst lawyers, it's regarded as kind of an eye rolling "oh how naive" type of question.  For lawyers who have a philosophical or introspective bent, and I'd submit that's a distance minority, they may have an answer that's based on, basically, defending a system that defends us all.  Maybe they have something even more sophisticated, such as something along the lines of St. Thomas More's statement in A Man For All Seasons:

William Roper : So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More : Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper : Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More : Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

That's about the best answer that there may be, and frankly the only one that applies to civil litigation.  We can console ourselves that in representing the interests of the potentially liable, we protect the interest of everyone.

But what about plaintiff's lawyers?

Frankly, the excuse is wearing thin.  

I.e., I don't believe it for a second.  It's all about cash.

And this is a real problem.

The question is what to do about it.

Well, frankly, the average person can't do much.  But you don't really have to accept it, either.

Shunning has a bad name in our culture.  Indeed, one English language European source states:

More specifically, shunning or ostracising is a form of abuse. It is discrimination and silent bullying. Unfortunately, often people who have been shunned also face other forms of abuse, ranging from death threats and physical assaults to murder.

And there's a lot of truth to that.

At the same time, it was and is something that is often practiced to varying degrees in religious communities.  Indeed, up until the revision of the Code of Canon Law in 1983, Catholic excommunications were of two types, vitandus and toleratus, with vitandus requiring the Faithful to cease all normal connections with the excommunicated.  It was very rare, but it could happen. Since 1983 that distinction does not exist.  Some Amish, however, still have such a practice, and they are not alone.

Realizing this is extreme, I also realize, as I've seen pointed out twice, that land locking rich magnates cannot do it without local help. They always hire somebody, I've heard them referred to as "goons" to be their enforcer, and when they need legal help, they hire a Wyoming licensed attorney.  Indeed, in this instance, remarkably, the plaintiff did not use a Denver attorney, which I thought they likely would have. 

And this has always been the case.  Wyoming Stock Growers Association stock detectives were sometimes enforcers back in the late 19th Century, and they were hired men.  In the trial of the Invaders, a local Cheyenne attorney was used, but then again, that was a criminal case, which I do feel differently about.

Elk Mountain is basically mid-way, and out of the way, between Laramie, Rawlins and Saratoga.  People working for Iron Bar Holdings have to go to one of those places for goods and services.  There's really no reason the excluded locals need to sell them anything.  Keep people off. . .drive to Colorado for services.

And on legal services?  I don't know the lawyers involved, so I'm unlikely to every run into them. But I'm not buying them lunch as we often do as a courtesy while on the road, and if I were a local rancher, and keep in mind that outfits like Iron Bar Holdings don't help local ranchers keep on keeping on, I'd tell that person, if they stopped in to ask to go fishing or hunting, to pound sand.

If this sounds extreme, and it actually is, this is what happened with some of the law firms representing Donald Trump in his effort to steal the election.  They backed out after partners in their firms basically, it seems, told Trump's lawyers to chose Trump or the firm.

And there are many other examples.  Lawyers bear no social costs at all for whom they represent in civil suits.  People who regard abortion as murder will sit right down with lawyers representing abortionists, people seeking a radical social change will hire lawyers to advance the change, and the lawyers fellows feel no pressure as a result of that at all.

Maybe they should.

Or is that view fundamentally wrong?

Thursday, April 8, 1943. Roosevelt freezes wages, prices, and jobs. The law of unintended consequences.

USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37) steaming at high speed through heavy seas off Cape Hatteras, April 8, 1943.

Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage and price controls in an effort to combat inflation, and froze employment in place.  The move, of questionable constitutionality, had a permeant, unintended impact on the U.S. economy.

While wages and prices were frozen, benefits, including health insurance, were not. That's because many employers didn't offer it until this time.  Unable to induce workers to switch from one employer to another, they switched to offering benefits, such as health insurance, although Roosevelt's order also precluded workers from switching jobs.  Employees required permission to move employment, and unions lost the ability to bargain for higher wages in an era when wages were rising, but the benefit inducements came in none the less.

We pick that story up here, from a prior thread:

Americans like to think we have a fee market health care system, but we do not and haven't since World War Two.  What we really have is a health insurance based system, although it's breaking down by anyone's measure..  Prior to WWII, most Americans just paid as they went for health care, which had the collateral effects of making health care generally very service oriented on a person to person basis.  I.e., "family" doctors were the majority of doctors not just because of the times, but because if mostly "health care consumers" were average folks with average wages, that's where the work was, and it wasn't going to pay all that well as a rule either.  That doesn't mean that there weren't surgeons, etc., of course, and it doesn't mean the level of care, where received, wasn't very good.  Anyhow, the switch to an insurance based system, with health insurance companies regulated on a state by state basis, alters the free market system as the carriers determine what benefits exist and what they regard as a fair price, based upon actuarial concerns and analysis.  Whatever that price may be, it's not the same as an average person going in to the doctor, and of course people who are covered can go in for much, much more than they otherwise would be able to afford.

Health insurance existed prior to World War Two, but most people didn't have it. But when wages were frozen during the war, for the first time a lot of companies started offering health insurance as a company benefit.  The law didn't allow employers to increase wages to compete with other employers, but they could sweeten the pot by offering health insurance.  For a long time after WWII health insurance benefits and retirement benefits were American employer norms for their employees.  Health insurance actually became increasingly common following the war, and was very common by the 1970s, as an employee benefit.  That's passing away now, however, as its become increasingly expensive for employers to provide.

In contrast to the US's history in this area, Germany introduced a type of national health insurance in the Bismarck era as a type of industrial insurance to combat the rising influence of Socialism and to acknowledge the increased danger of industrial work. The German model of health insurance is the model for at least one states Workers Compensation law, my state's, which provides it as a state benefit (no private carrier) and taxes employers accordingly.  The Germans seem to like their system, but there's always a lot of complaining about the same basic type of system here in the state, even though it actually runs fairly efficiently and pays for a lot of horrific injuries and their medical treatment.  It's interesting to note here that the Germans, whose political history is extremely different from ours, introduced national health insurance to combat socialism, when here its generally regarded as a type of socialism. That doesn't mean it is or isn't, but it's interesting to note that Bismarck took that approach in an effort to take the wind out of the sails of his primary opponents.  It worked fairly well too, in that the Socialist did not take over in Germany until the Weimar Republic, at which time they were the first, and ineffectual, party to govern under the Post World War One parliamentary system that fell in 1932.

The British NHS system, which most Britons seem to be quite proud of, also came about due to World War Two, sort of.  It was first proposed in its current form by the Labor Party in its 1945 platform.  As we all know, Churchill lost his position in 1945 at a time when most Britons believed a return to the Depression was inevitable.  Indeed, that was a very current view all over the world and generally assumed to be almost a certainty.

Stating that "Victory at war must be followed by a Prosperous Peace" the Labor Party proposed:

"By good food and good homes, much avoidable ill-health can be prevented. In addition the best health services should be available free for all. Money must no longer be the passport to the best treatment.

In the new National Health Service there should be health centres where the people may get the best that modern science can offer, more and better hospitals, and proper conditions for our doctors and nurses. More research is required into the causes of disease and the ways to prevent and cure it.

Labour will work specially for the care of Britain's mothers and their children - children's allowances and school medical and feeding services, better maternity and child welfare services. A healthy family life must be fully ensured and parenthood must not be penalised if the population of Britain is to be prevented from dwindling.

Sort of interesting, therefore.  Germany's national healthcare system came about when it was becoming a modern industrial power, in an effort to tamp the socialist down.  The US system came about as a way to skirt the wage freezes imposed during World War Two in order to attract workers.  The British NHS came about when Labor successfully argued that it could better protect the British against what was thought to be an almost certain return to Depression economic conditions.   Whether Labor successfully ran the government after the war is another question, but the NHS remains today and no British political party is going to touch it.

A national health care system was first proposed in the United States during the Truman Administration, but it failed to get very far.  Truman's presidency came hard upon the heels of FDRs and at the time the New Deal was pretty much accepted as having saved the United States from full economic collapse during the Great Depression. That proposition wasn't debated much (although it was always debated by Hoover, who remained a dedicated public servant even after the loss of the election to FDR) but it isn't nearly as accepted now, and really hasn't been since the rise of modern Conservatism starting in the late 1970s.  Even at that, however, Truman wasn't able to pass a national health care bill. The concept revived from time to time, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, without getting very far. Prior to Bill Clinton's attempt during his administration, spearheaded by his wife Hillary, the last really serious attempt had been under Richard Nixon.

Prior to Barack Obama's presidency nobody got very far with such ideas, as noted, in part because Americans were basically satisfied with the existing health care system, which had roots predating World War Two, but which had been heavily impacted by it, as noted.  People might asked what changed between 1970 and now, or 1990 and now, and the answer probably would be "personal experience."  And what that personal experience would likely reveal is a change in culture and in technology.

Prior to World War Two the country was much more rural than it is today.  Indeed, the rural nature of the country, which was predominate up through World War One, has declined steadily since that time and is mostly a memory, if that, for most people now. But that isn't that long ago in historical terms, and its an important aspect of this story.  "Rural" doesn't mean "everyone lives on a farm" like people tend to believe.  But agriculture heavily impacts everything about a rural society, and part of what that impacts is the nature of towns and cities in rural areas.

In that more rural era, doctors were principally general practitioners and generally had solo practices.  Over time this has steadily changed to where today group practices are likely the norm.  At any rate, in that earlier time, health care was very direct and personal.  It was also much less technical. Given that, being that it was less technical and more direct, it was priced accordingly.

That doesn't mean everything was wonderful.  Less technical equates with an era when a great deal less was known on every medical topic.  My grandfather, for example, who was born on this day, died from a stroke when he was 47 years old. There was just nothing that could be done for his condition.  He had high blood pressure and that equated with a type of death sentence really.  One of my partner's father's shared the same fate.  Today, they'd probably both have lived on a great deal longer.

At any rate, technology and an evolving practice model, funded mostly by insurance, has provided us with wonderful health care, but it's also become very expensive.  From World War Two, and increasing on through the 1970s, this was largely funded by health care which was purchased by employers. Some people bought their own health insurance, which was affordable at the time. Those without insurance paid as they went, which was inconvenient for most, and bad for some, but generally workable.

Now, expenses have reached the point where many cannot afford to pay themselves and health insurance has gone from being a workplace benefit to a near necessity for most.  People actually keep jobs just for the insurance.  I've known, for example, of one person who kept a job she wanted to leave to return to school for just that reason.  As a practical matter, the government has become the insurer of last resort for many who have no insurance and who end up using the hospital, in emergencies, as their health care provider.  Increased private medical competition, in the meantime, has become an increasingly common feature of health care as the large dollar amounts that are present in the industry naturally has resulted in private competition.  County and state facilities, therefore, end up in competition with each other, with the practical result of that often being that county and state facilities end up becoming more and more in the nature of public clinics in some ways.

And people have an expectation of health care, which is not abnormal, nor greedy, in a generally affluent society.  That's true of our views on a lot of various things, and its particularly true of health care.  People generally feel that anyone ought to, and even should, seek the health care that they need, when they need it, and there's a feeling of distress when a certain percentage of the population cannot afford it.  Put another way, back in the 1940s if a person was afflicted with a stroke died, it was probably the case that this would have occurred no matter what.  If they were unable to secure health care for some reason for that condition, the result probably would have been the same as if they did.  This would not be true, of course, for every sort of condition, but what that does mean is that there was an overall greater acceptance that if economic conditions prevented treatment, that this was part of the nature of life, rather than being something that would be regarded as deeply unfair. And, for that matter, the medical community made a dedicated effort to include those who could not pay in their practices. They still do, but the nature of that society wide had become different.

I note all of this not to promote or discredit any particular health care system.  It does, however, inform a bit of the background of the debate, and it might explain why the system that is presently being debated is an insurance based system.  That is, the AHCA is actually an insurance centric national system, which was probably a natural route given our history in this area, although its certainly been a controversial one.

Preventing workers from moving from one job to another was frankly a shocking move, in the modern context.  It effectively imposed a type of conscription, or even darned near slavery, upon the civilian population during the war.   Employees could move jobs if they secured permission, but it required that.

The 1943 NFL draft was held.

French actor Harry Baur died shortly after being released by German authorities, having been tortured by the Gestapo after his arrest which stemmed from his efforts to secure the release of his wife, Rika Radifé.  A Turkish actress, she had been arrested on charges of espionage and would survive the war.

I guess on this one, I should ponder what this meant for my family.  My grandfather owned his own business, a meat packing business, so the order wouldn't really apply to him, save for the fact that it did for his employees, which must have been an odd experience.

Compromise and Compromised

Joan d'Arc.

Eddie Mannix:  Father?

FC:  Yes, my son?

Mannix:  May I ask you something, Father?

FC:  Of course, my son.

Mannix:  If there's something that's easy, is that wrong?

FC:  Easy?

Mannix:  Yeah, yeah. . . easy to do.  An easy job.  It's not a bad job, it's not bad. But there's this other job.  It's not so easy.  In fact, it's hard.  So hard Father that sometimes I don't know if I can keep doing it.  But it seems right.  I don't know how to explain.

FC:  God wants us to do what's right.

Mannix:  Yeah. . . yeah, of course he does.

FC:  The innervoice that tells you that, it comes from God.

Mannix:  Yeah.  I got it.

FC:  That's his way of saying

Eddie Mannix: Yeah. Right, I get it.

Dialogue from Hail Caesar.¹ 

Years ago, I knew a woman who was at that time recently out of the Marine Corps.  She was a fallen away Catholic.  Interestingly, unlike so many who fall away from a faith, she made no excuses for it.  Indeed, in discussing the topic with her once, she stated that she'd become a Catholic in the first instance because, like the Marines, it didn't make compromises.

She was a very troubled soul, and plagued with problems. Her marriage was her second, and that may well have been the origin of her falling away.  All in all, however, looking back, a lot of her problems were likely organic in nature, for which she'd bear no fault at all.  Her cross was a heavy one, and she was definitely dragging it and dropping it, but she didn't make very many excuses for it, which is a rarity.

Her observation was a keen one.

She'd been a Marine, as they were a military service that didn't compromise.  And when she'd become a Christian, she'd become a Catholic, as it was a faith that didn't compromise with the Gospel.   They didn't compromise, and they were not, by extension, compromised.

That's a lesson that human beings seemingly have a really hard time learning.  We live in the era of compromise, with some institutions, and people, being so compromised, they have little value.  Some are so compromised that they've gone from having value, to little value, to negative value.

Compromise sneaks in by means of subtle ways at first, when it does.  Something seems hard, can't we make it just a little bit easier? Something seems unfair, can't we make it just a little more fair? And the truth is, we often can.  But doing it for its own sake often has very real dangers.

The small compromise works, quite often, towards a little larger one, that works towards an even grater one.  Value erodes, and the then the attempt to address the erosion, by that point, usually turns towards even greater compromise.  To reduce it to a bad analogy, we go from allowing a desert without finishing dinner, to asking if a difficult one would simply like to have dinner and skip all other meals in an effort to get them to eat.  

We live in the age of compromise, and now many things are compromised.

The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried.

G.K. Chesterton.

From the very onset of Christianity, there has been a struggle between those who would add to the Faith that the Lord entrusted to the Apostles and make it more difficult, and those who would subtract from it to make the narrow path urged by the Lord into a superhighway, if they could get their way.  This has always been the case, and while distressing and bewildering to those who must live through any one era in which it occurs, it will always be the case.

Indeed, even during the lives of the Apostles themselves, this occurred.  Fights broke out as to whether Gentile Christians, who at the very first were a minority with Jewish Christians the majority, were subject to Jewish dietary laws or, perhaps more daunting, laws requiring circumcision.  It was rapidly determined that they were not and indeed right from the onset dietary laws were completely suspended, none of which has kept various Christian groups from adding new ones in, often with no particular basis, from time to time.  Even as those things were going on, however, other Christians basically felt that if they showed up for the Sacrifice of the Mass, they were doing about everything required of them, causing St. Paul to list out a list of mortal sins that barred entry into Heaven, including grave sins against chastity such as fornication, male prostitution, and homosexual behavior as well as such sins as drunkenness.  St. Paul pulled now punches whatsoever on this, condemning, in the full texts, men who affected a female appearance.  So blunt is Paul in his letters that in our modern era people have taken to either ignoring, excusing or psychoanalyzing St. Paul in a fairly desperate effort to avoid his teachings.

Indeed, the easy out that people attempt to give themselves in this area is to try to limit and then minimize St. Paul, but pretty soon you have to do the same to Christ as well.  Jesus notably criticized the Pharisees for making things difficult needlessly, but it was also Jesus who just flat out stated that getting divorced remarried was adultery.  No exceptions.  And while people like to claim that "well Christ didn't say. . ." this or that, it's pretty clear that 1) he might have, or 2) in areas of well accepted moral conduct there would have been no need to go back over some things, and 3) he actually did condemn certain immoral act either directly or indirectly with statements that are recorded. The Samaritan woman at the well, for example, was directly criticized for serial marriages and living with a man she was not married to, which again indicates that divorce was barred and sex outside of marriage was as well, none of which has kept, for some time, Protestant Christians from going to Church feeling they are perfectly okay if they're divorced and remarried, shacked up with someone, or living the hook-up culture.

It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man's faith is put to the test on the day God's will is not his.

Sigrid Undset, The Axe.

Truer words were never spoken.

Certain German Catholic Bishops, now edging on open rebellion against the Church, assuming that they haven't raced into schism, should take a break, study some actually history and then reconvene.  Indeed, their betrayal of the faith is so great, they ought to resign.

And while I'm straining not to join those Catholics who now recoil every time they hear of Pope Francis, it is becoming a struggle.

And a lot of this is that, should St. Paul appear in Frankfurt today, he'd be none too happy with the German bishops who are really busy saying that sexual sins aren't that, and are going to take the well trod Protestant path of excusing and then blessing sin, something that took Protestant's decades to do but which the Catholic Church in Germany, seemingly ignorant of history, is doing at rocket speed.  Indeed, if Christ appeared on the streets of Frankfurt today and counselled against divorce, based on the ongoing conduct of the same Bishops, they'd seemingly inform him that while he may be the Son of God they've taken a vote and that's just too tough, so God must abrogate the rule.  Likewise, if St. Paul were to walk into the Kaiserdom Sankt Bartholomäus in Frankfurt and step up to the ambo to warn the congregants of their conduct, he might be interrupted by a Bishop to be informed that while St. Paul feels that homosexual sex is wrong, in Frankfurt they want to bless it.

No matter how a person attempted to address this, it's an example of secular compromise leading to irrelevance.  It's goes down a well-worn Protestant path that has pretty much lead the congregants out the door.

This history is well established, and not just in Christianity. Starting with the Christian example first, however, the pathway is pretty beaten down.

Most of the Protestant religions, indeed maybe all of them, were originally extremely stringent in their doctrine.  Indeed, it's an irony of this history that their original rebellion against the Church was fueled, in part, by the late Medieval Catholic Church having become slack in behavior.  Clerics ignored their oaths of chastity and married or took paramours, Bishops often occupied their positions for political reasons, Priests had become uneducated.  In short, the monumental effort of a fighting faith seemed to have been accomplished and a retreat into "well. . . ." had occurred.  Protestant reformers, often with a poor understanding of the Faith themselves, sought to burn down the edifice of the Church which didn't seem to match the message of the foundation of the Gospel.

Faced with that, the Church cleaned up its act and by Trent was heading back into correction, but that was too late to address the creation of numerous dissenting Christian bodies that had gone from schism, in some cases, to outright separation.  As noted, lots of those bodies were extremely rigorous at first, although this wasn't really the case for the followers of dissenter Martin Luther, who really showed what the future was going to be like.  Luther was an ordained Priest who rebelled against what he felt to be abuse and then caused his followers, mostly due to German princes wanting to separate themselves from Rome for their own greedy reasons, to completely separate.  Over time, Luther, found, as is so often the case, that Christianity was inconvenient to his sex drive, and found an excuse to violate his vow of chastity, taking a wife who had been a nun and who likewise violated hers.  Nobody can know the state of their minds or souls at that time or that of their death, but from the outside, it looks a lot like Luther found a way to rationalize his bedroom desires at the expense of his Faith at that point.

In so doing, he blazed a particularly noteworthy path. The entire Church of England came about due to King Henry VIII wanting an entire series of women who were willing to compromise their morals for a chance at queenly status.  Eventually the Church of England came to the conclusion that it was an Apostolic Church in the Catholic mold with all the same holdings, for the most part, but for being under the Bishop of Rome, including barring divorce.  Theoretically it still bars divorce, but in reality, mid 20th Century, it turned a blind eye to it, and then determined that St. Paul didn't mean what he said about homosexual sex.  In doing that, it reflects the path that, to varying degrees, almost every Protestant denomination has.  Finding a Protestant denomination that takes seriously Christ's prohibition on divorce is pretty much impossible, and even the Orthodox have strayed in this area, in spite of their insistant claims to have not interjected "innovation".  Not all Protestant faiths have cut St. Paul's letters out of the New Testament, but a lot of them have.  Some have pretty much reduced their theology to "its nice to be nice to the nice", which challenges nobody.

The Church of England started to die off as early as the 18th Century.  Increasingly weak tea in its theology, the English, a devoutly Catholic people before Henry VIII, came to more or less ignore it.  Now they're pretty much fully ignoring it. Culturally Christian, the Church of England survives because of the state in the United Kingdom.  In the US and Canada, it survives as it was once the church of wealth, and it retains it.  All over, Protestant faiths are simply dying, save for example of those which buck the trend and strongly retain fairly strict interpretations of the New Testament in various areas, which itself has caused silent schisms within them. There are, now, two Lutheran churches everywhere.  There are, now, two Anglican Communion churches everywhere.  

The German Bishops have determined to get on the wrecked train of the Church of England. It's just so hard, basically, that well, we'll ignore things, even if they don't put it that way.

What it boils down to, in the end, is that carrying your cross, particularly if you have money in your pocket, is hard, as we're really lazy and spoiled. So maybe, the logic goes, the Church ought to just say it's okay.

Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?"

He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good.* If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”

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

When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Mathew, Chapter 19.

We, in the West, and I mean 100% all of us in European nations, are the rich man.  We've collectively gone to God, asked what we need to do, and found it, well, if not hard, but seriously inconvenient.

We want to have sex with whomever, and at this point whatever, without consequence, and we want, in this modern era, God and Man's approval of it.  In other words, St. Paul may have warned his flock that men shacking up with men locked the gate to Heaven, but right now the German Bishops want to basically say, "hey, that's okay", I'll open them back up for you and bless it, it'll all be okay.

It won't be.

Indeed, we darned near want to be gods ourselves, recreating ourselves in our own imaginary image, rather than what we actually are.

Why had church attendance dropped off in Europe, and elsewhere, following the mid 20th Century?  It's hard to say, but money is a lot of it, even if we don't recognize it.  When the wolves were closer to the door, we were closer to the wolves as well, and less inclined to think that we can make ourselves into something we aren't.  Now, however, pretty much ever culture in the Western World is at the point where people are told making money is the point of their existence and that they should entertain themselves with sex and games. The Catholic Church has been the only thing, really, saying no, in the West.

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." 

Luke, Chapter 9.

Christ's quote, as recorded by Luke, is the antithesis of what the German Bishops propose.  No Cross, no Crown, maybe the old quote, but they'll not have it.  They'll convey the crown cheaply, they imply.  But it'll have no value in this world, and the opposite value in the next.

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.

William Penn

Ironically, but seemingly unnoticed, the Catholic Church as weathered the storm of sexualized consumerism a lot better than other Christian faiths.  It's suffered no doubt everywhere, as people decided that it was more fun to play with themselves without consequence than worry about the natural result of everything, as long as drugs could sterilize the results.  Free of the worry of war, and free of the responsibility of their own actions, and free of poverty, it was pretty much life in the Playboy Club all the time, save for the guilt of it.  The guilt is still there, but the German Church, worried about empty pews, seeks to do away with that.  In doing that, its missing that there's a fairly large core of Faithful who never left. They may be weakened, but they haven't gone. And beyond that there's a large crowd of Catholics near the door who want in, but who can't quite break way, yet, from the circus.  They've also missed the point that wherever parishes, sometimes by diocesan design, and sometimes by parish action, raised, rather than lowered, the bar, people came back in, in numbers.  Indeed, an entire young Church, with clerics who aren't party of an effeminate subset tolerated in the 70s, and who are orthodox , is doing well.

What will ultimately happen here, we don't know.  We can hope that Pope Francis will act, although in much of the Orthodox centers in the Western World, there's not much hope pinned on Pope Francis at this point.  And we might hop;e that the large, poorly funded, massively growing Catholic Church in Africa says enough.  The German Church is rich, due to the Church tax, but it isn't vibrant. The African one is poor, and vibrant.  History may oddly repeat itself in some ways, as Catholicism came originally out of Africa and wasn't very shy when it did.

Or the German Church may go into schism in some fashion, openly or without acknowledgement, and evaporate, leaving those who want real standards, which in the end turns out to be everyone, wanting.

And it might leave quite a few souls imperiled, including those who are gathered in Frankfurt.

Not everyone was cut out to be a soldier.  If you aren't, it doesn't mean you are a bad person.

SSgt. Ronald E. Adams, Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, May 1982.*

I have, and have not yet published, a long item on women in combat roles in the military.  I also have a shorter one I forgot about, inspired by what one of my friends (okay, relatives) thought was a charming photograph put up in Stars and Stripes, if I recall correctly, of a bunch of female troops breastfeeding their children.

The United States has been phenomenally lucky, maybe, to avoid any major wars since the Vietnam War.  I know right away somebody's going to state, "Since the Vietnam War? What about . . . "

I stand by my comment.  The US hasn't fought a major war since the Vietnam War.

The long war in Indochina required the United States to deploy 549,500 service members at its peak in 1968 in what is actually a very small country. After Tet, Westmoreland asked for the number to be increased to 750,000, and to be allowed to invade North Vietnam.  The maximum US deployment in Afghanistan was 110,000 in 2011. 157,800 was the maximum for Iraq during the second Gulf War.

In contrast to all of these, the U.S. Army, just the Army, reached the number of 8,200,000 troops during World War Two.  About half that number were inducted into the service in World War One.

Okay, so what?

Well, this, 

War is a male deal by its very nature, and I mean nature.  Warfare is one of the handful of roles written into a Homo sapiens's nature when they have an X and Y chromosome.  If they have two X chromosomes, it is not. This is true for all members of the genus homo across time, distance and culture.  

The male role as soldiers also, at one time, tended to propel them to leadership in society.  Tribal leaders who proved adept at war often had an influential role in society.  Geronimo didn't become a leader of his society, for example, by hosting tea parties or screaming in Congress like a howler monkey.

Indeed, early on most societal leaders in budding nation states had this origin.  Kings were originally simply leaders of their kin, in war and peace, but by the time they ruled over any appreciable amount of territory it was because they could command men in battle.  Put another way, it wasn't their respective views on Brexit that decided the contest between King Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy.

In more modern times, it was still the case that having been a notable military leader, or even just having served notably, could result in later success in politics or business.  We seem to have passed that era by, however, and probably for the better.  Our last President who was a really well known military figure was Dwight Eisenhower and we've not had a President who served in the military since George Bush II.  As the modern world is less and less violent, having leaders who are good at something else makes sense.

Which is probably the underlying, quite reason, that Western societies became concerned about women not being allowed to fulfill combat roles in their militaries.  We don't really expect them to actually have to fight. The militaries, that is.  And we've grown use to the idea that the fighting will be done by commandos where women are unlikely to end up, or by drones, which can be flown and commanded by anyone.

The war in Ukraine, however, is proving a real throw back.

Which proves that large-scale, peer to peer, war is still possible.  Indeed, we're edging up on one with China right now, by which time China will have the largest, if not the most capable, Navy in the world and an outsized army and air force.

All of which is why opening up combat roles to women in the military has been a mistake, and may well prove to be a really fatal, and worse, mistake for women and men both.  Oddly enough, I saw two women debating this recently on Twitter, in which one of them definitely noted an aspect of this:

HrafnJá 🇮🇸 @RedStarSysop 19h Replying to @daily_cowboy

I remember similar arguments as to why I couldn’t serve in a combat unit but living in the field was fine. “Well, you’re built different. Well, hygiene issues. Well, if you get hurt we’ll look bad.” I joined to do the work. The brass’s squeamishness was their flaw, not mine.

Lady Hecate @hecate40 18hReplying to 

@RedStarSysop

 and 

@daily_cowboy

Women don't belong in combat.  They are not physically able to do the job.

Eric Quallen (he/him)@QuallenEric10h Replying to 

@hecate40

@RedStarSysop

 and 

@daily_cowboy

Have you been in combat?

Lady Hecate @hecate409h Replying to @QuallenEric

@RedStarSysop

 and 

@daily_cowboy

No.  I have been in fights with men.  I got my ass kicked.

Well. . . yeah. 

Psychologically, combat is a male role.  Physically, it is as well.  And not to go into too fine of detail on it, morphologically, men are suited to it in ways women are not.  Men are generally stronger, more aggressive, do not have bodily cycles that prove to be a frequent periodic health and sanitation problem, and don't get pregnant.  And frankly men are generally replaceable in their other roles fairly readily, whereas women are not.

On some of these, it might be noted, there's a reason that women have not supplanted men in sports, which is not a substitute for combat in my view, but which has certain analogous features.  Indeed, the small invasion of female sports by men masquerading as women through "transgenderism" is an acknowledged threat to first rank female athletes in their own sports, and one which, frankly, sees the best of the best in female athletics being displaced by males who are nothing more than also-rans when they compete against men.

The latter is illustrative as the insertion of women into this male role has led to the decrease in standards across the board in militaries.  In order to make military service suitable for women, standards of all types have to be significantly depressed. This is widely known, even if the information is routinely suppressed.

And young men, who no compunctions about being attracted to women, also tend to avoid wanting to serve in combat roles with them.  This is likely due to a deep instinct in them that's twofold.  They know that serving with women will depress the martial nature of their units, but they also know that, if htey're decent men, that they'll protect women first.  No combat unit with any sufficient number of women in it is going ot have combat cohesion for long, as some man is going to act to save women in the unit, before his mission.  It's just a fact.

Goyaałé (Geronimo) legedary Apache leader.

University of Wyoming Engineering Building, 1950s.

We've had some comments, we might note, on Academia recently.

One thing that had never occurred to me, but which I find really interesting, is the modern expansion of the university is coincident with the rise of new academic disciplines.  That would never have occurred to me but for listening to a Catholic Things you Should Know podcast.  But once considered, it's quite clear.  Education prior to the expansion of scientific disciplines in the university was concentrated on a very limited number of fields. This probably provides the reason for why the service academies came into existence in the U.S.  They were engineering schools.  I know that, but it hadn't occurred to me exactly why there would have been a deficit of engineering schools. The reason is pretty simple, the pre scientific revolution university didn't really dwell on such topics.  A person would come out of them with a good education in history, literature, and language, and depending upon where they went, quite often religion, but engineering, biology, etc. . . well, not so much.

In the mid 19th Century, that all changed.  But one thing about change is that it tends to be self-driving.  Legitimate fields like sociology covered an awful lot, and then the academy in those areas kept on keeping on.  For that reason, we currently have things such as studies on sexual diversity that take themselves really seriously.  We've addressed this a couple of times as well.

The overall problem is that at some point you cross over certain bars.  Graduating from high school was actually subject to a fairly high bar at one time.  Starting in the 1970s it was lowered, and was low in the 80s, but efforts following that started to set it high once again and much of htat has recovered.  Be that as it may, university, which was never intended to be universal, lowered its bar starting in the 80s and it's stayed low in some areas.  

Part of that is because academic positions are professor's rice bowls.  The College of Law at the University of Wyoming, for example, openly wrings its hands in angst about whether low bar passage rates will mean the end of the school.  It probably won't, but the spiraling "let's make passing the bar" easier reaction is the wrong one.  Rather, the school probably ought to make itself tougher.  

Some fields, we'd note, mostly scientific and engineering ones, can't lower the bar no matter what.  They are what they are, and for that reason they keep on keeping on, unimpeded.  They ought to be the model.

This would mean, society wide, that there would be fewer college graduates.  So be it.  Dropping the bar as low as it's gone means that lots of degrees have no value, and some degrees only have value within academia itself.  As pointed out in our Oikophobia post the other day, if a degree only has value within academia, it probably really has very low value, and there may be a wholesale falseness associated with it.

University of Wyoming, Geology Building, 1986.

Oklahoma County Courthouse.

Your value as a person is not determined by your performance on this exam or any other exam, your performance in law school nor the bar exam. Your value is inherent and inviolate and nothing can take it away from you.

Professor Shelley Cavalieri.

The law is a bitch.

Common, but unattributed.

We just touched on this topic.

When I took the bar exam, we used a state and national test. The state test was all essay, and only on the state's law.  The exam took a couple of days, and was followed by an oral interview.

Prior to my taking the bar exam, the examiners, in the oral interview, could and did ask oral questions. That had been dropped by the time I took it.

Much more recently, the state went to the Universal Bar Exam, which is a joke. The state test was dropped.  The interviews were dropped.

The quality of lawyers. . . dropped.

Interestingly, law grads locally are now having a hard time passing the UBE.  It hasn't gotten tougher, everything has just declined.

Law schools, as noted, and state bars, spend a lot of time worrying about this, they shouldn't.  Rather, they should take the counsel of Sgt. Ronald E. Adams.  Maybe, if you can't cut the mustard, like Professor Cavalieri notes, you aren't a bad person, but just weren't meant to practice law.

I'll never get a gold medal in the Olympics.  I won't win the Medal of Honor.  I'm not going to be President.

But like most people, there are challenges that I have faced and will face.  Demanding that the standards be lowered so I don't have to face them is a personal defeat, and a defeat for everyone else as well.

Footnotes

1.  It may seem odd to start with a quote from the Coen Brother's comedy, Hail Caesar! here, but in fact, the movie is taken fairly seriously by philosophic and religious commentators.  The Coen brothers themselves made comments at the time that it was released that it was actually a serious religious picture presenting "big questions".  This has lead to discussion of whether the film, which is by two Jewish filmmakers, has a Christ figure in it.

Christianity Today, at the time of its release, stated.

This is a passion play, one with Eddie Mannix at its center, our Man of Sorrows, the savior of the (movie) world.... But he has reached a crossroads—a point of temptation, if you will. The tempter is a friendly Lockheed Martin executive, who wants him to abandon his true work in the world and come live the easy path.