Much ado about Twitter.

Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is busy making changes to it internally. This, in turn, has resulted in a lots of righteous anger about his behavior.

Here's the real question.

Who cares?

We have a Twitter Feed.  You can see it on the bottom right-hand corner of this page. That doesn't stop the fact that Twitter is basically stupid.

A person can't say anything worth saying in as few of words as Twitter restricts you to.  All Twitter really is for us is redirection to this blog. Does it work? Who knows.  But as far as weighty conversation, not happening.

Indeed, the fact that people seem to think its weighty shows how dim the American intellect has become, as if there wasn't plenty of proof for that otherwise.

Now, I have some feeds that I follow I really like. Some do nothing other than what this one does, direct you to other things Some are basically photo feeds, much like Instagram.

But as far as news or anything worth reading, not going to happen.

Some people seem to think that Musk shouldn't be allowed to own Twitter or, if he does, he shouldn't be allowed to wreck it. Well, why not?  He owns it.  If you are uncomfortable with that, as many are, the real argument is that a person shouldn't be allowed to amass the size of fortune that Musk has.  Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, and he's made more money, showing I suppose that being born to a wealthy family is a good way to get richer. 

It also shows how screwed up American immigration laws are, as Musk apparently lives in Texas. Why was he allowed to immigrate here?  No good reason at all, and in a society whose immigration laws made sense he'd be back in South Africa, or perhaps someplace in what's left of the British Commonwealth.

His personal life also shows how Western morality has declined.  Musk has ten children by three women, the first six by his former wife Justine Musk, then two by Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian singer who goes by the absurd stage name Grimes, and finally twins via Shivon Zilis.  If nothing else, this proves that vast amounts of money will get the male holder of the same money and sex, but it's not admirable and that this sort of conduct is no longer the type that is regarded as scandalous, although it should be.

None of which is a reason to get all in a twitter about Twitter.  If he wrecks it, well, he bought it.  

Who cares?

Lost in translation

It's interesting how things can basically get lost in translation.

And by that, I mean not so much language translation, but cultural translation.

I'm not going to get into the details, but in looking at a news story I noticed that the original headlines, based upon an event in a foreign land, read one way, but within a few hours, they read another way. And in that instance, they read in a manner familiar to an American audience. 

That took off on twitter and rapidly morphed, making the story worse.

So, I looked up the claimed criminal aspect of it.

Absent.

The reason being is that where it occurred, it's simply not a crime.  Not at all.  That's interesting, as in the US it certainly would be, and we tend to assume it is everywhere in the world.  Not only is it not, but much of the Western world, it isn't.

That makes it a sort of scandal, but not a crime, as has been asserted. And that in and of itself is interesting.

Breaking off the trail at the last possible moment.

Years ago, the Trib used to run a paid column on Sundays by a local Protestant minister.  I can't recall what denomination he was in, but it was over in the Anabaptist end of things.

It was always interesting, as the author was clearly really going down the trail of the early Church, and he'd follow it week after week consistently. . .right up until it suddenly didn't go where he wanted.  So, for example, he'd note Christ's commission to the Apostles, how Peter was the head of the early Church, and come within a hair of adopting the principal of Apostolic Succession. . . before he'd suddenly break off.  Or he'd take a look at the Last Supper, start going down the road of Transubstantiation, and then suddenly break off.

It's a very human trait.

Some time ago, on Twitter, I subscribed to Robert Reich's Twitter feed, and I'll occasionally read his articles. They're interesting on economics.  

Reich is solidly in the old school, "progressive", left wing of the Democratic Party.  I note that, as he can't get over it.

He'll start following a trail of economic thought, and how the economy in his argument is dominated by the few, how that needs to stop, how average people need more control of the economy, and get right up to the brink of Distributism. . .and then break off.  Taxes are the solution, he argues.

Well, they have to be.  After all, that's the progressive solution for, well, nearly everything.

Robert.  Your inner Distributist is trying to visit with you.  That's Chesterton's cigar you're sensing late at night . . .

The kind of dumb stuff you say when you actually really care about "your 'basic' fashion sense".

I don't know who Japanese Breakfast is (or for that matter what an actual Japanese breakfast is) but they've showed up on this Twitter headline:

Japanese Breakfast is too busy returning to Coachella and making 'music for bottoms' to care about your 'basic' fashion sense

Oh, bull.  That's the exact thing you say when you've tuned your fashion sense to look like you don't have a fashion sense, so you can appear to stay edgy for Coachella.

M'eh.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXIX. The Income Inequality Edition.

Starting a storm in the Twitterverse

Wharton professor Nina Strohminger did just that when she asked her students about what average incomes were like.

She posted it on Twitter.

Nina Strohminger

@NinaStrohminger

I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k)

Some interesting replies resulted from this, this one from somebody who is now apparently an "oil acquisition attorney", but who seems to be expressing some deep regrets otherwise about the state of his/her life if you look up their Twitter feed:

As an alum I’m curious what you expect of students. They’re looking at the segment of the world they’ll occupy. Is that wrong - for 18-22 yr olds at a competitive place like Wharton to be narrowly focused? Do you really expect them to care about wealth inequality etc right now?

And the response to that one:

Wharton students aren't undergrads. This is an MBA program, so your age range is likely a little off. Regardless, fucking-a right I "expect them to care about wealth inequity etc. right now."

Without using the 1980s barracks room vocabulary, that's more of my view, I'd note.  I expect them to care as well.

Robert Reich cares, and has a sting of videos on this, this being one of them.

Generally, establishment Republicans really hate the Reich videos.  Ironically, the populist Republicans, many of whom were Democrats not all that long ago, would have loved them when they were Democrats. They probably hate them now, however, as they seem to have fallen in line on this sort of thing for some reason.

But there's more than a little to this.  

We've posed on this topic before, but things are getting wildly out of whack, and COVID has emphasized that.  Suffice it to say, a nation in which very few have most of the wealth won't be stably democratic for long.  It'll head into a certain sort of mobism, or it'll end up on an oligarchy, the latter of which are not stable long term.

It'all also be a nation where most of the jobs, no matter what they pay, will be dispiriting for most people.

Wharton and other schools.

I don't know what to make of Wharton in general, I'll note.

Or rather, perhaps I mean its graduates. 

It has a fantastic reputation as a school, and one of my close relatives is a graduate of it. Based upon that, I tended to hold it in very high respect.

Since that time, however, its reputation with me has become a bit dented, probably mostly due to politics.  That's probably unfair.  The school could give you an excellent business education, and not mean that you come out as a politician that everyone admires or have political views that everyone respects.

I'm sure going there, however, is money well spent.

Not Wharton, but this reminded me of a Wall Street Journal headline I saw.  I can't read the article due to the paywall.

NYU Is Top-Ranked—In Loans That Alumni and Parents Struggle to Repay

By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt; ‘It feels like I’m kind of trapped’

She probably feels trapped because she's trapped.

The Journal recently ran this article on a similar theme.

‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off

Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans

Well, at least there's always the FFL.

The Migrant Concession and Inflation

An interesting accidental concession occurred a week ago on Meet The Press when Chuck Todd closed out the show noting that legal immigration into the US is way, way, down.  Todd, whose role isn't really supposed to be editorializing, nonetheless did and made the connection between low migration (which still is high by the standards of most nations) and wages.

Yikes.

For eons, Americans have been told that immigrants take jobs that "nobody else will".  Todd's concession basically admits that Americans will take them, if they pay a decent wage.

That's a huge concession.

Indeed, what that essentially indicates that much of the current inflation is in reality the economy adjusting to the decline in wage depression through paying immigrants, legal and illegal, low wages.

Everyone who ever looked at this honestly already knew that this was the case. There are next to no jobs that Americans won't take. Rather, there are jobs that Americans can't take as we've exported them overseas or won't take as we've depressed the wages so low they'll only be taken by the scared and desperate.  

This is particularly the case with illegal immigration, a feature of which is dirty jobs at low wages.

So it turns out that Americans will work these jobs, but in the post COVID economy lots of Americans who were already at the bottom end of the economic latter have, probably purely accidentally, joined hands with lots of Americans who were under employed, and told the nation to "screw you and the horse you rode in on" for keeping wages in the basement.

Rising wages will cause prices to climb, but this isn't quite the same sort of inflation that we experienced in the 1970s and 1980s.  Rather, this is a readjustment.  What might occur here is that it will depress the economy somewhat, but basically force it back into the 1950s model.  People will have more income, but will buy less.

Frankly, overall, that's a good thing.  Since the Second World War we've created a pure consumption economy that's anti family and hostile to those who don't want to get degrees to become cubicle dwellers.  The giant reaction by the formerly blue collar was already going on pre COVID, but now it's really going on at a massive scale.

The solution for this isn't to flood the market with desperate Guatemalans, but rather to pay actual decent wages.    There's a chance that this might actualy come about.

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

Uff

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

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

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

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

The Missing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shacking up is not the same as being married.

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

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

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

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

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

Antonio Planas, NBC News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Female Dresses and Undress

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

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

Why do women betray other women this way?

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

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

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

What to make of all of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blurred Lines

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

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

That's really dense.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

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

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

Really.

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

Well, this movie caught me off guard.

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

And then shocking.

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

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

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

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

Straight Lines

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

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

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

Everyone did the right thing.

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

Lawyer jokes.

I'm really tired of it

This applies to lawyer jokes.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't like it.

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

Clearly, I'm an idiot.

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

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

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

I still don't like being reminded, however.

Proud

Country Joe and the Fish.

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

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

Opinion Today: Monica Lewinsky wants to talk about cancel culture

So reads a headline in my New York Times newsfeed.

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

Forgetting old knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is suing Congress over subpoenas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justin Trudeau sorry for skipping first National Truth and Reconciliation Day

As The Guardian notes:

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

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

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

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

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

And then. . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Farming: Carbon Capture.

You have to admit it is funny.

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