Most people are tired of this. And by that, I mean a Congress that is monkeying around with bills that aren't going anywhere and are of the nature of throwing gasoline on a fire. We know that this impeachment is going nowhere. We know that a recent bill to do away with the Department of Education isn't either. We know that shutting the government down, which is going to happen soon, just causes the government to lose money.
Some people out in the audience of society may believe that all of this serves to get something done, but it sure isn't obvious. Most people are simply tired. Of course, this helps whip up a pre convinced base even though nothing is actually going to happen on a lot of these things.
Relating to fatigue, on another topic I posted on, that being the upcoming Synod on Synodality, I suspect a lot of Catholics are tired of this topic:
At some point, constant change and the search to change things wears people down. A good argument can be made right now that after Covid, and after a lot of people, would just like things to calm down for a while. That's part of the reason, I suspect, that younger people are looking back to more traditional times, and maybe that the whole culture is, except in certain quarters.
That may explain why the leaders of the Church, or some of them, are keen on a synod on synodality, as difficult as it is to figure out what that means, while globably, in the pews, only at most 2% of Catholics participated in the survey process. That alone should give the participants in the synod pause, as it may very well mean that the 2% that responded doesn't reflect anywhere near a statistically signficant number of Catholics. It may well be that the maybe 5% or whatever of Trads in the parish this morning do.
Of course, part of the reason changed, including unwanted ones, occur is that most people are just busy living their lives. That means people who have what a lot of us do not, surplus time, tend to be reflected in change. In some instances, that's because of the way that people are employed. It's ofen noticed by some that institutions are resistant to change, but by the same token, change can be forced on members of an institution simply becuase somebody in charge wants to change things, and everyone else just has their shoulder to the wheel and can't really take note until the change arrives.
On people in different quarters, and obviously wanting things to be different, Saturday I was driving up a really busy city street and saw, on the sidewalk headed towards the center of downtown, which was far away, a young woman riding a bicycle.
She was probably around twenty, fairly thin, had a large tattoo running up her side, and was topless.
It was impossible not to see, and I wonder if she had done it before, as quite frankly she looked nervous. She probably should have, as she wasn't like the late middle-aged woman, now deceased, who used to ride a Vespa around here topless. It was always a shock to encounter her, but as impolite as it may be to say it, she wasn't attractive. This young woman was, and for any normal male, she was going to be noticed, an impact added to by the fact that she was well-endowed.
My guess is she was headed to David Street Station, where her breasts were going to be oggled at by many. And the look on her face belied the fact that she no doubt would maintain that she was there to make some other point.
Another reason we really need to put the brakes on things until we take a look at Chesterton's Fence on all sorts of things.
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Indeed, something of this type, although not quite of this type, lead commentator Amy Otto, in an Op Ed written some years ago, to maintain "Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder To See Boobs". The caption on the article, which was flippant but which addressed a serious topic, if not idential one, not too surprisingly went viral.
Also not too surprisingly, this is a topic that's been pretty widely studied and the entire observational nature of this is hard-wired into men. That some don't get this is another defiance of science.
And one putting all the burden, I'd note, on men. I don't really want to be in the position of taking note of some 20-year-old woman's bare breasts, and I don't want to be seeing something that only a spouse should. But now I have, and I can't get that back, nor can she, nor can the probably hundreds of men, most with fewer reservations than me, that saw her on Saturday and whose thought went where every they let them go.
US Suicide Rates at all-time high
US suicides hit an all-time high last year
By MIKE STOBBE - AP Medical Writer
Updated
0
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever. That's according to new government data posted Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year. But available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II. Experts caution that suicide is complicated, and that recent increases might be driven by higher rates of depression or limited availability of mental health services. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says a main driver is the growing availability of guns.
A horrific story, to be sure.
It occured to me for some reason that all things being equal, a record number would likely to be set every year, as the American population continues to grow. Having said that, the rates are very high, which is referenced in this article.
Predictably, the reporter blames it on the "growing availability of guns", but firearms have been easy to get throughout American history. Availability has grown from the mid 20th Century, which saw a lot of gun control provisions come in which have later faded, in part due to being found unconstitutional, with the 1970s probably the high watermark of that, but if we go back prior to the 1930s, we'd find that things were, in most places, wide open. Even children could buy firearms in most of the US prior to the 1950s.
What has really changed is a society within any kind of foundation whatsoever. In the entire Western World, the culture built on Catholicism, but heavily impacted by the Reformation, has seen the foundation attacked and dismantled to be instead one that's now centered on radical individualism. It's not healthy, and it's killing people. Added to that, the increasing corporatist culture work in a box life throughout the developed world, that removes people radically from nature, is levying a toll. The combination of both is deadly.
Everyone claims to want to do something about this, which seems to amount to doing something about it sort of clinically, rather than existentially.
Storm Warning
At least 55 people died on Maui. Residents had little warning before wildfires overtook a town
By TY O'NEIL, CLAIRE RUSH, JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER and REBECCA BOONE - Associated Press
Maui residents who made desperate escapes from oncoming flames have asked why Hawaii’s famous emergency warning system didn’t alert them as wildfires raced toward their homes. Officials have confirmed that Hawaii emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens were triggered before devastating fires killed at least 55 people and wiped out a historic town. The blaze is already the state’s deadliest natural disaster since a 1960 tsunami. The governor warned the death toll will likely rise. Hawaii boasts what the state describes as the largest integrated outdoor all-hazard public safety warning system in the world. But many of Lahaina’s survivors said in interviews that they only realized they were in danger when they saw flames or heard explosions nearby.
I really have to wonder how long a large segment of American society, and the official leaders of the GOP, are going to continue to pretend there's nothing going on climate wise. It's extremely difficult to grasp why they won't face reality on this, unless of course it's an example of worshiping money as if it was as religion.
People are now dying. Shouldn't this be taken seriously?
Without fail, one of our state's Congressional delegation comes on television or other media to promote fossil fuels and at least two out of the three like to talk about "Biden's radical climate agenda". Keeping a natural climate isn't a "radical agenda" and simply refusing to discuss this topic is foolish.
Speaking of the Maui fires, some real goofballs are claiming that it was caused by a "direct energy weapons", which they also claim the last devastating California fires were.
It's scary to realize that people who believe something so idiotic have the right to vote.
Lil Tay is not dead.
I'd never heard of Lil Tay, aka Tay Tian, aka Claire Hope, aka Claire Eileen Qi Hope, but this line from her Wikipedia entry says a lot:
Tay's father and manager sought for Tay to become more focused on professionalism, suggesting a music career for her, though her mother and half-brother encouraged her to continue her original boastful character.
Keep in mind, she hit the music scene as a foul-mouthed rapper at age 9.
That's frankly sick, and not "sick" in the good pop culture lexicology way. Her parents deserve a dope slap for letting that happen in the first place.
Whatever her legitimate name is, her story illustrates the poverty of values in the Western World. Her parents were simply shacked up over a prolonged time, never married. At some point, they separated and shared custody of the child. Somehow, they allowed her to enter into the world of hip hop, which is marked for its celebration of criminal culture and high death rate. That made the stories of her death seem pretty credible. Hardly a week goes by without some hip hop artist with a made up name dying young, in all the ways that tragic young deaths occur. Just this week, it might be noted, one such artist was sentenced for shooting another, the victim of the shooting being Megan Thee Stallion (yes, that's a made up name).
When it was revealed she wasn't dead, I wondered if it was a PR stunt. I'ts being claimed her social medial was hacked. I see I'm not the only one who was speculating on the stunt possibilities, however.
Regarding Tay, even at age 9 to 14 she's an interesting example of a certain public pseudonym phenomenon.
Entertainers have always affected false names, often due to being required to do so by reporters. Actors with Jewish names, for example, almost had to take another name early on. Paul Newman, an exception to so many rules in the acting community, is notable here as his real name actually was Paul Newman.
That's pretty much stopped as cultural prejudice of that type diminished. A peculiar modern phenomenon has been people, particularly women, of mixed Asian and Euro-American heritage adopting their Asian mother's surname as a stage name. It seems clear enough that Chinese American Tay was given the name at birth of Claire Eileen Qi Hope, i.e., Clair Hope, a pretty generic European name, and when she was drop-kicked into hip hop she became Tay Tian, or at least around there somewhere she did, taking her mother's last name. Priscilla Natalie Hartranft, a Korean American, took her mother's name Ahn, becoming Priscialla Ahn for the stage. The surprising exception is the very successful Michelle Zauner (Michelle Chongmi Zauner) a Korean American born in Korea, who has kept her given name. Zauner is the front for Japanese Breakfast, which is eclectically named, however, as Koreans are not particularly fond of hte Japanese.
I guess that takes us to Asian Pop, or maybe K Pop. It's bad, but seems huge. I don't know why. Like a lot of Japanese group, K Pop tends to be very Kwaaii
But not all Japanese music actually is:
While I should not note it, by the way, I'm going to note it anyhow. And what I'm going to note is that the children of European ethnicity people and Asian ethnicity people look very Asian as a rule.
It's simply an observation. But as a genetic observation, the genes that contribute to appearance are obviously dominant for the contributing Asian partner.
When I was in college, I knew a student whose father was British and mother Japanese. He looked very Japanese. Zauner looks Korean (and yes, I've been to Korea). Ahn also looks Korean, and Tay looks Chinese. This is merely an observation.
Why the teenage waitress from a century ago on that thread? Read it, and it'll become plain.
Anyhow, if you follow the show, you'll learn how Hugh Hefner was totally debased, and how those around him, if male, became debased, and those subject to him who were female, had their lives destroyed. He treated women like toys and there's good reason to believe he didn't like women, really. Not as human beings.
Playboy magazine was part of the Sexual Revolution, that culturally failed and destructive movement that we're still suffering from and living with. Hefner's place in that was something like Goebbles place in the Nazi revolution, if we want to look at the Nazi movement in that fashion, in the Third Reich. If you take his own claims seriously, which there is some reason to reduce, he had a place akin, perhaps, to Hitler in that movement, or Lenin in the Communist Revolution in Russia.
And yes, the comparison to those evil men is intentional. He was an evil person, albeit one, who like those earlier evil people, attracted followers.
The record is far to clear to ignore. The impact of the Sexual Revolution was wholly and entirely destructive, and women in particular, and society in general, have suffered enormously because of it, and they still do.
All of which relates, oddly enough to a series of things in the Zeitgeist in recent days.
Let's start with this headline:
Maren Morris is celebrating the way she shows off "country female sexuality" ahead of her next album release.
What Morris had in mind? Probably not.
I didn't know until I saw the headline who Maren Morris is, and I still basically don't. I don't like country music, which is generally bad music and often has not much to do with actual country things. I learned, however, that Morris appeared topless (at least) in Playboy.
"Country female sexuality"?
Well, given what Playboy is, we could ask if she meant the Frontier brothel variant of female sexuality, as all her photos do is serve to have men check out and her naked boobs and imagine her in bed.
Her photos apparently appeared several years ago, so this revived controversy actually recalls the brothel analogy unfortunately well. It's been in the news as she revived the story, posting, apparently, one of her topless photos on the net somewhere.
This doesn't advance the cause for women in any sense, and certainly not in the bold independent women fashion. It's not a strike for, for example, female farmers, of which there are a lot. No, rather, its a strike for the objectification of women, and through a vehicle associated with their destruction and violence perpetuated upon them.
It can be argued, of course, that that has something to do with "female sexuality", but not in a good way.
We've long held that every time one woman does something like this, it sets things back for all.
Shame.
And then there's a name that's been in the news:
Deporting Alina Kabaeva?
The flag of Switzerland, where Kabaeva resides with her children at least part of the year.
Who?
Alina Kabaeva is a former Uzbek gymnast and Olympian. By all accounts, she was an excellent one. She's also the mother of three children.
Well, so what?
There's a campaign going on to deport her from Switzerland to Russia, along with her children.
Why?
Well, it's consistently rumored that one Vladimir Putin is the father of the children of the 38-year-old Kabaeva, who is a resident, currently, of Switzerland, but who is a Russian citizen (although not an ethnic Russian) who has, in the past, gone back and forth. Indeed, the rumors were so strong that at one time a Russian newspaper reported that they were engaged, which resulted in the newspaper being shut down.
Putin was married to Lyudmila from 1983 to 2014, but they divorced that year. Not a lot, really, is actually known about Putin's private life. The parentage of Kabaeva's children is routinely reported to be Putin, but if he is the father, it's certainly knot acknowledged publicly.
Well, again, so what.
Well, for one thing it brings up, maybe, the odd elements of power and hypocrisy. Part of the reason that Putin claims to have invaded Ukraine has to do with the Orthodox Church.
Now, the largest of the Orthodox Churches is the Russian Orthodox Church. But it's a fundamental element of every single branch of Christianity, Will Smith's apparent views aside, that extramarital sex is a mortal sin, no exceptions (are you listening to that Will?). If Putin has, and maybe he hasn't, fathered three children with Kabaeva, he's acting oddly for a man whose has cited Orthodoxy even as recently as a couple of weeks ago.
Which assumes that he has been acting badly in this area, which maybe he hasn't been. Maybe he and Kabaeva, who was a Muslim but who has converted to Christianity, are actually married. We might very well not know, and we do know that while Orthodoxy frowns on divorce, it allows it under some circumstances.
Or maybe Putin is like some monarchs of old who felt that their positions of power gave them some sort of personal pass in this area. Even Czar Nicholas II, who lived an exemplary married life, and who has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, had a mistress when he was young.
Or maybe Putin is just as Orthodox as his position as a would be Czar requires him to be. It is known that his mother was a devout Orthodox Christian. Putin observes Russian Orthodox Holy Days, so maybe he is an observant member, although former advisor Sergei Pugacheve claims he is not.
At any rate, Kabaeva is a convert, and maybe she's straightened out. Should she be deported from Switzerland?
Well, at first blush that seems silly and cruel. It's not as if she invaded Ukraine, and her children certainly didn't.
On the other hand, such is the fickle fate of courtesans, if that's what she is, or the spouses of monarchs, if we want to assume a marital union. Marie Antoinette didn't retire to Paris, after all.
Choices do have implications.
Blows In Defense of Honor?
Speaking of spouses, and ones with a bit of an odd relationship to each other, the news this past week has been filled with the story of Will Smith striking a blow upon Chris Rock, in defense of the honor of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
While everyone now knows the story, in spite of the low level of Oscar ceremony viewing, what occurred is this. Rock, who has a sort of rough sense of humor, but who is funny, made fun of Mrs. Smith's baldness, which is due to a medical condition. In this era of intentionally bald women, I don't know that female baldness is the big deal it once was, but it is a medical condition in her case and making fun of somebody's medical condition is rude, no doubt about it.
Having said that, the joke wasn't really all that aggressive, and related her condition to the movie G. I. Jane, which I havne't seen and I'm not going to. FWIW, that movie featured Demi Moore as a woman going through Navy SEAL training, and she had a shaved head.
Anyhow, Smith laughed, but Mrs. Smith cringed. Then, in reaction, Will Smith went up and violently struck Rock, who reeled from the blow. Rock actually recovered his humor, at first, quickly, making a joke of it, but it then ended up in a yelling match between the two, with Rock on the defensive.
Frankly, Smith was lucky. The slap was in the nature of what is sometimes called a "sucker punch", in that it was unexpected. Lots of men in other situations would have hit back, which Rock did not do, to his credit.
There was actually an ovation for Smith's violence at the time, although some were horrified immediately. Denzel Washington took Smith aside. Washington is the son of a Pentecostal minister, and is quite religious, warning Smith that at a person's height is when the Devil comes for them. Smith later, after winning an Oscar, gave a teary speech in which he apologized, but not to Rock (who has been silent on the matter), attributing his actions to having just appeared in The King about the father of the Williams tennis sisters. Mr. Williams condemned the violence later. At any rate, he went on about how he had been influenced by the role and felt God was calling him to protect those he loved at this stage in his life.
Well, to be blunt, he ought to get his own icky house in order in that case, assuming that he hasn't. If he has, given his public declarations on the topic, he ought to clear that situation up.
Smith was raised in a Christian household, but he's actually attended therapy in order to overcome its influences so that marital infidelity, introduced by Jada Pickett Smith to some degree, and in an unapologetic fashion, can flow along in his marriage. Neither of them has been faithful to the other, and it's an "open" marriage, and publicly so. Smith felt guilty about that at first, which apparently didn't stop him, but with counselling he was able to overcome a central feature of being married and a central tenant of his Christian faith.
What that means in terms of his current faith, I don't know, but there isn't any monotheistic religion that looks up infidelity kindly. Apostolic Christianity certainly holds it to be a mortal sin, and the tenants of any other Christian religion does as well, in so far as I know. Even those few monotheistic religions that allow polygamy don't look on infidelity kindly, and the entire "open marriage" thing is an example of the modern disease of thinking every standard of the past doesn't really apply to us as we're so modern, even though they do, and our transgression in that regard have led to untold misery.
None of which means that you can't defend the honor of somebody who isn't really that honorable in general, but this application of The Old Law is really interesting. It's the sort of thing that led to fisticuffs and even duels over the honor of women at some times. An interesting revival of a standard that once was widespread, probably still is, but hasn't been publicly acknowledged for a while.
Of course, the thing about the Old Law is that it brings up the Old Standards. The Old Standards travel together, not by themselves.
The Reappearance of the Old Order
Speaking of the men, women, and old standards, something interesting has been constantly reported on regarding the war in Ukraine, and with admiration by the press.
And what that is, is the that at the borders, most of the refugees are women and children, as "their men have returned to fight".
And nobody thinks that odd or unusual.
It's a roaring example of our Eleventh Rule of Human Behavior, and it's not the only one.
In the Russo Ukrainian tragedy, the Ukrainian men are fighting, and fighting heroically. Women are being heroic as well, taking their children where they can and fleeing, and suffering enormously. The tragic photograph of the pregnant woman being carried on a structure, whom we know lost her baby and died herself as the result of a Russian strike, will likely go down as the most famous photograph of the war.
The old order roaring back.
Now, some Ukrainian women are bearing arms. The other day, a young woman (very young, probably a teen) was interviewed in a village where she was serving as a Ukrainian militiaman. And she isn't the only example. Be that as it may, however, this is a male fight for the most part. Some women will fight in it, as wars involving partisan action have always included.
So far nobody has really remarked, however, how remarkable this really is, in our modern world where we pretend the distinction between men and women in relation to combat doesn't really exist. Not only does it exist, it's very evident here. Almost everyone in the Ukrainian service, regular and irregular, is male. All the Russian troops are male. Almost all of the Ukrainian volunteers are male. Almost all (but not quite all, I saw a photo of an Italian female pilot the other day) of the foreign volunteers are male, probably well over 90%.
Indeed, that latter fact is telling. NATO's public press likes to feature photographs of striking braided women in uniform (it's common enough that it can't be a repeated coincidence, and frankly its slightly weird). Military press photos from the US military seem to omit the secret "look at the cute girl in the beret" feature that NATO photos do, and are genuinely simply more in the nature of a certain type of news photo, which is much more businesslike.
From NATO Twitter feed, typical US non cheesecake photo of a woman soldier, in this case of the Third Infantry Division.
But the concept in the West of women in combat is completely untested and the historical examples grossly exaggerated. The most commonly cited one is the Soviet example from World War Two, which was actually much more constrained than those who cite it would like to admit. Indeed, the Soviets apparently didn't regard it as hugely successful, as limited as it was, as after the war, they eliminated that role for their female citizens. The heir to the Red Army, the Russian Army, is pretty much a male deal, just like the Ukrainian Army. The same is true of the Israeli Army, in spite of the occasional citations to it.
Wars are a cultural test of massive proportions, and the old rules and orders tend to come roaring back during them.
Struggling with the New and Biological Order
Pity poor Judge Blackburn, caught in a confirmation hearing and presented with questions that pit her between the spirit of the age as seen by those who are supporting her and the spirit of the age from those who oppose them, with biology in the middle.
BLACKBURN: I’d love to get your opinion on that, and you can submit that. Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of men and women as male and female? JACKSON: Again, because I don’t know the case, I do not know how I’d interpret it. I’d need to read the whole thing. BLACKBURN: Ok. And can you provide a definition for the word “woman”? JACKSON: Can I provide a definition? BLACKBURN: Mmhm. JACKSON: No. I can’t. BLACKBURN: You can’t? JACKSON: Not in this context. I’m not a biologist. BLACKBURN: So, you believe the meaning of the word “woman” is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition? JACKSON: Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law and I decide. BLACKBURN: The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.
Okay, the way she's been quoted, we note, is unfair. She did not say that only a biologist could define what a woman is, but rather she stated, albeit you have to know the context, that the legal definition of a woman in the context of any one case had to be understood from the law of the case. The way that American law is currently interpreted, her answer is quite correct.
But that raises a larger, indeed, an existential, question.
Earlier this week (at the time that I was posting this) there was something called the International Day of Transgender Visibility. Anyone day in the year is now designated for something, and indeed typically a lot of somethings. March 31 was also, for example, Anesthesia Tech Day, Cesar Chavez Day, Dance Marathon Day, Eiffel Tower Day, International Hug a Medievalist Day, National Bunsen Burner Day, National Clams on the Half Shell Day, National Crayon Day, National Farm Workers Day National Prom Day, National She's Funny That Way, Tater Day,Transfer Day (U.S. Virgin Islands) and World Backup Day. Some of these are obviously a lot more serious than others. Transgender Visibility Day, however, got a shout out from the President, who issued a statement recognizing, in essence, their cause and taking a position on bills that have been in this area.
Wyoming was one of the states with such a bill, and like most such efforts in this conservative but not as conservative as people think state, it didn't go anywhere in our legislature. Our bill concerned transgendered athletes, restricting sport participation to your biologically assigned gender. Utah had a similar bill which passed, was vetoed by their Governor, and then overridden by their legislature following that so that it has become law. South Dakota passed one which was signed into law by their right wing controversial governor, Kristi Noem.
Just after all of that occurred, the reason for the entire debate in athletics came into sharp focus as a genetically male swimmer who has undergone medial gender reassignment won a NCAA Division 1 swimming championship in the 500 yard freestyle event.
This does bring into focus the biological nature of the debate, and the peculiar nature of contemporary western liberalism. The swimmer is genetically a man, and he's built, and frankly looks, like one. He has a powerful male swimmers build, although if he was competing as a man, he would not have taken the title. Competing as a woman, which he can only due to surgery and pharmaceuticals, he took the championship, thereby beating out the nearest genetically female swimmer.
In some very odd way, although nobody has noted it, this actually answers the question that the Billy Jean King v. Bobby Riggs match supposed was supposed to years ago. Taking away the circus like nature of that tennis event, males will in fact beat women at sports every time for the most part, save for sports that women are uniquely biologically adapted to. There will be exceptions, to be sure, but if sports were not separated by gender, women would be so rare in most sports as to fade to nonexistent, something nobody wants.
That's what not addressing this in some fashion, however, actually argues for. The unfairness could be eliminated in sports overnight by just not having male and female sports.
Which would operate a larger, and massive, societal unfairness to women.
All of which begs the larger question, which is the one used as a "gotcha" on Judge Jackson. That is, what is trangenderism.
Nobody really knows, no matter what people may wish to claim.
The basic nature of the problem is that it's based on individual perception. That is, people who are "transgendered" have a strong feeling that they should be members of the opposite sex in spite of their DNA. That doesn't make them a member of the opposite sex, however, it only makes them desire to be. They can't achieve that goal without surgery and ongoing pharmaceuticals.
But should surgery and pharmaceuticals be used to defeat our genes? It's clear in the case of addressing a defect that few people would object. I.e., if a person can correct something like bad eyesight, or a defective organ, and return to the established obvious baseline, that's one thing. But what about things that go beyond that and fundamentally alter us in some way.
This isn't the only example, but the curious thing about this that, so far, most of the things that fit into this category involve sex in some fashion. Cosmetic surgery exists to repair all sorts of things, from birth defects to the impact of terrible injuries, but the thing that receives the most attention, and advertising, is expanding the size of boobs. That's one such example, and it's purely cosmetic, but unquestionably related to one single thing, sex appeal. Surgery and drugs to defeat natural sex assignment goes far beyond that.
But to what extent should a person do this, or be allowed to do this, on perception alone, and even if they are fully allowed, to what extent does the rest of society have to recognize the medical defeat of nature in this instance? The following stories in this area don't provide much comfort for the individuals who embark on this path.
Topics Where You Least Expect Them
This entire debate came up not only the Supreme Court nomination hearings, but also on Twitter in the form of a ban on the Babylon Bee.
For those who aren't familiar with the Babylon Bee, it's a satire site that originally was light Christian satire. I.e., the authors of the Bee are Christians, but it poked fun at things that come up in Christian circles and debates.
Early on it was quite funny, but there's probably only so much satire you can really do in this area before it becomes truly offensive or just ceases being funny and, at least in my view, the latter is the case for the Bee. And recently the Bee has crossed over from its original focus into outright satire, something that's actually quite an art to accomplish well (the best online satire entity in my view is The Beaverton, a Canadian focused website).
The Bee was banned on Twitter for its satirical post naming U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Levine as "Man of the Year". It flew in the face of woke convention by referring to Levine, born in 1957 as Richard and gender reassigned in 2011, at which point changed names to Rachel, as "he".
The Bee's satire was really not very funny, which is perhpas because effective satire is difficult, or perhaps because it was genuinely an attack and was fairly mean spirited, no matter what your view is on this. It ended up getting the Bee banned from Twitter, which hasn't caused it to back down one bit. Indeed, they're seeking paying subscribers by noting that they've been attacked by liberals. And on April 1, April Foods Day, it doubled down by issuing a false apology, which was also quite mean spirited.
Adding to a show on how this is all part of a raging culture war, political figures of the stoke the fires class immediately picked up on it, including such figures as Lauren Boebert, all of which raises a distressing question that was raised without reference to this in another forum, which we'll get to in a moment.
Before we do, however, we'll note that a similiar, but much less pronounced, Twitter storm broke out on the left due to a statement by former Trump spokesman Kayleigh McEnany, who, of course, is now on Fox News, where they all seem to go. That follows here:
The anecdote (sic, antidote) to darkness is light. And the anecdote (sic, antidote) to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies.
This caused a mini tempest in Cybersphere, predictably, no doubt in part because it came up in such a truly odd venue and way. But this also taps into a bunch of stuff in the culture wars.
Right away, some organs on the left went on the extreme opposite. Salon, for example, ran an article that stated "Kayleigh McEnany wants more "Christian babies": It's an overt call-out to racist paranoia". Salon goes on to claim that McEnany is espousing the "great replacement" theory.
That statement only makes sense, if it makes sense at all, from an American or at least an ethnic European prospective and a left wing one at that. Indeed, the statement itself is paranoid. Those familiar with the history of the Church would realize that while Christianity spread extraordinarily rapidly following the Resurrection, one of its claims to truth (it was amazingly fast), the first adherents were of course Jewish and the faith was (and the Apostolic Christians remain) amazingly color-blind, with one of the most important early saints, St. Augustine of Hippo, being a North African of at least half Berber descent (his mother, St. Monica, was a Berber). In the United States, the "black church" remains one of the most culturally influential Christian denominations. Therefore, "lots of Christian babies" doesn't mean a "lot of white babies" by any means. Of course, to those at Salon, chances are that they view a Christian world view as somehow racist, as it isn't an Islamic or Buddhist, or whatever, worldview.
The interesting thing about this overall, however, is how it shows a change in views over time and context, which is part of what this blog tracks.
Traditionally, large families were regarded as a blessing from God, with this view going back into antiquity. Efforts to limit family size are in fact quite recently, having really come in during the early 20th Century. An interesting part of that, however, is that it was part of what was openly discussed as part of the "Battle of the Cradle" in cultural terms, with those discussing it not regarding themselves as racist.
This depended upon the person expressing the views, of course. But in European and European American upper classes it was common to express concern that foreign overseas, non-European, cultures would pose a threat to Europeans due to their perceived high birth rate (which probably wasn't, in reality, much higher at the time, if higher at all, than the European one). None other than Theodore Roosevelt, who was an advocate of Americanism, noted in correspondence that he "had done his duty" in this regard, by having several children.
Whatever a person thinks of that view, it's also the case that birth control of the Margaret Sanger type originally came in, as people like Sanger had noticed the dropping birth rates in the upper class and worried that higher birthrates among African Americans posed a societal threat. Part, but not all, of her early birth control efforts were focused on the hope of dropping the African American birthrate based on that obviously very racist reason.
In the over century long time that's passed since then, the same demographic that Roosevelt and Sanger were part of have had their birth rates drop below the replacement level by a fairly substantial margin. Whether McEnany was expressing a variant of that fear, I don't know, but I doubt it.
I don't know what branch of Christianity she hails from or is a member of. Looking her up, she went to a Catholic high school, but that is not a reliable indicator of a person's religion really, as many non-Catholics attend those. She always refers to herself as a "Christian", but not by denomination, which suggests that she's probably a Protestant, as Protestant's are more likely to self identify in that fashion. Catholics usually identify as Catholics, which is a common way members of a minority self identify. I.e., the US is a Protestant country culturally which is obvious if you are a Catholic, and for that reason Catholics tend to identify themselves as Catholics.
Depending upon the answer to this, there would be different paths which a person might go to dive deeper into her opinion, assuming that needs to be done, or that the opinion has any additional depth to it. Given as we're not really doing that, but looking at other things, as we're inclined to do, we'll keep going down the road a bit.
One way that people can interpret it is the way the Duggers have. I.e., they're part of a "quiver full" movement. I don't know a lot about that other than it emphasizes, apparently, having a lot of children. The other way, however, is more of the traditional Apostolic Christian way, which really doesn't, even though some Apostolic Christians families do not. It might be best expressed by the statements of Fr. Hugh Babour, who is a Catholic intellectual and who often has surprisingly nuanced views on topics that a person wouldn't expect. On this topic, however, Fr. Barbour just always states that the purpose of marriage is to welcome children "and raise them up for the worship of God".
Anyhow, it's interesting how in a century or less we've gone as a culture to a point where the left wing of the culture assumes that making a statement that would have been simply regarded as an expression of faith, that most people probably held, and which the left itself held in a fashion, has gone to being one that's assumed to be racist and can only be stated on the right.
Slow Ride
Okay, onto something else.
Recently, a "trucker's convoy" was in the news, but only briefly.
Their timing was remarkably bad.
The entire concept, of course, came up due to the Canadian "Freedom Convoy" which had its origins in some truck drivers protesting being made to be tested and quarantined if they were unvaccinated and crossed from the US into Canada. It ballooned into a general Canadian right wing protest over . . . well everything. Ultimately, it got so bad in Ottawa that the Canadian government had to declare a state of emergency.
This all got a lot of press.
Then somebody got the idea of doing an American variant.
Well, no sooner had they started putting that together than the Biden Administration essentially gave upon mask requirements for most things and all sorts of states, including Democratically run ones did too. There really wasn't anything left to protest, but nonetheless the convoy got rolling.
And then Putin attacked Ukraine.
At that point, nobody was interested in this story anymore. Indeed, it had become a complete anachronism, and at a point in time in the nation where there's a trucking shortage, and the price of fuel is going up, what the heck?
Well, in Washington D. C. a biker, who may have had enough, got his revenge.
A bicyclist, that is.
He got in front of the convoy, and in spite of the trucks honking their horns and the like, he just peddled along at a crawl, and they had to crawl too.
A video of his actions was viewed 4,200,000,000,000 times.
Yesterday we noted, and quoted for the first time in the long-running (seven months) first part of the 2022 series on the legislature, some bills of interest.
Well, maybe not all of interest to everyone.
One that will be in the press a fair amount is SF 50, a Senate File, but which also has some House sponsors. That bill is:
AN ACT relating to school sports; prohibiting biological males from athletic teams and sports designated for females in public schools; establishing related causes of action and protections for individuals and educational institutions; requiring rulemaking; and providing for effective dates.
It is sponsored by:
Senator(s) Schuler, French, Salazar and Steinmetz and Representative(s) Gray, Haroldson and Jennings
Only Gray commented.
This is an interesting bill in that it addresses a socially hot topic, that being men who have had surgery and take chemicals to affect a female appearance.
Now, we'll be frank. We pretty strictly apply biology to things. All things. And part of this is that men and women are very different, including very physically different. We've stated previously:
Part of the way we're very different concerns physical strength.
The social movement, and that's what it is, that comports to the recent Western concept that a person's Weltanschauung is governed by their own personal perceptions, and therefore each person has their own personal reality, is a falsehood. This isn't related to matters of sex and gender alone by any means (indeed a few years ago it was, oddly, briefly discussed a lot in the context of "race", which is also a social construct). But as we're a very wealthy society and therefore have lots and lots of time to contemplate sex, our society does that a lot.
This is, I'd note, sort of a symbol and a symptom of too much societal wealth. The other is food. Americans in particular sit around pondering food constantly even though virtually nobody is starving, and we likewise are constantly pondering what we term "diets", which are often self imagined odd food rituals. Sex has become much the same.
Anyhow, as part of all of this we've moved to the "self realization" concept which holds that no matter what your DNA may hold, you can be the opposite gender. Medicine and our understanding of chemicals has gotten good enough that, with constant intake of pharmaceuticals to suppress your natural ones, you can obtain the appearance of the opposite gender, somewhat, and you can have similes that somewhat replicate the opposites genitals, although they won't actually work in remotely the same fashion.
Which has led to the phenomenon of men who've obtained surgery and are on pharmaceuticals getting access to female sports.
If there's any plus to this at all, and it's hard to see where there is one, it ironically ends up proving the old point that, yes, men really are stronger and much more dominant in physical contests and endeavors than women. The entire US Military, dominated by the current social atmosphere and safe as we're in no wars, may be ignoring this, but women trying to compete against men who have entered their teams cannot.
Now, a safe way, presumably, to address this would be simply to abolish the male/female distinction in sports. After all, if we can put women in basic training (and reduce the standards to help them get through it), we can simply do away with gendered sports entirely.
Why not?
Well, the reason is that we know (just as we know with the military) that if we do that women will soon make up a fraction of the membership of any team sport they're in. There's still be, for example, female competitive swimmers, but how many? Probably most teams would be 90% male, at least.
Hence, the statute.
So it makes sense to take it up, right?
Well, not so fast.
First of all this isn't a problem in Wyoming yet.
Secondly, this may be a self eliminating problem.
Long term, it probably is. The current movement we're addressing is probably a feature of a historical wealth bubble that shows signs of ending. While not really a good thing, in the larger sense, there's good reason to believe that a society that spends a lot of time contemplating its bits and bites will be refocused by economics, and hopefully only economics. It's happened before, in different contexts.
Secondly, there's also reason to believe that part of the feature of our times is a rising if grasping lurch back towards standards, and part of that may be the discovery that nature actually applies to us and that there is a human nature.
None of which says anything about the individuals who have this as a genuinely strong interior desire. That's another topic, and we'll touch on it briefly.
And this is a budget session.
That's relevant, as bills aren't supposed to deal with anything other than budgets unless there's some sort of bonafide emergency going on, and there isn't here on this topic. Given that this will take a super majority to get introduce, what the heck is up with this?
Well, I wonder somewhat if it isn't what Tim Stubson noted in another context the other day.
The whole sorry process shows that the majority of the Central Committee are not primarily concerned with improving public education. Instead, their priority is what every political hack’s priority is; feed the outrage machine, stoke fear and generate donations.
The legislator who commented is one of the most vocal populists in the legislature, and after Trump's defeat spent some time down in the Arizona circus that showed, in the end, that Trump lost by a wider margin there than had been previously believed. He was a candidate for the House until Harriet Hageman concentrated support in the My Honor Is Loyalty campaign that she's' running. He was a confederate of Anthony Bouchard, who is curiously absent as a supporter of this bill, who is still running and who ended up having harsh words for Gray after he started running.
Now, I don't know what any of these legislators reasons were for introducing this bill during a budget session, and that would include Gray. I also don't know anything about the real world legislative process. Maybe a bill needs to be floated and die in a session before it gets picked up and passed in another, in the real world. But I do know that many of these social bills are drafted by organizations and that they don't always comport with a state's own laws. Last session one such bill was introduced to try to give the legislature a veto, through a special committee, over the state Supreme Court. That foreign bill even included its own special oath, not the ones that legislators actually take in Wyoming. Essentially, in the guise of the "real' Constitution, it was a legislative coup enabling act.
It didn't get anywhere, but in these tense times, it seems every session there are some bills that seem to serve to "feed the outrage machine" and "stoke fear".
When the drafters of Wyoming's constitution penned it out, and that's in fact what they did, they thought that so little really occurred in the real world that the heavy lifting could be done every other year. On off years, the task was a budget.
This seems to be widely disregarded now. Some of the disregard is hard to figure.
Finally, it turns out the body that governs high school sports already has an existing policy on this and doesn't feel it needs one. It's been quiet about this, but there was testimony from one of its representatives at the hearing on this bill, and they don't feel they need a statute. What the policy says I don't know, but the organization's quiet approach, which avoids making a spectacle out of a difficult situation for those involved, is to be admired. They want a chance to let their policy to continue to work, and having gotten there first, they probably ought to be given just that chance.
A German friend of mine recently lost his job on a German horse farm when it sold. So he resumed his prior occupation as a game warden in a high risk region of Africa.
My reaction was envy. So was my son's. My wife's, on the other hand, was something akin to horror and sympathy.
More proof, as if any was needed, that man and women do not think alike, not matter what the coffee drinkers in the faculty lounge might think.
This news story regards, as anyone paying attention knows, a story which purported that male Marines (and most Marines are male) were acquiring nude photos of female Marines, most of whom are young, single, women in good physical condition, and "sharing" them.
This shouldn't be a surprise at the same time the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue is on the stands. It features mostly nude young women in good physical condition and is viewed mostly by men, for money. And that's celebrated.
Yes, what the men sharing photos of the female Marines is doing is immoral, and maybe illegal. But what those buying Sports Illustrated are doing is also immoral, if legal.
Anyhow, I've already written about that sorry tale, and have a different focus from what I note here.
On one of the subjects of the photos, it turns out that she is not a Marine, which doesn't make it any better. Anyhow, a news story reports:
While he was away training in California, she sent him lewd photos on SnapChat in private, thinking they would never resurface. Just a few months later, her life would be turned upside.
XXXX says her 25-year old daughter had no idea her former boyfriend saved and shared screenshots of the photos she had sent him while they were together. The pair eventually broke up, but a few months later on Valentine's Day a friend of YYYYY's, who's also a Marine, told her he saw photos of her posted in a secret Facebook group called 'Marines United.'
What do we make of that?
Well, she's a cretin. And he's a creep.
I know that's really harsh, but frankly, in an era in which the complaints allegedly are that this demeans women, maybe there is a point at which you can say, yes the "boyfriend" who did this is a cad, and a really bad person, but the girl who did this was sharing something she shouldn't have been, and in more than one way, probably. This isn't a just deserts argument so much as a warning. People who would decry traditional morality ought to expect that the suspension of it results in the suspension of a lot of additionally morality.
This was pointed out, apparently, by a somewhat controversial site that caters to Marines and which has not been kind, apparently, the recent social experimentation in the Marine Corps, in a rather blunt fashion. Tip Of The Spear, that I'm not familiar with I'd note, commented:
“On the female side of the apparent issue women post risque pictures of
themselves or send nudes to other people, they then complain about being
harassed. On the male side of the apparent issue, men are collective
and sharing nudes and risque pictures like they’re baseball cards and
are stupid enough to leave comments in public view promoting stupidity
and harassment,” the statement said. “Both sides are equally guilty but
in different ways. Guys stop thinking with your d— and girls stop
metaphorically burning down cities for attention.”
From a news article (can't remember where I saw it). But that is pretty much on the mark.
On the young woman noted above, some hometown newspaper got hold of her mother and interviewed her. Her comments were as follows.
YYYYY's father is a retired Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps. XXXX says this is not the Corps her daughter was raised to know.
"They were raised with this male figure who is a Marine who they very
rarely heard curse, they never saw him be disrespectful, they saw him
take care of business and take care of his home," said McGinnis. "This
is the image of Marines they have in their head. This is the image YYYYY has in her head of how a Marine should be, especially a
non-commissioned officer. Honor and integrity is what the girls were
raised with. This has her rethinking the way she views the world."
Well that's all nice and charming but it's also bull if meant to suggest it reflects the whole.
No, I'm not saying every Marine is a lech by any means. I was never a Marine, but I served with plenty of discharged former Marines while a Guardsmen, and I can say that they varied in morals and temperament like any group of men do. At least two of the men I knew who had been combat Marines were very religious men and likely always had been. One former Marine Corps officer I dimly know is a Catholic Priest now. A couple former Marines I know, both also highly religious, are lawyers whom I've never heard say a cross word. So I'm not saying that they all behave like this. All of this would be true of men I knew in the Army as well. But frankly, I'd also be less than candid if I didn't say that the many men who stayed on high moral ground did so in an environment that was less conducive to it than most others. Indeed, they tended to be admired for that, as otherwise all the vices that boys have, and I do mean boys, are accentuated by the fact that its a largely male environment and without the supervision of older people, male and female, like otherwise exists in society, a fact which is actually secretly missed by most servicemen. This has always been the case and is frankly generally worse in a peacetime army than in a wartime one when the service population base is wider. Indeed, even Kipling famously noted this in a stanza of his poem Tommy:
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you,
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
All of this is not said to excuse the conduct. But its again said to emphasize a point that is seemingly lost in modern American society. These societies are largely male as being a soldier mostly appeals to men for deep reasons of evolutionary biology. Efforts to recruit more women and to incorporate them in combat units are contrary to this basic fact and even damage these units to the extent that they require changes in them away from their real purpose. That purpose is a deadly one and it means the men in the units are trained to do something that people are otherwise taught is deeply immoral. We can expect them to exhibit behavior that's at least as good as that in college dorms, which is also often not all that good, but we're not going to get it. Indeed, at least one famous commander of World War Two noted for his profanity noted this as long ago as the that, although I'll not repeat the quote. Some experiments fail, which is why they're experiments, and that failure needs to be heeded.
Beyond this, there's a lesson that has to do with traditional standards and expectations society wide. . . and Tip Of the Spear likely summarized the tip of that lesson about as well as anyone.
Which means, perhaps, that I shouldn't publish it at all. If I do, it means I've overcome my reluctance to do so and my better sense
From the edifice of NCHS in Casper Wyoming: Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government
and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall
forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed
towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from
them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty,
they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful
wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity,
shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to
them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them. They'd probably take their clothes off in Denver for the distress comments in that first sentence. My goodness.
Which doesn't mean, that, every now and then, a rant my be in order.
Emily Davidson, dead. She was killed when she stepped into the path of a horse owned by King George V at the Epsom Derby. While her act was ill advised, she didn't loose her life so brainless twits could parade around topless in Denver. Get a clue.
Denver, it's reported, participated in Denver Go Topless Day on August 29, proving that the Big Weedy is just as dense as it seems. What used to be the Hideous Blight on the Plains has truly become the Stoned Hideous Overgrown Blight on the Plains, tempered perhaps by a warmish climate that allows the supposed snow capitol of the Rockies to bring out hills of another type for male viewing enjoyment combined with overblown deluded declarations of gender equality being achieved by an annual surrender to combined delusion and lust.
M'eh.
I should note here that it should be fairly obvious from the get go, if anyone reads my prior comments regarding Denver that I don't like the city. That should probably be taken into account, and its really rather obvious. I think its a big, overgrown, city and that common sense seems to be largely suspended there, particularly recently. So, I guess, perhaps my comments should be taken with a grain of salt.
Denver, before it was a complete loss.
And this from a person, I'd note, who has strong connection with Denver. My grandmother on my father's side spent much of her formative years there, and met my grandfather there. My father was born there, as were at least one of my aunts. One of my cousins lives there having returned, in a way, to our ancestral metropolis. My great grandparents on my father's side moved down into the Hideous Blight after leaving Leadville, where my grandmother was born and where they'd spent much of their married life.
Yes, my connections to Colorado are much deeper than most Coloradans. So I come by my disappointment with the city honestly.
And I like some things about it. I like the Colorado Rockies.
Go Topless Day ostensibly promotes gender equality. It doesn't. What it does do is provide an opportunity for men to ogle women without having to be secretive about it or turning on their computers in their apartments. Get real.
As a person with a daughter, I'm frankly angry that dimwits are hurting the image of women this way. They're dolts, and they need a dope slap.
The feminist twits who back this sort of thing apparently have absolutely no clue whatsoever how men work. Want men to treat women equally and put personal appearance into the equation? Don't undress them for goodness sake, that does the polar opposite. How freaking stupid are you people, really, if you believe that? And I don't know that many of you really do. Indeed, I think some are just out for a libertine exercise in exhibitionism, and this is the sorry pathetic excuse used to do it. Others, I think are engaged in a radical hatred of our very natures and go to such extremes in an attempt to deny them. And yet others I think are so mired in the dead propaganda of a bygone era that, like old Communist on May Day, they drag out the old, old issues as if they are relevant. Let's burn the bras again. Huzzah.
Whatever.
But more than that, really, there's some sort of pagan naturalistic element to this, and I think people who engage in it very well know that. Young women who do this may say one thing, but on another level, they're crying out to men "look at my boobs and want me". They wont' admit that, but they are. And that's reducing them to an animalistic level that we routinely declare we wish to avoid.
That society tolerates it rather than shames people for such exhibitionism is shameful in and of itself. Shame on us all.
No matter what feminist may think, undressing women, particularly young women, totally sexualizes them. Totally. Men showing up at these things, unless they are as gay as a millennia is long, are going to experience lust. Yes, they are. Frankly, probably at least 70% of the reason that any man shows up is so that he can look at the boobs. And that doesn't even take into account the impact of the Internet, which has become a vast sea of pornography with only islands of real content here and there. In a world in which a person can't look at YouTube video on anything without, sooner or later, some suggestion coming up that you should see a boob related video of some sort, individuals, or rather women, who think that showing their boobs in public isn't rank exhibitionism and titillation are out to lunch, in a major way. So far out to lunch, they may have retired to lunch forever. Their images won't, however, as whatever they thought they were doing, those images will now be memorialized on the net and in computer downloads everywhere, with those downloads not going into the hard drives of ardent feminists. No, not at all.
This is due to a natural attracting, and the natural way men work. This has always been, the case.
What hasn't always been the case, at least for the last 1,600 years or so, is that women were reduced to objects in this fashion for men's enjoyment, and then to be discarded so freely.
"You've come a long way baby!" declared the Virginia Slims cigarette ad, marked to women, in the 1970s. You sure have. All the way back to year 400. Equalization. . . emancipation, and right back to objectification.
Thomas Wolfe said "you can't go home again and stay there". Hmm.
Men like boobs as it causes a sexual response in them, and this is the case in absolutely every culture there is. Even cultures where the temperature is blistering hot and therefore women have traditionally suspended the wearing of tops (none of which, I"d note, is particularly marked by gender equality) will find that the men are checking out the boobs. Yes, they are. Women have apparently become so dense to this that they don't believe it, but back in the men's hut, the conversation is "wow, have you seen the rack on that one?"
Nature sparks the interest because nature's interest is that it put some of those men and women together and they create little people. Nature doesn't give a whit about concepts of shirtless equality. Nature does want the young men taking interest in the young women, and not solely in an intellectual way. Nature doesn't maintain that you're reading the topless crowd for the articles. Nature demands that men look at the tits and pursue them. Human intellect is supposed to temper that, morality is supposed to inform it, but neither stops it.
Evidence of this might in part be provided by the fact that in the 18th and early 19th Centuries European men, who came from a culture that at that time was very heavily endowed with a concept of racial and religious superiority, and which abhorred the genetic mixing of the races, did not sustain those barriers in the presence of topless women. The lure proved too great. While little discussed, it's well known that Protestant British missionaries, who believed that the Anglo Saxon Race was the absolute pinnacle of human creation, ended up marrying African women pretty darned frequently. Sent to Christianize and civilize them, and charged with a world view in which the British Race was the world civilizer and equal to none, they found themselves defeated by female appearances at a high rate.
Likewise, the sailors of the HMS Bounty are frequently noted as having rebelled against the cruel oppression of Captain Bligh, but in reality the lure of Polynesian women proved a huge element of it, and not just for the ranker, but even for the officers in at least once case. Lead by an officer in mutiny, they turned right back to grab their topless Polynesian girlfriends and took off for a remote island.
Did they say, at any point, "you know, now endowed with a full realization that men and women are equal in ever sense and wishing to live in an egalitarian society we're going to cast off the chains of servitude and go into freedom"? Not hardly. They basically said, to some degree, let's go back to the babes and take off.
Not nearly as noble as people might wish to believe, but let's be real.
Indeed, a lot of history is just that basic and juvenile. The entire Helen of Troy thing makes prefect sense if none of the principal actors is out of their teens. . . which a lot of them probably were not.
Not nearly as noble as people might wish to believe, but let's be real.
It's a complicated matter, but genetics and the related sciences have long established that men respond to visual ques and this forms an attraction for them with women, and more than an attraction as well. Hips, Breasts, and obvious female forms, do not exist for no reason. Indeed, there isn't anything in a human anatomy that is or was there by accident. We may live in an era of decreasing testosterone (we do) but all of this remains the case.
Which has always been a challenge for women. And which provides the notable historical fact that women have only received real equality where the Christian influence was very heavy. Christianity, right from the onset, was the only real force in the world that treated women equally with men. Ironically, the Christian law and Christian influenced laws that feminist have sought to toss off were the very ones that protected them. No fault divorce? Don't forget that it was only the Christian prohibition on divorce (retained now, really, only in the Catholic church) that protected women from simply being dumped. No fault has returned the dumping era in full force, and women, and children, are the worse off for it. Laws that required couples "cohabitating" to marry protected women and children, not men. But that's been forgotten. Social views that looked down on premarital sex, in the end, protected women from being left when pregnant and inconvenient, but this has been forgotten, leaving women the worse off for it, in spades.
In smarter eras in the Western World, the desire to put women on an equal footing with men therefore didn't involve stripping them down so that the men could look at them. It involved the opposite. The Suffragette era, and the 1920s that immediately followed, are remarkable in that serious women affected clothing that was female, but which tended to replicate the appearance of male business clothing. That is, just as the gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s sought to look respectable by dressing respectably, women of that same era did the same thing. And they were successful at doing it. Modern feminist might look to the women of the 60s and 70s as the ones who they admire, but they ought to really be looking at the women of the 10s, 20s, and 30s who plowed a lot more ground and came a lot further. They didn't do it nearly nude either.
Suffragette, age 19. A true feminist.
Which is why women are really loosing ground today. And no pants suit wearing President is going to change that simply by getting elected, as she almost certainly will be. This isn't a comment on Hillary Clinton, no not by any means. No, it's a comment about the women parading topless, and women like Kate Upton.
Which oddly gets to me to another aspect of this topic.
I go to Denver a lot. I'd rather not, as I do not like Denver (obviously), but I do. Just a few weeks ago I was down in Denver for depositions. I've been to Denver a great deal this year.
While I was there, I had some down time that allowed me to grab a bagel sandwich in some shop on 16th Street whose name I've forgotten, but which is near where I was working. Denver has a lot of local oddball newspapers for some reason, beyond the serious Denver Post, and as you'd probably expect, some were there for reading. It always has. Being alone in the shop at the time, I grabbed one and sat down.
Now, on this occasion, the news story entailed what is a sad story (and I mean that) about a local Denver girl who had just been photographed sans stop in Wax Tracks, the funky downtown records store. I have no idea why they allowed that, but people were complaining about it. And I agree that their complaints were legitimate.
The odd thing about the complaints, however, is how Neanderthal it is for the store to allow this to occur, and I agree it is. The story is downright funky, but this is just flat out wrong. It's all the more wrong as at least based on the (clothed) photo of the girl in question, she facially looks younger than the 21 years she was claimed to be. Or, perhaps, I may be so far past 21 years old that 21 year olds look pretty young to me. But I don't know, I think I might be right, in which case the perpetrator of this moral crime has compounded it by appearing to really creepy instincts.
Isn't enough of this enough?
Is the world not debased enough?
Isn't anyone worried for her?
Rather than allowing this sort of really Neanderthal conduct to continue, and indeed actually bolstering it so that there's no societal restriction on this sort of moral sewer at all, shouldn't we be going the other way?
To add a bit to that, and to admittedly change the topic a bit, but maybe not as much of it as it at first seems, and admitting that part of it is likely may age, I can't help but worry about a kid who shows up in photos of that type in the environment of Denver. Flooded with weed, and prostituting her image, where does that go? I can't think it goes very badly for everyone involved, her in particularly, the photographer that perpetuates this moral crime, and the viewers who leer over her wherever that stuff shows up. It's awful, and very bad. I suppose she may use whatever little money she was paid for this for her college tuition, but I doubt it. It in town awash with drugs, and in a culture that no longer has any restraints, my fear is that she gets used in a very bad way. Where are her parents, and what are they doing? Can they do anything. I guess a person can say a prayer for her and those like her. The whole thing is truly pathetic.
Sojourner Truth. Radical. Brave. And not acting like a brainless tramp.
And in an environment that's awash with dope, making it all the worse.
Now as every one surely knows, unless they've been living in a cavern within a cave, and hiding in a corner of that, Colorado has legalized marijuana. There's been a lot of commentary everywhere about this. And a lot of the commentary really misses the point.
There's a common thread in these stories about how marijuana has been "good" for Colorado. Well, maybe, but it hasn't been good for Coloradans, or the drifters who floated in there, at least by my observation. Indeed, while I tended to be of the view that the law shouldn't worry about marijuana before, even though I don't approve of its use (and I think most of the "medicinal" excuses people give for using it are a crock), seeing it first hand has really and strongly changed my mind.
Some of the ill effects of the drug I was aware of before, mostly by having been exposed to people who had become addicted to it. To some degree, they may have been cognizant of the problems it caused, them, and to others, not. The degree to which they became listless and lazy in some instances was notable. The addictive nature of it was obvious, and probably most notable to me when a former soldier of mine from the Guard stopped me on the street, after he'd gotten out, and asked me for help to get him off it. Now, at 22 or so years old and a college student, there wasn't much that I could do. That an older fellow, in his 30s by that time, would ask for help, because I guess I'd been his sergeant, made an impression.
Well, Denver has really made an impression.
And not a good one.
Since weed became quasi legal, and then fully legal in Denver, a giant social experiment has been conducted on its streets and the results are pretty easy to see. They're overrun, downtown, with listless dirty addicts begging, often quite openly, for money for marijuana. No job, no prospects, no motivation, just a craving for the stuff. Not pleasant.
The first time I really ran across it was just after or just before, I can't quite recall which, it was legalized fully and there was some sort of dopers gathering in Denver. Now, admittedly, a convention of dope fans may present a skewed image of the stuff, or not. But present an image, it certainly did.
I could describe it, but I think the best way to describe what I saw on that occasions, and subsequent ones, it to describe singular people.
On that occasion, the person who made the biggest impression was a girl sitting on the corner, back to traffic. She was probably about 20, and had once been fairly pretty. Now she was dirty in that funky way that only the really ills, or the really stoned, get. Not that honest sort of dirty that oilfield workers, for example, have. No, dirty in a diseased way, probably something we note because in an earlier era our natures told us to watch out when we encountered it.
She was glassy eyed and had a sign begging for money. On her lap was a Husky puppy. The puppy was cute.
I almost gave her money, but would have extracted a deal that I got the puppy. That isn't very Christian of me, and I didn't do it, but money for drugs wasn't going to help her any, maybe somebody could have helped the dog. But then, in her condition, I suspect, the dog was truly her only real friend.
Since that time situations like this have been really common. I've heard panhandlers yell for money. I've seen seen other glassy eyed dressed in bizarre mixes of discarded clothes rambling in begging appeals. They're addicts. Marijuana is all they want.
"Radar plot depicting the data presented in Nutt, David, Leslie A King,
William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore. "Development of a rational scale to
assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse" The Lancet 2007;
369:1047-1053. PMID:17382831. For more information, see image.
It contains not only the physical harm and dependence data like the
aforementioned image, but also the mean social harm of each drug. This
image was produced with the python plotting library matplotlib"
Now, I know, I'll hear the argument that "well, those are the exceptions to the rule" and "it's no more addictive than booze". Well, those are hardly good arguments.
First of all, at least based on my exposure to it, its far from the exception.
Now, I'm sure there are occasional users of marijuana that suffer no ill affects, maybe. But then this is the case with any drug of any type, so its not much of an argument. The real question is whether it has a demonstrative ill impact on a significant percentage of the users. It clearly does.
Now, right away, the argument will be made that "well it isn't as bad as alcohol". That's a pathetic argument.
First of all, according to some studies, it is in fact "worse than alcohol" is some real ways. The study printed above, in chart form, for example, would have it as causing less physical harm, a little less social harm, and causing a little more dependence. That's hardly a sterling endorsement. And that assumes that this is correct. It probably has caused less social harm and less noted psychical harm, so far, as its' been widely illegal. As it becomes increasingly legal we will likely be surprised to find, oh my, it causes harm.
Indeed, we're already learning that a bit. A recent study shows that relatively little use amongst minors, including teenagers, causes permanent alteration in the brain. Not good. And I suspect that the impacts from smoking it will likely duplicate much of the non cancerous impacts of smoking tobacco, none of which are very good. Indeed, people tend to associate smoking tobacco's risks only with cancer, but in reality, there's a lot of other cardio vascular and respiratory damage that it causes. I can't see a good reason why this would be different for marijuana.
Additionally, in regards to the oft made comparison to alcohol, it's worth remembering that the best evidence suggests that human beings have been consuming alcohol for so long that they have a genetic adaptation to it, varying by human population. This has been addressed here before, but the human tolerance for the poison that is alcohol is likely related to the fact that it was once safer to consume it than water. But that doesn't make it safe. The point is that we've been consuming alcohol now for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands of years, and we still can't really handle all of its ill and evil impacts.
If we can't really handle something that's been widely legal for maybe 200,000 years, what makes us think we're going to be any better at this?
I don't think so.
And what is going on, on a large level, that we seem to need to be numbed so much?
Alcohol, as noted, has been with us forever. Marijuana has not doubt been around for some time, but not as long as an intoxicant, and certainly not in such a widespread manner. But it isn't just these. We have made real progress in tamping down some really dangerous drugs that were getting widespread circulation, but at the same time we seem to be in a full scale effort to numb ourselves as much as possible. We still have booze (but not anywhere near at the consumption rate it was once at, in spite of what some may think). But we are also numbing ourselves in all sorts of other ways.
Indeed, the pharmaceutical level of mind alternation is at an all time high. Thousands of people have to take medication just to make it through their day, mentally. And news came this past week of a new psychological ailment based on an addiction to computerized technology. That is, people so deeply into the fantasy world provided by the Internet that they cannot escape it.
Part of that quite frankly circles back to what we started with above. Amongst the hugely addicted, we are told, are thousands, more men than women, who are addicted to Internet pornography. They can't control it and sit around consuming it in mass quantities. Now that the barrier of shame that existed if you had to purchase it, something harkening back to our natural instincts that this is wrong, is removed, they can't control themselves. This is similar, fwiw, to the impacts that result when the barriers have been removed on other areas of related conduct that have long been prescribed by tradition, law and religion.
So severe is this latter new problem, we're told, that there are now an appreciable number of young men who have so destroyed their natural responses that even in their 20s they have to resort to Viagra when acting in the real world.
And we are also given the news, not a surprise really, by the tremendously brave Elizabeth Smart that her abductor acted in part due to pornography, acting out on her what he was viewing there. Smart, as people will recall, was the Salt Lake teenager (at the time) who was abducted and repeatedly assaulted by a delusional insane man. That individual's insanity certainly cannot be discounted, but when the element of pornography is added into the story it gives us all the more reason to be alarmed.
Alarmed for girls like the Denver "model" mentioned above.
And alarmed at a society in which a gathering of women essentially offers the same live and in person in a public area, and no doubt memorialized in thousands of digital images.
Which leads me to the war.
Eh?
Well, stay with me.
We're in a war, whether we like it or not, with a variant of Islam that retains a very, very primitive view of the world and men and women's role in it. Hardly any of us would agree with the social aspects of our opponents movement, but in opposing it, we actually have to have a point.
We don't have much of one.
Which is why I will say, form time to time, that we could lose the war.
We could, truly, simply because we're fighting for. . . well what is it? The right to wear pants that are too tight? The right for men to self identify as gerbils? What was it?
Okay, I know what our core values are, and so do you, but how often does anyone actually think on those core values and where they come from? Not very often. But our opponents do.
Indeed, endowed with a strong sense of right, wrong, and the order of the world, even if we don't agree with it, our opponents have been remarkably successful in recruiting simply by using our libertine example as a recruiting too. And, part of that it might be noted, has been a distressing success rate with Europeans, including European women.
When we think of Islamic extremist groups in Europe, or the US, we tend to think that they're all radicalized Syrians, basically. But that's very far from true. Some of them are, but others are radicalized first generation Muslims in Europe, and more than a few have been Europeans with no Middle Eastern heritage. What's going on here?
Well, agree with it or not, Islam stands for something. That's much less true of the modern West.
Now, I'm sure people will react that we stand for democracy, and liberty. But do we?
I think we do, but in such an unthinking way that our examples are pretty hollow, as we've forgotten what democracy and liberty, in the modern context, were supposed to mean. They are not the same as social rationalization and libertine.
But what is seemingly forgotten in our modern world is that a natural law that recognizes natural rights will care not a wit about an individual's sense of what rights would be, were he creating them. That's something else entirely. Indeed, that's so debased that its' basically sick.
Natural law credits nature, and if we're to understand what our entire concept of the world, government, liberty and the like is based on, we have to do the same. We have free will, but we are not free to will what we will. We cannot, that is, create 6 billion individual realities, there is only one. Everyone's window on that reality will be different, at least somewhat, but that doesn't mean that there's more than one reality, it means that we're too small to grasp the whole.
Anyhow, properly viewed, we believe in individual liberty as we believe that people are endowed with free will. But that means that people are at liberty to act in accordance with the nature and the natural law, but they can't change it. Nature, and its law, is bigger than we are, and unchanging.
That may seem not to fit in here (and this post is stunningly rambling, I'll admit) but it very much does. We have looked out at the rest of the world since 1776 and maintained that we are the champions of liberty and justice, as that's part of the natural law. We've sometimes done it badly, but we've done it well enough that we've been a major factor in bringing about a "liberal" sense of the world globally. We've certainly had the assistance of the the political and philosophical cultures of other European powers in that, even though not all of us have quite the same sense of these things as a national culture. I'd maintain, however, that down on the street level the overall concepts are not far removed from each other. That is, the ethos of 1798 may have been the spark of 1917, but at the same time, the average Frenchman, up until mid 20th Century, held views more akin to an Irish tenant farmer than a member of the Parisian mob.
Since 1917, however, that being the retuning and focusing of 1798, we've struggled with an opposing view that detests the concept of anything but an animalistic view of our species and which has been largely at war with nature. In more recent years even though its political expressions have failed, it philosophical ones have not, and since the turmoil of the late 1960s most western political thought, both at home and abroad, has been devoid of any deep meaning. Long habituated to our political culture, we have not noticed much until recently as it slipped its moorings and became fully devoid of a deep meaning, although many now do sense that, but others have noticed.
In the Islamic world some certainly have, and in a Europe that took in a lot of Muslim immigrants post World War Two, post Colonial retreat, and post Algerian defeat, many residing there, where assimilation is poor, undoubtedly have. In the years following 1968 a Europe that had grasped that its political and cultural outlook was fully Christian in origin now doesn't know what it even is. It's for "fairness" and "human rights", but it doesn't know what those concepts are grounded in. We aren't doing all that much better, although we are doing better, which is frankly why our enemies view us somewhat differently.
For a people who retain a sense of a deep purpose, a larger culture that is grounded on nothing more than "if it feels good, do it", comes across as abhorrent, because it truly is abhorrent. That it is abhorrent provides the basis for young Europeans, particularly European women, crossing over into the minority culture. It's notable that more than a few of these women have been Scandinavian or British, as these areas are where the fall is amongst the most expressed.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they're right, and we're wrong, overall. I'm not urging that we all become radical Muslims and salute the black flag. Not hardly. Rather, I'm urging that we take a deep look at the deep things.
And that would mean recognizing that "if we feel good, do it", not only is a moronic philosophy, it's contrary to nature, its contrary to nature's law, and its extremely destructive. We need, apparently, to get back to where we started from and do some serious thinking.
Okay, so now I've made this long, rambling cri de coeur. So what is my point, really?
Well, here it is.
We've really gone off the rails recently. We've probably been going off of them for some time, but we're off them now.
As a society we've forgotten there are two genders. And we even have forgotten why the dimorphism in the genders exists. The most deluded of us now thinks that we can change genders, or ignore them all together.
And we now dislike the world that we live in so much that changing genders or getting stoned out of our minds seems like a better idea that facing reality.
Well, we probably better look back, to nature.
That doesn't mean becoming a Cro Magnon, but it does mean becoming a rational, thinking, human.
And rational thinking humans don't parade their daughters, sisters, and wives around to be gawked at. And they don't tolerate the photographic prostitution of them either. And they don't ignore it when others do that.
Nor do they bet numbed out of their skulls, or encourage others to do the same.
