Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 46th Edition. Fatigue.

September 3, 2023.

U.S. Rep. Cory Mills, R-Florida, and articles of impeachment, and issue/culture fatigue

Apparently, Rep. Mills has nothing to actually do.  Perhaps somebody can find something for him, so he has real problems to work on.

I can't help but note that District Attorney Willis in Georgia made a suggestion of that type to Representative Jim Jordan, expressing what is undoubtedly a widely held view that people are really tired of Congress acting like a bunch of children all the time.  

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:

Dread and the Synod on Synodality.

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 44 min ago
• 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
• Updated 2 min ago
• 0

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.

Last Edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVIII. Library withdrawals.

Angst. A Then and Now Analysis

I don't know that anyone has ever attempted a history of stress and anxiety, and if they have, it might be tough to do and therefore questionable in the first place.

Indeed, it might in some ways be impossible, in part because the nature of stress and anxiety and related conditions have been perceived differently in different eras, if noticed at all.  In the 18th Century the Melancholic personality, which we'd regard as a Depressive one, was celebrated as a romantic condition as it was perceived that such people simply felt everything too deeply, an observation that was perhaps not entirely inaccurate.  Shakespeare made Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane, the subject of his famous play of no later than 1602.  It's a justifiably famous play, but in recent years its hard not to find the character of Hamlet a bit too mopey, and the character of Ophelia as oddly undeveloped.  

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, 1870.

King Henry VI slipped into such a deep funk, perhaps caused by the monumental strain of being a monarch in an era when somebody was always looking to depose you from inside the country or attack you from without, that he slipped into severe mental illness episodes starting in 1453 and he was deposed in 1461 (and murdered shortly thereafter).  While he attempted to lead on occasion, for much of that period, he was completely incapacitated by his condition.

King Henry VI. While Sheakespeare's Hamlet may have been a depressed fictional prince, King Henry VI was a real one, which lead to periods of complete incapacity and ultimate his death.

Genetics and stress may have pushed King Henry VI over the edge, but it's not too hard to find other examples of lesser figures who similarly suffered.  "Soldier's Heart" was identified as a condition that afflicted combat veterans during the Civil War, which means that it must have existed in prior conflicts as well, as the combat soldier of the American Civil War wasn't really all that different than the combat soldier of the American Revolution or the English Civil War.  Certainly by the end of the Great War Shell Shock was well identified as a psychological condition, from which some afflicted never recovered.

Australian first aid station, World War One.

Less dramatic but just as well noted, the condition described as a "nervous breakdown" was well attested to from at least the early 20th Century up through its third quarter.  The term "nervous breakdown" was once widely used as a medical term but now no longer is, although its still used as a non medical one.  It's generally regarded as a period fo itnense anxiety, stress and depression (hmmm. . .just what we're talking about here) leading to a period of incapacitation.  While the term is no longer used, the condtion described still occurs, so its still something, sort of, at least.  The term has been used to describe periods of mental incapacitation in such famous varied people as Marilyn Monroe to Kanye West.

Indeed, one of the oddities of nervous breakdowns is that while they were hardly limited (or more particularly are hardly limited) to the famous, at one time quite a few well to do people reportedly had them, which routinely lead them taking "the cure", which was usually a very long vacation.  We'll get to that later on, but that's oddly modern in some ways.

On nervous conditions not being limited to the famous, a close friend of mine once related how her grandfather, a railroad worker with a large family, had a nervous breakdown over the birth of her mother, as he was realtively advanced in eyars at the time (60s?).  Having had a large family already, he just couldn't deal with the stress of an added child late in life.  Closer to home, it's family lore that my mother's father suffered from something like a nervous breakdown when young and as a result was sent for "the cure" in Hawaii. Whatever was the case, it's clear that he was a high strung fellow in lifelong poor health and he certainly suffered from high anxiety, a condition that lead him to drink quite a bit until he suddenly one day simply quit drinking entirely.  As my grandmother's late in life poor health also resulted in her being unable to, shall we say, engage in marital duties that was lost to him as well and yet he was, late in life, pretty much universally cheerful, which says something about his personality and perhaps provides a lesson in this overall thread.

Given all of this above, there'd be real reason to doubt that stress and anxiety are really on the rise. And yet it is reported that in recent decades they are, and there does seem to be good reason to believe that stress and anxiety, let's call it Angst, are on the rise.  Indeed, mental health professionals commonly report it so, and we see all sorts of societal reactions, most probably wholly ineffective, but a few that are likely on to something, being floated here and there.

So what's going on here?

We'll, we aren't licensed to really opine, but that's never stopped us before, so we'll add our thoughts about what is going on to cause this modern plague here in this thread.  Before we do, however, we'll note that we sort of touched on this before, here in this thread:

A Western World Modern Crisis: Suicide

Indeed, that thread directly deals with this topic and is worth revisiting.  And shoot, it's less than a year old as well.

Indeed, that thread noted much of what we're noting here, even though our reason for posting this one, a series of recent news articles, isn't directly the same.  Our earlier item, anyhow, noted the following:

The first one was a headline which noted that Americans are dying of suicide and alcoholism at all time record highs.

U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began

Alcoholism, if that's correct, would be amazing, and I'd at least somewhat question that figure as the alcoholic rates before Prohibition were stunning.  But the suicide one deserves some attention, and an increasing rate of alcoholism also does.

Of course, we have to be aware that statistics are only relevant in the context of the period they address, and this one only addresses a fairly compact period of time.  The USA Today article noted:

The number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide in 2017 hit the highest level since federal data collection started in 1999, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by two public health nonprofits.

The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America's Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.

Deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000, a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.

Anyhow, let's start with something obvious.  And in doing so, we'll link in a few things here that we've noted before.

Let's start with our Third Law of Behavior:

Holscher's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth.  He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you."  You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger.  He wants out.  He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.

It's really no different with human beings.  We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time.  Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage.  Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Holscher's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers.  Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.

That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well.  I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case.  A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly.  Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.

This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women.  Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a  mammal.  Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats.  But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees.  Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.

That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood.  If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one.  Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it.  So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there.  That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that.  It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.

The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them.  Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts.  But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen.  Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden.  But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become.  We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world.  In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.

Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.

In short, you may have forgotten nature, but nature hasn't forgotten you.

Here's something we noted earlier on this topic.

There's a seeming epidemic of suicide in the Western World.  In at least one area of the East, Japan, suicide has been at blistering levels for decades.

This is not true, however, of all societies everywhere.  Most specifically, it isn't true of those areas of the world that remain more rural than the West, and frankly more agrarian, and more authentically religious.  And by religious, I mean in the real sense, not the vague meaningless "spiritual but not religious" sense that Western "moderns" sometimes profess or in the Western Hollywood Buddhist sense.**

Our species has been around for a really long time.  It'll turn out, I'm confident, that as a species we've been around a lot longer than we now believe we were. But we have only lived the way most of us do now for a very, very, brief time.  For almost our entire history as a species we were nomadic.  Following that, we were agrarians for a long time.  We've become what we are not, urbanized, only very briefly and we've become urbanized in our current massive way only very, very recently.

In fact, nature is giving moderns the dope slap.  You weren't made to live in a giant city of millions working in an office of thousands for a company of thousands with a rootless career. But that's what we've come around to and what we celebrate.  No, nature figures you ought to be out in sticks, maybe the veld, or the steppes, or in short nature, living a natural life and nature isn't interested in any of your wacky diets of the moment, vegan, essential oils, baloney.  Kill a deer and eat is what nature figures, and that doesn't take 40 hours every week to accomplish.

Put another way, Great Thunberg, age 16, just reported that her recent fame pulled out of a year long depression.  She's 16 years old

No doubt, you figure, her intense angst over the environment is causing this depression?

No, it's probably her moronic diet and deeply unnatural lifestyle.

Just fifty years ago most Swedes, which is what Thunberg is, were farmers or fishermen.  They're famous for being dour, but that was a product of their combined think resources and the harsh brand of Evangelical Lutheranism that came to dominate in Scandinavia in the late 19th Century. Strict adherence to the Evangelical Lutheran Church has greatly waned as the Swedes became wealthy (like lots of people, the Swedes found the Gospels inconvenient when they had money and the pill), but in another way it lingers on in a dour view of life, now added to through the messed up concept that one diet or another will extend your life forever, the more unnatural it is the better.

Now, I don't really mean to pick on the 16 year old directly as I figure her stupid diet and her being used in the manner she is, no matter what you think of the cause, isn't her fault or even really doing.  Left to their own devices and a chance to run their own households a sizable minority of 16 year olds would make bad decisions.  No, the point is that now that we've lost contact with nature in a direct form, the entire Western World is making bad choices.

This blog has, obviously, focused on the past and the past of a century ago.  Let's not fall into the illusion that everything in the past was perfect.  That's far from true.  But let's also not pretend that evolutionary biology has skipped us. We're not really made to do what we're doing, in the examples of most people.

And, to take it out further, in the very modern world, the intense devotion to money and material goods has unhinged us.

The post World War Two world has been vastly rich.  When the free market economy nations, which of course were the democratic nations, by and large, of the post war era triumphed over Communism in the Cold War, that process of wealth ramped up even more than it had.  Capitalist like to point out, and quite rightly, that capitalism has lifted huge swatches of the globe out of poverty.  Indeed, again only fifty or so years ago, the majority of human beings once lived in poverty.  And as we've noted here before, prior to World War Two most Americans were middle class, but lower middle class on the edge of poverty constantly, and even when things were good.

Economically, therefore, we're now far, far better off, globally, than every before. But at the same time the real question now is whether we can handle that wealth.  The evidence isn't good.  We've clearly become obsessed with it and we've become extremely narcissistic about it.  We live in hideous conditions, in real terms, for wealth, we enter career occupations solely due to it, we live in cities because of it, and we avoid children and dump spouses due to it.  More recently, a lot of younger people avoid marriage entirely and simply live in a series of sad shacking ups, which implies the ability to leave somebody who nature has bonded, through their conduct, at the drop of a dollar bill.

Nature doesn't like that.  Not any of it.

Indeed, as we earlier noted:

Well so what, you may ask.  Haven't sociologist determined that agrarian life was miserable and people moved to the cities to be super happy?

No, well not any more anyhow.

There was at one time a running line of sociological thought, propaganda really, that basically ran just that way.  But more recent research has determined that nomadic people today, who are admittedly very few in number, are the happiest people on earth hands down.  Next to them, people who are basically agrarian in nature fit that category.  The least happy people on Earth are those who live in highly urbanized societies.  And as we now know Western suicide is beginning to become a plague, meaning we're joining the highly urbanized Japanese in that tragic classification.

Depression and anxiety are nature's wake up calls.  Nature is giving us a dope slap.

As we earlier put it:

It really doesn't require all that much thought.  But we won't think about it as it runs entirely contrary to the concept of "progress" and the intellectual dictatorship of progressivism we are now in.

Let's break it down even further.

We're a really smart animal, but an animal none the less, and we were evolved to live out in the wilds.  That's where, it truly turns out, we are the happiest.  In our native state we hunted and gathered, which more accurately means we hunted, gathered and existed in subsistence nomadic agriculture.  We at some point evolved the latter into a more fixed form, but often missed in that is that early agriculture was an adjustment of the existing pattern, not an abolishment of it.  In hunter gatherer societies, the men principally engaged in hunting and the women in gathering and both in some farming, quite often.  In agrarian societies, even fairly modern ones, the men engaged in the farming, the women supported the farming, but the men were almost always still hunters.  If you look at a society that was agrarian fairly recently, such as Finland or Norway,  you'll find that hunting and fishing is always common.  Even in Ireland, which was agrarian to a large extent up until the Celtic Tiger changed that and began to change Ireland to its ultimate misery, that was more true than we might suppose, with fishing, bird hunting and small game hunting common in a land that was otherwise obsessed with depriving the population of the means of rebelling in the same fashion which it had only recently against the English.

What are the features of such a life?

Close connection to nature is one thing.  Nature for such populations is everyday and immediate, not something that they encounter, probably in a sanitized form, on vacation somewhere.  Not the safe nature that people who pay to ride on a zip line in Costa Rica encounter either.

To add to this, one of the things contributing to our anxiety is forgetting the past, along with forgetting evolutionary biology, which gets us to this:

Holscher's Fourth Law of Behavior.  Old standards existed for a real reason.

Not every standards that used to apply to human behavior and institutions needs to be retained for all time, but it's a mistake to believe that they existed at whim.  There's trend, fashion, and fancy, and then there's long term standards.

From time to time, almost every society throws off a bunch of old standards.  When they do that, they usually declare them to have been irrelevant for all time, but they hardly ever are.  They were there for a reason.  Sometimes, they no longer apply, but that's because something deeply fundamental has changed.  Other times, the underlying reason keeps on keeping on and the reason for it tends to be rediscovered, slowly, as if its a new discovery.  People fail to think about the deep basis for standards, the really deep ones, at their behavior.  Again, that doesn't mean that some shouldn't be changed, or should never have come into existence, but even in those rare instances careful thought should be given to the matter so that the basic nature of the underlying error can be understood.

Out of combination of desperation, narcissism and wealth, the tail end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st have been marked by a dumping of old standards in celebration of what amounts to a new "Me Decade" on steroids.  It's been taken to the absurd level.

At almost any earlier time in history people who  lived well defined themselves by things outside themselves.  The now highly celebrated "Greatest Generation" is celebrated due to the imperfect and inaccurate memory of them as a class of men who left their homes, families and their lives, for the greater good of 1) their nation and 2) the world as a whole.  In other words, they're remembered as people who gave up something for everyone and not for themselves.

In contrast to that, we now have the absolute celebration not only of the individual, but the interior mind of the individual, no matter how poorly formed.  Wealth and the pill have given individuals in the Western World time to do not much other than feed their inclinations.  This has in recent years been focused on sex, one of the most trivial things imaginable to be obsessed on an existential level about, although this trend, in fairness, started as long ago as the during the influential period of Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud, unscientific weirdo.

Truth be known, if approached from a scientific prospective, and again from evolutionary biology,t he entire sex thing sorts out pretty easily.  There are two genders and only two.  Human beings are possessed of a high sex drive.  In a state of nature people pair up generally in their twenties and the resulting bond, while perhaps beset by the assaults of time and trials, is generally lifelong.

Humans are also a species that's best by lots of individual deviations many of which are destructive and cause us misery.  Eat too much you get fat and can die, which doesn't mean that certain people aren't super driven towards food.  Alcohol may have made the water safe but drink too much of it and you'll die.  You should sleep around eight hours every night but some people can't and that shortens their lives.  

Modern life contributes to all of that.  It would have been really hard to become a fat Cro Magnon. There probably weren't any.  You don't see any photographs of chubby Native Americans in Edward Curtis films, nor do you find any of chubby yeoman farmers in anyone's photographs, nor of obese 19th and early 20th Century cowboys.  But they had extremely active lives and they didn't eat a lot of process high fat, high sugar, food.  Likewise, there have been alcoholics for a long, long time, but chances are that the numbers in the Middle Ages, even when alcohol was hte normal drink for most, weren't that high.  Most yeoman farmers and Native Americans no doubt slept the whole  night through peacefully.  And so on.  And, no matter what their inclinations on an individual basis was, nobody went around demanding that they be identified by who they wanted to bed, or how many, or under what terms, at any time in human history right up until the 21st Century.

The fact that we make such demands now is a symptom of our misery, idleness and purposelessness.  The biographer of Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery was of the opinion that the Field Marshall was a homosexual, and indeed his son likewise had that opinion.  But they were also of the opinion that Montgomery, who was an extremely busy man, wasn't even aware of it if he was.  John Ford, the filmmaker, routinely fell in love with multiple actresses according to his biographer, but in spite of rumors that exist to the contrary, his biographer was of the opinion that while he fell deeply in love with some, he remained loyal to his wife Mary, and his Catholic faith, and deeply devoted to his craft. Roger Casement may have had very strong homosexual inclinations, or he may have been framed by British agents so that people believced that, but his defining characteristics were his dedication to humanitarian causes and Irish indpendence.

The point of all of this is something that Max Hastings, the famous British historian, noted at a speech he delivered to American university students following the release of his book on the Vietnam War.  When asked how students of the 1960s who opposed the war compared to students today, Hastings simply noted that he hoped current students would think about something that wasn't as trivial as sex.

My point is a little broader, however.  The absolutely manic focus on everyone self defining in every single way  is because that same 60s generation tore down the concept that the old standards meant anything. They very much did, and we keep trying to grope our way back to them. At the same time, society is also engaged in the absurd concept that everyone can self define what they are and who they are. They can't, as we're all members of the same species, and that actually defines most of what we are, and who we are.  The differences we otherwise see are very often extremely trivial and, beyond that, may simply be erroneous and inaccurate self assumptions based upon living in unnatural conditions without much to do.

Straying off of this a bit, another aspect of this is the manic emphasis on career.

There have always been "careers", but for much of human history most people occupied a fairly manual labor set of careers and the emphasis on career was limited to a few, and even then it was rarely expressed at the manic level things are now.

Now, you simply must have a career.  You must.  You won't be fulfilled if you don't have a career.

Well, we've long known that careers don't fulfill anyone.  And yet the lie continues on.  Indeed, not only does it continue, it's spread to where now women, who formerly weren't under the same pressure that they must have a career, are.  The great lie of female advancement is that men have let them into the fulfillment of careers.  In fact, due economic developments, they've been forced upon them.

As noted, careers have always been around, but the emphasis on careerism was not present in the same degree, except really among the upper economic classes, where oddly the truly wealthy were exempt from it.  Now, everyone is subject to the continually pressure of career success.

I've seen this among the young, but even among the old.  In some fields the career pressure has reached the point where people of retirement age are expected not to.  Indeed, I just oddly had a conversation with a lawyer (I'm not of retirement age) on this myself, in which they suggested that I should switch party emphasis in the law field and could have a "long career as a plaintiff's lawyer ahead" of me.  At my age, 56, I don't have a long anything ahead of me, but why would somebody even conceive of a person approaching 60 years of age as wanting to have decades of future hard work in front of them?  That's an odd thought, but not odd anymore in the legal field where people really aren't ever supposed to retire. That same view isn't unique to this field, however, but is common in business as well.

As part of all of this the old, and normal, focus of people on having "jobs" to support their families is gone.  Now people actually talk about their families or their spouses supporting their careers.   That's really messed up, and people know that at their core.

Then there's the news:

Holscher's Sixth Law of Behavior.  A lot of folks believe they live in the worst times ever even if they don't.Human historical memory is amazingly short.  As a result of that, people often think that they're enduring epic hardship and live in hideous times, even if they do not.Current times are a good example.  Many people believe the entire world is awash in a sea of massive violence such as the world has never known.  In actuality, things have never been so peaceful. Crime of all types is down all over the globe.  Warfare between sovereign states has almost disappeared.  Civil wars continue to rage on, but not at the level they once did.  Consider the 1930s and 1940s. For much of that time every major nation was engaged in a war so violent that destroying entire cities was regarded as okay.  Now, if we look at sovereign states  at war we'd find. . . well, only one example.  North and South Korea are in a legal state of war, and have been since 1950, but in which they don't shoot at each other.Or consider crime.  In the US, in spite of a recent horror, murder, the worst crime, is way, way, way down.  This doesn't seem to make the news, but its' the case.  For folks with long memories, you should be able to recall a time a couple of decades ago in your own neighborhoods where your town was much more violent, because it was.  But most people don't have memories that really stretch back that far.

Part of the reason we moderns are so stressed is that we have unparalleled access to information. 

The news media has existed for a long time, and indeed since the introduction of the wire service early in the 20th Century the ability to get up to date news daily has been very much there.

But what only became the case recently is the screaming immediacy of all news.  Fires in Australia, Ebola in Africa, all the way down to major car wrecks in distant cities and crime in places that we don't live come screaming through to us all the time.

We aren't really built to take that and it contributes to the idea that everything is a disaster, when in fact in spite of the bad things we have to contend with being bad, things really aren't as bad as they once were.

So what to do about all of this?

Well, there's plenty of advice, and much of it just leads to more stress.

One of the most pronounced characteristics of the current age is to find problems that are rooted in fairly recent changes in our societal behavior, and then suggest that we need to do something new to address them, when in fact what we might need to do is the one thing that never occurs to us. . . go back.

There's a widespread western belief that you can't go back.  But you most definitely can, and history has shown that again and again.  And even if we won't go back to a prior era completely (and we wouldn't want to), we can revive and apply those things from nature and our natures that were proven to work as they were part of nature and our natures.

That means, however, giving up a lot of narcissism, which has come to nearly define western values.  We aren't the center of everything.  It also means giving up the idea that you can have it all or that you even should.  You can't, you won't, and you shouldn't.

Slow down and get out there.  Try the old things that worked before espousing the new ones, which often don't.  Things existed, including standards and ways of life, for a reason.

New Years Resolutions For Other People (and maybe some for everyone) 2020.

In some years I've done a post entitled this, in other years not.

Usually its satirical, with some seriousness.  This past year, and perhaps its just my current perception, the year has been so odd and generally negative that it'd be impossible to do one that isn't negative.

Indeed, while I've never done this before in this thread, maybe this recent article by a Wyoming journalist simply sums things up better than any article here could do:

Resolve to Childish Rules

Published on December 30, 2019December 29, 2019  in Column/Range Writing

We'll give it a try anyway.

1.  For everyone.  

A.  Accept that "I feel it", "want it" or "desire it" doesn't make it anything other than an individual feeling, want or desire.

Your own particular desires of any kind don't rise to a level of a societal need that society needs to personally ratify.

They may not even be legitimate.  Just because you want something, no matter how deeply you feel it, doesn't mean its disordered.  Just because you want to eat all the cake, for example, doesn't give you a protected right to do so and it doesn't mean you really should, for a multiplicity of reasons.  And if you do eat it all, that doesn't mean that you have to demand everyone else accept that you ate it and agree that the problems its causing you aren't real problems.

B.  Consider The Fourth Law of Human Behavior.

In addition, the time has really come for everyone to reconsider our fourth rule of behavior and really ponder it, it is:

Not every standards that used to apply to human behavior and institutions needs to be retained for all time, but it's a mistake to believe that they existed at whim.  There's trend, fashion, and fancy, and then there's long term standards.

From time to time, almost every society throws off a bunch of old standards.  When they do that, they usually declare them to have been irrelevant for all time, but they hardly ever are.  They were there for a reason.  Sometimes, they no longer apply, but that's because something deeply fundamental has changed.  Other times, the underlying reason keeps on keeping on and the reason for it tends to be rediscovered, slowly, as if its a new discovery.  People fail to think about the deep basis for standards, the really deep ones, at their behavior.  Again, that doesn't mean that some shouldn't be changed, or should never have come into existence, but even in those rare instances careful thought should be given to the matter so that the basic nature of the underlying error can be understood.

Along these lines, it might be worth actually noting that a lot of the recent horrible behaviors of all types we have "discovered", we didn't. They've been horrible all along, but we started pretending they weren't and ended up bearing the consequences.

We had less of the "Me Too" movement in 2019 than we did in 2018, but it still provides a good example.  All the misbehavior violated an old, old law of societal conduct.  Much of the reason that it doesn't go away is that those noting the misbehavior and decrying it the violation an old, old law are busy violating other old, old laws, and don't want to stop.  You really can't  accept something as deeply wrong if you don't stop to ponder why it is, that its deeply wrong.

C.  Time to consider some evolutionary biology.

When I was young I was a geology student and, as a result, I was in that class of people who studied evolution in detail.  I know that there are those who don't accept evolution, but evolution is a natural fact and denying that doesn't make it less of a fact.

In keeping with that, we have our place in that picture and we're really busy denying that right now.  It's time to get over it.  This relates strongly to the item discussed in Paragraph B above, and there's another one of the laws of behavior governing it.  We'll set that item out here:

Holscher's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth.  He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you."  You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger.  He wants out.  He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.

It's really no different with human beings.  We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time.  Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage.  Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Holscher's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers.  Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.

That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well.  I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case.  A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly.  Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.

This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women.  Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a  mammal.  Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats.  But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees.  Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.

That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood.  If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one.  Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it.  So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there.  That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that.  It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.

The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them.  Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts.  But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen.  Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden.  But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become.  We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world.  In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.

Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.

I frankly don't know why it is that so many in our day and age can't accept this fact and believe instead that our realities are self described and self made. They aren't, any more than they are for a jackrabbit on the plains.

C.  Time for some Distributism

I've written about Distributism here a fair amount, but this year the need for a reassessment of economics is really evident.  On one had we have the Democrats embracing Social Democracy and all the vast cost and expenses associated with it, on the other we have a roaring economy which Republicans are telling us is the best for decades.  In the middle is everyone else with a vague feeling that things just aren't right.

They aren't right as not everything is about money.  Neither the "let's all move to cubicle jobs in Big City" view of the economy or the "Government will fund all the needs you can't fund yourself view" is making people satisfied.

Having something of their own, close to home, might.

2.  The Political Parties.

It's tempting to say "just stop it", but that's too flippant.

At any rate, however, the insanity of the two party system is now more evident than ever.  You'd think that with this being the case, a third party or fourth party or something would come along, but that's not going to happen rather obviously.

With that the fact of the matter, this polarity is too much for the country to endure long term.  It has to end.

In order to end it, however, some basic facts have to be accepted by both, and one is that the absurd level of name calling can't keep on keeping on and, moreover, whoever is in the Oval Office was put there through the process we have.  Eight years of Republicans asserting that President Obama was illegitimate have been followed by (now) three of the Democrats yelling that President Trump is illegitimate.  And it goes on down from there.

As party of the need for real change, party purity tests need to stop.  The Democrats are initiating this on a national level, informally, and locally the GOP has done this formally.  Parties aren't religions and there should be room within them, particularly in a two party system such as we seem to be captive to.

Finally, government can't solve everything.  The Democratic platform basically is that it can, and that's absurd. The GOP one isn't, but the thought there is that the economy solves everything, and that isn't correct either.

Having discussed politics, let's move to religion

3.  Confusion of Faith

I know that this is a topic that people aren't even supposed to discuss, save on Twitter and Facebook and I guess on Blogs, but this is a history blog, supposedly.

None the less, we've strayed into this topic a fair amount and so we're going to discuss it here.

A.  Pope Francis

I don't know what Pope Francis' overall theme on things is, but if we were to give him a grade on his overall Papacy so far, it'd be a C at best.  His vague comments, refusing to answer questions, and the like, are causing turmoil.

It's seemed lately that the Pope has an unfortunately Eurocentric view which is missing the real story of what's going on in Christianity in general and Catholism in particular, which is exploding in growth in the third world.  I get the concern over the Western World, but the sort of weak leadership we're seeing and suggestions that we're retreating in one way or another while leaving things vague isn't helping.

I don't know what he can do about it as it seems ingrained in his personality.  But a course correction seems in order.

B.  The German Cardinals

One group that needs the course correction is the German Cardinals who are practically acting as an independent body.  Somebody needs to point out to them the fact that their leadership hasn't been working and, moreover, the day in which people really listen to the Germans on about anything is over.  What African Cardinals gather and say is more important now.

C.  The Coffins and the Marshalls

Lest this seem exceedingly one sided, the Patrick Coffins and Dr. Taylor Marshalls of the world need to really re-assess their tone and what they're saying.  I don't think any new schism are on the horizon, particularly from the Rad Trads, but if there were to be, Coffin would have to at least pause and consider to what extent his comments pushed some in that direction.  Shows that come close to stating that the Pope may be illegitimate encourage schism as are shows that are blisteringly opposed to the current Pope.

You don't have to agree with a Pope, or a President. But that doesn't mean they're illegitimate.  A person has to work within the system if its a system they declare themselves to have faith in.

D.  The Irreligious Religious

Those of all faiths who proclaim to be faithful but then omit the tenants of their faiths need to knock it off.

This is particularly pronounced in Protestant Christianity, although it shows up in "liberal" Catholicism as well, at least in the United States. Boatloads of Christian churches proclaim themselves loyal to the Gospels, except where the Gospels address sex, for example. They say what they say and mean what they mean.  If you don't like it, that means you have something to work on, not that you just omit it.

4.  The Movie Industry

Stop it with the Marvel comic movies. They're stupid. Enough already.

I should note that I've typed out the start of a thread eons ago asking why movies have become so juvenile, but I've never finished it.  I should.

5. The Television Industry

Television is stupid, and one of its stupidest acts is an assumption that its to be on the cutting edge to race to the bottom in the depictions of human behavior that involve morality in any sense. We get it, television, you don't believe morality of any kind exist.  You are part of the problem (see above regarding the old standards).

Additionally, it's time to admit, Television, that graduates of the Harvard Lampoon aren't really funny.  Quit  hiring them as script writers for television and fire the ones you have.

6.  Colorado fishermen

Is there no place to fish in Colorado?  Look for one.

7. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit Posters

You are only heard, by and large, by a small limited audience.  Posting vitriol of one kind or another just feeds our polarization. Take the year off on that and post on some interest other than politics or your concept of social justice.  Posts on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook change nobody's minds on those topics whatsoever.

8.  Militarism.  Enough already.

A  person has to be really touch saying anything about this as they come across as not being a patriot or not supporting the military, or the like, but the United States needs to be at the point where it seriously reconsiders the nature and status of the military it created to deal with the Cold War.

From the countries earliest history, as colonies, up until 1947 when the Cold War started, the US based its defense on having a very small standing Army backed up by state militias, combined with a standing Navy.  The Navy developed into a global force first when the age of sail yielded to the age of steam at the turn of the prior century.  That made sense, as ships take years to build, last for years, and it isn't really possible to build a Navy from scratch during wartime, although we came pretty close to doing a bit of that during World War One and World War Two. 

Armies, however, we pretty much built by having a small professional Army, very small, backed up by state militias.  Early on, membership in the state militia was compulsory, but in later years it became voluntary.  If the war was a big war, like the Civil War, World War One or World War Two, we built a large citizen Army while the Regular Army and the militia, the National Guard in later years, held the line.  That's basically the way we fought the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War One, World War Two, and the Korean War.

The problem became that for much of the Cold War we were somewhere on the brink of a hot war a lot of the time.  Sometimes the Cold War broke out into hot wars, as in the examples of Korea and Vietnam, other times it just threatened to.  It's now known, unbeknownst to us, that the US and the USSR became very very close to to going to war by accident in the early 1980s, and its likely only the fact that the Soviet Union's aged leadership remained cautious about war due to their memories of the Second World War, even though they were pretty convinced that NATO was about to invade them.

The USSR is gone and the wars we're now in are much, much smaller than those of the Cold War were.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while definitely real wars, are minuscule compared to Vietnam and Korea.

The size of the military has very much decreased since the end of the Cold War, but it's still pretty darned big. The U.S. Army has 476,000 soldiers in it, with the National Guard adding an additional 343,000 and the Army Reserve another 199,000.  In 1990 when the Soviet Union folded up its tent, the Army had 750,000 men and the national Guard nearly that, combined with at least 400,000 in the Reserves. 

So the military is much smaller, but it has a lot of problems and those problems are highly concentrated in the bureaucratic culture that naturally came about as a result of the Cold War.  The pre World War Two U.S. Army lacked that to a significant degree as it was so small and had so much to do.  The bureaucracy now ingrained in the military is highly corporate and it hurts the nation's defense.  It's not surprising that the Marine Corps, the nation's smallest military branch, is the branch that is the most martial, if you will.  Even it, however, is restrained in its internal nature by an infection of social politics that has gotten into it.

In the post Vietnam War period the Army really suffered as its cohesion was destroyed by the war.  This was much less the case for the other branches of the service but they all suffered to some degree.  Ronald Reagan, however, put the Cold War service back on its feet in its final years and in a lot of ways the military we have today dates to that period.  Reagan deserves a lot of credit for what he did at that time, but the vestiges of it have become a problem.

One of the ways that's constantly exhibited is the absurd flood of money that enters the service's coffers on a continual basis that should't.  The Army has been working on a replacement for the lousy AR rifle platform for decades now when just about anyone who knows anything about service rifles well knows that adopting something in the 6.5x55 range with an action that's something like the G3s or the FALs is what is needed.  Floods of money, however, have gone into what nearly amounts to a permanent project that produces no results.  To make matters worse, nearly any small arm adopted by the infantry branch of the Army is rejected by the Marines, whose budgeting allows it to buy something else, which is absurd.  The Army and the Marine Corps can't even agree on what boots to buy, so they don't.

The most flagrant example of things being out of control is the recent creation of a United States Space Force, which was created last year in anticipation of a need to defend our interests in space.  This is flat out absurd.  Right now the Air Force is perfectly competent to do that, to the extent we need to.  And there isn't much of a need to.

The Space Force ends up becoming our eighth uniformed service, including the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA and the Public Health Service.  This excludes, of course, police branches of various government agencies of which there are now a plethora,  but which is a separate topic entirely.

We don't need a Space Force and never will.  If we ever need something like that, we have it handled right now.  And we also need less of a military in general and one that costs a lot, lot less.

That sounds pretty radical in this day and age, particularly with two wars still going on. But the service needs to be cut down to size now that the Cold War is over.  We could once again get by with an Army of 250,000 men backed up by a National Guard twice that size.  I won't opine on the size of the Air Force or the Navy, as I don't know enough about their war fighting needs to do so, but scaling back the cash register at this point is really necessary.

So, I guess, that's a 2020 budget resolution.


_______________________________________________________________________________

So what did we say on this before? Well, here's the prior editions:

New Year's Resolutions for Other People, 2015

New Year's Resolutions for Other People. 2016 Edition

New Years Resolutions For Other People, 2018

New Years' Resolutions for Other People. 2019 Edition