Worth listening to in its entirety.

I am tired of hearing from people who cannot point out Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala on a map telling us how to mitigate the millions seeking refuge.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Tuesday, June 27, 1944. Angelo Klonis or Thomas E. Underwood?

A famous photograph was taken of Saipan, which popularly is now claimed to be of Greek immigrant Angelo S. Klonis, was taken on this day, on Saipan.  

Or, maybe not.

First the Klonis claim, which was not advanced by Konis during his lifetime.

Painted Bricks: Evangelo's, Santa Fe New Mexico

Over on one of our other blogs, we posted this item:

Painted Bricks: Evangelo's, Santa Fe New Mexico:

Tavern sign for Evangelo's in Santa Fe, New Mexico, featuring the famous Life Magazine cover photograph of Angelo Klonis, the founder of the tavern. The late Mr. Klonis was a soldier during World War Two when this photograph of him ws taking by Life photographer Eugene Smith.  Konis, a Greek immigrant, opened this bar in his adopted home town in the late 1960s, at which time his identify as the soldier photographed by Smith was not widely known.

We also posted this on our blog Some Gave All.

There's some interesting things going on in this scene, that are worth at least noting.  For one thing, we have an iconic photograph of a U.S. soldier in World War Two, which is often mistaken for a photograph of a Marine given the helmet cover, appearing on the sign for a cocktail lounge in 2014.  Sort of unusual, but the fact that it was owned by the soldier depicted explains that.

Note also, however, the dove with the olive branch, the symbol of peace.  Interesting really.  Perhaps a reflection of the views of the founder, who was a Greek immigrant who located himself in Santa Fe, went to war and then  came back to his adopted home town.

All on a building that is in the local adobe style, which not all of the buildings in downtown Santa Fe actually were when built.

I don't know what all we can take away from this, but it sends some interesting messages, intentional or not, to the careful observer.

It's an interesting story, which I took at face value at the time.  I no longer do.

The problem is, it is supposedly known that Klonis, who didn't talk about his military service during his lifetime hardly at all, and who returned to Greece for a long period of time after the war, and came back during the 1960s, was supposedly also on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.  Advocates for this photograph being Klonis maintain that he must have been part of a secret Army unit, probably part of the OSS.

Hmmm . . . that doesn't pass the smell test, quite frankly.  Getting a soldier from Normandy to Saipan in just a few days would have been a monumental effort in 1944.  It wouldn't be easy now.  And while Saipan was an important strategic objective, it was just that. There's nothing that was so wildly consequential in Saipan that the War Department would have needed to transfer enlisted men from one front to another.  Moreover, the Army had specialized troops, Rangers, in the Pacific already.

I don't believe it.

Originally, the figure in the photo was identified as Marine Thomas Ellis Underwood.  The Klonis claim didn't come until many years later.

And I'm not the only one who doesn't believe it.

The Weary Warrior

First of all, the guy in that photograph is a Marine, not a soldier. The article explains this in detail, but the helmet cover alone makes that clear.  And there's quite a bit more.

More than anything, however, transferring a soldier from France to Saipan in 44?  No way.

The Klonis story, however, has really had legs, and It's expanded out to include all sorts of elements, including that Klonis had joined the Army then asked to switch to the Marines, but upon learning of the German murder of his family in Greece, he asked to fight in Europe.  Frankly, while the service did allow some switching around inside the service, for example from infantryman to paratrooper, the giant endeavor of the Second World War meant that regular enlisted men were sent where the service put them, not where they wanted to go as a special request.  Moreover, as noted, getting anyone from Europe to the Pacific in just a few days simply wasn't going to happen, and it simply wouldn't be needed.

As a final note, the photograph is probably not only Klonis, but Underwood, but it was likely actually taken in July, in spite of being attributed to this day.

The British took Cheux and Rauray and established a bridgehead across the Odon.

Fighting continued in Cherbourg even though the city had been surrendered.

U.S. Army captain observing the body of a German in Cherbourg who had killed three of the captain's troops.  Fighting continued on in Cherbourg after it had been surrendered due to the unwillingness of German diehards to quit.

The Red Army took Vitebsk and Petrozavodsk.  German 9th Army Commander Gen. Hans Jordan was relieved.

The Veterans' Preference Act was enacted, requiring the Federal Government to give preference to returning war veterans for employment.

Milan Hodža, 66, Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938, died in exile in the United States.

Last prior edition:

June 26, 1944. Cherbourg surrenders.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Army, Battle of Mogaung, British Army, Burma, Cherbourg France, Chindits, Dachau, German Wehrmacht, Operation Epsom, Operation Overlord, Operation Thursday, University of Wyoming, Wyoming

September has seen more views of this blog than at any time in its history.

It hit over 60,000 views this month. The Previous record was 55,954 views in February 2017.  The reason there was fairly obvious.  I had been tracking the daily progress of the Punitive Expedition, and the readership had increased steadily from the point in 2016 in which I started to do that.  

Prior to that, readership was about 3,800 views per month. Tracking the Punitive Expedition, however, caused a steady rise, one which was aided by my cross posting many entries, which I later learned I was not supposed to do, on Reddit's 100 Years Ago today sub.  Following the 100th anniversary of the withdrawal from Mexico, however, and my cessation of the cross posting, it declined by May 2017 to just under 10,000 views per month.  It rose again by December 2017 to just over 38,500 views per month, and then fell back down to about 7,800 by February 2018.  It's bounced around since then, but it basically drops to almost 5,000 views per month to up to around 10,000 views per month, normally.  A couple of times hit has spiked, however, to highs in a single month, even up to 38,000 views.

In May of this year it had over 40,000 views, and then dropped to just over 9,000 the following month.  In July, it was up to 12,000 views.  Then suddenly it began skyrocketing to achieve the current new high.

Why?  I don't really know.  Daily high posts show that some people are coming in for World War Two events, and events of 1923, and to follow the Russo Ukrainian War. But there is no single thread that people have really been engaged with.  The blog has now been viewed almost 1,250,000 times, which is quite a number, no doubt a fair number of times by repeat visitors.

If you are even one of the hits on that 1.25M, and most particularly if you are a repeat visitor, thank you for stopping in.  And if you posted one or more comments here, all the more thanks.

The Best Post of the Week of June 25, 2023

The best post of the week of June 25, 2023

We'd note, in posting this, that June 2023 had the second-highest readership tally of any month since February 2017 at which time we used to post a lot of threads to Reddit (which we learned we weren't supposed to do) and we were tracking the Punitive Expedition, which ended in February 1917.  We've hit this marks nearly this high since then twice, but only because there were suddenly days with high tallies. This was just steady readership.  Typically, we run around 500 readers per day, but recently it's been over 1,000 per day.

Thank you for reading, whether you just stop in once, or often. And please feel free to comment.

GMC New Design flatbed truck.

At war with nature.

Uprising In Russia? What just happened?

Welcome back to the Little Ice Age.

The 2024 Election, Part IV. The Difficult Questions With No Answers Offered.

Unwarranted nostalgia. Two instances, one which isn't.

Lex Anteinternet: Most of the time, the Supreme Court is highly predictable. The Independent State Legislature Theory bites the dust, as everyone knew it would.

Friday, June 28, 1923. Turkey's first election, Hi Power patent, Osage Murders in Oklahoma, Klan in Glenrock, Bert Cole accident.

Something to consider when you see a photo of that buff gal or guy . . .

The 2024 Election, Part V. Wooing the primary voters.

The Liz Cheney Maxim.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVI. Vulgar, Gross and Distressing. Are we seriously going to pick one of these guys?

The Post Insurrection. The Defendant. Part VI

Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part 6. Late Spring.

Wednesday, June 30, 1943. Forgotten battles in the Pacific.

Can't win for losing. Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action.

The Steer. 1942.

 Annual agricultural show at the state experimental farm at Presque Isle, Maine. Prizewinning "baby beef", raised by a daughter of a Farm Security Administration client.

The girl with the steer. Maybe we can't go home again, but you can sure see why we wish we could.

The Uncomfortable Homily.

The young pastor of one of the church's of the triparish gives homilies that are really hard to ignore.  Impossible, in fact.  They're very orthodox, but also almost guaranteed, quite frequently, to make every one in the parish squirm.  Indeed, so much so that I had decided not to post this at all, and then I started watching legislators who would raise a Christian flag make some, well morally debatable decisions, so I decided to revive it.

The four sins were:

1. Murder.

2. Failing to pay the servant his just wage.

3.  Sodomy 

4. Abusing immigrants.

He had these as the four sins "that really tick God off".

Probably the only one of these that doesn't make somebody upset is the first one.   It's pretty obvious that you shouldn't kill other people.

I'm going to dive into these a bit, save for murder, which probably causes people who stop in here to wonder, "when is he every going to get back to the point of this blog?";

Lex Anteinternet?

The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new.

What the heck is this blog about?

The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?

Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.

Well, I'm working on that too.

Blogging milestone.

This blog now has 1,001 comments.

Some of which are mine.

Some blogs have lots of comments all the time.  For a blog with 1,047,169 views,, and 9,886 posts it's not all that many.

It's clear that I've put up too many posts recently. . .

part of living in interesting times, but it makes the blog a mess.

Time to back off and bring this back, once again, to its original purpose.

Yes, thanks to Blogger, this now has a pretty screwed up appearance.

We'll fix it when we get a chance.

And worse yet, the easy editor pencil is gone, and I use that constantly.

Ugh.  Blogger.

Update.

Well, save or the edit pencil being mysteriously missing, which is something I use a lot and really like, we're not quite as screwed up as we were.

Why did the edit pencil disappear?

Also, we've had to put up a new photo on the header.  In the whole process, the old one evaporated, although I don't know that I don't like this one better actually.

1,000,000 Views

Around 6:00 a.m. on March 7, 2022, the blog went over 1,000,000 views.

In the overall context of world events, this is no big deal, but as a blog item, it ought to be noted.  Lots of blogs never reach that tally.

In context, that's 1,000,000 views in 13 years, so it took awhile to be sure.  Indeed, early on the views of things that were posted were quite low, to say the least.  Chances are, while I haven't checked it, some of those sixteen posts from 2009 still have really low viewer counts.  None of those posts are in the most viewed categories, in spite of being the oldest posts here, although the oldest post this one;

Lex Anteinternet?

received its very first comment this year.  That comment was such a non sequitur I remain uncertain whether it was a spam post or not, although I don't think so as its author didn't attempt to link it to anything else.

That first post, as I've noted here more than once, set out what this blog is supposed to be about, and what that was, was this:

The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?

Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.

That's still the purpose, but early on the posts were few and far between as I attempted to explore individual topics. What was transportation like a century ago? What was home heating like?  Things of that type, as well as observations.

All of that remains part of the purpose of the blog, indeed the main purpose really, but fairly early on it began to expand out from that into, well everything.  In that fashion, it became the successor to an earlier blog which had a lot of commentary in it, but which I shut down. That one didn't, however, share the historical exploration purpose that this one does.

The first foray, sort of, into commentary was this post here:

1920, law, and the Geology Museum

That came in 2009, but showing how slow the blog was at first, there weren't any posts at all in 2010.  Not one.

Things picked up again in 2011, with the first post being one called:

Some things don't change that much.

That post was simply a picture of my messy office desk, and office, which was arranged a bit differently than it is now. That was before my 100+ year old secretary desk came into my office, which means it was before my mother's desk, which is where that was before.

There were only 127 posts in that year, but that was the year the blog took a turn towards its current mix of topics, with some being fully contemporary.

In 2016 the blog started tracking the Punitive Expedition day by day, which was a real alteration of former practices.  It was, in other words, the Punitive Expedition in real time, a century removed. The original intent was just to track the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, but we kept on going.  When we got to the end of that, in early 2017, we were obviously into the history regarding the American entry into World War One, so we kept on through the war and the war's aftermath.  Only very recently did we stop day by day tracking of events exactly one century past, as we finally got past the nearly daily stories that linked back to the Great War.

When we were doing that, the blog received a huge boost in readership.  Then, some time in 2017, we started linking items into Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today subreddit, which we didn't know we were not supposed to do. That created a massive additional boost in readership.  When we quit doing that, after learning we weren't supposed to, readership stayed very high until World War One ended. Today, most days, it's down to around 200 to 300 views per day.

The Punitive Expedition and the Reddit links really changed the lineup on what had been the most popular entries here, which is worth noting.  Before that, there were a number of material item threads that were enduringly popular.  One was one on Brunton Compasses:

Brunton Compass

Another was on my old Filson briefcase:

The Filson

Those were both items I routinely used at the time, but oddly enough, they aren't now.  The Brunton is now fully retired in favor of a Garmin GPS.  That Filson bag finally completely blew out.

Peculiarly, a material item that's been hugely popular recently, and seems headed towards being one of the top ten this year, has been one on my old L. L. Bean boots from 2016, after the Punitive Expedition threads took off:

Munson Last Boots, or how I became a hipster and didn't even know it. And reflections what hipster affectations mean.

So obviously material item threads still have some interest.  

Indeed, one that went into the top ten early on and has stayed there is a 2014 one on hats.

Caps, Hats, Fashion and Perceptions of Decency and being Dressed.

That thread, however, is the only one to have survived in the top ranks after the Reddit experience. All of the other top ten posts were during the Reddit era, and their popularity must be explained by that. They displaced ones on Queen Elizabeth, and travel, for example, that were quite popular before, but below the 2,700 some views that it requires to get up into that group.  The one on the Somme has been viewed over 5,000 times.

This blog still serves its original purpose, and perhaps that's about to actually start being employed by me for that purpose.  At any rate, I hope the people who stopped in to view it 1,000,000 times have enjoyed it some, and perhaps learned a little.  They've contributed enjoyment and knowledge to me.

Page (and Blog) Updates for 2021

 

We've been really bad about updating the pages and features of this blog for one reason or another, but there have been a few recently, so we'll start off this thread by noting those.

One rather obvious thing is we reformatted the layout.  Now items appear on the left margin as well as the right.  The reason is that the items linked in have grown so large that they trail out beyond the posts, no matter what we do.  They still do, but not as severely.

We also culled a bunch of the linked in blogs on the right.  Some are just gone, mostly due to the links being dysfunctional, but many others now are down in the inactive blog list.  Some blogs just stop, and that's where the links to those are.

We also fixed some links that weren't working.  Turned out a few blogs linked in at the right actually update regularly, but their links were incorrect, so their content was being missed.

October 4, 2021

Hmmm. .  I really need to update the pages around here.  Indeed, I know that I've put up piles of posters on the main site, for one thing, I know that I need to add to the collections.

Well, anyhow, there is a new page added to the site:

The Killetarian Cookbook:  Cooking Wild Game.

This was just put up, and it doesn't have any recipes yet. As they're added, as with other pages, I'll update here.

Promise.

October 4, 2021, cont.

The Killetarian Cookbook:  Cooking Wild Game.

Added to.

October 7, 2021

Added to:  The Killetarian Cookbook:  Cooking Wild Game.

Antelope recipes.

December 1, 2021

Added to: They Were Lawyers.

Banastre Tarleton.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXII. Weary

Checking out.

I already posted this on another thread, but I'm seriously thinking of just stopping doing this, the blog that is, for a couple of weeks.

And I might not.  

Part of the reason for this is that I'm at a peak of disgust over certain things.  I'm really tired people of people being willfully blind and lying.  I posted a thread on our companion blog, Courthouses of the West, which touches on this a bit.

It's not  like this is a new thing in the world. . . but something about this era.

The Washington Post ran a Veteran's Day article on a guy who is a veteran who significantly helped get the 9/11 conspiracy theories rolling with a film for the gullible.  Even in the comments' section there were some who posted, even though the vet has recanted, who believe the theories principally because they want to. I'm sick of people being like that.

And there's a pile of people like that anymore, those willfully believing wild things.  I don't mean simply differences in opinion, but stuff that's demonstratively false that they're choosing to believe on just about any topic you can think of.

Something is really in the air right now, and it's hard to define what caused it.  Something needs to address it too. The problem is that once things get badly out of whack, getting them back in line seemingly requires something dramatic.

Or not.  I suppose if this blog demonstrates anything is that big weird events happen in which a lot of people are deluded by something, but then things seemingly straighten back out.  Let's hope and pray that occurs.

What I should do is work on my book.

An armed movie tragedy

When I first started this edition, the tragedy on the movie set of Rust had just occured.

Edward Peters

@canonlaw

·

22h

The reporting is instantly biased, of course. If something really fires real bullets, it’s a “gun” not a “prop”. Doesn’t matter what it’s intended USE was, it IS a gun. Heck, Baldwin actually used it at the time as a toy. That doesn’t make it a “toy gun”, it was a gun.

Fr. Joseph Krupp

@Joeinblack

·

12h

The tragedy is that a woman with a promising future is dead. The good news is, apparently her death is an excellent chance for us all to vomit our politics & opinions everywhere.

I think both of the comments above are quite right, and I don't think they're contrary to each other in any fashion.  That is, I don't think that Fr. Krupp's comment is aimed at comments such as that made by Mr. Peters. 

Fr. Krupp has a really good point, and it basically had occurred to me already.  I don't know that it's particularly unique to our times, but everyone who thinks they have a point to make will come out on Twitter and Facebook and the like with a series of comments, a lot of which will be really dumb.

Let's start with some obvious statements.

First of all, Mr. Baldwin did nothing that's morally blameworthy.  Somebody screwed up, for sure, but under the facts and circumstances as we know them, it wasn't him.  This is an awful tragedy, but its not one that you can put personal blame on the actor for.  It's purely an accident.  Indeed, it's at least the third such similar, but not identical, accident of a similar type of which I'm aware of in the movie industry, the first being the death of Jon-Eric Hexum back in the 80s, who was killed when the plastic from a blank round struck him on the temple, and the other being the death of Brandon Lee, who was killed when a portion of a previously shot live round, which was apparently stuck in the barrel, dislodged when a blank round was fired. 

And, of course, deaths on movie sets from other causes are hardly unknown.

Okay, so what happened.  

Well Baldwin was working on the filming of the movie Rust, which I'd not previously heard of, and I'd guess most of the readers here haven't either.  According to the Internet Moview Database, the film's is summarized as follows:

A 13 year-old boy, left to fend for himself and his younger brother following the death of their parents in 1880's Kansas, goes on the run with his long estranged grandfather after he's sentenced to hang for the accidental killing of a local rancher.

I have to say there's an element of strange irony at work here, in that the film is about an accidental killing.

Of note, Baldwin is a co-author of the screenplay and this appears to be very much a project that he's been involved with from its inception.

There apparently had been complaints during the filming by people working on it regarding safety, including the safety of the firearms used in it.  During filming, Baldwin was handed a "cold" firearm, likely a handgun, and it turned out to be loaded with live rounds.  Therefore, when the pistil discharged, it killed Halyna Hutchins, who was down muzzle of it.

So what can we learn, if anything, about this.

Maybe, quite frankly, nothing whatsoever.

Well, not quite that little.

One thing that we can learn is that the firearms weren't being properly handled.

Accidental deaths from firearms in the United States has declined remarkably over the years, and they're actually quite rare now.   In 2019 the total number of deaths from firearms was 39,707, of which a little over 14,000 were homicides.  In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, there were 19,300, which has been reported as a dramatic rise, but really basically isn't.  With a huge section of the population idle, at home, and out of work, we could have expected that.

Suicide accounted for 60% of deaths by firearm in 2019.  I don't know what it was in 2020, but looking at the figures, we'd expect it to have gone up some but it might not have much, if at all. Contrary to all the dire warnings, suicide rates went down 5% in 2020, which is also probably due to COVID 19.  Lots of people didn't have to go to their crappy jobs for much of that year and were likely happier at home.  The pandemic reportedly boosted the level of all sorts of other personal vice, but the much predicted wave of suicide just didn't happen.

Which says a lot about how people view their work.

While I don't have the statistics, accidental deaths from firearms has also really declined over the years.  We used to hear about "hunting accidents", and a few happen every year, but quite frankly hunters are likely more at risk driving to the game fields than in them.  Wyoming had one such accident this year, which was tragic, and frankly looking at it, it involved a lack of gun safety, but this is also pretty rare anymore.

Indeed, the US isn't anywhere near as violent as the news media would suggestion.  There were a little over 20,000 murders total in the US in 2020.  Interestingly, crime was overall down in the country (again, the pandemic. . . ) and violent crime went up in cities, but not in rural areas.

None of which seems to have been reported very well, but all of which is true.

Which gets me to the next thing.  

I truly don't grasp how this could have happened.  Most people who are really familiar with firearms check to see if they're loaded the second they're handed one, save perhaps in a store where they're new.  Most hunters compulsively check to see if their own arms are loaded once they get them out of the safe, and then they do it again once they put them away.  Even as a soldier, when handed a rifle, I checked to see if it was loaded, even though if it was in the arms room it shouldn't have been.

The other lesson is this.  As Ed Peters notes, these movie guns were real guns.  They were guns being used as props, not "prop guns".  There's obviously a large difference.

Which makes me wonder how many guns movie studios own.  Or maybe they don't own them, but rent them from a supplier.

In the wake of the terrible accident, this question is being asked:

Why are real guns still used on film sets? In wake of 'Rust' shooting, their future is in question

It's probably a legitimate question, although I hate to think what that might mean.  We already have the example of the absurd John Wick series, which I've watched as a guilty pleasure, glamorizing armed violence in a weird ballet like  way.  Yes, its completely absurd, but its an absurdity that very realistic CGI has given us.

And It's hard not to assume faked CGI violence becoming the norm doesn't make it all the more appealing to some people.

Something else on this, there have actually been meme's pop up making fun of Baldwin. That's sick.

Image

While we're on the Baldwin tragedy, we should add something about image.

It's no doubt copyrighted by the "armorer" from the movie set Hanna Gutierrez-Reed, age 24, has had a publicity photograph appear in articles in which she's posing in a sultry dreamy eyed manner with two revolvers crossed against her chest and leather bandoliers of ammunition.

There's no reason, I'd note, that a 24 year old couldn't do this job perfectly competently.  I was dutied as an armorer for a time in my National Guard unit before I went to basic training, and I was 18 years old at the time and perfectly competent to do it.  That's not the point.

The point is that this is really the wrong image.

First of all, every young woman in the movie industry doesn't have to look like she's auditioning for a photo spread in the now out of publication Playboy magazine.  And mixing firearm messages and sex messages is flat out weird.  Firearms in recent years have already had unfortunate associations made in magazines promoting the concept that just going about your daily business is as risky as delivering a message to the opposition in Damascus.  Not hardly.  And the introduction of sexy women in the same role that they used to play in tool catalogs (and maybe still do) has come about also.  The dough eyed look with guns . . . stop it.

An armorer, in my view, probably ought to look like a grumpy technician who doesn't bother to wash his clothes and who generally holds most of the world in contempt.

And that person shouldn't have youthful Goth photos that can show up in British tabloids.

It's Ain't All Black and White

I saw this post on Reddit about the recent Wyoming Special Legislative Session:

'Angry old white men nearly done wasting limited taxpayer resources to pointlessly yell at clouds . . . again'

To start off with, I've been pretty critical of the Special Session, mostly as it appeared at first that it was going to enact legislation that was Unconstitutional due to the Supremacy Clause through votes that violated the legislators oaths of office.  As it was, however, I was pleasantly surprised when the legislature didn't enact something unconstitutional

I'll note, however, that the concept that the legislature unilaterally of its own isolated volition put itself into session is wrong. Governor Gordon got it rolling in the first place when he indicated he was going to do it, and then never acted on it.  And the right-wing populist members of the legislature, which turns out to be a minority, was acting in compliance with the views of its constituents, whom are also probably a minority.  There's a lesson in that.

But what is really miffing me is the now constant insertion by the Woke of the term "white" into anything they deem lacking.  At this point I wouldn't be surprised to see people angry over traffic accidents noting that the drivers were "white".

Not every member of the Wyoming legislature is white.  Granted, the minority members are largely Democrats, but there are members of minorities in the legislature. And they aren't all "men" either.  Nor are they all old. There's some surprisingly young members, including one of the most populist members, Chuck Gray.  Gray is far from old, even if he is a while male.  He's a 2012 graduate of the Wharton School of Business, which would mean that he's probably about 31 years old.  It's really the older members of the legislature that kept this session from going full bore populist radical.

Moreover, while I've been critical of the American gerontocracy, it proved to be the more seasoned, and therefore older, Republicans in the legislature who really tempered what it was doing, as noted.  

I just posted on this elsewhere, but the "white" thing is really becoming a left wing cliché said mostly by white upper middle class dinks and sinks.* Say it often enough and you'll really piss off what amounts just regular folks.  "White" doesn't really exist as an ethnicity anyway, and lumping everyone who puts "Caucasian" down on the form at the DMV together in one category is stupid.  Beyond that, its racist, inaccurate, and arrogant.

What's also ignorant is assuming that the legislature, whatever you think of it, must be made up of "angry old men" because it must be.  The angry men and women in Wyoming politics seem to be younger, FWIW, than older, and they aren't all men.

D'uh

Harvard professors warn that war-torn countries will miss global vaccine goals in 2022

So reads a headline.  

Wars have always been associated with the spread of disease. Why would this one be any different?

Where the capitalist and socialist meet

Bernie Sanders Calls U.S. 'International Embarrassment' for Not Offering New Moms Paid Leave

Paid family leave means that the employer pays for the leave, which means that the cost is passed on to the consumer, as in the American economy we now have, there's not that much slack to absorb such things.  So everyone ends up paying for the leave, whether they have children or not.

Bernie might  need to actually get a regular job for a while so he knows how these things actually work.

One of the really interesting aspects, by the way, of how these supposedly kind-hearted social welfare programs work is to shift the paying to somebody else while tethering the benefitted person to their work.  It's interesting.

Paid family leave is paid for by employers.  Basically, what Bernie is doing is walking into offices across the land, opening up the till, and taking some money from it so that somebody can pay for somebody else's "paid family leave".  The employer has to make that up, of course, so what he does is raise prices or. . . .lay somebody off.  You don't have to give leave, after all, to people who aren't there.

In Bernie's world none of these connections exist as progressives secretly believe that all employers are sitting on giant piles of cash.  

Not hardly.

The flip side is also interesting, however.  The thought is that this act of kindness at a metaphorical gunpoint means that workers are super happy and now aren't faced with all sorts of difficult struggles.  In reality, a lot of female employees would rather be home with their children, but prior economic acts of kindness have wrecked that and they have to be at work.  Yes, extraction of cash from their employers by operation of law means they get some time home, but they're going to have to come back, and the net impact of the law is to make that all the more certain.

A better and more just kindness would be to have an economy in which families can be supported by one paycheck, but economic policies of the last few decades have made that pretty much impossible for most families  Part of that also would be to really require those responsible for bringing children into the world pay for them.

But, no, we're going down a path here that actually is a socialist one of sorts, but mixed into a capitalist system. We're going to tax everyone so people with newborns can have leave, and then they can drop them off in subsidized, i.e., taxpayer supported, daycare, so we can get women, and for that matter men, who'd rather stay home with their kids back at their desks, darn it.

The big shift.

Somewhat related to this, there's lots of news about inflation, which is very scary, but at the same time there's lots of news that employees aren't coming back to work.  Not only that, people are quitting work everywhere.  Some are calling it the Great Resignation.

Indeed, this is pretty surprising in lots of ways, as its not the youngest employees doing it. According to the Harvard Business Review:

Employees between 30 and 45 years old have had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021. While turnover is typically highest among younger employees, our study found that over the last year, resignations actually decreased for workers in the 20 to 25 age range (likely due to a combination of their greater financial uncertainty and reduced demand for entry-level workers). Interestingly, resignation rates also fell for those in the 60 to 70 age group, while employees in the 25 to 30 and 45+ age groups experienced slightly higher resignation rates than in 2020 (but not as significant an increase as that of the 30-45 group).

If you work in an office, you're seeing this.

There's something distributist and agrarian in this story somewhere.

Well apparently you really don't know what communism is.

Wiesters

@CalebWiest

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16h

So my wife found out today that if she doesn’t get the jab within the next 2 months she will possibly lose her job. She is 24 weeks pregnant and will definitely not be getting it before delivery. If that’s not communism I don’t know what is #LetsGoBrandon

It must be a legacy of the Cold War or something, but Americans are incredibly free in stating something is "Communist" or "Socialist" if they don't like it.  I wouldn't be too surprised if some people claimed hurricanes were Communists.

A vaccine mandate of any kind, public or private, isn't Communist.

Communism is the economic theory advanced by Karl "I'm sitting on my ass in the British Library" Marx. The theory was that everything of every kind ought to be owned by the government, and the government would be run by 19th Century workers, as technology had advanced as far as it was ever going to go and that was the end state of technology.  Once the workers had shot everyone who had money, and everything was owned in common, including wives, universal bliss would break out.

Marx was an economic idiot whose family turned into a disaster, but he didn't write much about epidemiology or vaccinations.

Like vaccine mandates or not, they've been around as long as vaccinations have existed.  George Washington at some point in the Revolution reversed the policy of the Continental Army and started requiring troops to be vaccinated. . . with live vaccines, as it were, for Small Pox.

So, truly, Wiester doesn't know what Communism is.

This could be reduced to a joke level, but this is now so common it's actually an American social problem.  here in Wyoming we hear bitching all the time about "socialism" but we're pretty darned keen on Federal government funding of the roads and airports, which is. . . Socialism. We have a state captive Workers Compensation system also, which is. . gasp. . Socialism.  

Truth be known, our free market economy, which isn't purely free market by any means, has always had some elements of socialism in it, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with vaccination mandates.  I guess free vaccines could be regarded as a social welfare policy, but not socialism.

Big Bird and Ted Cruz

The popularity of Ted Cruz frankly escapes me, but perhaps that's because I'm cynical to start with, but in the current climate, it's stuff like this that causes certain things to constantly have a certain weird tinge to them.

Cruz was a central figure in the "stolen election" post insurrection episode, so he's also a central character in the movement inside the GOP that is fanning the flames of a lie that's creating to a dangerous erosion in democratic values in the country.  

Not that there weren't roots in the left, which is being missed.

Since the 1970s at least the American left promoted rule by the courts, as it couldn't get what it wanted at the ballot box.  It was hugely comfortable with that, and in fact became completely acclimated to it. That helped create a conspiratorial atmosphere on the right that the courts were in league with "elitist" elements which were out to recreate society, and frankly there was pretty good evidence that was true.  

Disenfranchise one element, and it becomes a dangerous fanciful minded one.  If we look back on Russia, for example, leading up to the Revolution and during it, we have to wonder how people were led to believe such moronic slop as dished out by the Bolsheviks. Well, decades of repression by the Imperial household and the Russian elites set them up for it.  We're seeing something similar now.  That, as addressed here earlier, gave us Trump, and Trump is clearly now anti-democratic, so the irony turns full circle.  His supporters don't see it that way, however, as they've learned to regard the left as illegitimate.

The left isn't illegitimate, and it remains democratic, but it has an anti-democratic legacy that it hasn't dealt with and right now it really can't.  A person can't worry about having left matches around when the house is on fire.  Things are really a mess.

If a person was a mediator over the national psyche, you'd probably send the entire country out for counselling.  You'd have to get the right to admit the election wasn't stolen and that Trump is more than a little weird.  You'd have to get Republican lead legislatures to quit trying to rig votes, and you'd also have to get the right to admit that it hasn't won the popular vote for the Oval Office in over 20 years, and for a reason.  

The left would have to admit that a lot of people in the country are pretty conservative and that it's fallen prey to some deeply weird beliefs itself that are contrary to science.  Indeed, both political sides are picking and choosing the science they like and disregarding the science they don't like.

Frankly, the country could use about two more middle oriented political parties.

But people also have to quit listening to really self-serving figures, and I'd put Ted in that category.  A friend of mine who knows him and likes him says he's a "nice guy", but I mean come on, picking on Big Bird? 

Footnotes

*Double Income No Kids and Single No Kids.