Afflicted with the world they helped make, and afflicting it on everyone else. The Baby Boomers, old age, the Sexual Revolution, and expelling the Barbarians.

This is going to be harsh.

But not as harsh as it started out to be.  I actually toned it down.

And yes, it's another dissing the Baby Boomers thread.

This past week there's been two articles in major journals regarding the aging of the Baby Boomers.  One I had to hunt for as it was published in The Free Press, and I don't subscribe to that.  Still, I found it here.

The Long Boomer Farewell

This will not be a clean handoff. It will be an extended interregnum.

The article is well written and largely correct, although in my view, much more gentle than it should be.  It will be an extended interregnum because, like actual regents, the obsolescent monarchy cannot accept that the obsolescent monarchs should go, and go right now.

I said that this would be harsh.

But not as harsh as it started out to be.

I've been dealing with this topic directedly, recently.  The entire country has been in fact.  On a personally local level,  I'm presently so frustrated with it that, as a member of Generation Jones, I'm about ready to drop out of employment in my "good office job" right now. I don't only because a panicked spouse feels that's financial devastation, even if she's wrong.  I keep on keeping on only for domestic peace, that's it.

In this, I've been dealing with the intersection of the stubborn refusal of an entire generation to yield power on absolutely anything, while at the same time, watching how their choices and that of the post WWII era continually to negatively impact an entire society today.

In my experience Boomers just will not yield in offices, or in office.  Indeed, right now, Donald Trump, who is clearly demented is lamenting former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani being in the hospital in critical condition.  Giuliani is an 81 year old serial polygamist like Trump, age 79.  A hallmark of the generation is that it just thinks its going to live forever and that none of the rules that held society together from when the first Vandal was taught to read until 1968 apply to them.

They've never stopped to ask about the reason the rules were there and what tearing them down would do . . . even to themselves.

Or acknowledged they'll die.

They will, they are but they will not acknowledge it or yield, and they are well on their way to going from being celebrated, albeit mostly by themselves, to unlamented.

In professional offices, and often in politics, where they were granted power in their 30s and 40s, they retain it as a last ditch matter no matter what.  For two weeks running I've seen a Boomer confronted with the "it's time to go" reality and simply refuse.  That person would rather retain an presence in an office where the person is not wanted rather than leave with dignity.  It's bad enough that Gen Y and Gen X in that situation cites the Boomer presence as a reason that they might now want to commit to what the older person cites as his "legacy".

Well, if they have to work it, they may just let his legacy die in an economic desert.

Regarding one such struggle, I've seen a number of minor requests made recently of a Boomer, and some not so mild ones.  The latter come from an awareness by the Boomer's fellows that there's some cognitive decline.  "Whose project is this?" is the question, followed by, well Boomer took it in. . . 

Oh oh.

Less significantly, a minor request made by one Gen Xer to the effect of "can you move your office so the most active person in it could occupy it as we want that person up front was met with "No."  It's a prime example of the Afghan Warlord Principal. As we previously noted:

1.  "The Afghan Warlord Principal".  Years ago I saw a photograph of a body of men, all armed, in Afghanistan.  They were tribesmen fitted out to fight the Soviets. Some were boys.  The boys carried ancient rifles, and if I recall correctly one had a muzzle-loading rifle.  One man, squatted down dead center, had an AK47, the only one so armed.

He looked like he was 80, if he was a day.

He had the most effective combat weapon not because he was the most effective combatant, but because he was senior to everyone else.  Much technology in any one office setting works the same way.

It's not actually the physical trappings that concern anyone in this latter instance, it's just the stubborn grasp on the institution itself.  A better space is available for somebody who needs it, or who can better profit through its use. That person, whose in Generation Jones, cannot have it.  It'll sit, instead, largely empty a gaping Arch de Trump type monument to somebody who is largely not htere.

Things like this are the reasons that quite a few professional firms have a partnership agreement that actually expels a person at age 65.  

In the meantime I'm familiar with the descent into oblivion of another person, Gen X I think, who is killing herself with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana.  I think it's intentional, but it's also putting the person into a situation in which she can really no longer be employed.

That'd be tragic by any measure, but the entire time I've known the person she's had the same grossly underemployed "boyfriend" that she's shacked up with.  Her life is the job she's no longer able to do, pet cats, the deadbeat long-term underemployed boyfriend, and bar hopping.  If she was in her 20s it'd still be bad, but redeemable.  Now it really isn't.

Left to Gen Jones to clean up, I'd note.

Related to this, the aforementioned Boomer was approached by another Boomer, also in her 70s, about a job.  Her company is closing, and no wonder.  Also a professional company, it just never was successful in recruiting anyone young to work with it, save for the son of one of the partners who has decided to leave the field and go into a new one with his wife, who has a successful business.  No succession plan, just an end.  At least the owners of that business were able to successfully bring it to an end. Nothing of it will remain.

She's worked for them for something like 30 years.  In the 30 years that I've known her she was never married.  I don't know if she was ever married, although I dimly recall it being mentioned that she had a daughter. She's been hinting to another professional firm in her office that she "needs to work" and needs to find a job, which was a broad hope that they'd offer her a job.  She finally just flat out asked. . . the Boomer, for one.  A 70 year old office worker asking a 70 year old professional for a job which everyone else would have to pay for.

Gen. Jones vetoed it.

They don't doubt she needs a job.  They just don't have one for her.  They're not going to hire her based on her resume for a position that doesn't exist.

And here's the harsher reality.  

People love concept of romantic love, which is a real thing.  But on top of it, marriage is, as so often noted, a fundamental aspect of society.  An institution so ancient that it seems to be full ingrained in hte species, the Boomers broke that, and they're inflicting the damage on everyone.

When lifetime marriages went out the gate, and bed hopping and living for yourself came in, did nobody think that there would be implications?

The main Boomer I noted here is divorced.  He's shacked with somebody too, which is extremely unseemly for somebody in their 70s, but it means that not only does he have no attachments, his attachment to his (former, more or less) place of employment is massively disordered.  He won't go, as it that is what he dedicated his life to, and he's clinging to it as if its his life. 

It is, but like life itself, it won't life on forever.

Estranged from his family, living in a relationship of convenience, and hostile to religion, he has the four walls of his old office.

Would that have been different in prior eras?

It's hard to say, but at least to a degree we can say yes.  Their father's generation had their families, and families first.

The two women in this story?

Well, had marriage remained the institution it once was they'd both have spouses and children to rely on, at least to some degree.  Maybe the one has a child, but that gets to another point below.

The first point, however is that societal structures existed for a reason.  Marriage has always featured love, in spite of what some may say, but it also was society's protection against children and destitution.  Married couples provided for the needs of their children, not the Department of Family Services and the school free lunch program.  And husbands provided for their wives, unless a husband was too sick to do so, in which case the reverse was true.

People did very often work into old age, and we should not pretend otherwise, but I have to say that the Boomer woman in this scenario would very likely not be in it, but for the destruction of structure mentioned.

Likewise, before anti biologic pharmaceutical's women could not become the sexual playthings of men save at great risk.  The younger woman mentioned above would be married. And the pressures of society would have bene such that the man in question, who could get a real job, would have gotten one.

The FDA allowed the first pharmaceutical birth control pill in 1960.  The Boomers had taken it up in spades by the late 60s and were engaging in illicit sex on a broad scale.  No fault divorce was first introduced in California in 1969, and spread throughout the country rapidly.  Abortion was made a right by the Supreme Court in 1973.

No matter how it was sold, the impact was pretty clear.  The Sexual Revolution reduced women to sex slaves and slaves in general.  In essence, Western women had their status stripped to what it had been in pre Christian times.  Toys for sex, who very soon had to work.  Feminism didn't liberate them, it enslaved them, prisoners of war of the Sexual Revolution.

But not just them, men too became casualties of the war.

So here we are.  Crediting Generation Jones, as we should, as a real generation, the youngest Boomer is now 72 years old.  Save for those who solely own a business, or who are in family businesses actually run by their families, not one single one should be working.  Those who have the means to retire, absolutely should. Those who are in position of societal power should not be.  Sure some may be in great shape, and "want to contribute", but most aren't, and aren't contributing in a meaningful way.

But not all can retire.  For one thing, a lot of them don't have the spouses that would help them to.  Many lack the children that would provide guidance.  Even those with children are finding that the warehousing of the elderly they advocated and participated in, and the warehousing of children they advocated for and participated in, has come back to haunt them.  The damage they did to societal structures, in particularly their churches, has aided in all of that.

But the expectations remain there.  Gen X and Gen Y will still employ us, right?

No, they won't.  They have their own families and priorities, often much more traditional than yours.

Well Generation Jones will, won't it?

No, we're tired.  We had to struggle our whole lives due to you Boomers and are ready to lay our burdens down ourselves.  We will go, however.  You often never had a place for us, and we're not going to end our lives finding one for you.

The past was far from perfect, in every sense.  Women got married as they had very few options for a single life, if that's what they would have preferred.  Couples that did not have children, prior to 1960, or actually some time following that, did not have them due to what was usually a tragic medical situation, or because the marriages were truly ones of convenience.  Children didn't always grow up in a home in which they were really valued and wanted, but then of course that's true now.

But it is also the case that in fact much more of life had to wit with the family, and was much kinder.  My paternal grandmother, for instance, was in close contact, often daily contact, with all of her children.  My maternal grandmother was in close contact as well, in spite of her children being spread across two, and often three, countries.  One of her sons lived with her until he died, and then his siblings were careful to take care of him.

Now, well the barbarians are back through the gate.  The Boomers let them in.  Everyone behind them is struggling in some ways to toss them out.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

 

An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat

An open call to Greenlanders

I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.

Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports.  I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule.  There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.  

I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it.  Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.  

Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.  

I've written a lot about how we got here.  The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another.  The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy.  I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.

If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed.  More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism.  Again, France provides the model.  After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party.  The French right died. 

I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way.  Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump.  By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026.  The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.

That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him.  Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump. 

Not all of it will be capable of being repaired.  A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.

But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think.  In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S.  Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans.  The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence.  We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.  

Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.

Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do.  A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration.  The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to.  Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair.  The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.

The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice.  Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.

If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference.  Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial.  The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere.  Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.

In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur.  A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it.  While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.

The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation.  Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place.  We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that.  Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit.  Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor.  Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves.  Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else.  Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end.  Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein.  Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.

Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away.  Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States.  But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.  

Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.

Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there.  The U.S. military won't be there.

Monday, January 5, 1976. South African Television, sort of.

Television was introduced in South Africa.

Yes, that late.

The first shows were The World at War, which was truly excellent, followed by an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, which also was. South African TV was initially limited to five hours in the evening from 7 p.m. to midnight, with half of the programming in English and half in Afrikaans..

Would that such limitations applied everywhere today.

The scourge of no fault divorce was introduced to Australia.

Last edition:

Thursday, January 1, 1976. Venezuela nationalizes its oil industry.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, American Bicentennial, Australia, Australian Defence Force, Growing up in the 1970s, Lebanon, Oman, Petroleum, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, Venezuela

The Agrarian's Lament: Now, more than ever, it's time for an Agrarian/Distributist remake of this country.

The Agrarian's Lament: Now, more than ever, it's time for an Agrarian/Dis...: 

Now, more than ever, it's time for an Agrarian/Distributist remake of this country.

I was going to use the work "revolution", but didn't as I don't want it suggested that I mean an armed revolution.  I'm not.  Indeed, I'm not keen on violence in general, and as I intend to refer to the American Revolution in this essay, I'll note that had I lived in the 1770s, I'd have been genuinely horrified by events.  I highly doubt that I would have joined the "Patriots" and likewise I wouldn't have joined the Loyalist either.  I'd have been in the 1/3d that sat the war out with out choosing sides, but distressed by the overall nature of it.

The other day I posted this:

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 10...: Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The... :  CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The brave men and w...

In that item, I noted this:

Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State.  The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.

Oligarchy is now where we are at.

I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something.  The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was.  At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.

The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth.  To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.

We've been losing that for some time.  Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century.  It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.

Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.

Aristotle, Politics.

Corporations were largely illegal in early American history.  They existed, but were highly restricted.  The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections.  This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs.  It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.

Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist.  It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition.  Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage  Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.

Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it.  The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.

I don't know the source of this, but this illustration perfectly depicts how MAGA populists treat Donald Trump.

This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken.  Broken down, broken up, and ended.

The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret.  Only wealth and power can explain that.  The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class.  Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.  

It is really time for a third part in this country.

In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party.  Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy.  Or perhaps local parties might do it.  In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally.  The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties.  New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party.  Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties.  There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.

Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day.  And such candidates will meet howls of derision.  Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors.  And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.

The reason for that is simple.  Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist. 

The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets.  Ban it.  That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit.  A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.

The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well.  No absentee landlords.  People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.

That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land.  Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted.  The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.

On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity.  Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership.  You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.

While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level.  People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock.  It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair.  It 

Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem.  People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.

And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong.  Much of what we've addressed would solve this.  You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example.  And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented.  But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing.  Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated  that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be.  The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.

These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day.  We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere.  But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract.  Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls.  Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist.  J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.

And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.

A little noted trend. The Bride of Christ.

While the news likes to report on the decline in membership in "organized faith", or whatever, the Catholic Church in the United States will grow this year, and not through births, but through conversions.

More people are entering it, than leaving it.

The Catholic Church also now has more adherent faithful in the United Kingdom than the Church of England.

Secular France, but the First Daughter of the Church yet, is seeing a Catholic revival.

Scandinavia, a bastion of Protestantism, and then of secularism, is seeing a Catholic revival.  Small in overall numbers, it isn't in terms of what it represents.

Something, clearly, is going on.

Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.

 This blog, as we occasionally note has the intent . . . 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?

Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.

But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.

Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:

Seventeen year old Tommy Brown became the youngest player in Major League Baseball to hit a home run.  Brown had joined the Dodgers at age 16.

Brown provides a good glimpse into mid 20th Century America.  Nobody would think it a good thing for a 16 year old to become a professional baseball player now.  Moreover, the next year, when Brown was 18, he was conscripted into the Army, something that likely wouldn't happen now even if conscription existed.  He returned to professional baseball after his service, and played until 1953 and thereafter worked in a Ford plant until he retired, dying this year at age 97.  Clearly baseball, which was America's biggest sport at the time, didn't pay the sort of huge sums it does now.

Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s.  He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker.  Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time.  There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be.  But life was like that then.  My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.  

People did that.

If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.

He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16.  If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.

It was scraping as the military was.  The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry.  We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times.  Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating.  The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context.  It's relatively hard to get into the Army now.  After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape.  By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.

Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century.  Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports.  He went to work in a factory.

Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.

The US War Production Board removed most of its controls over manufacturing activity, setting the stage for a post war economic boom.

The US standard of living had actually increased during the war, which is not entirely surprising given that the US economy had effectively stagnated in 1929, and the US was the only major industrial power other than Canada whose industrial base hadn't been severely damaged during the war.  Ever since the war, Americans have been proud of the economics of the post war era, failing to appreciate that if every major city on two continents is bombed or otherwise destroyed, and yours aren't, your going to succeed.

Having said that, the Truman Administration's rapid normalization of the economy was very smart.  The British failed to do that to their detriment.

Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.

Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s.  Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat.   It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape.  We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s.  The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s.  West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice.  Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s.  Italy really started to in the 60s.  

Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new.  Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.

Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.

The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955.  It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.

Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.

Finally, we had posted on women and careers.  Well, sort of.  Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:

I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is.  I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.

This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.

She's right.

This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".

The world?  Well, that's a little too broad.  But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West?  You bet.

Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer.  It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles.  Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong.  Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.

The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich.  Not hardly.

FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive.  They no doubt probably save time.  Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.

Women only entered the workplace at this level in the first place after domestic machinery freed, or seperated, their labor from the house, where it had previously been necessary.  You don't see women being criticized because their house contains a vacuum cleaner, or a dishwasher, even though this is not intrinsically different.  

Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares.  The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.  

At any rate, she's right.  The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others.  We can fix it.

Wednesday, July 29, 1925. Traffic stop.

New York, July 29, 1925.

L'Osservatore Romano printed a long list of Fascist offenses against Catholics.

Italy announced a new law providing that any newspaper publishing attacks on the government that were "too strong and too frequent" would receive two warnings, after which the paper would no longer be recognized.

Mikis Theodorakis (Μιχαήλ "Μίκης" Θεοδωράκης), Greek composer known for Zorba the Greek's score, was born.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 28, 1925. Léon Augustin Lhermitte

Labels: 1880s, 1887, 1920s, 1925, Agrarianism, Art, France, Women

St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori on the practice of law.

My friend, our profession is too full of difficulties and dangers; we lead an unhappy life and run risk of dying an unhappy death.

St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori.

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: As Yourself

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: As Yourself: See yourself in someone else.            https://youtu.be/dtVwIdNdC5Q         

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 95th edition. Making us a more barbaric society.

A headline in the CST relates:

US completes deportation of 8 men to South Sudan

We've read this story before.

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

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

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

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

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts.

The men were illegal immigrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan. They have criminal records.  South Sudan makes sense for somebody whose from South Sudan, but Vietnam?

This is barbaric, and once barbarism comes to a country, it doesn't just leave until everyone has been brutalized.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 94th edition. Portents? The problem of Evil.

Labels: 1060s, 1066, 2020s, 2025, Catholic, Christianity, Disaster, Halley's Comet, Predictions, religion, Texas, The Big Ugly, The Second Trump Administration, Weather, Zeitgeist

Catholic Opposition to the Big Ugly.

Public Lands demand Action This Day.

 

It appears the Big Ugly Bill with Mike Lee's scheme to sell public lands that fall within the former putative state of Deseret, which he acts as if he represents, will occur today or tomorrow.

Call your people in Congress today and inform them you are opposed.

If you live in Wyoming, inform them that they better start putting in their resumes for post Congressional punditry right now, as you'll not vote for them for anything ever again.  They aren't representing you if they vote for this.

Cellmate of Boethius: IVF and a Half-Cath | June 11, 2025

Cellmate of Boethius: IVF and a Half-Cath | June 11, 2025

IVF and a Half-Cath | June 11, 2025

The Best Post of the Week of May 18, 2025.

It was quite a week.

We started the week off with a look at the Vietnamese Diaspora

A Sunday Morning look at the Vietnamese Diaspora.

And we delved into local politicians betraying local values.

Looking for Nate Champion.

The occupant of the Oval Office was on display again.

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Second Edition.

I posed a query to our readers, but received no response.

A query for the retired readers.

We noted a momentous anniversary for Christianity.

Thursday, May 20, 325. The opening of the Council of Nicea.

Republicans were all atwitter about alleged coverups of Joe Biden's decline, while they're covering up Donald Trump's.

The elephant in the room.

Some depressing news in the age of science denialism. 

Pandemic Part 10. A new paradigm?

Monday, May 21, 1945. British government falls apart, French mandates want out, Himmler arrested.

Women were on the blog a lot.

Mid Week At Work

Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

We considered authenticity.

Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling thread.

Tuesday, May 22, 1945. Operation Unthinkable.

The amazing ability of the Palestinians to self sabotage.

The 2026 Wyoming Legislature, Part 1. The way too early edition.

The U.S. took a giant step towards economic disaster.

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 6. “Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.”

Froma Harrop: The tax cut fantasy needs to end

Here's Six Ways Trump’s Budget Will Hurt Rural Americans

Saturday, May 23, 1925. Memorial Day Weekend.

Governor Gordon called  Chuck Gray out on the carpet.

Governor Gordon has enough of Chuck Gray.