O'ahu's Western Shore

O'ahu's Western Shore

 

Blog Mirror: The arrogance of the off-road vehicle lobby — Jonathan P. Thompson (@Land_Desk)

 

The arrogance of the off-road vehicle lobby — Jonathan P. Thompson (@Land_Desk)

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Wolves Now Add to the 'Colorado Experience'

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Wolves Now Add to the 'Colorado Experience': A wolf who walked in from Wyoming caught on a scout camera in North Park in March 2023 ( Don Gittleson via AP). Dad was still alive when the...

Friday, December 28, 1973. The Endangered Species Act.

On this day in 1973, the Endangered Species Act, having passed by the House of Representatives, 355 to 4, with the only opposing votes coming from Congressmen Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, H. R. Gross of Iowa, Robin Beard of Tennessee and Bob Price of Texas, was signed into law.

The Nixon Administration, now mostly remembered for Watergate, and the duplicitous end to the Vietnam War, had a remarkable record of passing environmental legislation, including this landmark example.  Perhaps more remarkable, at this point in time, Wyoming's Congressman, Teno Roncolio, voted for it.

My, how things have changed.

And more amazing yet, Teno Roncalio, was a Democrat, the last Wyoming Democrat to hold that position.  For that matter, one of the two Senators from Wyoming, Gale McGee, was as well.  McGee is the last member of the Democratic Party to hold that office in Wyoming.

Presently to admit that the ESA is a great piece of litigation is to invite castigation in Wyoming, and the world "Democrat" is nearly slanderous in nature.

On the same day, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) which provided to train workers for jobs in public service.

Whatever else may be the case about him, the country owes a debt to Nixon for legislation passed during his administration.

Solzhenitsyn's tome The Gulag Archipelago was published. The very first published edition on the horrors of the Soviet penal system were in French.

Bobby Darin (Walden Robert Cassotto) died at age 37 following a surgery to repair artificial heart valves he had received three years prior.

Darin had been a major Ameican entertainer of the 50s and 60s.  Of Sicilian descent, his early life was complicated, having had a grandfather that was a member of the mafia.  He was raised believing that his mother, who had borne him out of wedlock at age 17, was his sister, something she did not reveal to him until he was 32.

Going Feral: Match makers.

Going Feral: Match makers.: 

Match makers.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured a Mexican Wolf (a type of wolf, not a wolf that is literally from Mexico) in hopes of that she'll breed with one of two captive Mexican Wolves at a facility in New Mexico.

The US is attempting to restore the endangered population.

Going Feral: Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Aldo Leopold

Going Feral: Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Aldo Le...: 

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Aldo Leopold

Famous for his writings and the creation of "The Land Ethic", Leopold came to his views on nature and philosophy because he was an avid lifelong hunter.

Leopold bow hunting in New Mexico, 1938.

Going Feral: This is why we can't have nice things:

Going Feral: This is why we can't have nice things::   

This is why we can't have nice things:

 

The above is a case caption of a lawsuit brought in Montana in which Wilderness Watch is suing the U.S. Forest Service over the Forest Service program to use rotenone to take out non-native trout species so that cutthroat trout, the native species can be reintroduced in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

So, in the name of wilderness, Wilderness Watch, it acting contrary to nature.

Sigh.

High Plains.

High Plains.

Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.

Note:  This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives.  I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.

There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.

What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:

2 Dubium about the claim that the widespread practice of the blessing of same-sex unions would be in accord with Revelation and the Magisterium (CCC 2357).

According to Divine Revelation, confirmed in Sacred Scripture, which the Church “at the divine command with the help of the Holy Spirit, … listens to devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully ” (Dei Verbum 10): “In the beginning” God created man in his own image, male and female he created them and blessed them, that they might be fruitful (cf. Gen. 1, 27-28), whereby the Apostle Paul teaches that to deny sexual difference is the consequence of the denial of the Creator (Rom 1, 24-32). It is asked: Can the Church derogate from this “principle,” considering it, contrary to what Veritatis Splendor 103 taught, as a mere ideal, and accepting as a “possible good” objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, without betraying revealed doctrine?

Which was:

Question 2

a) The Church has a very clear conception of marriage: an exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the begetting of children. Only this union is called “marriage”. Other forms of union are realized only “in a partial and analogous way” (Amoris laetitia 292), which is why they cannot strictly be called “marriage”.² 

b) It is not a mere question of names, but the reality that we call marriage has a unique essential constitution that demands an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities. It is undoubtedly much more than a mere “ideal”.

c) For this reason the Church avoids any kind of rite or sacramental that could contradict this conviction and give the impression that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.

d) In dealing with people, however, pastoral charity, which must permeate all our decisions and attitudes, must not be lost. The defense of objective truth is not the only expression of this charity, which is also made up of kindness, patience, understanding, tenderness and encouragement. Therefore, we cannot become judges who only deny, reject, exclude.³ 

e) For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage. Because when a blessing is requested, one is expressing a request for help from God, a plea to be able to Live better, a trust in a Father who can help us to Live better.

f) On the other hand, although there are situations that from the objective point of view are not morally acceptable, pastoral charity itself requires us not to treat as “sinners” other people whose guilt or responsibility may be attenuated by various factors that influence subjective imputability (cf. St. John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 17).

g) Decisions which, in certain circumstances, can form part of pastoral prudence, should not necessarily become a norm. That is to say, it is not appropriate for a Diocese, a Bishops’ Conference or any other ecclesial structure to constantly and in an official way enable procedures or rites for all kinds of matters, since everything “that which is part of a practical discernment in a particular situation cannot be elevated to the category of a norm”, because this “would give rise to an unbearable casuistry” (Amoris laetitia 304). Canon Law should not and cannot cover everything, nor should the Episcopal Conferences claim to do so with their various documents and protocols, because the life of the Church runs through many channels in addition to the normative ones.

Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing.  This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did.  Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.

Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs.  Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves.  Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.

Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned.  Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves.  Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.

Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it.  Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O.  Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.

Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.

What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:

Yeoman'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 Yeoman'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.

Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.¹ And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

We will also note that Pope Francis, timed with the opening of the Synod, issued a new Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum ("Praise God") on the environment.  

Eh", you may be thinking.  I thought this thread was on something else.  One of these is not like the other.

Oh, they very much are.

Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics.  He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either.  The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch.  It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.

Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic.  Of interest, the document stated:

24. Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present, because “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience... We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint”.[17] It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity

* * *

72. If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries,[44] we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another.

Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden.  They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."

We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative.  It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel.  A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan.  Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow.  That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view.  A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.

Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view.  He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety.  Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science.  He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.

On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this.  People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it.  At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about.  Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy.  It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.

So the connection in all of this?

What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt.  A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:

Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.

Kennedy Hall in Crisis. 

We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.

Is there a world view that counters any of this?

The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.

Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature.  Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above.  We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.

People don't like the modern world.  It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.

We really don't have to do this.  Getting back from this, however, will not be easily.  It would take a purpose driven societal effort.

The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past.  It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not.  It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.

It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air.  It just isn't synthesized.

If it were. . . 

Footnotes.

1. These Bushmen bands are not Christian, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.

Blog Mirror: The toxic mystery of #Wyoming’s backcountry cyanobacteria blooms — @WyoFile

 

The toxic mystery of #Wyoming’s backcountry cyanobacteria blooms — @WyoFile

Friday, September 21, 1923. Oklahoma standoff, Lee's Ferry, Coolidge Press Conference, Dr. Fidel Pagés.

The Colorado River was photographed at Lee's Ferry.

Things were getting worse in the standoff between the Governor and the Legislature in Oklahoma.

.President Coolidge delivered an address to the Press.

I am reminded that when I came here I did a good deal of wondering whether I would be able to be helpful to the members of the press in these conferences that we have, and especially as to whether I wouldn’t find it more or less of a bore on my part and, perhaps, not particularly pleasant. I haven’t found it that way at all. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that I rather look forward with pleasure to having you come in twice a week, in order that I may talk to you, give you a little of the idea I may have of what the Government is trying to do, and satisfy you, insofar as I can, on the questions that you ask.

I am reminded too that my boys have returned back to school. They are just such boys as some of you have, I have no doubt. I hope that they can remain there at school without much of anything in the way of publicity. When they are here anything that they can do to be helpful, or that we can do, we are glad to do but I sent them up to Mercersburg, which is a very excellent school. They have always been in the public schools at Northampton and would have been there now, had we remained in Massachusetts, but there is no one in Northampton now, but my housekeeper. I wanted them to be under more supervision than that, so I sent them up there in order that they might be out of Washington and have that opinion, which I think boys are entitled to have, of privacy in their school affairs. Dr. Irving has been very helpful to them up there, and I presume that if you make any application to him, or any of your associates, to get any story about the boys up there, he will have to tell you that we very much prefer that they be not subjected to publicity while they are there.

Now I have several inquiries here – more than I do sometimes.

The veteran inquiry about the Governors’ Conference. I have practically determined that I shall adopt the time when the Governors are meeting in their annual conference, which is in the middle of October. I have adopted that as a result of some communications that I have had from Governors, indicating that that would meet their convenience, and that it would be of very much greater assistance to them, than should we call it at any other time.

Q. Where do they meet?

A. They meet in Indianapolis. I think it is the 16th or 15th of Oct.

Q. The meeting will be after that?

A. I am not sure yet whether it will be right after or right before. I am under the impression now that it will be more convenient if we have it immediately following.

Q. Do we understand that they will come here or you go there?

A. Oh, no. I shall not go there. The conference will be here.

I have several inquiries about an extra session of Congress, Nothing new has developed on that. I have already expressed to you quite a good many times that I couldn’t see any reason at the time I was speaking, nor do I now, for calling an extra session. There are many questions to come before Congress but I think, so far as they have been presented to me, they will be able to wait. Now as I said before, I don’t want to foreclose a session, and should it be disclosed to me that on account of some condition Congress might render a great public service by coming into session earlier than about eight weeks from now, I will take that instance up and decide it when it comes. At present, I don’t see any reason for an extra session.

An inquiry about the Oklahoma situation. So far as I know, there have been no representations made to Washington in relation to that situation, and an inquiry as to whether there is any Federal observation being made on it – not any that I know of. It wouldn’t be necessary to do it from Washington, of course, because the Executive is represented there by the Marshal and the United States District Attorney, as he is in every other jurisdiction, and should there be any violation of the laws of the U. S., why, of course, that would be the tribunal before which said violations should be brought.

Regarding the shipping board policy. I have no new policy about that. It really isn’t the business of the executive, as I understand it, under the law to try to formulate a policy for the Shipping Board. I am glad at all times to confer with, different departments, give them the benefit of any judgment that I may have or any information that may come to me, and assist them in every possible way. The Shipping Board has certain directions under the law for carrying on the shipping business of the U. S. to – generally speaking to try and get into private hands as soon as possible and to liquidate it. The plan that they had appealed to me, especially because they represented it to me, and it was my judgment that it was, perhaps, a first step and the best step that we could take towards private ownership and private operation. It has appeared that it isn’t possible to put it int o effect under the present statute. I haven’t conferred with the Board yet. I got that opinion from the Attorney General yesterday, I think – today has been Cabinet day. I am going to confer with Chairman Parley or any other members of the Board very soon, and see if I can help in any way. I don’t know whether they will desire legislation about it. Of course, one of the main elements of their plan was that it could be put int o operation without the mediation of Congressional action, that it could be put into operation immediately. That was the essential of it. Whether they think they want to pursue some other plan, if it is necessary to secure legislation, I do not know. Of course the Board had the plan that was explained in the Shipping Bill last year and which was debated in the Senate, but never came to a final vote. I suppose that represents the idea that the Shipping Board has of the kind of legislation they would like to have, rather than forming another, but whether they think it advisable to do anything about that legislation in the coming session is something I Couldn’t give you any definite opinion about now.

An inquiry also about Mr. Ahister and his conference with me. That leads me to say a general word about matters of this kind. Of course, the people that come here to see the President come because they have something that they want to lay before him. Something they want to tell him. Not because they expect to get information from me. That being so, I give them the opportunity, insofar as I can, to tell me what it is that they have in mind. Very much as you come in and get information from me, not by all talking to me, but by permitting me to talk to you, and it is the reverse of that operation that goes on here when any one comes to see me. When they go out they are, of course, at liberty to make such representations as they want to. They are not supposed to quote the conferences with me, but sometimes they undertake to do that and sometimes they don’t. Now, I shall have to adopt the rule, of course, of not being responsible for what people may say when they go out. They are good about it, I know, and mean to represent everything just exactly as they understood it, but if I should undertake to follow up all those things and correct them all, I don’t suppose I would have an opportunity to do very much else. So I am not going to do that.

This inquiry is in relation to railroad consolidations. I haven’t been into the particulars of that. Senator Cummings has it under consideration. He is a veteran in the study of railroad problems, was one of the authors of the present law, and I should want to confer with him and with others, of course; with the Interstate Commerce Commission, also, before I could have any mature opinion about railroad matters.

There wasn’t anything that came up today at the Cabinet Meeting that is of any particular interest. We discussed a lot of small details as to when we might be able to meet and take up some questions, but there were no decisions made, and while I had expected to take up the agricultural problem especially at this meeting of the Cabinet, I was not able to do so because Secretary Wallace hasn’t completed his survey of the wheat situation.

Another inquiry about the Merchant Marine problem. I have already spoken about that, and I can’t give you any more information as to what the next step will be.

I have already spoken about the Oklahoma situation. As I said, no representation, as far as I know, has been made in Washington at all about that, and it would be very unlikely that any representation would come from anyone except the Governor.

Further inquiry as to what may be done about profiteering in coal. The Federal Trade Commission, as I have already said, has all the facts that were gathered by the Fuel Commission. They are studying those, and undertaking to see if they can make any representations that would be helpful. On the 24th, which is next Monday, the Interstate Commerce Commission meets, I think, at Pittsburgh, in order to consider rates, especially of coal. I think that has firtually covered the things that you had in mind.

I am reminded that the Conference of Governors is at West Baden instead of Indianapolis. I assume that Mr. Welliver is right. He almost always is.

The pressman's strike in New York City ended.

Spanish military physician, Dr. Fidel Pagés, only 37 years of age and the developer of the technique of epidural anesthesia, was killed in a traffic accident in the town of Quintanapalla.  He was returning from a vacation with his family.

Blog Mirror: Bison Rubbing Stones – icons of the prairies

Bison Rubbing Stones – icons of the prairies

Blog Mirror: ‘Almost unimaginable’: The 2013 #Colorado flood, 10 years later — Colorado Newsline #SouthPlatteRiver

 

‘Almost unimaginable’: The 2013 #Colorado flood, 10 years later — Colorado Newsline #SouthPlatteRiver

I know how.

I have lived in a cramped camper van with my wife and our cat for 8 years. Here's how we make it work.

You never had children, that's how.

The article was from Business Insider, which is on my news feed for some reason, even though I'm not really a fan of it. The headline comes from a blog entitled:

Van Cat Meow

Now, I'll be frank that at my stage of my life, having worked since age 13 and now 60, a life in which I could take my wife in our camp trailer and go annually from Alaska back home, catching the seasons (fish, hunting, etc.) would appeal greatly to me.

It wouldn't appeal to my spouse, so this will be another dream unrealized.

But two young people living as vagabonds with a cat?  Well, it's not for some reason.

Let's be even more frank. This trip is made possible only by the pharmaceutical industry as it's made possible, probably, only due to birth control.  There's something weirdly narcissistic and self focused about it, therefore.

In a prior age, being an adult for most people meant taking on adult things, and that meant for most people, given the nature of nature and what that means, ultimately meant getting married and having children, the second following from the other.  Chemicals made the first possible without the second, which ultimately radically muddled the minds of many as to the true, deep, existential nature of the essential act that goes with that marriage.  In turn, that really gave rise to the "alternative" definitions of everything we have today, as the deep natural nature of that relationship became one for self defined entertainment, although at some level the deeper meaning is never lost.

Also lost, however, that going forward with the true nature of the relationship is deeply adult.

Or, in a former era, for one reason or another, it meant going into adult life on your own, and plenty did it.  But that was a pretty serious affair in and of itself.  People like to say "marriage is hard", which it isn't. Being on your own, as an adult, and as you age, is hard.  Frankly, for most people, it got pretty hard in all sorts of ways by the time a person was in their late 30s.

Traveling by van around Australia?  I'm sure it's fun.  But is also dropping out, in more ways than one, including dropping out of a part of nature while viewing it. The cat?  Probably not a conventional pet the way pets were in prior decades, but a substitute child, that instinct never really gone.

Dropping out, however, also says something about the state of our world.

Some people have always dropped out of the active world, to be sure.  But it's become a sort of post-pandemic pandemic.  Quietly Quitting, Laying Flat, and this. All symptoms of a world we've built that we don't like.

In an earlier era, this very British couple (and I know that one is Australian) probably would have met and farmed.  They seem to be angling for a simple life.

One pretty hard to achieve in our world today.

Related threads:

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

Painted Bricks: Prairie mural, downtown Denver

Painted Bricks: Prairie mural, downtown Denver:  

Prairie mural, downtown Denver

What's it mean to paint a mural of the prairie in the middle of a city?

Perhaps that we're not so happy with what we created there.

Blog Mirror: Open House at Noah's Ark.

 

Open House at Noah's Ark