Good news tends not to make the headlines, by and large. Indeed, it's worth noting that one of the things that's so newsworthy about the Russo Ukrainian War is that it's a big conventional war. Those tend just not to happen anymore.
This isn't going to be cheerful, as it's in the contest of the purpose of this site, which is really focused on the first couple of decades of the 20th Century. We're looking at good, long term, trends here that have hit the news somehow, recently.
May 1, 2023
Adult smoking hit an all-time low. About 1 in 9 American adults are smokers.
The degree to which average Americans smoked in the 20th Century, after World War One, is stunning. Women didn't start to really take it up until the 1920s, but by the 30s, everyone was smoking in earnest.
Teenage (high school) sexual activity is way down, with 30% reporting having had sex, down from over 50% a few decades back.
Teen pregnancy is also way down. It's often not appreciated the degree to which this was common in the past.
Of course, this can be explained in more than one way, including the spike in young marriages in the 50s and 60s, but there are other explanations as well.
The early portion of Hageman's address deals with the new rules that the House is operating under, some of which are a restoration of old rules, as is noted.
The back portion is a call for extreme budget cuts. Without saying as much, it would seem that you can take hints that this would include Social Security, but perhaps I'm just reading that into the speech and it isn't there.
It then goes into the legislative session.
I didn't really do a deep dive into it, but maybe that's worthwhile. This is the first big public address Hageman has given, and she took a much different approach than Senator Barrasso did, who gave a cheerful, very much at ease speech. Indeed, I've seen Barrasso speak before, but I've actually never seen him speak when he didn't sound stilted. This is an exception. He didn't try to talk politics in it.
Hageman did.
Hageman's speech isn't long, and it may be broken down basically into two parts. What she claims the House has already accomplished, and fiscal concerns. She was pretty blunt in it.
I'll start by noting that I probably didn't give the speech the due it deserves for a simple reason. I think that Liz Cheney's claim that Hageman was exhibiting "tragic opportunism" by running is correct. I find it a bit hard to take anyone seriously who is crying out from the hill they just climbed with the bloody knife of the body they just stabbed in the back in their hands.
But maybe in the world of politics, metaphorically killing your friends is just the norm. Well, it isn't, but it does occur.
Okay, the speech.
The first part of it addresses a whole bunch of House procedural changes which do make the Speaker less of a dictator and do force members of the House to show up and do their jobs. Frankly, I think those reversions to prior times are a good thing, and they needed to be done. I don't like the fact that they came about due to the far right, but I have to note that in lauding these changes Hageman doesn't give credit to where it is due, which is the far right. She is a member of the far right, but the changes or reversions cited were things that were brought about by the Freedom Caucus opponents of McCarthy. She stuck with McCarthy the entire time.
I'm not sure what to make of that, but there's an element of riding your opponent's horse in that.
Are these good things?
Well, even though I don't like the group that brought them about, they are.
A portion of this speech that seems to relate to fiscal matters, which we'll get to in a second post, dealt with oil and coal.
It's now become a state mantra that the nation needs Wyoming's oil and coal.
Prior to the U.S. Civil War, a common claim in the South is that the North would never fight the South as it needed its cotton, and indeed the whole world did.
Apparently, Southerners had never heard of sheep.
Or Egyptian cotton.
Just as Wyomingites apparently just won't believe that wind, solar, and ultimately nuclear, are going to, well, as Everett McGill had it in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou; "Yes, sir, the South is gonna change. Everything's gonna be put on electricity and run on a paying basis."
Everything is on a paying basis already, and that statement applies to the whole country in the context of technological evolution.
Windmills and memorial. Might as well be coal's grave.
We've addressed it before, but coal has been on its way out for well over a century now. It's so clear, that we've basically gone from the "cool menthol filters make these cigarettes safe for anyone" stage of things to the "I don't care if everyone in my family smokes, and they all have lung cancer, people get lung cancer from other things too. . . " stage of this argument. Yes, you can still light up a pack of "
Exceedingly creepy, and more than a little unrealistic, Lucky Strike advertisement from 1952. Yes, cigarettes won't hurt you. And yes, you can wish the entire nation back into the coal age. And yes, this young woman didn't die of lung cancer by 1972. Or. . . . ?
To put it mildly, the same group of folks who thought that passing a resolution banning electric cars to be sent to the Governor of California on the basis that, "that'll show them", seems to think we can just hold our breaths and turn blue and it'll be 1973 again, or perhaps we can just force everyone to use coal whether they want to nor not.
Just not going to happen. It's already not happening, all on its own.
Flat out denial of an economic trend is dangerous.
A lot of tobacco farmers are farming something else now.
This, obviously all male, occupation was exactly what it sounded like. Clerks who took appointments and handled the same. Sort of the equivalent of a secretary/receptionist.
As late as the Second World War, in government service this occupation was a male one. And, as the fine clothing in the photo demonstrates, one that paid a decent living to its occupants.
Indeed, every man here is wearing a three-piece suit of good quality.
Also of note, at least two are smoking cigars, not even taking time out from tobacco consumption to appear without one. When was the last time you were in an office and somebody was smoking a cigar?
A coal mine explosion in Spangler, Pennsylvania, killed 79 miners.
By the way, in the long odds category, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a direct descendant of Ali Kemal. I.e, not a cousin, Kamal is BoJo's Great Grandfather.
Wilson was in fact an anglophile, but his government certainly wasn't dominated by the British.
And Mexico barbarous?
Some old headlines are oddly contemporary, as are some jingoistic views, we have to say. This almost sounds like a Trump rally, as over the weekend he declared that some migrants aren't human.
Barbarous?
Is the cigarette ad a football helmet, or a pilot's helmet?
And the brown bottle thing is correct:
The Boomerang was less dramatic, but it did have an interesting item on pipe smoking at a St. Patrick's Day party.
The Adna Massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which would kill over 20,000 people, commenced. Ottoman troops would participate in it.
Armenian orphans from the massacre.
The Armenians had the first Christian kingdom in the world, and have had a state of one kind or another since 860 BC. Since the conquest of Anatolia by the Turks, they've been subject to repeated atrocities.
The Anglo Persian Oil Company was incorporated. The company became a power in its own right, and extensively exploited what became Iran, setting the stage for what we have today, unfortunately.
Minnesota passed a law banning cigarettes, effective August 1. Too bad that didn't stick.
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