Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever? Hey, what about whiskey (and other distilled beverages)?. Wait a minute, In Vino locorum subsidiarietatis Veritas?

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
"They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her,
"Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servers,
"Do whatever he tells you."
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them,
"Fill the jars with water."
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
"Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter."
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
"Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now."
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.

John, Chapter 2.*

Okay, we've done beer, and we've done whiskey, what about wine.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Pr...: A bottle of "double cask" Wyoming Whiskey, which is Wyoming Whiskey that's also been partially aged in a sherry cask. ...

 

And no, we're not grasping for those lyrics from the famous John Lee Hooker song.

Frankly, I know nothing about wine.

I've always known that, but it really occurred to me after I decided to add this post, following my one on beer and whiskey.

Indeed, I pondered why that might be.  

My parents rarely drank wine, but for that matter my father only bought beer during the summer and while we often had a bottle of Canadian Whiskey on hand, it usually lasted an eternity.  Indeed, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered to be a social obligation to have whiskey on hand for social occasions.  My folks weren't huge entertainers (they were definitely better than we are here however), and that's about the only time the whiskey was ever brought out.  We didn't stock more than one kind and for whatever reason, the only kind of whiskey my father ever bought was Canadian Lord Calvert.  I supposed that this might be because my mother was Canadian, but as she never ever drank it, that supposition might be way, way, off the mark.

One of my aunts and uncles liked Scotch, and liked Cutty Sark for that matter.  Asking my father about it, he told me that it tasted like paint thinner, and I have to agree.  And not just about Cutty Sark, but all Scotch Whiskey.

About the only wine my parents ever bought was Mogan David, which based upon their website must have been Mogan David Concord.  I feel bad, quite frankly, for the Mogan David company, because back at that time it was simply a fairly cheap and rather obviously Kosher table wine.  The purple wine came with a Star of David emblazoned upon it.  This was all prior to the introduction of tehir horrifying fortified "pop" wines which came out under the MD 20/20 name, and which acquired the nickname "Mad Dog 20/20".  I frankly think that their introduction of that brand, while it may have been a marketing mistake, was a mistake.  I'm surprised to learn that it still exists, actually.

Anyhow, when I was a kid, on very rare occasion, my father would buy Mogan David.  I'm not sure why.  It always came in big gallon sized bottles, and it lasted forever.  I haven't had it for years and years, and indeed not since I was young, probably ten years old or younger, and I'd get a small glass when they bought it.  As it isn't the kind of drink you serve to guests, and as they so rarely bought it, and quit buying it at some point, I don't know what the thought was.

Anyhow, when growing up and still young, "wine" to me meant Mogan David.

When I was in my very early teens my mother, for some still unknown reason, took a wine making class at the local community college and she accordingly started making wine as a hobby.  Simply taking up wine making was really odd for a person who basically didn't drink and who was living in a family that nearly didn't, so I don't know what she was thinking.  It was a mistake all the way around for a variety of reasons.

For one reason, she was a horrible cook and at least based upon her wine making experiment, being a bad cook equates with being a bad vintner.  Her wine was awful.  She made  most of it from berries that she harvested from where our garden was located and for years and years I assumed thereafter that the berries must have been basically unpalatable.  Later on, I found they weren't, when other people made other things out of them. Go figure.

Fortunately, after stinking up the house with the fermentation process for awhile, she gave it up.  Pretty bad stuff.

I don't know if that early experience left me tainted on wine in general.  I'd had beer obviously so apparently that didn't carry over.  As an adult I've been exposed to wine a lot more, but I've picked up a very limited taste for it.  Basically, I like Chianti and buy it on odd occasion.  I don't like any other wine much unless they are very close to Chianti.  Some of the wines that people really like I absolutely detest.   Most of them actually.  Dry Champagne I like, but it's not like you are going to drink gallons of that unless you are Winston Churchill.

So my knowledge on wine is super limited and will stay that way.

Anyhow, as I did beers and whiskey, and as I'm looking at this from a Distributist and local agricultural level, and as I know there are a couple of wineries in the state, I decided to complete the Tour d'alcohol with that.

Now, going into that I'll note that I'm very skeptical about the ability of Wyoming to produce any wine in the first place, unless it's made out of the wild stuff that my mom used, and I'd discourage that.  While my mother, in her brief vintner stage decided to plant a couple of Concorde grape vines over my objection (she never had a grasp on agricultural yield and she couldn't accept that a couple of vines weren't going to yield adequate grapes for fermenting, and she didn't accept that the harsh weather here wasn't conducive to grapes), Wyoming doesn't really have the climate for growing grapes.

Indeed, grapes are sufficiently susceptible to climate that you can actually tell what the climate of a past era was like based on them.  The line basically north of the Rhine in Europe and west the English Channel are the beer lines, basically (with some blending of the two) as you can grow grains north and west of there, but not grapes, usually.  When you can grow grapes in those regions, something odd is going on.  We know, for example, that there was a period when England produced a lot of wine.  It was during the Medieval Climatic Optimum.  You can't grow them there now.  Likewise, during the same era Newfoundland had abundant wild grapes.  It doesn't now.  There's never been a time when you couldn't grow grapes in France, Spain, Italy, Greece and North Africa, which is why all those areas have been wine regions (the modern exception being North Africa but only because of Islam).

So you can't do much with that here.

Apparently you can do a little,  however.

Before I go on, there's one additional thing I should mention that I recently learned.  I've always known that there are wines that are attributed to regions that surprise me, but I didn't realize that simply labeling wine is a big deal.  I had no idea.  Apparently in California, for example, a lot of wine labels are basically that.  Some big mega winery produces all kinds of wine and ships it out under lots of labels under contract.  People buying the label tend to think that a winery by that name is produced there, but nope, it may be just a label.

Indeed, a Benedictine Monk I know told me that the wine sold under the label of his home abbey was not produced there, but in another state and sold under the abbey's name via contract.  He was careful to note that as the abbey did in fact produce other things, but not wine.  The abbey was located in the far north so I would have really wondered about how the accomplished producing wine but, nope, they didn't do it.

That's a bit of a shame really as both wine and beer were once widely produced by monastic holy orders and for practical reasons.  Somehow, as we've progressed through the 20th Century and became more and more hedonistic and amoral we none the less found more in more in the way of societal puritanism to apply to people otherwise living moral lives.  Odd.  And its further misguided in that the Puritans themselves were not teetotalers at all.

Well, anyhow, I've come to know something about beer and whiskey but I remain really ignorant on wine.

So, anyhow, back to wine and Wyoming.

There are, surprisingly, a few Wyoming wineries.

The claimed first winery in Wyoming was Table Mountain Winery.  It interestingly was the brainchild of a UW student from a southeastern Wyoming farming family who researched the topic while a student and went on to apply what he learned, receiving a grant in the process.

And its a true winery.  A ten acre vineyard supplies the grapes for seven different wines which, after looking at their website, I realized that I have in fact seen in the stores.  I haven't tried it, but once again, this is a Distributist or Agrarian triumph, as its amazingly all local and they've been at it for nearly twenty years now.

I should note, before I move on, that the "claimed" item above is because well prior to this time, when I was a student in Laramie in the 1980s, there was some sort of winery in one of the small towns up in the mountains west of Laramie.  This was the Hiney Winery.  I know nothing about it other than that it advertised on radio a lot, back in the days when people, including me, listed to their car radios.  I recall it as their kitschy advertisements always closed out with the line "buy a little Hiney" or something like that, featuring that obvious double entendre.  I never tried it, and have no idea how it was produced.  Laramie is already 7,000 feet in elevation and the towns in the mountains were even higher than that, so I'd be amazed if the grapes were produced locally.

Moving on, Cody Wyoming has a Buffalo Jump Winery.  Knowing what a buffalo jump is, I wonder about the name, but the tourist town has a winery so called.  The last time I was in Cody I noticed it or at least an outlet selling the wines, but I didn't stop in (I'm obviously a very poor candidate for wine tourism).  Their website indicates that the grapes are from California, Oregon and Washington, and they have a second outlet in Arizona.  So they're producing wine, but they're acquiring the grapes. The owners also indicate that they're in buffalo ranching, and indeed they were in that prior to being vintners.

There's also a Jackson Hole Winery, making Jackson Hole the location of at least two breweries and one distillery, or perhaps two distilleries if we include nearby Driggs Idaho in the mix.  Their website indicates that they produce 2,500 cases of wine per year and a large percentage of the grapes are from a farm owned by the vintner, which is a family operation.  However, the vineyards are in the Sonoma region and other grapes are acquired via partnerships and business arrangements. As Jackson Hole is over 6,000 feet high, the lack of local grapes isn't surprising. They do produce the wine themselves.

Weston Wineries, which apparently also produces liqueurs, is another Wyoming winery that relies upon importing the constituents from other states, in this case grape juices.  Indeed, their website specifically notes that they do that and that its common in the industry, which it truly is.  In looking it up, I realized that it too is something I've seen in the stores but never tried.

A really unique winery is found in Gillette Wyoming and was mentioned here the other day in the context of distilleries, that being Big Lost Meadery.  As it name indicates, it specializes in mead.

I'll be frank.  I can't stand mead so I'm not going to try this product.

Most people have never tried mead and are only familiar with it, if they are at all, from stories about Vikings quaffing down buckets of mead. Given that, we imagine it in our minds being something like Russian Imperial Stout or something.  It's not like that at all.

Mead is made from honey.

That's right, it's made from honey.

Now, I'll confess that my experiences with mead are quite limited.  When I was 19 years old, and hence old enough to first drink in Wyoming (the drinking age was then 19), I bought a bottle of mead due to the Viking legends.  It was awful.   I likely didn't make it past the first glass before I tossed the bottle out.

Recently I've had mead again, but for an odd reason.

Up at the start of this entry I noted that my mother tried her hand at wine making after taking a class at the local community college.  About a year or so ago my son, in college, decided to try it too.  His efforts were less reliant on products of the wild, indeed they weren't at all reliant on it, and he gave it up after an initial effort.  Nonetheless, a friend of his wanted to try mead and so they recently made a batch.

Their mead wasn't nearly as bad as the mead that I had when I was young, and I note that there's "dry" mead that's less sweet.  His friend and his family were really impressed with it.  While I was much less unimpressed with it than with the stuff I had years ago, I'm not going to take it up.

Which means that I'm not going to try Big Lost Meadery's product.  It may be great, if you like mead, but as I don't, I'm not going to bother.

Based on their website, Big Lost (which also brews beer) plays a bit with the manly  man image of mead. But the fact that the Norse and other northern Europeans drank it at one time actually tells me something else.

Grapes don't grow in the far north but there are plenty of bees up there, and bees make honey.  The fact that the early Scandinavians made mead (and they weren't the only ones by any means) tells me that if people figure out how to make ferment something, they'll ferment anything available.  Honey was available.  As soon as beer became available, it's worth noting, the Norsemen switched to that.**

And that about covers it for Wyoming's wine. 

Except for the homemade stuff, of course.

________________________________________________________________________________

*St. John covers here, of course, Jesus' first public miracle, the changing of water into wine at the Wedding Feast at Cana.

The entire story is an interesting one, and not simply (but of course principally) because it was Jesus' first public miracle.  Like most of the Bible, the story is multi dimensional in all sorts of ways.  One thing we can take from here, from a historical prospective, is the practices that pertained to wine at the time.

Very clearly, then as now, there were various grades of wine.  We learn from this story that the wine that Christ created from the water was of superb quality.  The steward was amazed that the hosts had saved the best wine for last, a practice that woudl be the reverse of what we'd expect then and now. 

Also, based upon the common size of water vessels at the time, this involved a very large quantity of wine. 

That's interesting not only because it tells us of the commonality of wine at the time. . .nobody was shocked that there was a lot of wine, but running out of wine would have been a disaster for the hosts, but also because it touches on a theological point, that being that the drink that was brought into the room at the Last Supper was wine, not "grape juice", as some take great straining strides to maintain.

**I've referenced before, but the novel Krisin Lavransdottir, while a novel, gives a really good account of daily life in Medieval Norway including the drinking habits of Norwegians at that time.  Citing a novel for factual information is always hazardous, but its so well researched I feel it can be relied upon for those details, and it makes it plain that a vast amount of beer and ale were consumed.  Mead is mentioned exactly once in the book.

Wyoming's legislature considers a bill to address air ambulance costs.

Basically the bill would expand medicaid coverage in that area.

The cost of air ambulance service, which when you need it, you need it, has been in the news a lot here recently.  It's a fantastic service, particularly in a state like this, but affording it has become really problematic for anyone who doesn't have insurance that covers most of it, and that is seemingly a lot of people.  So we're finding, at least in this one area, Medicaid Expansion might be in the works in a legislative body that's otherwise opposed it.

Some Gave All: Monument to French War Dead, Versailles.

Some Gave All: Monument to French War Dead, Versailles.:

Monument to French War Dead, Versailles.

A monument to French war dead at the Palace of Versailles.



MKTH Photograph

I wonder what my grandparents and great grandparents thought? Was Lex Anteinternet: January 21, 1919 Ireland declares independence and...

About Irish independence that is.

I just posted this item on that topic, the commencement of the First Dail, the Irish declaration of independence, etc.

Lex Anteinternet: January 21, 1919 Ireland declares independence and...: The Casper paper, like most, lead with headlines about the German election held the prior day.  They were more than a bit optimistic abo...

In 1919, when this was declared, I had one great grandparent at least, who was Irish born.  In thinking on it, there's an element of irony to that as that was my father's maternal grandmother, who had been born in Cork, Ireland.  The irony is that my father put very little stock in a person's national ancestry and nearly didn't approve of people focusing on it very much.  The big American Irish holiday wasn't really much of a matter to observe as far as he was concerned and he never called himself an "Irish American".  Indeed, with a German (Westphalian) last name, if the topic came up at all, he might mention that we had German ancestry but he'd never emphasize it and didn't approve of people calling themselves "German Americans" or "Irish Americans" of anything of that type.  People were just Americans as far as he was concerned.

My mother, who was not an American citizen until after my father had passed away was, however, very proud of her Irish ancestry.  There's an element of irony here as well as she also had French ancestry and Scots ancestry, which were never really mentioned.  She was more Irish in ancestry than anything else, but that Irish ancestry was Anglo Norman Irish ancestry, which was a matter of some controversy for eons in Ireland itself.  Still, the Anglo Normans became "more Irish than the Irish" and two of her ancestors (which she was unaware of) had died fighting for Irish independence at Vinegar Hill in the 1700s.

Her family was part of the Irish community in Quebec, a largely forgotten demographic now, and her grandfather had done extremely well in Montreal.  He was the son of an Irish immigrant but rose up to be in charge of a company called the Anglo Canadian Insurance Company.

Anglo, we'd note.

Anyhow, in Quebec of that distant day English speakers still ran things even though French political parties were in charge.  Economically, Quebec was closely tied to the United Kingdom, even if a majority of its population was not.  That created a fair amount of tension in that Quebec wasn't keen on English projects, like World War One, but English Canadians, quite a few of which were from England itself, weren't shy about their Englishness, including holding Orange Day parades. . . something that wouldn't happen now.  Perhaps that's why the Irishness of the small English speaking Irish Canadian population was emphasized. They were English speaking, but they were not Englishmen.

Anyhow, given all of that, I wonder how these folks saw the Dail's declaration on January 21, 1919.

I suspect my father's grandmother likely approved  of it, even though she had been in the United States since she was three years old and had a brother still in the English Army.  I don't know much about her really, other than that she was a character.  Her husband, my father's maternal grandfather, I also know very little about other than that in photographs he had a very Irish appearance.  He'd come to Colorado from Ohio, but nobody knows if he was born there or had come there as a small child.  They were typical Irish Americans for their era in every way, and like most Irish Americans, they almost certainly were glad to see Ireland break away from the United Kingdom.

And what about those on my mother's side?  

I suspect they did as well, but in doing so they must have taken that strange trip that so many Irish of the era did.  Going into the Great War the Irish supported the cause as long as they were not forced to.  You can find plenty of Irish writing of the era about the mission of the "British", of which they were part.  But as soon as independence came, they supported Ireland in their thoughts and writings.  It was an intellectual leap, but they somehow managed to do it, even those who had a vested interest in the United Kingdom, as my great grandfather would have.  Somehow that didn't seem to be effected by the switch in loyalties.

Indeed, that was true for a lot of the Irish themselves.  Going into the war, they were for home rule.  Coming out of it, they were for independence.  Maybe the war caused that switch.  In the peace negotiations, they were for dominion status.  They continued to have mixed feelings about the United Kingdom for a long time thereafter.  At least at first, only a few in Ireland had really virulent views about that topic, although that minority has managed to keep that going until this very day, and likewise in the United States, long separated from the old problems, keeping an exaggerated clarity on a complicated topic seems to have lasted a long time as well.

Taxes, Education and Wind. More news from Cheyenne.

A proposal to tax wind energy is circulating in Cheyenne again.

Sooner or later the state is going to do this.  As coal declines and wind ascends, a new tax base is going to have to be found, and wind is going to be part of that picture.

The question is, really, when?  Too early, and it might be denning the wind pups before they are weaned, which we don't want to do.

That tax money, of course, is what goes to education, and it has for many years now.  Ever since the Wyoming Supreme Court determined that district by district education funding, which had been the state's model for eons, was unconstitutional.

That decision was based pretty solidly on the text of the state's constitution.  Education in Wyoming is a fundamental right, and the Court held that unequal funding meant unequal education.  That's no doubt true, but adjusting to it only really worked well when there was a lot of cash.  Now, there isn't.

Sen. Charles Scott is proposing to amend the state's constitution to go back to the old system.  I.e., district by district.

One thing that can be said, of course, about that system is that it obviously worked as it was done from statehood until the 1970s.  The flipside is that the new system also worked and a lot of really nice schools were constructed under it.  Both sides of this argument have some good points to them. The fundamental problem underlying both is cash.

And that may be the rub.  Wyomingites were really good about funding schools for decades and decades, but like so many such things, a lot of that sort of evaporated when the state took over, or perhaps it didn't evaporate and something changed in the culture.  At least locally the voters turned down to replace a high school swimming pool when it was in fact much needed, although that may be deceptive as that vote was also tied to an unpopular school facility that was at the high school level but not a high school.  The teachers themselves opposed that and its been a clear failure as enrollment for it just isn't there.  So, in other words my example may not be a very good one.

But then there's also the example of the new Courthouse.  When that came before the voters a couple of decades ago the voters also rejected it, and did so to such an extent that the state actually funded a new county courthouse, which is really remarkable.  But that may have taught the local voters that if you refuse to pay, maybe the state will.  Or maybe it hasn't.

Indeed, all of this may reflect a highly transient local population.  People aren't hugely keen on being taxed for something they aren't going to use, including if they're headed out when the economic tide turns, as many people have.

Anyhow, I suspect an amendment to the state constitution to unring the bell on the Wyoming Supreme Court's 1970s vintage rulings in this area aren't going to occur. . .yet.  But you do have to wonder if at some point that becomes tempting, as it passed the ball back where it had been, and the legislature won't have to deal with it.

Before then, however, my guess is that we'll have a tax on wind energy.

January 21, 1919 Ireland declares independence and the Anglo Irish War commences; the deposed Korean Emperor dies.

The Casper paper, like most, lead with headlines about the German election held the prior day.  They were more than a bit optimistic about what that meant for Germany.  The momentous news about the Irish Dail, however, was also on the front page.

On this day in 1919, the Anglo Irish War commenced when the first Irish Dail, comprised of individuals elected to Parliament from Ireland standing on an independence ticket, assembled in Dublin.  The assembly was intended to simply express, and declare, Irish independence but on the same day the Irish Republican Army, acting independently, conducted an ambush on two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary at Soloheadbeg and the war was effectively started.  The Dail never officially declared war, although it termed the English presence to be an invasion, and of course the United Kingdom did not, regarding such acts as acts of rebellion.

The Dail did, however, declare independence, adopted a constitution and issued a proclamation intended to call upon the nations of the world to recognize Ireland as a state.

The declaration of independence, in Irish, read:

De bhrigh gur dual do mhuinntir na hÉireann bheith n-a saor náisiún.

Agus de bhrigh nár staon muintir na hÉireann riamh le seacht gcéad bliadhain ó dhiúltadh d'annsmacht Gall agus ó chur ina choinnibh go minic le neart airm.

Agus de bhrígh ná fuil de bhunadhas agus ná raibh riamh de bhunadhas le dlighe Shasana san tír seo acht foiréigean agus calaois, agus ná fuil de thaca leis ach sealbh lucht airm I n-aimhdheóin dearbhthola muinntire na hÉireann.

Agus de bhrigh go ndeárna Saor-Arm na hÉireann Saorstát Éireann d'fhorfhógairt I mBaile Átha Cliath Seachtmhain na Cásca 1916 ar son muinntire na hÉireann.

Agus de bhrigh go bhfuil muinntir na hireann lán-cheeaptha ar neamhspléadhchus iomlán do bhaint amach agus do chosaint dóibh fhéin d'fhonn leas an phobuil do chur chun cinn, an ceart d'athchur ar a bhonnaibh, an tsíothcháin I nirinn agus caradas le náisiúnaibh eile do chur I n-áirithe dhóibh féin agus féineachus náisiúan tsíothcháin I nirinn agus caradas le náisiúnaibh eile do chur I n-áirithe dhóibh féin agus féineachus náisiúnta do cheapadh go mbeidh toil na ndaoine mar bhunudhas leis agus cothrom cirt is caoitheamhlachta dá bhárr ag gach duine I nÉirinn.

Agus de bhrigh go ndeárna muinntir na hÉireann, agus sinn I mbéal ré nuadha de stair an domhain, feidhm a bhaint as an Olltoghadh, Mí na Modlag, 1918, chun a dhearbhughadh de bhreis adhbhalmhóir gur toil leó bheith díleas do Shaorstát Éireann.

Ar an adhbhar son deinimídne .i.na teachtaí atá toghtha ag muinntir na hÉireann agus sinn I nDáil Chomhairle I dteannta a chéile, bunughadh Saorstáit d'áth-dheimhniughadh I n-ainm náisiún na hÉireann agus sinn féin do chur fá gheasaibh an deimhniughadh so do chur I bhfeidhm ar gach slighe ar ár gcumas.

Órduighmíd ná fuil de chomhacht ag éinne ach amháin ag na Teachtaíbh toghtha ag muinntir na hÉireann dlighthe dhéanamh gur dual do mhuinntir na hÉireann géilleadh dhóibh, agus ná fuil de pháirliment ann go mbeidh an náisiún umhal do ach amháin Dáil Éireann.

Dearbhuighmíd ná fuilingeóchaimíd go bráth an cumhangcas atá dá dhéanamh ag an annsmacht Ghallda ar ár gceart náisiúnta agus éilighmíd ar chamthaí na Sasanach imtheacht ar fad as ár dtír.

Ilighimíd ar gach saornáisiún ar domhan neamhspleádhchus na hÉireann d'admháil agus fógraimíd gurab éigean ár neamhspleádhchus chun síothcháin a chur I n-áirithe do'n domhan.

I n-ainm muinntire na hÉireann cuirimíd ár gcinneamhaint fé chomairce Dhia an Uile-Chomhacht do chuir misneach agus buan-tseasamhacht n-ár sinnsear chun leanamhaint leó go treun les na céadta bliadhain gcoinnibh tíoránachta gan truagh gan taise: agus de bhrigh gur móide an neart an ceart a bheith againn san troid d'fhágadar mar oighreacht againn, aithchuingimiíd ar Dhia A bheannacht do bhronnadh orainn I gcóir an treasa deiridh den chomhrac go bfhuilmid fé gheasaibh leanmhaint do go dtí go mbainfeam amach an tsaoirse.

In English:

Whereas the Irish people is by right a free people:

And Whereas for seven hundred years the Irish people has never ceased to repudiate and has repeatedly protested in arms against foreign usurpation:

And Whereas English rule in this country is, and always has been, based upon force and fraud and maintained by military occupation against the declared will of the people:
And Whereas the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, by the Irish Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people:

And Whereas the Irish people is resolved to secure and maintain its complete independence in order to promote the common weal, to re-establish justice, to provide for future defence, to insure peace at home and goodwill with all nations and to constitute a national polity based upon the people's will with equal right and equal opportunity for every citizen:

And Whereas at the threshold of a new era in history the Irish electorate has in the General Election of December, 1918, seized the first occasion to declare by an overwhelming majority its firm allegiance to the Irish Republic:

Now, therefore, we, the elected Representatives of the ancient Irish people in National Parliament assembled, do, in the name of the Irish nation, ratify the establishment of the Irish Republic and pledge ourselves and our people to make this declaration effective by every means at our command:

We ordain that the elected Representatives of the Irish people alone have power to make laws binding on the people of Ireland, and that the Irish Parliament is the only Parliament to which that people will give its allegiance:

We solemnly declare foreign government in Ireland to be an invasion of our national right which we will never tolerate, and we demand the evacuation of our country by the English Garrison:

We claim for our national independence the recognition and support of every free nation in the world, and we proclaim that independence to be a condition precedent to international peace hereafter:

In the name of the Irish people we humbly commit our destiny to Almighty God who gave our fathers the courage and determination to persevere through long centuries of a ruthless tyranny, and strong in the justice of the cause which they have handed down to us, we ask His divine blessing on this the last stage of the struggle we have pledged ourselves to carry through to Freedom.

The short constitution, which was the constitution for the Dail, rather than the country, read:

Article 1

All legislative powers shall be vested in Dail Eireann, composing of Deputies, elected by the Irish people from the existing Irish Parliamentary constituencies.

Article 2

(a) All executive powers shall be vested in the members, for the time being, of the Ministry.

(b) The Ministry shall consist of a President of the Ministry, elected by Dail Eireann, and four Executive Officers, viz.;

A Secretary of Finance

A Secretary of Home Affairs

A Secretary of Foreign Affairs

A Secretary of National Defence

each of whom the President shall nominate and have power to dismiss.

(c) Every member of the Ministry shall be a member of Dail Eireann, and shall at all times be responsible to the Dail.

(d) At the first meeting of Dail Eireann after their nomination by the President, the names of the Executive Officers shall be separately submitted to Dail Eireann for approval.

(e) The appointment of the President shall date from his election, and the appointment of each Executive Officer from the date of the approval by the Dail of his nomination.

(f) The Ministry or any member thereof may at any time be removed by vote of the Dail upon motion for that specific purpose, provided that at least seven days notice in writing of that motion shall have been given.

Article 3

A Chairman elected annually by the Dail, and in his absence a Deputy Chairman so elected, shall preside at all meetings of Dail Eireann. Only members of the Dail shall be eligible for these offices. In case of the absence of the Chairman and Deputy Chairman the Dail shall fill the vacancies or elect a temporary Chairman.

Article 4

All monies required by the Ministry shall be obtained on vote of the Dail. The Ministry shall be responsible to the Dail for all monies so obtained, and shall present properly audited accounts for the expenditure of the same -twice yearly- in the months of May and November. The audit shall be conducted by an Auditor or Auditors appointed by the Dail. No member of the Dail shall be eligible for such appointment.

Article 5

This Constitution is provisional and is liable to alteration upon seven days written notice of motion for that specific purpose.

This is a translation of course.  The Irish text, which can be translated slightly differently (apparently. . . I don't speak Irish Gaelic) is as follows:

AN CHEUD ALT.

Beidh iomlán comhachta chun dlighthe dheunamh ag Dáil Éireann agus isé bheidh san Dáil ná teachtaí toghtha ag muintir na hÉireann ó sna dáilcheanntair atá san tír fé láthair.

AN DARA hALT.

1. Beidh iomlán comhachta gnímh éan tráth aca so a bheidh I bhfeadhmannus san Aireacht an tráth soin.
2. Isé bheidh san Aireacht ná Príomh-aireach, toghtha ag Dáil Éireann, agus ceathrar Aireach eile, eadhon:

Aireach Airgid.

Aireach Gnóthaí Dúthchais.

Aireach Gnóthaí Coigcríoch.

Aireach Cosanta

Isé an Príomh-Aireach ainmneochaidh an ceathrar Aireach eile, agus beidh de chomhacht aige iad do chur as feadhmannus.
3. Is éigean do gach Aireach bheith n-a Theachta san Dáil agus beidh sé freagarthach I gcomhnuidhe don Dáil.
4. Is éigean ainmneacha na nAireach do chur fé bhrághaid na Dála ag an gceud thionól taréis don Phríomh-Aireach a n-ainmniughadh, I gcóir a ndeimhnighthe.
5. Beidh an príomh-Aireach I bhfeadhmannus chomh luath is a thoghfar é, agus beidh na hAirigh eile I bhfeadhmannus chomh luath agus a dheimhneóchaidh an Dáil a n-ainmneacha.
6. Is féidir don Dáil an Aireacht nó éan duine desna hAirigh do chur as feadhmhannus le neart bhótaí má chuirtear foláramh rúin fé scríbhinn d'éan toisc chuige sin isteach seacht lá roimh ré.

AN TRÍOMHADH ALT.

Ceann Comhairle toghtha ag an Dáil I naghaidh na bliadhna, nó Ceann Ionaid toghtha I naghaidh na bliadhna, muna mbíonn an Ceann Comhailre I láthair, a bheidh I gceannas gach tionóil den Dáil. Ní bheidh I gceannas infheadhma I gcóir na n-ionad so acht Teachtaí de'n Dáil. Má bhíonn an Ceann Comhairle agus an Ceann Ionaid as láthair, ceapfaidh an Dáil lucht ionaid nó toghfaidh siad Ceann Comhairle sealadach.

AN CEATHRAMHADH ALT.

Gheobhaidh an tAireach pé airgead bheidh uaidh de bhárr bhóta na Dála. Beidh an tAireach freagarthach don Dáil san airgead a gheobhfar mar sin agus leagfaidh sé cúntaisí mionscrúduighthe ar chaitheamh an airgid fé bhrághaid na Dála dhá uair sa bhliadhain - um Shamhain is um Bealtaine. Scrúdaidhe nó Scrúdaidhthe toghtha ag an Dáil a dheunfaidh an mionscrúdadh. Ní féidir éin Teachta den Dáil do thoghadh mar Scrúdaidhe.

AN CÚIGMHADH ALT.

Bunreacht sealadach é seo agus is féidir é d'atharughadh ach foláramh fé scríbhinn do thabhairt d'éan toisc chuige sin, seacht lá roimh ré.

The text of the Dail's Message to the Free Nations of the World read:

To the Nations of the World—Greeting

The Nation of Ireland having proclaimed her national independence, calls, through her elected representatives in Parliament assembled in the Irish Capital on January 21, 1919, upon every free nation to support the Irish Republic by recognising Ireland's national status and her right to its vindication at the Peace Congress.

Naturally, the race, the language, the customs and traditions of Ireland are radically distinct from the English. Ireland is one of the most ancient nations in Europe, and she has preserved her national integrity, vigorous and intact, through seven centuries of foreign oppression; she has never relinquished her national rights, and throughout the long era of English usurpation she has in every generation defiantly proclaimed her inalienable right of nationhood down to her last glorious resort to arms in 1916.

Internationally, Ireland is the gateway to the Atlantic; Ireland is the last outpost of Europe towards the West; Ireland is the point upon which great trade routes between East and West converge; her independence is demanded by the Freedom of the Seas; her great harbours must be open to all nations, instead of being the monopoly of England. To-day these harbours are empty and idle solely because English policy is determined to retain Ireland as a barren bulwark for English aggrandisement, and the unique geographical position of this island, far from being a benefit and safeguard to Europe and America, is subjected to the purposes of England's policy of world domination.

Ireland to-day reasserts her historic nationhood the more confidently before the new world emerging from the war, because she believes in freedom and justice as the fundamental principles of international law; because she believes in a frank co-operation between the peoples for equal rights against the vested privileges of ancient tyrannies; because the permanent peace of Europe can never be secured by perpetuating military dominion for the profit of empire but only by establishing the control of government in every land upon the basis of the free will of a free people, and the existing state of war, between Ireland and England, can never be ended until Ireland is definitely evacuated by the armed forces of England.

For these among other reasons, Ireland—resolutely and irrevocably determined at the dawn of the promised era of self-determination and liberty that she will suffer foreign dominion no longer—calls upon every free nation to uphold her national claim to complete independence as an Irish Republic against the arrogant pretensions of England founded in fraud and sustained only by an overwhelming military occupation, and demands to be confronted publicly with England at the Congress of the Nations, that the civilised world having judged between English wrong and Irish right may guarantee to Ireland its permanent support for the maintenance of her national independence.

Of interest, the message to the free nations of the world specifically referenced the "Peace Congress", i.e., the Paris Peace Conference.  Put in this context, the declaration and the message were calling upon the democratic nations of the world to put their values to the test, which presented a difficult argument for the British in particular in some ways, as the point could hardly be ignored or rejected.

This sort of problem was one that was going to reoccur again and again for those gathered in Paris.  While various European nations (but not the Irish) would be able to advance their claims for independence from ancient empires, overseas colonies of European nations wouldn't find seats at the table. There were quite a few that would have liked to have had them, and some did better than others.  Be that as it may, European nations weren't acting like the Age of Empire was over, even though the sun was clearly setting on that age.

As for Ireland, the Irish question would launch the United Kingdom into a war that had many unseemly and dirty features on both sides and which came immediately after the Great War, in which Irish troops had fought heroically for the United Kingdom. The entire situation was murky in the extreme in that the Irish themselves never gave their unqualified backing to independence in-spite of having seated a pro independence majority for the English Parliament which was clearly going to pursue full independence.  As recently as 1916 such moves had clearly not received the support of the majority of Irish sympathies and even in 1919 it was entirely clear exactly what the Irish electorate wanted, as the results of the subsequent war and peace negotiations would demonstrate. The English, for their part, proved to be less yielding than might have been imagined for one reason or another, all of which suggests that the Irish and the English were grasping, for the most part, for some ground between home rule and independence, with dominion status ultimately agreed upon for at time.

Even at that, this story in some ways has failed to fully play out.  The Irish, undoubtedly a separate people with a separate but nearby homeland, had, as the Dail's declaration pointed out, endured 700 years of English occupation.  But they had in turn been very heavily influenced by the English during that period, as their cousins the Scots had been.  In some ways their national character came to be defined by steadfastly not being English in whatever they could refuse to be English in.  Their early independence would see the new nation overemphasize that in numerous ways that came back to haunt the country later, and then when it achieved economic power in later years it came to loose much of its identity in the rush to gain what it perceived it had lost to the extent that Ireland today is a rather poor reflection of what it once was, now being a nation that's much less Irish and much more one of the United Kingdom's angry teenage children, with a parent that's not concerned that much about the child that moved out of the house.

Speaking of the rise and fall of Empires and trying to wrest free from them, Korea's only real modern Emperor, out of power, died on this day in 1919.

Elsewhere, Gojong of Korea (고종; 高宗;), the Emperor Gwangmu, Korea's First Emperor (광무제; 光武帝;) died under mysterious circumstances that are still somewhat debated, although at age 66 he was not at an age where death and failure to detect its arrival were really uncommon by any means.

He had abdicated in 1910 due to Japan absorbing Korea into its empire following the Russo Japanese War.  Gojong had declared an empire in the first place to attempt to separate Korea from Chinese influence, but the result was ultimately unsuccessful as his nation ended up being absorbed into the expanding Japanese Empire, which resulted in his abdication.

There was really nothing that Korea could do about this itself and there was nobody the Koreans could turn to.  The fate of small Asian nations sandwiched between the rising Japanese Empire, Russia and China was not one that any western nation was going to bother taking up, and the only anti colonial power in the region was the United States, which had no association with Korea of any kind at that point in history.  The great Korean tragedy was about to begin.

Burkburnett Texas, January 20, 1919.

The Cross.

A cross in France.

The Best Posts of the Week of January 13, 2019

The best post of the week of January 13, 2019.

Violence and booze seemed a pretty consistent them this week.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Church of St. Nicholas, Old Believers Russian Orthodox, Nikolaevsk Alaska

Some Gave All: War Memorial, Coulombs, France. The war memorial in Coulombs, France, dedicated to the men of the town who lost their lives in World War One and World War Two. The flags are those of France and the European Community.

We're really conservative except when we're not. The thorny problem of applying principles even when you do not wish to.

January 15, 1919. Murders in Germany, The Eve of Prohibition in the United States

Wyoming legislators propose radically different, and radical, primary changes. One is pretty good, but it has no chance.

Wyoming, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Missouri push the 18th Amendment over the top.

Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever?

Big Changes to the Friess School Bill, was "Lex Anteinternet: We're really conservative except when we're not. ..."

Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever? Hey, what about whiskey (and other distilled beverages)?

January 19, 1919. Echos from a distant wall. Red Army commences assault on Allies in Northwestern Russia, the first real democratic German election, the Atrocities of the Turks upon the Armenians in Film, Welcomes to Returning Troops and Odd News.

January 19, 1919. Echos from a distant wall. Red Army commences assault on Allies in Northwestern Russia, the first real democratic German election, the Atrocities of the Turks upon the Armenians in Film, Welcomes to Returning Troops and Odd News.

On this day the Allied Expeditionary Force in northwestern Russia came under attack in a series of events that would lead to its practical defeat at the hands of the Red Army, even though it fought well throughout the ordeal.

The prior summer and fall the Allies, under the command of British General Poole, had advanced south from their bridgehead at Arkhangelsk.  The Americans had dispatched the 339th Infantry, a unit made up of Michigan and Wisconsin draftees, to the mission in northwestern Russia without instruction.  Upon arrival, their commander, Lt. Col Stewart (MoH from the Philippines) agreed to Gen. Poole's use of American troops and in fact he basically sat the rest of the expedition out from Arkangelsk thereafter.  The most successful unit of the campaign, in turn, turned out to be Company A of the 339th which advanced sought of the resort town of Shenkursk that fall.

Shenkursk in 1919. Shenkursk was a pre war restort town and had only come under Allied occupation that previous fall when a British commanded offensive caused Company A of the 339th Infantry to capture it.

Allied Expeditionary forces, in this case American, British and Canadian troops, came under attack in a major battle of the Russian Civil War that's all but forgotten, as in fact is the case for the Allied expedition in the context of being direct combatants itself, on this day in a Red Army effort to regain the ground lost that fall.

The Battle of Shenkursk commenced on this day with a giant Red Army artillery bombardment on Allied, principally American, positions at Nizhnyaya Gora followed by a 1,000 man bayonet charge on a position held only by 47 American troops of the 339th Infantry, and supported by nearby company of White Cossack's.  The American force obviously had no choice but to withdraw, but it was ordered to do so only after putting up as much as a delaying action as possible.  While they were doing this the Cossack company arrived but withdrew after their commanding officer was wounded, showing the unreliability of White forces.  By the time the American retreat was authorized, the streets of the town were covered by Red machine guns so an alternative route under heavy fire and with no artillery support was undertaken at great loss.  The artillery, for its part, was White Russian and the cannoneers at first abandoned their posts until they were compelled to return at pistol point by the overall American commander, Cpt. Otto "Viking" Odjard. Unfortunately, they returned to their posts too late to provide covering artillery fire.  As a result, only American soldiers, including their commander Lt. Meade, made it through the fire to return to Allied lines.

339th Infantry in Russia in 1918.  The majority of the men were conscripts from Michigan, rounded out by conscripts from Wisconsin.

Showing the unreliability of the Red troops next, they failed to followup on their initial success and the Americans were able to return to the field during the day and recover their wounded.  By nightfall, only nineteen remained uncovered, of which six were known to be dead.  During the night, two of the missing made it through the Red lines back to Allied lines.  

Unit crest of the 339th Infantry recalling their Russian service.

Overnight, Canadian field artillery arrived with artillerymen who took over two 3 in. filed artillery pieces that had been abandoned by the White Russians.  The Cossack company undertook a strategic withdrawal from Ust Padenga to Vsyokaya Gora without being detected by the Reds.  Over the next three days outnumbered Allied forces held on against repeated attacks by a reinforced Red Army.  The Allied forces inflicted heavy casualties on the Reds, but were ultimately compelled to withdraw on January 22.  By January 24, after fighting a delaying action at Sholosha, they arrived at Shenkursk where they were quickly surrounded by the pursing Red forces.

At Shenkursk Cpt. Odjard requested instructions from his commander, British General Edmund Ironside, who was in Arkangelsk.  Ironside ordered the Allied force to withdraw.  That withdrawal was commenced at midnight of January 24 by way of an unguarded logging trail.  The Allied withdrawal was conducted entirely at night and the Red Army commenced firing artillery on a new empty Shenkursk the morning of the 25th.  The retreating men occupied Vystavka on January 27 where  they were again engaged by the Reds over several weeks.  

The resulting Allied retreat cleared the far north western Russia of Allied forces and therefore constituted an important Red victory.  With the Allies marginalized in the north, the only forces opposing the Reds in that region were the Whites, who would prove to be ineffective in the north.

The Allied mission in Russia never had a clear purpose to start with and was seen in strikingly different terms by the different Allied forces committed to it.  In the east, the Americans were strictly precluded from engaging in offensive actions.  In the north, they'd been given no instructions at all and fell under British command. The British saw their mission as being to directly provide for the defeat of the Reds and to aid the various White forces.  The British commanded forces performed well and outfought the Red Army, but they were never committed in sufficient strength to be able to really engage an army the size of their growing opponents and had, in fact, basically outrun their ability to control ground in any event that prior fall.

The German flag under the Weimar Republic . . and again for the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949.

In Germany, proportional voting for the Reichstag, featuring the first election in which women were allowed to vote, took place, although the election was trailed out as German soldiers stationed in the East, where things remained tense, did not vote until February 2.  The election is regarded as the first really democratic election in German history.

The results were that the Social Democratic Party took 163 seats out of 421 giving them the largest block in the Reichstag but not a majority.  Second position went to the Centre Party, a Christian Democratic Catholic Party, which took 91 seats, with the third position going to the left of center German Democratic Party.  The German Communist Party didn't take any seats, but the Independent Socialist, a heavily left of center party took 22 seats.  The SDP would add two seats after the soldiers in the east voted in February.

Because the structure of the German government varied from other parliaments, the immediate impact of this is a little difficult to explain.  Philipp Scheidemann of the SDP would become the chancellor, but would only take office in February, and would ultimately resign in protest over the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

The initial German election offered some hope for the future as holding an election, for a country that had never had fully fair elections before, right after a major defeat in war and during the midst of a civil war is a difficult feat.  Under the circumstances, the election was a triumph for German democracy and, moreover, for the SDP which, while it did not obtain a majority of seats, acquired more than any other party and essentially had its views ratified by the majority of Germans, including a majority of serving soldiers.  Democracy in Germany would prove to be fragile, however, and the Germans would hold four more elections prior to the Great Depression really setting in. In that last pre Great Depression election the German National People's Party, a right wing nationalist party, took second position demonstrating the rise of German nationalism even before that time.  In that same election the Centre Party and the Communist Party, in third and fourth places, were not far behind the SDP, although all were fairly far behind it.  In the next election, 1930, the Nazi Party was in second place with 107 seats to the SDP's 143 and the Communist Party in third with 77.  In the last democratic election prior to World War Two the Nazi's supplanted the SDP as being in first position, taking 196 seats to the SDP's 121 while the Communist took an even 100.  Oddly enough, even under the Nazi's first election in 1933, the last election in which other parties appeared, the Communist took 88 and the SDP took 120.  No party ever had over 50% of the German vote in any election.

In Washington state the Knights of Columbus dedicated a hut for returning servicemen on this Sunday, January 19, 1919.  The Knights had been one of the really active service organizations of the Great War, which is remarkable in that the country remained, at that time, very much a Protestant country in spite of having a significant Catholic minority.

Closer to home, and in-spite of ongoing combat involving American troops in Russia, and no official peace in Europe, troops were pouring home.  Service organizations were turning their attention on that in an era in which the support for soldiers did not have the infrastructure it later would, as this "yard long" photograph of a dedication of a Knights of Columbus hut in Washington state demonstrates.

Like all service religion based service organizations of World War One, the Knights hut served everyone, not just Catholics.  

I've talked about the Knights of Columbus a little bit, but not much, in my threads about service and fraternal organizations I've posted here.  The Knights were formed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that fraternal organizations were huge in the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. So huge, that membership in one was practically necessary for people in certain lines of work.  Some of those organizations were Protestant or at least Anti Catholic in nature and therefore Catholics could not join them, or they were secret societies which Catholics are precluded by their faith from joining.  So, as a reaction, the Knights were founded.

I've seen it claimed, and indeed in a state journal run by one of the various Knights of Columbus state organizations, that World War One abated anti Catholicism in the United States but I don't think that's really true.  Indeed, Al Smith would loose the Presidential election of 1928 principally because he was a Catholic.  It would take World War Two and the GI Bill to mainstream Catholics into American society and it would take the Presidency of John F. Kennedy to really blend them into the American fabric to such an extent that their distinctiveness was substantially lost, in no small part due to their own accommodations with American life that they had up until then not acquiesced to.  Interestingly enough, in spite of notable Catholics rising to high position in American life, including the featuring of some of them absolutely abandoning the positions of their faith, a strong element of prejudice remains, as exhibited during the 2016 Presidential election in which a Clinton staffer insulted the entire faith. Recently, interestingly enough, liberal commentator Jill Filipovic called the Knights of Columbus an extremist group for holding traditional Catholic opinions on such things as abortion and the nature of marriage, which would also put the Knights in tune with the bulk of human history and nature.  If it were any other group other than a Christian one, and more particularly a Catholic one, there'd be cries of outrage over that.  But as is often noted, anti Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice in American life.

Another anti Christian prejudice hit the movie screens on this Sunday, January 19, 1919, that being the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks, which was both ethnic and religious in character, the Armenians being ancient residents in the region in which the Turks were originally an invader and also a people that had remained faithful to their faith, the Armenian Apostolic Church. That church in fact one of the Apostolic Churches and today is in the Oriental Orthodox branch of the Apostolic faiths.  The Ottoman Turks were of course Muslims.  But to be fair they were also aggressive against all non Turkic people in their empire.

Ravished Armenia, also known as the Auction of Souls is a film for which only twenty minutes survives but it is a powerful film even at that.  The film, perhaps partially because some of it is original footage (I'm not certain), or perhaps because it appears to be, is nearly a documentary in character.  What's so additionally remarkable about this is that the Turkish atrocities were well known almost at the very moment they were committed, and yet Turkey continues to deny they occurred to this very day.   The film was based on a book by an Armenian survivor of Turkish atrocities who also stared in the film, Aurora Mardiganian, who was only 18 years old at the time the film was released.  At that time, she was recalling events of just a few years earlier, and she had herself escaped death by being sold into slavery and then escaping.

Armenian stamp honoring Mardiganian.

The film, not surprisingly, was subject to some censorship because it includes nudity, in the form of Armenian women being crucified nude by Turks.  Mardiganian somewhat objected to the portrayal, however, not because it was cruel or because of the nudity, but rather because she maintained that the Turks raped Armenian women and then impaled them through their vaginas in a particularly masochistic fashion that the film makers determined not to portray as it was so barbarous.  The film itself used many Armenian extras living in Southern California, which has a large Armenian population even today.  Sadly, over twenty of the extras died due being exposed to the Spanish Flu during the film.  

Mardiganian herself lived to old age and died in Californian in 1994.

If that film was too heavy of content, and it likely was for many, a comedy entitled Here Comes The Bride oped that weekend as well.

It doesn't survive, but frankly, it sounds like a typical pre Hayes Code cheesy comedy.

The Dub also opened that Sunday.

It was a comedy too, and it's also a lost film.

Or maybe it'd just be more entertaining, sort of, to read the paper that day.  Russian revolutionaries who were "spry" and had "sass", discharged soldiers shaving off the mustaches of NCO's., bad beer in the UK and radicalism in Cheyenne. . . . 

Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever? Hey, what about whiskey (and other distilled beverages)?

A bottle of "double cask" Wyoming Whiskey, which is Wyoming Whiskey that's also been partially aged in a sherry cask.

Here's an item I just posted, all about local beers:

Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever?: Eh? Okay, let's start off with a definition refresher, as for many folks the term "Distributist" is a mystery. ...

Several years ago here, I posted an item on whiskey that featured a photograph of a bottle of Wyoming Whiskey:

The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibition.

Things have really changed since then.  Like breweries, distilleries are popping up all over.  Even locally, to my amazement.

Wyoming Whiskey was a new offering at the time, and was advertised as a bourbon comparable to Maker's Mark.  Frankly, I didn't care much for it, but I'm not a huge whiskey fan.  Inside word is that its much improved since then and I did buy a bottle of it as a gift for somebody the other day and, yes, it was much better than I recalled.

But it certainly isn't alone anymore.

Actually it wasn't even then.

Before we move on from Wyoming Whiskey, which as noted now has a reputation as being much improved as noted, let's note something on the Distributist angle to this.

As probably everyone knows, Wyoming Whiskey is owned by the Mead family.  It isn't employee owned or anything, so it doesn't really fit the model perfectly and its certainly not in the same category in regards to that as Casper's Skull Tree Brewery or Ft. Collin's Fat Tire Brewery, but an interesting thing about it is that it was formed as the Mead's had more corn than they knew what to do with.

Plowing a corn field in which last years cut stocks are visible.  1906.

Corn is the basic constituent of bourbon and sour mash, the archetypal American whiskeys which are notable in that regard as it distinguishes them from the whiskeys of the British Isles, where whiskey got its start (Scotch and Irish Whiskey are rye whiskeys).  Bourbon, which bears that name for reasons I know not of, got rolling as Appalachian farmers, mostly descendants of the Scots and Scots Irish at first, didn't know what to do with their corn surplus so they distilled it.  The Mead's took the same approach.  So they do provide an example of a farming family with a local product that made it into another local product.  If not a great example of subsidiarity, it's sort of one.

Anyhow, there was already the Koltiska Distillery in Sheridan Wyoming when Wyoming Whiskey got up and rolling and which was making an assortment of hard alcohols.  I've never tried it and I've never even seen it in anyone's home for that matter. But it was around then and still is now.  In fairness to my original post, it doesn't distill a whiskey and it specializes in liqueurs, although it now distills a vodka.

Vodka was the original product of Backwards Distillery, a small distillery that got up in running in Mills Wyoming and which is owned and operated all by immediate  members of the same family.  I was skeptical that the small distillery would make it at first, but the collection of people who own it and work there proved to have a real business head as its first product, vodka, was its choice simply because its easy to make correctly.  It turns out that they always intended to offer a whiskey and they've been aging a batch for some time.  According to the early press on it, the constituents are unique so it can't be classified as a bourbon or rye, etc., but is something else. American Whiskey is what they're calling it.  Based on what I read, it features corn and wheat.  Maybe wheat has been used in other whiskeys (I know its been used in vodkas, and in fact is what vodkas are normally made of), but if so, I've never heard of that.

This is interesting in and of itself as they've not only successful produced an aged whiskey as a very small outfit, they've done it under the wire so that not much was known about it as they were doing it (they also started distilling gin).  I don't like vodka as a rule (and I don't like bourbon really either) but the one and only occasion I had Backwards vodka it was actually really good.  Since then I've had a high quality Russian vodka brought back from Russia by a friend on a single occasion and I have to note that it was good also, so my opinion on vodka may be based on bad vodkas, which if that is true, would include nearly ever vodka.  Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see what their American Whiskey is like.

A page out of the same book might be found in Jackson Hole Still Works, which is a distillery in Jackson Hole that produces vodka and gin, which seem to be the starter hard alcohols for distilleries. Their web site indicates that they might have whiskey on the horizon.  The company was started by two friends and they note that they use all local products.  As there's no constituents grown in the immediate Jackson's Hole area, they importing corn from Byron and Powell, which means they are benefiting local farmers within the state. They emphasize, in a subsidiarity sort of way, that they're committed to environmental and local causes, and all of their spent grain is donated for animal feed to a local livestock producer and a further emphasis on having a low carbon footprint.

They aren't the only Jackson's Hole distiller, however, and a Grand Teton Distillery also is up and running in Jackson although it gives its address as Driggs Idaho.  It also produces its products, including vodka and bourbon, from local constituents, advertising that nothing comes from more than 25 miles away.  It bottles potato vodka, which for an Idaho distillery, makes particular sense.

There was, until this past July, a Wojtek Distillery in Laramie, which I don't know anything about other than that the Polish sounding distillery was owned by Polish descendants there who specialized in Polish distilled beverages, including something called Vazoonka.  I'm clueless about Vazoonka, but Laramie, while a college town, isn't a giant city (20,000 souls).  It briefly had a distillery of its own, but one that didn't produce whiskey (which is okay by me).  It shared space with a winery, but when it shut down it indicated that it's "parent company had sold" and I note that the winery it was indicated as being associated with apparently no longer exists.  It promised to reopen soon, but I can't see that it has yet.

The individual that started Wojtek Distillery is apparently from an Albany County ranch family, which if so gives us another sort of Mead like example, although I know nothing else about this operation.  I lived in high altitude Albany County for a little over six years and I saw very little in the way of crop agriculture while there, although there's a little in the Centennial Valley region.  Given that, I'd be surprised if they're raising whatever the constituents for these products are, but I don't know that or anything else about their operation.  They believe that they are the only producers of Vazoonka outside of Poland, or rather were, I suppose.  Whatever that beverage is, I'd note, it's so obscure that I can't even find a Wikipedia entry for it.

Anyhow, this is a really interesting trend.  I've been surprised by the explosion of local breweries, and further surprised when at least one, Skull Tree, dedicated itself to acquiring its constituents locally. Distilleries surprised me even more, and then to find at least three of them dedicating themselves to using local constituents in a really dedicated way, and one of them, Jackson Hole Still Works, going even further in that in their community involvement, is really remarkable.

So we're seeing local products in this area competing with something that only a few years ago was very much headed in the other way. And now some of them are dedicated to using local constituents.

Interesting.  And. . .interesting model for other areas?

Bill Calling for a Constitutional Convention over Citizens United fails

Citizens United has been a hugely controversial U.S. Supreme Court case and frankly I'm not that keen on it.  I'll note that, as I think it's a good thing this bill died.

Citizens United was a 2010 United States Supreme Court decision in which the Supreme Court held, 5 to 4, that corporations and associations of all types have a free speech right to spend their money in support of electioneering in any fashion they wanted.  A Federal law had restricted that.

Many people were shocked by the decision and feel that it allows all sorts of organizations, including business corporations, non profit corporations and associations, to influence elections this way.  It's easy for nearly anybody to find a group that they're really upset with this way and therefor being angry over Citizens United is easy.  People who dislike the NRA, for example, will point to it.  People who dislike Planned Parenthood will point to it.

Hence the larger problem.  Coming together in an organization dedicated to promoting your views really is a type of conduct that most Americans support.  People don't like it if its somebody else's point of view they disagree with.  They do like it if its their own point of view..  So pretty obviously something going very far in the nature of repealing Citizens United will make almost everyone mad.

By the same token, this gets into the really interesting current world view on associations.  Corporations are regarded, as we well know, as people in the eyes of the law.  If that's the case, they'd have free speech rights like other people, even if they aren't really people.  They aren't people, of course, in the natural sense, so hence the level of frustration expressed here.  But does that mean that if we're going to take that on, we're going to take some of the larger legal fiction on?

Anyhow, petitions have been circulating nationwide to hold a Constitutional Convention to amend the constitution in order to repeal Citizens United.  The problem is, you can't do that.

Oh, you can hold a Constitutional Amendment alright, and I think there's been proposals for one nearly my entire adult life.  But you can't hold one on one topic.  The last time that was tried it was when a convention was held to fix the Articles of Confederation. . . and that yielded the Constitution.

That is, once you assemble a Constitutional Convention, there's no earthly way to restrain it.  You can't tell it what to address, and you can't even tell it when to shut down and go home.  So you have to ask yourself if you really want a Constitutional Convention in the current political atmosphere.

It sounds all fine and dandy if you assume that everyone thinks just the way you do, but they don't.  At a Constitutional Convention there would be proposals to repeal lots of Supreme Court decisions.  Okay, that may suit you, but you should ponder it.  Among those that would surely be the subject of somebody's proposed amendment would undoubtedly be:

Citizens United (duh).
Obergfell
Roe v. Wade
District of Columbia v. Heller

Unless you are in the rare group of people who would support all of these, and more, being address by Constitutional amendments, you ought to probably think twice about gathering a group of folks to tackle the U.S. Constitution.  I'm not saying I agree with all of these decisions.  I don't.  But. . . beware. . .

January 18, 1919. The Paris Peace Conference Commenced.

The work of the war was over, although the peace wasn't very peaceful by a long measure in many places.  Be that as it may, on this day in 1919, the Paris Peace Conference opened to commence the work on arriving at a formal peace.

In addition to the momentous story of the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, some other news was circulating as well, including the start of the news on the uneven treatment the National Guard, which had shouldered a heavy burden in the war, had received from the Regular Army.  It truly did, and indeed it continued to be slighted even into the peace, where the Regular Army, in its memory of the war in France, managed to omit the Guard as much as possible.

Blog Mirror: Alcoholic Beverage Recipes a Hundred Years Ago

There's been a lot of posts on alcohol here recently, and some more to come.  Here's one that relates us back to the centennial of prohibition that we just passed, with a mixed drink recipe from that era:


Alcoholic Beverage Recipes a Hundred Years Ago

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: “Take Good Care of Nature, and She Will Take Good Care of You”

A really interesting item on A Hundred Years Ago:

“Take Good Care of Nature, and She Will Take Good Care of You”

I have a post that will be vaguely related to this, and a lot of other topics, that will be posted shortly.  In the meantime, this century old item is really worth reading.  So are the comments.

The Montgomery Ward Seizure

A World War Two episode I knew nothing about:

The Montgomery Ward Seizure

Posted on December 27, 2018 by ahcadmin

On December 27, 1944, the U.S. government seized control of properties belonging to Montgomery Ward, a successful department store retailer that had been in business since 1872.

Very interesting.  And with long lasting repercussions.

Wyoming to abolish the death penalty?

In another surprising development in the legislature, a bill has been introduced, for the sixth time, to do away with capital punishment.

Now, introducing something for the sixth time wouldn't seem like news, but on this occasion the bill offered by one of the few Democrats in the legislature is receiving a lot of Republican support.  All of a sudden, a lot of Republicans are signing on in support of the bill, including some that are very well placed in the legislature.

The death penalty has been a controversial topic since at least the 1960s, but up until now there's been no indication that the state's legislature would abandon it or that Wyomingites would support that move.  Something must be changing.

And indeed, it would appear that something is.

For one thing, everyone has come to appreciate that its hugely expensive and they're sick of that.  Because of the way that Constitutional aspects of this work there's no way to address that.  People are tired of that.  And the fact that it causes endless delay in the carrying out of the sentence means that people more or less feel that the intent of the sentence really doesn't get carried out either.

Part of its justification certainly is defeated by delay, in that while its often cited that those people who receive the sentence could kill again if left to live, even in prison, they are in fact left in prison for a really long time.

Beyond that, however, there's been a slow rethinking of the death penalty in the U.S. and that appears to have reached Wyoming.  An increasing number of people aren't convinced that the sentence itself is a moral one for a variety of reasons.  That view received a bit of a boost from Pope Francis, who put the topic in the news in 2018, when he caused a modification in the Catechism of the Catholic Church precluding its use by Catholics, the largest Christian denomination by far in the world.  That sparked a lot of debates among Catholics itself, including a debate on whether that teaching was binding or not, but the fact is that it was only a slight modification of the view held by the two prior Popes.  Anyhow, with the largest Christian denomination in the world officially opposed to the penalty, at least some movement among serious conservative Christians (liberal Christians were already opposed to it) was inevitable.

I don't know what all factors resulted in this bill having a better chance than any of the prior ones in Wyoming.  It was probably a combination.  It'll be interesting to see where this bill goes.

Big Changes to the Friess School Bill, was "Lex Anteinternet: We're really conservative except when we're not. ..."

Calling this the "Friess School Bill" may be a little unfair, but at least that allows anyone tracking it to know what we're talking about.  We first reported on this bill here:\

Lex Anteinternet: We're really conservative except when we're not. ...: In our recent Gubernatorial election, some candidates from the hard right complained that a couple of candidates who were on the right, but...

The bill as originally written would have exempted private schools from local zoning requirements, pretty much entirely. This came about after a small private school sponsored by the Friess family in Jackson, which has something like only 3% of its area available for development in any fashion, ran afoul of Teton County zoning and was turned down for an expansion.  Apparently the school is facing eviction, in addition, from the church that now houses it, if the report in today's Tribune is correct.

Well, the bill apparently was really controversial in committee and ultimately Democratic Senator Chris Rothfuss offered an amendment that not only changed it, it modified it out of existence from its prior form.  The bill as amended requires private schools to pass the state's Schools Facilities Commissions, just like the public ones do.

Wow.  That's a huge change.

I'm actually surprised that made it out of committee as that wouldn't have appeared to have been close to what the original sponsors wanted.  If I understand it correctly, the bill might exempt private schools from local zoning boards, maybe (I know that towns and cities in fact include where schools may or may not be in their local zoning, but maybe they don't restrict size, I'm not sure), but it adds a real element of state control to something that hasn't had it, and probably should have.  More on that in a future post, maybe.