That vaguely uncomfortable feeling

I am not an opponent of technology by any means, but I don't unthinkingly accept any new technological development as unquestionably good either.  Simply accepting any new thing seems to be the American way now days, and that isn't a good thing. Still, I've been an early adopter of many office electronic devices, and chances are that a lot of people inaccurately think I'm a techi.

But recently certain things have been giving me a vague feeling of discomfort.  Usually I analyze any such feelings to see if its simply my naturally conservative nature reacting to a changing circumstance or if my feeling is based on something genuine.  And on more than one occasion I have conceded something as an improvement, even if I don't really like it personally.  Here, however, I can't really define the sense of discomfort, or why it persists.

But it does.

To try to define it, for reasons I can't really adequately explain, I have the sense that technology is moving us so far from the real, and natural, world that it's a threat to us at a core level.  We're obviously fascinated with technology, and it seems most (but not all) human cultures continually adopt all things new no matter what the utility or costs.  Our electronic devices are, I fear, becoming so advanced and distracting that the risk permanently enslaving us in the world of the fake.

And it isn't just Ipods, Ipads, and computer, but other things as well.  In this season of poultry fueled bliss most Americans do not realize that turkeys, the national Holiday bird,  have been rendered so deformed as a domestic species of avian livestock that they can no longer breed. That's right. Turkey breasts have grown so huge, through breading, that turkeys are actually incapable of reproducing naturally, in the case of the production variety, so that artificial insemination is needed to reproduce them.  I can't really say why I find this horrific, but I do.  In order to get a turkey that's not a freak of production nature, you actually have to buy a "Heritage Turkey".  I'm not inclined to do that, but it's one more reason that a person, if they can, ought to just harvest one of the wild ones.

I know I sound like a Luddite in saying all of this. But we are what we are, and I don't really think we were meant to be a couch sitting, Ipod using, "consumer". But we risk taking the whole planet there.

Starting one of the early ones.

Starting a biplane.

Penn State and a lack of moral standards.

There's been a lot of commentary on the alleged horror of sexual crimes against children by a member of the Penn State football coaching staff.  Like any well publicized crime, everyone is going to get their two cents in by the end, with some demanding Federal action, and no doubt a host of psychological babblers seeking to explain it.

I wasn't inclined to comment myself, and frankly I don't know that any comments are not necessarily off the mark by a bit simply for the reason that individual crimes are individual crimes, and we can draw broader lessons that are learned in error for that reason.  Nonetheless, I was struck by a couple of the comments, including one on national television, that are highly insightful, and highly unusual.

First there is this comment by David Brooks, on Meet teh Press

MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene. If--there's been a ton of research on this. They say people, they ask people, "If you saw something cruel, if you saw racism and sexism, will you intervene?" Then they hire actors, and they put it right in front of them. People do not intervene. It's called the bystander effect. It happens again and again, people don't intervene. That's why we need these scripts to remind people how, how evil can be all around.

and:

MR. BROOKS: Well, I think they obviously need to make the law more robust. But we can't rely on law and rules. It's up to personal discretion. We've taken a lot of moral decisions and tried to make them all legal based. But there has to be a sense of personal responsibility, regardless of what the rules are, "Here's what you do to stop it." And so if you try to make everything a matter of legalism and rules, you're going to get people doing the minimal, and you're going, going to have people thinking, "It's not my responsibility. It's, it's somehow lodged in the rules."

Brooks is, in my view, right on.  Frankly there are a large number of people in American, and Western, society who do not know what evil is, and beyond that do not even acknowledge it's existence.  Evil is. Some people are in evil's grip.  But you would not know that today if you listened to any popular media.  Sex crimes committed by adults upon one another are excused as "addictions", or the like.  And in the popular media it is now the in thing to popularize and glamorize the propagation of   sexual deviancy.  Homosexuality, which was defined as a mental illness up until the 1970s, is now hip, cool, and glamorous.  It's regarded as an unwarranted prejudice to even suggest that the existence of two genders with different reproductive origins might mean that sexual activity requires two sexes in order not to be deviant.

It's also now supposed to be the case that we're not to point out that the serial polygamy culture of the day, in which mating couples do not stick with each other for long, produces a horrific domestic situation for children.  Anyone hanging out at court for any length of time would realize that a very high percentage of violence in the home, including sexual violence, that is committed by adults is committed by an adult who shares no DNA with the child, but lives there.  I've never seen statistics on it, but based on observation I'd guess that the percentage of that feature of those crimes is well over 50%.  Simply put, the "boyfriend" (a term that ought not to apply to anyone over 25 years old) is typically the offender against a child he is not related to.  This is extremely, extremely, common.  But we are not to acknowledge it.  The "father", for that matter, simply moves on, without shame, and women will have multiple children by multiple fathers, as if this does not create a set of rather obvious problems.  In a prior era, this would have been regarded as a moral depravity, because it is a moral depravity, but those living it do not even know that now, as to mention it will provoke an active response from those whose only standards are the lack of standards of relativism. 

Conservative columnist Cal Thomas added this commentary in a column that's running this week which makes much the same point as Brooks did, but in an expanded form.  He starts off by aptly noting

Baseball may still be called the national pastime, but football has become the national religion. College football is played on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, while professional football is mostly played on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Fans of both often express themselves in ways that are more vocal than the wildest Pentecostal preacher. 

While denouncing what is alleged to have happened at Penn State as repugnant, we would do well to examine the reasons behind such things. Yes, it begins with human nature, but society — buttressed by religion — once did a better job of keeping human nature in check. 

Since the free-loving ’60s, we seem to have taken a wrecking ball to social mores. Today, anyone appealing to such a standard is denounced and stamped with the label of the day, usually ending in the suffix, “-phobe.”

This is exactly correct, and I'd note was the opinion of such widely ranging people as Thomas Jefferson, who is sometimes regarded as religiously eclectic, Theodore Roosevelt, who moved through a couple of Protestant religions during his lifetime, and Winston Churchill, who was born into the Church of England but whom rarely attended.  That is, they all felt that without the foundation of religious morality, no society would survive.  Right now we're running a big test to see if that's true, and so far the results do not look good.

Thomas goes on to note:

The medical and psychological professions have aided and abetted the cultural rot. Doctors once took an oath to “never do harm,” accompanied by a pledge never to assist in an abortion. Now the official position of the American Medical association’s “code of ethics” is this: “The principles of medical ethics of the AMA do not prohibit a physician from performing an abortion in accordance with good medical practice and under circumstances that do not violate law.” 

Doctors once led, now they follow cultural trends. 

On its website, the American Psychological Association brags, “Since 1975, the American Psychological Association has called on psychologists to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated with lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations.” It once considered such behavior otherwise and while even most conservatives no longer regard homosexuality as a mental illness, many still regard it as sinful. That theological diagnosis, too, has been discarded in our increasingly secular and anomalous society where everything is to be tolerated except those people who assert that, according to a standard higher than opinion polls, some things remain intolerable.

Again, he's quite correct.  Indeed, it's worth nothing that the ground breaking paper that lead the APA to change its mind on homosexuality was written by a homosexual, hardly a disinterested person in such a debate.  It may or may not be a mental illness, but it is certainly a deviance, in the context of deviating from the norm.  Now, however, a person is not even supposed to state that, as neutral as it is.

Thomas also goes on to state

What changed? Pressure groups aided by secular education and the entertainment industry. 

Last week, an episode of “Glee” featured two couples — one straight, one gay — “losing their virginity.” The show’s co-creator, Ryan Murphy, told Bravo’s “Sex in the Box”: “Hopefully I have made it possible for somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three years. Maybe that will be my legacy.” Some legacy.

Indeed, not only is Murphy likely to make sodomy and buggery  fare for children through television, but moral depravity already dominates on television.  The popular sitcom "Friends" has serial illicit sex as a routine topic, arguing that it was the cultural norm and to be admired.  The HBO show Sex and the City was a monument to immoral narcissistic behavior.  HBO followed upon this with what amounted to a campaign for polygamy, a cause with has now been taken up by "Sister Wives", a show on some other network, in which a strange acting fellow with a Cheshire Cat grin promotes his "marriage" to three women at one time.  It can be expected that polygamy will soon join with homosexuality in a campaign to dilute the meaning of marriage.

Does all this have something to do with Penn State?  Yes it does.  In a society in which there is no moral standard, and in which the popular media insists that serial sex is good, that homosexual sex is good, and which plural marriages are nifty, can such conduct as occurred at Penn State appear to be far more deviant that what the medial claims to be the norms?  Apparently it can be, according to the media, and we all should know that it is wrong. But by the same token, a society in which right and wrong is so debased as a standards will see many more such horrors.  Indeed, they've been going on for some time, and this one has only hit the news because football is such a big deal in our society.  At our current state, standards are only applied when they're applied to the nationally known.  Plural marriages are okay, but affairs by politicians are not, for example.

Any society that doesn't know right from wrong will see its debasement hurt the weakest first.  And all it takes for evil to prevail, as Neimoller noted, is for good men to do nothing.  In this case, good men and women have to say what they believe publicly.  It's time for that.

Courthouses of the West: Federal Courthouse, Sheridan Wyoming

Here's an another example of a disappearing Federal Courthouse presence. Courthouses of the West: Federal Courthouse, Sheridan Wyoming.

This topic, i.e., the construction, and then the abandonment, of Federal Courthouses in Wyoming was addressed here a bit earlier.

It's hard not to notice how nice two out of the three abandoned Wyoming Federal Courthouses are (I haven't seen the third, that I know of, so it may be just as nice, it's used as a library today). I'm sure the courtrooms were very small, and probably they'd be regarded as inadequate for most Federal courtroom usages today, but still, it's hard to understand why the Federal government would have abandoned such nice structures, and not preserved them for their intended use.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13:

1933 "(MONDAY) UNITED STATES: The first dust storm of the great dust bowl era of the 1930s occurs. The dust storm, which has spread from Montana to the Ohio Valley yesterday, prevails from Georgia to Maine resulting in a black rain over New York and a brown snow in Vermont. Parts of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa reported zero visibility yesterday. Today, dust reduces the visibility to half a mile (805 meters) in Tennessee. (Jack McKillop)" Attribution: The WWII History List.

Old Picture of the Day: Old Prospector

The Old Picture blog is having a week dedicated to prospectors. I've linked in one photo already, and here's another.

My great grandfather Hennessy was briefly a gold miner in Leadville, Colorado, in the 19th Century. Only briefly, however. He opened up a general store there, and then occupied that occupation.

Old Picture of the Day: Old Prospector: It is a been a while since we have visited the men of the rugged outdoors, so I think it is time we have an Old Prospectors week. We start ...

Old Picture of the Day: Prospecting for Gold

Old Picture of the Day: Prospecting for Gold: Today's picture was taken ni 1889 and it shows some Old Timers mining for gold. The picture was taken near Rockerville in the Dakota Terri...

Why?

Why is it:

1.  That television advertisements, and "entertainment news" think it's neat to have pitchmen/babblers with thick Cockney accents?  How did that happen?

2.  That soap operas pitched at teenagers, and twenty somethings holding on to their teen years in an undignified manner, like to feature male and female characters who appear to be well fed, well clothed, and good looking, who do nothing but mope?  If I didn't have to work, had lots of stuff, and was really good looking (okay, I am stunningly good looking) I wouldn't run around moping.  I'd probably buy cattle and work, but I wouldn't mope.

Heck, I don't have a lot of money, and most of the time I'm not moping. What's up with that?

3.  That television associated Italian men and French men with sophistication, beauty, and libertine, apparently sterile, sex?  I've seen, and even met, real French and Italian people. They're fine, really, other than a different standard of bathing (why doesn't tv associate them with that) but they're no more beautiful than anyone else, quite frankly. They're not as chubby as we Americans, but then who is?

4.  Why is that people (well, really mostly women) like to watch television dramas that are all about turgid messed up family relationships?  Do people like turgid messed up family relationships?  If so, why don't they just hang out at divorce court, where things are even more turgid and icky.

5.  That people with serial bad relationships seem to think that launching into another is a good idea?  Maybe they ought to just cool it and try hanging out with themselves.

6.  That people regard the opinion of any entertainment figure as relevant to anything?  After all, if you are in the entertainment industry, you make your living by putting yourself on display.  "Hey!  Look at me!"  If you make your living that way, that doesn't make you a great intellect by any means, and it doesn't qualify you to venture an opinion on diddly.

This is so much the case that I don't grasp it as to anything.  I don't care what Lady GaGa feels about homosexuality, and I don't care what Charlton Heston thought about guns.  Betty White's opinion on animals is meaningless as far as I'm concerned, and I don't care what any actor or singer has to say about any politician.  I'll give a rare pass to anyone who seems to be engaged in serious thought for a prolonged period of time, but in that industry, it has to be pretty demonstrated to bother with.

British Airways - Our advert 2011: To Fly. To Serve.

Normally I wouldn't post an advertisement, but this one is just so well done.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 11. Veterans Day

On Today In Wyoming's History: November 11. Veterans Day: we take a look at various things that World War One caused to occur globally, and locally, some of them relate closely to the theme of this page. Particularly those items that discuss the massive expansion of the state's oil industry, and the agricultural boom that World War One caused in the state and nation.

I don't want to really repeat those themes in their entirety here, but anyone who has lived in Casper Wyoming for example, or indeed Wyoming in general, has to be aware of the very significant presence of the oil and gas industry in the state. It's been a fairly significant factor from some point early in the 20th Century, and oil exploration was going on around Casper as early as the 1890s. Oil refining had made its appearance prior to World War One.

But World War One caused oil to be significant in a way it never had been before. The United States was an oil exporter in that era. Mechanization had started to make its appearance in various armies about this time, but it was navies that really used the oil in that period. The Royal Navy, for instance, converted from coal to oil just prior to the war.

Oil production received a huge boost due to the war, resulting in a boom in Wyoming's oil provinces of that era. Casper, for example, saw the construction of its first "skyscraper", the Oil Exchange Building, in 1917.
The building is still there, still in use, as the Consolidated Royalty Building. It was oil, as the name would imply, that caused it to be constructed as the headquarters for a local oil exploration and production company.

It wasn't just oil, however, that was booming in Wyoming. Agriculture was as well. A boom in the horse market had started in 1914, as British remount agents combed the United States for military horses. Wyoming provided a fair number of remounts to the British in that era, as did the other Western states. When the United States began to prepare for war horse production switched over to American needs. The boom lasted throughout the war.

Agriculture of other types also boomed in these years. Food production was a desperate matter during the First World War, and Wyoming was primarily agricultural in those days. The era was good for farmers, and the largest single year for homesteading in the United States came just at the end of the war, 1919, which was also the last year in US history in which farmers had economic parity with city dwellers.


Indeed, post war the state would see a new influx of homesteading that was directly the result of the war. The government operated to create some special homesteading programs for returning veterans, to help them get a start in farming or ranching, and have a place of their own. I personally knew one such homesteader many years ago.

Justice James Barrett

Justice Barret of the Tenth Circuit passes on.

This is outside the scope of our usual musings here, but his obituary is an interesting one. Son of the late Frank Barrett, who as born on this day in 1882, Justice Barrett grew up in, and practiced law in, the small town of Lusk, where his father, a former Senator, Congressman, and Governor, is memorialized by way of a bronze plaque in the courthouse. Frank Barrett, his father, is an interesting man in his own right, having chosen to locate in Lusk following his service in World War One, and therefore following a bit of the same career path as the Congressman discussed here just the other day, Vincent Carter. Indeed, they were co-religious, which is an interesting fact as well. Justice Barrett served in the Second World War before entering into practice in Lusk, where he practiced for 18 years before events launched him on the path that would lead to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he served for many years.

I don't know that further comments would be very insightful, but it is an interesting look at one lawyer's practice in Wyoming from the mid 20th Century to the early 21st, and by extension, looking at his father, the life of another in the mid 20th Century.

Hot and Cold

Awhile back columnist Reg Henry had an amusing article about air conditioning.  It was really funny, and I wish I'd linked it in here.

I suppose the reason I found it funny, as I share one of Reg's apparent attributes.  I never get so hot that I appreciate air conditioning, and my wife is just the opposite.

Every summer I suffer in our house, as my wife turns on the swamp cooler.  I've never turned on the swamp cooler for myself ever.  I hate it.  I never lived in a house with air conditioning until I was married, and I never get so hot that I feel I need it.  Rather, I just freeze in the house, in summer.

Indeed, she'll keep it going until late Summer, when it isn't hot by anyone's defintion.  She's just always hot.

Now the reverse is the case, as it is every winter.  It's already winter here, but there are entire rooms in the house where we'll go through an entire winter and almost never turn on the heat, including our bedroom.  I just freeze, but she just refuses to believe that its really cold in the house.  It only really changes when everyone in the house starts protesting about how cold it is.

Funny thing is, I really like winter, and like being outdoors in winter, although I'm frequently freezing when I am out there.

Awweewanna Wuffington

Can anyone explain to me why anyone takes Ariana Huffington seriously?

And what country's accents includes all Ws the way Awweewanna Wuffington's does?  I've heard it claimed that she's Greek, but I know Greeks and they don't seem to have a plethora of Ws in their speech.

And, to extend out, while I know it sounds nativist, and is, what can somebody who is so patently obviously from somewhere else tell us about running our own country?  And if she's an expert on running stuff, and Greek. . . .well. . . .

The horror of it all.

Putting walnuts in to chocolate chip cookies should be a crime.

Just saying.

The ignorance of vegetarians

 
One of the real negative impacts, indeed dangers, in the increasing urbanization of the Western World's population is that it has given rise to a sanctimonious myths based on wholesale ignorance of food production and nature.  One of the biggest of these is that it's "green" or "kind" to be a vegetarian, or beyond that a "vegan".

In actuality, the opposite is quite true.  If a person really wanted to be kind to the planet, and still eat, what they'd be is a hunter,  not a vegetarian, and certainly not a vegan.  Or they'd hunt, gather, and plant a little garden. That's about as green as you can get.

The basis for the vegan myth is apparently a view that vegetable farming is kind to the land, and that by being a vegetarian you are not responsible for the deaths of any animals. 

Taking the latter part of that first, that's far, far, from the truth.  In fact, all farmers kill animals, and all farming kills animals.  It is not possible to be a farmer without killing something, even by accident.  Tractors combine through snakes, birds and deer, just to give one example.  Vermin are killed by necessity, sometimes through the agents of another animals.  And things get killed hauling things to and fro.  Indeed, while I don't know for certain, I'd wager that farmers, kill far, far, far more animals than hunters do every year.  No farmer, of any kind, doesn't kill something, and probably a fair number of somethings.

Eat your whole natural wheat bagel and imagine otherwise, but there's some dead deer DNA in there somewhere.  Probably some dead rabbit dna, some mice dna, and a few bird dnas as well.

Nor is farming environmentally benign.  Some farming improves the land, some does the opposite, but it is not possible to raise a crop without altering it.  One of the prime alterations is that the surface of the land isn't what it once was, so whatever animal once lived there probably doesn't the same way.  Farming increases forage for some things, and decreases it for others, but it doesn't leave things in a state of nature.

Now, I'm not dissing farmers by mentioning this, they know it.  It's the ignorant self satisfied person eating a bowl of all natural oats that I'm laughing at?  Natural?  Was it wild and picked up by a gatherer?  No.  Did something die to get it to you.  Undoubtedly yes.  It is natural in that man is a natural farmer, but it also wasn't raised fee of any animal deaths, and if it was grown by somebody you didn't see grow it, fossil fuels were used to get it and produce it.

Of all farming, I'd note, it's animal farming, ie., ranching, that has the smallest environmental impact, as all it does is put large animals out where there were otherwise large animals.  They probably aren't the same, to be sure, but there's no plowing or reaping involved.  There may be haying, but that's relatively benign, but not purely so, as well.

Again, I'm not criticizing farmers and ranchers, and I am one.  But I am amazed by the extent to which certain people think they're morally superior because they don't eat meat.  They actually do eat meat, they just don't realize it's in there. And they're causing greater acreage per man to be tilled to feed them personally.  They don't know that, as they're ignorant.  And they're ignorant, as their exposure to the real world is lacking.

Wisdom

From today's Reading, Wisdom, Chapter 6

Resplendent and unfading is wisdom,
and she is readily perceived by those who love her,
and found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire;
Whoever watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed,
for he shall find her sitting by his gate.
For taking thought of wisdom is the perfection of prudence,
and whoever for her sake keeps vigil
shall quickly be free from care;
because she makes her own rounds, seeking those worthy of her,
and graciously appears to them in the ways,
and meets them with all solicitude.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 6: Vincent Michael Carter

Also on today's Today In Wyoming's History: November 6: is an item noting the birth of Vincent Michael Carter, who was Wyoming's Congressman from 1929 to 1935.

The item noted:

1891 Vincent Michael Carter, U.S. Representative for Wyoming from 1929-1935, born in St. Clair, Pennsylvania. He was a graduate of Catholic University and a World War One Marine Corps officer. He set up his law practice in Casper Wyoming in 1919, and then relocated it to Kemmerer Wyoming prior to becoming the Republican Congressman from Wyoming in 1929.

I'll freely confess that I've never heard of Mr. Carter. In looking him up, all I could really find was the Wikipedia entry on him, which noted that he had graduated from Catholic University in Washington D. C. in 1915, served in World War One in the Marine Corps. Perhaps his Marine Corps service was natural, as he'd gone to the U.S. Naval Academy Preparatory School before law school, and had also attended Fordham. The USNAPS is usually something that only those who wished to compete for the Naval Academy attended, and usually they had a very good chance at attendance. The Wikipedia article notes that after his discharge from the Marine Corps, he started a law practice in Casper, but only practiced here until 1929, when he moved to Kemmerer, on the far western edge of the state. He served in the Wyoming National Guard from 1919 until 1921, was deputy attorney general from 1919 to 1923, which means that he occupied his deputyship as part of his legal practice, and served as State Auditor from 1923 to 1929, which would suggest that he really left Casper no later than 1923. It would also suggest that he was either extremely lucky or well connected, or perhaps just very impressive, given his rise from out of state novice attorney in 1919 to State Auditor in 1923. He'd just practiced four years at that time.

He tried to run for the Senate in 1935, but was not elected, which is why he left the House about that time. He resumed the practice of law in 1935, but in Cheyenne. He retired in 1965 to New Mexico. There's no indication of World War Two service, so presumably he practiced throughout World War Two as a civilian lawyer in Cheyenne.

This tells us a lot, but at the same time almost nothing at all. For instance, why was an Eastern educated lawyer with an interest in the Navy relocating to Wyoming? Perhaps that isn't as odd as it might seem, as the legal practice in Wyoming was dominated by those who were born outside the state (as was nearly every other aspect of business) up until at least the 1930s. If we read between the lines, a lot of these people were highly ambitious, and Wyoming was merely a wide open opportunity at the time. The early history of the state is full of such examples. We are left, really, with the impression that any venue would have served, had it provided equal opportunities, and sometimes the careers of these early legal and business pioneers are not all that tasteful to those of us who have come up from here, or who came here for other reasons.

Was Carter one of these? We have no way knowing really, based upon what little we know of him. The Wikipedia article does not even provide a photograph of him, and there isn't one available on the Library of Congress' website. He seems to have moved to locations that were perhaps active at the time. Casper was very active due to oil activity around World War One. Was Kemmerer that way a decade later?

Still, he came back in 1935, and practiced law another 30 years. He's proof, in a way, that lawyers tend to only be really well known in their own times, and not thereafter, as we can presume that a World War One Marine Corps officer, a successful lawyer from 1919 to 1929, and a Congressman, was a well known man. Too bad we don't know more.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 6. Myth, reality, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

In today's Today In Wyoming's History: November 6: there's an item about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meeting their demise in Bolivia in 1908. In spite of what romantics may wish, all the evidence is that the criminal pair bit the dust at the hands of Bolivian cavalry on November 6, 1908, in San Valentia Bolivia.

The story of Harry Lonabaugh and Robert LeRoy Parker, Butch and Sundance's real names, tell us a lot about myth and reality. This is so much the case that they've inspired at least two movies, one bad television series, and countless Butch survived myths.

One illuminating thing about them, in terms of this blog, is how late in history their story is. Their glory years, if that's what we'd consider them, fell between 1896 and 1901, so they're 19th and 20th Century criminals. As much time passed between the first crimes of the James Gang and the Wild Bunch as passed between the Wild Bunch and the famous gangs of Prohibition. The Wild Bunch's criminal depredations came in the early era of the automobile and concluded just before the Wright Brother's first flight. They are, in some ways, nearly of our own era.

But at the same time, they obviously lived in a Wyoming that was still so remote, and still so much of the horse era, that they were able to fairly openly used The Hole In The Wall of Johnson County as a hideout. That could only have occurred in the less mobile horse era. A few years later, the criminal Durrant, the Tarzan of the Tetons, was only able to hide for a few days, as opposed to Butch and Sundance's several years. Wyoming of 1908 was still very easy to disappear in.

The ongoing fascination with them also says something, I suppose, about ourselves. According to the Pinkertons, the Wild Bunch was the only criminal gang of the West that came close to meeting its public image, but none the less the gang killed in pursuit of its criminal objective of staying free after theft. That Lonabaugh and Parker did not is somewhat besides the point, as their gang was an armed gang that did use violence to remain free.

It was the public image that resulted in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which remains a Western classic, and their real nature which lead to another classic, The Wild Bunch. In spite of its name, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not really directly about the Wyoming gang, and isn't even set in Wyoming, but Peckinpah made the movie as a counter to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the name of his film probably wasn't an accident. Peckinpah's film, sent on the border with Mexico in about 1915, depicts a different region, but arguably it portrays the fin de cicle nature of the West at that time more accurately than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the misunderstood Peckinpah film certainly more accurately depicts the "glamour of evil" that actually attracts people's attention to crimals and their gangs than the charming Butch and Sundance film does.

Nowhere to run

For whatever reason, it occurred to me that one of the big differences between our country now, as opposed to a century ago, or even a half century ago, is that there is really no longer a place for most people to run.

By that, what I mean is that,  like it or not, to some degree the United States proved to be such a huge success as it was ideal for quitters.  Sounds  harsh, in no small part because of our "never say die" public attitude, but it's true.

Most people in the country today descend from people who quit whole countries. Germans, Irish, whatever, who picked up, said of their native land "I quit", and left.  Suire, a lot of that still goes on today, but an awful lot of immigration today is of the "I must leave", or "I can make a better buck", variety. That's been the case since the immigration reforms of the 70s. And that element was always a strong aspect of immigration. But there was also a lot of "I don't like England anymore. . .", or the like, in it also.

And within our own country quitting a region, picking up, and starting over was very common.  The entire State of Texas, in terms of its early history, seems to have been populated by titanic quitters.

All this sounds really harsh, but quitting is often the simple acknowledgment of a mistake.  Things are working out, people thought, so I'll hitch up the mule and move over the divide, or the next one, or whatever.

Now, you can move, but you really can't quit.  Your credentials follow you everywhere, and determine what you can do, and you can do what you've been doing.  No quitting.

Perhaps that's inevitable for a country as densely populated as ours is now.  Quitting was greatly aided by available land.  You needed no qualifications, and not all that much cash, to quit your job as a bank clerk and homestead. Sure, you might fail, but then you could always pull over the next ridge, or quit that and go on to something else.

No. longer.

Gene Logsdon On The Myth of the Self Made Yeoman

Gene Logsdon on The Myth of the Self Made Yeoman.

Funding Failure II

A very interesting NPR Talk of the Nation episode on Student Loans.

What is so interesting about this, I think, is that there's at least one caller who emails in with complaints about how the burden of loans caused her to take a career she didn't want, Wildlife Management, over one she did, Veterinary school, as she couldn't afford the loans.  She then goes on to blame the burden of servicing her loans for living far from her family, and for not having any children.

The other thing that is is ineresting is that a few callers have no sympathy at all with those complaining about their loans.

I'm afraid I'm in that camp, the one without sympathy. Choosing a career you don't want, just because the loans are cheaper, is stupid.  Beyond that, avoiding real life, to service loans, is as well.

This probably says something, however, about the current nature of our societal view towards education. Why must we go this route?  We don't have to, we're choosing too.  And now, a large section of the population views paying for the loans they obtained for their education as unfair, when nobody asked them to get the loans in the first place.

Not that society cannot be blamed to some degree.  We've created a culture where we now view manual labor as demeaning, and teach our middle class children that.  The grandsons of machinist and tool and die makers feel they must go to college, and indeed they must as we sent the tool and die work to China, more or less intentionally.  So we're now all over-educated, and can't pay for it with the jobs we retained. And we encourage this to continue on by giving loans for educational pursuits we know will never pay off.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 1

Today In Wyoming's History: November 1: 1886 First snowfall of what would prove to be a disastrous winter. Attribution. Wyoming State Archives.

Remount Station, 1917

Relates back, in some ways, to my attempted poll on Working With Animals.

Will somebody please turn out the lights?

The news has hit today that Kim Kardashian is filing from divorce from whomever she married two months ago.

It's good to know that in this time of crisis, with ever increasing distressing news, with moral, financial, and political decline becoming more evident every day, that our nation still has time to following the actions of twits who are famous only for being famous.  It's a sign that, um. . . . , well, um.

Old Picture of the Day: The Iron Horse

Old Picture of the Day: The Iron Horse: The Iron Horse, or Steam Locomotive is probably as responsible as anything for taming the West, and leading to a country that stretched from...

Old Picture of the Day: Emiliano and his Men

Old Picture of the Day: Emiliano and his Men: Good Monday morning to you all. Hopefully some of you have this week off and can enjoy a little time unwinding from the busy year. Bandit We...

Old Picture of the Day: The Brothers Madero

Old Picture of the Day: The Brothers Madero: So yesterday we talked about the short-lived presidency of Francisco Madero. I suggested the tragedy was due to him forgetting his bandit r...

Old Picture of the Day: The Sad Saga of Maximo Castillo

Old Picture of the Day: The Sad Saga of Maximo Castillo: I have to say I have very much enjoyed researching Mexican Bandits and the Revolution of 1910. It is a particularly hard topic to get your ...

Old Picture of the Day: The Butcher

Old Picture of the Day: The Butcher: Merry Christmas to you all. I hope you have a blessed day, and enjoy some good times with family. We will not have a mystery person contest...

Old Picture of the Day: Old Delivery Truck

Old Picture of the Day: Old Delivery Truck: Good morning to you all, and I hope each of you had a blessed Easter weekend. I had a great time, and our sunrise service was excellent. Th...

Old Picture of the Day: Old Dump Trucks

Old Picture of the Day: Old Dump Trucks: Today's picture is from about 1910. It shows three old dump trucks. The sign on the building and on the trucks reads "S. M. Frazier". I am...

Old Picture of the Day: United States Express Truck

Old Picture of the Day: United States Express Truck: Today's picture was taken in about 1910, and it shows men loading a cabinet onto a United States Express Company truck. I guess this was b...

Old Picture of the Day: Train Deopot

Old Picture of the Day: Train Deopot: I realize that this is Train Week, and that this picture does not have a train in it. This is the train depot in Maricopa, Arizona. It is t...

And here's another classic example.

Old Picture of the Day: Old Train Station

Old Picture of the Day: Old Train Station: We finish out the week with this picture of a train station in Gardiner, Montana. The picture was taken in 1905. This is a classic photogr...

Classic example of an early 20th Century rural Western train station.

The Big Crash

Today In Wyoming's History: October 29.

Today is the day, in 1929, when the legendary Wall Street Crash occurred. In spite of what we might think, we've never seen anything like it since. Up to 1/3d of the population ultimately was out of work in the United States and Canada. There was no real government established "safety net", and in that era, men were the overwhelming majority of wage earners which meant, by extension, that a huge number of families were left with no ability to support themselves. Every region, and every industry, in the country was impacted.

Today in History. October 28, 1919

The Volstead Act goes into effect. Booze, banned.

The movement to ban alcohol had really been around for a good twenty or so years, and was sort of oddly and closely wrapped up with a bunch of other social movements to which it otherwise had no obvious connection. For example, it was related in a way to the Women's Sufferance Movement, even though voting and drinking (or not drinking) are not obviously connected.

It was really World War One, however, that managed to get Prohibition enough traction to be come the law. That may sound odd, but it was the fear that American servicemen had been exposed to booze and corruption in France that caused enough Americans to want to address what they feared would be a post war drinking problem to pass it. Of course, we know the rest of the story.

On Painted Bricks: Opal, Wyoming

I recently posted a photo of a general store on Painted Bricks, as Painted Bricks: Opal, Wyoming.

This store isn't the Old West type General Store we so often imagine, but an example of a substantial business located in a small town. Indeed, this was a substantial business because it was in a small, isolated, town. This sort of general store basically doesn't exist anymore, and indeed this store doesn't exist anymore. The town hardly exists.

But not all that long ago, before the Safeway's and Albertson's became the norm, and before WalMart, small towns like this were both isolated, and viable, served by stores like this one. A fairly large, two story, brick building, selling everything, including groceries. As can also be seen, this town was serviced by rail.

As odd as it may seem to us today, this town, which the highway bypasses today, and which was always remote, once had a railhead, and no doubt a hotel, and a substantial general store. A person could easily stay there for a day or two if need be, or live there without needing to get the necessities elsewhere. No longer the case.

Holscher's Hub: Who would have guessed it?

Holscher's Hub: Who would have guessed it?: A cartoon blog by a female West Point cadet, about West Point . That's not something I would ever have expected to see.

In terms of change, sort of speaks for itself.

Electronic Communications

On Saturday I was staying in a hotel room with my family, in Rapid City. It was a quick trip, and I forgot to take a book, which is my traveling habit.

I did, however, take my Ipod, which has become my traveling habit, substituting, for the most part, for the radio.

While there, there was a moment when I found that both my son and I were on our Ipods, I actually took a photograph of him on his with mine, and it struck me how dependent we've become on modern electronics. During the time I was there, I checked email to check on a relative in the hospital, I found that an old friend had "friended" me on Facebook, and I accepted, I actually took a photograph from the hotel and posted it on Facebook, with my Ipod, and I checked for the local Mass times for Saturday and Sunday masses in Rapid City. I also checked Google Maps for various things while there.

Recently, while in Tulsa for business, I used Facetime on my Ipod to connect with my daughter's Ipod and visit with my family. It's free, as long as you have a WiFi connection, and while the video quality isn't good, the audio is, and you can see your family.

I started to think about this, and the dependency we have developed on this in short order. It's temping to bemoan it, and indeed there is a lot to bemoan about how technological and electronic we have become. On the other hand, however, I'm not so sure that in some ways all of this doesn't take us back a bit to one of the more warmly remembered aspects of our past, which is who people were in close association all the time. To a degree, this lets us do that, although the element of distance and separation is still there. Still, at any rate, for the traveler, things aren't as lonely as they used to be.

Holscher Packing Company Refrigerator Car

Holscher Packing Company refrigerator car for a model railroad.

Neat! That's my family's old packing company.

Pay the last penny

Gospel according to Luke: 12:54-59

Jesus said to the crowds,
"When you see a cloud rising in the west
you say immediately that it is going to rain--and so it does;
and when you notice that the wind is blowing from the south
you say that it is going to be hot--and so it is.
You hypocrites!
You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky;
why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

"Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?
If you are to go with your opponent before a magistrate,
make an effort to settle the matter on the way;
otherwise your opponent will turn you over to the judge,
and the judge hand you over to the constable,
and the constable throw you into prison.
I say to you, you will not be released
until you have paid the last penny."

I've seen this passage from Luke distinguished by commentators by era, ours to the period in which it was spoken. That is, some people will attempt to say that this quote is unique to its period, and not a commentary on modern law:  " If you are to go with your opponent before a magistrate, make an effort to settle the matter on the way; otherwise your opponent will turn you over to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the constable,and the constable throw you into prison. I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny."

I don't know why this comment would be just as applicable today, as then.  It seem to me to be a perfect comment on the average legal proceeding.

Branding

Cattle being branded by an electric iron at a ranch in the United States.

I don't see any electric iron in this. This is a scene that has remained remarkably consistent over the years, and it still goes pretty much this way. Film taken in 1918.

Farm families gather in an open space at a ranch in United States.

Farm families gather in an open space at a ranch in United States.

A scene from 1937.

Food for thought

Recently I saw this quote on another website, and then verified that it is, in fact, genuine:

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

G.K. Chesterton.

American army personnel try to pull a truck out of a hole in Wyoming

American army personnel try to pull a truck out of a hole in Wyoming

Trucks of Transcontinental Motor Convoy cross The Continental Divide in Wyoming and Full track pulls out stuck trucks

Trucks of Transcontinental Motor Convoy cross The Continental Divide in Wyoming and Full track pulls out stuck trucks

Steve Jobs to the Graduates

Cigarette in the mouth, no hard hat or safety glasses. This photo was clearly taken before the invention of safety.

This audio clip is of Steve Jobs delivering a commencement address.  It's been on the radio a lot, although usually only in snippets, since his recent premature death.

The part of it that gets played is that part about finding something you "love" to do.  Basically, the advice is to do something you love for a career.

But how realistic is that for most Americans now days?  I really wonder. Certainly it isn't realistic for the great mass of people who simply enter the workforce after high school. Does anyone even care what they "love" career wise.  Men who would have been machinist or worked in factories, and liked it, are working at Wal Mart now.  I doubt they love it.

And is it even true for college graduates?  Most college grads don't go on to found a major computer company.  Most cannot.  Do they love their careers?

And assuming they do not, is this a change in the nature of the world?

Casper's "neighborhood schools"

Casper's "neighborhood schools" Here's another link in from the hub blog, a rare editorial on my part. Shifting away from that, here's a change that's occurred locally that's very much within my own lifetime and observation. This is, of course, a local story, but I'd guess that similar things have occurred in many locations. When I was a kid, I went to Garfield Elementary School. The school had been built in the 30s, I think. Originally it was called the "Harding School", named after President Warren G. Harding, and it was a school for developmentally challenged students. Some time in the 50s, or maybe earlier, it was added on to and became Garfield Elementary School, a regular grade school for students living in that portion of the Standard Addition to the City of Casper. Basically, the school took in those students who did not go to Park, which was downtown (named for the nearby park) or Grant, which wasn't really far away either. Garfield was pretty much the only grade school on that side of town until Crest Hill was built in the 1960s. Starting about 1990, and really getting ramped up in the late 1990s, the local school district went to a new system that abolished boundaries, and created a competitive system between the schools. Some old schools died, Garfield included. New schools were built, but without any consideration for local population considerations. They usually were built with land availability in mind. Now the school district wants to shift back. But I doubt it really can. Too many things have changed, most locally. But some things have changed everywhere in the US. Whereas we walked to school, hardly any kid does that anymore. Vehicle transportation is the norm for everyone now. I routinely find that various people I'm working with, no matter where they are located, will have to stop work early to pick up children from school. That just didn't happen with us, when we were young. We walked to school, and walked back. And competition between schools seems to be the norm all over now. Lots of kids go to "charter schools", etc. Our district may be unusual in that all the schools are competing with each other, but an element of competition seems to have come in everywhere. This makes public schools a bit more like private schools, in some locations. Generally, I think that's a good thing. On one more thing, it is simply the case that a lot more students, no matter how we might imagine things to be, complete school, or more grades of school, than they used to. Even as late as mid 20th Century a very high percentage of Americans did not complete high school. Probably around 40%, on average, of Americans left school in their mid to late teens at that time. It wasn't regarded as that big of deal. Arguably school was harder to get through then, but it was also the case that a high school degree was less valued then. It wasn't regarded as necessary for those going to work on farms or ranches (although many farmers and ranchers completed their schooling, and in some regions of the country, by that time, many were going on to college educations). And it wasn't necessary for those going on to many types of industrial, or even office, employments. Now it is not only necessary, but for many some degree of college is as well.

Holscher's Hub: Flying back from Tulsa

Holscher's Hub: Flying back from Tulsa: Sunrise over Colorado, Kansas, or Oklahoma. Wyoming.

This is another one of those topics which relate to the massive change in transportation we've witnessed over the past century. As followers of this blog know (okay, there are not followers, it's just me) this blog is attempting to focus on the first part of the 20th Century, and look at that era, but we do occasionally stray into more recent ones for comparison purposes as well.

This topic nicely illustrates these changes.

On Sunday I flew down to Tulsa, which is the second time in the past three months I've visited Tulsa (very nice town, by the way, in my view). This time, I left Casper around noon and flew via United Airlines to Denver Colorado. I had a three hour lay over in Denver, and then flew on to Tulsa, arriving about 8:00 p.m. their time. I worked in Tulsa the next day, and then I flew back yesterday morning, leaving Tulsa about 6:30 am. I was back in my office about 10:00 am, local time.

Okay no big deal, right?

Well, take this back a century and lets do the same trip, for the same purpose.

Now, granted, a person in Casper Wyoming would be pretty unlikely to make such a business trip to Tulsa in 1911. That's illustrative of the change right there. Hardly anyone would do that unless there was a very significant reason to do so. Given the region, I don't doubt that this did sometimes occur, but it would be infrequent. By the 1930s, however, such a trip would have been much more likely.

In either event, such a trip would have been by train, not plane (plane is a theoretical possibility for the 30s, but mostly theoretical). What would that have entailed. Well, it would have started with boarding the train downtown here in Casper, probably early Sunday morning, and then making a series of train transfers all day long. You'd probably sleep in the train at night. Maybe you'd have to leave on Saturday, particularly if you intended to start work on Monday.

You'd still stay over Monday night, as I did, but you'd re-board a train on Tuesday morning, and spend all day traveling back.

Perhaps all this doesn't seem as dramatic of change to you, as to me, but it is significant. What we now do in a matter of hours was then done in terms of days. I still had time to myself Sunday morning, and worked most of Monday here in my office. That, at least, would have been different.

What about plane travel, when that became possible? I'm not sure when Casper received regular air traffic, but I believe it would have been some point in the 1930s. I have no idea what the travel patterns were like, but it sure would have been a lot slower. Could you fly from Casper to Tulsa in a day? Perhaps, but I'd guess it would have been pretty much an all day type of deal.

Interesting article from the Tulsa newspaper.

Not the usual fare here, but an interesting article that notes some societal changes from the Tulsa newspaper.

The Best Posts of the Week for the Week of October 2, 2011

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 1: Plan for life

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 2: Don't count on outside observations about another occupation.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 3: Excitement isn't necessarily exciting.

Funding Failure

Funding Failure

One of the topics that's been kicking around the GOP Presidential race is that of student loans.  At least one candidate, Ron Paul, says he wants to phase them out altogether.

I wouldn't be in favor of that, but I really do think that the entire topic needs to be revisited, as it's helping to fund failure, and has a weird impact on our economy.  This is the reason why.

Generally, student loans are a government backed system in which private young individuals receive funding for university or college irrespective of the needs of the economy, or the wisdom of their choice.  I'm not suggesting, of course, that we should override the choices of individuals who make study choices that are not likely to advance our collective economic well-being, but I do feel that it's a bad economic choice to fund them.

Students of the history of student loans often point out that they've been a boost to the American economy, which is somewhat true, but which really confuses the loans with the GI Bill, which was an outright grant.  At any rate, what they fail to note is that the early post World War Two American economy was such that that the student population (largely male) was unlikely to be study something that wasn't directly useable in the work sphere, and that having a college degree in the 1945 to 1975 time frame was rare enough that nearly any college degree could translate into business utility.  Neither of those factors is true today.  Indeed, at this point in time college degrees have become so common that a lot of them have no economic value to their holders at all.

This is not to say that pursing a college degree is worthless. That would hardly be true.  But if the government is to back the study of something, it ought to be something useful to the nation as a whole.  Not something that's likely to have no use to the nation, and which moreover is likely to have no real value to the holder in later economic terms.

As an example of this, which I've already noted here, one of the protestors at the Wall Street occupation was reported to have a $90,000 student loan for the study of art.  Why would the nation help fund this.  If she wants to study art, the more power to her, I just don't want to help.  In economic terms, this isn't going to help the nation at all, and frankly she'll be really lucky if she ever fines a job.  By funding her, we've made ourselves poorer and, chances are, her too.

What I'd propose to do is to restrict funding to areas where we really feel we need to boost the nation's educated populace.  If we're weak in the sciences or engineering, that's what I'd fund.  Other areas where we need new workers, who need an education to obtain it, would likewise be eligible for loans.  I wouldn't bother funding art students, or literature students. That doesn't mean their studies are unimportant culturally, or personally, but rather if they are important, it's in a manner that cannot be economically judged, and therefore people shouldn't be taxed to help fund it.  Law is the same way.  The nation has a vast oversupply of lawyers and I can't see any good reason to give a person a loan to study that.

I don't think that this would mean these other fields would dry up by any means.  But it probably would mean that a lot of people who don't qualify for private scholarships and who don't otherwise have the means of obtaining such a degree would do something else. Frankly, however, that would be a good thing, as by funding the non economic, we're fueling the hopes of a lot of people who aren't going to be able to find employment later.

And, no, I didn't have any student loans, thanks to the National Guard.

An observation on protesting

Protestors are occupying Wall Street right now.

But why?  Nobody seems to be able to define the nature of the protest.  It seems partly economic, but every other cause imaginable, on the left, is also being advanced in the protest.

A protest that protest for every left wing cause is not going to do anything, and actually looks fairly foolish.

There are some legitimate things to protest right now.  But what are they protesting?

An Observation on Immigration

There's some interesting things going on, in terms of immigration law, right now, but I don't know how many people have noticed it.

One thing is that Alabama has passed a strict new immigration law, and it appears that illegal aliens are clearing out of Alabama at a surprising rate.  The undercurrent in the news is that this is unjust, but it cannot be denied that there are a large number of people in the country illegally, and that if the Federal government was actually capable of enforcing the law in this area, these people would not be in the country.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a case concerning whether or not a state can pass its own laws regarding illegal immigration.  This is full of all sorts of ironies.  At one time, the US government did enforce immigration laws in the interior of the country, rather than just at the border, but an agreement reached with forces basically opposing immigration restrictions resulted in the US agreeing not to do that.  That's why it is basically the case that illegal immigrants face much reduced risks of being caught if they get over the border and into the interior of the country.

Most Americans are not anti immigrant, they are simply not in favor of unrestricted immigration.  People are well aware that unrestricted immigration reduces wages country wide and reduces employment for those legally here.  Illegal immigrants, already being illegal, frequently work at low wages and put up with poor living conditions.  You have to admire them for their drive, but by extension this means that wages in certain types of employments are kept low and an American cannot, therefore, earn a living in those occupations.  Remove illegal aliens from the country, and wages in those occupations would rise.  Yes, it would mean a rise in the price of some things too, but frankly, that's only just.

Encouraging illegal immigration, which the GOP at the national level basically does by ignoring the law as it favors low prices on things, and which the Democrats at the national level do because they basically favor an open border, results in American unemployment and, I suspect, also provides a relief valve for Mexico which needs to clean up its own house.  Of note there, however, for the first time in its history most Mexicans are in the middle class, so things really are changing in Mexico.  Perhaps this problem will take care of itself.

Anyhow, the Federal government failing to enforce its own laws is shameful.  It's no wonder that the states are acting.  And this is yet another example of how the national government isn't really fully functioning right now. The Federal government suing to stop states from enforcing what are essentially Federal provisions, when it won't do it, is bizarre.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 3: Excitement isn't necessarily exciting.

In this day and age a fair number of people are inspired to enter careers based on television and film portrayals of that occupation.  This isn't really new, I'd note.  I've heard of a fair number of people being inspired to become lawyers because of older films, like To Kill A Mockingbird, or Anatomy of a Murder.  Both fine films, I'd note.  I'll be the same is currently true for people becoming fireman today, as fireman dramas have been pretty common.  War stories, of course, seem to be perpetually.

But a person should really think about it if they are saying things like "I loved the courtroom drama and knew I wanted to do that".

We love the depictions of stress in story as we like artificial stress.  We don't like real stress, however.

Stressful situations are usually agony for the people in them.  A person would be foolish to watch The Sands of Iwo Jima and think they wanted to be a combat Marine, as being a combat Marine is not fun at all.  Seeing a trial lawyer in a movie may be fun, but that doesn't mean actually working a trial is (just ask anyone who has ever done one).  There's no doubt a million other examples.

So, if we're looking for excitement in a career, we should keep in mind there's good excitement and bad.  If we think something looks fun because it's "exciting", we should consider what that excitement really would be like.

UW Religion Today Column for Oct. 9-15: Moral Challenges in Catholic Higher Education

UW Religion Today Column for Oct. 9-15: Moral Challenges in Catholic Higher Education

An observation:

"As a result, Catholic University is being sued by Professor John F. Banzhaf under Washington's strict anti-discrimination law. The restriction of freshman dorms to single-sex is criticized as sexual discrimination"

Obviously Professor Banzhaf is a complete idiot. Discrimination? Please.

Can somebody check Prof Banzhaf's credentials? What was his degree in?

"Many if not most American Catholics disagree with their church's position on family planning and use contraceptives regularly. Furthermore, Catholic University employs many non-Catholics on its staff. Should the university force them to pay for contraceptive services when all other Americans can use them for free?"

Why should any employer have to pay for anyone's contraception?  I've never grasped that.  Even setting aside the moral aspects of contraception, what about the morality of taxing people to subsidize sex?  Doesn't seem like a very fair thing to do.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 2: Don't count on outside observations about another occupation.

When assessing careers, don't count on the members of one profession or occupation to be able to assess what another is like.

Lots of that type of advice is given.  People will say, for example, "you should be a lawyer" or "you should be a doctor" or you should be an accountant, based on their view of what these people do, even if they have no real experience with that work themselves..  Somebody, for example, sat through a lawsuit and found it fascinating, or saw lawyers interviewed on television and found that fascinating, and based their view on what a lawyer does based on that.  Or somebody likes their doctor, or maybe their doctor's car.  Such opinions are wholly erroneous.  Same with negative views.  Somebody will hate members of some profession based on what that individual did, rather than on what the professionals actually do.  A person must get the inside view, not the outside one.

No, that doesn't sound nifty to me.

Two nights ago my son answered the phone, and it was a solicitor from a hotel outfit. Somewhere during business travel I stayed at one of their hotels, and I must have enrolled in their program to get some pricing advantage.

Of course, it was some sort of time sales sales pitch.  I listened through the babble about going to Hawaii, when suddenly that deal disappeared, and the offer was for Orlando Florida.

Now, here I should note that I'm no doubt a tele solicitors worst nightmare.  I usually won't even listen to the pitch, and I'm such a contrarian that the conventional arguments they have are completely lost on my.  For example:

Q.  Now sir, how much would you  normally pay to go to Orlando?

A.  Um, I don't know. . .

Q. Well sir, when was the last time you were there?


A.  Um, five years ago.


Q.  Well, it's changed a lot, would you like to go back?


A.  No.


Q.  Um, why not.


A.  Why would I?


Q.  Well, there's a lot to do, what did you do last time?


A.  Worked.


Q. Well, it's time to go to play. . .you'd like to do that, right!


A.  No.


Q.  Why not.


A.  There's nothing there I want to do.


Q. Well, certainly you'd like to go to the local amusement facilities. . .


A.  No I wouldn't.


Q.  Well your family would, right, don't you think your family deserves that?


A.  They deserve a vacation, that's for sure, but that's not anything I'm interested in taking them to.


Ultimately I hung up.

Style, Fashion, and the decline of American Standards

There have recently been an entire series of posts on blogs about American standards of appearance, and what it means.  I'm proud to say that I've yapped about it myself, and did so early, so I was a pioneer in complaining, on blogs, about this.

Well, maybe that isn't really something I should complain about, but I have done it.

Anyhow, most recently this comes up in the context of Catholic bloggers noting how poorly some people appear at Mass.  Ms. Scalia has noted it on her blog The Anchoress.  Deacon Kandra got things rolling recently when he noted the same on The Deacon's Bench. These blog entries all noted that a lot of Catholics show up looking pretty darned bad, or even dressed in fairly suggestive clothing.  I've noted that myself, although in all honesty I think that this phenomenon was worse a few years ago, and this is less the case now.  I've also noted here and there that the standards of dress at Mass vary considerably by region, and for some good reasons.

Anyhow, I don't really think, as I've posed here before, that the decline in American sartorial standards is unique to Catholics at Mass. Rather, I feel that what people are noting is a general society wide decline is standards of dress that has become so ingrained in the American culture that we're now the sloppiest people on earth, and we don't know it.  Oddly, as I've also noted before, we still judge others by how they dress, which is interesting and says something, I guess, about the nature of symbols and appearance.

Is this phenomenon real?  If yes, why did the decline happen. And does it matter?

Well, it is real. Take a look at the last century and a half in terms of dress, and it becomes pretty evident.  Let's start with the 1860 to 1920 time frame.

If we do that, what we would find is that most people owned far fewer clothes than they do now. That's an irony of this situation that often fails to be appreciated.  Lots of clothing is a fairly recent phenomenon for a lot of reasons. For one, cheap easy clothing didn't really come about until the modern machine age, when clothing could be easily mass-produced.  For another, there was simply less wealth in the society until post WWII, so people couldn't buy a lot of changes in clothing. For yet another, clothing was washed by hand until the washing machine, and washing clothing by hand is really hard work.  People didn't change their clothing nearly as much as we do today.

For that matter, wool clothing was dominant up until the washing machine.  We think of blue jeans as cowboy wear today, but it wasn't until well into the 20th Century.  Wool trousers are what cowhands wore up until the washing machine became common.

Perhaps the connection with standards of dress isn't plain here, but there is a connection.  Most people had a good set of clothes for social functions.  They also had fewer clothes.  Men who worked indoors basically wore their good clothes all the time.  Those who had hard manual labor tended to have a set of good clothing for certain functions, such as church, and they didn't want to appear poor or disrespectful so they wore such clothing whenever the function suited it. For this reason, we're often surprised to see how well people are dressed just to be in town, in the 19th Century.

Additionally, clothing wasn't really used to send the same sort of personalized individual message that it is today.  Working men didn't need a set of clothing to send the message that they were working men. They had a set of clothing that suited work as they were working me.  Those who worked indoors likely did wish to send the message that they were not manual laborers, and wearing suits sent that message.  That was about all the more message their was.  Exceptions existed, in the United States, principally only for those who occupied specialized occupations, such as military men and the Protestant clergy (Catholic male clergy in the 19th Century largely dressed in suits).

Of course, as part of this, the standard was simply higher.  Caps, which so predominate now, were regarded as vulgar and vaguely obscene up until the automobile became common.  Why this is the case isn't really clear, but caps were something that were pretty much only worn by manual laborers whose jobs precluded them from wearing real hats.  That's probably the reason.

With modifications over time, this remained the general situation for pretty much the entire Western World up until the 1950s. Some things did change, but for real reasons.  Caps came in as acceptable men's ware in the 1910 to 1920 time frame, as they proved handy in connection with automobiles, and that converted them, at first, from being sort of a dirty working man's headgear into a sporty item.

Real change, however, came in the 1960s.  The "Cultural Revolution" not only brought about a challenge to every standard going, including clothing standards, or so it seemed.  In retrospect, it coincided with a change in material wealth and production in the US which was unprecedented.For the first time in our history, a generation was born with the expectation of higher education and the means largely existed to obtain it.  That generation was also born into an era when material goods were much easier to obtain than previously.    As a result of that, clothing that had been the domain of working men, t-shirts and Levis, became everyday wear for middle class children trying to affect the look of working men.  We've never gone back.

But does it really matter?

Well, yes and know.  It can't rationally be argued that people should return to the clothing standards of an earlier era.  But people should be aware that clothing sends a message.  Wearing clothing that looks disheveled or sloppy in some settings sends the message that we so value ourselves that we do not value anything else. We just can't be bothered.  The spread of clothing with fake messages, like fake schools or fake entities (very common amongst the young) sends the message that we have a fake life. Rude and suggest messages demean ourselves and cause us to lose respect, no matter what our intent is.

Stated another way, G. K. Chesterton once stated that:  The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.  Today, if a person really wants to dress like a radical, they'd have to dump the t-shirts with rude suggestions blazoned on them and dress a little decently. That doesn't mean wearing suit and tie, except where appropriate, but it also means dumping the "Hurley" cap on sideways and the t-shirt with skulls on it.  This is particularly true, I'd note, for the middle-aged, on whom these things look silly.

Still, at the end of the day, I find that when I go to Mass, which really matters to me, I am not dressing up a great deal.  I'm not dressed like a slob either, but I'm not in a tie.  I'm probably wearing Levis.  Most other people I see are similarly dressed.   Part of the regional culture, I suppose.  I'm better dressed at work.  I'm not sure what that says about me.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 1: Plan for life

For those high school aged kids, or college kids, pondering their career choices.

Fist a caveat.  I'm not a career coach, and have no business being one.  I'm not certain that I've ever listed to my own career advice.

Anyhow, in planning a future career, most people sort of vaguely imagine the first ten years of it, maybe.  Maybe they only generally envision the career.

Try to imagine yourself 20 or 30 years into the career.  Indeed, try to imagine yourself married, with a couple of kids, having worked it for two or three decades.  Does it still sound interesting to you?  Why?  Do you really know anyone in that position.  That is, really know them, not casually know them.  If so, talk to them and see what they have to say about it.

Holscher's Hub: Dugout

Holscher's Hub: Dugout

This is a dugout. That is, this is a very early dwelling by some homesteader, most likely.

A lot of homesteads started in this fashion. For that matter, quite a few started and failed having never become any more built up than this. I've seen dugouts that I could date to as late as the 1930s.

This gives us an example of many interesting changes that are hard for modern Americans to really appreciate. The conditions of living expectations were simply different. Not far from this example, I know of another one in which a stone dugout was built, and about a mile away another wooden framed dugout, which were the homes of families. Not single men, but families. Man, wife, and children. And this was their bedroom and kitchen.

Early homesteading was hard, of course. But homesteading continued on up until about 1934. The peak year for homesteading was 1919. The dream of owning a place of ones own was strong (it still is) but making it in agriculture was hard in ways we can hardly imagine. Movies and television have liked to portray mansions on the prairie, but that was very rare. More typically, they have liked to portray white clapboard houses on the prairie, but frankly that was somewhat of a rarity too. For a lot of people, this was their starter home. A log structure likely came later. If it was a 20th Century homestead, and the homesteaders were Irish, a house in town was actually almost as likely.

To add a bit, another thing that is hard for some to appreciate is that in the mid 20th Century there were a lot of little homesteads. They were being filed, proven up, and failing, in rapid succession. Almost all of these little outfits have been incorporated by neighboring outfits now. A few hang on as rentals to neighbors. There is no earthly way these small outfits could survive economically today, on their own, and they barely could earlier. But, while there were many of them, they were also very isolated in an era when a lot of people still traveled by horse, and those who had cars, sure didn't have speedy cars.