Puritans, Medicos, and thirsty folks. Concepts of drinking and health

President Roosevelt signs the bill legalizing the sale of beer, March 22, 1933.  Contrary to what people generally imagine, the repeal of the Constitutional prohibition on the sale of alcohol did not legalize all alcohol overnight as a Federal proposition.  It came in, in stages.  This is true of the states as well, including Wyoming, which had its own prohibition laws that had to be addressed before alcohol could be sold again, and with Wyoming as well, it was beer that was first legalized.

I've written on the topic of alcohol a few times before here (but not, apparently, as many times as I thought that I had).  This post however looks at a topic that's only been sort of addressed in the prior ones. That being, how much is too much.

No, actually that isn't the topic either.

The topic is, how much is perceived as being too much, which is, after all, a completely different topic.

This comes about for a couple of reasons.  The first one is that I happened to stumble across an item regarding the cause for canonization of the great G. K. Chesterton.

I wouldn't expect everyone who stops in here (not that this is a lot of folks) to be familiar with Chesterton, although I'll put up one of his quotes from time to time here.  He is a man who is very hard to define, so even though who are familiar with him in one way or another may be surprised that there is a cause for his canonization.  Of course, not everyone would know what that means. That is, he's being considered for a formal declaration of sainthood by the Catholic Church.  It's far from certain, as all such matters are, and it can take decades and decades for a cause to be fully examined.  Chesterton is up for consideration, however, as amongst his many writings, he was a true polymath, are a whole selection of those which are deeply religious in nature.  He, together with Hillaire Belloc, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis formed a group of highly Christian writers all in the same period of English history and they all knew each other.  Of that group, all were Catholic except for Lewis, who was a very dedicated Anglican.  Chesterton and Lewis were converts to their faiths, Chesterton having converted from a lukewarm Anglican upbringing and Lewis having converted from Atheism.

All of which would seemingly be way off topic and mostly is.

Anyhow, like all such individuals, there are those who are dedicated in opposition to them, and in Chesterton's case those individuals, apparently have claimed he lacked temperance.

Well, in reading the article, I didn't come away with the impression that he was not intemperate at all. Rather, what I came away with was the impression that he was one of those peculiar intellectual people who we run across from time to time, more in the past than now, who were sort of indifferent to their own care.  It seems that Chesterton was just always sort of personally sloppy and that in addition his dietary habits didn't meet the current puritanical definition of what they should be.  That is, he wasn't thin as a pipe rail in later years (early on he was) and he didn't spend hours at the gym.

He did die, probably, of complications from being hugely overweight in his late years.  But that doesn't mean he was drinking it up for his entire life.  In actuality, there were large portions of his life where he didn't drink at all, or only barely did.  In later years he tended to drink beer by observation, and as he was a huge man, he many have been able to drink a beer more than most people who drink beer might consider the amount you should drink.

Or, rather, let's rephrase that.  He drank a beer more than most people who do not drink beer regard as the amount you should (or shouldn't) drink.  He was quoted on drink, as follows:

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

He also  ate pretty much a meat and potatoes diet, which is also something a lot of people today regard as intemperate.

I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow / I like beer / It helps me unwind / And sometimes it makes me feel mellow.

Read More: Top 10 Country Songs About Beer | http://theboot.com/country-songs-about-beer/?trackback=tsmclip

I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow / I like beer / It helps me unwind / And sometimes it makes me feel mellow.

Read More: Top 10 Country Songs About Beer | http://theboot.com/country-songs-about-beer/?trackback=tsmclip

I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow / I like beer / It helps me unwind / And sometimes it makes me feel mellow.

Read More: Top 10 Country Songs About Beer | http://theboot.com/country-songs-about-beer/?trackback=tsmclip

I don't know of Lone Star is the "national" beer of Texas, but at least by my limited observation, it's pretty bad.  Ack.  But it does show how widespread regional brands of beer have been.

Which gets me to my point.

The way it strikes me is that Chesterton is being criticized by some, as are others, under a current contemporary standard that may not be all that realistic itself, and which may also be very temporary.  We live in a very puritanical age regarding food, and like all things puritanical, the current concepts of what is proper are perhaps not only not well grounded, they are frequently ignored, but they are also the source of much shaming.

Eating a Reuben sandwich for lunch?  Shame on you.

Roast beef and a glass of wine for dinner last night?  Shame on you.

You get the point.

Now, as I've also noted here on this blog, these things really change.  When I was in my teens we were lead to belief that eating eggs for breakfast would surely kill you by the time you were seventeen years old, and probably cause senility, and result in our loss of the war in Vietnam, the triumph of Communism in Cuba, and confusion over whether the Mets or the Yankees were really New York's baseball team.  Now were' told that they are a great breakfast item, and even better if you have them with sausage.

Geez, so people ate like cows for breakfast for two decades for nothing?

Apparently yes.

This isn't to suggest being hugely overweight, as Chesterton was towards the end of his life, is good. Rather, what it is to suggest is that prior to the 1970s, people didn't actually obsess about that, that much.  As we've addressed in our linking in of Fairlie's The Cow's Revenge, there's good reasons for that.

Falstaff, named for the jolly, chubby, king of literary fame.  Apparently there was a time when beer companies didn't think the beer ideal were hyperactive, over funded, 20 somethings who spend all their time partying at the beach but needing to watch their caloric intake.

Part of the neo-Puritanism that we've seen in recent years is a dedicated focus on alcohol consumption. There is good reason for this, but there are also social reasons for this.  Interestingly, the focus has probably been at least as great in Europe as the United States, and in the various European nations, some of which have strong drinking cultures of one type or another, their various governments have taken a role in that.

None of which answers the question, is there a safe level of alcohol consumption and if there is, what is it?

Well, we probably have to start off with, we don't really know.  But what we can also do, is take a little bit of a look at the history of this topic, which might be illustrative.

 You can say "Jax", but I doubt you'll get one.  I've never heard of it.

It seems that people have created alcoholic beverages as far back as we can determine. Alcohol, we know, is a poison, but many human cultures are adapted to intake it at a certain level. That means that for many human beings there is an evolutionary adaptation to alcohol, suggesting that it was something that we took on very early.  And we know from other sources that this is true.  Early recipes for brewing beer go all the way back to Mesopotamia, making those writings amongst the very oldest to be preserved. Likewise, we know that Egyptian laborers in ancient times received  part of their pay in beer.  In the Western Hemisphere, we know that Central American Indians were brewing corn beer early on.  In Africa, a type of beer called something like kraal is likewise a local indigenous drink.  Beer at least goes way back.  Indeed, it would seem to be unique amongst toxins and drugs in that its long, and actually purposeful, associated with our species is has some evolutionary adaptation in many populations to some extent.  Beer is truly ancient.

So is wine, but I don't know how far back wine goes. Far back, however.  It shows up in the Old Testament as a drink that the Jews were drinking at that time, showing that they'd developed the ability to ferment wine quite early.  Christ's first public miracle, we know, was turning water into wine at a wedding.  Wine figures very prominently in the Last Supper and in the Apostolic churches and those based closely on them is a necessary species for the transformation that gives rise for Communion. The Greeks and the Romans of course are famously associated with wine early on.

So people have been drinking for a very long time.

How much they were drinking, and how strong it was, is another matter.   The evidence suggests that wine, in the ancient world, was typically heavily watered down.  Drinking wine was a necessity for a variety of reasons (the water could kill you) but it was also commonly watered.  Indeed, at least the early Greeks believed that drinking straight out fermented wine, which does not have all that high of alcohol content, would make you insane.  And, of course, if you are in fact drinking it all day long, it

might.

Ancient beer was likely that way as well, simply from the brewing process.  It was also flat.  It was, therefore, not only a drink, it was basically food.  Think of it like Guinness Stout.  Low alcohol (Guinness is only 3%) and like bread. Beer, indeed, was likely as much of a food item as it was a drink, sharing a status in those regards perhaps only also shared by milk.

Okay, so that's alcohol in antiquity.  So what? What does that tell us. Well, it tells us humans have been drinking it for a long time and there's also some level of evolutionary adaptation to it in most human populations.  This was done for good reason, water was often dangerous.  However, it's also been known that too much alcohol has real risks, and this too was noted by ancient sources.

Let's take this forward.  Actually, let's take it way forward, as I don't really have any ability with my limited resources to cover it in depth.  We know that by the Middle Ages people were drinking quite a lot.  Something on the order of a liter a day of beer was included in the pay of itinerant farm workers in Northern Europe at that time, which means that they were likely consuming that much, if we consider that such a farm worker likely had a wife and children, and they .  Oh, wait, that means he really wasn't drinking that much. . . .Well anyhow, beer was also rationed to Medieval monks in surprisingly large quantities as well, and they brewed the stuff at that, as well as operating wineries.  That might not be as much as it sounds like either, quite frankly as we don't know how much of that was being distributed to others, but we do know that it seems that the consumption of beer and wine, depending upon region (in the wine regions they weren't drinking beer, and vice versa) was a daily occurrence, and no doubt down to the child level.

Now, this seems shocking, and some people who like to be shocked have been, but once again we have to consider the reasons and meaning of this.  People in the Middle Ages weren't drinking wine and beer because they were hoping to get sloshed.  Rather, they were  drinking this much as the water could be lethal.  Wine and beer is much less likely to be lethal for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, alcohol itself will kill some bacteria, rather obviously.  Additionally, however, the care that goes into making beer and wine, including the vessels it is made in, and the care to the product, helps explain it as well.  In addition, at least in the case of beer, it has a nutritional value that's easy to preserve.  Barely and other grains can be kept, but they do risk spoiling.  Beer and wine can spoil as well, but it's less likely that they will.  It's worth noting, of course, and part of its story, that hard alcohol, like whiskey and vodka, will not spoil.

 Renaissance print circa 1592 demonstrating that there's certainly always been risks on drinking.  "

"Osculum sumis quid tu nisi toxica sumis".  "You would not be getting a kiss if she was not drunk".

Taking that forward again, this also seems to be more or less the rule in the Renaissance.  And perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.  The real difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages is so slight that it might not actually even exist, and rather it might be a creation by Reformation era historians simply to create a distinction, false though it might have been, between their own era and a slightly prior one.

Going on to the Age of Enlightenment this was also true, but perhaps things were beginning to change a bit.  Daily drinking was common, and at levels that would shock most of us.  John Adams, as an example, drank Madeira, a very common and popular wine at that time, with breakfast, a practice which strikes me as absolutely gross.  Ick. (I've find "champagne breakfasts or morning mimosas to be a gross thought as well).  And he certainly wasn't the only one, the practice was fairly common.  Nobody worried a great deal about that sort of thing at the time, which isn't to suggest that people approved of people being drunk all the time either.  The Mayflower, carrying the Puritans we call the "Pilgrims" put in because it was out of beer, not because it was just at the right spot.

A wine celebrating the dueling culture of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.  Personally, I think the very common consumption of wine at the time might help explain why dueling seemed like a good idea. . . .

Indeed, early European Americans had a much closer relationship with alcohol than we imagine.  The Puritans, as noted, did not abstain from alcohol, which makes the title of our entry here a bit misleading, but that's because people have tended to be mislead about this, as well as certain other Puritan beliefs.  The Puritans certainly were harsh on all sorts of things, but they didn't advocate for Prohibition.  And this followed on for Colonial Americans for a long while.  Brewing of beer was common in the Colonies and early United States, as was the fermenting of wine.  Indeed one of the things that British soldiers noted about North America is that the beer was bad, not that it wasn't.

At some point in here things began to change.  For one thing, at least in North America, and prior to that the British Isles, the distilling of whiskey increasingly became a big thing.  Distilled drinks are, by their very nature, quite a bit different from simply fermented ones.

When people first learned the peculiar art of distillation is not known.  Some things may have been distilled prior to alcoholic beverages, such as aromatics.  Anyhow, the process is obviously quite old, but it doesn't seem to have been widely engaged in prior to the 1500s and at that, when it really started coming in on the British Isles, it was done first for medicinal reasons.  That soon gave way to simply consumption.  "Whiskey" is a Gaelic word itself, and the process crossed over to the New World with the Scots and took root in regions of North America that they immigrated to so that even by the time of the American Revolution the distillation of "corn likker" was pretty common in North America.

 

Bottle of Wyoming Whiskey, a bourbon.  Bourbons are distilled from a corn mash.  This one is distilled in Wyoming.  While I posted on this topic quite awhile back, and it was once one of the most read posts on the forum, I don't know enough about whiskey to opine on this one other than that one bottle we had from the first batch seemed good, and the other not so much, but then, I don't like bourbon as a rule.

 

There's something industrial about distilled beverages, and that's often missed about them.  Compared to whiskey, fermenting wine or brewing beer is pretty easy, even good wine or beer.  Distilled beverages are a real process however, and while its certainly possible to do it just because you want to, by and large there's more of a reason to do it than that.  In the case of North America, distilling corn became the easiest way to get remote corn crops to market.  Hauling harvested corn before it spoils to a remote market is tough.  Hauling distilled whiskey less so.

 Really primitive distillery, or still.  Interestingly, a Jewish distillery in Central Asia is depicted here, no doubt a cultural depiction now long past.

The reason that I mention the industrial nature of whiskey, if we accept that even small scale industry is in fact industry, is that this somewhat changed the nature of drinking.  It's certainly possible and not uncommon for people to become beer or wine alcoholics, but it's much more efficient to do that with distilled alcohol.

Indeed, the distinction between beer and hard alcohol and rural traditional life and industrial life was noted so early that it was the subject of an English industrial revolution era etching called Beer Alley and Gin Lane, with Beer Alley being the scene of happy peasant life and Gin Lane being a scene of dissolute drunkenness.  That seems extreme, but perhaps there's a little something to that.  If there is, what it might be is that rural conditions of heavy labor with light alcohol weren't as destructive as urban conditions with hard alcohol.  We might be able to take that a bit further forward and note that the first real concerns with heavy drinking seem on a society wide scale seem to have come in early in the 18th Century, which is not to say that drunkenness as a problem was not noted earlier.  Indeed, St. Paul noted that drunkenness was a condition that would keep a person out of Heaven.  St. Paul, it probably also noted, was a Roman citizen and familiar with urban Roman life, which again may have been a bit different than the conditions that the rural people of the same era generally dealth with, so the same sort of conditions are somewhat analogous.

 Temperance poster, 1846.

By the concern for drink in society really began to ramp up in modern times in the Industrial Revolution, and it does seem that the level of drinking became truly stunning.  Alcohol was largely unregulated in most places, including most of the United States, so no restrictions of any kind existed on the sale of alcohol. Members of all elements of society and individuals of all ages became addicted to drink, and with that the Temperance movement rose.

The Temperance movement came into being as part of the society wide rise in various other progressive movements, some of which are now fully incorporated into the mainstream and some of which have passed into forgotten history.  Existing for decades, the movement reached the pinnacle of its popularity during World War One, and frankly because of World War One, although it had a long run prior to that.  It ramped up, as noted, after the Civil War, and at a time when when various other movements were also in circulation.  Like abolition, it acquired an association with some religions at the same time, although unlike abolition it was not well theologically grounded in that the early Apostolic Churches had very clearly never advocated for the position that Christianity prohibited any consumption of alcohol and they had also always taken the position that wine was a necessary element for transubstantiation.  As temperance movements gained strength in the US, however, some of them mixed their beliefs with interpretations of Christianity that they asserted supported their views.  However, it was a wide scale acceptance in a wide cross section of the American population over a long period of time that convinced legislatures and utlimatley the natioal legislature to ban the consumption of alcohol.  The movement was so strong that it had its own political party, the Prohibition Party, which amazingly still exists.  States and counties began to ban alcohol slowly after the Civil War, even as a saloon trade thrived where legal.  In 1881 Kansas banned the sale of alcohol by way of its state constitution.  Just prior to World War One Virginia banned the sale by statute, taking that step in 1916.

  Temperance poster, immediate post World War One period.

But it was World War One that pushed things over the top.  The fear that the war would turn young men into drunks, which of course sometimes it did, pushed the movement over the top to success.  The seeming veracity of the fear in the post war era brought about the Volstead Act in 1919, and prohibition came to the United States, but not just the US.  Most of the English speaking world also had strong prohibition movements, although not always so strong as to cause Prohibition to become law.  The UK did not, for example, ever pass prohibition, nor did Ireland, but prohibition laws were passed in Canada.  Partial prohibition came to Australia, but not to New Zealand in spite of a majority of New Zealanders voting for it in a referendum (it fell below the required 60% vote).  All the Scandinavian countries passed prohibition bills of varying degrees of strictness, and in fact they still all strongly regulate the sale of alcohol.

 Meeting just days after the end of World War One, the National Conference for World Wide Prohibition.

Prohibition, of course, was very unpopular in the United States.  Part of that was cultural, and part of it reflects a split in the views of different generations, although it is rarely looked at that way.  Prohibition was very popular in much of the United States. As much as it might surprise Wyomingites now, it was at first popular in Wyoming and our very own Senator Francis E. Warren pushed it over the top in Congress. Wyoming, like much of the West, had suffered under a completely unregulated saloon trade that was clearly bad for all sort of things.  Indeed, the law on everything had been very loosely enforced in the "Wild" West to start with, and in much of the West that went on a lot longer than we now recall.  Free flowing, unlicensed, dispensing of alcohol and the gathering of men in an almost all male congress of drinking is going to result in problems rather obviously.  When the Prohibition movement came, therefore, it was very widely supported here.

 

Trade card for Wiedemann Beer. This is a company that I've never heard of, but it turns out, they survived Prohibition, and they're still around.  Apparently folks like Senator Warren, and probably for good reason, didn't think of all the cowboy drinkers being like this somewhat long in the tooth puncher, but more like the ones in Remington and Russell paintings.  Hmmm. . . this graying puncher with mustache and gray stubble is someone I'm starting to sort of resemble. . . maybe I better to have a Widemann's.

It was much less supported in those established areas of the United States with large immigrant populations from Germany and Ireland, which had their own drinking cultures.  Beer was an integrated part of the German and Irish social structure.  Likewise, in Canada, wine was an integrated part of the Quebecois culture, as it also was in the growing Italian community in the United States.  A split, therefore, existed right from the onset.

A Klu Klux Klan poster if favor of the 18th Amendment.  If this seems exceedingly odd, and it is, keep in mind that the KKK was an organization that was racist in the sense of being not only white racist, but white, Anglo Saxon Protestant.  It hated blacks, Jews, and Catholics, the latter two of which had historical associates with alcohol in one form or another.

It also existed in regards to younger Americans who had been exposed to alcohol in a different fashion just recently in World War One. The American troops who made it overseas to the fighting were stationed in France, mostly, and therefore became familiar with a culture that, at the at time, drank daily and fairly heavily.  French water was still quite bad in the early 20th Century and the routine consumption of wine at meals and social events was something that could not be missed.  Troops who served in the Army of Occupation in Germany were additionally exposed to a German culture that treated beer in a similar fashion.  Additionally, World War One came, oddly enough, at the height of the cocktail boom in the US and Europe and therefore officers in particular came home knowing at least one or two cocktails, including the French 75, the recipe for that being:

Pinch sugar

Dash sweet and sour mix

³⁄₄ oz. dry gin

³⁄₄ oz. French brandy

Club soda

2 oz. champagne

Slice of lemon

It sounds ghastly.

And it also would be exceedingly stout, which is the point.  The concept of fancy cocktails of which a single example would make most people woozy and sick in the morning was new to the US, and not really welcome by an older generation of any type, understandingly.

So, Prohibition came, becoming the law on October 28, 1919.

 

A pro Temperance song, with a somewhat creepy illustration.

 Not everyone had always viewed things that way.


Oh well.

But it wasn't universally well received, including, ironically, even places like Wyoming that had supported it all along.  There's something, apparently, about being told "no" that inspires a unique kind of graft, greed and corruption and that followed everywhere.  It became so bad, of course, that everyone knows the end of the story.  By 1932, a mere thirteen years after it had become the law, it started to be phased out, but not all at once.  It was actually stepped out, beer being slowly allowed first, other alcohols being allowed in later.

 Crowded New York City bar the evening Prohibition went into effect, getting their last legal drink.

Unfortunately, really, the law was changed during the  Great Depression, when a lot of people really felt like they needed a drink and some of them shouldn't have been drinking. That masked the real success that even the temporary Prohibition had been.  Health problems associated with alcohol actually did diminish notably, at least at first, and while it was on.  And even after it was repealed, the fact that the states came in and freed things up slowly meant that alcohol came back in with a set of rules.  Really rules that existed for the very first time.

 Destroying individual bottles of beer during Prohibition.

It had unfortunate collateral effects of various types, including wiping out some of the well established breweries and distilleries that had made fine products prior to Prohibition.  Rye whiskey acquired a bad name during Prohibition simply because it had such a good one prior to it, as bootleggers attempted to pass their product off as Rye.  A permanent smuggling culture seemed to arise as a result of it as well, and in some ways that has never left us.

 Budweiser came right back and associated itself with various outdoor sports and farming when it was first allowed back on the scene.

The repeal coming when it did was, as noted, also unfortunate as the Great Depression was not universally conducive to sobriety and World War Two definitely was not.  World War Two had a huge impact on the young drinking and would for a very long time.  The Bill Mauldin cartoons showing a drunk Willie and Joe were really not very far removed from the truth, and a high level of acceptance for casual drinking came into the culture.  Period movies that show hard alcohol being served at any hour of the day and in any setting, including in hte office, are not  far off the mark by any means.  For a very long time after World War Two the expectation that a gentleman would have a liquor cabinet was universal, even if that just meant a bottle of Canadian Whiskey behind the glass is the cupboard.  

This probably only really began to change in the 1970s.  Booze managed to hold its own in the 1960s even against the influx of all sorts of other competing drugs.  Indeed, the wine industry aimed at the young with "pop" wines specifically marketed towards them  In the 1970s, however, the boomers became focused on physical fitness and they started associating beer with being fat.  The beer industry with "Lite Beer", which was generally lager style beer down at or below the 3% range.  Ironically, maybe, English beers that are usually associated with being "heavy" were already down that low as a rule, as they were "session beers", meant to be consumed at a pub session with friends, and hence low in alcohol.  Americans generally preferred lagers of around 5% at the time, however, so it seemed new to them.

A lot of American beer was pretty bad at the time, and had been for quite some time, which isn't to say that it all was.  Starting in the 1980s "craft" beers started to come in and there was a renewed interest in better beers.  Or, perhaps more accurately, Americans became interested for the first time in better beers.  There's been a huge explosion in local and craft breweries since that time, but as that has occurred, there's also been an increased concern about how bad alcohol may before you.  And the concern hasn't just been in the United States, which is sort of fanatically health conscious anyhow, but in Europe as well.

As this has occurred, people have been confronted with a blizzard of news of one kind or another for about twenty years.  Some would suggest, including some governments, that no level of alcohol is safe for anyone.  Quite a few official studies and unofficial ones seem to suggest that a safe level maybe up to three "units" (careful there) per day may be okay for men, and two for women, but others legitimately note that with some drinks, wine and hard alcohol in particular, people nearly always exceed the unit right off the bat.  It's harder to do that with beer, due to the way its packaged, but really easy to do with wine, which is sometimes poured into massive glasses that are never meant to be full, ever.  Same with hard alcohol, particularly in the case of people who don't measure it, and many don't.

So, right from the onset there's a problem in that there are definite health risks.  Alcohol is associated with cancer and liver damage, just to start off with. However, it's also associated with some reduced health risks, such as  reduction, at moderate levels, in the risk for heart disease. Go figure.

Added to that, nobody really truly has a very good grasp of how much is too much, for a daily drinker. It's really clear that getting hammered is universally bad.  It seems pretty clear that exceeding three "units", ever, is bad, if you are a man, but then maybe you should stay down at two. . . or maybe one.  The British government says none.  Health benefits can easily be outweighed by health risks.

Added to that, when exactly a person is regarded as addicted to alcohol is not at all clear.  This is in part because there's a real distinction between psychological and physical addiction, and you can be addicted either way.  Physical addiction is pretty easy to spot in some instances.  If a person suffers due to alcohol withdrawal, and some people can to the extent its life threatening and they really should be hospitalized, well they're addicted.  If a person just feels they must, however, they may be addicted in a different fashion.   

This has lead, over time and place, to actual differences in opinion over what a "drunk" or an alcoholic actually is.  Way back in law school, for example, I recall attending a talk of a student's year in Australia in which he made a comment that the amount of alcohol consumed by many Australians would cause a person to be regarded as an alcoholic in the US.  I doubted that, but in later looking it up that was in fact actually somewhat correct at that time.  They weren't regarded that way there, however.  As another example, some time ago I saw an item where it was being discussed that a worker at the Sam Adams brewery remarked on one of the beers there being his favorite daily beer, with another person reacting in horror that only alcoholics drank daily.  Some may think that, but that's definitely not true.

Indeed, as noted, now some physicians are sort of endorsing the benefits of one drink, or maybe two (if you are male) per day. That's sort of cautious advice, I'd note, as others note that while that level of drink may have its benefits, alcohol's overall health risks out weigh any benefits in a larger sense.

Well, this all goes to this.  Just because in former eras people didn't worry about this nearly as much doesn't mean we've discovered everything.  Nor does it mean that those people in former eras were intemperate.

Which I suppose is that while I was finishing this post, I was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Not a Sam Adams, Fat Tire, Newcastle or Blue Moon, but oh well, some times good enough, is good enough.

The Sunday State Leader for August 6, 1916. Laramie steps up to the plate with Guard recruits.

Cheyenne's Sunday State Leader was reporting that neighboring Albany County had come in with Guardsmen to help fill out the state's National Guard.

And the GOP comments on Wilson's policy on Mexico wasn't being well received everywhere.

And labor was unhappy in New York.

The Cheyenne Leader for August 5, 1916: Recruits still needed.

The Wyoming National  Guard was still shorthanded, which was delaying its deployment.

Friday Farming: Let's take a look at the WWII British Land Army.

British World War Two Women's Land Army member.

California National Guard and Mexican forces nearly clash, August 4, 1916

A Mexican sniper shot a California National Guardsman on this day in 1916 at the Santa Cruz River and members of the patrolling 14th California Infantry returned fire.  This nearly resulted in an engagement, but leadership on both sides managed to steer clear of that.

 D. C. Guard training for border duty.

This item is really interesting in that often the Guard's role in the story of the Punitive Expedition tends to be marginalized.  The suggestion often is that because they didn't cross the border, they didn't really do much. But they did.  There are several examples such as this of Guardsmen getting into combat with small parties of Mexican raiders.  This is simply the earliest example of that I ran across, and it may well be the very first.  As we have seen from newspaper entries from this past week the Guard did not all deploy to the border at one time.  Indeed, this was not accidental as Guard units came and went, reflecting their initial state of training and the desire to not overtax them, and to get them all trained.  Nearly the entire Guard served on the border during the crisis, but not all at once.

 California National Guard, 1906.  Note how much had changed in just a decade.  These soldiers look a lot more like soldiers from the Indian Wars than ones who would serve in World War One.

That meant, and not coincidentally, that stories like we saw in the Wyoming newspapers earlier this week were common.  Soldiers who were not fit for service were getting discharged.  That leads us to another aspect of this. The Punitive Expedition is often treated a bit in a vacuum but the newspaper articles we've been reading (and if you look at Reddits "100 Years Ago" subreddit you'll see this to be even more the case) show that as time went on the huge fear and expectation that we were going to war with Mexico rapidly declined over a period of a few weeks and, instead, the disaster of World War One loomed increasingly large.  It's hard not to believe that a large part of the purpose of Federalizing the Guard changed over those few weeks and Wilson, while he may have "kept us out of war", was preparing for one, including using the border crisis to bring the Guard up to fighting speed.

In Wyoming's case, that meant getting the  Guard up to full strength, amongst other things.  As we've seen, the Guard was recruiting to make its quota.  In California's case, however, it apparently deployed very rapidly, which makes sense.

California National Guard, 1906.

Cheyenne State Leader for August 4, 1916. The Wyoming National Guard still short of recruits.

The August 4, 1916 details the continued efforts to bring the Wyoming National Guard up to strength, this time with an appeal from the Governor for five recruits from every county.

Technology and the rig count

The Tribune ran an article today that had some really interesting observations about technology and the rig count. Something that those who are focused on the energy industry and employment should consider.

First will note what the Pew polls noted before the recent bust:

Workers in America’s oil and gas patches have enjoyed some of the country’s biggest gains in the buying power of their paychecks over the past decade and a half, while workers in several small and mid-sized manufacturing-oriented cities have watched their buying power shrink over the same time period.

That was great, of course, for the Wyoming economy.  Now we're in a huge slump, which of course is not so great.  We've been hearing a lot about "when it comes back", but perhaps we should be a bit careful.

First we will note what the Tribune noted:

The average rig count in Wyoming for July was eight. That’s the lowest anyone has seen it. It’s a fraction of July 2015’s average of 21, which was a record low, and the previous year’s 52.

That's a huge decline, so say the least; however:

But 7,364 barrels were produced this month in Wyoming, compared with 6,438 last July and 5,264 in 2013, according to the EIA’s data.

That's a bit surprising.  Apparently a lot of the new oil remains marketable.  Here's what is:

In a call with analysts last week, the CEO of Halliburton said the counting game has changed, as rigs operate with better productivity, speed and efficiency.

“In the next North America rig cycle, 900 is the new 2,000,” David Lesar said.

Wow, that's quite a change. . . and quite a change in employment, and even its nature as well.

These new rigs have been around for awhile.  An oddity of the North American boom recently is that a huge number of old rigs were put back in service, at least as first.  One long time hand I knew told me that he hated working in North America as compared to the Middle East, where he had been, as the rigs were all so low tech.  But as things advanced, that changed.  I'd been hearing more and more about the new high tech rigs, although I have yet to be on the floor of one yet.  All the ones I was on in the past few years were old style ones, and perhaps actually old ones.

When things come back, if they do, there will likely be enough of the newer rigs around that what  David Lesar reported to the Tribune will be correct, or become correct.  And as that becomes true, what that means is that employment in the oil patch will not resume its former levels.  And a lot of other things will be different as well.  A person from the Oil and Gas Commission reported to the Tribune that:  "In my time, it took us six months to drill 10,000 feet. Now a rig can do that in a week and a half".  Quite the change.

The Cheyenne Leader for August 3, 1916: Wyoming still mustering its Guard.

There was a variety of grim news for this day which pretty much shoved it to the side, but Lyman Wyoming was hoping to be the home station for a new National Guard company being raised to go to the border.  The telling thing is, really, that Wyoming was still trying to come up to strength for border duty.

Railroad strikes, the Deutschland submarine, and the imminent execution of Roger Casement took precedence, however, in the day's news.

Vienna appears to have been a bit optimistic, we'd note.

Some Gave All: Is this spot too busy?

Some Gave All: Is this spot too busy?: Recently I was in Albany County and I stopped by a rest stop, just to visit the Lincoln Memorial, and found that the stop is jammed packed ...

Lex Anteinternet: Glasses Redux, wherein I ask for advice.

 

Back about a year ago, I published an item about glasses:

Lex Anteinternet: Glasses: I started wearing glasses when I was in junior high.

Well, actually I didn't.

I'd just gotten reading glasses, in addition to my regular glasses.  In regards to that, I noted:

Recently, I've had no choice, and after an eye examination, I had to have a second pair made, one for work, and one for home.

My reading glasses.

I hate them.

The ones I have at home are on a pair of rimless frames, much like my Bausch & Lombs. The frame is a bit heavier, but they're still not bad.  I thought it would look silly, however, to have a set of reading glasses with temple frames duplicating my regular glasses.

Of course, the new frames have a huge lens, reminding me of why I hated that kind of frame to start with.

I'm not blaming anyone. This is just part of life.  But it's the pits.

Well, a year has passed and I hate them more than ever.

The reason isn't the frames, it's the switching back and forth, constantly.  I order to see my computer, I put them on.  If somebody comes in, I have to switch back to my other glasses, if I want to see them, it's a pain.

To make matters worse, I now find that the distance at which my computer screen is set, about 2.25 feet from me, fits into a zone that I just can't focus in now.  I found that to be hugely problematic this weekend as I was working on electrical outlets.  I hate working on electrical things in general, but it's really the pits to work on them if you flat out cannot see them.  And this now happens to me a lot.

So, the question is what to do?

I don't want to be constantly shifting glasses back and forth, particularly as some of the time I'm someplace like the grocery store where I don't want to take off one pair of glasses and put on another.  

I've given, therefore, some renewed thought to adopting contact lenses. I'd still need reading glasses, or probably two pairs. but maybe putting on reading glasses would be less of a pain than taking my regular glasses off and the reading glass on?

My son suggested lasix surgery, but having anyone operate on my eyes, scares me. But then, a couple people I know have had it done and reported great results.

Anyone out there dealt with this? What'd you do?

How Joe Biden can become President in the 2016 Election. A wild, but hypothetically possible, scenario.

 Does Joe know something we don't?  Well . . .

What?  Joe Biden can win the election?  Surely you jest?  

No, and he doesn't even have to run.

Will this happen?  No.  

But it's theoretically possible.

And in a wild hypothetical exercise, here's how.

Let's start by looking at the 12th Amendment of the Constitution, which controls this topic.

The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and all persons voted for as Vice-President and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate.

The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

The 12th Amendment of the Constitution provides that the President must receive the majority of electoral college votes.    Let's look at that again, in relevant part:

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed . . .

So, to win, a candidate needs the majority of the whole number of electors appointed.  There are 535 electoral college votes.  To win you need 270 votes.

It is not inevitable that either party gets 270.  In this past weekends This Week the pundits made their predictions, all coming in with figures for Trump from around 240 up to 269.

But that's in a two person race.  Indeed, this week summed up the race as "100 days, 50 states and two nominees".  But that isn't what we have.  Right now we have a little less than 100 days, 50 states, and at least six candidates.  Of those six candidates at least four of them have fairly serious followings, with one other having a very small serious following.  There's been a lot of talk about the Libertarian Party taking away Republican votes this year, and the Green Party taking Democratic votes.

Now, recently, the Green presumptive nominee has offered Bernie Sanders the Green Party nomination, which of course he declined.  

Let's assume, for purposes of our wild hypothetical, the Greens draft Bernie against his will.  

If they did, he'd protest. But would he take any states. . . . I'm guessing he might.  Heck, even as it is, its not impossible that the Libertarians might pick up one or two.

So, let's say the Greens draft Bernie and nominate him kicking and screaming.  After awhile, well. . . the voice of the people and all . . . 

So, the election comes, and the day after, let's say Sanders has twenty or so electoral votes and neither Trump nor Clinton have 270.   Neither Trump nor Clinton would win, under the Constitutional provisions. Then what?

Well, it would go to the House of Representatives who would pick from the top three candidates.  But there the House would not vote by the number of Congressman, but by state.  I.e., there would be just 50 votes.  Consider again:

 and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.

So, in order to win a candidate would need 26 states to go for him or her.  Assuming, a quorum of states could vote.   What's a quorum for this purpose:

a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states

A quorum, for this purpose, would apparently be 34, or maybe 33, states.

There are no Constitutional rules for how a state would pick who it would vote for.  Presumably rules would have to be chosen, as was the case the last time this provision of the Constitution was used, 1825.  Presumably each state's House members would vote in a separate internal ballot to determine which way their state would go.

Now, here's the curious thing.  Right now, 34 states have a majority Republican House makeup.  Sixteen have a majority Democratic makeup.  So if even one GOP state can't make up its mind, there's no quorum.  Of if one went for the Libertarian candidate. Or if even one just didn't want to go for Trump.  

So, what happens if there's no quorum?

And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

Well, Joe Biden becomes President. 

Indeed, in this wild scenario, the Democratic states would be nuts to vote for anyone. They'd be better off angling for no vote at all and defeating the quorum, which they'd only need one GOP state to aid them in, and some of the GOP states aren't very Republican.

Likely?

Surly not.

Possible.

It actually is.

I wonder if Joe has thought of this?

Today In Wyoming's History: August 1, 1915: Automobiles first admitted into Yellowstone.

 Automobile, Yellowstone National Park, 1922.

In updating our blog Today In Wyoming's History, I couldn't help note this item, which fits into the time period we look at on this blog:

Today In Wyoming's History: August 1:

1915  Automobiles first admitted into Yellowstone National Park.

Quite the difference, then and now.

Cheyenne State Leader for August 1, 1916. Guard getting ready to leave and some leaving the Guard.

Cheyenne's less dramatic evening paper was reporting on this day that it expected the National Guard to depart for the border at any moment.   South Dakota's Guard, we read, was in fact off to the border.  There was quiet a bit of dramatic news for Cheyenne residents returning home to their paper that today.

Somewhat surprisingly, the paper actually reported on who was being discharged for physical infirmity, and even giving the name of one who was being discharged on August 1.

Also, perhaps emphasizing the improving relations with Mexico, in spite of the ongoing deployment of the National Guard, Carranza's forces were pursing a five man raiding party that had been earlier pursued by the 8th Cavalry.  Perhaps emphasizing the global outbreak of violence, we read also that Zeppelins had the UK for the third time in a week.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Laramie County Government Complex, Cheyenne Wyoming

Courthouses of the West: Laramie County Government Complex, Cheyenne Wyoming

 Laramie County government complex

This is the Laramie County government complex, which houses the District and Circuit courts of the 1st Judicial District. This fairly new building is quite modern in design and appearance.

Monday at the bar: The ABA's Which movie lawyer are you quiz.

Not sure that I'd agree with my results, but the ABA's "Which movie lawyer are you?" quiz.

Shaving sure has gotten expensive.

Back in April, 2014 I wrote this item about shaving:

Lex Anteinternet: Shaving:

West Point Cadet shaving with a straight razor in the field.

The first thing I do every weekday, or at least every weekday that I work downtown, is shave.

I don't really like shaving.  I don't want to grow a beard however, so shave I must.  I've been shaving, but not every day, since I was 13 years old. .  .

As noted there, I don't like shaving much, and I went on to expand on that a bit:

As noted, I frankly don't care much for it, and I'd likely skip shaving a lot of days if I had the option.  It sort of irritates my skin, and it's just not something that I look forward to doing in any fashion.  Still, for the most part it's been part of my daily routine for decades.  Having said that, prior to my practicing law, I'd skip days now and then, including week days, and I still skip Saturdays usually.  Just because I don't like it.

In my entry, I discussed razors quote a bit, including safety razors and disposable razors, and the modern razor must of us guys use.

Patent drawing for the Gillette safety razor.

What I didn't discuss is how freaking expensive its become to shave.  It's flat out ridiculous. 

As my beard is fairly heavy, I go through a fair number of razor blades shaving.  I stretch as long as I can, but unlike one pundit on cheapness I heard on this, I can't make a blade last a year, or even months.  I sure try, but they start cutting me up as they get dull, or they get painful to use, so I change them.  Every time I buy more, I cringe.

Well, just the other day I stopped by to buy new blades, as I had none.  Holy cow, they were way up there.  You could actually get packs of 20 or something that were up over $40.00, which just seems flat out absurd.  A pack of safety razor blades sure didn't cost that.  The small pack I bought shouldn't cost anything near what it does.

I really, truly, don't get it.  Yes, modern disposable razor blades are easier to use that safety razor blades were and they are no doubt way easier to use than straight razors, but this kind of cost? What the heck?

Indeed, this is so pricey that I'm actually considering blade alternatives.  With a heavy beard, can I get buy with an electric shaver (which I don't like)?  Should I join that shaving club I see advertised all the time, which my son now informs me has just been purchased by a one of the razor companies?  Should I try to learn how to use the dreaded straight razor?  Maybe in the fall, I'll grow a short beard.

Yes, I know that's being really cheap.  And yes, I  understand the nature of a market economy.  But man, these prices are absurd.

Henry Cabot Lodge, not a shaver.  Maybe I'll follow his example.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Grace Fellowship, Buffalo Wyoming

Churches of the West: Grace Fellowship, Buffalo Wyoming:

Interesting architecture which appears to lean on some Byzantine elements, located in Buffalo Wyoming

The Wyoming Tribune for July 31, 1916.

Cheyenne's more dramatic paper, the Wyoming Tribune, with a grim headline for July 31, 1916.

\

Headlines like this one almost seem like something that's more from our own era, so perhaps it serves to remind us that giant natural disasters have been around for awhile.

The Wyoming National  Guard was still awaiting orders in that hot 1916 July.

Lex Anteinternet: Cognitive Disconnect on the left and right. Mark Shea and Moral Delusion.

 

 AGH photo, Jefferson Memorial.

I'm going to make my recent analysis on political discourse a bit sharper.  In doing so, I'm going to directly go into politics and religion, which I generally don't do in such a forward manner.  But here, in part because of the nature of what's referenced in this and my earlier post, and in part because it just cries out for it in this instance, I'm going to.

Recently I posted this item.

Lex Anteinternet: Cognitive Disconnect on the left and right.: This is one of those posts I started long, long ago, and then sort of let hang there for awhile.  A series of posts by a niche columnists c...

In that article, I mentioned

Expanding this out, once columnist I'm aware of is outright hostile to Donald Trump.  A lot of columnist are outright hostile to Donald Trump, that's fine, but this particular columnist is known only because he focus on religion in his writings and is known, therefore, as a religious columnist.  The irony here is that this particular person's faith holds extremely strong opinions on matters of life and death, and including the lives of those who have not yet been born, and by implicitly backing Hillary Clinton he's basically backing a candidate who is very obviously in favor of conduct that this religion holds to be a mortal sin.  What constitutes a mortal sin is not as simple as it may at first seem to be, to those who are not familiar with this in depth, in that it requires knowledge that the conduct is a mortal sin, but almost everyone who writes from that prospective well knows that the underlying conduct is a mortal sin which then raises the question of what arguing for the election of a person, implicitly, who supports conduct that's grave in nature and which is regarded as a mortal sin amounts too.  I'd hesitate to do that, if I were he.

I didn't name that columnist for a variety of reasons including, and I'll emphasize that here, I don't regularly read him and when I have, I tend to read only snippets of his.  But, given a recent column that I'd regard as a stunning example of poor logic, I'll change that policy here. The writer is Mark Shea, who posts on religious themed, and more particularly Catholic themed, items on Patheos and the National Catholic Register.

Shea is clearly in the political left, in my view, which does not mean he isn't a sincere Catholic.  It does raise serious questions however, that can't be lightly brushed off in 2016, even though they likely could have been, say, in 1966, or 1976.  And his recent backpedaling and intellectual disconnect in print doesn't hold water.  Shea, who had been vocal in his disdain for Trump, just posted the following item, which I'm breaking down in snippets, and using here under the Fair Use doctrine, to comment on it as its really a serious matter.

Now, let me start off with noting that even though I have abstained, or tried to abstain, from commenting on the current election, I can't really avoid doing so here, so I will.  I don't like either of the major party Presidential candidates and frankly, as I'll post soon, I'm not really very happy with the political parties themselves.  Indeed, I find myself doing something I never would have considered in prior years, I may very well vote for a third party candidate in an admitted protest.  If I do, I'll likely write in the candidates from the American Solidarity Party even though I know that they have no chance whatsoever of winning. So, perhaps ironically, Shea and I are in the same boat in regards to that.  He's going for a third party candidate as well (I'd wager the same one), and for similar, but certainly not identical, reasons.  So how can I criticize him? Well, I certainly can as his vociferous anti Trump writings fit into a very problematic category for somebody who is writing from a moral, i.e., religious, prospective.  He must have an inkling of that, given this surprising article, but we will delve into that a little more deeply in a second.

The article starts out:

Why I’m not Voting for Hillary

  . . . . in a single story

That story is that a speaker at the Democratic Convention came flat out and spoke about the termination of the infant life within her and what a good thing it was.  From the prospective of the Apostolic churches, of which the Catholic Church is one, and which Shea is a member of, and from whose prospective he claims to write, this is a mortal sin.  It's a serious matter that the Church has always opposed, indeed back to its very founding.  The Church forgives those who seek its forgiveness for committing it, so this is certainly not aimed at the women who do that, but the fact of the matter is that from a Catholic and Orthodox prospective this is a horrific thing to back which a Catholic politician at least cannot morally sanction.  Nor can Catholics, in the abstract, ignore it.

Shea tries to rationalize that away as follows:

But you have said you would vote for her if you lived in a swing state.

Correct.

Because, as I have said a thousand times, I agree with Cardinal Ratzinger that, “When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.” Donald Trump abundantly supplies those proportionate reasons.

So the goal is to stop Trump, not to support the evils Hillary advocates, to which the link above provides eloquent testimony. So I would vote for her if I had to in order to stop him and I would still urge anybody living in a swing state to do so.

But I don’t have to because I live in ultra-violet Washington which will defeat Trump in our electoral college just fine without my vote. So I have the luxury of a protest vote against the both of them.

Only one of them can win and it must not be Trump. She is “wrong within normal parameters” as P.J. O’Rourke puts it. Trump is catastrophic.

Our children will curse us for our folly if he wins.

So, Shea maintains, and if you go back and read his articles you can see that he has consistently maintained, that Trump is such a moral abomination that his hideousness, from a moral prospective, overcome Clinton's support for killing the unborn and old.

Wow.

That's completely in error and Shea, as a Catholic, ought to sit in the pew for a day and think about it.

Indeed, this is the very sort of logic which has caused the Democratic Party to go from a working man focused slightly left party to an effete urban upper class party that's obsessed with an upper middle class strata that's childless, bedroom obsessed, and at war with human nature.  The Democrats, it should be obvious, are as in deep of trouble as the GOP is, but the effective leadership the party has exhibited has proven to be capable of suppressing insurgents, as the nearly successful campaign of Bernie Sanders proved.

Now,  I don not mean to claim here that we have a campaign between a deeply evil person and a deeply moral one.  Not by any means. While some of my friends do indeed regard Hillary Clinton as evil, I see no evidence of it.  Rather, I regard the Hillary Clinton as deeply political, and I'm fairly confident that some of the positions she takes today she'd take the opposite of, if it suited her politically.  If there was a groundswell in favor of life issues, she'd come along (although over time there has in fact slowly been something like that).  She's very much in favor of gun control now (which I don't regard as being in the same moral category), but if it looked like that was going to tank the campaign, she wouldn't be.  Part of the problem that I have with the Clinton's, but only part (I'll get to the rest) is that they're so political that in an era of extreme politics I think they can be relied upon to be extreme, not necessarily because they believe it, but because that works to their advantage.

Trump is morally problematic, to be sure, but much of that is on a personal level.  His conduct in regards to his personal relationships with women certainly raises red flags, as he's been married three times and it isn't as if his wives haven't all had physical characteristics uniformly that would suggest his selection of them wasn't based at least a little on that.  Additionally, as the great G. K. Chesterton pointed out, as an extremely wealthy man he must have made choices in his business life that would be morally problematic by their very nature.  I don't admire him, on any level.  Indeed, I don't like him.

But, and this is what matters here, if we take the two candidates, and their party's respective positions, we are faced with the uncomfortable truth that highly competent Hillary Clinton backs positions that are morally bankrupt from a Catholic prospective.  Some would argue that Trumps are as well, and obviously Shea is arguing that, but in truth his positions fit into the peripheral areas of morality where devout Catholics are fully entitled to differ.  Indeed, if we wish to go one step further we are faced with the problem taht a lot of the problem folks like me have with Trump has to do with the extreme nature of the message in part, but also with the messenger, whom we just don't like or trust.

So, removing the personalities of the candidates and even removing the candidates themselves, what are we really left with?  With the Democrats, on what Catholics would regard as major moral issues we cannot avoid, the Democrats are in favor of death before birth at the election of one of the parents.  They are also in favor of allowing the killing of the old, which implicitly reduces their dignity.  They are also in favor of requiring the public at large to supply, through employers and insurance, health care for pharmaceuticals designed to arrest the natural result of private conduct. And they're also now in favor of pretending that natural marriage doesn't exist and that the only thing marriage is for, optimistically, is so that everyone can have a friend for life with which to share a bed.  Frankly, these positions are so contrary to the Catholic understanding of the world (and also contrary to the scientific nature of the world) that a Catholic could not, using the standard mentioned above, vote for a Democrat backing them unless the countering moral consideration was absolutely titanic.

And in this circumstance, given as part of the consideration obviously involves matters of life and death, that really must be what we are speaking about.  Unless Donald Trump supports genocide on a fairly massive scale there's no way that Shea's logic works.  In fact, quite the contrary is true.

On the matters that Trump has spoken about, which get into matters were morals may apply, he claims that he will appoint judges who actually grasp that there's a physical difference between men and women.  Catholics should support that.  In the past he's flip flopped on life issues prior to birth.  So he's problematic there.  I don't know what his position on death at the end of life is, so I don't know if he's problematic there.  So, again from a Catholic prospective, he's very far from perfect but not clearly as bad as Clinton on these issues.  There's a chance, in other words, of Catholic moral views on fundamentals doing better under Trump than Clinton.  There's no chance of them doing well under Clinton and quite the opposite is true.  On one issue, same gender marriage, he's stated that he'd support appointing judges who would reverse the judicial coup on this issue effected by the five justice ruiling on this issue.

Beyond that, from a general moral prospective, informed by a Catholic view, we have to keep in mind that while both candidates are morally problematic, they aren't in teh same ways.  Clinton would very clearly create a Supreme Court that would be the most socially radical we've ever seen.  The current make up of the geriatric, non elected, body already is confused about men and women. Younger baffled radicals would replace those dying or declining into senility or infirmity under Clinton's watch.  It would be a conservative, and moral, disaster.  Under Trump it's likely that conventional conservative jurist, with whom both political conservatives and liberals have been able to live, would be appointed.

A big issue that gets claimed to be a moral one has to do with the Trump "wall".  I know that this is a Trump position, and I feel its an absurd one, but I also feel that there's no earthly way it will happen. Congress would have to appropriate the funds for it, and its not going to.  That doesn't mean, however, that immigration wouldn't be an aspect of a Trump Presidency.

And here's that uncomfortable area where those who find Trump distasteful perhaps have to actually consider that he has a point on some things.

The entire idea about building a wall is absurd, and it does seem to pander to the worst instincts in human nature. But at the same time, the pandering has frankly been going on in the GOP now for a very longtime and then simply not acted on.  Underneath it all, prior to the malignant form it is now taking, there actually is a legitimate point, that being, how many people can one country take in?

Americans don't like to concede it, but the country is flirting with overpopulation right now.  Plenty of formerly very nice areas of the United States have become less than that due to increasing population.  The country cannot expand forever.  Recognizing that is not necessarily an immoral act.  Indeed, ironically, Americans now applaud the original native inhabitants of the land for that very thing. Reduced to its basic elements, much of the post 1865 Indian War drama centered around Indians resisting the invasion of European Americans onto treaty lands where they had no right to be.  In other words, the Indians were violently resisting illegal immigration, for which they have been celebrated and praised.  A country does not necessarily act immorally by determining that it will defend the interior of its country from illegal settlement.

Catholics who follow this closely will note that the Catholic Bishops in the United States have basically been in favor of an open border. But that sort of statement by the Bishops, while it must be taken seriously and weighted, does not amount to an absolute directive. This is an issue which Catholics can and do have a variety of opinions on.

The much more problematic aspect of this is the suggestion that some 11,000,000 people will be deported.  But that raises another moral question that has never been addressed by either party.  The voters suspect that this many illegal immigrants were able to enter the country in the first place as both parties were complicit in it.  That is, they believe that the Democrats never saw an illegal immigrant whom they did not figure was a future Democratic voter and the Republicans never saw an illegal immigrant whom they did not picture mowing the lawn.  If that's correct, and there appears to be some basis to believe that, there's the troubling fact that the parties have lied to the citizenry and conspired to defeat the law.  That would not justify committing a human tragedy however.  This is an area where most people, I think, are troubled by Trump's apparent policy, although they may not be so troubled as to not quietly support it.  At any rate, while uprooting 11,000,000 people, assuming that its even possible (and for this moral calculation you must) is a moral evil, it isn't a moral evil that outweighs killing that many or more, which from a Catholic prospective is what the alternative is.

Taking that a step further, some would note that Trump has stated that all Muslims should be banned for a time from entering the country, which has since apparently been modified into a ban based on geography (I have to think some advisor came up with that).  That is, Trump is now stating that, for example, the door should be closed to Syrians, and others from that region.  I've consistently maintained myself that while I'm favor of much reduced immigration into the United States, I am in favor of letting people displaced from the wars in the Middle East come in, so I don't agree on this. But I will note that just this past week James Comey, director of the FBI in New York, stated: “At some point there’s going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before". 

Given that, while Trump's position strikes me as wrong and morally problematic, it doesn't seem completely irrational. What it is, is heavy handed.  It doesn't rise to the level of such a moral problem that people must apply the test that Pope Benedict set out and come to the conclusion that they must vote for Clinton to stop Trump.  Indeed, it wouldn't result in that result at all.  Indeed, now that a serving member of the Federal law enforcement community, serving the current Democratic President, has basically confirmed the fear that Trump's position is based on, Trump's proposed policy can be said to actually be rational.  Over the past year we've become very much aware that those from Islamic countries who have immigrated, and even those who have parents who were immigrants but who were born in Western countries, can indeed turn to violence.  The murder of a French priest and the truck mass killing in France before that provide very recent evidence. This doesn't mean that Trump is right, but it does mean that the position he has taken on this isn't based on facts.

War and peace also present moral issues, but the problem here is that almost nobody in the United States seems to realize that we actually are at war.  It's odd. The French Premier has stated on more than one occasion that France is at war.  France has its own problems, but being able to recognize when it is at war is not one of them. They're at war, Belgium is at war, and so are we.

That raises questions of how we're going to wage the war, but like many such questions, that's going to be determined here by our enemy more than us.  ISIL holds ground in Syria and Iraq, but they are loosing that ground steadily now.  They'll likely loose most of it or all of it by some date in 2018.  We're conducting operations there now in the form of air efforts and artillery support, while pretending that we're doing nothing.  Military strategist have debated how to go about this, and some Republicans suggested carpet bombing, but I don't know that Trump has suggested anything in particular.  The military debate is between boots on the ground as opposed to air and special operations, and somewhat of a mix has been used so far.  Chances are almost overwhelming that whomever is President will continue that.  Indeed President Obama has shown a distinct taste for drones and special operations and it is likely hat Clinton would continue that.  Chances are that Trump might go for a more conventional approach.

Other issues that every faces in their choice do not reach the moral level.  And we shouldn't pretend they do. That can be aggravating as there's a natural tendency to see things that way.  But they aren't. And that puts people in a difficult spot in the Fall.  Indeed, it tends to do that on a local level as well.  The past few cycles in Wyoming, for example, the Republican Party has swung more and more to the right with some real extremist running.  This year in the House race the candidates with the most rational policies on public lands here are Democrats.  Chances are the Democrats, for that reason, will do better than usual. But the Democrats here have become like the national Democrats and they never saw a social issue that they didn't fall of the left edge recently.  So, while voters like me would like to look at those Democrats who are opposed to the GOP's land schemes, we really can't, if we take the moral issues noted above to heart. 

That often places us where we don't want to go. But that's the nature of every moral decision in some ways. Morality isn't for convenience.  

Now, I'm not accusing Shea of going in this weird direction for convenience. But I am saying he's absolutely fooling himself if he thinks the balance of the moral scale means that a person living in a swing state must vote for Clinton to stop Trump.  On the contrary, like it or not, under the views we jointly hold, that person must vote for Trump.

What aggravates me, therefore, is that he's gone after Trump, and is a religion writer, and then suddenly back up to say that what the Democrats are saying here is reprehensible from a moral prospective, only to say that if he lived in a swing state he'd vote against Trump.  It's logically inconsistent and if a person is serious about the moral aspects of this dilemma the opposite conclusion would make a great deal more sense.

Of course personally he's off the hook he notes, in that in his state he can vote for a third party candidate and expect it to have no real impact on the election.  Well, that's fine, but you can't advocate for something, and he's done that repeatedly and strongly, and then claim that you aren't really for it.  He's urging people to take a certain act, and when you do that, you are morally culpable if they do it, and maybe you can't get off the hook so easily.  Saying "I'm not really for her" puts you in the same position as those 1932 German Christians who perhaps voted for Hitler because they felt that Ernst Thälmann would win if they didn't, except they actually had viable alternatives between the two which right now it appears we do not.  While I haven't read all of Shea's articles by any means, perhaps he has urged that some viable third party should rise up, or some insurgent candidate, and my comments would then be ill informed.  But, whatever he may have argued, at the end of the day, from a Catholic moral prospective, the argument that you must vote for Clinton to stop Trump doesn't hold water, and the opposite, as uncomfortable as that may be, is a much better moral argument.

Where did Wyoming's political parties go? A lament.

When I was a young voter, Wyoming had political parties.  And by that, I mean rational political parties.  There was a large, rational, Republican Party and a smaller, but actually viable, and rational, Democratic Party.  You could be a member of either and not be ashamed of it.  Indeed, you could and would have friends in the other party and you weren't embarrassed for them.

They both put people in office too.  The Democrats, the minority party, put Governor Ed Herschler, Governor Mike Sullivan and more recently of course, Governor Freudenthal in office.  Wyoming also sent Democrat Teno Roncalio in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Roncalio, who had served in the Army during World War Two, was a southwestern Wyoming born man of Italian extraction who came from solid blue collar, coal mining roots who had won the Sliver Star during World War Two and who came home to become a lawyer prior to becoming a Congressman.

My, I miss politicians like that.

Roncalio was a solid Italian American Catholic and even if you weren't Democratic in your politics, you'd like him. Ed Herschler was a hard bitten tough lawyer from western Wyoming who'd been a Marine Corps Raider during World War Two.  There was nothing light and fluffy about him.  Even Gale McGee, who tended to be pretty darned liberal by our definitions, was a solid character who taught at the University of Wyoming before we sent him to the U.S. Senate.

And there were local Republicans and Democrats all in this mold as well.  I can recall at least a couple of middle of the road Democrats serving in the Legislature from Natrona County.  Now hardly any Democrats are in the Legislature, although there are a few.

The old Democrats all dropped out of activity or they fled their party for the Republicans, where they would have been middle of the road Republicans but we don't hear much about them now. At least two really prominent former Democrats have made runs at higher office in the last ten years as members of the GOP.  Something happened, although I'm not really clear what, to the Democratic Party during the Clinton administration that just killed it here.  It's darned near dead.  And with all the old Democrats departing, the party now can't help but lash itself to the decks of the Democratic Ship Delusional and Nutty ever two years.  Even when it has some solid candidates, and it does this year, by the time November comes around it will have officially gone out in public in its tie dyed t-shirt with some bizarre announcement such as "ban the guns!, ban the soft drinks!  multi species marriages!"  Right about that time some Democrat will have been doing well and they will have done the functional equivalent of shooting him at dawn.

Not that the GOP is all that much to brag about now days either.  Something has really happened to it as well.

Indeed, a member of the Legislature I know told me that he'd watched the infusion of money from an outside interest group really alter Wyoming politics, and it really has changed.  We always had some Republicans who were Oligarchical Conservatives, but not many.  Now the Wyoming GOP has taken a giant lurch towards the Tea Party, including taking positions that are actually downright hostile to the real interest of the average Wyomingite.  Twenty years ago there are opinions I hear now routinely expressed that the average Republican here would have regarded as downright nuts, but now they're commonly held to be unquestioned truth.  Hostility towards any type of spending, a belief that the Federal government is engaged in a giant conspiracy against Wyoming and the common man, a belief that scientific matters are mere political opinions, a disregard of world economics and an outright hatred of the Federal Government and the current President are all commonly held Wyoming Republican Canon.  This year in runs for Congress and for the Legislature we've seen some open discussion of ideas in Republican quarters that have no place in an educated, intelligent, society.

Oh, would that there was a viable third party, and not something like the Uber Conservative White People's Party, the I Know The Secret Constitution Party, The We're Really for Anarchy Party, or the Squirrel Nut Zipper Party.  The Republican and the Democrats are broken. If they aren't, they ought to be.

Bringing this squarely in the forefront was the news this past week of two things.  One was that Dr. Rex Rammell dropped out of the House race. Good riddance, and I hope he goes all the way back to Idaho where he's from.  His slogan was "It's time to take America back", by which I assume that he was sponsoring the concept of a Crow and Shoshone uprising to toss people like him out off the continent.  Hmmm. . . . probably not.  Anyhow, he was far to the right and was in the race far too long.  In getting out he's endorsed somebody named Darin Smith who is far behind in the polls (Rammell was as well) and no matter what the deal is with Smith, the mere fact that Rammell endorsed him should be sufficient reason to question him, and even he seemed a little uncomfortable with the  Rammell endorsement.  

Having said all of that, perhaps this race isn't as weird as it looks like it is, as really only two candidates Tim Stubson and Liz Cheney, stand a chance. Cheney is far ahead in the polls.  Stubson is a sharp guy I sort of know, and a really decent guy, and I'm hoping he wins.  He's had the good sense, by the way, to back away from the crazy unpopular land transfer concepts that floated in the Legislature last go around, even though he sponsored one of them.  Cheney has the appearance of a slick professional politician, which she probably acquired from her father as she isn't a career politician, and is massively funded.  I don't really grasp why we would need to send somebody with as thin of connection as she as to Congress, but then I've had enough of political dynasties and don't feel like Wyoming out to encourage the creation of another one.

The second thing was the spat between "Chuck" Gray and Ray Pacheco, or more pointedly Chucks' silly right wing tantrum.  They're both running for Wyoming House District 57 and Gray, who has only lived here four years and who holds the position of political commentator on one of his father's radio stations is blathering about how Ray used to be a Democrat and has been caught by the Tribune, according to the Tribune, misrepresenting Pacheco's history in a mailing.  So what if Pacheco used to be a Democrat?  Lots of Republicans from the central part of the state were Democrats, and frankly the Republicans could use a few people who aren't out to sell all the public lands, don't believe that the President has a long list of Wyomingites he's personally out to harm, and who doesn't think that the price of coal and oil is personally directed by the White House.  In other words, the Democrats who left that party were center right Republicans to start with, in their views, and the center right Republicans in that party are mostly crying about the sad state things have come to, with one of those being the overburdened Governor Mead who occasionally has to defend himself against the Tea Party elements of his own party.

Would that there were viable third options.

The Black Tom Explosion: July 30, 1916

German saboteurs blew up New York's Black Tom pier, in a strike against the shipment of American munitions to the Allies.  The massive explosion caused some damage to the Statue of Liberty.  Necessarily, in a year in which the US had just averted one war, and was sliding towards another, a thing like this would have its impact.

The news hit the Cheyenne Leader that very day, suggesting that this paper, which I've been running some mornings, must have been an evening paper.

History I missed in my own backyard.

 

 My backpack, University of Wyoming Geology building, 1986.  1986 was the year that I graduated with my undergraduate degree, right into unemployment.  Just before I graduated I wondered around town and took a collection of photographs of the town, about the only photos I have of Laramie in any sense from my undergraduate days.

I lived in Laramie, in the 1980s, twice, for a period of time totaling up over six years.  That doesn't sound like a long time, looking back, but it really is.  Right now, that period of time is over 10% of my life, which isn't an insignificant period of time.  Indeed, anything you do for that long, including just living in a place, has an impact on you, some good and some bad.  I can truly say that this is the case for my period of time in Laramie.  There were many very good things that happened to me while I was there, and a few really bad.  Perhaps the latter impacts my recollection a bit as I've tended to be jaundiced to some degree about my time at the University of Wyoming, but then I also have a naturally somewhat cynical outlook on some things.  All in all, Laramie is a really nice high plains town.  And the area around it is, in my view, beautiful.  Indeed, while it still is, I'd dare say it was more beautiful then, as with all places everywhere, it seems, the American belief in endless expansion has meant that Laramie has slopped over a bit into neighboring prairie that was prairie while I was there, and which I would still have as prairie, if I had my way with things.

But that's not what brings me to post an entry here.

Rather, it was because I was in Laramie for a couple of days recently for the first time in over twenty years.  I've been to Laramie a lot of times since I graduated for the second time from the University of Wyoming, but I only stayed overnight there once before since graduating, and that was shortly after I had graduated.  So I was likely as oblivious then as I was while I was a student.

I've always been very interested in history, even as a small child, and there are very few places of historical interest around Natrona County that I haven't been to, probably repeatedly.  I'd even as a kid I'd been taken by my historically minded parents to all the major sites within easy driving distance of Casper, and loved it. So I have no good solid excuse for missing things around Laramie, but I sure did, in this context.  And I don't even have any of the conventional reasons you hear for that associated with university.

Now days, I constantly hear from people about their wild college days, some of which I frankly think fits into the "when I was a kid we ate nothing but mutton" type of story.  In other words, an expected false memory.  But some of that must be true. Well, it wasn't for me, and frankly it wasn't for those in my undergraduate major, geology.  In that field, we were all so aware that our job prospects were grim that a focus on actually trying to get through the very difficult course of study (it made law school look like a cakewalk) and hopefully doing well enough to find a job or get into graduate school meant that most nights found  us working on classwork.  The weekends and Fridays didn't always by any means, but we weren't very wild then either.  In a field that was almost all male, if we did anything maybe we went to a bar where there were a million others similarly situated and had a few beers, and that was about it.  Almost all of my colleagues were male, and real guys' guys, and almost none of us had girlfriends.  Some of us did, but in looking back I think I can recall only a couple of those relationships developing seriously in that environment.  And those of us who were not attached at any one time weren't chasing after a bunch of girls either, as we didn't know hardly any and we were worried about spending a bunch of money and having no jobs.  

Which doesn't mean that I missed things because I was studying 100% of the time. That wouldn't be true either.  I just missed them.  On the weekends when I had time, back then, I tended to hunt and I knew a lot of the prairie around Laramie very well. But somehow I missed history.

I wonder how often this occurs?

For example, I somehow missed Ft. Sanders while I was there, and just really studied it a bit the other day.  How did I missed that?

I just posted my entry on our Some Gave All blog on Ft. Sanders, but what I didn't note is that this is only the second time I've stopped at this sign, and the other time was just last year.  I didn't stop here at all while I lived here.  I wonder why?

 

 Or take Robert Russin's giant bronze in honor of Abraham Lincoln.

 

I've driven by this a million times, but I stopped by this location for the very first time earlier this week.  Pretty inexcusable.  I wasn't therefore even aware that a Lincoln Highway memorial was also there.

 

I also had never stopped by the giant, and very odd, Ames Brothers monument, even though I was well aware that it was there.  I had no idea that it was so huge.

 

I'd heard about it, but apparently my interest was sufficient in this location, in a town I never felt that I really lived in, to run up to the county line and take a look at it.  Odd.

I did a little better with the Overland Trail marker, which I know that I had stopped at while I was a student.  I can dimly recall stopping here while driving towards Centennial, more or less on a pretext.  I.e., I had something I had to check on my truck or something, but I was curious about the location, so I stopped.

 

I really think missing all these places is pretty indefensible.  They form part of the character of Albany County, and I should have appreciated that. And the real Albany County, not the Albany County that's just the student body of the University of Wyoming, which I suppose formed up a larger part of my mental imagination of Laramie at the time.

Well, the purpose of this blog and its exploration of history has been stated many times before.   But maybe an accidental part of it is to cause me to look a little more carefully at a lot of places that I've been to many times before.  Or at least I have been doing that.  I wish I had earlier.  Indeed, I can think of people I've known who lived history that I know wish I'd asked them about, but no longer can.  By age 53 quite a bit of history has gone by while I observed it, and those who had experienced earlier aren't around.  The markers still are, however, and they're more than worth looking at.

"Ranching from the high point" marker, Albany County, Wyoming.

This is a marker dedicated to agriculture in Albany and Laramie Counties, Wyoming.  It's located at  the same rest stop that features the Lincoln Memorial, the Purple Heart Trail marker, and the Henry Bourne Joy marker.

The final paragraph of this marker is quite true and highly significant.  In this region of the country, environmentalist like to take pot shots at ranchers all the time, but if they weren't here, the wild spaces wouldn't be here either.

The Cheyenne Daily Leader for July 29, 1916. Hope on the border?

The Cheyenne Leader was reporting today that there appeared to be some hope that border difficulties might be mediated through a commission.  Of course, it can't help but be noted that Carranza, who appeared to be willing to do this, had not caused the original border difficulty in the first place and Villa wouldn't be participating.

Otherwise, Frontier Days was making the news, as was the Russian offensive on the Eastern Front.