Friday Farming: Why wouldn't they be content?

The way things should be. . . .

From stream to grill

Boots on the ground. . . doesn't that include artillerymen?

Because it sure should.

Somehow, it's gone almost unnoticed that Marine Corps artillery units are serving in Syria.  Consider this item from the Military Times from just a couple of days ago:

U.S. Marines are conducting around-the-clock artillery support for American Kurdish partners battling ISIS in its de facto capital of Raqqa. That support has become vital as Kurdish forces have hit fierce resistance as they inch closer to the city center, according to on the ground fighters.

If American infantry was on the ground (other than the special forces, which you can bet are on the ground, and probably providing the artillery spotting for the Marine Red Legs), you can bet you'd have heard about.

But artillerymen?  Apparently we just don't count.

New blog, sort of: The Aerodrome

We recently revived an old blog of our, The Aerodrome.

The blog, dedicated to aircraft, was started in 2012 and had just a few posts when it became in active.  We've continued to post photos of aircraft, but over on Holscher's Hub, where we were always posting them.

Well, because we have a blog dedicated to railroad topics, and we like airplanes just as much, we decided to revive the old blog.  In doing that, we've been cross posting the airplane and airport entries from our other blogs, with their original dates.

Which is quite the pain, we might note.  It's taking forever.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, former location of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Gillette Wyoming.

Churches of the West: Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, former location of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Gillette Wyoming

When I took this photograph, it was the location of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Gillette, Wyoming. As noted at the time, I had no idea how old the structure of the church was. An addition, not visible here, to the back side looked to be a rectory.

Since I took this photo, the Church structure sold to the Antiochian Orthodox parish in Gillette, and this Church is now Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church.  I don't know where the Episcopal parish formerly located here is now located.  The pastor of this church informs me that it has been redone inside, in keeping with Orthodox traditions, and he would graciously allow me to photograph the interior in the future.

Poster Saturday: Wild and Woolly (released on this day in 1917)

Best Post of the Week of June 18, 2017

Relaunched:  The Aerodrome

Why would that be a question?

The Big Picture: Troop A, Michigan State Troops

American Father's Day

June 23, 1917. War news of all types

I haven't been covering it much, although I've been meaning to post a separate thread on it, but the arrival of the Great War in Wyoming, and the expectation that thousands of troops would be flooding into the state's two military posts, produced a flurry of all sorts of activity. 

One of the collateral impacts of the war was Cheyenne going dry due to Congressional action (arguably unconstitutional) and, soon thereafter, the town fathers. . . and mothers, moving to shut down the "resorts".

Resorts, at the time, was the euphemistic term for houses of prostitution, of which Cheyenne apparently had some prominent ones.  The town reacted and the town's women in particular reacted to have them shut down, with the war as the ostensible reason.  The war may have been the reason, but it isn't as if Ft. D. A. Russell was brand new. . . but then thousands of conscripted soldiers going through there was a new thing.  Cheyenne was apparently more worried about vice and regular boys who ended up in the service, and recalled National Guardsmen, than it was about regular soldiers.

Anyhow, some of the soiled doves flew to Laramie and right away Laramie followed Cheyenne's lead.  In today's headlines we see a specific example of a "colored" house being closed.  The move was on against all of them, but for some reason that one got the axe first, with the others ordered to  quit serving alcohol.

Cheyenne's papers, in contrast, were reporting that Russia would stay in the war. . . which of course it wouldn't.  It would stay in a war, of course, one of its own horrific internal making.

And another headline gave a glimpse into the past, although it was a fairly recent past in 1917.

Ernie Shore's Relief No Hitter. June 23, 1917.

In a pitching event against the odds Ernie Shore came in to relieve Babe Ruth, then the Boston Red Sox's starting pitcher, and turns in a no hitter.

Ernie Shore on the left, Grover Cleveland Alexander on the right, 1915 World Series.  Shore was a remarkably tall pitcher, particularly for his era, as he was 6'4" tall.

What's amazing about it is that Shore had virtually no time to warm up and nearly pitched the entire game.  Indeed, at one time, this was regarded as a perfect game.

The reason for that is Babe Ruth.

Ruth pitched to just a single batter, the Washington Senator's Ray Morgan.  Morgan was walked, but not before Ruth hotly disputed three out of the four pitches that were called as balls, letting home plate umpire Clarence "Brick" Owens know it in no uncertain terms.  After the fourth ball he yelled out at Owens again.  Owens calmly replied and warned Ruth to calm down or he would be ejected, to which Ruth may have replied “Throw me out and I’ll punch ya right in the jaw!”, or might not have. At any rate Owens ejected Ruth at that point and Ruth took a swing at him, hitting him in the ear but knocking him down. The Boston police then escorted Ruth off the field.

Babe Ruth as a Red Sox pitcher, 1917.  {{PD-US}} – published in the U.S. before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.

Shore, a very good pitcher in his own right, then came in and pitched a nearly perfect game.  Indeed, at one time this was regarded as a perfect game, although now its only regarded as a no hitter.

That woman on a car photo?

Nephele A. Bunnell at the automobile fashion show held at Sheepshead Bay Race Track, New York City, June 23, 1917.

 Nephele A. Bunnell

 Ruth McDonald

Mrs. James H. Kidder.

Actress Gertrude McCoy

Gertrude McCoy

Beatrice Allen, Hazel Dawn, Consuelo Bailey, Eleanor Dawn, Ann Pennington, Gertrude McCoy, and Vera Maxwell

 The cars

Why would that be a question?

 Vietnamese refugees being evacuated from Saigon in 1976.  This photo is closer in time to the Allied victory in World War Two and the Roosevelt/Truman administrations than it is to our current era. . .just like the formative years of the leadership of the Democratic Party.

Following the defeat of the Democrats in the election just held in Georgia, some are questioning whether Nancy Pelosi ought to be deposed from her position as a leader in the party.

Seriously?  They need to ask that?

She should have been deposed 20 years ago.

Now, I don't blame Pelosi for the Democratic loss in Georgia.  Any one state's election is, after all, a local election and Georgia has been in the GOP camp for some time.

But Pelosi bears about as much of a relationship to the average American voter now as . . . well. . . . Hillary Clinton.  Or Chuck Schumer.

Pelosi is 77 years old.

Schumer in comparison is practically a baby at 66.

Hillary Clinton is 69.

Pelosi, Clinton and Schumer have been in politics their entire lives. Their connection with the old blue collar base of the Democratic Party, in terms of actual work, is non existent.  She first held a position in California's Democratic Party in 1976.  In contrast Clinton has had much more in the way of "real work", but it's notable that she worked for Congress as part of the effort to impeach Richard Nixon.  Schumer became a member of the New York Assembly in 1975.  In short, these politicians formative years all have a lot to do with the ERA, Post Vietnam, Watergate era of Democratic politics.

A person may not be defined by their formative years, but then maybe they can be as well.

The ERA is not a consideration for current female voters.  Indeed, the rabid feminism of the that era, outside the leadership of certain current movements, has no relationship whatsoever to the views or concerns of young female voters today.   The Vietnam War is over and even the hand wringing over the results of the war are over.  Nixon is dead.

CH-54 landing in Saigon, April 30, 1975. At the time this photograph was taken, Hillary Clinton had already worked on the Nixon impeachment effort, Chuck Schumer was already in the New York Assembly, and Nancy Pelosi was already involved in California's Democratic Party.

It's time for the current leadership of the Democratic Party to move on too.

$43/BBL and going lower

I haven't posted on the price of fossil commodities for some time and I've felt bad about it.

The reason for this is that I posted regularly on this as the price was falling last year and the year before but have remained mute as prices stabilize and recovered a bit. Certainly coal, which was really bad off last year, pulled out of a near crash and has recovered somewhat to everyone's surprise.  Oil stabilized before that and was hovering around $50/bbl for quite awhile.  Oil in Wyoming recovered a bit however and things weren't doing as poorly as they were.  The sell off, by some big producers, of Wyoming fields continues to go on, but there are buyers. The big producers are concentrating on the Permian Basin in Texas, but even that should give some older Wyoming fields a boost as the Permian has been in production for a long time and remains hot.

And then, oil dropped to $43/bbl.

That's right, today oil dropped down to $43/bbl.  

Libyan production going on line big time has a lot to do with that.  Libya is a mess right now and there's no reason to believe that Libya, or whoever is in control in Libya, will control production as long as overproduction brings in money, and that it will do.  The New York Times further reports:

HOUSTON — The price of oil keeps sinking, and there is no shortage of reasons: American oil companies are producing too much petroleum. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has not cut production enough. Motorists around the globe are not driving enough to shrink crude and gasoline inventories as quickly as expected.

There's no earthly way that American producers can economically sustain $43/bbl.  And there's some thought it will go even lower.

I feel bad for coming in and mentioning that. But my gosh, $43/bbl.  

That's unsustainable.

Blog Mirror: First Things; Dress Up: What We Lost In The Casual Revolution

Perhaps more than we think. At least First Things thinks so.

Dress Up
What We Lost In The Casual Revolution

For quite a few years now, academic philosophers and socio­logists, as well as pop­ular social commentators who get paid to pronounce on such matters, have been telling us that people have been abandoning their formal personas in favor of the whims and behavior of their individual selves.

I think maybe they're right.

I've posted on this before, in terms of the development of dress.  Indeed, I've written on it quite a bit. And indeed it fits in nicely with the them of this blog.  But as I've also asked before, does it matter? 

Well, I think it likely that it does.  First Things adds to that discussion.

Chesty Puller on simpilfication

We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things.
  
Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller

The Big Picture: Troop A, Michigan State Troops

Copyright deposit on this day, 1917.  Troop A, Michigan State Troops.

The Solar Eclipse of June 19, 1917

This isn't, as we have noted, the "one hundred years ago today blog" or the "This Day In 1917 Blog".  Those blogs may of course exist (I don't know) but this isn't it.

Still, I note quite a few things that are exactly a century past in the context of this blog, some in the context of things that have changed and some in the context of things that have stayed the same.  In that context, I was surprised by this partial solar eclipse that occurred on date in 1917.

I was mostly surprised, fwiw, as we're having a total eclipse on August 21 here, and this town is in the dead center of its path.

That's neat enough, I guess, but we've been hearing for months that thousands of people are expected to be here for it.  Some people I know are expecting guests.  A lawyer I spoke to last week, who lives in Denver, told me that he had rented a pontoon boat and plans to be on Glendo for the event.

I don't get it.

I either have too little imagination, or perhaps too much, but it gets dark every night.  I don't see why people would travel thousands of miles to experience something for a couple of minutes that the experience for hours every night.

The Casper Record for June 19, 1917. Changing standards. . . an advertisement you are unlikely to see today

How about a suit for the 4th?

Hmmm. . . . I'll bet you aren't planning on wearing a suit for the 4th, nor are you planning on buying one, are you?

Monday At The Bar: Mistrial

The American public is getting an education regarding its legal process via the recent Cosby trial.

I'm not going to go into the allegations in part because I don't follow criminal stuff very closely.  Quite a few people who aren't lawyers would find that odd, but quite frankly just because a person is a lawyer doesn't mean that they follow every aspect of their own profession in the same fashion that sports fans follow a favorite team.  Indeed, most of us don't.  I've done very little criminal law myself and most major crimes leave me queasy in one sense or another, so I don't really pay very much attention to them.

Some you can't ignore, however, no matter what as they're Really Big Deals, and by that I mean big deals in either the true societal sense or, alternatively, in the sense of the press following the story closely.  The "O. J. Trial", for example, gives us an example of the latter.

Anyhow, the jury hung in this one, and a mistrial was declared. So now people are familiar with what that means. 

I wonder if it also means that people personally paid much attention to the legal maxim of "presumed innocent until proven guilty".  I doubt it.

But maybe they have no obligation to on a personal level.  

Certainly hardly anyone thinks that about O. J. Simpson.  It's pretty much universally agreed that he was guilty and that the jury that found him innocent was out to lunch, or perhaps beguiled by spectacular lawyering by his defense team and other factors.

Here, it would seem, Bill Cosby was well represented.  But additionally, jurors might have had evidence that we basically never hear.  The press generally does a really poor job of reporting any legal matter.  In this instance, without knowing the details, at least half the jurors apparently thought that whatever happened, the tort didn't. 

But that takes us back to the public's eye.  No matter what actually happened, Cosby's reputation is permanetnly shot and its never coming back. He's not going to experience a latent revival of his reputation like Fatty Arbuckle, who enjoyed that only briefly.  Indeed, Arbuckle's fall for being accused of a crime he didn't commit lead him to being shunned by Hollywood for a long time, and he only came back really as a director in 1933, finishing a film, celebrated a marriage anniversary, commenting that "This is the best day of my life", and dying that night at age 43. 

Not really a happy ending.

Cosby is well past 43.  His reputation as a family man and a man who successfully became an American icon while also representing the urban black demographic, is completely shot.  Maybe that's punishment in and of itself no matter what his crimes or torts may have been, for leading a personal life of decadent sexual behavior irrespective of its legality.

In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence John Ford counseled When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."  The lives of the famous, in the current age, tend to suggest that this is no longer true.

It probably never should have been.

American Father's Day

Today is Father's Day in the United States for 2017.

 Almost like a scene out of the Andy Griffith Show, father and son fishing, Jackson County West Virginia.

It's set on the Third Sunday of June, meaning you father's don't get the day off.

I'd have guessed this was some sort of uniquely American holiday, but it isn't.  The US actually came to it late in comparison to Catholic Europe and Latin America, where it was established on conjunction with the Feast of St. Joseph, which is celebrated on March 19.  The separated Coptic Church, interestingly, also makes this connection but celebrates the feast day on July 20. 

 St. Joseph depicted with Jesus as a young boy.  This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less.

The connection comes due to the obvious role of St. Joseph.  In this connection its also interesting to note that the focus on St. Joseph has increased in recent years in association with his role as the patron saint of workers.  Indeed, he's sometimes called St. Joseph the Worker.

Another depiction of St. Joseph, who made his living as a carpenter and passed that trade on to Jesus.  This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less.

Those two roles, it occurs to me, are probably more connected than it might at first seem. . . . 

Father's Day as an American holiday was first proposed in the early 20th Century and Woodrow Wilson wanted to make it such. Wilson seems to have experienced his first early troubles with Congress, which would become enormous later on, with holidays as Congress would have none of it.  Note that we just passed Flag Day which didn't become official until after World War One, but which was subject to a Presidential proclamation in 1916.   In regards to Father's Day, Congress feared it would become commercial so they wouldn't go for it. Finally President Johnson made it subject to a proclamation in 1966 and it became an official holiday in 1972.

Based on the advertising found this time of year, Congress may have had a reason to worry about the day's commercialization. . . . 

 It's been a really long time since you could get a plate of anything for .30.

On this day I always see, now that we have so much cyber stuff going on all the time, posted dedications by some to their fathers.  And that's great.  What strikes me, however, is the interesting connection between the example of St. Joseph and the day, and in a way that occurred to me about this day before but not quite in the same context.  If we look at St. Joseph's veneration's, that of father and of a worker, what we're left with is the example of a really dedicated individual who carried his family through some really horrible times, to say the least, and who passed his trade on to his son through direct example.  

We don't know a lot, indeed, about St. Joseph.  We know that he was older than Mary but much is debated beyond that.  Quite a bit of early church attention suggests that he may have been a widower at the time that he became betrothed to Mary and indeed that explains a lot about their relationship that seems to completely baffle modern Americans in particular, given that they think relationships between men and women as portrayed by Friends or The Big Bang Theory are normal, rather than pathologically abnormal in the real and natural sense.  What that means is that a lot of St. Joseph's life was about duty and example.  Indeed, his life, to the extent we know about it, was pretty much about dedication.  He may very well have suffered the tragedy of the loss of his first wife, and may have had children from that union (again, this is maintained by quite a few students of the Gospels and it seems to be a fairly valid argument).  His betrothal to Mary seems likely to have been under circumstances in which he was marrying a young woman (Mary was likely quite young, perhaps about sixteen) who was perhaps a consecrated virgin (again, something argued by some students of the Bible and which seems to be a pretty valid argument) which meant that the marriage was going to be a Josephite Marriage from the onset.  He wasn't making his life easier in any sense by the marriage and right from the very onset it took a turn that made it marketedly worse for him on a real physical level.  And yet, he just kept on keeping on.

Immigrant farm laborer with his sons, the older two of which were already working with their father at the time this photo was taken in the late Great Depression.  Note the depiction in the background which sort of ties into this dicussion.

Which is part of my point.

A lot of fathers today just don't stick around.

Indeed we've grown accustomed to a situation in which they're not even expected to quite often, even by the women they get pregnant.  This has made, to a degree, us accustomed to the concept that fatherhood is somehow optional.  It isn't.  It is, rather, an obligation, and being there is a big part of that obligation.  And, by being there I mean in the sense that St. Joseph was.  

Now most of us won't endure trials such as his.  Most of us won't have to flea for Egypt.  But then most of us wouldn't pass that test and men who just ignore the situation in general have already flunked it.  Women who allow them to are flunking it as well.

But being there means more than being physically present.  It also means being some sort of example.  We all fall short on that, particularly in comparison to a Saint, but a lot of us fall very far short of it. Being an example only in the acquisition of wealth doesn't mean very much at all.  Conveying a value to things that are done means a great deal more, but that's not always easy in a society which measures everything simply by monetary gain.  Very few young men today grow up in a situation in which they see their father's work, and a lot of that work has a value that's somewhat mysterious at best.

Idaho father and son, late l930s, in a cleared field.  Agricultural families today remain really rare examples of families in which children actually see what their parents do and what the value of it is.

And of course there's a lot more of value to life than work, although we seem to have forgotten much of that.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: The Masters School, formerly St. Paul Lutheran Church., Lewistown Montana

Churches of the West: The Masters School, Lewistown Montana:

A Christian school, located in Lewistown Montana, in what was formerly St. Paul Lutheran Church