Monday, January 1, 2018

Attrition and Saving the Bacon. The United States and World War One


 January 1918 Coke calendar.  Soon, soft drinks would be about your only option.  World War One gave a big boost to the Prohibition movement, but a lot of the days after reading the days news you'd probably feel like you needed a drink.

If you've occasionally read the headlines of the newspapers from 1915, 16 and 17 (and now 18) we've put up here, there's something that should probably be obvious from reading them.

The Allies were loosing the war.

Okay, maybe not loosing. But the Allies sure weren't clearly winning.

Let's take a look at that, at this point, the beginning of 1918.

And to start off on that, let's take a look at it as an observant reader of one of the newspapers we've been putting up might have read it.  I think such a reader, observing the news of the prior day over his cup of morning coffee, or the news of the day over his soon to be banished glass of evening beer, would have been worried. And particularly so if they had a son in the service (and let's face it, while there were women volunteering to serve in various roles, the services were overwhelmingly male at the time. . . and in fact they still are).

 
Women did serve of course, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise, in a variety of ways.  Indeed, if you subscribe to Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today subreddit you'll frequently find the photographs of British nurses and war workers who died as a result of the war.  Pretty poignant.
 
So, what would such a person have absorbed before they went to work after that cup of Joe. . . or after they came home and poured that glass of beer?

Well let's go back to 1914, as nobody reads a newspaper or absorbs the news in a vacuum.

 Readers of the Cheyenne July 28, 1914 morning paper were greeted with the news that Europe was on the brink of war.  If they got the evening paper, and many did, they'd next read that Europe was in fact at war.  Another name already familiar to Wyomingites which would be followed the next few years, that of "General Villa", was also on the front page that morning.

Readers of the Casper Record in then tiny Casper would have been less disturbed that morning.  And keep in mind there was no commercial radio at the time either.

Starting in August of 1914 they'd have been reading about the horrific outbreak of a titanic war in Europe. And in that war, the Central Powers, Germany and the Austro Hungarian Empire, gained ground, and a fair amount of it in the East, in 1914.  Their progress was arrested in the west, but not before they'd shown a willingness to trample over the neutrality of a small nation, Belgium, and to have come frighteningly close to breaking through and overwhelming France. . .something they had done last time they'd fought the French in 1870.

Then things seemed to stabilize in the West while bloody huge battles continued on in the East.  Chances are our reader would have vaguely sympathized with the Allies, but only to a degree.  Ethnic feelings about the war were strong and some German Americans were less than keen about the Allies while Irish Americans had mixed feelings about the English. Generally, however, that war was "over there" and we weren't in it, and we were glad.

All along, and so commonly forgotten in histories about the war, our reader would be worrying at least a bit about the situation on the American border with Mexico.  The Mexican Revolution had been going on in one form or another since 1910 and things just refused to stabilize. The US, moreover had demonstrated a feeling that intervening in Mexico, as necessary (in our view) was justified.  Chances are that our reader might have been more concerned, in 1914, about Mexico than Europe.  Indeed, the United States had intervened in the Mexican Revolution by landing troops in Vera Cruz in April, 1914.

Marines and Sailors raising the Stars and Stripes in Vera Cruz, April 1914.

We occupied the town until November.

 [U.S. Naval occupation of Vera Cruz, Mexico: Searching Mexican for weapons at Vera Cruz]
 Sailor searches Mexican man in Vera Cruz.

And so we go to 1915. The war in Europe just keeps on keeping on, but the war south of the border is really ramping up.  Mexico is in a full scale civil war, and its bloody indeed.  American eyes, to a large extent, and for good reason, were looking south and worrying. The US government was keeping a watchful eye and getting involved.  In the background, some men like Theodore Roosevelt were demanding that the US enter the war in Europe, but most Americans were keeping Europe on the distant horizon and worrying about Mexico in the not so distant foreground.

Nonetheless, the war in Europe was making an appearance in Wyoming. In June of that year British Remount agents started purchasing horses in the state.  By the wars end they'd be purchasing them all over the globe, and indeed they already were.  An economic boom in the state, fueled by the war, was on.

Things were getting scary.

And the changes going on couldn't be missed.

So then arrived 1916.  And the U.S. was attacked.  By the rebel Mexican Division del Norte commanded Pancho Villa.  Now the US was in a conflict, although a low grade one as the US retaliated by entering Mexico in pursuit of Villa.


The entire time it threatened to break out into a general war with Mexico in which the US would be at war with the Carranza government in Mexico City.  Troop needs required the calling up of the National Guard to man the border in very short order, with the entire National Guard ultimately rotating through border posts over the 1916-1917.

The US actually did end up exchanging some shots with the de facto federal army of Mexico at Carrizal while still trying to hunt down and wipe out the insurgent Pancho Villa. Finally, at that point, with a full scale war looming, it seemed, we backed down and entered into an uneasy occupation of Chihuahua while we negotiated for an exit.  As we were negotiating, the war in Europe started to become more and more of a problem.


In early 1917 we left Mexico under an arrangement with Carranza's government.  The whole thing had been very inconclusive and far from a victory of any sort.  Carranaza, whose government we had been aiding in the civil war in Mexico before we were attacked by Villa, and indeed, that likely caused Villa to attack us, had shown us contempt.  Villa was on the rise once again.  Tension on the border had not gone away and US troops were not out of danger.  Indeed, cross border action, both ways, continued.





And then came the Spring of 1917.

Even as we were struggling to find a way out of Mexico, with that struggle being in the newspaper nearly every day, we were starting to worry more and more about the war in Europe, which was now drawing nearer and nearer. And then, just as we were getting out of Mexico, getting into the war in Europe suddenly looked inevitable, as it was. February 1917 saw the US finally take its troops out of Mexico and the National Guard was finally allowed to stand down, but that same month saw the Germans resume unrestricted submarine warfare, something that would cost American lives.  Also in that same month the Zimmerman Note, a German diplomatic effort to coax Mexico and Japan into an alliance with the US in the event of war, was revealed. National Guards men were finding themselves called back up in anticipation of war just weeks after the last of them had gone home.  The cycle was so fast that many National Guardsmen would likely have been better off in every sense if they hadn't gone home at all.

 

Starting in February 1917 the hypothetical reader of the news we imagine here would have seen one thing after another rushing the US towards war.  By April the war had arrived.



The war news after that was confusing. At first the US talked as if it was only going to raise a Navy. But soon thereafter it had enacted mass conscription.  It was obviously going to raise a huge Army, but how huge wasn't evident at first.  By late summer it was pretty clear it was going to be really big, and the Navy wasn't going to be the primary fighting arm of the nation.  At the same time both the British and the French launched huge offensives, with the British ones featuring the first use of tanks. There was reason for our reader to hope that the war might even end before the US really got committed in Europe.

That hope was soon dashed. The offensives rapidly stalled and by Fall revolution had broken out in giant Russia.

We don't often think how that news must have read to the average person.  In many histories written later its often noted that this meant that Americans could accept that the war was really one "to make the world safe for democracy".  I'll bet that at the time, at least for a savvy reader, the news of the fall of Russia was unbelievably grim.

Imperial Russia in the war meant that the Central Powers tied up on a two, or really three, front war with one of those fronts involving a combatant with a much larger population and fast resources and territory.  Never mind how primitive Imperial Russia was and how inept.  I think this would have been at least obvious to a savvy reader.  And then, right after that, a massive Austrian offensive through Italy back on its heals. To most readers, it would have appeared, rightly, that Italy was about to be knocked out of the war.  And it would have been hard not to conclude that the extra defensive front that would have opened up against France would have been disastrous.

And that's about where you are right now. 

According to the Wyoming Tribune, the Kaiser was saying he was going to win.  Readers of the paper would have to wonder if he was right.

So, at this point, New Years Day, 1918, you'd know that the first American troops had arrived in France, and indeed some had already been killed in action.  You'd also know that Russia was descending into chaos and its giant army had dissolved.  And you'd know that Italy had nearly been defeated in the past few weeks.  You'd also know that the French and the British had mounted successful offensives in late 1917, but they hadn't succeeded in gaining a breakthrough.  You'd know that the British had taken Jerusalem in the Middle East but the Turks were trying to take it back. You'd know that U-Boats were ranging the seas, and indeed they'd sunk a British ship with large loss of life just a couple of days prior.  And you'd know that Pancho Villa was fully resurgent and a force again in Northern Mexico, and there were renewed Mexican raids, from somebody, going on along the border.


It would have been hard to have been optimistic.

Of course, you'd also be aware that there were persistent rumors that there were serious foods shortages in Germany.  And you'd know that US troops were arriving in France.

And locally, no matter what you might think of it, a major economic boom was going on.  Indeed, it had changed the entire town.  That would have been impossible not to notice.

Okay, so that's what you know. And what would you have thought of all of that?

Well, that depends, I suppose, on how much you deduce for yourself and how much you accept what others are saying.  Personally, I think in my own case, as I have a little military experience, and I would have had at the time, and assuming that I would have been in Casper on a frigid January 1918 rather than in the service (it was easier to get in, if overage, at the time), I would have been pretty concerned.

It would have seem obvious to me that the German defeat of Russia would mean that the Germans would now be free to move hundreds of thousands of troops to the Western Front and they would have also have had all the resources available to them that Western Russia has, and that's a lot.  My guess would have been that that would take a few months, but once they did it, they'd be ready to launch a major offensive to knock France out of the war, and end it.

Of course, that's based on what I would have known. What I wouldn't have known is that the food crisis in Germany was now at the true crisis level and starvation was starting to set in.  I would also not have know that the revolutionary spirit that was haunting Imperial Russia was now also setting in, inside of Germany, and revolution was becoming a real possibility, particularly in the radicalized German Navy's enlisted ranks.  And I would never have guessed that Imperial German avarice and incompetence would lead it to keep advancing in Russia even as the country surrendered and descended into civil war such that Germany was unable to move substantial numbers of men to the West after all.

I also would not have guessed that the Germans had so depleted their horse stocks that they were now incapable of mobile warfare.  And I wouldn't have guessed that the Germans proved unable to exploit Russian resources which could have addressed that, and their food, situation.

I would also not have known that moral was so low in some units of the French army that they could no longer be used for offensive warfare.  Obviously that wasn't true of the entire French army, but it was true of some of it and it was a serous problem.  And I would not have realized that British and French manpower resources were now so stretched that they were importing Chinese labor in order to relieve service troops.

So, I would have been legitimately worried. 

Which gets to a topic that we'll likely look at more later.  The U.S. role in the First World War.  

It's always been somewhat controversial in a way. The way we view it has been, for a long time, significantly different than the way at least the British view it.  But viewed in context, a century past, while the British retained the ability to launch offensives, and the French somewhat did, their manpower situation was now desperate.  Italy was barely hanging on, and while Germany was facing severe problems of its own, only its own greed and incompetence kept it from working through those problems and solving them in time to win the war in the spring of 1918.  Without the commitment of U.S. troops to the defense against that 1918 spring offensive, as we'll see in a few months, the Germans may well have prevailed that spring.  And certainly without the increasing number of American troops in action, brief though that period of action was in the spring, summer and fall of 1918, its doubtful that the Allies could have overcome the increasing German manpower advantages. They likely would have gotten their act together sooner or later.

So, while we will look at the situation in greater depth later, did the entry of the United States into the war in 1917 win it for the Allies?  Nobody can say for sure. But a good case for that can be made.

And I would have been skeptical that U.S. troops would arrive in time.

Booze was on its way out, temporarily. But cigars were still in, temporarily.  The war was bringing in cigarettes in a major way.
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Today In Wyoming's History: January 1. New Years Day

Today In Wyoming's History: January 1. New Years Day:

1918  Oil and gas pipeline commences operation from the Salt Creek field to Casper.  The first such pipeline in the Casper region.  Attribution:  On This Day .com

I've been told, and indeed I've seen the photos, that my father in law's great grandfather worked on hauling material to the Salt Creek fields during their construction. And this by mule team.  Photographs of locals hauling equipment from Casper to Salt Creek by mule are really impressive.  It's interesting to note that early on, it was mule power, not heavy truck power, that supported the petroleum industry.

The Salt Creek field remains in production today.
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New Years Resolutions For Other People

We skipped this last year.  I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  But this past year.

Eee gads, what a doosy.

So, the thread is back.

The Inappropriate Actors, Bad Actors and Really Bad Actors


First off.

Harvey, put your pants on. We mean it.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way. . . okay we really didn't.

The Me Too folks made the cover of Time for Person(s) of the Year this year, and they richly deserved it. The news just keeps on keeping on.  It's been incredible. So we have to touch that a bit.

So, all you bad behaving men, act right.  You know what that means and don't need re-education to do it.

But, and I can feel the cringes starting, all you female assistants and aspiring female entertainers, you can in fact say no, and that "he was powerful" is bulls**t.  If you said yes, well, stop complaining.  Go to Confession, or whatever you do to reconcile your bad behavior.  His bad behavior doesn't excuse yours.

And in general, men who can take advantage of that office girl, or who are cheating on spouses, or whatever, just stop.  Women who are easy marks, or trying to sleep their way to the top, you stop too.

Now that we have that out of the way. . . Harvey!  Put your pants on!

Oh, and Hugh, you pathetic slim ball, you left just a little too early for you to see society reap the harvest of your "revolution". Figures, slug.

Hollywood

 

And while we're talking about "actors" (bad segue, I'll admit), Hollywood, given the cartoon movies a break, will ya?

I've been meaning to post on this for some time, and probably doing it in a year in which there were actually at least three really good adult movies is bad timing, but the outbreak of infantilism in movies is really weird.  Marvel comic characters weren't interesting in the comic book form for people over ten years old to start with.  Movies based on them for adults?  Infamnia!

All in all, I think this trend says something, but I'm not really sure what.  Movies always drew in a fairly youthful audience, in spite of all the angst that got rolling in the 1970s about movies suddenly being made to appeal only to kids.  Indeed, that might have been first bit of opening angst of the Baby Boom Generation as they were getting worried, I suspect, that movies might not be getting made for them, although they still were.  Be that as it may, something about that time really caused the Peter Pan movement, I.e., I don't ever want to grow up, to really get rolling. So new we see adult audiences going to movies based on cartoons.

Movies based on cartoons have existed for a really long time.  Superman movies appeared as early as 1948 and Superman shorts appeared in 1941, very early. But they were geared for kids, showing that kids at the movies have always been a considered Hollywood demographic.  But now huge budget films are being shot in this category.

When we look back at the classics of earlier eras, like Casablanca or the Maltese Falcon, or Lawrence of Arabia, it's easy for us to now forget that a lot of that movie audience was only in their 20s. They were just more mature.

So, Hollywood, just stop it.  And movie growers going to these. . . grow up.

And while you are at that, television can grow up as well.  If we must have endless sit coms, how about some about people in at least some semi realistic situations?

And regarding realistic situations, how about you just dump all the "reality" television for 2018. And, as part of that, sending the Vanderpumps back to the UK would be fantastic.

Donald Trump

 Hands off that phone Donald.

Quit tweeting.  Right now. In fact, don't use a computer for the rest of your Presidency, particularly if you want that Presidency to have any length at all.  Every tweet just makes things worse for you.

And I don't care if this appeals to your demographic or not. This has really jumped the shark.

Also, think before you speak a little.

Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders

 The head of the Democratic Party in the House, which fancies itself as holding the youth vote, 77 year old Nancy Pelosi.

Retire and let the kids have a crack at things.  You know. . .those whippersnappers in their 50s.  It's okay. . . they almost have enough experience to go it on their own now.

The kids will be all right.

The GOP


You likely  have about eleven months left to prove you can govern or the House is going to change hands.  Get your act together.

If that means ignoring your President, do that.  But it certainly means acting like adults and actually acting on your expressed convictions.  So far, you've mostly bumbled around since the last election.  That's going to catch up with you really quickly in 2018, if in fact it hasn't already.

The Democratic Party



Apparently when Bob Dylan sang about never trusting anyone over thirty, you took it to mean to never trust anyone who isn't under thirty right now, and never trust anyone who isn't in that Woodstock Generation ever.

Man, you guys are old.  Old, old, old.  You need some new blood.  You have it, but you don't trust it.

So, here's a thought.  Look around and find out who in your power structure is over 40  (which I am, I'll note). Fire all of them.

Yes, can them all.

All.

100%.

Retire, fire, exile, whatever.  But they have to go.

You can't get anywhere when you have a situation in which the youth vote in your party has to go up to an even older generation to find somebody they think is hip and cool.

Sheesh.

Carpetbagging Candidates In Wyoming

Stay home. There are enough locals here who want to run without you people coming in and thinking that we're going to elect you. Don't take Liz Cheney as a model. Her pop retained popularity in some pretty strong corners and the GOP was divided in that election. That's not going to apply to you unless your name is Theodore Ronald Regan Roosevelt.  And it isn't.

Pope Francis (and a few others)

Pope Francis? 

Yes, and I'll admit that I have to be careful here.

I'm a practicing Catholic that probably can claim to be devout.  I certainly try to be fully observant.  And for folks like me, Pope Francis has been one unending blurry headache in some ways.

I respect the maxim that we need to respect the Pope, and unlike one of my very conservative Catholic friends I haven't reduced myself to referring to him by an abbreviated first name.  He is the Pope.  But he suffers, dare I say it, from the same problem Donald Trump does.  He talks a lot, and he's really unclear when he speaks.  He ought to take a break for awhile.

This is actually a two part problem with the Pope, and some of it has to do with him just liking to talk and being extremely imprecise when he speaks.  Additionally, he seems to not grasp that the media, and all media, not just the American media, by necessity latches on to snippets.  Most media is not of the caliber of The Economist or First Things by a long shot.  So a rambling paragraph that contains a shocking sentence or two is going to be taken out of context every time.

That leads to various figures scrambling to correct and define what was said. And that creates a mess.

This same problem, I'll note, extends to some figures who are close to the Pope. They'll make a pronouncement about what the Pope is thinking and then it turns out to be inaccurate and has to be called back.

So, no, it isn't the case that the Pope has suddenly approved Medjugorje.  No, he isn't going to require a change in the text of The Lord's Prayer (even if that would be a translation correction).  No, he didn't suddenly approve gay lifestyles.  You folks just weren't listening.

Okay, so much for that.

Now, on to a more serious problem.

We've had a series of reforming Popes going back to Pope John XXIII, who brought Vatican II about.  But they haven't all been the same type of reformers.  Pope John convened Vatican II, but he died during it and Pope Paul VI had to complete it.  People are on both sides of what occurred, but it's pretty clear that Vatican II, no matter what it actually did, had the impact of releasing some forces within the Church that would like to go well outside of Catholic doctrine if they could. And for practicing Catholics who have lived long enough to appreciate it, it unleashed the "Spirit of Vatican II" folks who have been a menace or at least irritating at the Parish level since the 1970s.  

Starting with Pope John Paul II (now St. John Paul the Great), the Vatican started to take back the ground that the Spirit of Vatican II released, but it's been a chore.  Following the death of St. John Paul the Great, Pope Benedict Benedict XVI came in and it's clear that the very orthodox Pope Benedict worked to carry on the work advanced by St. John Paul the Great.  But he then did the unprecedented step of resigning, the reasons for which are still very unclear.  That lead to Pope Francis.

What's fairly clear about Pope Francis is that he had the strong support of the "liberal" Cardinals.  What that means beyond that is unclear, however.  And Catholics believe that the Papacy is preserved from error no matter what the personal views of the Church are.  That's an interesting point for Catholics, as Pope Francis would seem, now that he's been in long enough to appreciate his views, to give good evidence of that.

It now seems fairly clear that his convening of the Synod on t he Family was likely an effort to really go in and modify doctrine in a way that liberal Cardinals, like Cardinal Kasper, would have it.  It didn't work.  He next released Amoris laetitia, which is was a post synod Apostolic Exhortation.  It's a long document, but a footnote, and that's what it is, suggesting that divorced Catholcis living in second marriages without annulments can receive Communion in some unusual circumstances.

That's not actually a change in doctrine, and Canon Lawyers will point out that it in now way changes Canon 915, which provides:  "Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion."  The common interpretation of Canon 915 provides that as the Church does not recognize divorce (there's actually an odd exception in the Catholic Church under the Pauline Rule, so that's not completely absolute), and as remarrying without a declaration of nullity means that a person is now living in an adulterous union (presuming sex is going on, which is usually a safe assumption), and as that's a grave sin, such people cannot receive communion.

That's been understood that way for a long time, but there's always been some exceptions that can apply here and there, so the suggestion that there's exceptions isn't a change in anything.  However, putting this in a footnote in an era in which 1) divorces are more common than they have been at any time in the past five hundred years at least (but not as common as commonly supposed); and 2) Western Society (but pretty much only Western Society) has had its sexual culture polluted by the "Sexual Revolution" and vile disgusting slugs like Helen G. Brown and Hugh Hefner to the point where lots of people don't take any restrictions on sexual libertineism to be really serious, even if they profess sincere religious faith, is a bad idea.

Indeed, perhaps ironically, it might be some of point number two as well as point number one that has been leading Pope Francis to try to address this.  I.e, in our current age when some people have become so dense as to actually define themselves by their sexual desires (which is flat out weird) and in which society is bombarding everyone all the time with sexual messages to the extent that a lot of people seriously don't grasp that sex out of marriage has alwasy, and I do mean always, been regarded as a mortal sin, let alone the existence of an age in which the Protestant faiths have completely abandoned any concept that a person cannot divorce and remarry, there could be some confusion.  But confusion that cannot be cleared up, would be extraordinarily rare.

Which leads us to his recent letter to the Argentine Bishops.  

Every since the Apostolic Exhortation various Diocese have been struggling to figure out how to apply the exception, with that varying from just giving up on restricting Communion to simply not applying any exceptions that weren't already being applied.  The Bishops of Argentina issued instructions, however, on how to apply it that the Pope wrote a letter to them about, approving them.

Now that's pretty significant in that the Pope never answered the Dubia that was issued by Cardinals asking him to clarify things, and things haven't really gone particularly well for those associated with the Dubia.  The letter therefore almost stands as the answer, and in his highly confusing way, the Pope came around to, apparently (although we're really not sure, as it came about due to somebody close to him, rather than him) indicating that he wants the letter to be regarded as an Apostolic Letter.

Now we don't know what that means.  Apostolic Letters, when on matters of faith and morals, have infallibility attach to them.  But if they're on the practice of doctrine, the (apparently) don't.  So now theologians are trying to figure out what's what.  But whatever is what, the remarkable thing is that he practice of the  Argentine Bishops is extremely restrictive and so basically we're left with the confirmation that nothing has changed.  For faithful Catholics, things have the appearance of Pope Frnacis creeping up on doctrinal changes, and then being arrested from doing them. And it seems pretty clear that the arresting of his actions comes from outside of him.

But in any event, his actions, confusing though they are, and going on for a long time, are creating genuine turmoil and he should accordingly give it a rest.  His actions, while they've not changed anything, are becoming truly harmful.  Indeed, within the past few months one of the liberal Cardinals indicated that most of them now regret voting for him and there's a movement afoot to urge him to resign as they're fearful that if this keeps up, it'll cause a schism.

And here's another way that Pope Francis is like Donald Trump.  Trump's in the GOP but the GOP fears he's ripping it apart.  Now even the liberal backers of Francis fear he's having that effect.  He needs to stop and focus his efforts elsewhere.

And as I'm on the topic of religion. . . reunification

When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.  Peter Kreeft

It's time to apply this logic.

And yes, this usually snarky and satirical entry is rather serious this year.

Kreeft's maxim couldn't be more applicable to our current time, for Christians, and perhaps his personal journey is a well.  Originally a Calvinist his exploration of the early Church had the same impact on him that it has on a host of dedicated Protestants.  It lead him to become Catholic (on rarer occasion it leads some to become Orthodox).  That's not directly what this section of resolutions is about, but it's sort of what its about.

The Protestant churches in most of the world (but not all) are really dying.  The US is a general exception. The Anglican Church in Africa is a specific exception, where it finds itself in near schism with Canterbury.  The Pentecostals (whom some regard as non Christian actually) in the UK are an exception as well.  But elsewhere, while things are nowhere near as dire as claimed, things also aren't what they used to be.  Most Scandinavians remain Christian Lutherans, for example, but they don't pack in the Lutheran churches regularly like they once did.  

So here's the point.  Christianity suffered its early heresies and whatnot nearly from the onset of the Faith, but a real split set in for a variety of reasons approximately in the 1050s, although it'd take another 500 years (truly) for htat to really set in, in the way we have it now.  That was, of course, the seperation between the Catholics (not the Roman Catholics, the Catholics) and the Orthodox.  

Over time, whether the Orthodox care to admit it or not, various formerly Orthodox groups have come back in.  It's been really slow, but it had definitely happened, which is why we have groups like the Ruthenians today.  On rare occasion, there's been a little flow in the reverse direction, for one reason or another.

Most of the ongoing split has been healed and what preserves it, in spite of what people like to imagine, mostly has to do with human obstinacy.  There are some doctrinal differences between the Orthodox and the Catholics, but they are really slight.  The Orthodox like to point to the filioque in the Nicene Creed, without usually noting that Eastern Catholics use the same version of the Nicene Creed as the Orthodox do, and that in theological terms it looks like everyone is on the same page.

A bigger stumbling block is the role of the Pope, which frankly I worry that the current controversies over the current Pope make worse.  By and large the Orthodox are truly "orthodox", and there aren't liberal branches of Orthodoxy.  So the arguing going on in the Catholic Church that split liberal and conservative likely push the Orthodox even further away.  This is a really good reason, I'd note, for the Pope to take a break on these sorts of things and maybe focus on the Orthodox for awhile.  It looked like we were making quite a bit of progress on reunion under Benedict.  It's also, fwiw, a really good reason for the Orthodox to come back in, and that is what it would be, to the Catholic framework as that would no doubt boost the number of conservative cardinals and conservatism in general, and no matter what anyone like to thinks, everyone knows that the Catholic Church is the bulwark of Christianity everywhere.  Indeed, whole groups of "missionaries" only go to places made more or less safe for Christianity by the Catholic Church, while the Catholic Church continues to send Priests to places where they're likely to end up dead if discovered.

Anyhow, regarding the role of the Pope, the Orthodox already agree that he's the "first amongst equals" and they already know that the various churches within the Catholic church are self governing.  So there's relatively little that a reunion with the Catholic Church would impact them as to, for the most part, although again I'd think that Pope Francis is likely scaring them in these regards.  They would have to agree to having the Pope as the head of the Church.  But by the same token, the Metropolitan of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Metropolitan of Constantinople, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, would have a say in the much larger Catholic Church, and that's a big deal.

It's particularly a bid deal in an age in which everyone is countering a sea of secularization and, frankly, an Islamic invasion.  I mean, come on.

Almost every other issue that seems to keep this split alive can easily be reconciled. And some are purely human.  The Orthodox will repeatedly cite, for example, to the sack of Constantinople by Crusaders, never noting that it was a reprisal for the Massacre of the Latins by the Orthodox.  And does that matter now?  It was 1,000 years ago and most Catholics in the world aren't actually related to German Crusaders in any fashion.

It's time to patch this one up, for everyone's sake.

And the same is true of the "close to Catholic" Protestant faiths, of which there are notable group.  Conservative Anglicans already largely claim that they are Catholic, or that they are genuinely Apostolic like the Catholic and Orthodox faiths.  If they claim to believe everything the Catholic or Orthodox churches do, for safety's sake, it would be better for all if they joined one or the other. The same is true of the conservative branches of the Lutheran churches.

Now, I'm not so naive as to think in 2018 there's going to be a big meeting and people say, "you know, I think we've fixed this."  But  the time has really arrived to do that very thing.  Keeping divisions going serves to divide and aid in yourselves being conquered.  Disputes aided by distance, misunderstanding, and personal animosity five hundred to 1,000 years ago shouldn't be kept going when all of those things have been overcome, or easily can, or should, be.

The United States Supreme Court

Everyone there needs to take a few CLEs this year on Constitutional interpretation.  Your job is to interpret the law, not make it up.

I'm not saying that you're doing a horrible job, but my goodness you have really gone off the rails from time to time over the last few years.  It doesn't matter if you thinks something is right or wrong.  Thorogood Marshall was wholly incorrect when he said the role of the judge is to do what you think is right and let society catch up. That's the role of the benevolent dictator, and all dictators think they're benevolent.  The role of the judge is to interpret the law as it actually is.

And, frankly, some of you really need to step down and retire.  If your occupying that chair and your 70 years old, what are you thinking?  Do something else.

The land grabbers

 Just stop.  You know who you are.  Knock it off.
keep-it-public-files_main-graphic
Included in knocking it off is that you quit the self delusion that the idea of transferring t he public lands is massively popular in any quarter other than a little tiny one you are in. The Wyoming ranchers don't want it. The sportsmen don't want it. The national and international oil companies don't want it.  Just stop it.
 
The Nature Contravenors

Nature is what its, and you are what you are, in a natural sense.  You can't ignore nature, and you can't create your own nature.  Nor can you self identify yourself into a new nature.

And pretending otherwise is dangerous, as nature will get you in the end if you ignore her.

Newspapers and newspaper writers

Catherine Rampell:  Quit writing until you actually worked a real job.

Rampell is a syndicated writer who is a Princeton legacy graduate and works as a full time writing snot.  Lots of people have opinions on how everything should work, and lots of people are snots. Combining the two does not disqualify a person from being an opinion writer, but a life devoid of actual experience should.  Get some.  If you did, I suspect it would reduce the snark level at least a bit.

The Casper Star Tribune:  For the price charged, we ought to get a real newspaper.  But it's down to a pamphlet.  I know times are tough from newspapers, but given the size it's down to, the price needs to come down or the size needs to go up.

Technology Developers

Take the entire year, heck, the rest of the decade off.

At this point, your work is becoming a threat to everyone.  We ought to sit down and figure where all this technological development goes and what its point is.  Until we figure that out, the random nature of it has a certain cancerous aspect to it.  You're becoming a plague.

Kim Jong-un

Hey, Kim. Be a big hero this year.

Everyone knows that North Korea is not long in the tooth, at least not as the Stalinist theme park it currently is.  It's going down the tubes.  Whatever your strategy for keeping it a Siberian backwater is going to fail.

So accept that.  You could be a big hero overnight simply by announcing that you were folding things in. Take the troops back from the DMZ.  Open the border.  Announce that you are reuniting the country with the South and you've been a closet capitalist all along and retire to Switzerland.  You could live out the rest of your life comfortably and be warmly remembered rather than go down in a fatty bloody pulp and remembered as a nasty dictator, which is where your headed to right now.  Seriously, it's only a matter of time.  Make that course correction for yourself and your country before its too late. . .this year.


Me

Stop blogging so much.

Yes, I know that this is new years resolutions for other people, but here's one that I"m making for myself.  I blog too much and its time to back way down.
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The State Of The Blogs

Ladies and Gentlemen. . . the Blogger!


(Riotous Cheering)

Thank you, thank you.  . . 

I'd like to report to you that, today on the Dawn of 2018, the State of the Blogs is good.

(Applause).

We saw all time viewing records this year, peaking out at 55,954 views in the month of March alone. That was a peak however, and it matched the end of the posts on the Punitive Expedition. After a steady rise in March, 2016, that coincided with our commencement of posts about the Punitive Expedition, which saw readership jump up to nearly 5,000 views in a month, readership really took off and steady climbed until that month.  As a result, this blog has now had over 560,000 total views.

Of course, it's dropped off like a stone, somewhat, since then, which was expected. After March, readership was down to 10,000 views per month by June, still pretty respectable by the historic standards of this blog, but way, way down.  However, for some odd reason, it had doubled to 20,000 views per month by October, fell to 12,000 the next month, before going to the second highest readership of all time last month, 38,000. Weird.  It's expected to drop way off in 2018.  My guess is that we'll be luck to get 200 views a day, and a lot of days right now it's down that low or lower.

Part of the reason is that we're past most of the daily entries about the Punitive Expedition, which have been followed by frequent ones about World War One. These will not be coming nearly as fast, we think, as the slice of life aspect of these depart a bit . But we suspect they will.  And that will likely result in fewer posts.

Indeed, the pace of posting has already declined this past week as we move towards this new phase, or perhaps somewhat return a bit to the older original one (okay, we've said that before).  Indeed, the tally of posts over the years tells its own story in these regards:
As we've noted here before, this blog had an earlier version, so the tallies are more than a bit off (including the tally of readership hits), but this tells its own tale.  Posting here really began to pick up when we killed off that earlier blog, took a hiatus from posting, and then picked up posting here.  But we've simply been writing more.  This year nearly matched last year, but it was higher.  The year before that saw an increase in posts that was quite significant, although 2015 was actually down from 2014.  Chances are pretty high that 2018 will drop down from 2017 and 2017 is likely to cap out as the all time high in terms of posts here. Having said that, 2018 is another election year, like 2016 was, that contributed to a lot of posts being made here.

The Somme viewed from the air, January 19, 1917

 For reasons that aren't clear to us, this is the most viewed thread on the site, having received 5,293 views.

Lex Anteinternet, our most diverse blog, is only one of our several blogs, of course, and looking at them tells a different tale.  Our older blog, Holscher's Hub, was way down in posts over historic highs:
Indeed, it was at its lowest ever, if we discount the inaugural year of 2011.  We hope to see more posts there this year.  It hit its historic highly monthly viewing, however, last month, at 3,000 views . . which suggest it was something on the net, rather than our brilliant content,t hat contributed to that.  Once the most viewed of our blogs, it stands today at a respectable 64,533 total views, which increase at the rate of about 1,000 or so a month, surprisingly, given the low posting rate there.

Today In Wyoming's History should be way down, but oddly it isn't.  This may be because when we started updating this post nearly daily due to the Punitive Expedition we linked those posts to Wyoming newspapers to try to give a Wyoming flavor and Wyoming view to those posts.  More particularly, we wanted to try to explore, as part of the original purpose of this blog, what it was like for Wyomingite's in 1916 when things tarted hearing up on the Mexican border in a major way.  As we did that, we linked those items into Today In Wyoming's History and updated a lot of entries, indeed sometimes on a daily basis.  Beyond that we posted some new items as well.  We kept that up to an extent in 2017 as we posted newspaper items and daily events concerning 1917.

Perhaps in part because of that, the readership steadily claimed all year and peaked at over 6,000 views last month, although as we've been noting here it seems that a lot of that was due to net activity.  Today In Wyoming's History now has over 114,000 views, making it the second most viewed of our blogs.

New Mexicans In Wyoming

 Most recent original entry on Today In Wyoming's History.

Churches of the West, which has historically stood next in line, also saw a big decline in postings this past year:
Quite the drop off, but then this one drops around a lot.  As its based on my travel for work, it doesn't get much new if I keep traveling to the same places. And frankly, I've run out of subjects in Wyoming to post to it, almost.   At over 71,000 views, it stands in second place to this blog for readership and jumps around wildly from month to month, getting between 1,500 views and 2,500 views per month.

Immaculate Conception Church, Rapid City South Dakota

A portion of the most popular thread on Churches of the West at 3,696 views.

Courthouses of the West tells a similar tale this year.  It usually gets about 500 views a month (which is surprisingly high given the low activity rate), but freakishly jumped to an all time high of 1600 last month (hmmmm. . . . ).  There was nearly no posting on it at all in 2017:
Again, as t his is a travel based blog, this reflects the fact that last year I rarely went to a location that I hadn't photographed before or, if I was in an unfamiliar place, I just didn't' have time to take photos (an increasingly common work phenomenon).  So, not much going on there.  I'm amazed that the blog has 26,000 total views.

Lawrence County Courthouse. Speerfish South Dakota.

 Last post of the year for Courthouses of the West.

Painted Bricks is the first of our specialty blogs here about structures.  It originally was focused on a single location, but rather obviously branched out pretty quickly.  It's readership has always been low, but it saw a surprising hike last month as well, and also in August (probably due to the eclipse).   It usually is the least active of the specialty blogs, but last year it was not, which doesn't mean it was very active:
Somehow its managed to receive nearly 28,000 views.

Hotel Virginia (Natrona County Annex), Casper Wyoming

 Most popular, and now out of date, post on Painted Bricks with 1,029 views.

A revived blog, The Aerodrome, focusing on aircraft, is in at over 7,000 total views and its just a few months old.  Half of that came in December, suggesting that net activity had more to do with its total readership so far than any other single cause.  We like airplanes, so we hope to see more activity here.

Maybe Berlin Airlift Rates were achieved.

Part of the Eclipse post at The Aerodrome, our most recent blog, or not.

Our other transportation blog, Railhead, remained about as active, which isn't much, as always:

Sunrise Train, Torrington Wyoming

Last post of the year for Railhead
 
This is frankly surprising as this is also a travel based blog.  I'm amazed that there were fifteen posts on it last year.  I"m also amazed that it has had a grand total of 32,000 views. 
Finally, there's our low activity blog on war memorials.  Well, that blog, Some Gave All, is now on memorials of all types, showing how everything here expands all the time.  It's also travel based and highly opportunistic, meaning that I pick things up for that blog as I pass them, and I pass by things I could photograph constantly, and I do mean constantly.  Given that, the fact that its totals every year remain about the same is not too surprising:

 It has 47,550 total views, which is really surprising.

Veterans Memorial, Ft. Laramie Wyoming

Snippet of the last post of the year from Some Gave All.

Well, we can't really say "finally", as we took a run at expanding out the number of blogs a bit to reflect the somewhat bogus expansion of some of the existing one.  Along those lines, we planned oan  Churches of the South and Churches of the East. We have the URLs for both, but only the East has been posted.

Churches of the West: Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto Ontario

Not much is going on there yet, and for good reason. Every photo posted there is already posted elsewhere.  Whether this activity will be worth doing is yet to be seen.

So, the state of the blogs is good, and we've received a lot of viewership this year.  We'd guess that it'll never be anywhere near as high in any one year as it has been for 2017, and that's okay.  We'd also guess that the posting rate will be down, and indeed if you tally all the blogs up together, it already is. But that's okay too.

Thanks for stopping in and reading our entries from time to time. We appreciate it.
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