Why "Conservative" Judges aren't, and why "Liberal" Judges are. And why liberal angst over conservative judges is misplaced and not all that real, while the opposite is not true.

 Thomas Aquinas, who wrote on Natural Law. Liberal politicians and pundits like to imagine that a "conservative" justice means somebody like Aquinas, but it doesn't.

There is, on Reddit, a thread in which a self declared liberal lawyer (and most lawyers declare themselves to be that, whether they are or not) admits that he just isn't worried about Kavavnaugh.

Truth be known, probably few are.

For all the hoopla, feigned tumult, and shouting about it, the truth is that there's a huge difference between "conservative" and "liberal" judges and justices, and political liberals know that.  Moreover, they know that they don't really have to worry about conservative jurist doing something philosophically conservative.

Liberal judges are politically and philosophically liberals in the modern "progressive" sense.

Conservative judges are judicially conservative, but whatever their personal views are, as jurist they are not politically or philosophically conservative.  Or, if they are, they don't apply conservative philosophy by making it law.  Liberal jurist do.

And, indeed, that's why political liberals don't really care all that much about the courts as political issues, but political conservatives do.

For the most part, the biggest thing that political liberals really have to worry about, in the context of a modern judicial conservative being appointed to the court, is that there will be a majority that defers to the legislatures and the people.  That makes work for liberals, and liberals are well aware that a lot of "progressive" ideas are highly unpopular with average voters, let alone likely voters, but that's the fact of it.  Put another way, if the Supreme Court touched Roe v. Wade or Obergefell, all that would really mean, most likely, is that the Court would say "well. . . that's the sort of thing we don't decide as the Constitution doesn't say anything about it. . . take it up with your state legislators. . . "

Not exactly the end of the world, in spite of the way the way it is so often presented by liberals.

Put another way, modern conservative jurists aren't going to do anything in regards to a woman's "right to choose" or "reproductive rights". They would, at most, say "not our field, take it up with the voters".  Liberals do indeed fear that, as they fear that their ideas aren't all that popular with the voters.  But they will not do what liberal jurists do, which is to declare what must be done and make that the law.

And that is what liberal jurist do. They take their philosophical and political views and declare them to be the law.   That is what happened in Roe v. Wade and that's what happened in Obergefell.  Basically, in those cases, the Supreme Court made into the law what the liberal justices view of what the law ought to be.  Put the way Thorogood Marshall put it, they determined what the law ought to be, in their view, and decided to let the people catch up with it.

But it could work both ways, which is the irony of the Liberal Angst.

 Where conservative judges feel that the answers really ought to come from. . .ballot boxes.

It would be possible, albeit extraordinary unlikely, to appoint conservative jurists who were political and philosophical conservatives and who were prepared to act on it.  That won't happen, but the fact that it won't shows how the liberal position is hypocritical and the balance of arguments is, moreover, highly misplaced.

If this were to occur you could appoint, for example, the handful of conservative jurists or legal academics who were natural law conservatives and have a view of what the ultimate law is, just as liberal judges have a view of what the ultimate law ought to be.

Let's consider Roe v. Wade again.

In a modern context there is, in spite of what people whine and cry about, about 0 chance that any Supreme Court is going to reverse Roe.  Roe v. Wade is mostly about a right to privacy.  Where it may be modified, in a modern context, is on the bright lines it makes on weeks of pregnancy, which has always been scientifically suspect at best.  A court could uphold Roe's legal basis completely but, at the same time, find that the scientific and medical views on it are so obsolete that abortion was no longer sanctioned as a right by it at any point.  As a court could do that, a court could certainly move the decisions bright lines or modify them, which is widely regarded as not only likely, but frankly quite proper, by nearly everyone.

But what the court will not do is to make an overarching philosophical leap into the nature of life and what life counts and why.  It's not impossible to imagine that, and perhaps the Court should be bold enough to do that, but it won't.  At the very most you might imagine the Court stating that it was clear that life is viable far earlier than the Court had imagined in 1973, and that therefore it couldn't really tell when it was viable, and therefore it would err on the side of life and find abortions violated the right to be secure in your person, infants having that right as much as adults.

Indeed, such a finding would actually be consistent with Roe. Roe itself recognized that such a right existed, but found that it didn't exist early on in the case of the fetus but did in the mother and therefore it was throwing the weight to the mother. That's the part of the decisions, as noted, that' has always made people queasy as it frankly doesn't make very much sense.

But what won't occur is to have a Court declare that a right to your life is a natural right trumping everything else, at least for the innocent, which would be to find a right beyond which we normally conceive of it as being. Although only barely. Because that's a natural law concept it sounds familiar to us in a way, and it should, as it's basically what the framers of the Constitution set out as a natural right in the Declaration of Independence when they stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That's a Natural Law declaration and it recognizes such a right.  As the concept to a right to life is still very  familiar to us, and as it finds expression among liberal and conservative justices in other areas, such as the Constitutionality of the death penalty, perhaps this musing isn't as far off as stated here.

But if we take the topic on to something like Obergefell we can really see where the difference between modern "conservative" justices and what a true conservative justice, the mirror image of a liberal justice, would be.  The declaration that same sex marriage is the same as heterosexual marriage was manufactured out of whole cloth with no basis in the law at all, the creation of liberal justices concepts of how the world and the law ought to be, rather than how it is.  By the same token, a truly conservative judge could write that natural law had created them "male and female" and that an institution endowed by its very nature with a recognition of that fact, and that therefore no law could be made to contravene or redefine that.  That would be much beyond what any conservative justice would do today.  If the question decided in Obergefell should suddenly reappear in the Supreme Court with five conservative justice, they might conceivably reverse it, but just to send it to the states. They wouldn't overturn any legislative act recognizing it.  But a Natural Law conservative theorist could.

Indeed, a Natural Law theorist and a modern liberal justice would actually recognize each other in that approach.  It wouldn't worry about the written law or the written Constitution, but rather some higher goal of how the law ought to be.

And that's the real difference and why its the case that liberals, in spite of their complaining, don't really care that much about the Supreme Court at the polls. They can still go to the polls and campaign, and they know that.  At most, conservative jurists just send things back to the ballot, they don't decide the issue with attempted philosophical finality, like liberal jurists do.

Karl Marx, who asserted that if people followed his views history would end in a man made paradise, a view that's much closer to what liberal jurists basically espouse, if not in the same exact fashion.

The Kaiserschlacht Ends. July 15, 1918. Operation Friedensturm

Not very cheery news for a Monday.  Wyoming State Tribune for Monday, July 15, 1918.

Monday, July 15, 1918, brought discouraging, if not unexpected, news.

 

The map one final time, with the final German fifth drive.  This time the Germans attempted to exploit the earlier success of their drive on Paris with a new front to the east.  Over two days the effort gained ground, but the effort was rapidly halted and by this point the French were able to regain the initiative and counter.  The Germans were effectively blocked and gave up offensive efforts on August 7.

On July 15 the Germans resumed offensive operations, but not the Operation Hagen that was designed to be a final blow. Rather, they launched Friedensturm to exploit the earlier  Blücher–Yorck gains. While the offensive, like every other German offensive in this series of operations gained ground, the French were able to ultimately counterattack successfully and the German offensive operations came to an end on August 7.

Laramie residents not only read about the fierce fighting in France. . . they also got to read about how coal shortages were looking to bring an end to beer.

The final effort would see, as with the earlier efforts, some hard fighting.  The Second Battle of the Marne was part of the offensive, which would run from this day until August 6.  The Fourth Battle of Champaigne also started on this day. Both were launched against the French Fourth Army, the Germans having switched attention to them, of which the US 42nd Division was a part.  The 42nd was a division made up of National Guardsmen.  The French forces, moreover, were rapidly reinforced by British and American troops.  The US 3d Division would be back in action on this day and earn the nickname "The Rock of the Marine".  By the battles end eight American divisions would participate and the US would sustain 12,000 casualties.  The number of divisions contributed to the defense would be twice that of the British, with American divisions being twice as large, but even embattled Italy contributed two divisions and sustained 9,000 casualties.  Forty-four French divisions would fight in the battle and fifty-two German divisions.

Allied battlefield loses would be roughly equal to German ones in the campaign, but by this point the Germans did not have the troops to lose.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East . . .

. . . prisoners of war, including German prisoners of war, were coming into Jerusalem following yesterday's Battle of Abu Tellul, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, which had seen Empire troops defeat Turkish and German troops.

The action had featured significant cavalry action by both the Turks and the Empire forces.

With all that was going on in France and Italy at the time, you have to wonder how much attention this was getting now outside of Constantinople, Cairo and Jerusalem.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Church, Oklahoma City

Churches of the West: First Church, Oklahoma City:

The First Church in Oklahoma City is so called as it was the first church established in Oklahoma City. The original wooden structure, very much added to and changed over the years, was first set out in 1889.  The Church is a United Methodist Church, and was directly across from the site of the Murrah Federal Building bombing, in which it was heavily damaged.

Best post of the week of July 7, 2018.

The best post of the week of July 7, 2018.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

The University of Wyoming adopts an unneeded slogan and some faculty reveals themselves to be trendy twits

The 2018 Wyoming Election. Volume Four

Quentin Roosevelt shot down and killed in combat, July 14, 1918

U.S. Army marching in Lyon, Bastille Day, July 14, 1918.

U.S. Army marching in Lyon, Bastille Day, July 14, 1918.

Quentin Roosevelt shot down and killed in combat, July 14, 1918

Quentin Roosevelt, age 20, one of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt's son, was killed in aerial combat over France.

Quentin was the youngest of the Roosevelt boys, all of whom were serving in World War One (Kermit was serving in the British Army).  His death came as a terrible shock to his parents and his father never really recovered.  T.R.'s decline into death himself accelerated rapidly after Quentin's death and his fiery nature evaporated.

2nd Lt. Roosevelt was buried with full military honors but they were not above making a postcard out of the photograph of his dead body and wrecked airplane, a site that was sufficiently grisly that the German populace, which remained fond of Roosevelt, was shocked.

Quentin was by all accounts highly intelligent and very well liked.  He was engaged at the time of his death to the wealthy Flora Payne Whitney who was treated by the Roosevelt family in the immediate aftermath of his death as if she was one of the family.   She would go on to marry a fellow member of Roosevelt's squadron in 1920, although the marriage would be brief (she remarried in 1927).

Quentin as a boy at Sagamore Hill.

July 14, 1918 - Quentin Roosevelt Shot Down

University of Colorado, US Training Detachment, Boulder, CO. SATC. Utah contingent leaving Boulder, July 13, 1918.

Off to be officers in the Great War. . . leaving from a rural Boulder to enter the Army. . . something we likely wouldn't see today.

Oh my, I can only imagine what this headline would create locally in 2018. . . "Booze or Coal Is Choice For This Country": July 13, 2018 Cheyenne State Leader.

Geez, in weedy Denver this was even an issue?

Heck, with people hanging around stoned, how could they not do this?

DENVER -- Starting in January, the rules surrounding alcohol in Denver’s parks are likely to change.On Wednesday evening, Denver’s Parks and Recreation advisory board passed a recommendation making revisions to the alcohol policy.Currently, people are only allowed to consume 3.2 percent alcohol-by-volume beer in Denver parks.The new rules would allow park patrons to possess and consume full-strength beer in cups or cans. No glass containers, including bottles or growlers, would be allowed.

The summer that wasn't.

Great, two days of mild heat (seriously, 90s in July is normal, not abnormal) followed by, once again, torrential rains and freezing weather.

None of which keeps the people who are near the thermostat from turning it down to Absolute Zero.  After all, it's summer so it must be hot.

Not this summer.

Feels like 1816 . . . which by the way was only 1 to 2 degrees colder in most of Europe (and hotter in Urasia) than normal.

"A remarkable photograph made at U.S. Rifle Range, Glassy Mountain showing where bullets strike ground at the dark targets" July 12, 1918

The Casper Daily Tribune for July 11, 1918. Escaped Wheatland Felon Dies In Battle

Henry Sweeney had blown the safe at the Guernsey Mercantile and ended up in the Platte County Jail.  He broke out, aided by his friend Sullivan, and they both took off and enlisted in the Army.

Sweeney died in battle, and apparently he must have felt badly about his prior life of crime, as he had Sullivan write home about it.

Sweeney, in light of giving up his life for his country, had the charges dropped. 

The article didn't say what Platte County's attitude was towards Sullivan . . .

The Lions' Last Roar. The ongoing decline of service organizations.

I read in the paper earlier this week that the Lions Club is giving up sponsoring the local fair and rodeo parade, which its done for a decade.  This year is its last year.  The parade was held yesterday.

Of course, they drew that last parade in an election year, which must have been a pain.  I didn't watch but a few minutes of the parade, and that from an office window, but even at that I could tell it featured all the running politicians.

The reason the Lions are giving the parade up is a simple one. It takes about thirty people to do the parade, they reported. They're down to ten members.  As the Tribune reported, in an interview of the club's leader;

We looked at our membership. It takes an awful lot of people to put that parade on. Most service clubs have declining membership and ours has declined to the point we didn’t feel we could do it adequately. We notified the fair board officially in January but they knew it was coming. On a regular basis, we have about 10 members and it takes at least 30 people to start that parade, so we’ve taken advantage of our children and our wives and husbands.

Wow.

I've written about the decline in fraternal organizations before.  The Lions aren't really that, however. Their a service organization.  My prior posts probably somewhat confused the two and frankly most fraternal organizations have a service element to them.  Probably in the modern context they darned near all do.  But some organizations are expressly service organizations.  The Lions are one of them.

The Lions were founded in 1916 in Chicago.  It has 1.4 million members worldwide.  So it's still around and still relatively big.  But around here, it's not.  And that's common.

The Rotary Club, which seems to be doing much better, will be taking over.  Rotary International is a little older, having been formed in 1905.  I've known quite a few people who have been Rotarians, but I've also known a few Lions. The Lions I've known have been frank over the years that they were worried about the local clubs (there were at least two, maybe there still are) future. At some point, I'd think, you'd tip over a scale where the weight would be really against you.

Which is a shame, but then I myself have never been in a service or fraternal organization and don't really have any interest in joining one either.  But that's a feature of my character.  I wouldn't have been in one if this was 1968, or 1918.  It's just not me.  I'm glad its been somebody, however.

Theodore Roosevelt on Fifth Avenue, New York, near St. Patricks Cathedral. July 11, 1918

The University of Wyoming adopts an unneeded slogan and some faculty reveals themselves to be trendy twits

 Black cowboys.  Oh my, this would suggest that certain faculty members at the University of Wyoming are, well, ignorant, sanctimonious, twits.

One third of all cowboys in the Frontier Era were black or Mexican.

One third.

Of cowboys that drove cattle up to Wyoming on the Texas Trail 25% to 30% were black, meaning that when Hispanics were added in, even a higher percentage were non white, if you will. 

This doesn't even consider individuals like Jim Edwards, Lost Springs Wyoming rancher who was also black.  We could consider him to be a cowboy, yes, but more than that, he was also a rancher, and a large scale rancher at that.  And it doesn't consider areas like the Sagre de Cristo region of Colorado, where nearly all the ranchers were Hispanics . . . and many still are today.

Blacks and Mexicans formed a significant base of cowboys early on.  The occupation has never been racially exclusive.  It wasn't in the 19th Century and it isn't now.

I have, from time to time, handled a fair number of cases on the Wind River Reservation.  The judge there was also a rancher.  And yes, he was an Indian.

I've herded cattle many times with working ranch families, including married couples and their teenage daughters.

The point?

Being called a cowboy doesn't imply a race by a long shot and never has.  And in the modern context, it doesn't imply a gender either.

And somebody who gets all up tight in a politically correct snit about that is an sanctimonious ignoramus of epic proportions.

What's this about?

Well, the University of Wyoming, for reasons that escape me, recently decided that for marketing purposes they needed to hire Victor & Spoils, a Boulder Colorado (of course) marketing firm to come up with a new catch phrase for UW.  V&S came up with "The World needs more Cowboys".  UW paid V&S $500,000, so I"m hoping that they got more than that, as if that's what the $500,000 bought, that's pretty darned lame.

Be that as it may, lameness isn't what the faculty flap is about.

Let's go to the Tribune:

“I had lots of different reactions,” said Angela Jaime*, the director of the American Indian Studies department. “I was really disappointed in the university for endorsing such a negative slogan.”

“I was kind of like, ‘Woah, has anyone else heard of this?’” said Christine Boggs, an instructor and the co-chair of the Committee on Women and People of Color at UW. The group sent a letter to university leaders to voice its “grave concerns” about the slogan and requesting that UW “shelve” it in favor of a more diverse tagline.

“Well the concern for me is the ‘boy’ part, right?” said Christine Porter**, a UW professor and vocal opponent of the slogan. “Since the 1950s at least in other parts of the country, it is no longer acceptable ... to use the generic masculine and pretend that includes the feminine.”

She added that the word “cowboy” brings to mind an image of a straight white man and past conflicts with Native Americans.

“As the director of American Indian Studies, it becomes incredibly problematic to try to imagine using any of this promotional material when I’m recruiting Native students,” Jaime said. “The term ‘cowboy’ evokes the play time — the racist play time — of cowboys and Indians, right?”

What a bunch of self important, pretentious, ignorant snobs. All of this faculty ought to go.  And permanently.

And probably go to a ranching and agricultural reeducation camp where they are exposed to a strong dose of reality and actual history.

Let's break this down.

“I had lots of different reactions,” said Angela Jaime, the director of the American Indian Studies department. “I was really disappointed in the university for endorsing such a negative slogan.” 

Has Jaime been on the Reservation's Arapahoe ranch and visited with its Arapahoe cowboys?  Perhaps she should.

Agricultural operations on the Wind River Reservation feature a large Native American element.  One of the biggest operations on the Reservation, if not the biggest, is owned by a Shoshone family whose name is strongly identified with that Tribe. Another is owned by one of the tribes itself.  There are many smaller, Indian, ranching operations on the Wind River Reservation.  On a more personal level, I once employed an Indian secretary whose father was. . . a working cowboy off of the Reservation.

She [Christine Porter] added that the word “cowboy” brings to mind an image of a straight white man and past conflicts with Native Americans.

Only for people who get their history from old re-runs of The High Chaparral.

 An American Indian. . . cowboy.  This isn't as uncommon as some ignorant folks at UW would probably believe. . . and it certainly isn't uncommon now.  Indeed, while Indian cowboys made an early appearance after the introduction of cattle and are very much still with us, it's worth noting that native cultures in the West entered the livestock industry with sheep, which were very common in the Southwest amongst Indian tribes well before the United States had any sort of control of the territory.  But you'd have to know history to know that.

I honestly don't know where the "Cowboys and Indians" concept of Western Expansion came from but it is really grossly exaggerated in the concept of Indian v. Stockmen fights.  Stock raising is an economic activity and by and large most economic enterprises attempt to minimize their risks, not run out and engage in them.  For that reason, while there are certainly exceptions, most of the history of ranching in the Far West comes after that region had been largely pacified in terms of Indian v. Euro American conflict.  Put another way, George Armstrong Custer wasn't leading a band of cowboys into Montana with cattle.  Shoot, for that matter the pioneering economic enterprise in that region was gold mining, not livestock raising.

Anyhow, to be fair, you can find some Indian v. Stockmen conflict, but if you do you are looking at areas like Texas or at fairly rare examples elsewhere.  While there may have been Stockmen v. Indian conflicts somewhere in Wyoming, I'm at a loss to think of a single example.  That doesn't mean that the attitudes of either party were all Faculty Enlightened or something.  No, it means that by the time livestock came into most of Wyoming conflicts with the native populations were largely over.

You'd think a university professor would be educated enough to know that.

But then, you'd also think that an educator at a state land grant university located in Wyoming, the only four year public university in the state, would be aware that not only have their historically been Indian cowboys, there still are.

Consider the Arapaho Ranch.  And in considering it, consider their website, which relates:

The Arapahoe Ranch is a Non-Hormonal Natural Grass Fed Certified Ranch located on the Wind River Reservation. With over 300,000 acres, the cattle are worked and cared for by Native American cowboys.

So, does Angela Jaime find that the Arapahoe Ranch's proud indication that it's cattle are "worked and cared for by Native American cowboys" to be offensive?  What about its proclamation that this is consistent with:

a rejuvenated effort by the Northern Arapaho Tribe to reconnect with its strong traditions as a hunter/gatherer society whose very existence depended on its willingness to live in harmony with nature.

Eh, Jaime?

Or that its "is the Pride of the Northern Arapaho Nation"?

Well, that's the real world.  Not the University of Wyoming in our current times, apparently.

You'd also think that a university professor would be educated enough to know that 1/3d of all cowboys were Mexicans or Blacks.  But apparently not.

 Nat Love.  Former slave, cowboy, and later Pullman Porter. Oh, and a married man as well. Oh, what to do, he's not white but not a homosexual . . .and he allegedly was kidnapped by Indians.  What a PC nightmare.

For that matter, you'd think you'd be educated enough to know that up until relatively recently the Mexican presence in working cowboys here remained pretty high.  I knew at least one local top hand who was a Mexican and whose family also owned a ranch in Mexico.  When he retired locally, he retired to the family ranch in Chihuahua.  And most ranchers in the modern era know other ranchers or stockmen somewhere who are either of Hispanic descent or actually Mexican and may have ranching interest in Mexico.  I do.

And I won't even go into sheep ranching in depth, which I won't do in part because sheepherders aren't cowboys.  But if I did, you'd see there was a point at which various ethnicities, Irish, Mexican, Basque and Peruvian cycled through the industry on the working end. Today, if you find a sheepherder, he's more likely to be Peruvian than anything else.

Okay, what about that (oh my gosh) "straight" part of that.

Well thanks in part to campaigning on the topic, and the American entertainment industry, Americans now believe that homosexuals are a statistically significant portion of the population. They are not.  That doesn't mean that they're insignificant as human beings, which would be wholly incorrect, but it does mean that when were discussing the impact of a statement we shouldn't presume a vast slight is being offered.  And that matters to this conversation.

Consider this item of awhile back from Gallup.

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.

3.8%.

That's pretty small, and that includes people who are lesbian, "gay" (which is technically a subset of the homosexual demographic), bisexual (which is also different) or "transgender" (a category which is still subject to serious debate as to whether or not it is even real).

If, therefore, the image of a cowboy is a straight male (more to that male part in a minute), it's because 96.2% of the American populations is straight.  If you are thinking of a cowboy, oilfield worker, laundress, mechanic, court reporter, policeman, criminal, Mini Mart clerk, accountant, lawyer, mail, or whatever, you ought to be thinking of a "straight" individual as they almost all are.  If you are thinking of any profession as "gay" or any group of individuals as "gay" you are buying into a false stereotype as it is statistically true that almost all members of any profession, no matter what it is, is straight.

Yes, there are people who are not, and that no doubt includes some ranchers and cowboys, but most people are.

Indeed, the greatest modern triumph of "progressives" is creating the illusion that a statistically insignificant demographic is significant so that the argument that laws and social norms ought to be changed to accommodate them partially on that basis. That's a stunning success, if perhaps one that should be questioned.  It certainly ought to be questioned here in this context.

In contrast, to use a really bad comparison which is used as its easy to find, JAMA estimated that 12.7 % of the American population are alcoholics (which I'll note is not meant to suggest the comparisons here are anything other than statistical, clearly same sex attraction is vastly different from alcoholism and I don't mean to suggest they are the same in any fashion, which would be very insulting to homosexuals), up from about 6% in a prior estimate.***  That may be due to a change in the statistical definition, but at any rate its statistically significant and over three times the number of individuals who are regarded as being in the category of sexually attracted outside the norm.  Indeed, it wasn't all that long ago that having a sexual attraction outside of the normal norm was regarded as deviant (by deviating) and a mental illness in no small part due to its comparative rarity.  The change in that is still noted to be rather unscientific in nature and open to question in terms of its process, which is not to say that in most instances there's be any valid social reason to consider it a mental illness.  That doesn't mean, however, that laws and social customs should have been changed to accommodate this statistically small demographic simply because it exists, any more than a person would argue that laws should be altered to accommodate the much larger populations with other behaviors which are outside of the biological norm without there being some good reason beyond the simple fact that it occurs.

Which is to say that people like Porter who are having a snit because the world cowboy brings to mind statistically normal males, to them, is to say that people like Porter have a problem with reality.  Most males, and females, are normal in their attractions.  Only a very small percentage are not. To recognize that fact is to recognize reality, not to identify some horrific slight.

Which brings us to the male/female part.

 

 The Jordan Motor Car Company's legendary Somewhere West of Laramie advertisement, which was inspired by Jordan actually seeing a mounted female west of Laramie. Somewhere on the campus in Laramie now, such a site would cause faculty members to have a seizure.

Women have been involved in ranching since ranching was involved in ranching. In Christine Porter's view, the word "cowboy" may bring up an all male enterprise, and in reality it is largely male even today, but in reality, like it or not, most physical jobs are male.   That has everything to do with male/female physical morphology and male/female natural psychology.  In the current era, and in particular as amplified by our last President, it may be popular for the over-educated ignorant to believe that there are no differences between men and women, but in reality there most definitely are.  That doesn't matter much in the Overheated Under-thinking Faculty Lounge, but it reality it does.

Which his why that even in an era when the last bastions of all male professions, combat soldiers, have been opened up to women unwisely there are still very few women in those roles.  But we should also be honest, even in those roles, such as even in traditionally female roles, the other gender does fill in and does take a role by necessity on occasion.

In agriculture, there have always been female agriculturalist for a couple of reasons.  For one reason, women in farming goes back to the dawn of farming.  Women in animal husbandry does not seem to go back to animal husbandry antiquity, however, which is likely because almost all agricultural animals are big and dangerous and hence it was a male role.  That's the reality of it.

But the added reality of it is that women married to men who engage in animal husbandry have taken a role in that in modern times also by necessity.  If a person doesn't know that, that's because they just flat out weren't looking.  It's not hard at all to find examples of women and girls herding cattle.  And on any modern operation its not hard at all to find women from their early teens to their late sixties doing the same.  Indeed, at least one very promising Wyoming rancher politician, who was also a woman (gasp!), and who is closely related to our current Governor, had her career cut short in a horse accident.****

Women cowboys were not only something that was known, but something celebrated in literature and art at least as far back as the early 20th Century. There was an entire genera of books based on women ranchers.  Women cowboys were a really common early 20th Century literary and artistic motif.

 Girl of the Gold West card, which was related to a novel by that name, that became a series of early movies.  The theme of a cow punching female ranching protagonist was a very early one in 20th Century American literature and, quite frankly, the female central character was shown as a lot more natural active than a lot of female centric novels today.  This gal would have been more likely to pistol whip Gray than bother with his fifty dubious shades.

So what does all this tell us?

Well, probably a lot more than most are willing to admit.

Some time ago the Washington Post Columnist/Snot Catherine Rampell posed the question of why Conservatives hate universities.  I started a reply post at that time and then shelved it, but this is an ample demonstration of why that seems to be the case.  Here article started off:

More than ever, higher education has become critical to snagging a stable job, moving up the income ladder and succeeding in the global economy.*****

Yet more than ever, higher education has also become a political football and object of derision.

It isn't that they hate higher education.  It's that higher education is no longer really very educated, in many departments.  Instead, it's become a refuge from reality and indeed from education itself.  It's become an object of political football, and hence derision, as in many instances its a mere expression of politics, and often left wing radical politics, in and of itself, having not very much to do with actual education.

The faculty reacting at the University of Wyoming are showing themselves to be blisteringly ignorant. They are ignorant of history and of nature. And they're so ignorant that, as long as they are on public support, which is what is the case, they will remain so,and in fact be completely useless.

And in fact, they're fitting into an agenda that seeks to really radically reshape the world in contravention to nature, and they find large aspects of nature and history to be intolerable.

Consider, for example, if you are white male, which is the second largest demographic in the United States (right behind white females, the largest American demographic). For some reason, you are basically defined as bad by these people no matter what you have personally done, and simply because  your demographic has been statistically significant for a long time.  Nobody would do that with any other American ethnicity.  Consider Jaime once again:

“Come up with a different slogan that doesn’t evoke some sort of a white guy in a cowboy hat and tight Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots,” Jaime said. “Rather than trying to quote-unquote redefine a word. There are lots of words we can already use that are really positive.”

So what's this say to the Arapahoe cowboys in the Arapahoe Ranch?  Apparently that they're genuine rural lifestyle doesn't count to a professor who hails from California, enrolled tribal member of Pacific Coast native peoples though they may be. 

Indeed, what's this say to women in agriculture?  And what's it say to a white guy who may be heavily into agriculture but fail to meet the other assumed definitions people like Porter and Jaime have? There's no reason to believe, except perhaps from their prospective, that there aren't gay men or women who are just as much a cowboy as the image they apparently are limited to through too many hours of watching television or movies.  I'll note that I once represented a fellow who had been insulted in a legal context because he was a homosexual; he was also a decorated combat Marine and very proud of that.  Do people like that fit into Porter and Jaime's world?

All cultures define themselves.  A culture without any hero's are archetypes is simply replaced by one that does.  A culture that destroys natural heroes, i.e., ones associated with nature in some ways, won't last.  At best, what Porter, Jaime and Boggs represent is not a bold new reconstructed world in which everyone defines their reality, but the end stage of a Western culture too effete and weak to admire anything at all.  A culture like that, if it persists, won't last long. . .or at all.

But you don't have to sit around accepting its demise.

 Breakin' Through, a University of Wyoming statute depicting a woman riding a bronc.  Oh my, we can't have such horrific racist male depictions can we.

__________________________________________________________________________________

* Jaime had bonafides in that she's an enrolled member of two Pacific Coast Native American tribes. . . or maybe not.  While she's very well educated, a person has to ask the dread question here if being a member of one Native American tribe is as good as being a member of another, to which the answer should be no.

If that seems odd, what is meant is this.  Members of Pacific Coast Indian tribes, ethnically, bear no more resemblance to Plains tribes than Irishmen do to Ukrainians.  Yes, they're both Europeans, in the latter example, but there's a lot of differences.  And hence the odd point.  Even asserting that there's such a thing as "Indians", by an institution, is to make a racial categorization that itself risk being racist.  I don't know much about Pacific Coast tribes, but maybe there were few who were cowboys (I really don't know), but there are Plains Indians who were and are cowboys and there are also Floridian Indians who are cowboys. That's part of their heritage.  To make bold assertions about what an Indian can and cannot be, and what cowboys must be ethnically, is, well, risking racism.

**Porter has a biology degree but a quick look at her University of Wyoming biography reveals a character who would seem to fit into the university "progressive" mold, which is one of the reason that universities are increasingly loosing credit with more than one sector of the American public.  It's easy to be a progressive on the faculty.

***Some argue, and indeed it seems generally presumed, that the number of alcoholics has in fact doubled.  That's questionable, however.  It may be that the number of people recognized as alcoholics has simply doubled.  Indeed, having lived long enough to see the change in how this is viewed, I suspect that's the case.

Likewise, the number of people identified as homosexual and other categories deviating from straight has undoubtedly increased from a lower percentage to 3.8%  In part that is no doubt because people were highly reluctant to self identify in that fashion up until recently, and no doubt quite a few still are reluctant.  At the same time, however, there's an odd element of trendiness in some quarters in identifying in this fashion which causes some identifications in some demographics that are likely false.  That's also true, oddly enough, with alcoholism.  The errors this creates are likely insignificant in the overall percentages, however.

****Mary Mead.

*****Legacy Princeton educated Rampell probably doesn't realize it, but while there's a large element of truth to this, in the modern American economy this is not actually universally true.  Technical educates are once again quite productive, while the occupation that  Rampell occupies, columnist, a species of journalism, is in real trouble.

Brett Kavanaugh. Let the ignorant analysis begin.

I don't know anything about Brett Kavanaugh.  From what little I can learn, based on the analysis that's been dug up on his decisions, he's a solid pick to replace Anthony Kennedy, for whom he once clerked.

He wouldn't have been my choice.  Barrett would have been.  But I can see why Kavanaugh was picked.

Well, now that he's picked, it's interesting to see the really ignorant analysis of all kids begin.  Within a couple of hours I saw on the reddit the following comments:

1.  He's pro gun.

Really? We have no idea if this is true.  Indeed, the only person in the Supreme Court orbit who is "pro gun" for sure is Alana Keegan, who is a hunter.

What they think they mean is that he's "pro Second Amendment". But what we really know is that he's a textualist who applies the law as written, which is pretty easy to do in regards to most of the U.S. Constitution on straight forward issues.  That doesn't make him "pro gun", it makes him capable of reading and understanding something in context.

2.  He's anti immigration?

Oh?  Based on what.  Nobody has a clue on what his views are on immigration at all.  Maybe people have a concept on what his view of the law is in this area, but that doesn't say anything about his personal views whatsoever.

This is from Reddit, keep in mind, and not in a legal forum.  If it were on a lawyer subreddit it would likely be no better, as the official "I'm a hip and cool lawyer" requires a public personal of being to the left of Karl Marx no matter what you really think.  So this is the sort of ignorant analysis that seems to assume that the Supreme Court is a big legislature and that what judges are picked for is what they believe in politically.

Indeed, when judges act that way, which tends to be relatively rare with the current court, is when we get bad decisions.

In the pundit world there's piles of analysis as well that's really not much better.  We already are hearing that he's "more conservative" than Kennedy, but the evidence isn't really there. That's why I'm not really all that excited abotu Kavanaugh.  Kavanaugh, for example, is on record that he fully regards Roe v. Wade as falling within that big set of cases to which stare decisis fully applies, and frankly that doesn't make very good intellectual sense of the full application of the case is considered, although if more broadly considered its hardly ever noted that the main holding of Roe v. Wade on privacy can actually be upheld while even completely reversing its holding on abortion.

Well, more bad analysis to come, I'm quite sure.

Lex Anteinternet: Today's Event and the Supreme Court short list

Lex Anteinternet: Today's Event and the Supreme Court short list: Today, we are told, President Trump will announce his finalist for Supreme Court justice to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. I ex...

I was hoping for Amy Coney Barrett, but the pick was Brett Kavanaugh.

Like most nominees, I don't know much about him.  We'll be learning a lot more about him in the next few weeks.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

In an anticlimactic footnote to the Siege of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese Army raised the flag above the outpost that had been abandoned by the United States on July 5.

Khe Sanh bunkers

The entire affair became symbolic for many for the state of the Vietnam War. The US had occupied an interior position, much like the French had at Dien Bien Phu, and then held it against what turned out to be a giant feint in order not to suffer the same humiliating defeat that the French had earlier.  In the meantime, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive and the combined impact of everything made the NVA and VC look to be a much more potent force than they really were.  Having said that, the NVA assault on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh was an impressive feat involving moving a large number of men, including artillery, through the jungle without being detected.

The siege commenced on January 21, 1968 and ran all through the Tet Offensive and into the Spring with President Johnson ordering that the base not be allowed to fall after the base was quickly surrounded.  Air support to the surrounded base was massive.  Ground fighting on the neighboring hills was sometimes intensive. 

The 1st Cavalry advancing in Operation Pegasus.

In March of that year Operation Pegasus was commenced, over Marine Corps objection, to relieve the base, which the Marines asserted was not in need of relief.  By mid April the 1st Cavalry Division had reopened the highway and declared the base no longer surrounded.  On April 15 the Marines followed on the Army's Operation Pegasus with Operation Scotland II to clear the area around Khe Sanh. That operation continued into February 1969, but in the meantime the Marines withdrew from Khe Sanh in July, 1968.

Marine Corps memorial service for fallen American and South Vietnamese servicemen on June 19, 1968 the day the abandonment of the base commenced.

Operation Charlie, the withdrawal from the base at Khe Sanh was commenced on June 19, 1968 and was conducted at night.  Hill 689, near Khe Sanh, was occupied for a few days after Khe Sanh itself was evacuated.  On this day, the NVA occupied Khe Sanh. While the military declared the ongoing occupation of Khe Sanh pointless in the conditions that followed Tet, the Press was not kind to the US military after the occupation was learned of. Less well known is that the Khe Sanh plateau continued to be patrolled by the Marines, lending credence to the changed American view on the importance of the base, if not the overall American assessment of the strategic situation in 1967 and 1968.

Khe Sanh was actually reoccupied in 1971, a fact that's rarely noted, by the ARVN and the US in Operation Dewey Canyon II and subsequently used for a jumping off point for the ARVN in the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 offensive.  That latter offensive turned disastrous for the ARVN in Laos and the base was abandoned for good on April 6, 1971.

Transportation disasters and milestones, and a draft war. July 9, 1918.

101, officially, (it may have been 121) people were killed and 175 injured in  a train collision of two trains belonging to the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway near Nashville.  Many were black munitions workers on their way to work in Nashville.

The locomotives were actually repaired and put back into service, being retired in 1947 and 1948.

It is the worst railroad accident in American history.

Elsewhere, and more specifically in Alberta, American aviatrix Katherine Stinson made the first airmail flight in Western Canada, flying a mail sack from Edmonton to Calgary.

Stinson had been flying for six years at the time and had already set air records. Indeed, she's figured on our blog before.  She would later become an architect and worked in that profession for may years.

In other news of the day, July 9, was day two of the Cleburne County Draft War in Arkansas.  The small armed conflict involved draft resisting members of the Jehovah's Witnesses who became involved in a gunfight with local law enforcement and then fled into the rural hills, picking up other draft resistors on the way.  The Arkansas National Guard responded to search for them.  The event would end in a few days, after the loss of one life in the conflict, when the resistors surrendered.  This was one of three "draft wars" in Arkansas, which was highly rural and retained strong aspects of the Southern ruralism at the time, which would occur during World War One.

Today's Event and the Supreme Court short list

Today, we are told, President Trump will announce his finalist for Supreme Court justice to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy.

I expected, and still expect, the debate on the picks to be vile and so far they are somewhat exceeding my anticipation in that regard.  All of the names mentioned, to the extent I know anything about them (and I don't know much about them) have been excellent. This reflects the work of Republicans in the Senate and particularly Mitch McConnell, who have done a yeoman's job of finding potential Federal nominees over the past year or so who will actually apply the law.

This seems to be the one area, actually, where McConnell and Trump really are united in much.  The Federal bench has always been important to McConnell and that showed when the Senate Republicans held up President Obama's last Supreme Court nomination in a gamble that Trump would take the seat.  And so far that gamble has paid off.

It's also creating histrionics on the part who prefer to see the Supreme Court as a hyper liberal board of Lords.  And the degree to which that is the case is really apparent. Nothing a judicially conservative Supreme Court does can't be overturned legislatively in one fashion or another.  And that's the very point of those crying in their Voss Water.  The underlying loathing of conservative picks is that they might send things back to the legislatures and the people. . . and those folks just can't be trusted to impose upon themselves the progressive world view that liberal politicians want to have imposed on them, and indeed already have, by way of the Court.  Convincing five out of nine robbed individuals who are secure in lifetime appointments is one thing. . . convincing the electorate is quite another.

Personally I'm hoping for Amy Coney Barrett.  Liberals already hate her, and yet they have no real reason to do other than that she's believed to be a judicial conservative and most particularly she's a sincere practicing Catholic.  She's done such hated things as adopt two Haitian orphans, one with special needs.  So she's a woman whom fits the mold more perfectly of the post baby boom American female who doesn't see a conflict with conservative views and positions of power for working women.  The likes of people like Diane Feinstein simply can't tolerate them. . .which is why a politician like Hillary Clinton was nominated as the Democrats last Presidential candidate in spite of being deeply disliked and being a generational anachronism.

Section of 156th Depot Brigade, Camp Jackson, Columbia, S.C. July 8, 1918 copyright deposit, July 5, 1918 photograph.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, Rock Springs, Wyoming

Churches of the West: Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, Rock Spring, Wyoming

This is Our Lady of Sorrows in downtown Rock Springs, Wyoming.  The Romanesque church was built in 1932, replacing an older Catholic Church that had served the English speaking community in Rock Springs.

Badly photographed ornate entry way to Our Lady of Sorrows.

Best Post of the Week of July 1, 2018

Antidemocratic Liberals and Democratic Conservatives. The politics of Federal Court appointments

The Mexican Border . . . today.

Battle of Hamel, July 4, 1918

It was July 4, 1918.

The Mexican Election

The United States Marine Corps in World War One (and before, and beyond).

The 1st Division in World War One.

Gun Boat Diplomacy? What year is it?

The 2018 Wyoming Election. Volume Three

The Transportation Inspection. July 7, 1918.

The Transportation Inspection. July 7, 1918.

On this day in 1918, Major Osborn (left), Chief of the American Red Cross Transportation Service and Major Perkins, Red Cross Commissioner for Europe, inspected the Red Cross transportation assets in Paris France.  Keep in mind, Paris was not far from the front lines and was under occasional heavy artillery fire by long range artillery, so this was inspecting, essentially, something very near the front.

It occurs to me that I haven't expanded out on the role of the Red Cross in World War One. That's a pretty severe omission and I'll have to do it if I have time.  One thing that should be pretty obvious is that there came a point at which the American Red Cross's ambulance service was basically folded into the Army.

 C. B. Brockway in the uniform of an American officer.

Something else worth noting here is that the Red Cross ambulance service was motorized.  That was something that doesn't seem like that big of a deal to us now, but it sure was at the time.  Automobiles were new, and a minority of people, including a minority of Americans, knew how to drive them.  Driving required skills and talent, far more than driving does today, and qualified drivers were in demand.

Because the Germans doing it seemed like such a good idea? Now the Allies opt for intervening in Russia.

And Woodrow Wilson decided that the U.S. would participate in it, over the objections of Army which advised against it.

Everything about Russia during World War One has a certain pipe dream quality to it.  The Western Allies had hoped from day one that the giant nation would prove to be a vital and decisive ally. It did turn out to be a handful for the Germans, who ultimately defeated it, but the German hopes for what they had defeated and their greed meant that the fruits of that victory were never realized. 

Following Russia's collapse into civil war the Allies hoped that the situation could be restored and a new republican government would rejoin the war, a hope that was folly at best.  Ultimately that hope lead to the decision to intervene in Russian affairs, putting the Allies into the extraordinary position of fielding expeditionary forces that would deploy direction into a civil war when, at that very time, the Allies were on the verge of loosing the war themselves on the Western Front.

Perhaps it is somewhat understandable, but only somewhat.  There was really no earthly way that Russia was coming back into World War One.  Moreover, the force needed to insure a quick White Victory, which is what would have been necessary to achieve that result, just wasn't there. . . which suggests that the Allies thought the Reds weren't really as powerful in 1918 as they were.  Not that they were not challenged, to be sure.  The Whites were also powerful at that time and the Communist government had seen an uprising on July 6 and 7 from the left, in the form of an attempted seizure of the government by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.  Russia was a mess.

But the Allies, in the midst of the largest war since the Napoleonic Wars, weren't going to be able to reverse that.

Indeed, in the American Army's case, they weren't even going to be given a clear mission.

Mexico in the news again. . .and this time it was submarines. . .

Which the US complained about to Mexico in the context of its suspicion that Mexico was collaborating with the Germans in some manner concerning U-Boats in the Gulf of Mexico.

In reality, of course, German U-boots, even the quite primitive World War One variants, were quite capable of cross Atlantic operations.  The entire thing must have been the far edge of miserable for anyone on the crew, but they could do it, and without Mexican assistance.  This no doubt required refueling, but the Germans had worked out how to refuel submarines at sea quite some time prior.