George Wuerthner as an example of American Movement Politics Senility.

Legendary, and frequently radical, civil rights leader W. E. B. Dubois who when once asked about his early sympathetic feelings for Communism stated, "Only a fool never changes his mind".  Unfortunately, few seem to have the wisdom of Dubois.

George Wuerthner is busy trying to ensure the destruction of wildlands in the United States by operating under the delusion that he's trying to save them.

That's because, for people like Wuerthner, it's always 1972.

For those who don't know who he is, Wuerthner, in his delusion, believes in kicking livestock off the public lands and that this results in them essentially being a big park.  That's because he believes that the county is inhabited like it was in 1972. . . the population must be about 250,000,000 people, outside interests don't buy ranches. . . and the ranches go on ranching on their deeded land. Truth be known, he doesn't care about those people much, so that doesn't fit in his equation.  He'd be harmless enough, but the fact that the Western Watersheds Project was formed in 1993, and he's a figure in it, means he has an annoying and dangerous public voice.  Articles written by him show up in newspapers, at least in the west.

Cattle in deep grass, for the West.

In reality, of course, what would occur if livestock were removed from the public lands is quite the opposite.  It'd kill off local ranching, vest the land in the wealthy, many of whom could block up access to public land, and it overall it would be a wildlands disaster.

But dense twits like Wuerthner, stuck in 1972 like they are, live in a fantasy land where this won't occur.

Wuerthner is 66 years of age.  That's not ancient by any means, but it puts him in the Archdruid years of the environmental movement.  If you recognize that reference, you are old enough that you may fit in it too (obviously I recognize it).  If you don't, good for you.

One of the real problems of any sort of movement is that they tend to get stuck in their founding years, and then when central concepts adopted in those years become obsolete, or false, their adherents absolutely refuse to change them.  Usually that dooms them for extinction, but if it doesn't, it can cause tremendous problems for the movements and worse yet the public.

In this case, the environmental movement really dates back to the 1960s and fully flowered in the early 1970s.  The views it adopted at that time were heavily peppered with the left wing ethos of the era.  Certain central tenants in individual branches of the movement have become absolutely fixed to the point where, ironically enough, they're anti-environmental.

Perhaps the best example is the locked position nuclear power.  The movement's view on nuclear power was always completely naive.  From the very onset, nuclear power was safer than any then available alternative and in fact it offered a way to clean energy.  It still does.  A sane environmental movement would be screaming for coal fired power plants all over the globe to be replaced with nuclear ones within a decade.  It could very easily be done.  Those nations that are the prime energy consumers on the planet all have nuclear technology.  Indeed, if somebody is really worried about climate change, the argument is to go to nuclear power and electric transportation, solving almost all of the problem overnight.  By and large, however, most larger environmental movements would rather be wrong about nuclear power than adopt such a straightforward and easy solution.

Cattle being fed in the winter. . . away from a creek bottom.  If they were buffalo, they'd be in it.

Wuerthner isn't an opponent of nuclear energy, as far as I know, but he's a hater of livestock on the public lands, a position he shares with at least one University of Wyoming law professor. The stupidity of that position is perhaps best demonstrated by an article written by that law professor in the last decade or so in which she laments seeing cattle outside of her kitchen window in Laramie, which means she lives in a house on the edge of Laramie which is likely new, as that's where the new houses are.

The idiocy of that position, and it is idiotic, is that if you see cattle in the west, those lands are at least somewhat wild.  And the transition is very well known.  If you remove the public lands from livestock use, you make the ranches non viable, they become housing subdivisions of some sort, and the wildlands are destroyed.

High country pasture, during the period of the year its grazed.  Cattle were in this pasture at the time this photograph was taken.  Places like this remain places like this due to livestock.

But to people like Wuerthner and the Western Watersheds Project it's still 1972 in a series of dry years when there was overgrazing in some spots. There never was in every spot.

And moreover, their view is weirdly devoid of historical knowledge.  It's very well known that large cottonwoods bottoms in the western United States were destroyed in the late 19th Century principally by buffalo.  Buffalo are every bit as destructive on watersheds as cattle and exhibit largely the same behavior in regard to them.  When its noted that cattle replaced buffalo, that's just what happened. The cattle replaced them. They're both big ungulates.  But buffalo are benighted, as they were here  prior to European Americans.

Working men doing work that's actually worth doing, which very little modern work actually is.  Another factor in keeping agriculture viable.

Now, in the case of buffalo the destruction of cottonwoods bottoms was brought about as they wintered in them and the Cheyenne started to as well. So there was a human factor.  But its different from any current one and it'd be largely politically incorrect to criticize the Cheyenne for that.  Indeed, it's be intellectually incorrect as well as you can't blame them for doing that with the state of knowledge then possessed by them.

Chopping ice for bulls. . . and deer.  It's been well established that the deer population in the west is dramatically larger than it was prior to the mid 20th Century as ranchers have done things like this.

But what you can do now is look at the facts and how they operate.  Ungulates are natural to the land and the land doesn't care that much if the ungulates are buffalo or cattle.

Modern ranchers, and for that matter most ranchers all the time, move cattle from pasture to pasture and place things like salt blocks out in places to require them to move. Ranchers are, on a day to day basis, much more concerned with the state of the land and watersheds than anyone else is.  So they've addressed the situation in a natural way.

Indeed, at least one African born cattle advocate, Allan Savory, has taken this to another step and argued not only are cattle that are rotated on pastures fully comparable with nature, but necessary to it, even maintaining that only livestock can reverse desertification.  Savory is hugely controversial among environmentalist for that reason who just can't accept that this could possible be correct.

Joseph Stalin.  During the 1930s a writer for The New Republic wrote to Stalin to warn him that it seemed people were doing really bad things under his watch. . . .unable to grasp that Stalin was doing really bad things under his watch.

During the 1920s a lot of the American movement left developed an admiration for Soviet Communist and kept it all the way into the 1950s and even beyond, well after it was proven that it was a bloody mess.  All kids of stupid radical ideas that came up during the 1970s remain around now and are still wreaking destruction well after both science and experience have proven them wrong.  A concern for the planet or regions of it doesn't exempt a person from this

Wuerthner is flat out wrong.  Their views are ossified.  It's time for him to retire from public life.  MeTV has plenty of 1970s vintage sitcoms on, so he should be right at home.

Friday Farming: A Hundred Years Ago: Coachella Date Trees a Hundred Years Ago

Coachella Date Trees a Hundred Years Ago

April 26th, 1919. Sgt. York brought to nation's attention, Orlando goes home, 26th Division photographed.

The Country Gentleman and The Saturday Evening Post both featured Norman Rockwell illustrations on this Saturday, April 26, 1919.

The Saturday Evening Posts would be a significant issue, as it brought Sgt. Alvin York's heroism to a national audience for the first time.  The article, entitled "The Second Elder Gives Battle" made York a national hero.

In Paris, Italian Prime Minister Orlando packed up and left as the conference would not give Italy the port city of Fiume.  That failure would doom Orlando's leadership and he would be out of office within a month.  Fiume became a free state in 1920.  It would last until 1924 when the Kingdom of Italy absorbed the city by way of a treaty which the Free State regarded as invalid.  Today the town, known as Rijeka, is the third largest city in Croatia.

Closer to home, a a "war tank" was going to arrive on Sunday in Casper.

And units of the 26th Division were photographed.

Supply Company, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division, April 26, 1919.

Company I, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division

Company F, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division.

Company M, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division

Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day, 2019

Ranch kids at work.  Not because it was take them to work day, but because they're ranch kids.

Today is National Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day for 2019.

I don't think this day is observed as much as it was, at least in the press, as it was a few years ago.  I'm not sure what that means. Times have been rather odd for the past few years and perhaps that has something to do with it, or perhaps not.

One of the great, and actually truthful, career recruiting posters.

At any rate, I have to wonder how many people even have occupations where they can really do this.  I don't, and it's not like I'm operating heavy machinery.  It just wouldn't be practicable until your kids were old enough to know more or less what you do anyway.

Not that I haven't done this on odd occasion, the most notable of which is when my son traveled with me to an argument in Tribal Court some years ago.  And they stop in from time to time for one reason or another.  And, I suspect, like all children of trial lawyers, they hear a lot of practiced debates and see their lawyer parent working from home.

Of course, they've been exposed a lot to ranch work as well, which brings me I suppose to my point. That participation is not in a "take your . . .to work", but work.

It's an odd world we live in now in which by and large our kids don't really see us work.  It's part of the transition of the Industrial Revolution and the migration of people from the rural to the urban.  And as that's occurred, work has become very self isolating.  Most people spend at least a third of their day working, usually more, five days out of seven.  In the United States, where work has a manic level of devotion, a lot of people spend more time there than that. And as they do that, they associate themselves with their coworkers, some of whom are their friends, if they are lucky, but many of whom are just people they meet at work.  

And most modern work isn't fun.  It's interesting how that well known fact.  Forbes Magazine has called the line "It's not supposed to be fun, that's why they call it work", a "Business Lie", but for many people it isn't.  Young people are counseled to find careers that they will love, but at least if people who keep statistics on it are correct, most don't.

Now, this isn't to say that some don't, and it isn't to say that the counselling is bad.  What it might be is to say that a lot of career field propaganda is just that, propaganda.  People are coaxed into "fun and exciting careers in. . . ", when they aren't all that fun or exciting.

Of course, a lot of people simply fall into a career as well, they start off to be African Underwater Ornithology Scientist but things happen and they end up the IT guy at Big Boxes Dun Be Us, Dude.  Life has always been that way, and there's not much you can really say about that.  Early planning and changes in it have long term consequences.

Which is a good reason that careers and those in them shouldn't lie about them, and why society at large shouldn't do the same and encourage misdirection. But both do.  There's the common American story that you can be whatever you want, at any age, and have it all.  None of that is true, but the first statement is closest to true.  The second and third are absolute bald faced lies.

So too are the numerous statements individual careers make about themselves.  For odd reasons, we subscribe here to the New Zealand Air Force's magazine, and I love it. For one thing, I like airplanes. But to read the issue the RNZAF is the Royal New Zealand Fun Corps and you'd be left with the impression that the RNZAF does nothing but fun and games at government expense all day long, with an occasional break to rescue kittens.

My exposure to other careers is fairly broad because one of my occupations, my day job so to speak, exposes me to a pile of other ones.  That makes it pretty plain that some careers are a lot more honest about their natures than others.  The military is semi honest, but rarely is it fully honest that its job is to kill people and break things in service of the nation.  

Rhodesian bush war era recruiting poster.  "[I]nteresting and varied career. . . "?  Well, maybe, in a way.

Oddly enough, because it receives so much criticism for its "romanticism", agriculture, particularly ranching, is extremely close to its public image.  Whether you would like doing it or not, the way cowboys are portrayed is surprisingly close to what its like to actually do the job, right down to the outdoor work in all weather, being around animals, and the low pay.  If you've seen the movie The Cowboys, you actually have a decent concept of what cowboys actually do.  Perhaps that's why nearly 100% of the adults I've found who in agriculture absolutely love it. They knew what they were getting into when they got into it.  And perhaps that's why I've also observed that a lot of young people who move off the ranch to go into other careers, come back around and back onto the ranch after their exposed to the fabrication of what other careers are like, or they work in those other careers for decades attempting to get back into what they left.

The law is notorious about lying about the nature of its career to outsiders.  Law schools like to put out the absolute nonsense that "you can do a lot of things with a law degree".  You can, as long as all of those things are practicing law.  Otherwise, a law degree is about as broad as a diesel mechanics certificate.  You can do a lot of thing with that as well, as long as they all involve diesel engines.  That's not bad if that's exactly what you expected to do, and you knew the actual nature of the work and what it entailed.

Romantic?  I've seen this actually happen.

Of course, part of what work entails involves what its like to actually experience it, and that's really hard to explain.  People like depictions of certain activities, including some of them which are in fact careers or occupations, but that doesn't mean that they would actually like to experience them.  To give a rather extreme example, I like watching what's depicted in Saving Private Ryan, but that doesn't mean I'd want to experience it.  Not really.  That's often forgotten.  People actually join the military because they've watched military films and been enthralled.  The character portrayed, for example, in Born On The Fourth Of July claimed that he joined the Vietnam era Marines after watching John Wayne films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima.  Taking that at face value, it would have been wise to recall that John Wayne was an actor, not an actual Marine, and his character, Sgt. Stryker, is killed in the film.  Indeed, there's piles of death in the film.

Lawyer researching the law.  What doesn't come across is that he may be researching a desperate cause in which his client has pinned all his hopes on this research and it looks really bad.

The same is more or less true of other professions. To use the law as an example again, watching a movie about a trial, such as The Verdict, Anatomy Of A Murder, or A Civil Action, or even A Few Good Men, may be enthralling but that doesn't really mean that you'd really enjoy the high stress of being a trial lawyer.  Maybe you would. But before you engage in it, you ought to appreciate whether you endure high stress well or not.  But it's frankly nearly impossible to appreciate that without experiencing it, and a lot of folks don't until they're in the situation.  

All of these factors have been around for men at least from the point where some fellow left his peasant village in Paderborn Westphalia and headed off to the university in some Medieval town, but I think the added factor, and difficulty, is that its now been foisted upon women.  That may sound like an odd thing to say, but since World War Two we've gone from a world in which most women worked at home, but could have some kind of job, to one where they could have careers if they wanted, to one where carers are now demanded of them.  With that has been the whole absurd Cosmopolitan line that "you can have it all", which wasn't ever true of any occupation to start with.  Every occupation, even the one that's absolutely the best for you individually, entails compromises and generations of acclimation or perhaps genetic predisposition predisposes men to that reality.  It hasn't really done that for women which means that the uploaded expectations are necessarily met with massive failure in realization.  Added to that is the several decades long abandonment of male responsibility in general which leaves many women with the choice to either occupy the traditional role of mother alone while also working, or forgo it entirely, and their burdens have been increased enormously.  At least recently, although ironically coincident with their being pushed into traditional male roles where they're often subsequently sexually exploited, there's also been a return to allowing for them to assume a more traditional role if they wish.  By the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was massive social ridicule if they wished to attempt that.

Of course, part of the problem here is that society is now so geared to this that it's almost impossible for society at large to imagine anything else.  Trades jobs go unfilled as the young are pushed away from them.  People are pushed from local jobs to ones in big cities far away.  A student loan system has been created to fund the pursuit of degrees that are known to be unlikely to result in employment, and currently its faddish in the Democratic Party to suggest that this system should be expanded into one in which the taxpayers at large will fund that on a society wide level.

So, it's take your daughters and sons to work day for 2019.  But be honest.  And kids. . . choose well.

April 25, 1919. Anzac Day, J'Accuse, Canadians return.

On this day in 1919, the French film J'Accuse was released.  

J'Accuse can legitimately be regarded as one of the very first anti war movies ever made.  The message of the film was made all the more potent by the fact that the director had used actual French soldiers for its filming while the war was still on.  Reportedly 80% of the soldier extras in the film were killed in action before the war was over.

The movie famously features the ghosts of the dead in accusation, but it also features a somewhat complicated betrayal by a love interest plot fairly typical of early films.

Also on this day, Australian soldiers marched for ANZAC Day parades in several cities, but those in Sidney were cancelled due to the Spanish Flu.  Contrary to widespread popular claim, this was not the first ANZAC Day. The official date had been established in 1916.  This was the first post war ANZAC Day.

While Empire troops were marching in Australia, they were arriving in New York on their way home to Canada as well.

Canadian officers Sir Henry Worth Thornton (president of the Canadian National Railway in civilian life) and Air Commodore Alfred Cecil Critchley arriving in New York City on the Aquitania.  Both general officers are wearing classic examples of British officer dress.

The troop ship Aquitania arrived with Canadian soldiers on their way home, greeted by at least one British dignitary.

Gen. Thornton with Sir James Benjamin Bell, Timber Comptroller for the British government.

Ranger Texas, April 25, 1919.

Ranger Texas was photographed.

Ranger was where famous western historian Walter Prescott Webb went to school, being from a nearby farm.

Earth Day, 2019

Monday, April 22, was Earth Day.  This is my belated Earth Day post.

It occurs to me that almost all of our problems in the Western world are due to assaults on nature.  But that doesn't mean what you may at first think it does.  Indeed, a lot of people who may be inclined to cheer that sentiment, at first, are primary in assaulting nature.

I'm not going to get into a big long post on one environmental topic or another.  Not at all.  But it's clear that in the Western world, we're assaulting nature and starting off with assaulting our own natures.  We are emphasizing the unnatural in innumerable ways, from diets that don't comport with our natures, to confusing chemistry with food production in frightening and developing ways, to views on nature and nature's animals that are deeply unnatural, to views on our own selves that are highly unnatural, to chemical and surgical alternations of our natural selves.

That may not seem to have much to do with Earth Day, but it does.  Do really appreciate nature, you have to be part of it.  And to be part of it, you can't deny it.

April 24, 1919. Oil Town, 130th Field Artillery arrives, Well Dressed Students

Burkburnett Texas, April 24, 1919.

On this day in 1919, Burkburnett Texas got a formal portrait.  Seems like the oilfield was a bit close.

Officers of the 130th.  The officer on the left, as viewed, is carrying a sidearm with that sidearm being a revolver, probably one of the two M1917 revolver types issued during World War One.  Why he's under arms is unclear, unless of course the revolver is one that he owns, in which case it wouldn't have been a M1917.  He's also wearing private purchase "trench boots", high leather boots, rather than the official issue field boots.  Private purchase boots were common for officers.  The officer next to him wears the regulation leather puttees that were common for artillerymen.

The 130th Field Artillery, part of the 35th Division and an artillery unit made up of Kansas National Guardsmen, arrived in New York on April 23 aboard the Mobile.  the Bain News Service published its photographs of the unit on April 24.

The student staff of the Wyoming Student was photographed for this issue of their paper.  

The Wyoming Student was the paper that became The Branding Iron, the student newspaper today and for many years.  The presentation was quite a bit different, with the presentation both then and now being pretty good.  What surprised me about this issue, and why I put it up, was the high standard of dress exhibited by the student staff.  I don't think this would be repeated in a paper today, as I don't think you could find that many young men who owned suits.  Quite a change in a century.

Blog Mirror: HISTORY OF THE FIELD WATCH

HISTORY OF THE FIELD WATCH

April 22, 1919. Homecomings and mustering out.

363d Infantry upon their return to California.

Final review of the 26th Division, Camp Devin, Massachusetts.

312th Infantry passing in review.

April 21, 1919. Des Moines river front, Red Cross councils, Victory Loan Drive.

Des Moines, Iowa riverfront.  April 21, 1919.

Officers and War Council of the American Red Cross, including President Wilson and former President Taft.

President Wilson was photographed with Red Cross dignitaries, including former President Taft, on this day in 1919.  Most of the men photographed were wearing frock coats, which remained full daily formal wear at that time (they weren't the equivalent of tuxedos) even as Edwardian suits were coming in.  The latter were regarded as less formal.

American hospital ward in France, April 21, 1919.

Of course, a lot of men were still in France.

American engineers in France.

Some of the men back were participating in a big Victory Loan drive which was kicking off in earnest on this Monday.

Victory Loan Parade, Seattle Washington.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the East: Notre Dame de Paris, Paris France

Churches of the East: Notre Dame de Paris, Paris France

Notre Dame de Paris, Paris France