How long do you keep your vehicles?

I just hate changing vehicles.

This topic comes up as somebody I know well, who must have a truck due to his line of work, has taken up the practice of trading them in when they reach about 75,000 miles.  This same practice was the one that the state and Federal government used to employ with its motor vehicle fleet and maybe it still is.

It isn't the one I employ at all.  Indeed, in the back of my mind, with at least my last two trucks, including the one I currently own, I've more or less assumed that I'd keep them as long as they ran decently.  My current one I seriously hope to keep until: 1) I can no longer drive due to the passage of time or the passage of me; or 2) electric vehicles are the norm.

Everyone in my family says this is nuts. At age 56, they maintains, I'll long outlive an 07 truck and will end up replacing it at the point at which its junk.  Indeed, they all maintain that I'll soon be putting more into the vehicle than buying a new one would cost.

Well, not yet, and on top of it I don't think that argument makes sense given the modern price of trucks, which has hit the super high level.

Indeed, that's part of my difficulty in grasping this argument.  When my father drove his trucks into the ground it probably did make sense as they never got up to 100,000 miles before they were wrecks and during their last few years they were in the shop all the time. But modern vehicles really last.  My 96 Ford F250 diesel made it up to 175,000 miles before it started to have engine problems, which it sadly did, and it started to rust away.  I'd never even had the brakes worked on the entire time I'd had it.  The current 07 Dodge 3500 is going strong at 175,000 miles.  For that matter, the 97 Dodge 1500 is at about 150,000 miles.

On Monday here I posted an item about diet, which I realize has nothing to do with vehicles, but one thing it did was to link in a post to a blog which referenced buying less stuff.  It didn't mention it in this context, but I note that as I'm continually amazed by the degree to which people are so ready to buy trucks here which are extremely expensive and yet they don't really expect them to last long term.  As most of them are purchased by way of loans, and therefore are even more expensive than the negotiated price, that makes them a major and continual expense that people seem willing to engage in.  I guess my thought, perhaps naive, is that if I spend that kind of money on a thing, it ought to really, really, last.

Of course, vehicles are rolling stock and they do not last forever.  They do wear out, or they can wear out.  But well maintained, they don't have to wear out that quickly.  The logic of frequently trading in is that way they retain their value, but the counter to that is that if you do that and are paying with a loan, you are always paying on loans.

Additionally, I never have a 4x4 that I don't end up customizing in some way, with that usually being the addition of a heavy bumper or grill guard and a tool box.  Now that I know what the situation is with differentials, in order to really have a truck outfitted the way that I want it to be, I need to swap out the open rear differential with a torsen differential and put lockers on the front axle.  A person can't, however, buy a long bed 4x4 pickup with these features, or at least not a diesel American made one.  Let alone one that is also a crew cab, as  is.  You have to add the differentials yourself.  Sinking brand new differentials into a brand new truck would be silly, let alone expensive, and for that matter new tool boxes and bumpers aren't either.

All in all, I guess, I don't get it.  I don't understand why people don't get trucks or cars of the type they really really want, and just keep them.

Headlines I wish we'd see: Commissioner of Baseball Annuls Justin Verlander's Marriage to Kate Upton As Sanction for Astro's Sign Stealing Scandal.

"Pitching for the cheaters is naughty so the pitchers must forfeit the hotty, Roy Manfred proclaims."

1917

I happened to catch this movie on opening day.  Off hand, I can't recall having ever seen a movie on opening day.

This film, opened on limited release just a few weeks ago and already subject to wide acclaim, is an English film that's expected to have a wide theater run in the U.S., making it one of a series of war pictures produced in the UK recently that have done well or are expected to do well in the U.S.  This would suggest that the widely held belief that Americans won't watch movies that aren't about themselves, or at least war pictures that aren't about Americans, is obsolete.  The recent films Dunkirk, The Darkest Hour and the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old have all done well in US releases.

This film, as its name indicates, takes place in 1917.  More specifically, the film takes place in April 1917, at which time the British were engaging in an offensive, and it is focused on two British soldiers who are dispatch runners.  In the movie's opening scenes the two young Lance Corporals (a single stripe in the English Army) are assigned the task of running an order from a General to a Major whose unit that is advancing rapidly in order to order that Major to halt his men before they are committed to an assault which areal reconnaissance has revealed will be a trap.

Running just under two hours long, this scenario sets up a tense journey for the men that I'll forgo detailing, as it would involve discussing elements of the plot that would constitute spoilers. And that's not really the purpose of our reviews here in any event. We will note that the film develops its plot very well, including doing an excellent job of character development in a fairly short period of time.

Indeed, we'll go so far as to say that this is the best World War One movie since Paths Of Glory, the epic 1957 film focusing on a real event in the French Army.  The two films are directly comparable other than that the trench scenes in both and the trench fighting scenes are remarkably well done.

If this film, this is aided by the technique of using one long shot, something rarely attempted in film but something that makes this movie uniquely personal.  As the film is a two hour long, single shot, the viewer is uniquely participating with the characters and never departs from the singular focus of the major protagonist, which is of course how people actual experience any significant events themselves.

The film is unique for a World War One film in that its not sympathetic with the Germans at all, which has tended to be the post 1950 view of the Great War.  Because it is a long shot, and because the film is focused directly on the protagonist, there wouldn't be an opportunity to do otherwise, but the film makes no attempt to do so.  Because of this, the movie has received some criticism from those who want to suggest its unduly patriotic or that it approaches the Great War too unilaterally.  That criticism fails to take into account the cinematography but frankly it also fails to take into account that the Germans in World War One were already exhibiting some of the conduct that they're uniformly criticized for in the Second World War and that such comments given World War One Germany a lot more credit than it deserves.

Concerning material details, this film is remarkably excellent.  Details of British uniforms are exact.  Trenches are, I'm informed, correctly done.  It's an amazing effort.  Particularly notable is the correct depiction of the use and nature of the British SMLE rifle of the time.  Also notable, however, may  be the correct depiction of the really slow nature of period aircraft, which is rarely accurately depicted.  A bit of a shock, from an American prospective, is the depiction of an army of the period which incorporated English blacks, as during this period the American military was strictly segregated.

We can criticize a few details and so we'll do so here.  On a large scale tactical level, during this period there would have been an effort to inform an advance element of a change of orders by air.  That isn't shown here, but it probably should have been addressed.  For those familiar with battlefield movements of the Great War of this period that sticks out.  It could have been explained easily enough as such efforts were frequently ineffective.

On another matter, in at least one scene one of the messenger soldiers turns into a sniper to engage him and in another the soldiers clear a farmstead.  Those familiar with actual message running will find this to be surprising as the delivery of the message is always paramount and messengers avoid engagement if at all possible.  In both instances the encounters seem unnecessary to the mission (a similar thing is done in Saving Private Ryan), although in the instance of the sniper it can be explained if the path is the only immediate one available.  If that's assumed, the soldiers action in engagement and the method of engagement is correct.

All in all, this is an excellent movie.

January 14, 1920. Untimely passings.

January 14

1920  The first fatal air accident to occur near Casper occurred, taking the life of pilot Bert Cole and passenger Maud Toomey.   Ms. Toomey is also the first female air fatality in Wyoming.  The very early airport in use at this time was located where the town of Evansville now sits, and a memorial to Ms. Toomey, who was a schoolteacher, is located in Evansville.  Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.

On this day, Natrona County suffered its first air fatality.

The location of this tragic accident is in Evansville, Wyoming, where the county's first air field was located.  There's a cross marking the location somewhere in Evansville, but I've never been able to find it.

On the same day, the paper was reporting on the prior days violent clashes in Germany.

Also on this day in 1920, John Francis Dodge, one of the two Dodge brothers who rose from machinist to automobile manufacturer, died from what really amounted to complications from the Spanish Flu.

John Francis Dodge.

Crude by nature, the Dodge's were somewhat of social outcasts, although their vast wealth made them important members of Detroit society none the less.  At the time of his death John Dodge was worth $100,000,000, a vast sum of money now and then.  He was survived by his third wife, Matilda and had outlived his first, Ivy. Both Ivy and Matilda were Canadians by birth.  Matilda had been  his secretary.  His second wife, Isabelle, about whom little is known, was his housekeeper and the marriage was kept secret during his lifetime.

Matilda married well twice and inherited large estates twice, going on to become the first female lieutenant governor of Michigan.  John's younger brother Horace would live only until December, 1920, also dying of complications of the Spanish Flu.  Their deaths sent their car company on the path to being sold to Chrysler in 1925.

The Treasury Department, which enforced Prohibition, was now employing chemists.

Truck Forums and the Lack of Cogent Comment

Humvee military vehicle.  They're diesels.

One of the pages on this site is the Dodge 3500 Project, about the slow motion of working on my 2007 Dodge 3500.  As people stopping in at that post will be able to see, the discussion there is the work that's slowly taking place on that truck, which is a mere thirteen years old the way I view it.  It has about 176,000 miles on it, as also noted, which doesn't seem that much to me in terms of a modern diesel vehicle.

Anyhow, one of the things I've tried to do as the project has advanced, slightly, is to learn the technical details on various things about the truck.  As I have one really old truck I had grown accustom to the really good Dodge Power Wagon Forum.  Otherwise I'm mostly familiar with the really good forum of The Society of The Military Horse.  From that I slowly picked up the idea somewhere that all forums must be like that, i.e., populated by really knowledgeable folks.

Not so much.

Indeed, my efforts to learn some technical details from forums on modern Dodge trucks was a complete failure.  Questions about such topics as the differential type (open, as it turns out) on my truck went completely unanswered.  Its become pretty clear that fishing in those waters is fishing in a pretty shallow pool.  That's probably, quite frankly, the way most forums are.  I just didn't realize it.

Anyhow, in looking up one recent item I saw a comment along the lines of "of course, diesels aren't real off road trucks".

Eh?

Every military in the world uses diesels for their vehicles, and they are very off roady.  I have no idea what the person who stated that thought was the case, but the comment is stupid.

Of course, what he may have meant is that modern "off road" 4x4 pickups aren't diesels.  But frankly, I don't get those anyhow . They're one of the odd developments in trucks that are hard to grasp in general.

Dodge 4x4 pickup of early World War Two. They were all "off road" back then.

When I was a kid, there were pickup trucks.  Most were 2x4 and some were 4x4.  Most of the 4x4s were owned by ranchers or companies that had back country work on a regular basis, but some were owned by outdoorsmen.  The belief that 4x4s required a lot more maintenance than 2x4s kept most outdoorsmen, however, from buying them.  As time went on, however, that changed and more and more outdoorsmen bought 4x4s.  At some point in the late 80s or early 90s it seemed that every pickup in this region became a 4x4.  Today, I'm surprised when I see a 2x4 truck.

Anyhow, there was no distinction at all between work trucks and trucks you used to go hunting, fishing or camping, etc., except at some point Chevrolet, at least by the 1960s, marked 2x4 trucks as camper specials.  None the less, any truck a person had was useful for any purpose a person could put a truck to, whatever that was, within its weight classification.  By the 90s at least Chrysler had introduced the "Sport" truck which seemed to mean a 1/2 ton with nicer than normal features.  But it was still a truck.

Now things have indeed changed and at least Dodge and Ford both market 4x4s that are specifically "off road".  It's weird.  Any 4x4 should be off road.  Otherwise, what's the point?

Of course they're marketed as sort of super off road.  I don't know that much about the Ford offering the Ford Raptor, but it's a 1/2 ton truck with a high horsepower engine and special off road features.  The Chrysler offering is the Dodge Power Wagon.

The current Dodge Power Wagon takes its name from the old Power Wagon which was introduced after World War Two and made all the way into the 1970s.  It was a really heavy duty truck and there was no doubt that it was intended for off road use.  But the intended use was off road working use.  People didn't buy the 6 cyl version to go hunting, fishing or camping. They were feeding cattle and putting up power lines.  They were really slow too. The later 8 cyc versions had wider use and were useful for anything that other 4x4s were,, but they were really heavy duty trucks.  Dodge is borrowing from that old cache for the name.

That truck is a short box, automatic transmission, 3/4 ton. Why a short box?

Indeed, why a short box on anything?  If you can't put a sheet of plywood in a truck, it's use is impaired.

Anyhow, both of those offerings  have special off road features and at least the Dodge has locking differentials.  I wish my 07 had them and that's part of what I need to do.  The interesting thing, however, is the development of these specialized, and expensive, 4x4 pickups designed to do what any old 4x4 was expected to do.

Paths of Glory

I just reviewed 1917 here the other day, although that review won't appear here until tomorrow, and the viewing of which caused me to recall the trench scenes of this film, Paths of Glory.

Paths of Glory is a black and white film directed by Stanley Kubrik and featuring Kirk Douglas as a French lawyer serving as an officer during the Great War.  The movie is a fictionalized account of an actual event in which French soldiers were tried for cowardice for their actions during a 1916 advance.  More than half the movie concerns their fate in French legal proceedings so the film is both a legal drama as well as a war picture.

Considered an anti war drama in typical reviews, the film contains one of the best filmed depictions of trench warfare ever made, surpassed only recently by the depictions in the English movie 1917.  The film was regarded as so critical in this regards that the French managed to put pressure on United Artists not to release the film in France for nearly twenty years.  Release in Germany and Switzerland was delayed so as to not offend the French, and the film was not released in Spain until 1986.  U.S. military establishments would not show the film.

In modern terms the film is mild as an anti war film compared to films on the Vietnam War.  And the degree to which any antiwar film is successful in conveying that message is always debatable.  At any rate, as a drama and a depiction of World War One trench warfare, the film does well.

In terms of material details, the film is a good one, accurately portraying uniforms and equipment of the French Army of the Great War.

I think I'll have a steak, rare.

Bar har har!

A  note, this is one of those threads (well actually now two combined threads) I started along time ago (in October, to be exact), and I'm just getting back around to it.

Anyhow. . . it's back on my radar, and for some amusing and not so amusing reasons.

Almost every single aspect of dietary advice that's existed in the course of my lifetime has turned out to be flat out wrong, so why would this be surprising?

A lot of health advice has to be taken with a grain, or even a bucket, of salt.  And I've tended to do that with the constant "don't eat meat" which is the deceptive morphed view of "don't eat red meat".

I've also tended to take the real advice, which I've ignored, to be don't eat fatty red meat, which is different advice actually, and as stockmen have responded to the demand, fat red meat is harder to get than it used to be anyhow.  A steak, even a prime cut, can be fat or lean.  If you order one now, unless you are specially ordering a steak in some place that's really old timey, is not going to be anywhere near as fatty as one you might have ordered in the 1970s.

Now, I'm not a dietitian, and nobody should take eating advice from me, but frankly, if your spouse would let you get by, and some will, on deer, elk, moose, antelope (particularly that) I think you could skip this entire topic.

But assuming not, you are now left with this:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

Hee hee hee.

Well, of course everyone who has a vested interest in the existing state of things is countering it. "What?  That can't be true!  I've been saying the opposite."

Well, consider this, from the NYT:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.

Of course, by this point the public's trust in dietary advice is pretty eroded anyway, which may explain why so many Americans are practitioners of the Diet Of The Week, no matter what it may be, combined with a lot of non scientific baloney about eating this or that substance not approved by the FDA for anything.  

And as I've long stated, a lot of American's dietary habits de jour are based not on science, but on our national cultural history and the sad state of our society.

Puritans, they didn't have any food hang ups, but were pretty much opposed to almost everything fun.  Modern Americans have largely dumped their theology as they prefer to believe that God personally approves of anything they do, but they've oddly kept the strong instinct to suffer.

The best dietary advice a person could give would be to grow your own food, and hunt for your own meat, to the extent you can.  That dovetails with the best health advice a person can give, which is get regular exercise. We basically ignore all of that as we want to rationalize the modern urban lifestyle we largely detest, find an explanation for the reasons we're unhappy that don't involve making any really tough or disciplined decisions, and also, oddly enough, punish ourselves in some ritual manner that makes  us miserable but also makes us feel morally superior. It's a combination of the effects of our Fourth Law of Behavior, modern conditions, and our cultures ongoing Puritanism.

This would explain the change over the years from diet to a sort of secular Jainism.  Contrary to widespread belief, Hindus can and do eat meat, but the related Jain's do not and claim not to eat anything that lives (which they do, as almost everything in a real human diet was alive at one time and you can't live on the few things, like salt, which are not).  The Jain diet is a religiously imposed one and a very odd one at that, the underlying roots of which we'll not go into, but as odd as it is, the American vegan diet that's come up in recent years is stranger yet.  It's deeply, deeply unnatural, not good for its practitioners, and bad for the environment in spades, but it allows its adulterants to suffer with a sense of misplaced moral superiority while not having to observe any of the strict moral codes such disciplines require.  By way of a more familiar example, some Christian monastic orders or individual monks also ate strict vegetarian diets or nearly vegetarian diets, as a form of fasting, but they also pray without ceasing and completely abstain from sex, something most emaciated vegans none the less would recoil from following even though its a lot more likely to bestow real virtue upon them. But then, that requires real concentration and sacrifice, not just ordering the vegan special at dinner and then lording it over your friends.

More recently yet, now armed with a scene of benighted superiority, the followers of such diets in the west have been on a full blown Cromwellian campaign to compel it on everyone else, the most recent example of which was the really absurd example of the Golden Globes serving a vegan dinner in the name of the environment.  Well, dear vegans, your diet is arguably  the most destructive one on the planet ever imagined.

Let's be blunt.  If you really want to pour the greenhouse gases into the environment, go vegan.

Let's start with some basic facts, something Americans in particular do not like interjected into their public discourse.  Beef cattle are responsible for only 2% of US greenhouse gas emissions.  That means 98% are from something else, and farming (i.e., plant farming) contributes its share to that.  And of that 2%, a fair amount of it would be there anyway.

Eh?

Yes.  A fair amount would be there anyway.

Cattle get picked on as the cattle industry has been the whipping boy of ill informed environmentalist going back at least until the 1970s.  Themes have varied, but generally a lot of urbancentrntric or relocated urbanites took up picking on the cattle industry in the west under the strange assumption that it was responsible for the decline of everything that they loved, and if it wasn't there, things would be 100% Granola Perfect.  The basic gist of the argument was, if you boiled it down, cattlemen came in and shoved out the Indians (which is not the way that happened) and put their dirty dirty cows on the range which displaced the super clean and nifty buffalo.  If the cattle were removed, all the good old days would return.

Navajo horsemen, 1904. They weren't vegans.

The big fallacy to that, of course, is that the Indians tribes who fought so hard to retain their lands (quite a few of whom now raise cattle) would require these same lily white Granolas to also remove themselves from the range in order to achieve that natural status.  That's not part of the proposal. 

Navajo sheep.

Indeed, it doesn't even begin to grasp that the wide open spaces in the West are here today as they're livestock ranges.  The degree to which people are deluded on a topic such as this is perhaps best symbolized by an article once written by a University of Wyoming professor decrying seeing cattle out of her house windows in Laramie, when in fact the reason such a person can see that is that they must in one of the newer houses on the edge of Laramie.  Building houses destroys wild lands like nothing else.

High altitude prairie.  Ranching keeps it as such.

Next to it, ironically, is farming.

I love farming, but a farmed field is not a natural field. We'll get back to that in a moment.

That's because we're not done discussing gassy cows.

As noted, only 2% of U.S. greenhouse gases derive from cattle, and much of that is due to the way they're fed out on corn.  If you don't don that, and simply eat grass fed beef, the figure drops.

It'd never drop to 0% as ungulates fart. . . including wild ungulates.

Buffalo, in this case ones that are being raised as livestock.

One of the cherished tales of the Granola set is to recount how before the millions of cows, there were millions of buffalo.  Millions.  And those millions of buffalo. . . well. . . they farted too.

It could be pointed out that there are no doubt more cattle today than there were buffalo, but there were a lot of buffalo and they were gassy. That's the way ungulates are, to a small extent.  So, even in the Granola dream, those millions of domestic ungulates, were they gone, would be replaced, in a pure state of nature, by millions of wild ungulates.

Indeed, it might be noted, cattle themselves were a wild species originally, although not in North America. They certainly were all over Europe, Asia and Africa, however.  Indeed, they still are in Africa.

Environmentalist Ernest Hemingway with a gas contributor in Africa.

This brings us around to farming.

One of the things that's become really obvious about modern Americans is that very few of them have any concept whatsoever of how food gets on their tables.  Not even remotely.  It just appears there. 

Vegans and other vegetarians seem to have the concept that agriculture exists in the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic era.  That is, a farmer goes out of his stone hut and roots in the ground with a sharp stick (note, such sticks were often sharpened and then hardened with fire, so we'll presume our super environmental neolithic farmer doesn't use flame. . . just more sticks).  Having done that, he plants his seeds by hand and waters them with a clay jug throughout the growing season.  Once that's completed, he carriers his food to market by hand, where it's sold in Free Trade Farmers' Markets.

No, that's not even close to how that happens.

Even this would be an advanced state of agriculture compared to the one that vegans and vegetarians seem to imagine exists.

Modern farming is petroleum dependent in a major way in reality.  Much more so than livestock production.  Every farm of any substantial size uses really heavy rolling equipment that consume buckets of diesel fuel and expel CO2 exhaust, among other things.  In addition to that, even watering systems simply to water crops depend quite often on gasoline or diesel engines, or electricity supplied by a power plant that may well be fossil fuel using. From planting to harvest there isn't a day that doesn't go buy that uses a lot of fuel.

And that crop doesn't get to wherever its going, either to be processed or to market, with out more fuel.  It's trucked to one place, and then shipped to another, and in the U.S. that's by truck.  When Jimmy Hoffa declared back in the 60s and 70s:

If you have it, a truck brought it

he was right.

And this assumes that you are restricting yourself to crops grown in North America.  If you are enjoying feasting on third world plantains or nuts or whatever, that came by a diesel powered ship and was grown in a place where the concern for fuel consumption was likely low and the environment even lower.

Indeed, the beauty of animal consumption is that animals feed themselves on what they eat, and you usually can't eat it.  Cattle live on grass, and you can't eat grass. Even cattle fed out on corn are eating something that humans are extremely inefficient at digesting (and frankly cattle aren't great at digesting, but which are better than  we are).   They water themselves and while cattlemen do use fuel to be sure, in much of hte US cattle are left to themselves to a surprising degree much of the year and another ungulate, horses, remain used for transportation much more than a person might imagine.

And to add to that, agriculture is a great killer.

Vegans and vegetarians like to imagine that by having that bowl of rice they've avoided hurting animals, but they're simply fooling themselves.  For one thing, every farm field has displaced natural habitat.  But for another, agriculture itself results in the death of a lot of animals simply by accident and occasionally by design.

All of which leads to this.  Veganism and vegetarianism aren't supported by your evolutionary biology.  That doesn't mean your current diet does either.  Ideally, you'd plant a garden and hunt for meat, or buy local lean meat if you can't hunt for it all.  That's what you'd do if you really were concerned about your diet.  If you aren't, chances are you are concerned about something else. With some, that's a frightened knowledge that they'll die combined with a primitive belief that day can be pushed back endlessly through ritual.  For many others, it's a lack of knowledge combined with, or even simply dominated by, a retained Puritanism that's become secular in nature and which demands that you must suffer, for which you may regard yourself as superior to others.

Really health or healthy environment?  Not so much.

Indeed this topic has been well explored by some other blogs, which were once going to be the topic of a separate blog entry here but now have been combined with this one.  One really interesting one is this one below, by the self styled "Buzzard", a young woman rancher in Kansas:

Changing Your Diet Won't Help the Environment but these 5 Changes Sure Will.

A big part of Buzzards point here has to do with greenhouse gases, which I'm only addressing here because of the claim that switching to vegan burgers or something is going to address that in any meaningful way.  This isn't a post on the climate, it's a post on diet, or more specifically meat.

Anyhow, the "5 Changes" the blogger discusses in detail are these:  1) Reduce your food waste; 2) Reduce your reliance on single use plastics; 3) Park the car and walk (or take public transportation; 4) Turn off your faucets and lights; and 5) Stop buying so much stuff.

The same blogger is pretty blunt with an additional administration of a dope slap with this one:

A Burger Won't Negate an Airplane.

I won't comment on all of those, and I think you ought to read the blog entry if you are interested.  But I'd note that the really interesting one of those is "Stop buying so much stuff".

Buying stuff is the modern American thing.  Even people who claim not to buy stuff, buy a lot of stuff.  The entire modern American economy is based on buying stuff.  Americans buy stuff just for something to do.  I  know more than one person who is cognizant of this that they'll choose working over an idle day as if they have an idle day, they'll buy stuff.  Indeed buying stuff is now so vital to the American economy that after the U.S. was hit by terrorist on September 11, 2001, politicians urged the American public to spend, so as to keep the economy rolling.  Americans themselves are routinely referred to by their leaders by the insulting term "consumers".

An economy based on stuff purchasing is sort of odd in a way.  I'm not arguing against buying stuff and indeed shopkeepers and manufacturers are depending upon the sale of things for their living, and always have. But the level of stuff consumption is something I haven't ever addressed on the blog and probably ought to just as an interesting societal matter.

The reason I haven't addressed it is that I don't have a good command on the consumer culture.  I've read widely that it started to come about in t he early 20th Century, but simply reviewing old ads and newspapers I suspect it came about at least as early as the post Civil War period.  Already by the turn of the prior century there were a lot of advertisements aimed at consumer spending during the Christmas period, for example, and Christmas Season advertising of a century ago is very familiar to what we see today.  Economists worry like crazy if people stop buying stuff, even while encouraging people to save, as if everyone quits buying stuff, the result is an economic depression.

Anyhow, the consumer culture in the U.S. is so deep that people really can't grasp the extent the extent to which they participate in it.  Even people who are the greenest of the greens usually are pretty deeply into it, they just don't realize it.  Indeed, they often express their greenism by things they bought to show you how green they are.

The point there is that even while we can disagree with Buzzard on items on her list, your diet probably isn't contributing that much to greenhouse gases unless, ironically, you are a vegan or vegetarian, as the amount of fuel needed to produce what you are eating in the modern farm economy is enormous.  

So, what to do if you really want to be a dietary steward of the environment?  Well we could add to her list with 6) plant a garden and 7) go hunting and fishing.  Or you could just make that your list and maybe add being careful about what you buy and how much of it you buy. Stop participating in a throw away society in other words, if you are.  Buy local if you can, including local foods.

I'd add a bit, before going on, that if Buzzard's blog hits a little too hard, you can find a lot of the same type of content on the twitter feed of one Sarah Mcnaughton in a very well presented and scientific way.  Mcnaughton, a young woman agriculturalist in North Dakota also has a blog, Sarah's NoDak Living, which is worth checking out.

Indeed, both of these blogs are connected into our blog feed under the agricultural heading on this site.

Anyhow, go hunting or fishing, preferably both, and plant a garden.  If you can't do those, you might, or might not, be able to get a fair amount of your meat and vegetables locally.  But don't go vegan, your DNA will hate you and it doesn't achieve anything other than to make you weak, crabby and make everyone view you like Oliver Cromwell dropping into a Christmas Party.

Oliver Cromwell.  Don't be Oliver Cromwell.

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January 13, 1920. Strife and change

German soldiers guarding the Reichstag following violent Communist demonstrations on January 13, 1920.  The troops ultimately ended up opening up on the crowd with lethal effect.

In Germany a massive demonstration in front of the Reichstag took a turn for the worse when violence erupted and troops opened fire.  Over forty people were killed.

And in Oregon ratified the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  

The New York Times, always on the right side of history, published a cartoon lampooning Robert Goddard for claiming that a rocket could make it to the moon.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This is a hard to describe recent Netflix film by the Coen brothers which lives up to their eclectic reputation.

A series of vignettes, the movie is the cinematic equivalent of a collection of short stories and is presented in that fashion.  Each vignette, set in the American West, is presented through a filmed page in a book, shown in the style of books in regards to illustrations and printing that predominated for the first half of the 20th Century.

The opening story is the one that contributes its name to the movie.  It's a send up of the old singing cowboy movies but with a plot turned on its head. Buster Scruggs, the singing cowboy, is also a cheerful misanthrope who is essentially a cartoon in character.  Amusing but overdone, the first scene is accordingly not one of the better ones in the film.

The second one, entitled Near Algodones, is much better, featuring James Franco as a would be bad man who cheats death repeatedly.  The opening of this story is improbable, but its a comedic role which somewhat serves to point out in more than one way the absurdity of spaghetti westerns.  It's well done and serves to start to revive what the first scene somewhat lost.

The third act is the extremely dark Meal Ticket.  It's frankly disturbing in content and would have been better left out of the film as it doesn't contribute to it and is very odd and disconcerting.

The fourth, All Gold Canyon, starts off as a charming study of an elderly prospector before taking no less than two Saki like plot twists that are very well done.

After that comes the best episode of the film, The Gal Who Got Rattled, which in spite of its dark and morally objectionable conclusion probably better depicts characters on the actual Oregon Trail better than any other movie or television show ever made, including its depiction of a frontier 19th Century marriage proposal.  Again, its depiction of suicide is morally objectionable, but the rest of the episode is a surprisingly accurate look at the characters of the time and in context.

The final scene, The Mortal Remains, is a purely allegorical depiction of a trip over the River Styx which I suspect a lot of viewers won't quite get.  For those who do, however it's well done.

The reputation of the Coen brothers is well established by now and this film fits right in with their prior works.  It is, as noted, difficult to review in the fashion of the films normally reviewed here as it it doesn't intend to be an accurate historical movie.  Nonetheless, in one scene it manages to go further than other movies depicting the same events and in terms of comedic effect, Near Algodones is well done in the Coen brothers style.

And now Iranian protests against its government

The Iranian people's level of trust for their own government is low and has been waning for a long time.

Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran.  And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.

The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage.  President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.

It failed.

Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life.  It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War.  The US was shown to be impotent.

Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane.  The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down.  Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion.  In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.  

Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly.  It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.

And now they've shot down their own airliner.

A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988.  Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it.  Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly.  The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time.  The Iranian government is going to change.

The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly.  Now that seems to have already eroded.  Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist.  Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed.  The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident.  And Iranians are back to protesting their government.  The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.

Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.

Blog Mirror: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: CPW: New Wolf Pack Appears in Colorado

 Michigan timber wolf, 1930s.  This must be in a controlled setting as there's a person in the background.

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: CPW: New Wolf Pack Appears in Colorado: Wolves -- our spiritual teachers (stock photo). I have a longer blog post in the works about the upcoming Colorado ballot measure on the...

This should be interesting.

It now appears nearly certain that wolves are now in northern Colorado.  I'm of two minds about it.

Indeed, I've always been of two minds about wolves.  When I was a law student I worked as a researcher for a professor who was studying the then proposed introduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park.  The following school year he kept me on in the project and we became co-authors of an article that was published as a law review article.  As a result of that I interviewed some figures who were involved on both sides of what was then a debate.  I recall the Secretary of Agriculture for the state declaring that wolves would never be introduced under his watch, a prediction that would fail within less than a year.  A wolf advocate of the time who was a big figure at the time has completely disappeared.  A Federal government figure who was very much involved and who had wolves on his thin wooden business cards is now no doubt long retired, assuming that he's even still living.

Anyhow, at the time I was in favor of wolf reintroduction, but not for the Granola way that so many were.  I figured that wolves were good for wild lands, and that was good for people who like wild lands, including hunters, and also, probably to some people's surprise, ranchers.  I figured there's be hunting of wolves when they were reestablished, which means that I thought that the claims that they'd stay in the park were absurd.

I proved to be more right than wrong.  The wolves left the park almost immediately and they can now be hunted, although that process turned out to be one that took much longer and involved much more drama and litigation than I imagined.

What I also thought about wolves, and said many times thereafter, is that wolves weren't the problem so much as the people who come with wolves, and I was also quite correct on that.

Way back then there were those I knew down in Albany County who swore that 1) wolves had never really been fully eradicated from Yellowstone and 2) that they had seen wolves in Albany County.  I was sure that #1 was probably wrong and I'm now sure it was wrong.  On #2, I'm not so sure now, although my guess is still that it was wrong.  The people I knew then who claimed to have seen wolves had a lot of outdoor experience and insisted that a wolf was unmistakable.  Having seen wolves now in Teton and Natrona Counties, I have to agree, they aren't mistakable for anything else.

So what do I think of wolves in Colorado?  Well, I guess my opinion hasn't changed that much.  My suspicion is that they'll be a pain for stockmen in a state that's rapidly going from being a Western one to a large suburb of Los Angeles in some ways, but has lots of wild left still.  That may be a good thing as a dose of what's really wild helps keep thing wild.  And a dose of reality, wolves aren't kind, may be a good thing for The Centennial State as well.

The artist here must have never actually have seen a moose.

As for the ballot initiative to introduce them?  Well, if they've introduced themselves, that ought to be avoided.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral, Billings Montana.

Churches of the West: St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral, Billings Montana...:

St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral, Billings Montana

This is St. Patrick's Cathedral in Billings Montana. The Catholic Gothic Revival Cathedral was built in 1907.

The Natural

I made a reference to this film the other day and was surprised to see that I'd never added it to our Movies In History list.  As its a great period movie, I'm correcting the omission.

Nearly anyone who reads this will have seen this movie already.  Released in 1984, the film was based on a 1952 novel by the same name, meaning that the book had taken a surprisingly long thirty years to reach the screen.  The plot surrounds a single baseball season in 1939, but the very early part of the story set in 1923 is critical to the story.  We learn, early on, that in 1923 the then 19 year old protagonist, Roy Hobbs (played by former university baseball player Robert Redford) has a chance to enter the major leagues as an absolute stand out baseball player.  On his way to his tryout as a pitcher he strikes out a Babe Ruth like figure as a demonstration, and then has his tryout disrupted by the intervention of a literal femme fatale (played by Barbara Hershey). The story picks up again in 1939 at which time Hobbs is 35 years old and has lost contact with those back home.

Much of the film is allegorical involving the struggle between good and evil, with evil personified in the form of dramatically beautiful women played by the aforementioned Barbara Hershey and a young Kim Basinger, and good likewise personified partially in female form in the character of Hobb's teenage girlfriend (Glen Close).  The remainder of the roles are all male as they make their way through the season and through a battle of good and evil metaphorically.

This is a great film and its likely the best baseball movie ever made.  It's a great American movie.

Regarding material details, having viewed it again just the other day, I was struck how accurate the details are.  Period baseball uniforms are exact, but more amazingly crowed details are incredibly well done.  The crowd looks more accurate and more in place for a 1930s vintage crowd that crowds in sports movies made in the 1930s do.  It's simply amazing.

As this is a very studied film, like all films, there are some errors in material details. But they are very minor.  Once scoreboard depicted in actual stadium, for example, is noted not to have been present in 1939.  The Star Spangled Banner is sung before an opening ball was thrown, which wasn't actually done before every game until World War Two (it was done during World War One and then discontinued and reinitiated during World War Two). But these are minor errors. All in all, the film is amazingly well done.

The best posts of the week of January 5, 2020

The best posts of the week of January 5, 2020.

The Oppressed and the Vapid

Asymmetrical War and Gross Overreaction

An Iranian American Conflict was something. . . .

Angst. A Then and Now Analysis

According to the New York Times it was Mike Pompeo who urged the targeted strike on the Iranian general. . .

Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

The Royals. M'eh