Presidents Day

Today is Presidents Day, a Federal Holiday which merged the birthdays of the generally acknowledged two greatest Presidents in U.S. history, Presidents Washington and Lincoln.  Indeed, it's hard to find any who compare to them in any fashion.

It's also a holiday that mostly isn't.  Most people in the US don't get it off as ignoring holidays of all kinds has become an American thing.  People don't take their vacations and they don't take off most of the civil holidays.

Christopher Columbus, who was added to the US civil holiday list when the Federal Government basically wanted to grant that Italian Americans were part of the nation in full.  My prediction is that he'll come back off the civil holiday list in the near future.

Indeed, some of the civil holidays have now faded into obscurity or even controversy.  The US recognizes ten Federal Holidays, three of which are actually religious holidays that are deeply ingrained in our culture, those being Christmas, New Years and Thanksgiving.*  The other Federal Holidays are Martin Luther King Day (Equality Day in Wyoming), Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day.  In at least my experience, people get all of the holidays off that were originally religious ones, but of the others, they only get Independence Day off as a rule.  Quite a few law offices, FWIW, do get Veterans Day off recently.  Columbus Day is not only rarely observed as a civil holiday anymore, it actually sparks protests by Native Americans or people who claim to support Native Americans.

The barely remembered President Millard Fillmore, whom nobody has proposed giving his own day.

Lincoln and Washington, for their part, were really great men, which doesn't make them perfect.  When this day was renamed and made into a single holiday it probably should have retained both of their names, such as in Washington-Lincoln Day.  A day named Presidents Day cheapens the day by lumping all of the Presidents together and thereby bringing along all the baggage that is associated with the office.

Jimmy Carter, who is a really nice guy, but who was a really ineffective President.

Of course, while not knowing it for sure, I suspect that part of the reason the day was renamed and collectively grouped is that, as time goes on, various people regard other Presidents as sufficiently great to merit their own day. Theodore Roosevelt is regarded as a great President by many, although he never faced the sets of problems that Washington and Jefferson did.  Some regard his cousin Franklin Roosevelt as a great President, and FDR did man the helm during the Great Depression and most of World War Two, troubling times to say the least.  In recent years I've heard mention of Ronald Reagan, who again never faced crises like this, but who did bring to an end the period of frightening inflation and whose strategy in regard to the Soviet Union helped bring it to an end.  At least Gutzon Borglum thought Thomas Jefferson sufficiently great to include both him, and Theodore Roosevelt, in his masterpiece at Mount Rushmore.

All of which probably should serve to remind us that all of our Presidents have been men, as in human beings, and we've had our share of duds.  Moreover, they were all flawed in various ways, some more so than others.  Latter day critics and hagiographers should consider that before being too laudatory or condemnatory.

Jefferson at age 78.

Washington, like his Mount Rushmore fellow, kept slaves.  Both men appear to have realized it was morally wrong, but they were sufficiently weak in character to be unable to free their desire to retain their wealth from participating in what they knew to be a moral travesty.  Washington only freed his slaves upon his death.  Jefferson didn't even do that, and as we know, his relationship with one of his female slaves was deeply weird.  

Black Hawk.

People rarely throw stones at tragic Lincoln, but I suspect its only a matter of time.  He was a militia officer during the Black Hawk War which puts him in the same camp as the vast majority of Americans of his time in being comfortable with the conquering of the continent from its native peoples and the basic destruction of their culture.  Endless such examples could be found.

Andrew Johnson, the first of three American Presidents to be impeached. . .and the only one to hold that distinction until quite recently.

And in this day in our own history, in which national politics are in a period of deep stress and extreme polarization, it's easy to forget that lots of people absolutely detested prior Presidents and that this isn't unique to our own era.

Washington was reviled while he was in office by a section of the population.  Jefferson had more than a few critics.  Lincoln was so unpopular with thirteen southern states that they attempted to leave the Union and pitched the country into the worst war of its history, something that hasn't come close to being repeated since.  Quite a few people thought Theodore Roosevelt a really dangerous radical and more than a few inside the Republican hierarchy thought he was nuts.  Frankly Roosevelt was initially widely distrusted by many Republicans. And I can personally recall Reagan being detested among the college set when I was in college.

Indeed, part of the reason I think the recent shock at the acrimony that now exists in politics is around is that people have forgotten that the periods of more or less decent respectful behavior in politics are interrupted by periods of the opposite.  In our own case, the long shadow of World War Two and the immediate sorting out of the early Cold War operated to keep the lid on extremism for a long time.  By the late 1950s the GOP wanted the country to forget that it isolationism had contributed to the onset of World War Two and the Democrats wanted people to forget that a lot of the accusations levied at it in the McCarthy era about Democratic administrations being penetrated by Soviet spies were correct.  Both parties agreed on a lot in that period out of necessity.

That started to unravel in the 1960s but even as late as the 1990s there were still a lot of older politicians around who retained roots in that period.  There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.  Now, the conservative Democrats don't exist and have been basically driven out of the party and the GOP is in a struggle between a conservative branch and populist branch.  Politics started getting weird during the Clinton Administration and they seemingly have become more strained with each election.

Which may mean that this holiday can serve to remind us that the period of acrimony will end.

That is, if anyone actually observes the day.

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*Contrary to what Americans believe, other nations don't recognize many more civil holidays than we do.  The United Kingdom recognizes fewer, there being eight, and France one more, eleven.

Of interest France, which is often noted as being "secular", includes four religious holidays on that calendar, those being Christmas, Ascension, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and All Saints Day.  The UK effectively includes three those being Christmas, Boxing Day and Easter Monday.

Railhead: Former Chicago & Northwester Depot, Lander Wyoming...

Railhead: Former Chicago & Northwester Depot, Lander Wyoming...:

Former Chicago & Northwester Depot, Lander Wyoming.

Up until now, I've somehow managed to miss putting up a photograph of this former Chicago & Northwestern Depot in Lander, Wyoming, which now serves as the Lander Chamber of Commerce building.  That may be because, as these photos suggest, downtown Lander, in spite of Lander being a small town, is pretty crowded in some ways and I missed the depot early on, and had a hard time catching it in a photographic state later.

Indeed, I never really did catch it in an ideal state to be photographed.

Lander was the western most stop on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad.  The line sometimes called itself the "Cowboy Line" and this lent itself to the slogan "where the rails end, the trails begin".  In 1973 the railroad abandoned the stretch of the line between Riverton and Lander, and since then of course it's ceased operation entirely.  The railroad, which like many railroads, was the product of mergers and acquisitions and was doing that right up to the late 1960s when its fortunes began to change.



In Wyoming its line ran astride the Burlington Northern's in many locations but it alone ran on to Lander.  Starting in the early 70s, it began to contract in Wyoming and then pulled out altogether.  The Union Pacific purchased its assets at some point, although its now the case that all of its old rail has been pulled.  Indeed, unless you know that the CNW had once run to Lander, you wouldn't know that Lander had once had rail service at all, let alone that it had it as far back as 1906.

Giving up on the print edition

When the local paper moved to a location 150 miles away for printing, I knew that there's be delivery disruptions. . .

frequently.

The paper insisted they'd be rare.  But that was optomistic.

This winter has proven me quite correct.  There's been a lot of days when the paper simply didn't make it here.

And if it didn't make it here, I can only imagine what it must be like in areas to the north of here.  After all, there's more or less a straight shot between the city of publication and the city, ours, whose name appears on their masthead.

And its become very expensive.

As a subscriber, I'm entitled to use their on line version, but I haven't liked it. Or I thought I didn't.

But then I learned just the other day, from a friend who only subscribes to the on line version and reads it on an Ipad, that in actually a setting allowed it to appear larger.

Well, that version gets here reliably, electronically, every day.

And its cheaper.

So, with some reluctance, I'm going to go with that next time my subscription comes up.

Which frankly seems to me to make the paper less viable long term.  But with the expense, and frequent road closures, well. . .

Blog Mirror: " 'Shocking' Results When WWI Helmets Were Compared to Modern Military Designs

WWI helmets protect against shock waves just as well as modern design. French Adrian helmet suggests simple geometry may save brains from overhead blasts.

February 16, 1920. Reviews and Troubles.

General Pershing reviewing troops at Jackson Barracks, February 16, 1920.

On this day in 1920, Columbia joined the League of Nations, Armenia made a statement to the League in Paris that it was ready to enter into negotiations to secure its borders, and the US and the European powers went into a spat about Yugoslavia in which the US threatened to back out of Europe entirely.

Cardinal Patrick O'Donnell

In Ireland, where there was no peace but low grade guerrilla war, there were now 41,000 British troops serving in the country, up from 25,000 prior to the war.  Bishop Charles McHugh of Derry accused the British of "military despotism", Bishop Thomas O'Doherty of Clonfert referred to British rule as a "regime of militarism" and Bishop, later Cardinal, Patrick O'Donnell stated that an "atmosphere of war and blood coupled with resentment, and the indignities of military rule, was in some danger of endangering wrong notions in regard to human life."

The statements by the Bishops was significant in that the struggle between the Irish and the English had a strong confessional based to it.  The Bishops weighing in lent support to the common Irish people's distress that that the British were treating them as occupied people and and unfairly.

Churches of the West: Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church

Churches of the West: Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian be...:

Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church.

I debated on whether to put this entry here or on our companion blog, Lex Anteinternet.  In the end, I decided to put it up here first and then link it over. This will be one of a couple of posts of this type which explore changes, this one with a local expression, that have bigger implications.

When we started this blog, some of the first entries here were on churches in downtown Casper.  These included the First Presbyterian Church and the First Baptist Church, with buildings dating to 1913 and 1949 respectively.  First Baptist, it should be noted, has occupied their present location, if not their present church, for a century.

Indeed, while I wasn't able to get it to ever upload, I have somewhere a video of the centennial of the First Presbyterian Church from 2013, featuring, as a church that originally had a heavy Scots representation ought to, a bagpipe band.  Our original entry on that church building is right below:

First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming

This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park.

The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.

Well, since that centennial, First Presbyterian has been going through a constant set of changes, as noted in our entry here:

Grace Reformed at City Park, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming

This isn't a new addition to the roll of churches here, but rather news about one of them.  We formerly posted on this church here some time ago:

Churches of the West: First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming: This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of whi...

People who have followed it would be aware that the Presbyterian churches in the United States are undergoing a period of rift, and this church has reflected that.  The Presbyterian Church, starting in the 1980s, saw conflict develop between liberal and more conservative elements within it which lead to the formation of the "moderate conservative" EPC.  As I'm not greatly familiar with this, I'll only note that the EPC is associated with "New School Presbyterianism" rather than "Old School" and it has adopted the motto  "In Essentials, Unity; In Non-Essentials, Liberty; In All Things, Charity. Truth in Love.".

The change in name here is confusing to an outsider in that this church is a member of the EPC, but it's no longer using its original name.  As it just passed the centennial of its construction, that's a bit unfortunate in some ways. 

We'd also note that the sought set of stairs is now chained off.  We're not sure why, but those stairs must no longer be used for access.

The changes apparently didn't serve to arrest whatever was going on, as there's a sign out in front of the old First Presbyterian, later Grace Reformed, that starting on February 23, it'll be City Park Church.

City Park Church, it turns out, is the name that the congregation that presently occupies another nearby church, First Baptist Church, will call its new church building, which is actually a much older building than the one it now occupies, which is depicted here:

First Baptist Church, Casper Wyoming

This is the First Baptist Church in Casper, Wyoming. It's one of the Downtown churches in Casper, in an area that sees approximately one church per block for a several block area.

This particular church was built in 1949, and sits on the same block as Our Savior's Lutheran Church.

What's going on?

Well, it's hard to say from the outside, which we are, but what is pretty clear is that the rifts in the Presbyterian Church broke out, in some form, in the city's oldest Presbyterian Church to the point where it ended up changing its name, and then either moving out of its large church, and accompanying grounds, or closing altogether.  I've never been in the building but I'm told that its basement looked rough a couple of years ago and perhaps the current congregation has other plans or the grounds and church are just too much for it.  At any rate, the 1949 vintage building that First Baptist occupies is apparently a bit too small for its needs and it had taken the opportunity to acquire and relocate into the older, but larger, church.  It can't help but be noted that both churches have pretty large outbuildings as well. Also, while they are both downtown, the 1913 building is one of the three very centrally located old downtown Casper churches, so if church buildings have pride of place, the Baptist congregation is moving into a location which has a little bit more of one.

While it will be dealt with more in another spot, or perhaps on Lex Anteinternet, the entire thing would seem to be potentially emblematic of the loss that Christian churches that have undergone a rift like the Presbyterian Church in the United States has sustained when they openly split between liberal and conservative camps.  The Presbyterian Church was traditionally a fairly conservative church, albeit with theology that was quite radical at the time of its creation.  In recent years some branches of that church have kept their conservatism while others have not and there's been an open split.  As noted elsewhere this has lead in part to a defection from those churches in a lot of localities, and a person has to wonder if something like that may have happened here, as well as wondering if the obvious fact that a split has occurred would naturally lead to a reduction in the congregation as some of its members went with the other side.  We've noted here before that the Anglican Community locally not only has its two Episcopal Churches in town, but that there are also two additional Anglican Churches of a much more theologically conservative bent, both of which are outside of the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming.

A person can't really opine, from the outside, if something like this is "sad" or not, but it's certainly a remarkable event.  We've noted church buildings that have changed denominations of use before, but this is the first one where we've actually witnessed it.  And in this case, the departing denomination had occupied their building for a century.

Poster Saturday: An Heroic Sacrifice

February 14, 1920. A Sober Valentine's Day.

Zintkala Nuni

Zintkala Nuni, who was found as an orphaned infant on the bloody grounds of Wounded Knee died of the flu contracted from her husband on this day in 1920.

Her story is uniformly tragic.

She was found by an Army burial detail still tied to the back of her dead mother.  She was raised at first by members of her tribe, who named her "Lost Bird", but was soon taken into the home of Gen. Leonard Wright Colby who referred to her, at first, as a "curio" of the massacre.  Colby and his wife Clara Bewick Cody adopted her in 1891, with Clara, a suffragette and publisher of Women's Tribune principally raising her.

When she was five, her adoptive father abandoned Clara and Zintkala and married Zintkala's nanny, thereafter moving to Beatrice, Nebraska.  Her childhood was rough as an Indian child raised among the white privileged.  Like many Indian she was educated in Indian boarding schools for part of the time, in part because Clara was so busy.  At age 17 the rebellious Zintkala was sent to live with Gen. Colby and became pregnant soon thereafter.  The father of her child is unknown but some historians suspect Colby of sexual abuse of her.  After she became pregnant Colby committed her to a reformatory for unwed mothers, where the child was born stillborn.

She then returned to Clara's home and married, leaving her husband after a few weeks of marriage and after having contracted syphilis from her husband.  The Spanish Flu ultimately brought about her death.

On the same day Konstantin Konstantinovich Mamontov, former Imperial Russian General and then serving as a White Russian General, a Don Cossack, died of typhus at age 50.

Konstantin Mamontov

And in Chicago, the League of Women's Voters was founded.

Friday Farming: February Fields

February Fields

February 13, 1920. Leagues Founded. Leagues Joined. Leagues Not Joined.

On this day in 1920, the National Negro Leagues were founded and professional black baseball was launched.  Black baseball teams already existed at the time, but the NNL was the first association of them to last for more than a year, and hence some stability was brought to the African American leagues in an era in which segregation kept players out of major league baseball otherwise.  The effort was lead by Rube Foster, owner and coach of the Chicago American Giants.

Rube Foster

Foster would serve as president of the league but suffered from a near fatal asphyxiation from a gas lead in 1925 from which he never recovered.  He became increasingly erratic thereafter and died in 1930, after which the league, suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, disbanded.  A  new one would be formed several years later.

On the same day Switzerland was admitted as a neutral member of the League of Nations.  And in the US Robert Lansing, Wilson's Secretary of State, was effectively terminated by Woodrow Wilson.

Robert Lansing

Lansing had fallen increasingly out of favor with President Wilson since the end of World War One.  Lansing did not regard the League of Nations as being vital to U.S. interests, in contrast to President Wilson.  And he called the cabinet together several times for consultations during Wilson's absence, and further urged the Vice President to assume the duties of the President during his illness, which Wilson regarded as disloyal.

Both Nichols and UW fought to keep the records pertaining to her firing as the President of U.S. confidential. . .

but the Court ordered them opened. 

They served to be embarrassing, in part as Nichols wasn't made aware of them while they were going on and couldn't contest them.  Nothing horrific, but simply allegations of abrasive behavior, which might be untrue.  Nonetheless, the Press fought for their release, they spread it around.

Since then they've been complaining that the news that they spread around, which she didn't want released, is an awful thing as she couldn't contest it. She couldn't, but now she has to defend her reputation in the public sphere, to the extent anyone cares about it now, which is pretty hard to do.

And today the press is running a story that UW spent $42,000, which really isn't all that much to hire a competent attorney to takes this on, as they did, fighting the release. Presumably the press will also report on how much it spent to drag the story out in the public.  All in all, I'm surprised by how low the legal fees were, but that probably isn't the point of the stories, which don't grasp how expensive and difficult legal work really is.

Something is simply amiss here.

Risk. Coronavirus, Influenza, and Other Scary and Not Scary Things.

Gasoline Alley, February 9, 1920.  In 1920 there was a great deal of concern about the revival of the prior two years horrific flu epidemic.

Let me by start off by noting that I'm not saying that the Corona Virus is just a bogus scare.  It might turn into a true human disaster.

We don't know that yet.

It might, but it might not.  It probably actually won't.

None of which is a comfort to you if you are dying from it.

According to some statistics that are probably now completely obsolete as they change every day, there have been 37,592 confirmed cases in the Coronavirus, almost all of them in China.  814 people have died (more than that as the death toll reached 100 in one day this past week, and these figures are from January).  2,920 people have recovered from the virus after having it. Add that up and it tells us that most of the people who have been infected are infected right now.

Scary?

Well, last flu season 45,000,000 Americans were infected by the flu virus, of which 61,000 died.  Over 800,000 were hospitalized. Last year was a really bad year for the flu, we'd note, and the number of Americans who died from it were about double the norm.  So far, this year, between 21,000,000 and 30,000,000 Americans have come down with the flu, of which about 30,000 have died.

This, we would note, places the current flu season in the category of being a bad one. February is the worst month for the flu, normally, and we already have seen a year which would be more or less average for infection and death.

Which brings me to my point.

Yes, people worry about the flu, but not like they do strange new exotic viruses.  

But the flu is a real killer.

The flu killed millions in a pandemic that we've discussed here, which raged across the globe killing tens of millions just a century ago. That pandemic still isn't understood very well, and it may never be.  But if you are reading this today, you have DNA from that flu virus in you.  Every living human being, save perhaps those who live in truly remote regions where it never touched, does.  Today, in fact, the same strain still exists, in closely mutated form, and will make you sick. But it won't kill you.

Sooner or later there will be something like the 1918-19 Flu again, most probably.  Perhaps we've developed our medical technology so far that this won't occur, but it probably will.  And with the larger human population of today, it'll be every bit as bad, probably, as the 1918-19 Pandemic was.  Maybe worse.

But if you were a betting medical man, the bet would be that it will be the flu. . . not Coronavirus, SARS or Ebola or any of the other viruses that the news media and the general public like to freak out about.

Indeed, while the scientific memory of the 18-19 Flu remains very strong, and causes the annual focus on the developing strain in the medical community, the scientific knowledge of the American public has bizarrely declined in recent decades to the point where while we now have vaccines that  can address it, people will forgo having themselves or their children vaccinated or even treated because they are ignorant of science.  Just this past week a four year old child died because his ignorant mother took advice from an Anti Vaccination Facebook group about treating him with Tamilflu.  She's a moron.  They're idiots.  They are culpable in his death. But such things are now common in the US now, while also running around like chickens with our heads cut off about new viruses also is.

Sailor and Red Cross nurse at the site of a munitions plant explosion, October 5, 1918, wearing mask for protection against the flu.

Indeed, the ability to calculate risk is a really interesting topic, and the topic of infectious disease, and health in general, gives many such examples.

Humans, in their long history, have battled with many killer diseases.  Interestingly, in earlier eras, while these diseases did scare us, rightfully, we often carried on carrying on in the face of a massive death toll anyhow.  This is so much the case than modern historians now like to assert, falsely, that the news of an outbreak was suppressed.

This is very much the case with the 18-19 flu.  It was bad, and communities did end up closing schools and churches, but for the most part people carried on to a remarkable degree.  Now you hear all the time that the news was suppressed in the press.  It most definitely wasn't.  It was front page news the entire time, including the daily death toll in the community.  People very much knew what was going on and just how bad it was.

Diseases like smallpox provide another example.  Smallpox plagued humans for centuries and people worried greatly about it, but for the most part they carried on enduring risks we would not if faced with a similar disease today.  In really desperate situations people would inoculate themselves or have themselves inoculated, risky as it involved a live vaccine, but that's because they were living and working in conditions where they couldn't avoid the disease.

American with smallpox, 1912.

The only disease that's really been like that in modern times has been the flu.  It visits us every year, and some years its really bad.  We know what we can do about it, but we don't worry all that much about it really, even though it remains a first rate killer.

Instead we worry about the exotic.

In recent years the first disease we really freaked out about was AIDS.  AIDS is a horrific disease, but it's also largely behaviorally based.  During the height of the freaking out about it there were suggestions that it was going to become airborne or the like.  There was never any chance of that. Rather, it was always a sexually transmitted disease, of more than one strain.  In the Western world the overwhelming majority of individuals who contracted it and still do, do so through homosexual sex.  In Africa, where the strain is different, the overwhelming majority of people who contract it do so through heterosexual sex.  There are definitely other ways it has been transmitted, but the key to it was sex.  It's a sexually transmitted disease. As a sexually transmitted disease, it's one whose mode of transmission is an automatic limiter and it was never going to be as deadly as the flu in any one year or even close to being.

This is the case, we'd note, with all sexually transmitted diseases, all of which have increased in recent years as sexual conduct has become less and less governed by common sense, morality and science.  People are bad at calculating risk.

Indeed, diseases provide interesting examples about the miscalculation of risks of all sorts.  During the height of the AIDS epidemic the common advice for members of the demographic most threatened with it was to employ condoms, which given the failure rate of the same is really a poor calculation of risk.  The obvious recommendation that could be made that would have completely avoided the risk was rarely given.  "Avoid sex" or at least "avoid sex with people you know with certainty not to be infected" wasn't the common advice.

The flip-side of this is provided by the decades running advice on avoiding "red meat" out of cancer and other health concerns.  In reality, the danger posed by red meat is very small, statistically.  Abstaining from meat of all types is, on the other hand, universally dangerous to people who practice it, requiring that such persons go to great lengths to find artificial substitutes for the things they would have acquired from meat.  And yet, because of this marginal risk, people abstain from meat and chose instead to incur greater health risks in the exchange.

Interesting examples of poor calculation of risks are provided by smoking and drinking as well.  Drinking, as it has an interesting mixed history, is one we'll look at first.

Alcohol poses very real risks to those who consume it, which has been known for a long time. Alcohol itself is a poison.  Simply drinking too much alcohol in a single setting will kill you.  However, we also know that human beings have a genetically developed tolerance for the poison up to a certain level, in most, but not all, populations.  That tells us, from an evolutionary biological prospective, that at some point human beings developed a tolerance for something that's a manufactured poison, for some reason.  That's downright odd.

The reason for it initially seems to be that primitive beer was a food source.  Liquid bread, basically.  As grains aren't capable of being harvested around the calendar, beer was a way to keep it.  Early beers were flat and probably heavy duty, sort of like Guinness Stout, basically.  Every grain growing cultures seems to have developed them.  Even early on, however, the intoxication aspect of it was known, which is reflected in graffiti in huts left by the builders of the pyramids.

Additionally, brewing beer provided a safer liquid to drink than water in many places, indeed darned near all places, that routinely brewed it.  In a very primitive world water was basically safe to drink, but as soon as there were sufficient people and sufficient domestic animals belonging to those people, that changed.  Water from early times up through the dawn of the 20th Century was often pretty darned dangerous.

People debate on this a bit, but basically the attention required to brew beer, or to vint wine, in and of itself, was sufficient to make it safe for consumption. So in a way, as some people like to argue, the process, rather than the alcohol, made it safe.  Others say, no, the alcohol did it.  No matter, which ever did it, it was safe to drink and was drank in many areas in gigantic quantities year around.  Medieval European farm workers, for examples, drank liters of beer per day.  Scandinavians in the Middle Ages started the day off with hot beer.

And while the Middle Ages were very full of beer and wine, European cultures continued a really heavy alcohol consumption up through the 1950s.  It's really only after that it started to drop off, and for much of the original safe drink water concern reason.

But that didn't mean that Middle Ages Brew was 100% good for you.  It meant the water was riskier.

In modern terms, now that the threat of the water is over, the risk calculation has really changed.  Physicians debate it but alcohol consumption is somewhere between 100% risky to some degree to okay if done very moderately.  Most drinkers who are more than casual drinkers exceed the recommended consumption rates routinely.  There are some known health benefits to drinking, as is often cited, but as often pointed out, they're marginal.  People make the risk calculation today, but frankly they probably, much like the condom example given above, err on the side of the risk, rather than the safe approach.

Alcohol isn't the only drug like this, by the way.  Opium poppies were first used to season bread by Medieval Italians specifically because their lives were so hard and painful it dulled their wits.  That's a hard thing to accept but it was the case.  So it was like alcohol in a way.  Having somewhat dulled wits is a bad deal, but the risk calculation to overcome the pain was deemed worth it.  Modern poppy seed bread isn't made with opium poppies today and the risks associated with opium in any form grossly exceed a casual use such as that.

Coca leaves in the Andes actually served a similar function for natives living at  high altitudes. While their physical morphology actually has evolved to endure high altitude living, it's still so problematic that adults at one time spent a lot of the day chewing on coca just to have dulled wits and therefore not endure the pain of daily living the same way.  In modern times, however, the drugs that stem from coca are far riskier to use for any purpose than any calculation of risk would support.

Tobacco use, and soon marijuana use, travel the same path. Tobacco was claimed to have benefits at one time but it never really did.  Marijuana use will prove to be the same.  They're risky and their users grossly underestimate the very well known risk associated with them.

Indeed, this takes us back to the vaccination topic. Are there any risks at all in being vaccinated for an infectious disease?  Well, yes, but not the ones that are promoted by people whose claim to fame is having been a Playboy Photographic Prostitute.  Some people do get sick from vaccinations, and indeed I'm one of them, having been put in the hospital due to an Army vaccination for yellow fever. It turned out that I was allergic to one of the constituents.  And I've actually seen a person come down with a mild case of smallpox due to an Army vaccination, which must have meant that there was a little live vaccine in the vaccine we received and he hadn't been previously inoculated.

But those are rare examples and the risk run that a person has a reaction of that type are much lower than the risk posed by not getting the vaccination.  Yellow Fever is really bad, and so is a full case of smallpox.

All which gets back to risk.  People are bad at calculating it.  Everyone runs risks every day, but people chose to freak out about the small risks such as coronavirus suddenly being everywhere or eating red meat, and forgo worrying about the ones they are seemingly acclimated to, like the flu.

Meanwhile the Irish are going to the polls on February 8.

According to the Irish Times, 70% of the Irish are wanting a "change" and feel the country is going in the wrong direction.

D'uh.

Ireland, ever since the "Celtic Tiger" economic era, slowly at first, and now rapidly, has been busy changing itself from a country that was really culturally distinct to a lesser version of England.  That's a radical change, but like most changes, people feel they want the change, find it dissatisfying for which the answer is more change.

According to the Times, Fianna Fail now has a small edge over Fine Gael which would mean that Taoiseach Varadkar would be on his way out.  Varadkar has a track record for going back on at least one major policy matter as a candidate and can claim to being responsible for a lot of the legislative changes in recent years.  Fine Gael itself started off as an Irish Christian Democratic Party which leaned to the right, sometimes pretty strongly, but can now be looked up on as just another European social party (social, not socialist).  It deserves to lose this election.

Fianna Fail is the old Irish Republican Party and is a catch all party.  Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail share the same position on the European Union, which the Irish have been eager to please in recent years, so how much of a change FF would bring over FG is difficult to discern.  Sinn Finn, the party associated with the Irish Republican Army, is trailing third.

As Ireland has a parliamentary form of government there are a multiplicity of parties, but none of them poll as well as FF, FG or SF, all of which have been around for a long time, and therefore Ireland suffers from the same sameness of political parties that the United States does.  Disgust with this situation, in part, lead to the formation of a new Irish political party, Aontu, which is actually Irish rather than the WannaBeEuropeanCentristParty that FF and FG now are.  That party was formed just a year ago but already has won some local seats and has one member in the Dail.  It'll be interesting to see where it goes in the future.

As an interesting element of this, both FF and FG have been backing a plan to raise the Irish retirement age to 68 from the current 66. This is interesting in that it already has positions that are much broader than just dissatisfaction with Ireland's direction in recent years.  It'll draw the typical "progressive" criticism that progressivism is on the right side of history always (wow, please advert your eyes from progressive support of prohibition. . .and Stalin), but it's unique and thinking.

January 23, 2020

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And the results were SF, 24.5%, FF, 22% and FG 21%.

That's regarded as a big victory for Sinn Finn, but nobody has sufficient seats in the Dail to form a government.  Prior to the election, the other two Irish parties that are well represented in the Dail had stated that they'd not form a coalition with Sinn Finn, so nobody is quite certain what will happen now.

February 9, 2020

February 9, 1920. Knowles and Spiker Say Yes, Hoover Says No, Senate Reconsiders, Riots In Kentucky and Treaties On the Far North

Monday February 9, 1920 saw Guy Spiker marry Emily Knowles, seemingly resolving the drama over the illicit, and as the paper notes illegal, relationship between Pearly Spiker and Miss Knowles and the fate of their son.  Time would prove that settlement less certain.

Another settlement that would prove to be uncertain was that reflected in the Treaty of Versailles, which the U.S. Senate was agreeing to take a second look at.

Railroaders were threatening to go on strike again in the U.S. and the National Guard stopped an attempted lynch mob in Kentucky through the use of violent force, showing that the events of the Red Summer of 1919 weren't quite fully behind the country yet, and wouldn't be for some time.

Herbert Hoover, whose name had been circulated as a potential Republican candidate for President in the 1920 race declined to run.  A person has to wonder if he later wished he had run in 1920, instead of eight years later when he did.

Elsewhere, the landmark treaty regarding the joint use of the Arctic island of Svalbard, a Norwegian territorial possession but used by several nations for hunting and economic activities, was signed by those principally interested in the island.

Flannery O'Connor on the teaching of literature

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

Flannery O'Connor.

Churches of the West: Old Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston Texas

Churches of the West: Old Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hou...:

Old Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston Texas

This is the old Co Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston Texas.  The new Co Cathedral is located one block over and this cathedral, originally a 1912 church that was elevated to the status of Co Cathedral in 1959.  The other cathedral for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston is located in Galveston, with that church being the Mother Cathedral for Texas.

Iphone photograph from the highway, with the new Co Cathedral also partially visible.

Best Post of the Week of February 2, 2020

The best posts of the week of February 2, 2020

It's Superb Owl Sunday

Because its Monday morning, and you really need a cup of Joe.

Takeaways from Super Bowl LIV

If anyone has any doubts about the impending full arrival of electric vehicles. . .

Winter sports

Winter sports

Winter sports

Poster Saturday: Technicolor is Natural Color

Actually, it isn't.  And this isn't a poster either, but an advertisement.

Oh well.

Technicolor was beautiful movie color, irrespective of it not being really natural.  It was sort of more natural than natural.  It actually evolved, and pretty significantly, from when the process, which I'll skip the details on, was first introduced.

The first Tecnicolor motion picture,  using the first process, was released in 1917.  That movie, The Gulf Between, required a special projector and had a limited run.  Of course, it's now a lost film, destroyed in a fire in 1961, with only some snippets remaining.

Scene from The Gulf Between.

The second technicolor movie was 1922 The Toll Of The Sea, which didn't require a special projector and which is still around.

Scene from The Toll Of The Sea.