Not grasping the Constitution.

George Washington with the Constitution, which soon proved in need of fixing.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was called to fix the Articles of Confederation.

I note this as there was a bill in the legislature to hold a Constitutional Convention to amend the Constitution to address some hard right concerns, those mostly amounting to the concept that courts and lawyers trample on the original meaning of the text and that legislatures can throw the penalty flag on that and, they believe, fix it.

At the same time a bill just was defeated in the legislature whose backers repeatedly used the words "the original Constitution". This is very obviously part of a current right wing campaign, as not only was the Wyoming legislature considering it, but right at nearly the same time Lauren Boebert, Colorado's hard right Congressman, was commenting on the Original Constitution.  As already noted here, that bill has a weird concept of the "original Constitution" and asserts that its a "contract".  That's wrong, but its dangerously wrong philosophically.  The reason for the bogus assertion its a "contract", which it isn't, and which is an unconstitutional interpretation of the Constitution, becomes clear, however, if you consider the bills goals.

All of this comes about due to a lot of ignorance about the Constitution and the age old desire to bend how its viewed to your own viewpoint on how it ought to read.

First off, let's deal with this.  The "original Constitution" of the United States isn't the document that came about due to the 1787 convention.  Arguably, the "original Constitution" of the country was the hopelessly vague English Constitution which is a concept rather than a document, but it what we derive much of our understanding of the relationship between the government and the people to be.  To the extent its written, it includes but isn't limited to the Magna Carta, which principally serves to establish the point that the sovereign is subject to the people at some point, although in its original form it served to point out the not novel concept that English kings served subject to the implied will of the nobles.

While Americans rebelled, at first, partially due to protect the "rights of Englishmen", they obviously needed an organic document for their new republic and that document was the Articles of Confederation.  Like it or not, that's the original constitution, if the English Constitution wasn't.  When people run around talking about the "original constitution", they should be aware of that.

A constitution is simply an organic documents.  It's the founding central law, not a contract, of an entity.  In terms of sovereigns, it's the Really Big Law. The "supreme law of the land". Its no more contractual than a traffic ordinance is.

Conceptually, of course, the thesis behind the U.S. Constitution is that the "several states" were the supreme sovereigns, sort of, more or less, or maybe not, at the time they came together.  In actuality, of course, they'd already come together for the Articles of Confederation, so at that time they already had agreed to transfer a level of sovereignty to the Federal government.  So, even if you are big on state sovereignty, and the backers of these concepts are, you have to concede that at least with the nation's second constitution, the one we call "The Constitution", the states transferred large elements of sovereignty over to the Federal government.  Once you do that, you don't get it back.  That would be antithetical to the concept.  And its been tested in the courts following the Civil War, so that question is more than decided.

Of course, the nation would just as soon forget the Articles as they didn't work very well, so we have, along with the fact that George Washington was not, as so often claimed, the first President.  But oh well.  

It's important, however, to note that the next part of this story is that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened to fix the Articles of Confederation, not to draft a constitution.

But once you convene a Constitutional Convention, there's absolutely no earthly way to limit what it does.  None.  People who insist that state legislative enabling acts can do that are in a fantasy world. No, no, no, they can't.  Yes, I know that there are some legal scholars that hold the opposite, but they're completely out to lunch on this issue.  If they were right, the Constitution would be invalid and we'd be right back to the Articles of Confederation.  Nobody believes that.

So, at a  Constitutional Convention, everything is on the table.

If you don't believe that, just ask the Articles of Confederation.

Of course, it'd still have to be ratified by the states.  Which brings us to this.  Anything anyone feels strongly enough about such that the proposed amendment can't get through Congress isn't going to be ratified by the states.  So, in all likelihood, a convention would be a huge noisy waste of time.  

And if it wasn't, based on the Wyoming bill up the other day, it'd be a disaster, full of proposals to keep those nasty lawyers from arguing the law and the Supreme Court from doing its job, and instead allowing all 50 state legislatures to decide what the Constitution meant.

This gets back to the "contract" theory, which the bill in front of the legislature the other day would have required members of the proposed committee to adhere to by way of an oath, a charming view of oaths in light of the fact that legislators in every state and at every level have a pretty loose interpretation of their duties under oaths anyhow.  The gist of the concept is, it's not a law, its just a big contract, and we get to decide what it means just like the other contracting party.

It's not a contract, and that's not how contracts actually work. What would actually occur is that the first time a legislature actually stated some law it didn't like was unconstitutional it'd end up in court and the court would decide the matter, likely deciding whatever it was, was.

If you thought the US was darned near ungovernable now. . . 

And, it should be noted, those who take the view that this will solve all their problems ought to be aware that liberal states would do the same thing.  Wyoming might decide some gun control law was unconstitutional but Colorado might decide that "arms" meant muskets only.  We soon wouldn't like the results much.

By the way, of the 55 framers of the Constitution, 32 were lawyers.  

And, also, while the backers of the bill feel that the language of the Constitution is so clear that anyone can read it and know just what it meant, the framers themselves were arguing about that during the ratification process. They didn't all agree what it meant.  The much cited Federalist Papers, for example, were an argument, not an explanation.

Added to this, it should be noted, the mythical "original Constitution" is meant, by those supporting it, to apparently include the Bill of Rights.  Lauren Boebert took some heat on this the other day for this Twitter comment.

Lauren Boebert

@laurenboebert

·

Feb 19

Protecting and defending the Constitution doesn’t mean trying to rewrite the parts you don’t like.

People blasted her noting that the "original Constitution" didn't include the Bill of Rights. That's correct, it didn't.  I don't think she meant that the only part of the Constitution that counts is the part before the Bill of Rights and what she actually is arguing is the same thing the bill backers in the legislature were arguing the other day, which is that lawyers and courts, in their view, have messed around and applied all sorts of interpretations which are outside of the text.  And that is in fact fairly substantially true.  Her way of stating it however, does bring up the irony here that, if you don't like something about the Constitution, there's something that can be done about it, amend it.

A problem there, however, is that the backers of the bill argued that people should look at what the framers meant, and the first Chief Justice, and be informed by Common Law and Natural Law.  I don't disagree with any of that, as I'm an originalist in terms of Constitutional interpretation, but that argues for appointing judges who are originalist.

But that means appointing people, really, who were largely of the same background as the framers. . . lawyers.  It's easy to state that you'll know just what they meant, and in some cases you really were, but if you have to resort to Common Law and Natural Law, well you have to be schooled in them.  Indeed, part of the modern problem is that hardly anyone is schooled in Natural Law..  And if a person is being given arguments that cite to something like Natural Law, and haven't studied it, they're prey to significant error.

Instead of courts, the bill propose that legislatures just nullify acts that legislators feel are unconstitutional, after pondering the text, and consulting Natural Law, etc., which isn't how the Constitution itself works. The Supremacy Clause would make any such attempt completely invalid, and from the earliest days of the Supreme Court's existence, the Court has held that it gets the last say on what is, or isn't, Constitutional.  So right from the onset there's a problem with what they're proposing, as its unconstitutional and not at all what the framers had in mind.  If a legislature attempted to act in this fashion, it'd be acting unconstitutionally under, as they say, "the original Constitution".

Added to that, a lot of the people who hold this mindset have interpretations of the Constitution which themselves are far outside of the text.  On the hard right of the political spectrum, which is where this movement comes from, the Supremacy Clause doesn't even seem to exist, nor does the Commerce Clause, and many seem to have a quasi religious concept of the Constitution and what it means.  People all the time complain about their "rights" being violated as if they're protected by the Constitution when what they're complaining about doesn't  Both the right and the left do this, but recently the right has been loud about it (but the left has often been very loud about it in the past itself). Originalism does mean not interpreting the document to read the way you don't like, as Boebert meant to suggest, but it also means not doing that yourself.

Finally, there's the tricky matter of the "incorporation" clause of the Constitution, which relies in large part on that very "judge made law" that the backers of these things  hold in contempt.  As originally written, these restricted Congress, not the states.  So, for instance, Congress couldn't restrict free speech, or establish a national religion, but states could do just that.

Or again, take the Second Amendment.  Congress couldn't restrict the right to keep and bear arms. . .but could states?  Hard to say, but probably.  And if Wyoming argued that "the original Constitution" kept the Federal government from, let's say, doing something environmental, New York could argue that the Federal government couldn't ban guns but New York sure could.

March 22, 1921. Launches

The USS Colorado, the lead ship of the Colorado class of battleship, was launched on this day in 1921.  Dignitaries were, of course, in attendance, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

Photograph shows Colorado Senator Samuel D. Nicholson, his daughter and sponsor of the battleship USS Colorado (BB-45), Ruth H. Melville (1894-1934), and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1887-1944) at the launching of the ship on March 22, 1921. 

She served in the Pacific during World War Two, including receiving 22 hits from shore batteries during the landing at Tinian.  

On the same day, the Navy suffered a tragedy when the airship A-5597 left Pensacola and, after being sighted last twenty miles offshore, disappeared.

Mrs. Coolidge and her sons were out on the town.

The German Weimar republic, which was already making a habit of thumbing its nose at its former enemies, saw one of its courts convict two American bounty hunters of false arrest in their effort to arrest fugitive draft dodger Grover Bergdoll, whom we've earlier discussed. They released the pair on March 31.

Turkey's unrecognized, at that time, republican government adopted the Istiklal Marsi as its national anthem.  The "Independence March" remains the country's national anthem to this day.

March 22, 1941. British advances in Africa, frustrations on the Atlantic, and Vichy French complicity in murder.

Things continued, on this day in 1941, to go downhill for the Italians as the British overran them in Ethiopia at the Babille Pass.  By this point it was pretty obvious that the Italian army wasn't up to. . .well about much of anything.  Italian fortunes were flagging.

Having said that, the Italians did put up a fight at Keren in Eritrea where they launched a massive counterattack at Ft. Dologorodoc.  It failed, but it was fiercely fought.

In spite of the Italian misfortunes, Vichy France signed a bill to construct a trans Saharan railway, which admittedly didn't directly involve Italy, but given that Italy was losing badly to the British, should at least have signaled that North African construction projects were rather unlikely to be successful constructed.  To make matters worse, the French government conceived of the project being built by POWs, which made them a quasi belligerent, and Jewish slave labor, which additionally made them racist criminals. So already, by this point in 1941, Vichy France was complicit in one of the greatest crimes of all time.

By some accounts the 99th Pursuit Squadron was activated on this day and Jimmy Stewart, who would go on to long service in the Air Corps and Air Force, was inducted, which demonstrates how even relatively recent dates can become confused. We've covered both of these events, attributed to earlier dates, within the last week.

More on the 99th Pursuit Squadron on this entry here, which also discusses the Grand Coulee Dam.

Today in World War II History—March 22, 1941

In the early morning hours, the German near battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were met by German Kreigsmarine destroyers operating out of Brest and were escorted into port.  Their 60 day sortie had resulted in 22 merchant ships being destroyed. The Royal Navy attempted to intercept them, but was too late to do so.  On the same day, the German armed merchant ship Kormoran stopped the British tanker Agnita and sank it.

Wow, . . . Chuck Todd seemingly made a lot of people mad today on Meet The Press.

I'm not a Chuck Todd fan, but I listened to today's episode and didn't think him awful.  Plenty of people apparently did, including one of my favorite reporters Soledad O'Brien, who texted:

Chuck todd continues to be terrible. And non-contextual.

This seems to be over his being pretty harsh on Biden for the crisis at the border.  It is a crisis by any measure, but calling it that seems to get a person dissed.

Blog Mirror: In French woods, rivals take aim at senator Doug Mastriano's WWI research

 In French woods, rivals take aim at senator Doug Mastriano's WWI research

Of interest to this story, I first heard Mastriano's thesis on the Pritzer broadcast, which you can hear here:

Col. Douglas Mastriano, Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne

I recall being impressed at the time, but quite frankly, in retrospect, I think there's real reason to question his conclusions.

March 21, 1971. Coming Apart

Signs that the US Army was becoming ungovernable in the field occurred with two platoons of the 1st Cavalry Rgt of the Americal Division refused to advance to the Laotian border to recover damaged equipment.  The unit had lost men in an NVA rocket attack.

M48 of the 1st Cavalry in Vietnam, 1968.

Their company commander was relieved of duty and and the men resumed their regular duties.  Gen. John G. Hill declined to discipline them.  It was the second time during the late war period in which troops fo the Americal Division had refused to obey orders.

Well known during the period, and for quite some time afterwards, but seemingly forgotten now, by this point in the Vietnam War some units of the U.S. Army was becoming highly undisciplined and some units were becoming defiant to orders.  It impacted the leadership of the Army as there was a fear that this would spread and reduce the Army to the point of uselessness.  Given this, there was an increasing desire inside the Army's leadership to get out of Vietnam before the situation became worse.  It would take the Army years to recover from the war.

March 21, 1921. The New Economic Policy.

Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, a short run return to capitalism under state control.  It was essentially an acknowledgment of the complete failure of communism in the economy and darned near the complete failure of communism in general.

The policy was primarily an effort to revive agricultural production, which had fallen off dramatically. The mass of the Russian peasants were overwhelmingly opposed to Communism and were resisting collectivization.  80% of the Russian population was rural and support for Communism was nearly completely centered in urban areas, an interesting example of people basically voting for what they could get, as Communist appropriations benefited only the urban working class. Russian peasantry, in contrast, had viewed the Revolution as simply a chance to get formal ownership of the land they were working, a process that had in actuality been going on by default, but which was not yet completed, for some time. 

Lenin thought that ultimately collectivization would occur, but only after the NEP had built up rural areas over a period of decades.  He oddly acknowledged that creating a functioning capitalist economy, but under state control, would lift the Russian economy out of the basement, but he believed that by doing that the entire state would be educated in the benefits of Communism and then would convert to complete state ownership thereafter.  It was a peculiar belief, as it welded the reality of the present with a clinging belief that somehow collectivization would ultimately benefit everyone.

Upon Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin, who had favored the NEP over objections like those of Trotsky, would reverse course and force collectivize agriculture, resulting in a massive man made famine.  This isn't the only area where Stalin would follow a path first suggested by his arch rival, and it should make fans of Trotsky, who have traditionally assumed he was a more benign malignancy than Stalin, pause.  In reality he was an even bigger fanatic.  At any rate, the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1920s through the early 1930s, which took that long, resulted in a massive death toll from starvation.  What remains surprising is that the Soviet populations didn't rise up in rebellion at the time.

Lenin fans have continued to note that Lenin, in his political will, suggested that Stalin be sidetracked and that if he had been, Communism would have succeeded.  This is probably completely incorrect, however.  In reality if the NEP had progressed in Soviet Russia a capitalist middle class would have developed. Where the country would have gone from there is unclear, but it wouldn't have been further into Communism.

Indeed, there's reason to look at modern Red China as a state employing what is essentially the NEP. The present leaders of that state have expressed the view that the NEP better represented what Communism was supposed to be about and have basically employed elements of it in their economy.  How that will play out for them remains to be seen.  At any rate, modern Red China's state run capitalism is similar to what the NEP imagined, and imagined would then go into full collective ownership.

Soviet gold backed note.  The NEP reintroduced gold backed currency in Soviet Russia.

The Constituent Assembly of Georgia held its last session, and then abandoned the country to the invading Soviet Union.

The British changed the Mandate for Palestine to allow for the creation of Transjordan, which is now Jordan.

The most successful Irish Republican Army raid in County Kerry occurred when the IRA ambushed a British troop train at Headford.  Like most IRA/British battles, there were low casualties.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 10. Filibustering, Wrecking the economy, Trend lines, Infrastructure, The Wages of Sin, The cover of privilege, Reassessing Reagan, Catalytic converters

Yappity yap

Huey Long after a filibuster.

There's a move to returning the Senate to the real old fashion, talking for hours, filibuster.

That is, in fact, how they originally worked.  Senators simply refused to yield the floor, talking, in some instances, until they collapsed.

The filibuster has been in the news recently a great deal as the Senate's rules require 60 votes, more than a simple majority (51) to pass most things, although that has been eroding in recent years.  This is a rule of the Senate, not a provision of the Constitution, so there's no real legal requirement for this.  The Senate has traditionally been a lot more gentlemanly, however, than the House, and the evolved filibuster, which simply requires the extra votes to move along in its current form, is under attack.

There's a lot of fear about altering this, but there's also a lot of criticism about this extra constitutional process which slows things down or keeps things from happening. Whether you want to end the procedure or not depends on if your party is in or out of power to a large degree.  Returning to the original form of it, however, might be a good idea for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to demonstrate that the Senate is composed of a lot of old, tired, people.

Worst U.S. Macroeconomic Policy In Forty Years.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned that the U.S. is suffering from the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in four decades, pointing the finger at both Democrats and Republicans for creating “enormous” risks.

From Bloomberg. 

Opposite Directions.

At the same time that Wyoming's legislature is seeking to fund lawsuits against states that retire coal fired plants, Congress is taking steps to end them in a bill that has some bipartisan support.

This is interesting for a variety of reasons, but one of the things that it points out that Sen. Case's comments that Wyoming is getting "redder" as the rest of the country turns more "blue" is correct.  What that may mean to people is of course subject to individual views, but what should seem obvious is that the state is going to have to start pondering a much different economic future.

Indeed, it already is, even as these actions take place. Recent votes in the legislature would suggest that most of the legislature is more centric than the news might suggest.

Infrastructure 

Hard on the heels of the largest spending bill of all time, the House is taking up an "infrastructure" bill.

Discussing infrastructure is a favorite thing for both parties to do, nearly in an unthinking manner.  The common comment is "we need to fix our bridges. . ." etc., which may very well be true.  Little thought, however, is given to the concept that if New York built a bunch of bridges decades ago that need repair, there's no real reason that Wyoming should help fix them.  Fix them, yes, but fix them yourself.

Hardly anyone seems to think of things in that fashion anymore, however, and beyond that the infrastructure bill is rapidly becoming a climate bill, with the concept of "building back better".  If the real goal here, however, is to do that, nuclear power plants are what ought to be built, which I predict won't even be discussed.  

The added factor is that with the Senate divided 50/50, getting a second big spending bill past the Senate is going to be hard. . . unless the filibuster is done away with.  House Democrats seem really motivated by this and other items on their agenda. . . Senate ones less so.

And perhaps wisely less so.  The absolute flooding of the economy with cash is reaching the really frightening level.  A huge spending bill on infrastructure would ramp up the already rising risk of creating inflation.  That might make the infrastructure bill, therefore, a casualty of the last Coronavirus relief bill, much as the Great Society was a casualty of the Vietnam War. 

There's only so much money, or rather so much debt, a society can really endure.

Oh, it can't be that.

The nut who killed a collection of prostitutes in Georgia claimed sex addiction as his motive.  This was immediately dissed by the experts and pundits.

A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.

There's a huge tendency to camouflage news stories in terms of what's really going on vs. what a certain view of what's going on that is pretty pervasive in contemporary society. This isn't new, it's been going on for awhile, but it's corrupting as it tends to cause stories to have a campaign like quality to them at worst, or is simply corrupting to the truth at the least.  On the latter, its helped fuel the entire right wing concept of "fake news" that's been so harmful and that's helped some on the right deny the results of the election and all that entails.

This has, literally, nothing to do with that, but you wouldn't know it from the news story. What has occurred, and what is extremely disturbing, is that some people have been attacking people of Asian appearance because of the Coronavirus.  People who ran around calling it the "Chinese Flu" or the "CCP Flu" or the "Wuhan Flue and the like have helped create this atmosphere.  People like Donald Trump or Patrick Coffin who used one of these terms deserve our moral contempt for doing so and are obligated at some level to try to address it now.  

Indeed, even the most conspiratorially minded ought to know that even if the Chinese government launched COVID 19 as a biological weapon, which they didn't, that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the average Chinese person anywhere.  Even in China itself the Chinese are the captive of a totalitarian government they have no influence over.  It's not like they as a people thought this up on their own or something.  Far from it.  The whole association of the disease with the Chinese peoples or their cultures is simply stupid.

What's also a problem, however, is associating absolutely everything on earth with the current right/left political divide and, in things like this, sort of giving the entire tragedy a lefty social interpretation.

The truth of the matter is that poverty has been long associated with prostitution, and immigrants are poorer than other people, as a rule.  A crime reporter familiar with Atlanta has already noted this in regard to sexual vice in that city, and that's part of the background of this story.*

Immigrant populations, being poor, have over time more than their fair share of vice and crime.  Irish Americans today may wish to imagine that 100% of their ancestors were charming folksy people from Cork, but there was an Irish Mob that coexisted, and sometimes was affiliated with, the Mafia in its hay day.  The Mafia itself was essentially a Sicilian ethnic gang.  Go out from there and you'll find that every poor ethnic group has had a criminal organization.  One of the things every criminal organization deals in is prostitution.

Prostitution itself doesn't match at all the movie image of it.  Prostitutes aren't people like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.  Nobody takes it up who isn't blisteringly desperate.  Almost 100% of it is controlled by some sort of organizing criminal  Off hand, probably the only accurate portrayals of it that I can think of are those given in The Godfather, Part II and in the recent Perry Mason series, both of which are really grim.  Most prostitutes are captives of something or somebody.

There's a high ethnic component to it as well.  Some years ago in rich Jackson Wyoming the police broke up a prostitution ring in which the girls (and they were that) were almost all underaged Mexican illegal aliens controlled by a Mexican mob.  And all over the U.S. you'll find "spas" or "massage parlors" that are actually cat houses.

Indeed, the situation has gotten sufficiently bad in Casper, Wyoming that legitimate spas went to the city and asked for a licensing ordinance to help drive out the illegitimate ones.  The legitimate facilities were probably getting tired of being asked for favors, even though the customers who walked in them should have realized that women who didn't look worn out and strung out on drugs were probably not prostitutes.  At any rate, prostitution is already illegal in Casper, so the degree to which that will help is questionable.

In Atlanta its apparently the case that prostitution is broken up into three classes, and maybe it is everywhere.  Once class is "lingerie models", which is probably made up of strippers.  Ethnically, they tend apparently to be white.  Actual street walkers tend to be Hispanic and Black, apparently, two underprivileged classes in urban areas.  In between them are those who work at "spas", which are Asian, and who are principally controlled by and captives of Asian gangs.

You'd not be aware of any of that if you listen to the news, which keeps addressing the spas as if they're, well, spas.  That's unless you are observant of the photographs of them however, and the photos in their windows show that the services offered appear to be rather broad.

Prostitutes are hugely endangered in every way by their occupation.  All kids of them get murdered with nobody noticing, and of course others die young by disease.  They're slaves, quite often, and treated just as such.

Prostitution is very closely associated with pornography.  People may imagine that pornography is produced at the Playboy Mansion or at parties hosted by Jackie Treehorn, but in reality those who make it go where the human material is and pay whomever controls the prostitutes to do what they're getting paid to do anyhow.  

And the association of prostitution with violence and sexual deviance is overwhelming.  

In spite of that, our society has not only closed a blind eye to this, it actually denies it.  Depictions of women prostitutes are as old as the Police Gazette, but starting in the 1930s there was a slow creep of "nice girl" images that crept up on, or crossed over into, pornography.  World War Two massively expanded it and society never came back.  Indeed, it can be argued that the war not only acclimated society to violence at epic levels, it acclimated it to prostitution to a degree as well.

That was exploited by Hugh Hefner in his pioneering rag starting in 1953 which took the nose art bombshell, impossibly proportioned, girl off of B-25s and on to slick magazine print.  And that expanded exponentially from there. We just passed, for example, February, which is the month Sports Illustrated issues its annual pornography issue.

While pornographers may deny it, we well know that everything about pornography and what it has brought about has been destructive.  And its more destructive with some than others.  Some simply can't handle the images, which anyone can download at any time, and they go from Playboy like images to the sicker and sicker.  And that some will go from rags to attempting to get the services that Playboy and its fellow travelers assert are free for the asking is well known.  Some will start killing.

The sadistic perverted killing of prostitutes has been a feature of crime for eons.  Jack the Ripper gives us a famous example, but he's hardly the only one.  And in our age now we have the added factor of the mentally disturbed unemployable male.

But that's a complicated story which, if focused on, would argue for restricting images on the net, finding meaningful employment for the marginal unemployed, and going in and freeing women enslaved in prostitution.

All hard work, with no woke social story to it.

And while we're at, Andrew Cuomo.

Andrew Cuomo as the Secretary of HUD, 1997 to 2001.

Back when Bill Clinton ran for President we were warned that there would be "Bimbo Eruptions" as the election neared.  There sort of were, but back in those days politicians were still given an element of benefit of the doubt.

They aren't now.

That's because male authority figures are not, both rightly and wrongly, depending upon the case. Society wide, however, the development has been a good one.

We've noted before that in some ways the irony of this whole movement is that it urges for a very traditional return to morality, while at the same time absolutely refusing to term it that.  In the most recent claim to come out against Cuomo, whose princaplly accused of innaprporaite conduct, not of something worse, his accuser notes how he said things he shouldn't have said and was caught looking down her shirt.

Don't look down women's shirts is something that anyone of a certain age knows better than to do.  But in an age in which we're simultaneously supposed to look at Kate Uptons' boobs, it gets confusing.  A society can't really say "look at Kate's boobs" and "don't look down women's shirts".  It's the same thing.

None of which excuses Cuomo, about whom ew shouldn't be surprised.  Cuomo is old enough to know that he's not supposed to peer down women's shirts, but as he hasn't been adherent to any prior serious moral code that applies to him, why would we be surprised.  Cuomo is a Catholic who is divorced and until recently was shacked up with some cooking personality.  If you can get by the several moral restrictions that entails, peeking down women's shirts is an easy next step.

The point here is that we seemingly give all sorts of people real leeway on their self declared moral positions, to include recently both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  This makes a person less intellectually honest than a person whose moral code is more lax, which is not a reason to have a lax moral code.  But if a person claims a certain thing, and then pretty publicly acts contrary to it, there's no real reason to suppose that they are suddenly morally adherent in a more private setting.  Some people no doubt are, but there's no reason to suppose that.

All of which gets back once again to something relatively obvious but which people just don't seem to want to grasp.  If part of the moral code is "don't look down women's shirts", by extension part of it is also "don't look at Kate Upton's exposed boobs", and then part of it is "don't tolerate pornography", etc. etc..

Noncompetitive

The GOP has declined so much in Colorado its officials now feel that in 2022, they will not be competitive.

Colorado went form reliably Republican to "Purple" to urban Democratic quickly, fueled in part by the odd world view of chamber of commerce types who think all business is good business.  Colorado brought in a lot of business, and a lot of the new workers were Democratic, and then it brought in weed, which is all Democratic in terms of support and the people it brings in.  So whatever a person thinks of this, those who were GOP boosters of "let's get all this in. . ." got in just what they were asking for.

Additionally, Colorado is a Western state, and by that we mean a Western state in a West that doesn't include Texas and Oklahoma.  That means its politics were never all that "red", as in Trumpist red, or even mainstream Republican red, as people who are outside of the area would believe.  At the present time the hard alt right edge of the GOP is noisy in the West, but its support is probably razor thin.  It may have elected Loren Boebert, but only, barely, and the support for the GOP in Colorado is evaporating.  Chances are, there's been more evaporation from the hard right than those in it, who seem pretty self convinced, may imagine. Certainly recent hard right bills in the Wyoming legislative session have met with limited success.

Reassessing Reagan

When I was a college student a person would have had to be among friend they really trusted if they were going to say anything nice about Ronald Reagan.

For a long time, you wouldn't know that.  Reagan became a conservative hero and after that, like Jack Kennedy, he became somebody that members of the opposing party would even point to as a laudable figure.  

All of a sudden, that's changed. Several times in the past week I saw printed items going after Reagan for doing away with Welfare, the most notable being an opinion piece by Robert Reich (who at least admitted it was really Clinton who did that). Some of hte commentary was really nasty.  It was almost like the late 1970s again.

The interesting thing about that is that it must mean that all the Democrats who praised Reaganin later years, and the ones who were just silent, were really harboring animosity towards him all this time, in the same way that some Republicans still really  hate Franklin Roosevelt.  Je me souviens, je suppose.  At the same time, it's interesting to see the extent to which the left truly feels its unleashed.   Moderate Republicans who didn't vote for Trump last go around and middle of the road independents have good reason to feel queasy.

Grand Theft Auto

Denver has an experienced a 145% increase in automobile theft since the beginning of the year.   Apparently being coupled up in the house doesn't deter theft at some point, or maybe a need for weed money counter acts that.

Fairbanks is experiencing an increase in catalytic converter thefts.  Apparently the whole country is.  I didn't even know that people stole those.  It's odd to think of as its one of the things that I remember people removing from their cars back in the day, although I doubt they do now.

Footnotes

*This may have been unfair, as while it seems clear that there is a sexual aspect to the work of the massage women, it may be more in the nature of being alluring, potentially, rather than actualized.

Having said that, I just don't know. The oppressive nature of the circumstances of these women's occupations is so glossed over in these stories that as of right now, even taking a view that I was wholly incorrect as to its nature, its still not really clear what it was.

Responsum: "Negativamente".

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded to a dubium concerning whether or not the church could do what individuals like Father James Martin, SJ, and the leaders of the German bishops, would appear set to have the Church do, that being bless and indeed regularize in some fashion homosexual unions.  The response probably came as a surprise to those who seem to think that they know what Pope Francis thinks, but its solidly in line with Church teaching.

First, here's the text, in its English translation.

Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to a dubium regarding the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex

TO THE QUESTION PROPOSED:

Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?

RESPONSE:

Negative.

Explanatory Note

In some ecclesial contexts, plans and proposals for blessings of unions of persons of the same sex are being advanced. Such projects are not infrequently motivated by a sincere desire to welcome and accompany homosexual persons, to whom are proposed paths of growth in faith, “so that those who manifest a homosexual orientation can receive the assistance they need to understand and fully carry out God’s will in their lives”^[1].

On such paths, listening to the word of God, prayer, participation in ecclesial liturgical actions and the exercise of charity can play an important role in sustaining the commitment to read one's own history and to adhere with freedom and responsibility to one's baptismal call, because “God loves every person and the Church does the same”^[2], rejecting all unjust discrimination.

Among the liturgical actions of the Church, the sacramentals have a singular importance: “These are sacred signs that resemble the sacraments: they signify effects, particularly of a spiritual kind, which are obtained through the Church’s intercession. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions of life are sanctified”^[3]. The Catechism of the Catholic Church specifies, then, that “sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (#1670).

Blessings belong to the category of the sacramentals, whereby the Church “calls us to praise God, encourages us to implore his protection, and exhorts us to seek his mercy by our holiness of life”^[4]. In addition, they “have been established as a kind of imitation of the sacraments, blessings are signs above all of spiritual effects that are achieved through the Church’s intercession”^[5].

Consequently, in order to conform with the nature of sacramentals, when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord. Therefore, only those realities which are in themselves ordered to serve those ends are congruent with the essence of the blessing imparted by the Church.

For this reason, it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex^[6]. The presence in such relationships of positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated, cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing, since the positive elements exist within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator’s plan.

Furthermore, since blessings on persons are in relationship with the sacraments, the blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit. This is because they would constitute a certain imitation or analogue of the nuptial blessing^[7] invoked on the man and woman united in the sacrament of Matrimony, while in fact “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”^[8].

The declaration of the unlawfulness of blessings of unions between persons of the same sex is not therefore, and is not intended to be, a form of unjust discrimination, but rather a reminder of the truth of the liturgical rite and of the very nature of the sacramentals, as the Church understands them.

The Christian community and its Pastors are called to welcome with respect and sensitivity persons with homosexual inclinations, and will know how to find the most appropriate ways, consistent with Church teaching, to proclaim to them the Gospel in its fullness. At the same time, they should recognize the genuine nearness of the Church – which prays for them, accompanies them and shares their journey of Christian faith^[9] – and receive the teachings with sincere openness.

The answer to the proposed dubium does not preclude the blessings given to individual persons with homosexual inclinations^[10], who manifest the will to live in fidelity to the revealed plans of God as proposed by Church teaching. Rather, it declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such. In this case, in fact, the blessing would manifest not the intention to entrust such individual persons to the protection and help of God, in the sense mentioned above, but to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God^[11].

At the same time, the Church recalls that God Himself never ceases to bless each of His pilgrim children in this world, because for Him “we are more important to God than all of the sins that we can commit”^[12]. But he does not and cannot bless sin: he blesses sinful man, so that he may recognize that he is part of his plan of love and allow himself to be changed by him. He in fact “takes us as we are, but never leaves us as we are”^[13].

For the above mentioned reasons, the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex in the sense intended above.

The Sovereign Pontiff Francis, at the Audience granted to the undersigned Secretary of this Congregation, was informed and gave his assent to the publication of the above-mentioned Responsum ad dubium, with the annexed Explanatory Note.

Rome, from the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the 22^nd of February 2021, Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle.

 

Luis F. Card. Ladaria, S.I.

Prefect

Giacomo Morandi

Archbishop tit. of Cerveteri

Secretary

_______________________

^[1] FRANCIS, Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, 250.

^[2] SYNOD OF BISHOPS, Final Document of the XV Ordinary General Assembly, 150.

^[3] SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, 60.

^[4] RITUALE ROMANUM ex Decreto Sacrosancti Oecumenici Concilii Vaticani II instauratum auctoritate Ioannis Pauli PP. Il promulgatum, De bendictionibus, Praenotanda Generalia, n.9.

^[5] Ibidem, n. 10.

^[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357.

^[7] In fact, the nuptial blessing refers back to the creation account, in which God's blessing on man and woman is related to their fruitful union (cf. Gen 1:28) and their complementarity (cf. Gen 2:18-24).

^[8] FRANCIS, Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, 251.

^[9] Cf. CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Letter Homosexualitatis problema On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, 15.

^[10] De benedictionibus in fact presents an extended list of situations for which to invoke the blessing of the Lord.

^[11] CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Letter Homosexualitatis problema On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, 7.

^[12] FRANCIS, General Audience of December 2, 2020, Catechesis on Prayer, the blessing.

^[13] Ibidem.

Now let the woke Internet reaction begin.

And it certainly will.  

The adherent and faithful in the Church should be buoyed by the restatement of the long held Catholic understanding of sexual relations outside of marriage, of all types, being illicit, which is the basic holding of this document, based on the Catholic understanding of marriage which is that it can only occur between complimentary genders and be oriented, by that nature, to the possibility of life.  Indeed, this is a step toward  the reaffirmation of orthodoxy that many have been hoping for.  Therefore, Rad Trads and the like should be very much buoyed by it, but we'll see if they are.

Catholic liberals, and western secularists, will have a fit.  They've been hoping for the Pope to follow the path that the German Bishops seem intent in blazing which would basically shelve St. Paul forever and follow the paths of Protestant churches that have simply abandoned almost all long held Christian tenants regarding sex.  Of note, German Bishops have dropping out of the "Synodal Path" over time and therefore its claim to be able to proclaim on such issues within Germany is weakening.  The Vatican has already indicated that it cannot take actions that are contrary to doctrine as it is, although its leadership has seemed intent on doing just that.  This action effectively informs the German Bishops, in advance of their taking any action, that they cannot in this area.  The German Bishops in the Synodal Path have in the past simply ignored the Vatican and now there's a clear line in the sand.

One thing the very wealthy but increasingly ignored German Catholic Church doesn't quite seem to want to acknowledge is that Christianity has never been a religion that simply ratified people's needs and wants^[1].  Indeed, whether there is such a religion that's survived long term is questionable.  Certainly in the English speaking world large sections of the Protestant denominations have done just that, turning a blind eye to pretty much all of the sins that St. Paul said barred the gates of Heaven to their participants^[2].  The Catholic Church, moreover, has always been clear on sin and its effect, while not holding that the individual person is an anathema, something that ironically some hard line Protestant churches that now ignore this conduct once did^[3].

This has caused particular confusion in the United States which is a Protestant nation in numbers and cultures.  Because of the long influence of certain Protestant denominations in the US, there's a general retained cultural belief that all Christians are opposed to science, for example, which is far from true in the case of knowledgeable Catholics^[4].  There's also a retained belief and a mocking belief in the secular left that Christian morality is defined by Mike Meyers' "Church Lady" from Saturday Night Live.

Meyers grew up in Toronto and was born of English parents, which is interesting in that Toronto, now one of the most liberal cities in Canada, was once one of the most conservative and most English.  Meyers sort of personally reflects Toronto in that fashion.  Toronto, for example, was once the bastion of English conservative beliefs, but its hip Canadian progressive culture defines the opposite now.  While Meyers "Church Lady" was presented on American television, it fits that view of Christianity that baffles Catholics as it doesn't represent Catholic Christianity or any of the Apostolic faiths in their world outlook, which holds that God's nature is unchanging, universally good, but that all humans are burdened with a cross to bear they can accept or reject, with some crosses heavier than others.  People with homosexual inclinations, Apostolic Christians hold, cannot act upon those licitly, any more than people with "polyamorous" ones can, but that doesn't make the people themselves objects of contempt.

All of this has presented any number of societal challenges in the modern world, particularly the post Second World War world. We've often noted before that something seems to have dramatically changed following World War Two, and perhaps because of it.  We've posted on that many times in the past, and in fact just recently.   What exactly it is, isn't clear, but what is clear is that something has changed in how people view their fealty to things outside of themselves, particularly when they're against deep seated desires.

Some of this changed prior to the war, to be sure, but following the war society became wealthier and wealthier.  European nations that had been regarded as "advanced" and "industrialized" none the less contained vast number of working poor and rural poor.  This was true of the US as well, but mech less so.  It would be totally false to argue that the working poor were all religious or even traditional.  Indeed, to a large extent the opposite was true, which is what gave rise to so many Socialist and Communist parties before the Second World War.  Nonetheless, large numbers of people did focus in the immediate and the metaphysical in ways that people do not now.  Somehow, since that time,  as wealth increased, "self realization" did as well, not all of which was a bad thing by any means.  But at the point we are now at, this has advanced to the point where people actually define themselves in some instances by their sexual urges, and that's a bizarre thing.

Agree with the Responsum or not, (and Catholics must agree with it), it serves to focus on something which people need reminded of.  For those with faith, God does not exist to validate our self realization or to give the stamp of approval to all of our desires, no matter how strongly felt.  It's a fallen world. And for those without faith, its not a perfect world and we cannot make it so.  The basic order of it is plain to see, but reengineering it on a person by person basis cannot be done and in fact is dangerous to try. 

Footnotes:

1.  German churches and synagogues benefit from the Kirchensteuer which taxes the income of registered members from their paychecks. As there's a real "out of sight, out of mind" element to payroll taxation, its something that people really don't pay that much attention to even though the approximately 8% taxation rate is not unsubstantial.  By analogy, very few Americans pay any attention to their FICA tax rate which is 6.2% for the employee and 6.2% for the employer.

About 70% of German church and synagogue revenue comes in this fashion, and as a result the German churches are very wealthy.  For reasons that are unclear, however, the problems that we've noted here in regard to post World War Two morality and whatnot have hit Germany fairly hard in recent years.  It's worth noting, therefore, in this context that people who are convinced that state support of religion keeps it strong do not have very good evidence to support that.  Indeed, some evidence of the opposite can fairly easily be found.

For what its worth, this system is not unique to Germany and is in fact common in Scandinavia.  

2.  Some of done this in a fairly remarkable fashion with the larger Anglican Communion providing one such example.

To be completely fair, the Church of England never had that good of grasp on the English in the first place.  England was as devoutly religious nation throughout its long Christian era, a period which is considerably longer than its Protestant era, but is forced conversion to Protestantism was rocky and violent, and never really worked out that well.  Unlike the Scandinavian regions were distance and confusion operated to allow a complete co-opting of Catholicism in the region, the United Kingdom rocked back and forth between doctrinal positions before finally landing on the Anglican one.  By that time large groups of English had only loose affiliation with the new religion.  In the colonies, however, the Church of England did fairly well, although the oddity of the American Revolution created a particularly odd severance, and retained loyalty, in the Episcopal community.

None the less,  particularly in the U.S., but also in Canada, the Episcopal Church benefitted from being wealthy and was associated with economic success. That fact made it a magnet to Christians of other denominations.  Protestants who wanted to associate with the more affluent could switch denominations and be comfortable that they were entering what seemed to be a Protestant church, even if the Anglican Communion itself was murky on whether it believed itself to be Protestant.  Catholics who were willing to commit what the Church holds is a mortal sin by leaving it could convince themselves that they really were not, if they were attracted to the Episcopal Church for economic reasons, as the Episcopal Church retained many Catholic features.  Indeed, this was so much the case that at one time the question of the validity of its Holy Orders was submitted to the Vatican which returned the opinion that they were "completely null and utterly void".

At any rate, the Anglican Communion was highly conservative up into the 1960s.  It didn't, and still doesn't officially, recognize divorce.  But starting in the 1930s it began to move toward more liberal positions subtly, and then a wing of it, like a wing of every Christian faith in North America, became politically liberal in the 1960s.  It's never stopped evolving in that position and whereas as late as the 1960s there was some thought that it might reunite with the Catholic Church, it's put itself far to the left on many social issues since that time. At the same time, its pews began clearing out and some conservative parishes joined the Catholic Church.  A recent report in Canada suggests that the once powerful Anglican Church in Canada may well go extinct in the foreseeable future, oddly leaving disappearing parishes that are well endowed with funds from prior loyal members.

3. This is true of the modern Orthodox churches as well.  While Orthodoxy made some concessions in the area of marriage and remarriage long ago, in terms of modern social trends its turned its back on them.  This was perhaps particularly well summed up, in terms of their views, in the statement issued by the Russian Orthodox Bishop in Alaska who politely and firmly noted that Supreme Court decisions had no impact of the moral teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church.

4.  Indeed, this is confusing enough that many rank and file American Catholics, including occasionally American Catholic religious, have picked up Protestant beliefs in this fashion.  It's not uncommon to hear some Catholics express the view held by some Evangelical Christians on evolution, for example, even though the greater Church has no position at all on that topic, and most Catholics world wide accept it.  This is, interestingly, a very recent development.

Blog Mirror: It’s hard to think clearly about marriage if folks don’t speak clearly about marriage

It’s hard to think clearly about marriage if folks don’t speak clearly about marriage

Best Posts of the Week of March 14, 2021

 The best posts of the week of March 14, 2021.

"Bidenomics" and the return of the Great Society. . . and why that isn't good.

Lex Anteinternet: The Central American Mess and Citations to the Statue of Liberty. Nobody is going to do anything, probably.

Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe

The 2021 Wyoming Legislative Session, Part III

Blog Mirror: 1921 Recreational Vehicles

Blog Mirror: 1921 Recreational Vehicles

On Saturdays I try to post something outdoorsy here, although like most of my scheduled periodicals, I miss doing that quite a bit.  Indeed, recently this blog has been a bit overrun with politics, as it seems the country is a bit overrun by politics.

Anyhow, I saw this interesting item:

1921 Recreational Vehicles

It's that time of year, sort of, depending up where you live (we're still getting snow) where you start to think of such things.  I've often wondered when the first RVs came about.  Pretty early, it would appear.

March 20, 1921. The Upper Silesian Plebiscite

"Vote for Poland and you will be free", a pro Polish campaign poster.  Interestingly, while the vote would go on largely ethnic lines, this poster was in Polish and German.

A plebiscite was held in Upper Silesia to determine its national fate. The result apportioned the territory between Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia. 

This would, of course, help set the game board for World War Two, as did the Treaty of Riga from the day prior.  Germany wasn't content with the results, and in actuality Poland really wasn't either.  When Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia in the following decade, Poland took a piece, although I think of lower Silesia and other border areas, before it soon faced Germany's territorial expansion itself.  Czechoslovakia took them back in October 1939 and then the border returned to its 1920 line following World War Two.

Also following World War Two almost all of Upper Silesia was placed in Poland.  Interestingly, unlike Lower Silesia, not all of its ethnic German population was expelled as some of it was bilingual and as the Germans in Upper Silesia were Catholic, and somewhat intermixed with the Polish population, some were allowed to remain.  The region currently has a small autonomy movement.

March 20, 1941. Forced Allies, Weak Allies, and Future Allies.

The Yugoslavian parliament, facing demands from Nazi Germany, voted to join the Tripartite Pact 16 to 3.  The result of the vote would soon prove not to work out they way it had been planned.

Yugoslavia was, on this day, a reluctant ally of the Germans at best.  And the Germans should have given some thought to what having reluctant allies meant.  Nazi Germany based its ideology on a radical concept of racism, and yet already, at this early stage of the war, it found itself entering into alliances with nations populated by peoples it otherwise claimed to despise.  And some of those people despised them right back.

Added to that, while they were enlisting Balkan states for the war, they were also enlisting states whose armies were not necessarily up to the same quality as theirs, and which had exhibited no strong desire to get into the war on any side.  Germany already had one ally that had entered the war voluntarily, Italy, which was proving to be a net drain on its efforts.

Indeed, on this day Indian troops advanced 100 miles and took Hargeisa in Somaliland, which exposed Italian Ethiopia.  

On the same day, U.S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Wells warned the Soviet Ambassador that the United States had picked up intelligence indicating that Germany intended to attack the Soviet Union.  This was by far not the only warning the Soviets would receive, but Stalin would not take action on any of them.