There are only handful of really worthwhile agrarian blogs around. That's at least better than the situation with the distributist situation, where there's nothing worthwhile whatsoever. Of the handful that are out there, the two best ones are linked in here. A third one that is also worthwhile (which is a successor to two prior blogs, just as this blog also is), is also linked in, but it's not quite as good. I'll do a thread on them some other time, or on all of these together. A fourth one would get a link for its actual agrarian posts, but it descends into "Southern Agrarianism" of the Lost Cause variety, and we're not going there. Nope, no way.
Anyhow, I thought that this entry by an agrarian California sheep rancher, who is an adult entrant into hunting, really interesting. He's also a self professed agrarian.
We've posted a lot about hunting here, from the prospective of the nearly feral agrarian who has been a hunter his entire life. It's interesting to see some similar views come about from the thoughtful agrarian adult who came to it late.
I haven't made it all the way through the back entries on Foothill Agrarian. Not by a long shot, but I was also struck by this entry:
This is a little like reading my own thoughts. Indeed, this guy is just about the same age as me (I'm a little older), and he's a rancher, not a "homesteader", which anymore conveys something else, and frankly something less serious, or perhaps less realistic. I'll be looking forward to perusing his prior entries.
This quite frankly is a deceptive headline, but that's how it generally reads, even in English language editions of Finnish newspapers. What it really means is that the City of Helsinki will be changing what it serves at official state and municipal functions, and venues it owns, and it actually still will be serving meat.
What it will serve is local fish and also local game. We don't see wild game as a restaurant item much in the US, and indeed its subject to very strict statutory provisions everywhere. Why peole make the distinction between fish and "meat" baffles me, but they have here.
This is being done, maybe, by Helsinki (its drawing a lot of criticism) to reduce, it claims, its carbon footprint. There's a certain "m'eh" quality to this as frankly the concept that bovines are farting the plant into a climate crisis is not really well thought out. Humans are omnivores and meat is part of our diet, including meat that is raised by farmers and ranchers.
Having said that, I've long been an advocate for getting your own meat directly, and therefore I'm somewhat applauding Helsinki here, probably surprisingly to those who might know me. They're emphasizing local fish, which is something that people of that city probably mostly subsisted on until the mid 20th Century. And hunting wild game has always been a big part of Finnish culture, and still is.
Now, I'm not advocating for what Helsinki did, and I suspect that the Woke city counsel of the city, or whatever its administering body is, won't have this in place long. I'm a stockman and I'm hugely skeptical of the cow fart accusations on the climate. Depending upon how cattle are fed, this is not the problem its made out to be, and so to the extent its a problem, and there's always been ungulates around all over, it can be addressed. But I find it really surprising that in 2021 I'll occasionally find even ranchers and farmers who don't hunt.
People should get their meat locally if they can, and included in that, is getting it directly from the field. Its healthy, and honest, and connects you with reality in a way that going to the stocked shelves at Sam's Club doesn't.
On this day in 1941 Isoroku Yamamoto (山本 五十六), following a conference with the Emperor and others, issued Combined Fleet Operation Order No. 1 committing Japanese forces to offensive action against the United States unless the US yielded to Japanese demands.
In essence, given the failure of diplomacy up to that point, and the unlikely chance that diplomacy would yield results that Japan regarded as favorable, the secret order committed Japan to war against the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Tactically, it relied upon a strategy that Japan had successfully used in the past, which was to hit an opponents principal in theater naval base in port, immediately after a declaration of war, the same strategy which had been successfully used by Imperial Japan at the initiation of the Russo-Japanese War. In this case, however, the difficulties presented by the operation were vastly more difficult than those presented in the 1905 Port Arthur attack.
The reasons for what now seems an obviously doomed effort by Japan are surprisingly difficult to discern. Given as they tossed the U.S. into World War Two and resulted in the downfall of Imperial Japan, they are worth considering.
Japan had committed itself, of course, to war in China and in spite of years of effort it had never been able to digest the giant country or to defeat either of the two claimants to national supremacy there. The recognized government, the Nationalist, had proven incapable of defeating Japan to date, but they fought the war much more effectively than they've generally been credited with. If not winning, they really weren't losing in 1941 either.
The war in China had almost been accidental in some ways, but it demonstrated how deeply militarized Japan had become. In essence, the war commenced because Japan's occupation of Korea and portions of Manchuria were irreconcilable with China's sovereignty. Neither China nor the Soviet Union could really tolerate Japan's obviously imperial presence in the region. Japan's presence there was purely colonial, and in a way it differed very little from Germany's presence in 1941 on the Russian steppes. Japan had a large and growing population, and it had a concept of settling a portion of that population on lands that it regarded as suitable for them, views of the occupants of that land notwithstanding.
Japan's invasion of Manchuria inevitably lead to clashes with the Chinese Nationalist, and Soviet, armies. For its part, the Japanese army in Manchuria operated nearly independently. Ultimately clashes with the Chinese lead to full-scale war and an invasion by Japan of China.
While Japanese offensive operations were initially successful, ultimately China was too vast and too populous for the Japanese to defeat. The Chinese Nationalist held on, first with German and Soviet material help, and then with American and Soviet help The United States, sympathetic with the Chinese Nationalist started to put in place economic boycotts against Japan, fully aware that Japan could not continue to function without access to foreign raw materials. That made it plain to the administrations in both nations that Japan would have to go into diplomacy with the Chinese, or launch a war against the United States. In spite of the seeming obstacles of the latter, the Japanese did not back down and in fact expanded into French Indochina when the German occupation of France made that practical.
The Japanese Navy itself was a major factor in Japan's launching strikes against the West. A major world navy, it had not seen significant combat since the Russo Japanese War and was involved in intense rivalry with the Japanese Army. In spite of being bogged down in a quagmire against China, the Japanese Army saw a future war against the Soviet Union as being both inevitable and desirable, contrary to the views of some latter-day historians who assert that the Japanese Army did not have that in mind. It very much did, but did not view it as practical until China was defeated. The Japanese Navy, however, which was extremely dependent upon foreign oil, saw a quick sharp strike and series of invasions as a way for Japan to secure the raw materials it needed.
The oddity of that view is that it required the United States to acquiesce to defeat. In spite of some comments from within the Japanese Navy that suggest that it never regarded that as realistic, it did. The thought was that taking out the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor, including its aircraft carriers, would render the United States defenseless and that after Japan invaded the Pacific territories it wished to take, the United States would sue for peace.
It was completely unrealistic.
On the same day, as detailed below, the Joint Board of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy agreed that in the event of a war, the primary goal would be to defeat Nazi Germany first.
By this point in 1941 the military, in spite of what the public still hoped, had concluded that full scale declared war with Germany and Japan was inevitable and it was preparing for it night and day. The Navy was already fighting the war, albeit unofficially, in the Atlantic. Military eyes on the continental US and the Administration were focused on the war in Europe, while also knowing that a war with Japan was coming. Even at this point, the decision had already been made to defeat Germany, regarded as the more strategically dangerous enemy, first. And indeed the decision was correct, given Germany's ongoing advance into the Soviet Union. Had Germany defeated the USSR the results of the Pacific War, in some ways, would hardly have mattered.
As an aspect of this, and we'll note more on this in a future post, this meant that the US was committed to a two front war right from the onset. While we frequently hear of Stalin's demands for the opening of a "second front", the Western Allies were always fighting on two or more fronts while the USSR was fighting on one.
On this day in 1921, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) applies for a trademark for its "star in a ring" logo. In Bavaria, the funeral of King Ludwig III was held without incident, in spite of fears that it might result in a pro monarchy demonstration. It didn't occur in part as Prince Rupprecht, who did hold aspirations of regaining the thrown would nonetheless not allow his father's funeral to be used for that purpose.
The residents of the state got a brief glimpse at how members of the legislature actually view each other, or how at least some of them view each other, yesterday when news broke that Rep. Harshman twice used the "f" word in describing Rep. Chuck Gray. Both men are from Casper.
Harshman was attending remotely and had his computer "mic" on. He didn't realize that.
Harshman is a long-serving member of the House who was once its speaker and who is employed as a high school coach and educator. Gray is what is now termed a "conservative" in most circles and is even sometimes referred to as "most conservative", even though some of the things he's presently backing wouldn't have been regarded as conservative in prior times (telling employers who they can and can't hire and fire isn't traditional conservatism). Gray was recently running against Liz Cheney but failed to secure much support, and he spent part of the fall involving himself with the conspiratorially minded Arizona recount.
To put things in sharper focus, Gray and Anthony Bouchard have been in the forefront of the Trump populist movement although beyond that the two men share little that's obviously common and Bouchard was taking shots at Gray recently due to their being competitors in their respective doomed efforts to replace Cheney as the GOP nominee. That effort is now obviously centered on Harriet Hageman, and Gray's funding didn't seem to extend much beyond himself and his father, the latter who also owns the radio station where Gray is employed as a commentator. He has drawn a group of "conservatives" around him, at least locally. It didn't go much beyond Natrona County, however, in spite of his being scandal free, well-spoken and media savvy, which isn't surprising given his occupation.
In backrooms of the GOP and out on the street you'll hear little rumblings about the populists, but you have to really be listening to pick them up. Truth be known the GOP here is splitting into two parties and may already really function that way. One party is made up of the traditional Wyoming party, and the other is the populists. Out on the streets, some longer standing regular workaday Republicans are pretty frank that they think the populists are nuts, whereas the neo firebrand populists seem to think anyone who doesn't think just like they do is a traitor.
This broke fully out with comments about Gray, which actually closely expresses the views held by more than a few workaday Republicans. In the comment section at Oil City, this immediately became apparent with some populists figures, including some local ones of note, expressing shock and taking the extreme party loyalty position against Harshman ("how could he take a shot at one of the most conservative members. . . ), and others coming back and slamming them for doing so ("he's allowed to have a view. . ."). A couple of probable Republicans not only excused Harshman's comments but endorsed them.
Harshman drove to Cheyenne to apologize and Gray hasn't commented on it. Harshman may face censure and has lost the right to appear remotely, but if the House censures him (some street populists are calling for resignation) they'll have to implicitly answer why another recent country Republican figure was allowed to say terrible things about Sen. Naracott with no real penalty ensuing.
Meanwhile, this explains what we've seen in Cheyenne. The regular GOP has been sidetracking the extreme unconstitutional bills and instead dealing with the less unconstitutional bills. Some variant of those will probably be passed, rather than the real firebrand ones. Just as it is nationally, the GOP is really waiting for the Trump era to pass and is hoping it does so soon, so such obvious discord ends before too many of the rank and file are disenchanted for good. The legislature voted to hold the special session, but chances are that most of the members felt compelled to do so, rather than enthusiastic about it, and now they'll pass something, as they reluctantly feel obligated to do that. There's a strong sense that an elected majority fears the populist branch of the party, which is controlling it right now, so it goes along with it, but only to the extent it absolutely has to.
October 4, 2021
The legislature passed a single bill, HB 1002.
The bill provided a compromise $4,000,000 to fight Federal mandates in courts, although this provision is odd in that the Attorney General's office is already staffed, so why $4,000,000 would be needed is unclear.
The bill itself does very little. It expresses the legislature's discontent with mandates and provides that public entities in Wyoming shall not enforce the, unless required to do so by the Federal government. It provides a time-out for that if things are in court.
All in all, the bill is surprisingly moderate and sensible, setting aside anyone's views on the policy behind it, as it recognizes the Supremacy Clause. This bill is one that a person didn't have to violate their oath of office in order to vote for. It demonstrates that the Republican Party in Wyoming is still made up of more of its traditional rank and file than populists, who wanted to take some fairly obviously unconstitutional acts in regard to mandates.
In passing the bill, Representative Nicholas, who is a lawyer, noted that the legislature's "hands were tied" as the legislature "can't override Federal law", which is exactly correct, given the Supremecy Clause of the US Constitution. It turns out that the Supremecy Clause provided the basis for Rep. Harshman's harsh words on Rep Gray, at least according to a statement he released, which stated in part:
Last Thursday, we had a debate
on the Federal preemption issue. And Bill 1001 has this statement, and
it is still there; the statement that the Bill goes away if a Federal mandate
is ever in place. And I think that's very disturbing. I mean, a Federal mandate
is clearly unconstitutional, outside of the powers granted to the Federal
government in the United States Constitution. It is also clearly an
unconstitutional delegation of congressional authority to the Executive Branch.
It's just unconstitutional in a variety of ways.
For
this state bill to have this statement, that the bill just goes away if there's
a federal mandate, and just to concede the Federal government preempts (which
is wrong; they don't)...the media can claim they do all they want, but it's not
true because it's not a constitutional action. So to have that statement in
there that the bill goes away with the Federal mandate is very troubling...it
wasn't needed and it was wrong.
And so I brought an amendment to discuss
it. I think it was important that we try to remove that, that we remove it and
that we have that discussion, and then I called for a recorded vote. Now,
amendments do not receive recorded votes, which I am very troubled by. I've
been troubled by it since I became a member. I think it's an important issue, I
called for a recorded vote, and there are many members that don't like that.
And that was the context for the wrong comments. I think there's a larger story
here. It just shows that this reaction to recorded votes totally wrong.
Members should be on the record on issues that come before the legislature. We
need accountability. I've called for recorded votes in the past, I called for
it there, and I stand by that because it's important for members of the
legislature to be on the record.
So,
I was very troubled by the comments. I think it was very unfortunate.
Gray, who is not a lawyer, is incorrect on the mandates being facially unconstitutional. You can make a constitutional argument regarding them, but it would have to do with there being no correctly worded enabling act, a pretty sophisticated legal argument that nobody has made so far, in so far as I'm aware.
Calling for recorded votes is another matter, and a person can have separate views on that. This is of course Gray's view on what occurred, and might not be Harshman's.
No matter, it was the correct view of the majority of the legislature that trying to override Federal law would violate the Supremacy Clause, which it would. So the bill sent to the legislature seeks to avoid that.
November 4, 2021, cont:
So, after all of that, the Federal Government's new rule came out, and it mandates vaccines or masks. In other words, it doesn't make anyone actually get vaccinated.
So, there is no actual Federal "vaccine mandate" as the Federal government isn't mandating anyone to get vaccinated save, probably, for its own employees. The new statute, then, if signed into law may actually apply to nothing in existence right now, unless a court was to interpret the new rules as a "vaccine mandate" as it mandates that people get vaccinated, or wear masks. That's an open question.
Alice Mann was photographed driving her car on this day in 1921. Mann was a silent movie actress with thirty films to her credit. She married this year and, unusual for her occupation, remained married to her husband Stanley Ash for the rest of his life. She dropped out of film in 1925 and died in 1986 at age 86. Only seven of her films remain. (Note, after posting this, it appears that this is actually Alice Wright Mann, who was the daughter of a West Virginia millionaire. I saw a post of the photo elsewhere that noted that, and the monogram on the car's door).
Hara Takashi was assassinated by a railway worker who was upset with his leadership, including a perception that he was going to act to grant women the franchise and that he'd involved businessmen in the government. His assassin was sentenced to death, which was commuted, and he was ultimately released after serving a thirteen-year sentence.
Hara left an enormous diary which he was aware was valuable. It is a primary source for much Japanese history of the era, which would otherwise have gone completely unrecorded.
Italy interred its unknown soldier of the Great War in a tomb in Rome.
I can't recall exactly when it was, but it was some point while I was in university. As I don't remember it being right when I first went down to UW, I suspect it was when I went to law school, which I would have started in the fall of 1987. I was supposed to start in the fall of 1986, but I had reservations about it, so I held off for a year, and my mother was also deathly ill as well, so I had reason to return home.
I'll leave that story for some other time, but what I recall is that I went back down to UW and at the start of law school I was under the impression that it was going to be really hard. Truth be known, law school, and I suspect any law school, is an incredibly easy course of study. Indeed, one of the first deflating things about becoming a lawyer, at least for me, was to realize how easy law school was. [1] I'd just gone through an undergraduate course of study in geology, and that was very hard. Law school involved readsing cases and knowing what they held. Any idiot can do that.
Anyhow, the first year I didn't come home much to my old hunting haunts as I thought the finals as the end of the semester were going to be really hard and I couldn't afford the time off. M'eh, they were not. That did establish a course of conduct, however, in that throughout law school I didn't come home for Thanksgiving. It was right before finals and I always used it to study for finals. I didn't go home for Spring Break either.
Somewhere in there, I came home and found to my surprise that my father hadn't gotten his antelope. He had gone out after I had come home and got mine, but he didn't get one that time and didn't get one at all. It was a shock. Even my mother, who was quite ill, remarked on it, and she'd gone out with him, whihc was also very surprising.
More surprising is that he hadn't hunted waterfowl at all.
It concerned me as it didn't seem like him.
When I returned from law school, he was much his old self, but slowed down. He still fished regularly when the streams opened back up. He went with me when I hunted antelope and sometimes deer (he never took weekdays off to do these things ever, but back then I would). He helped, and by that I mean did almost all the work, butcher a moose and an elk I shot back then. But he also was getting a little absent minded, enough that I noticed.
The year he turned 62 he was too sick to go antelope hunting with me and my good friend Tom. I knew he must be really sick, as he'd never cancelled on anything like that ever. He died the following April, never recovering from what started off like a cold.
This has been on my mind.
It's not on my mind as I'm missing hunting season. I'm not. But it has occured to me that I've become so busy in recent years that I'm now like my father. I don't take weekdays off to go, unlike when I what I did when I was younger. At some point my father went from a schedule that was six days a week, with half a day off on Wednesday and half a day off on Saturday, to all of Saturday off, and retaining the half day off on Wednesday, but he still started work incredibly early. For my part, over the years I've reached the point where I work six days a week nearly every week and sometimes seven days a week.
The past year, or indeed ever since the onset of COVID, I've been really busy. Things may have slowed down for oether people, but they sure didn't for me. So I've had my whithers to the yoke the entire time. So I'm a bit tired right now.
Which is what my wife tells me is going on here.
Well, during the really busy run up to a trial I started waking up early, as in 4:00 a.m. Recently that retreated back to 3:00 a.m, then a couple of times after that, it started crowing 2:00 a.m. At that point you have to do something and so I'm not back to sleeping into 5:00 a.m., thank goodness. But I'm just back to that.
Deer season has been wrapping up.
I didn't make the weekend before last out, as I had to work one of the days (I ended up working on Sunday) and we shipped cattle on Saturday.
No problems there, up at 3:00 a.m., worked all day, came home, ate out, and then up for Mass the following morning. And off to work after that.
That meant that I didn't go out for deer that weekend, but I met my son in a new area that we tried the following weekend. And that went fine. Up at 3:00, drove to Medicine Bow, met him there and hunted all day, without luck.
That takes me to this past weekend.
It was a frustrating week for a lot of reasons, some of which I'll not go into detail with but which make me feel a lot like John Daly, the saddle maker, in the 1920s. Anyhow, I had to work again on Saturday, which I did until a little after 2:00 p.m. About that time I knocked off and stopped by Our Lady of Fatima for confession. That took a little longer than I'd anticipated as the pastor was ill and a substitute priest came from downtown, but he was a bit late. I stopped at the sporting goods store after that, thinking about getting a replacement 15 watt gmrs radio for the Jeep to replace one I'd recently bought which was defective. I went home after that, getting home a little after 3:30.
I'd thought about going to Mass that night, and asked Long Suffering Spouse about going, but in the end we went to the across town sporting goods store instead. I was just pretty fatigued by that point for some reason, with the suspect being that I"d bee up since about 2:00 a.m. I'd have been better if I went that night, as that would have given me all the next day to go deer hunting, but I was simply worn out. I ddin't even get ready to go the following day.
The next morning I slept in to about 4:00 a.m., much later than I'd bee doing, and felt pretty good. While I was tempted to skip breakfast (I think eatinng three meals a day has contributed to my earlier rising for reasons I'll skip going into), I intead made two breakfast sandwiches with eggs, Canadian bacon and cheese, which is a gigantic breakfast for me. I don't really know what I was thinking, quite frankly.
I continued to feel fine until about halfway through Mass.
About that time, I was hit by a wave of fatigue that's difficult to describe. I attributed it to eating a big breakfast, but about the same time I began to feel odd. By the time I left Mass I was definitely feeling odd. At home, I briefly considered staying home for the day or switching to nearby duck hunting, but that was conceding I didn't want to, so I loaded up and got ready to go. By that time, I didn't just feel sleepy, I had a toothache where my one remaining wisdom tooth is located.
Now that might require a little explanation.
I was born with wisdom teeth, having a full set of four. When I was a teenager they started to "erupt", and my father pulled out the top two when it was convenient to do so. We always think of oral surgeons doing that work, but he did it for me as a result dentist. And both of them were removed without pain or inconvenience. I amazed at the time when people complained about how painful this process was, as it wasn't for me.
But he didn't get to the bottom two before he died. For the most part this hasn't been much of a problem. They'd erupt from time to time, but generally that would pass with there being only a little pain while they were erupting.
Once I was in my fifties, however, I began to break molars. And I broke one that was near my back left wisdom tooth. When that one was pulled by the oral surgeon (it was cracked right to the base in three pieces), the wisdom tooth in that area was removed as well.
That left just one.
This wasn't a problem until just the other day. I cracked the molar over there, and it was crowned, just like its opposite on the other side, leaving one molar between it and the wisdom tooth. The crown came in just last week.
All of a sudden, on Sunday morning, the wisdom tooth made its presence very much known.
It started hurting, and that went from annoying to really noticeable. I ignored it however, hoping it would go away. I packed up, and drove off. By the time I left the gas station, I had an incredibly dry mouth, and it was really hurting. This grew worse and worse as I drove out to where I wanted to hunt. I finally reached a place I wanted to check my maps and stopped.
By that time I was incredibly sleepy and in a huge amount of pain. I got out a canteen of water I had with me, checking its appearance (I filled it up about two weeks ago), and took a drink. The drink tasted good and I sat in the truck for a while contemplating the maps. By now it was foggy and wet and had snowed, I was tracking mud, and we still had a very long ways to go.
Normally I would have done that without hesitation.
Well, I hesitated. I felt so sick, I turned around to head back in.
Driving back in quickly became dicey. I was driving much slower than normal just due to the fatigue and the pain. To add to it, my tongue started to swell up on one side, the side that the wisdom tooth was on. I began to worry a little, but just a little, that I wouldn't be able to make it all the way back in, but then I was calmed by the double realities of being in far too much pain to accidentally fall asleep and that I had no other choice. No other choice really focuses a person.
I hit the highway finally, by which time I took the truck out of four-wheel drive as it seemed like the weather had improved. I started coming on in the hour-long highway speed final leg of the trip, still keeping my speed down. I was doing highway speed, but not high speed, which was in part because of the road still being wet. As I crossed the road where the bridge over the Power River is, I realized it was more than wet.
As I approached the accident scene, I knew what had happened. The Dodge truck, just like mine, had slip on black ice, its sudden disaster created in part because it was towing a trailer. It had happened on the bridge. It' had made it over the bridge, by which time the disaster was on. It had gone off the road and the trailer had rolled. One of the truck's windows was out.
I was headed towards the bridge myself of course and I knew that it had black ice, and I was in two-wheel drive. I'll go into four-wheel drive at the drop of a hat, but there was no time to do it now. Normally this would be pretty tense for me, but it wasn't. Just hurt too much. Up the hill I drove through what I knew to be a fatal accident site in bad weather from just a couple of years ago. I stopped in Powder River and went into four-wheel drive.
By the time I got home, I didn't feel so bad, but I didn't feel great. My wife recommended I take some Tylenol, but the tongue swelling had gone way down. About 4:00 I drank a glass of Irish whiskey, very slowly. I had a second over dinner, very slowly, and started to feel a lot better. I stayed up as long as I could, but when it was obvious that no Trick or Treaters were going to common in the 20F weather, I went and took a shower and hung on for bed.
On Monday I mostly felt a lot better. The mouth pain still comes and goes. I probably ought to call the dentist. I recall my father telling me that oral infections have the risk of being fatal, simply due to their location. The plan was, after all, to take that tooth out.
So, what of this experience, and those leading up to it? When I was a kid in the 70s I recall watching in math class in junior high, for some inexplicable reason, a Disney cartoon that was filmed in the 40s, probably for industrial workers, reminding them to stay home if they were sick. The film took the position that a cold was nature's way of making you take a day off.
Maybe.
Or maybe it's an opportunist predators chance to take something out, as it's worn down. Slow moving member of the herd so to speak. Or, more accurately, somebody who have worn themselves down through long hours and stress has a bit of a weakened immune system, maybe.
Still, maybe that means take some time off. That's hard to do, however, with things rolling on by. Or at least so I imagine. Perhaps it's often we imagine things that way. Not like a month or anything, but a day or two.
World War Two Office of Defense Transporation poster. Vacationing at home was no doubt easier prior to the cell phone and all of its electronic intrusions.
So perhaps none of this is as ominous as a person might suspect. At 58, I'm in a lot better shape than many, probably most, my age. But other than trying not to pack on too much weight (something I've always tried not to do, but I've always had to be careful about it), and being the beneficiary of my father's strong genes and my mother's athletic ones, I haven't been as active in any fashion as I used to be. I don't have a regular exercise routine like I once did, which was based simply on the 1980s Army Physical Fitness Test and walking or riding my bicycle to work. [2] And that's not really good. For some time, I've thought I should get back at it, but that's difficult when there are reasons you need your car at work and that you don't feel like doing much when you get home.
Still, as noted in a prior entry, the scene from No Country For Old Men put in above makes more and more sense to me as time goes by, and like Servant of God Black Elk, I agree "“Death? There is no death, only a change of worlds.". That's pretty evident.
And I'll be back out there next weekend. Probably for waterfowl. Deer has closed.
Footnotes.
1. There are a whole series of things like this.
Being a lawyer is really hard work, but you soon find as a lawyer that the field isn't populated by super genious of a Wil E Coyote level. There are huge intellects in the law to be sure, but you also encounter some folks whom you know aren't Albert Einstein or Richard Oppenheimer.
One of the big deflating things is the poor quality of oral argument, I'd note. I've been to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals twice, and when you do that, you sit there waiting for your turn, listening to the prior arguments. As a rule, they aren't great. Indeed, all in all the arguments I've heard at the Wyoming Supreme Court have been much better.
2. I'm not a "gym" guy and simply couldn't bring myself to do that, even though some of the gyms around here have swimming pools.
My mother was a fanatic swimmer and bicyclist which probably helps explain her remarkably physical condition after she recovered from her long illness. She basically went from somebody on death's door to somebody in their high 70s who was incredibly fit. Indeed, her really fit condition helped stave off, in my view, her ultimate mental decline, and when she suddenly quit her physical activities, I knew that something was very badly wrong.
I'm not going to bother to comment much. Off year elections are weird by nature, and I just don't know that they really mean anything. Indeed, if you read the headlines you can read everything from claims that Virginia is a disaster for Biden to Virginia being proof that Virginia's white demographic is clueless to Virginia being proof that Republicans who don't embrace Trump are the future of the GOP. As it's an off year election, it probably doesn't mean too much other than it was an off year election.
Locally the ballot initiative in Natrona County was the first election to be held in the state in which voters had to present ID to vote. I voted and presented my ID, which I thought odd at the time, but it didn't occur to me that this was new, even though I recall the change in the law, until I read it. It'll be interesting to see if the clerks found that this presented any difficulties or what it meant, if anything, for the election.
I don't normally combine these two, but today offers an interesting example of early 20th Century conditions in the form of the centennial of the birth of Charles Bronson.
Bronson as the central figure in Man With A Camera, a television series of the 1950s.
I don't idealize actors the way some people do, and that would include Bronson. But his early life really provides a glimpse of how things were in "the good old days". Indeed, of his films, only the short speech in the film The Dirty Dozen about why his character speaks German mirrors his own origins. Bronson spoke, in addition to English, Lithuanian, Russian and Greek, unlike German and Polish like his character in the film.
Bronson was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky, the eleventh of fifteen children of his parents. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who changed the family name to that from. Bučinskis. His father was actually a Lithuanian Lipka Tatar, many of whom are Muslims. His parents were however Roman Catholic.
Bronson's family was desperately poor. His father died when he was ten and he began working in Pennsylvania coal mines at that age. He nonetheless graduated from high school, being the first member of the family to do so. He was a full-time miner until 1943, when he joined the Army and entered the Army Air Corps. He ultimately became a B29 crewman and was wounded in action over Japan. After the war he returned to Pennsylvanian and worked odd jobs until breaking into acting in the early 1950s. Unlike many of his acting contemporaries, his wartime service had nothing to do with acting at all. He was acting in movies by 1951 and had regular television and even leading television roles by the mid 1950s. His breakthrough star role came with The Magnificent Seven in 1960.
Reviews like this tend to become hagiographies, and I don't intend for that to be the case. In fact, I don't like most of the Bronson movies from the 1970s, when his star power was at its height. Interestingly, he broke into full-scale stardom after age 50, which is rare in acting, but a lot of his roles of that period were cartoonish violent exercises. He was married three times, the first time to aspiring 18 year old actress Harriet Tendler which ended in divorce nearly twenty years later, then to Jill Ireland, and lastly, after her death, to Kim Weeks. His character in real life always remained hard to get at as he was intensely private and shy, but he was known to hold grudges for protracted periods, seemingly caused, in some people's minds, by lasting surprise that he'd succeeded in movies.
So what, if any, lessons can we draw from this life?
Well, for one thing, while poverty certainly remains in the United States, early childhood stories like Bronson's have gone from common to extremely rare. We don't read about families of fifteen much, and if we do, they tend to more often than not be regarded as interesting oddities, like the now fallen Dugger family. Bronson's family was big, because it was big, and there's not much else to that.
We also don't see miner works himself to death and then boys begin mining as kids stories either. But at that time, that was common. Child labor laws were in effect by 1920, but in the coal mining regions of Appalachia, they obviously weren't really enforced. This is an American story we thankfully don't see much of, even with the very poor, and even with immigrants.
It also demonstrates that even relatively recently an era remained in which people could be intensely private, even secretive. Surprisingly little is known about Bronson as a person. Finding out what happened to his fourteen siblings is darned near impossible, other than that they all retained the Buchinsky name. We know that he was raised in a Catholic family, and his fist father-in-law, who was Jewish, objected to the marriage partially on those grounds, but we don't really know how observant Bronson was, if at all, as an adult. Indeed, some rumor mills have him as a Lutheran or Russian Orthodox believer, both of which are unlikely. He clearly wasn't observant in regard to the Catholic views on marriage. He was a Nixon supporter and his series of early 1970s crime films are of a stout right-wing vigilante character, neither of which tells us more about his deeper views. We just don't know that much about him.
American success story or American tragedy? Hard to say.
The city is a major one and to a degree this accomplishment, and it was one, shows how people reading the newspapers, or sitting around tables in war rooms, would have had reason on this date to be gloomy about Allied, and at this time that really meant British and Soviet, prospects for winning the war.
Things for the Allies continued to look very bad.
The Germans tried again, and failed again, for Tula.
. . . points out that the first radar attack by a (British) submarine took place on this day, a major technological achievement, the Army commences Japanese language instruction. . . more than a little late, and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, which I have not read, was published.
It was published posthumously. Indeed, while Fitzgerald was already well known due to The Great Gatsby, he was about to achieve a late prime position in American literature due to World War Two. This was because the US had thousands of editions printed for soldiers during World War Two, along with other novels.
I was rummaging in my Secretary Desk top drawer the other day rearranging things and found two of these. I knew they were pen nibs, I just thought they were sort of odd looking ones.
It turns out that they're for a dip pen, not a fountain pen. That is, that old fashioned sort of pen that you dipped in ink in order to write with them.
The desk itself is over 100 years old. I don't know how old it is, but it's old. These nibs no doubt came with it, as nobody in my family every wrote with pens of that type since the desk arrived. It had been belonged to my Great Great Aunt Philomene, but I have to imagine that at the time of her death she wasn't writing with them either. Surely everyone had gone to fountain pens at some point.
Apparently these pens remained common for school children into the 1950s, which surprised me. I know that when I was in grade school in the 60s and 70s, some desks still had ink wells to hold bottels of ink, but I just assumed that they were for fountain pens. It turns out, I was wrong, which I didn't know until looking into this. They were for ink bottles for dip pens. Fountain pens were expensive and dip pens were not, comparatively. After ball point pens started to come in some schools held back adopting them as they increased the speed, and hence the sloppiness, of writing. Oddly enough, decreasing the speed of my writing is why I went to fountain pens.
Apparent dip pens are still made, although why isn't clear to me. As I have the nibs, maybe I should look for the pen.
The Emirate of Jabal Shammar, whose territory would comprise at least 30% of modern Saudi Arabia at its height, surrendered to the British backed House of Saud and was incorporated into the Saudi kingdom, which was not yet referred to by that name. The rise of the Rashidi state had resulted in the elimination of the Second Saudi State, which comprised over 40% of the current country. It's defeat on this date in 1921 brought the Sauds very close to controlling the entire Arabian peninsula, although their borders did not yet include territories that are now within them.
Emir Abudull-azia muteb Al Rasheed who died in battle against the Saudis in 1906.
The story is complicated and long-running. The Rashidi Emirate was established in 1836 and had feuded with the Saud's from the onset, exiling them to Kuwait. Constant strife between the ruling family and the Sauds was a permanent feature of its existence, and the emirate had begun to lose ground to the Sauds starting in 1902 as they fought to regain their territory. The emirates position was both strengthened and imperiled by its decision to ally itself with the Turks, who were unpopular on the Arabian Peninsula, where as the British backed the Sauds for nearly inexplicable reasons. To make matters worse, the House of Rashidi was incredibly unstable, with no established means of succession.
Following the sitting emir's death in battle in 1906, Mutail bin 'Abulazia succeeded is father but was assassinated by Sultan bin Hammud within a year. That figure then became emir but was unsuccessful in turning back the Saudis and was killed by his brothers in 1907. Saʿūd bin Hammūd then became emir and lasted until 1910 when he was killed by relatives. That lead to Saud bin Abdulaziz who ruled for ten years, from age ten until twenty, when he was assassinated by a cousin. Only twenty at the time, he already had multiple wives.
Following his death, ʿAbdullah bin Mutʿib ruled for a year as the 7th emir, surrendered to Ibn Saud on this date in 1921. He, too, was only twenty years old at the time.
The story plays out violently, as we might suppose. Upon the surrender the wife of one of the grandsons of the original emir, the grandson being Muhammad bin Talāl and his wife being Nura bin Sabhan married Prince Musa'id bin Abdulaziz Al Saud while Talāl was imprisoned. The Prince was the twelth son of Ibn Saud. The Prince and his wife became the parents of Prince Faisal bin Musa'id who murdered King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1975. So in essence the murderer of King Faisal represented a union between the House of Saud and the Rasheeds. The reasons for the Ameican educated Prince's actions have never been satisfactorily explained.
Let me first note, I really like NPR in general, and the NPR Politics podcast in particular. I'm a regular listener. I don't buy the "liberal bias" line about NPR at all, and generally find that it has good, straight forward, reporting.
I haven't been too thrilled by the addition of Nena Totenberg, however.
Seventy-seven year old Totenberg has a reputation for Supreme Court reporting going way back. And while I complain about the top of everything being vested in the Boomers, I will note that Totenberg is a real exception in that most of the hosts of Politics are Millenials, which is very refreshing. I have no one specific thing, other than I just feel that Totenberg is an example of an antiquated view on the Court somehow. A little snarky, sort of inside baseball, kind of approach to somebody who maybe has been around the Court a little too long.
Maybe.
Anyhow, there's a case in front of the United States Supreme Court regarding whether the 2nd Amendment provision regarding the right to "keep and bear" arms means you can carry them concealed or not. This is the episode:
In addition to Totenberg NPR invited Joseph Blocher to speak.
And this, dear reader, gives us a prime example of everything wrong about press Supreme Court coverage.
I've already listed my somewhat vague complaints about Totenberg, which are admittedly perhaps completely unfair.
Blocher is a law professor, and as such, however, his opinion here is, well, much like a law professor's.
Being a law professor is often an exercise in evading the practice of law Far too often law professors walked through the doors of a law firm, and then fifteen minutes later went crying out the front door after finding out that it involved hard, hard, nasty brutish, work.
So they entered a law school where they don't have to deal with the reality of law as it really is, in the nasty real world, where real people are.
Which often makes their views on big topics in the law 1) irrelevant; 2) worthless, or 3) dangerous.
This time it was pretty questionable.
Now, Blocher, in looking him up, and about whom I know nothing at all personally, worked on the Heller case, as a practicing lawyer, which is why he is probably a professor in the Duke Center for Firearms Law. Heller was the big case that found that the 2nd Amendment was incorporated into the full Bill of Rights and that it conveyed an individual right.
Having a Center for Firearms Law means, however, that you have a center for things most students don't deal with in their real law practices. Right there, that's worthy of a complaint from a practicing lawyer. A Center For Small Claims Court Law would be much more useful. A Center For Firearms Law sounds too much like a Center For The Way Law Professors Feel The World Should Be.
M'eh.
Anyhow, Blocher is a top dog there.
Now again, I know nothing about him. Just looking him up, it looks like he's built a nice career with this being a partial niche in it. He graduated from law school in 2006. That's long enough ago to have entered picked up the ability to really practice as a real lawyer, which takes about a decade after graduation for some field, and less time for others. I.e., to be able to practice on your own.
He then clerked for a year.
Mm. . . . .
Clerking had a somewhat prestigious reputation when I graduated from law school, and it still does, but it's evolved over time. Clerks used to serve one hitch for one judge and then be booted out into the cold real world a year later.
And that's what his first clerkship did.
First?
Yes, first.
We're starting to see the phenomenon of multiple clerkships now This is pretty much a new thing. Also a new thing, FWIW, is permanent clerkship. I.e., clerks who make that a career, which Blocher has not done, I'd note.
Blocher then went to work for almost a year. . . yes, almost a year, for a law firm, where he helped brief Heller. And then he went back into a second clerkship. Then, after a year of doing that, he became a law professor at Duke.
So he practiced law from September 2007 until June 2008.
This demonstrates everything wrong with law schools. Less than a year of actual practice? Nobody should be teaching law to people who will practice it who hasn't been in the trenches. A law professor teaching law to students who will be lawyers with less than a year of practice is like giving the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a guy whose strategic experience is limited to paying Stratego.
So, again, me'h.
Now, some would immediately note, and some lawyers at that, that to teach a position in a law school surely shouldn't have to mean that you've been a practicing lawyer. The professors in the physics department didn't built atomic bombs, probably, before going to work there. And that's quite right.
But law isn't like those sorts of disciplines. Professing disciplines, of the traditional type, save for the clergy really require you to be out in the muck before you really have an appreciation of what's going on. Those teaching medicine should have seen patients, for example.
And the law belongs to the people. It's easy enough to imagine that you know all about a legal topic, but you don't know anything about it until you've actually practiced law. A think like an individual right to carry a firearm may seem like something you can grasp through statistics and study, but until you are dealing with somebody whose ex spouse is threatening to beat them to death. . . well you don't.
Well, NPR, with Nena and Skippy, went on to try to consider the history of concealed carry and the law.
Totenberg did a good job, in spite of my criticism of her, in giving the history of the recent change in the approach of the states. Need to carry did use to be a requirement in most states in recent years, but has really changed. So that was correct. Where the show dropped ball, however, was here:
TOTENBERG: You know, if you really want an example of how much has changed in the law, I remember Chief Justice Burger in the 1980s, at some point in the 1980s - and he was a conservative Nixon appointee to the court - saying that the idea that you had an individual right to carry a gun was really just silly. He dismissed it. He had an interview with Parade magazine, and he simply dismissed it out of hand. And that was the absolutely accepted, in the legal profession, idea at the time. That has - we have seen not a sea change; we've seen a typhoon - you know, just obliterate that idea now. And oddly, it comes at a time when we have increased mass shootings and more dangerous weapons. So it is, you know - it's sort of - if this weren't radio, I would be gesturing that - my two hands banging up against each other. RASCOE: It's counterintuitive. TOTENBERG: It's very counterintuitive.
Okay, first of all, it is simply not the case that the legal profession universally thought there was no individual right to carry a firearm. In fact, it was hotly debated as there wasn't a case that had clearly decided it. But the one case that did exist, from the 1930s, strongly suggested such a right was in fact there. That results oriented opinion went as far as it could in restricting the one thing before it, a sawed off shotgun in the hands of a felon, but even in that, it suggested the right was there.
Now, at this point, Skippy leaped in to correct Nena, right?
No.
Let me also note that none of the "conservative" judges of the Burger era were all that conservative. Following the Second World War the Court became the domain of the left, and conservative judges of that time simply weren't all that conservative. It was simply a liberal court era. The first real conservative anyone nominated was Bork, who failed to gain a seat after the Senate, with Joe Biden playing a prominent role in it, skewered him for being conservative. That act held back an evolving conservative evolution on the Court which had, in part, been inspired by an activist Court simply making things up.
This doesn't mean Burger was a flaming liberal, either. That's not true at all. Rather, he was conservative in context. As Totenberg notes, he was a Nixon appointee, and Nixon was a conservative in context. Nixon wasn't Reagan, in other words.
But there were lawyers around, even as far back as that, and further, who felt there was an individual right to keep and bear arms. And there were those outside of the legal field who certainly did as well. It was 1993, for example, when Jeffrey R. Snyder penned A Nation of Cowards, a blistering critique of the gun control culture, which ran in the journal National Affairs.
Which gets us to two things.
The Constitution enumerates certain rights, certain rights can justifiably be implied from it that aren't enumerates, and reasonable restraints on the rights that are present or implied can be imposed. But in the long era following the Second World War and up until the last decade, some still were.
That's a subversion of democracy at worst and leads to contempt of the law at best. Under Chief Justice Roberts that trend has been retreating, and it may now have actually ended.
Does that mean you have a right to carry a firearm outside of your home without government permission? Certainly Does that mean that you have a right to carry it concealed? That's much less clear. Can some restraint be imposed? Again, certainly. Can they effectively be so strict as to keep you from carrying anywhere except the game fields and the range? No. Can the government insert itself into knowing what you are doing? Again, probably.
Should NPR get a new Court reporter? I wish they would.
Should Professor Blocher be tossed out on his butt and made to practice real law for a decade? Undoubtedly, and for his own good.
Should Duke do away with the Center for Firearms Law and create a Center For Small Claims Court Practice? It should.
Adolf Hitler issued a formal statement claiming that the United States had attacked Germany, making reference to the German sinking of the USS Reuben James the day prior.
During wartime the Coast Guard has traditionally serves as an auxiliary of the Navy, while during peace time it used to be part of the Department of the Treasury. Post 9/11 it's been part of the Department of Homeland Safety.
The Coast Guard was transferred from the Treasury Department into the Department of the Navy for the ongoing emergency, recognizing that the US was very near being in a state of war.
Selective Service issued a list of key occupations which were to receive conscription deferments. The last two items are noted here:
The first mass use of Soviet multiple rocket launchers occurred. The production effort, which had actually commenced prior to the war, was so secret that the Soviets didn't even inform the soldiers assigned to them what their official designation, the BM13, was until after the war. As they were marked with the letter "K" soldiers nicknamed them Katyusha after the popular wartime Russian song, although Stalin Organs was also a popular name for them.
The weapon was groundbreaking. Inaccurate, it went for volume of fire and was deployed in mass batteries. It was copied by other combatants once it became known, being a simple weapon to make, and its the origin of multiple rocket launching batteries that have replaced heavy artillery in some armies, including the United States Army.
The song was written just before the war, in 1938, and has gone on to remain a hugely popular Russian tune. About a girl on the Steppes, it is in the same category as Lili Marlene in that it was copied by other parties in the war, including those fighting the Red Army, with new lyrics being written in some instances. A search for it on YouTube will bring up a zillion Russian versions, many with dancing Russian women dressed in wartime uniforms. It's remained popular with Russian expatriot populations, and is popular in Israel as a folk tune. The crowed singing the farewell tune in The Deer Hunter, in the wedding scene, is singing it, most likely spontaneously as it the extras in that scene are actually parishioners of an actual American Russian Orthodox Church.
The Slovakian government issued orders requiring Jews to ride in separate train cars and to wear to mark their mail with the Star of David.
Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls, another Depression Era project, was opened to traffic.
These servicemen and clergymen attended a service at St. Andrew's Church. I'm not sure where, but probably in Wales or Scotland.
On this day in 1941 the USS Reuben James, a destroyer, was sunk by a U-boat while escorting merchant ships. The destroyer was not flying the US ensign at the time and therefore wouldn't have been completely easy for a U-boat to identify as a US ship. At the time it was hit, it was dropping depth chargers on another U-boat, although ironically the U-552 was actually aiming for the merchant ship, which was carrying ammunition, at the time it was hit.
100 sailers were killed in the strike, only 44 survived. The ship sank rapidly.
The event resulted in a notable folk song by Woody Guthrie.
While tragic, the event was another example of the United States really crossing the line on what a neutral could do. The ship wasn't flying the US ensign and it was attempting to sink a U-boat when it was instead sunk itself. Perhaps realizing that this was of a certain type of nature, the American public didn't rush towards war as a result of the sinking, as it likely would have done in 1917.
Guthrie's song was perhaps a natural for him. He was a communist and had been, therefore, an "anti fascist" since the Spanish Civil War days. The US entry into the war would lead him to be concerned about being conscripted into the Army, when the war came, and he actively attempted to receive an assignment through the Army to the USO, and effort which not too surprisingly failed. He then joined the Merchant Marines, which was a role that was actually more dangerous than being a combat infantryman. He served as a Merchant Marine from June 1943 until 1945, when his status as a communist resulted in the government requiring his discharge from that service. In July 1945 he was conscripted into the U.S. Army.
Guthrie's relationship with the Federal Government was an odd one. During the Depression and even after he was commissioned to write songs for the government, and famously wrote a set of songs associated with damming the Columbia River. He was a true musical genius of the folk genre, and while he was openly a communist or communistic,it probably only really shows strongly in one of his songs, the much misunderstood This Land Is Your Land. He died in 1967 at age 55 of Woody Guthrie's Disease. He was the father, of course, of musical legend Arlo Guthrie.
Final drilling took place on the monuments at Mt. Rushmore. This is regarded as the project's completion.
Nazi Germany imposed a heavy "sin tax" on this date in 1941, which it claimed was to reduce consumption of unhealthful products. The tax was on tobacco, hard liquor and champagne.
Health measure or not, by this point in the war the German economy had been overheated for a decade and things were getting worse. The Nazis did legitimately oppose tobacco consumption and were aware of its health dangers in a pioneering manner. Hitler, who had weird dietary views, was a teetotaler but the more likely reason for the tax on hard liquor and champagne was that they needed the money and the production of both resulted in caloric diversions that could have been better invested in other agricultural products. The Nazis did not attempt to take on beer, however.
