The 2021 Election Post Mortem. The Mortem and Self Interest Addition.

Okay, I wasn't going to comment on the 2021 off year election, but the combined impact of pundit bloviating and mutual left wing crying and gnashing of tofu encrusted teeth has caused me to reverse course on this.

Whitaker Chambers, 1948.

First, something to consider.

Virginia,in it's off year election, has only once elected a person from the same party as the sitting President.  So the results of its election are probably completely meaningless.  Why Virginians think that the interest of their state automatically lie with whomever is not in the Oval Office is an open question, but they probably do.

Or at least those who show up do, which is important to consider.

For some incredably odd reason, people tend to get really mad at the sitting President really quickly.  There's no real way that most Presidents can make any real difference in things in less than at least three years, but the public seems to think that if they haven't made the world perfect in about six months, they're a failure.  That explains part of the typical mid term election shift, and it probably applies to early off year elections as well.

And in an off year election, moreover, only the really motivated show up.  It's been noted that Republicans in general tend to show up, while Democrats do not unless they're in passionate love with a candidate.

Things like that, I'd note, are a consideration in things like bond issues.  Some strategists put bond issues in off year elections thinking that the motivated will show up and nobody else. Trouble is, the most motivated are those who vote "no", which is why that's not a good strategy.  When the general public shows up at a general election, those things tend to pass.

Anyhow, if we're really going to try to put some meaning into the Virginia election, and we probably ought not to, that's about it.  If we go a tad further, and we ought not to, it might be that the GOP candidate pretty much tried to run without anyone mentioning Trump.

There may be a real lesson in that.  

If we go a tad further than that, and some Democratic punditry certainly is, a potential lesson of the 2021 midterms in general is that the American public didn't suddenly take down their Reagan posters from the secret recesses of their homes and put up AoC posters.  People turn out to be middle of the road conservatives, just as they have been since, well, 1492, at least on a lot of things.

None of which has kept liberals from screaming out into the street decrying the benighted public as ignorant dolts who should never be allowed to vote.  

And this is no surprise. The left doesn't really like democracy very much.

The wailing is particularly noticable in regard to the supposed case of "white women", who we recently read were abandoning the GOP in droves and supporting the Democrats, which made the same Democrats at the time chortle.  Now that it turns out that "white women" are voting more conservatively, like white men. . . and like Hispanic men and women. . .and also like black men and women in some places, which means in the view of progressives they're ignorant fools who need to be sent to the Gulag.  The general trend isn't mentioned, however, just the "white women" part of it right now.  Similar stories on "white men" must have run their course.  And progressives engage in the preverbial whistling past the grave yard when the growing conservatism of Hispanics and some African American demographis are mentioned.

Part of this is based on a left wing view of what's in people's "best interest".  And in the view of liberals, allowing abortion on demand is pretty much in women's best interest.  Witness the following:

57% of white women in Virginia voted for a Republican *the day after* Republicans spent an entire day in court trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, and *actual professionals* in charge of Democratic messaging are going to blame it on Beloved.

And consider the following: 

Nobody votes against their best interests like white women.

This latter one caused some wag to amusingly note: 

Why is the left calling them, "white women"? I thought they called them "white birthing persons who chest feed"?

While that last item was in jest, there's actually more than a little truth to it.   Part of the reason that "white women", Hispanic women and black women, among others, are voting more conservatively is that they are women and want that recognized.  Progressives have entered an era in which biology doesn't exist.  It actually does, and people don't like pretending otherwise.

Much of the liberal angst here, of course, is about abortion.  Abortion is about killing a fetus so that it's not born.  There's no two ways about it, and anyone honest with themselves and with reality has to admit it. Basically, we're more comfortable with killing people we don't see, and as we haven't seen the baby yet, we're okay with that to a surprising extent.  It's the same reason we're okay with drone strikes in remote regions of the globe.  We don't see the people we're offing, even though they're just as dead as if we went out and hit them in the head with an axe.

Of course, killing people is generally an uncomfortable topic for most people, so we camouflage it, and in the case of abortion the left likes to call it "reproductive rights" now days.  That's just goofy.  It's actually "anti reproductive rights" if we are going to use the word "reproductive", which at least is some progress in acknowledging reality.  It's almost a societal admission that abortion in the United States is mostly about birth control, rather than rape or incest.  Of note in the area of progress also, recently pro abortion advocates have been encouraging women to speak about their own abortions, which at least is honest, and in doing so they're drawing the inevitable "I just didn't want to have a baby" admissions.  Having a baby is serious to be sure, but that admission is referring is pretty much the same as simply admitting that when a person presents you with a serious life difficulty, you ought to be allowed to off them, or should be able to at least if they're helpless.  And again, the speakers haven't tended to be "I was attacked" so much as women in their 20s admitting that sex causes people, and they didn't want to be burdened with a person, so they killed it.  It was convenient.

Not that society at large doesn't engage in this.  The "no abortions except. . . " line of logic, which is very common, feeds into this as well.  If a person is a person since conception, and science at this point says it is, a person is still a person no matter how horrific the circumstances of their conception may be.

Of course all of this is rarely in mind, which is why the recent debate style changes in the pro abortion camp have made some in that camp nervous.  People grew pretty acclimated to a combined clinical speech pattern in which the humanity of a fetus was never addressed as well as the talking point that all those getting an abortion are 13 year old incest victims.  Turns out this isn't true and a surprising number of women who receive an abortion really knew what they were doing.  That debate is more honest, but it may backfire as well.

Indeed, it might already be backfiring.

Anyhow, "white women", like perhaps most women everywhere, might simply feel that that's just too much.  I.e, they might not be buying into the liberal logic that a fetus isn't a person, or is't a person we need to pay attention to, or put another way, they may have the view that science and politics aren't frozen in the year 1973.  That doesn't mean that they're voting against their own interest.  They're voting for it. If they feel that their interest is preserving life, and women have always held that more closely than men, they're voting for their interests.

And it's a big assumption that this is a "white women" think, as this post from a black woman noted:

Lol Democrats are blaming white women for Glenn Youngkin's victory. These people are insane. Your guy lost. Get over it

Well exactly.

Most voters aren't single issue voters anyhow, and there's no real reason to believe that somehow white women, if they'd been aware of this, which is assuming that they would not have been, would have voted for the Democrat.  It just doesn't seem to be the case.  I.e., the liberal logic that its de facto in women's best interest to allow for wide-ranging abortions is an assumption without support. Why would that be in their best interests?  The answer would have to be that they might get pregnant, and if that occurred they'd need to have an abortion.  They may have instead included that if they get pregnant they'll choose life over death.

It's also assuming a lot to assume they were not aware of their self-interest.  Indeed, the single biggest problem in American politics today might be people over identifying with their self-interest.  People do, in fact, vote against their long term best interest, but typically in doing so they vote for their short term self-interest.  I.e, "I make money doing 'X', therefore the 'X' industry is good for business/the economy/the nation/the environment/ etc., and (believe it or not) somehow authorized by God".  You see this all the time.

On the topic of abortion, proponents who are voting on best interest or self interests are usually voting for hypothetical short term self-interest, which isn't at all the same as long term best interests.  So here, when "white women", or brown women, or black women, vote against abortion, they're actually weighing personal belief and long term societal best interests.  

When liberals, however, decry this as not voting in "best interests", what they really mean is not voting to ratify the liberal, or progressive, ideal, which pretty much regards children, and even people, in a theoretical rather than real way.  Indeed, it appears the overwhelming majority of Americans are not now, and never have been, for the liberal ideal.  Abortion was very much part of that.

Back in the 60s and 70s liberals promulgated a world view based on what they thought an ideal world looked like, and the feminism of the period was very much part of it.  Feminist of the period imagined that men lived in an industrial workplace paradise and that if only women could break into it, their lives would be as prefect as men's were.  In that world that they imagined gender practically didn't exist, except in terms of having sex.  

Sex by feminist of the period had oddly enough adopted the same view of sex that Hugh Hefner had adopted earlier, with slight variations in the view.  Hefner had advanced the idea that women, all of whom had big boobs in his world, were available for sex on demand and they were all sterile.  Feminists weren't as fascinated by huge mammaries, but they glommed onto the concept of sex as existing for nothing other than entertainment.  Unlike Hefner's sterile chesty dimwits, however, they took it a step further and assumed that sex doomed women to second class citizenship as they knew it could cause children.  Pharmaceuticals and abortion, however, took care of that.

This mattered to them as they tended to have a sort of quasi Marxist view of sex.  There's been a lot of ink spilled on "critical race theory" recently, but it might be better to spill it on Marxism in the bedroom.  Marx was an enemy of marriage and normal child rearing and early Communists really picked that up.  Up until the the October Revolution Communists were aggressive in separating sex from reproduction and had a view of it nearly identical to 1970s feminists, something that's rarely noted.  When they came into power they interesting pretty quickly became prudes, but even well into the 20s and 30s there were communists outside the USSR, including women, who were aggressively anti marrage and aggressively libertines in this area.  Whitaker Chambers, who was a bisexual until his rejection of Communism, goes into this a little bit in Witness, noting that the decision of he and his wife to have children was contrary to the American Communist world view at the time which universally favored abortion.

Feminist regarded children as the enemy  and took the view that sex couldn't result in children, however, as women always got stuck raising them, which kept women from financial independence and workplace fulfillment, which is where all fulfillment was.  Separate sex from marriage and children from sex was all part of the goal, and then women could join men in the boardroom in marital-less, equality, everybody could make loads of cash, and full equality of every type would bloom forth.

Pharmaceutical sterilization and abortion would help to achieve that, they reasoned.

Problem was, it was all based on a big lie.

And that lie was that men lived in paradise. They didn't.  They never had, but they particularly hadn't after industrialization.

We've dealt with that elsewhere, but what was forgotten is that industrialization took men out of their homes and away from their families to serve industry basically by economic force.  Marx was full of bs about "wage slave" but failed to realize that the economy he was advocating for the "worker" was even more in the nature of bondage.  People, as COVID 19 has shown, just don't naturally decide to spend most of tehir days in cublcles way from their family and kin.  They don't.  Indeed, as feminist knew, but failed to appreciate, men seperated for hours every day from their spouse begin, in some instances, to replicate that relationship with available women at work, with predictable disasterous consequences.  Feminists saw this as a male power play, which in some ways it actually was.

We've dealt with that elsewhere, but what was forgotten is that industrialization took men out of their homes and away from their families to serve industry basically by economic force.  Marx was full of BS about "wage slave" but failed to realize that the economy he was advocating for the "worker" was even more in the nature of bondage.  People, as COVID 19 has shown, just don't naturally decide to spend most of their days in cubicles way from their family and kin.  They don't.  Indeed, as feminist knew, but failed to appreciate, men separated for hours every day from their spouses begin, in some instances, to replicate that relationship with available women at work, with predictable disastrous consequences.  Feminists saw this as a male power play, which in some ways it actually was.  Prior to the 80s some of it was absolute hypocrisy and power in action, no doubt.  But some of it was biology combined with our fallen natures as well.

The fact, however, that such dalliances occurred says something about the overall satisfaction people have with their work.  At least in part people who are married aren't going to spend time chasing skirts if their work brings fulfillment.  And they aren't going to turn to other vices either.  Indeed, people somehow managed to not really note what average work actually was like for men.  Sure, they worked 8 to 5, as a rule, for their families, but the "work place camaraderie" was more likely built in a bar after work than at work itself.  People's work bonds, if they had any, tended to be outside of work, not in it.

The big reveal from the big feminist success of the 1970s and 80s was to expose "work fulfillment" as a lie to a lot of women. A lot of men already knew it was a lie. The lie is still being told, and its part of the pablum of professional schools and organizations.  Lots of pros, from attorneys to accountants, to business workers, to physicians, etc., are fed lines that happiness lives in work in and of itself  If they fail to achieve it, it's due to some problem, probably in them.  Only recently have some of the professions started to look at the profession itself, and wonder if it's them.

The famous quote is that you can't fool all of the people all the time, and that certainly applies to things that are deeply ingrained in nature.  Whereas Cosmopolitan may have imagined a world in which every woman in the office was a libertine who was on her away to a super happy desk job career it turned out that most women, and men, continue to see the world pretty much the way they always have, so regular life including children and marriage kept happening.  What did change, however, was the workplace, which now had not only been opened up to women, but which had now evolved to where their availability was now expected and mandatory.  This has made the lives of some women all the rougher, which takes us back to the liberal impulse.  If women won't abort their children, well then society must find a way to coax women away from children back to the workplace, and universal child care would be that.  With that, women will be allowed back in the workplace soon after giving birth, which is to say that they'll have no excuse not to be there and therefore will have to be.  Nobody of the Bernie Sanders ilk is going to say that, as they aren't thinking of it that way, but that's the reality of it.  Universal child care is a child care subsidy for industry so that the female part of the work force has no good reason not to be back at work.  This too represents "their best interests".

Finally, there's the gross overuse of everything being race related.  This really came out in a NPR Politics episode when Nena Totenburg had a melt down when a lifelong Democrat in Virginia expressed his discontent with the Democrats making everything about race.  Totenburg was practically spewing her coffee through the Iphone to maintain that only the Republicans do this.

Now, in the Virginia race there were no doubt differences in how various demographics voted. But note that the GOP nearly won in New Jersey as well, and not for the first time. And while hardly anyone seems to have noticed it, in spite of everything, the Republican Party's popularity has been going up with some black voters and generally with Hispanic voters.

Totenburg had a fit over the interviewed Democrat noting that the Democrats routinely reduce things to race at the present time, and not only do that, but that they basically demonize "white voters".  A person can question how to even really define "white" voter as that's merely the sort of color of a person's skin and not everyone agrees who is "white".  "White" doesn't really mean anything in and of itself, and the ability to define "white' is increasingly problematic.  Lebanese Americans have long been regarded as white, for example, so why wouldn't recent immigrants from Syria? They're the same ethnicity, separated by their religions.

Some Hispanics consider themselves white and lots of "white" American consider Hispanics without accents to be white.  Like Italians of earlier generations, at some point they'll all be considered "white" and that some point is probably very soon.  As the predictions of the decline of "whites as a majority" is based in large part on the increase in the Hispanic demographic, such predictions are actually completely meaningless.  And they should be, if we're speaking of general European culture, as Hispanics are just as much the heirs of general European culture as people of English ancestry.

Which in reality means that when the press and Democrats speak of a person being "white", what they really mean is what used to be called a WASP, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  And when progressive WASPs decry the election in Virginia, that's what they mean.  It's an internecine spat between the nation's oldest European demographic, paler members of other demographics need not apply.

This spat has been going on forever.  It's always been the case that urban WASP elites have looked down on rural WASP groups. Entire regions look down on others, but even WASP in the cities look down on their cousins in the sticks, and have for about 200 years.

Now some of this does have a real racial and racist expression.  The Southern hinterlands have never been friendly towards African Americans and following the election of Barack Obama old hatreds came back out.  And not just out there, but amazingly out everywhere. Trump made them worse as he fanned those flames for nearly inexplicable reasons.  Praising any group in which the Confederate battle flag shows up is sending some sort of racist message and at a bare minimum people ought to know that.

Nonetheless, the GOP increase in some African American demographics and some Hispanic demographics continued anyway.  A conservatism based on traditional values and traditionalism also existed which isn't really "white" and which isn't racist.  Indeed, church going African Americans and church going white Southerners are at least partially motivated by the same values.  Hispanic culture, as we've noted here before, is actually deeply conservative and much of the liberal social agenda is an anathema to it.

It's those values that that progressives keep slamming, and people voting to preserve them doesn't mean they are voting against their self interests. The Democratic dissing of these values has made them fully fair game for Republicans, the much more conservative party anyway, and that is why conservatives of all stripes and ethnicities have leaned into the GOP.  People who hold traditional views on marriage, sex and even simply biology feel they are being assaulted by a Democratic Party which holds all of those things in absolute contempt.  That doesn't make those voters racist and when they vote Republican, they are voting in their own self-interest.

This doesn't mean that there aren't really dark elements in the GOP. There are.  Genuine racists and bigots of all sorts have crept into it since the 1980s, and this increased during the Obama Administration and Trump took advantage of this.  This has tainted the populist movement no end and the Democrats have made hay with it.  But at this point, they've overplayed their hands.  It's one thing to call people flying the Confederate battle flag racists, as that's a racist symbol for which there is no excuse in 2021.  It's another to hurl the invective "white" at somebody as they feel marriage is only between a couple of the opposite gender or because modern American televised culture reflects a moral sewer.  If you keep doing that, eventually Democrats who were in that party as they sought a socially active country will leave, seeing that their moral values are not wanted, or even under assault.

And that may be one of the lessons of the 2021 election.

It's also dangerous, we'll note, to reduce a person's ethnicity or color to a joke.  Racists did this for decades with blacks and indeed American culture did.  But at some point within the last 20 or so years progressive WASPs started to do it as well and now it's extremely common. To call something "white" or somebody the "whitest" is not only inaccurate, but is meant as a type of racial slur.  If that's done long enough people get pissed off about it.

Indeed, one of the Twitter comments that I didn't post was by a very white woman with bright pink hair complaining about "white women". The irony of this is that this is about as upper class WASPish as a person can be.  When WASPs complaint about WASPs, they ought to look in the mirror.

As for the off year elections, most people might not be voting for Trump with their votes.  But rather, their votes may instead mean that they don't want their nation to be a large-scale soy vegan variant of downtown Amsterdam.

And people get tired of continually being told that their personal views are rubbish and they themselves aren't much better.  Whatever a person thinks of Trump, forty years of that from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party put him in the Oval Office and might again.  The GOP has to deal with that right now, but the Democrats might have to as well if their only response to losing is to have a bunch of white liberals complain that they lost due to white women.  

That's certainly not true.

Blog Mirror: 680: A Brief Explanation of Modern Monetary Theory

 

680: A Brief Explanation of Modern Monetary Theory

Some feral threads in the fabric.

I'm not going to take this too far, and you definitely could, but a couple of odds and ends I've run across recently.

One is this Agrarian blog I recently located:

Foothill Agrarian

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.

Persistence

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:

Coming to Terms with Being Part-Time

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.

I'm glad I found his blog.

Here's the other thing that caught my eye.

Helsinki says no meat will be served, single-use cutlery used at its events

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.

Picture Perfect: Iowa in the 1940s

Wednesday November 5, 1941. Japan commits to war.

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.

Today in World War II History—November 5, 1941

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.

Saturday, November 5, 1921. Star in the ring.

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 2021 Wyoming Special Legislative Session, Part III. The unvarnished views addition.

October 30, 2021.

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.

The bill can be read here.

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.

Prior editions:

The 2021 Wyoming Special Legislative Session, Part II

The 2021 Wyoming Special Legislative Session.

Friday November 4, 1921. Lost and Nearly Lost.

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.

Momento mori.

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.

The 2021 Off Year Election was . . .

yesterday.

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.

Mid Week At Work. November 3, 1921 The birth of Charles Bronson

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.

Monday, November 3, 1941. The Last Tycoon

On this day in 1941 the Germans took Kursk.

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.

Today in World War II History—November 3, 1941

. . . 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.

It's for a Dip Pen

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.

Wednesday November 2, 1921. Rise of the House of Saud

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.