November 10, 1942. The end of the beginning.

Admiral Darlan agreed to a ceasefire in French North Africa.

On the same day, Oran in Algeria surrendered to the Allies.  U.S. forces captured Porty Lyautey.

Following Darlan's declaration, the Germans launched Case Anton and occupied Vichy France, an operation which Italy particpated in. This ended Vichy's autonomy.  Darlan, in turn, declared that this move released him from any requirements of loyalty to Vichy and pleged cooperation with the Allies, with the condition that he be appointed French high commissioner for French North Africa.  While a hgly legalistic approach to thins, it 

Churchill used the occasion to give a speech which characteristically defined events with one of his most famous phrases of the war.

I notice, my Lord Mayor, by your speech you have reached the conclusion that news from the various fronts has been somewhat better lately.

In our wars, episodes are largely adverse but the final result has hitherto been satisfactory. Eddies swirl around us, but the tide bears us forward on its broad, restless flood.

In the last war we were uphill almost to the end. We met with continual disappointments and with disasters far more bloody than anything we have experienced so far in this. But in the end all oppositions fell together and our foes submitted themselves to our will.

We have not so far in this war taken as many German prisoners as they have taken British, but these German prisoners will, no doubt, come in in droves at the end, just as they did last time.

I have never promised anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat. Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory-a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers and warmed and cheered all our hearts.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England-he should have said Britain, of course-always won one battle, the last. It would seem to have begun rather earlier this time.

General Alexander, with his brilliant comrade and lieutenant, General Montgomery, has made a glorious and decisive victory in what I think should be called the Battle of Egypt. Rommel's army has been defeated. It has been routed. It has been very largely destroyed as a fighting force.

This battle was not fought for the sake of gaining positions or so many square miles of desert territory. General Alexander and General Montgomery fought it with one single idea-to destroy the armed forces of the enemy and to destroy them at a place where the disaster would be most punishable and irrevocable.

All the various elements in our lines of battle played their part. Indian troops, Fighting French, Greeks, representatives of Czechoslovakia and others. Americans rendered powerful and invaluable service in the air. But as it happened, as the course of battle turned, it has been fought throughout almost entirely by men of British blood and from the dominions on the one side and by Germans on the other. The Italians were left to perish in the waterless desert. But the fighting between the British and Germans was intense and fierce in the extreme.

It was a deadly battle. The Germans have been outmatched and outfought with every kind of weapon with which they had beaten down so many small peoples and, also, larger, unprepared peoples. They have been beaten by many of the technical apparatus on which they counted to gain domination of the world. Especially is this true in the air, as of tanks and of artillery, which has come back into its own. The Germans have received that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others.

Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning to the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Hitler's Nazis will be equally well armed and, perhaps, better armed. But henceforward they will have to face in many theatres that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others and of which they boasted all around the world that they were to be masters and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless.

When I read of the coastal road crammed with fleeing German vehicles under the blasting attacks of the R. A. F., I could not but remember those roads of France and Flanders crowded not with fighting men, but with helpless refugees, women and children, fleeing with their pitiful barrows and household goods upon whom such merciless havoc was wreaked. I have, I trust, a humane disposition, but I must say I could not help feeling that whatever was happening, however grievous, was only justice grimly repaid.

It will be my duty in the near future to give a particular and full account of these operations. All I say about them at present is that the victory which has already been gained gives good prospects of becoming decisive and final, so far as the defense of Egypt is concerned.

But this Battle of Egypt, in itself so important, was designed and timed as a prelude and a counterpart of the momentous enterprise undertaken by the United States at the western end of the Mediterranean, an enterprise under United States command and in which our army, air force and, above all, our navy are bearing an honorable and important share. A very full account has bee published of all that has been happening in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

The President of the United States, who is Commander in Chief of the armed forces of America, is the author of this might undertaking and in all of it I have been his active and ardent lieutenant.

You have, no doubt, read the declaration of President Roosevelt, solemnly endorsed by His Majesty's Government, of the strict respect which will be paid to the rights and interests of Spain and Portugal, both by America and Great Britain.

To those countries, our only policy is that they shall be independent and free, prosperous and at peace. Britain and the United States will do all that we can to enrich the economic life of the Iberian Peninsula. The Spaniards, especially, with all their troubles, require and deserve peace and recuperation.

Our thoughts turn toward France, groaning in bondage under the German heel. Many ask themselves the question: Is France finished? Is that long and famous history, marked by so many manifestations of genius, bearing with it so much that is precious to culture, to civilization and, above all, to the liberties of mankind-is all that now to sink forever into the ocean of the past or will France rise again and resume her rightful place in the structure of what may one day be again the family of Europe?

I gladly say here, on this considerable occasion, even now when misguided or suborned Frenchmen are firing upon their rescuers, that I am prepared to stake my faith that France will rise again.

While there are men like General De Gaulle and all those who follow him-and they are legion throughout France-and men like General Giraud, that gallant warrior whom no prison can hold, while there are men like that to stand forward in the name and in the cause of France my confidence in the future of France is sure.

For ourselves we have no wish but to see France free and strong, with her empire gathered round her and with Alsace-Lorraine restored. We covet no French possession. We have no acquisitive designs or ambitions in North Africa or any other part of the world. We have not entered this war for profit or expansion but only for honor and to do our duty in defending the right.

Let me, however, make this clear, in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter: we mean to hold our own. I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. For that task, if ever it were prescribed, some one else would have to be found, and under a democracy I suppose the nation would have to be consulted.

I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy, without which the good cause might well have perished from the face of the earth.

Here we are and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world. There was a time not long ago when for a whole year we stood all alone. Those days, thank God, have gone.

We now move forward in a great and gallant company. For our record we have nothing to fear. We have no need to make excuses or apologies. Our record pleads for us and we shall get gratitude in the breasts of every man and woman in every part of the world.

As I have said, in this war we have no territorial aims. We desire no commercial favors, we wish to alter no sovereignty or frontier for our own benefit.

We have come into North Africa shoulder to shoulder with our American friends and allies for one purpose and one purpose only. Namely, to gain a vantage ground from which to open a n ew front against Hitler and Hitlerism, to cleanse the shores of Africa from the stain of Nazi and Fascist tyranny, to open the Mediterranean to Allied sea power and air power, and thus effect the liberation of the peoples of Europe from the pit of misery into which they have been passed by their own improvidence and by the brutal violence of the enemy.

These two African undertakings, in the east and in the west, were part of a single strategic and political conception which we had labored long to bring to fruition and about which we are now justified in entertaining good and reasonable confidence. Taken together they were a grand design, vast in its scope, honorable in its motive and noble in its aim.

British and American forces continue to prosper in the Mediterranean. The whole event will be a new bond between the English-speaking people and a new hope for the whole world.

I recall to you some lines of Byron which seem to me to fit event and theme:

"Millions of tongues record thee, and anew

Their children's lips shall echo them and say,

Here where sword the united nations drew

Our countrymen were warring on that day.

And this is much and all which will not pass away."

Somewhat oddly, this date was the date on which the movie Road To Morocco was released.

And there's this:

Women lumberjacks at the Northwestern Timber Salvage Administration’s lumber mill at Turkey Pond, N.H. get $4 a day, 11/10/1942. 

Thank you to NARA staff member Shannon Kerner for the document suggestion!

File Unit: [Women Operating Sawmill, Turkey Pond, New Hampshire], 1938 - 1943

Series: Records Relating to Timber Salvage, 1938 - 1943

Record Group 95: Records of the Forest Service, 1870 - 2022

Image description: Three women in heavy work clothes and kerchiefs over their hair carry a log on their shoulders. In the background is a pond filled with logs.

Source: catalog.archives.gov

Blog Mirror: Pine Nut Cookies.

I have to admit, I'm pretty curious what these would taste like.

PINE NUT COOKIES

Takeaways, so far, from the 2022 General Election.

Early takeaways.

1.  Poll models are existentially wrong.

There is no longer any reason to pretend otherwise.

For weeks prior to elections, we read of poll results. They were wrong in 2022, wrong in 2020, and wrong in 2016.

They're wrong.

Something is amiss in them, one thing simply being that younger generations don't really care to talk to pollsters.

This might be, overall, a good thing.

2.  Conservatism retains a strong appeal, but Trump doesn't.

Edmund Burke.

Trump caused the Republicans to lose the House and Senate in 2018.  He lost the Presidency in 2020, and never secured the popular vote in the first place ever.

The midterm election always sees a return of the party of power, something that may be a good thing, democratically, or not, but it's a fact.  This year there's real doubt that will happen, and Trump is the number one reason why.

Trump, whose appeal to anyone completely escapes me, loves Trump only the way that Trump and his acolytes can, and he's going to announce next week that he's running for the Oval Office.  In normal times, the GOP would send a delegation to Mar-a-Lago, invite Trump to go fishing and require Lindsey Graham to go along to listen to Trump's weird, weird diction in the same way that Uncle Colm is used by the girls to talk to the police in Derry Girls.  But these aren't normal times, so he's going to go ahead and run and the Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, will fall right in line.

An opportunity exists here for other Republicans to take advantage of this and push for the Presidency.  The problem with that, however, is Trump.

The ultimate irony here is that the elections from 2016 forward have demonstrated that there is a strong base for a conservative political party, including a conservative political party that includes populism.  People are, in many areas, voting culturally, and voting culturally for a return to Western values. There's nothing wrong with that, and the concept that these have been under attack by the left is correct.

But linking that movement, to Trump, will kill it.

3.  Wyoming has become the Post Reconstruction South.

Eh?

Bear with me.

In 1860, as we all know, the Southern states attempted to leave the United States and form their own country over the issue of slavery.

Most Southern whites, throughout the South, were yeomen.  Small independent farmers.  

The Civil War was about one issue and one issue only, race based slavery.  But slavery impacted everything in the South, most particularly its economy.

It's sometimes claimed, and indeed has been recently, that only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves prior to the Civil War.  I recall hearing that myself when in school, and even recently apparently somebody in the Internet claimed that only 1% of Southerners owned slaves in 1860.  A pretty detailed analysis of that shows that's actually incorrect, and a whopping 30.8% of free Southern families did, a pretty high number.  You can knock the percentage down by addressing only individuals, rather than families, but frankly that's unfair and inaccurate in an era prior to female suffrage.  And it's also been knocked down by including the entire Southern population, but you can't really count the enslaved in this analysis and have it make any sense.

At any rate, the reason that we note this is that about 69% of Southern families didn't own slaves, but that 30.8% that did dominated the culture and the region's economics.  Owning slaves was thought to be a necessity by planters, the large industrial farming class, just as serfs were in fact necessary to the feudal system.  The planter class absolutely dominated the economics and the politics of the South, even though the majority of Southerners were not in the class and in fact, as noted, were yeoman.

Not all yeoman were poor, as is sometimes claimed, and some of them owned slaves as well.  But the planters, who were the wealthy class in the South, completely dominated its economy and politics.  It would not be proper to take a Marxist view of this and assume that they dominated it simply because they were wealthy, but their wealth had the practical impact of making them the only really educated class and the only class that had time for leisure in the sense that Josef Pieper has written about.  This meant that their own self-interest became the interest of the entire region and were regarded as such.  When barefoot Southern farmers hit the road to fight against the North in the Civil War, they were pretty convinced that their interest and the planters were the same.

They were not.

That became pretty evident during Reconstruction, but the domination of the planter class actually never waned.  White Southern yeomanry had more in common, economically, with the recently freed slaves than they did with white planters. For a time it briefly looked like they'd act accordingly.  And during Reconstruction, they found themselves nearly violently at odds with the planter class.  Yeoman who had always made use, for example, of the woods as commons for the grazing of cattle and for hunting found themselves suddenly fenced and locked out, and nearly resorted to arms over it.

To a degree, what prevented that from really developing is that while the yeomanry did not feel itself aligned with the planters at first, planter propaganda, the nature of being occupied by the North, and the shared experience of the Civil War won them over against their own interests.  The monied and powerful classes of the South backed the concept of "The Lost Cause", a noble struggle for "Southern Rights", which wasn't about slavery at all, but about something else, never mind that it couldn't be rationally defined as it didn't exist.  All Southern officers were noble, all the enlisted men stalwart loyalists, sacrificing themselves to the cause.  The myth lasted so long that the dedication of Stone Mountain in the 1970s could still be regarded in the Oval Office as a noble thing, and not a monument to treason.  Southern yeoman remained in second class status and following Reconstruction were basically heavily marginalized along with Southern blacks.  The entire region declined into second class economic status as it clung to an old economy benefiting mostly the already wealthy.  Education became second rate. 

That all started to change during the Great Depression, but it really took into the 1970s for it to break.  We'll omit that part of the story, as that would be secondary to what we're looking at now.

Wyoming is now the New Post Reconstruction South.

How so?

Consider this.  Plantation economics had originally made the South one of the wealthiest parts of the United States.  Cotton actually was the second crop subject to the plantation system.  Tobacco was first, and tobacco made the south wealthy.  Cotton followed and added to that.  The North wasn't poor, but in the pre industrialized country, agriculture was king and the South had market agriculture, producing tobacco, cotton, and corn based alcohol, all for sale.  Nothing like it existed in the North.  Going into the Civil War, they still believed that this was the case.

It wasn't.

Wealth had moved to industry by 1860 and the North had taken advantage of it.  It was much more economically developed, and as a result, much more of the wealth had gone down hill to its population.  It also had an economy which acknowledged and accepted government assistance, which made for good roads and canals.  It was more affluent, better educated, and much better informed.  The South fooled itself into believing the opposite and entered into a war it couldn't win as a result.  After the wear, the class that had controlled that wealth maneuvered to keep it, and did so successfully, keeping the South in a state of existence that, but for slavery, closely mirrored that which had existed before the war.

So what does this have to do with Wyoming?

Quite a lot.

The original wealth of the South came from simple farmers, true yeoman, the class that Thomas Jefferson hoped thought necessary to democracy and hoped to see flourish in the country even though he was a planter. The conversion to a planter based economy took some time.

That's true of Wyoming, to a degree, as well.

The first European cultured people to enter Wyoming weren't Americans at all, but rather Quebecois.  French culture people were pretty prominent in the state early on, and it was really the fur industry they built that caused the early private fort system to come about.  The government followed in the 1840s following the Mexican War, when the Army first marched into the purchased Ft. Laramie in order to guard the trails to the Pacific Coast that were developing.  The first really Wyoming based economic endeavor to some about after trapping was the livestock industry, which didn't enter the state until the 1870s, for the most part.

But even as early as the 1880s petroleum was seen as the state's future.  By the 1890s, it was common for newspapers to put remote oil prospects on the front page, even as the livestock industry was dominating the actual economy and providing for most of the state's employment.  Coal had an even earlier appearance, being first mined by the Union Pacific railroad to fuel its trains.

It was really World War One, however, that gave Wyoming an oil extraction, and at that time refining, economy.  And much of that was locally centered.  Refineries sprung up all over the state in this time period.  Casper saw not only three refineries develop, but major structures as well. The Oil Exchange Building was completed in 1917.  The Pan American Building sometime after that.   The Ohio Building in the 1940s.  The Sinclair Building, now only a memory, was built during this time period as well. The big club, where all sorts of business deals were made, was The Petroleum Club.

So we based our wealth, after 1917, on the extractive industries.

We did nothing wrong whatsoever by doing that.

But times have really changed, and they're in trouble.  

We can't and won't accept that.

The US of 2022 isn't the US of 1917, or 1922, or even 1962, or 1982.  But we basically are looking back to 1982, or so, economically, culturally and politically to an era when things were better for us.  

And this requires us, apparently, to now believe in The Lost Cause.

At one time if you talked to Southerners, everybody's Civil War ancestor was a colonel of epic heroism, not a deserter from the Confederate armies, even though a huge number of Southern soldiers became just that.  And they didn't fight for slavery, but for their culture.

We haven't been able to adjust to the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, twice, so we now have that as our Lost Cause Myth.  The brilliant super genius "very good genes", as Trump would have it, didn't lose, the election was stolen.

Never mind the clear evidence that Trump was planning to steal the election prior to the election occurring.  Never mind the destruction of the U.S. Post Office as part of that.  Never mind the effort to undermine COVID voting protocols.  Now, listen to people like Chuck Gray and you'll learn that 10,000 mules were employed in a nefarious plot.

I don't know how many Wyomingites really believe that, but probably about the same number, percentage wise, of Southerners at one time that believed that Uncle Euclid was a Colonel in the Confederate Cavalry, and not a barefoot infantryman in who deserted.  There were likely always doubts.  But like Homer Stokes in Oh Brother! Where Art Thou, there are underlying issues that people really have in mind.  "That ain't my culture and heritage".

The ultimate problem is that this is going to, long term, marginalize us economically and politically.  Just like it did the Post Reconstruction South.

4.  Democracy can work for the left.

As we've noted elsewhere, the real starting point in the attack on American democracy was by the left going towards a Court oriented aristocracy.  If Americans wouldn't reform and usher in the new liberal era on their own, the Courts could rule and force them.

The left was pretty comfortable with that.

Now the Courts have stripped that role away from themselves and returned issues that never should have been determined solely by nine ancient people with Ivy League law degrees to the people, effectively telling them they'll just have to figure these things out for themselves.

And low and behold, they actually can.

Thursday, November 10, 1922. Erskine Childers arrested by the Free State.

Erskine Childers, Ango Irish, English-born, Protestant, Irish Republican, was captured by the Irish Army in a nationwide roundup of IRA members.  

Childers was an Irish revolutionary figure who went from being an ardent supporter of the British Empire who served in the Boer War, into a revolutionary.  He was a member of the Anglo Irish aristocratic class, a lawyer, and a writer, who originally fit into the classic role of the period of English Empire loyalists, a view which he moved away from following the Boer War.

He helped smuggle German rifles into Ireland before the Great War, as he was by that time a supporter of home rule. When World War One came he was recalled into service and served first in the Royal Navy and then in the Royal Air Force.  His nationalism known, he was already a figure in Irish efforts to secure independence, and following the war he ended up the secretary of the delegation which negotiated with the British for independence.  He was an ardent opponent of the treaty with the UK.

He followed De Valera out of the Dail and published a pro-Republican journal following that while being a figure within Irish Republicanism.  He was not popular, however, among the Republican rank and file who regarded him as English, not without some good reasons. He was not trusted with a military role in spite of being vastly experienced in the same.

He was arrested for carrying a .32 handgun and put to death under the Army Emergency Powers Resolution which made carrying a firearm without a license a capital offense, a supremely ironic law for a government that had come into existence through doing just that.  He was executed on November 24, in what should be regarded as a supremely unjust act.  He was 52 years of age 

The Greek city of Saranta Ekklisies ("Forty Churches") in Thrace was turned over to the Turks, who renamed it at first "Kirk Kilise" ("Forty Churches").  Today it is Kirklareli, "The Place of 40"

The Marine Corps League was established.

The US released twenty vessels seized on the seas for carrying alcohol.

Funk No.1 - TOKYO GROOVE JYOSHI

I had a college roommate once that was really into funk.

This band is as good as any funk band I've ever heard.

"We keep you alive to serve this ship", Dying lashed to the oar. Part 2 of societal institutions and work.

There's a fair amount of discussion here on retirement.

No, I’m not retired.  And I'm not close to retiring either.

And, frankly, if I listened to outside sources such as financial planners and advisors, as well as the Social Security Administration, and even the Wyoming State Bar, I shouldn't really think about retirement until I'm dead.

Eh?

Well consider this.

This election, the Wyoming State Bar is backed a proposal to raise the retirement age for judges to 75 years old. The life expectancy for American men right now is 77.8 years.  In other words, much like the wizard scene in The Princess Bride, you can retire when you are mostly dead, and hope to enjoy your mostly dead status until you are really, really dead.

And why?

Well, we need to keep the brilliant brains at work until their light goes out for good, while keeping the young brilliant brains toiling in steerage, apparently.

And, let's not forget, it's a huge cost savings to the State

Indeed, if the State gets really lucky, because our upper ages are increasingly a wild card, judges will start dying on the bench, and we'll never have to pay out a dime of retirement money for them! 

Wouldn't that be great!

We know that the State of Wyoming wants you lashed to the plow until you drop dead in the furrows, but what about everyone else?

Well, if you listen to almost any casual retirement advice, it's based on the age you can first take Social Security and you are discouraged to do that.

Depending upon your demographic, that can be age 62.  "Full" Social Security starts at age 65 or 67, depending upon when you were born.  

Here's the government tables on that.

How Your Social Security Benefit Is Reduced

If you start getting benefits at age *	And you are the: Wage Earner, the Retirement Benefit you will receive is reduced to	And you are the: Spouse, the Retirement Benefit you will receive is reduced to
62	70.0%	32.5%
62 + 1 month	70.4	32.7
62 + 2 months	70.8	32.9
62 + 3 months	71.3	33.1
62 + 4 months	71.7	33.3
62 + 5 months	72.1	33.5
62 + 6 months	72.5	33.8
62 + 7 months	72.9	34.0
62 + 8 months	73.3	34.2
62 + 9 months	73.8	34.4
62 + 10 months	74.2	34.6
62 + 11 months	74.6	34.8
63	75.0	35.0
63 + 1 month	75.4	35.2
63 + 2 months	75.8	35.4
63 + 3 months	76.3	35.6
63 + 4 months	76.7	35.8
63 + 5 months	77.1	36.0
63 + 6 months	77.5	36.3
63 + 7 months	77.9	36.5
63 + 8 months	78.3	36.7
63 + 9 months	78.8	36.9
63 + 10 months	79.2	37.1
63 + 11 months	79.6	37.3
64	80.0	37.5
64 + 1 month	80.6	37.8
64 + 2 months	81.1	38.2
64 + 3 months	81.7	38.5
64 + 4 months	82.2	38.9
64 + 5 months	82.8	39.2
64 + 6 months	83.3	39.6
64 + 7 months	83.9	39.9
64 + 8 months	84.4	40.3
64 + 9 months	85.0	40.6
64 + 10 months	85.6	41.0
64 + 11 months	86.1	41.3
65	86.7	41.7
65 + 1 month	87.2	42.0
65 + 2 months	87.8	42.4
65 + 3 months	88.3	42.7
65 + 4 months	88.9	43.1
65 + 5 months	89.4	43.4
65 + 6 months	90.0	43.8
65 + 7 months	90.6	44.1
65 + 8 months	91.1	44.4
65 + 9 months	91.7	44.8
65 + 10 months	92.2	45.1
65 + 11 months	92.8	45.5
66	93.3	45.8
66 + 1 month	93.9	46.2
66 + 2 months	94.4	46.5
66 + 3 months	95.0	46.9
66 + 4 months	95.6	47.2
66 + 5 months	96.1	47.6
66 + 6 months	96.7	47.9
66 + 7 months	97.2	48.3
66 + 8 months	97.8	48.6
66 + 9 months	98.3	49.0
66 + 10 months	98.9	49.3
66 + 11 months	99.4	49.7
67	100.0	50.0

You'll almost never see any industry suggestions that you retire early.  Rather, in fact, it's the opposite.  You can find plenty of industry advice that not only should you work until you are 67, but you should work beyond that, just to be safe.

Whose interest does all of this serve?

Well, if you don't take a pension that's of the state type, that serves the state or local government.  If you don't take Social Security, that serves the United States government. They don't pay out the balance to your survivors, or at least not purely so.

What about independent financial advisors?

This probably varies enormously from person to person, and here I'm talking about the people you employ to manage your money, including your retirement money.  I really like my guy, who does great, but at the same time, I have yet to ever get a really straight answer on a simple planning questions.  When could I, if I wanted to, retire?  I asked the other day, and have before.

About the most I ever get out of that is "you're getting there".  

That's not really an answer.  Just the other day, therefore, I tried another approach.  If I were to retire today, how much could I draw and not deplete the principal?

"We need to schedule you in".

That's not an answer either, really.  

Now, as noted, I like my guy, but I think that financial planners fit into the same category as other economic folks.  They're end product driven.  It's not like a guy going out and thinking "I'll build me a car", and thereafter collecting the parts.  It's more like General Motors thinking, "I wonder how many of these cars we can make?"

As that's a bad analogy, let me put in this way.  To planners, to at least some degree, if you die with a big pot of untouched loot, you win. Hooray!  To the person whose dead, well they plowed five more acres.  yippee.

I'd note that industry advice, at least in my industry, also works this way.  If you look at any articles on lawyers retiring, what you tend to find is articles about lawyers who "retired" by changing the work that they do. That's not retirement.  That's like the plow mule being released from dragging a plow, so he can drag a cart.  You're still dragging.  For some reason, and perhaps this has to do with industry validation, it's a lot easier for article writers to write something like "Bob went from being a high stakes litigator to switching to be a high stakes litigator" than it is to saying "Bob went from being a high takes litigator to fly-fishing".

And that makes some sense to me.  It's important to any industry to keep up the myth that the reason you undertook this wonder activity in the first place wasn't the money, or wasn't because you needed a job and this was the only one you could do, but because you love it.  It defines you, you miserable sot, now sit back down and row.

Which indeed brings us to the few industries which really have noted short retirement periods, things like military service and the like. At a certain point, those lines of work actively say "get the crap out and get out of the way". Why?

Well, they depend on your fitness and feel you are a drag on things at that point.  

All of which gets back to the point made in part one of this series.  Why do you work?

Well, you have to. But if you work for a living, why should you keep on keeping on after you can actually just live.

Well, because society would prefer you do that.

Row.

Cowpoke

Monday, November 9, 1942. The Germans invade Tunisia

In reaction to yesterday's landings in French North Africa and Morocco, the Germans invaded French Tunisia.  Vichy forces offered no resistance.  They were offering little resistance to the Allies further to the West, but they had resisted in Syria and Madagascar.

The Germans had no choice, as with the Allies at their back, they had to attempt to protect their rear.  This meant, however, that the Germans were fighting a two front war in North Africa, more or less protected from the south by desert, but open to flank attacks from the sea.

Sarah Sundin, on her blog, notes:

80 Years Ago—Nov. 9, 1942: German planes transport troops to El Aouina Airfield in (Vichy) French Tunisia to combat Allied landings in Algeria.

This means of transportation was frankly remarkable.

It ought to also be noted that at this point in the war, the Western Allies were fighting in Africa and Asia, and therefore overall involved in a massive two front war on the ground.  The Soviets, who were constantly arguing for a second front in Europe, failed to appreciate that there already was one, effectively.   The Western Allies let this go unnoticed.

The French had occupied Tunisia since 1881, governing it as a protectorate.  Its status was at least technically different, therefore, than other African colonies held by the French, and it would ultimately be very much different than Algeria, which became an overseas department of France.

Tunisia had independence movements that predated the war, but it wisely avoided using the war as a means to argue for a change in government, as it did not want Axis control of the country.  The Free French would, however, mess with its government and depose its popular nationalist bey.  The country became independent in 1956.

Sundin also noted:

Germans force Danish King Christian X to appoint collaborator Erik Scavenius as prime minister.

Scavenius was not a Nazi, but took a down key approach, hoping not to create controversy with the occupying Germans.  He remains a controversial figure in Denmark.

Canada, Cuba and Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with Vichy France.

Another thing noted by Sundin: 

German spy Werner von Janowski is landed by U-boat U-518 at New Carlisle, Québec, but is arrested within hours on a tip from a suspicious hotel clerk.

Von Janowksi was  an odd figure the Canadians tried to turn, and there's some indication he may have ended up a triple agent.  He was eventually sent to the UK in 1943 and repatriated to Germany after the war. As he was from Prussia, he was then homeless, and ultimately ended up working as an interpreter for the German Navy once it was reconstituted.

And on a topic other than the war:

Charles Courtney Curran, noted for his highly romanticized paintings of women, passed away.

Lost in translation

It's interesting how things can basically get lost in translation.

And by that, I mean not so much language translation, but cultural translation.

I'm not going to get into the details, but in looking at a news story I noticed that the original headlines, based upon an event in a foreign land, read one way, but within a few hours, they read another way. And in that instance, they read in a manner familiar to an American audience. 

That took off on twitter and rapidly morphed, making the story worse.

So, I looked up the claimed criminal aspect of it.

Absent.

The reason being is that where it occurred, it's simply not a crime.  Not at all.  That's interesting, as in the US it certainly would be, and we tend to assume it is everywhere in the world.  Not only is it not, but much of the Western world, it isn't.

That makes it a sort of scandal, but not a crime, as has been asserted. And that in and of itself is interesting.

November 9, 1922. Hedging bets

The French Chamber of Deputies approved Raymond Poincare's policy of France abstaining on paying its war debts unit it had received reparations due from Germany.

Former White Russian General Viktor Pokrovsky, age 33, died while resisting arreste by Belgian authorities. They were conducting a murder investigation.

And the election results are in!

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The results are now in and, suffice it to say, what a giant surprise.  

Contrary to all expectations, Wyoming's voters, demonstrating independence of thought, rejected the creeping descent into fascism that the GOP was exhibiting, and the squirrel ball left group think of the Democratic Party, and wrote in thoughtful candidates instead.

First and foremost was the rejection of Harriet Hageman, the Republican nominee for the House of Representatives, who displaced Liz Cheney on the ballot.  Rethinking the matter, voters elected Ernst Sepansky, a member of the American Solidarity Party.

"I'm surprised and honored" stated Sepansky.  "Shoot, I didn't even know that most people knew I was running" Sepansky said, taking a break from his role as a sheep herder.  "I'll have to find somebody to tend the sheep, but I'll be happy to go back to D.C.  After all, I'm already used to smelly unthinking group think".

Rumor had it that Sepansky's employer, noting Hageman had come from a ranch as she frequently stated, was going to ask her if she'd like to return to more benighted employment while he is in Washington D.C.

The Secretary of State's position, in turn, was taken by independent Amanda Feliciano.  Feliciano, presently a clerk in Harriet Hageman's law firm, stated; "look, it isn't as if Harriet or Chuck know how to file a @#$@#$ thing in real life.  I've been filing these @#$#$@ UCC 3's for decades.  Little Chucky can get a @#$#$ job for the first time in his life".  

An effort to interview Mr. Gray failed as he could not be located.  Sources indicate that he'd wandered away from Casper, fearful that this might mean he'd have to send out resumes for employment.

Results were similar down ballot, as voters rejected right wing Republican candidates for the legislature who had only recently secured their nominations.

Voters, coming out of their polling stations, gave an early clue as to what they were thinking.  

Bob Edsel, an oilfield worker in Casper, was interviewed at the gas station after voting.  He stated "Look, I was going to vote for the Republicans, but I was pulling 'Ol Betsy, my new lifted diesel D3500 into the gas station for the third time on the way to work, listening to ol' Dr. John on the YouTube talk about how Joe jacked up gas prices, when a Russian drone missile took the darned filling station out.  I gots to thinking that Dr. John might not really be right about those 'ol fuel prices".

Katerina DeSantos spoke to us at her café job.  "I'm opposed to abortion, but I’m worried about a lot of social issues otherwise.  I spoke to my GOP candidate and asked him why he was in favor of the death penalty for parking violations, and he said it was in the Constitution. That was stupid."

A similar view was expressed by Ernst Darbonski about the school board election.  "Mom's for Liberty?  Liberty my @#$#.  One of those gal's came by my house and told me that I'd be able to educate my children with a Christian world view, and when I said I was Ukrainian Orthodox she urged me to convert to Christianity.  Ugh".

Kent Allred, the interim Secretary of State, indicated that he would certify the results.  He was going to decline to, and came into the office packing heat, but a State Trooper, after warning him he couldn't come in armed, shot him.

"Dag nabbit", Allred stated, "I just wasn't fast enough on the draw."

Well. . . a person can always dream.

How did things get so messed up?

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American democracy is in real trouble right now, there's no doubt.  The evidence is everywhere.

From 2016 to 2020 the President was a boorish multimillionaire whose early history was that of a New York Democrat.  Picking up on the anger in the country, he converted himself into a populist Republican and ran the nation in a semi unhinged manner restrained only by as set of advisors that reigned him in, or simply just didn't do what he wanted right up until when he tried to retain control through a coup.  On the plus side, however, Mitch McConnell basically ran the judicial nomination system, and after decades of Democratic picks who regarded the Constitution as more of a loose set of guidelines than a law, and weak kneed Republican nominees who turned out to be disappointments, some real jurists were finally elected.  

Now we've reached the point where in Arizona there's a serious chance the next Governor will be an election denier, in Pennsylvania a quack doctor may be their next Senator, and in Wyoming we're going to elect a Congressional candidate who stabbed her predecessor in the back and claims to believe, although I very much doubt she does, that the election was stolen.  Indeed, if she doesn't believe it was stolen, that makes her all the worse for promoting lies.  In the Secretary of State's office the current interim occupant is another election denier, and in January Chuck Gray, who based his campaign on nothing else, is going to be elected to an office he shouldn't be holding.  The state's GOP, meanwhile, is led by an extreme right wing Trumpite.

Democracy, truly, is in peril.

How did this happen?

We've dealt with this before, but if we really look deeply at this election, what we're seeing is 1) a hardcore group of Americans who feel their culture is being attacked, and not without merit for that belief, and 2) a group of fellow travelers who would probably, quite frankly, join in any political movement as they either don't think their claimed beliefs through or they want to be on what seems to be the winning side.

Note that I didn't say that it was because people believe the election was stolen. Some do, but what is really the case for most of those people is that they want to believe the election was stolen.  

And they want to believe that, as they want to believe their nation was stolen.

Was it?

The culture wars have been going on in the US for a lot longer than pundits would have it.  Indeed, the United States has always had some sort of culture war going on, and It's always had more than one culture.  But by and large, its culture as a whole has been a Western European Christian one.

And by and large, it still is.

Attacks on that go back quite some time as well.  Indeed, one way it is sometimes dated is to go October 31, 1517, when Monk Martin Luther ostensibly nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door.  In doing that Luther, who temperamentally should really never have been a cleric, unintentionally ushered in the age of individualism, which is always an attack on a culture as it ultimately must mean that an individual can define a culture himself, and sooner or later that leads to a sort of rampaging societal narcissism.

Which we have now.

Which means the 1517 date isn't a bad one from which to track the decay of Western European society, of which we are part.

Whether that's correct or not, we see larger, more radical attacks coming about in the late 18th Century. The celebrated French Revolution, a massive failure, was one such example.  The following of Communism and Communist Revolutions, which were ideologically and historically children of the French Revolution, are more recent examples which did real damage.

But through it all, the basic tenants of society remained.  Two genders.  Conventional relationships.  Marriage. A broad Christian concept of society, held even by non Christians. All of this was part of Western European, and more particularly, American, life.

That's been under attack since at least the 1920s, and very much under attack since the 1950s.

And that's what people are reacting to, albeit, much too late, and often on an instinctive level that ignores their own hypocrisy.

We just ran an item entitled Cis. That doesn't explain it all, but in the conversion of the GOP into a sort of Populist-Fascist Party, we see part of the reaction to that.  When people say the 2020 election was stolen, what they really mean, on an instinctive level, is that they want their culture back as the cultural norm, and any result contrary to that is a species of theft, as it's illegitimate.

Put another way, they don't accept that homosexuality is normal. They aren't accepting the damage done to marriage. They don't want a multicultural society of any kind.  

They also want Detroit of the 1950s back, and American industry back. They want Dayton Ohio back before it was modern Dayton. They want blue collar jobs that you work at all day long without a lot of thought, and when you knock off at 5, you go to the bar with your buddies, hit on the bar maid, and then go home to your wife.

They want to set the dial back.

But they don't want to set it all the way back, and that's what's so ironic.  Only parts. They probably just want to set it back to maybe 1985.  Not 1885, or 1485.

And they don't want to impose the societal rules that apply to themselves personally.  That is, other people should not be openly acting on self identified sexual concepts, but the disgruntled voters, assuming their inclinations are conventional, doesn't really want to return to a day when Playboy was still capable of being banned in some places, divorce required fault, and living in sin was heavily frowned upon.  Going back, in other words, is fine for me, where I like it, but shouldn't have to bind me otherwise.

And, in setting things back, you have to really honestly ask what you are setting them back to.

This isn't going on just in the United States.  It's going on elsewhere in the Western World.  Hungary and Poland provide two such examples, and they're not alone.  Just the other day, Sweden elevated to power a party that has its roots as a recent Neo Nazi movement.

So do they really believe the election was stolen?

I don't think they care.  And if they do mean that, they probably really mean that the election was stolen when Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms became law in the early 1970s, and when the results of the Stonehill Riot didn't come out as expected.

Getting here was a long road.  Part of it was an American inability to really restrain the negative implications of technology that started to come in during the early 20th Century.  Film, in particular, brought a leveling impact on society nationwide, but it also brought in a depressing one.  Prior to the initial introduction of movies, a person might be able to indulge in their prurient interests, but it wasn't a very safe thing to do, and it'd become widely known, or risk becoming widely known, and condemned.  After movies came in, it was at first easy to indulge in that just by going to them. There were no laws that precluded anything from being shown on film, and some early silent movies were outright pornographic.  That brought in the Hayes Production Code, but the influence of money meant that was only able to hold back the tide.

Even while the production code was in effect, the improvements in film of all kinds, and in medial production, meant that leaps and bounds were taken in regard to the portrayal of women in society, and not in a good way, by the 40s and 50s.  Playboy broke the door down, and the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s did what all wars do, destroy.

The Great Depression of the 30s played its role by bringing in the Federal Government in ways it had never operated before, and by effectively destroying the American System of economics, which had always blending government assistance with private, and often localized, economics.  Even by the mid 30s some were complaining about the impact of The New Deal on localized economies and cultures, such as "The Southern Agrarians" in I'll Take My Stand.  It was a losing battle, however, due to the great crisis, which was followed by a second great crisis; World War Two, and a third great crisis; The Cold War.  A nation that had to engage in that sort of struggle, or rather ongoing struggles, for a period of sixty years was one that was going to be geared towards economic magnitude and emphasize it above all else.  

It had to.

This was also the glory years, truly, for American industry and therefore for American blue collar workers.  European industry had been destroyed by the Second World War.  The British and French Empires collapsed.  The Soviet Union was our only contender in the world, but it wasn't that much of an economic contender.

So no harm in relaxing the standards a bit, eh?

Legal standards certainly relaxed.  A Supreme Court which had taken the Lochner view prior to Franklin Roosevelt's threat to pack it relented and then, during the long Democratic period in power, followed by Republicans who were economic conservatives but were in the middle of the road, became effectively a third branch of government in the way it never had been before.  And again, at first this was necessary, as the Supreme Court smashed through the vestiges of legal color barriers and forced the country to live up to its founding documents of the Revolutionary and Civil War period for the first time since the 1870s.

All that was necessary, but like most things, if the first helping is good, a second or third is warranted.  The large size of the government did not abate at any point. The Court, having addressed concerns that it really needed to, went on to things which it neither had a need to nor really had any legal ability to address.  The ever expansion outward of the economy was never reigned in, and Americans were converted from people into consumers.  And, finally, a Democratic Party that had struggled between liberalism and reaction, freed itself of its reactionary wing but launched into first its New Deal wing, and then following Watergate, it's very liberal wing.  While the latter occurred, the Republican Party largely stood by the wayside until the mid 1970s, when the reaction started.

The party reaction started then, but there had been reactions all along, and they spread and changed during the 1960s.  It was also during the 1960s that the Baby Boomer generation, all over the Western World, enjoying economic largess on an unprecedented scale, began to adopt in a large way the more radicalized, in every sense, features of the 1950s.  This eroded social institutions from below while the Courts eroded them, in the US, from above.  Governments in the West attempted to address this, but largely post 1968 by accommodations.  Social institutions of all types began to try to react during the 1960s as well, with many that had traditionally been very conservative in their outlook moving towards the left.

The reaction didn't begin to develop until the mid 1970s, but by that point so much had changed that finding a point on the compass was difficult.  In the United States, Reagan came in and moved the needle back towards the right.  In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher did the same.  But even as that occurred, most of the progress, if viewed that way, was fairly limited in real terms to economic matters on a large scale, with very little on the small scale.  Social conservatism rose in the late 70s and early 80s, but not enough to really disrupt the overall direction of things, and the Court moved only from left to left center.

Given this, real systemic and social problems that set in soon after the end of the Vietnam War never ended up being addressed.  Industry began to flood overseas without any effort to arrest it.  Social changes brought about by the courts continued on.  Social change at the local level was adopted wholesale by certain "elites" and the entertainment industry, to some degree in ways that would be regarded as shocking today.  Damage to social structure was ongoing.  Immigration reform brought in by Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats that reflected a concept of global social justice and 1950s style unabated economic opportunity set in so much that it's never been capable of being addressed.

While this occurred, the hard hat class lost their jobs.  Men who had provided incomes for their families no longer could.  Man and women had to go to work to support their families. The concept of simply abandoning women and children to the support of the government fixed in.  Institutions long held sacrosanct were attacked.

So, in essence, Baby Boomers who grew up in their parent's 1950s and early 1960s (with the early 1960s really being part, culturally, of the 1950s) and then attacked it, looked back to that past and hoped to live in it, finding they could not.  But not just that, the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War Two, looked back at the glory of the 40s and 50s, and the social support of the 1930s, and couldn't figure out how this had happened.

The World War Two Generation, once condemned by the Boomers and now universally praised by them, has largely passed away. But the Boomers, elderly though they now are, has not, and many of them are irate.  And their children, who grew up in the broken world the Boomers created struggle as well, kept down in various real ways by the Boomers, but also looking for a raft in the flood.

And then entered Donald Trump.

Like Adolph Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Trump has a message to deliver to his followers and it is that you can go back, and that this is not your fault.  Hitler told the Germans that losing World War One was not their fault, even though it certainly was, and that they'd been betrayed by the Jews.  He would take them back, and not back to Imperial Germany, but to a Germany far beyond that which existed only in myth, when the Germans were rising out of the forest to conquer the world by right.

Trump promises to take Americans back, to Make America Great Again, and to take it back as well. Back to an era when we were the only power on the globe, the only one making things, and when all was right in the neighborhood.  And, implicitly, just as Hitler promised to restore German greatness to the exclusion of all others whom the Volk had to deal with, Trump implicitly does the same.  Trump's America is a white, male, Protestant one.

This narrow view of the United States doesn't reflect a country that actually ever existed, but it does completely buy off on two foundational myths of the country, one being the country was founded in much the same way betrayed in The Patriot, and the other being the less Puritan one of the 1950s.  As odd as it may seem, Trumpist Americans see the country as a combination of strongly endowed with Puritan heritage while enjoying the pinups on the wall at a working class bar.

You cannot, of course, have both, which is the further irony.  Every Trumpite who wants to "make America great again" and sees the country, as many strongly do, as a result of Manifest Destiny, would need to first consider that those early forebearors would be horrified by much personal conduct exhibited by average Americans today. Trump himself is basically a serial polygamist, something that up until recently was regarded as beyond the Pale for public figures outside of the entertainment industry.  Divorced and remarried Americans who are populist standard-bearers are bearing a standard which, at its core, would not sanction that.  We could go on.

Much of this is, we'd note, a failure of Conservatism. This all should have been something that Conservatives addressed, but they failed to effectively do so.  Perhaps at least through Reagan they simply lacked the power to do so.  They do lack the power to do so now, which explains the abandonment of democracy by a surprising number. But make no mistake, Conservatism and populist, let alone espousing Illiberal Democracy or fascism, are not at all the same thing.  Conservatives are failing right now, as they have not taken on the illiberalism of the Trump forces that have stolen their banner.

We should hope they recover the courage to do so.  Otherwise, large sections of the American public are falling into delusion, and the fate of the country rides on them being awakened from it.

Conservatives have good and valid points about the antidemocratic nature of the left that got us here.  Only recently, it seems, have American progressives woken up to the need to support democracy. Before that, rule by a legal aristocracy was fine with them.  But resorting to exclusion and denial of the vote, and the will of the voters, will not be the long term answer to anything. Rather, it sews the seeds of ultimate destruction, first to the true Conservative cause, and secondly to democracy itself.

Colter Wall "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie"- Live from Speedy Creek

Wednesday, November 8, 1972. HBO Premiers, Nixon Fires.

Home Box Office premiered with its first broadcast being a NHL game between the Rangers and the Canucks.

President Nixon announced that he had asked for the resignation of everyone serving in his cabinet or whom he had appointed to office.

November 8, 1942. Operation Torch commences.

 Operation Torch commenced, that being the Anglo American invasion of French North Africa.

The landings were a compromise between British and American concerns, designed to knock the Axis out of North Africa by opening up the territory of theoretically neutral French North Africa. While it tends to be obliquely noted, it was an active of aggression against a party that had resisted going into war fully and which was not a declared belligerent.

The Western Task and Center Tasks Forces were made up of all American troops, while the Eastern Task Force included some British troops as well as Americans. The naval contingent was Anglo-American.  French loyalty to Vichy was already wavering and Admiral Duran, in Algiers, quickly convinced the Vichy authorities not to oppose the landings.  Duran was in Algiers at the time, visiting his son, which worked out freakishly well given that it was soon clear that Giraud did not have sufficient command over Vichy forces to influence them.  Casualties would be overall low for the operation, which lasted a little over a week.

Vichy France broke off diplomatic relations with the United States on this day, but as a practical matter this was the beginning of the end for Vichy, which had been fighting the British nearly continually in Africa for most of the year, and had been beaten by Japan in the Pacific.  It was reduced to a rump state after this, with the Free French increasingly being the legitimate French authority.

Sarah Sundin noted the day on her blog, of course, and included the naval Battle of Casablanca:

Today in World War II History—November 8, 1942: Operation Torch: 400,000 American and British troops land in Morocco and Algeria. In Naval Battle of Casablanca, US ships sink nine Vichy French warships.

The operation proved to be a masterful strategic and logistical success.  In very short order, it became clear that the tide that was already turning was rapidly rising.  And at that, it's worth noting that rolling back the Axis in Europe really started with British successes in North Africa, followed by Operation Torch, prior to the Red Army commencing to advance in any meaningful manner.  Having said that, simply holding the line by the fall of 1942 was a major Soviet success.

Torch, by the way, pitted 107,000 Allied troops against 125,000 mostly Vichy troops.  It was, therefore, spread out over a long axis and while the landing forces were concentrated, they were actually outnumbered in terms of overall numbers.  Armor landing in support of Torch was, moreover, weak.

Hitler, in a speech in Munich, declared Stalingrad to be in German hands.  The speech was his annual one to his "old fighters".

The Germans eliminated the Piaski ghetto, spreading their genocide further.

1942  Two United States Army Air Corp fighters conducted a demonstration over Lusk, with one of them being flown by a resident of Lusk, now in the USAAC.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

Wednesday, November 8, 1922. The trailing end of the Mexican Revolution.

Mexican Gen. Juan Carrasco, in rebellion against the government of Alvaro Obregón, was killed in hand-to-hand fighting near Guamuchil, Mexico.

Carrasco was illiterate and had risen up in rebel ranks during the Mexican Revolution. He tended to command personal loyalty and his success was based on that, with his ranks often filled out by personal associates and relatives.

The United States Army redesignated the Aviation Repair Depot as Maxwell Field, after Second Lieutenant William C. Maxwell who died in the Philippines in 1920 trying to land a disabled aircraft and avoiding a group of children on the ground.  Today, the based is Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.