Today In Wyoming's History: July 28. The Weather Again

The weather again:

Today In Wyoming's History: July 28:

2018  Tornadoes touch down south of Douglas and near Glendo Reservoir.

Rain every day.

And now tornadoes.

Best Post of the Week of July 22, 2018

The best posts of the week of July 22, 2018.

The 2018 Wyoming Election. Volume Four

The Wyoming Wildlife Federation Gubernatorial Forum

Now I know how the cat felt.

Um. . . no suprise. "14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming"

From National Archives Today's Documents: Blacksmith class at Benson Polytechnic School, Army Training Department, Portland, Oregon. 7/26/1918

The End Of A Fully Local Paper

 

Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns and Money. Is it just me, or does this song suddenly seem relevant once again?

The Wyoming Wildlife Federation Gubernatorial Forum

100 Years on the Lincoln Highway

Buffalo Soldiers Day

Reflections on a Canadian Shooting and on Canada itself.

I hesitate to post on this at all, for a variety of reasons.  First of all, because I tend to think these things get more attention that they should, and therefore I hesitate to be part of that.  Secondly because, as a person posting from the United States, such posts can come across as posted in the wrong spirit. Certainly I frankly find a lot of Canadian postings on American tragedies to nearly be in the nature of gloating and I don't want that to seem to be the case here. 

Downtown Toronto, January 2015.

But I am a Canadian, even if I'm one who never has lived in Canada, so maybe I have a right, and perhaps as a Canadian living outside of Canada, who has always lived outside of Canada, I have a different and unique prospective.  One that's both Canadian, of a sort, and sort of not, and frankly, one that's from the older, and I'd argue better in some ways, Canada rather than the contemporary one.

On all of that, I'm a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.  My mother was from St. Lambert, Quebec (which as will be noted below, adds to what is perhaps a unique prospective).  Her family had roots in Quebec that go as far back as roots can go there and, while she ultimately became a dual citizen herself, I think she was in her 70s when she did that, so for most of her life she was a Canadian and always identified in that fashion.  So, she was not only a Canadian, but she was from Quebec which has a unique history, but she had also lived in Alberta, which also figures into this post below.

 

My mother, probably in the late 1940s or the early 1950s, Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre in Quebec in the background.

What's all of that have to do with this post? Well, let me put in a little history, as in the end, history always defines everything in some way.

Canada is one of the most urban countries in the world. It's much more urban than the United States.  Shoot, for that matter, its more urban than the United Kingdom.  Most Canadians live in cities.

But that wasn't always true. Indeed, it's only become true very, very recently.

Up until the 1950s, Canada was an incredibly rural country. It's undergone a process that has happened throughout much of the world following (and commencing well before) the Second World War of urbanization, but its transformation has been more dramatic and frankly, in my view, almost wholly negative.*  Canada, going into the Second World War, certainly had some large and indeed, at least in Quebec, some very European cities, but the mass of its population was not city centered.  Even Quebec, which had a Euro-Canadian population dating back to the 1600s, was principally rural in character.**  Almost no nation that undergoes this transformation rapidly, and Canada did, does it really well, and Canada is no exception.***

This does not mean that its population was uniform in character, although it was much more uniform than that of the United States.  Quebec certainly varied in that it had a large French population that was distinct in nearly every fashion from the rest of Canada.****  The country also had significant populations from the remainder of the British Isles, and then starting in the early 1900s it acquired, in some (but only some) locations a significant Ukrainian and Russian population. All the while it retained a significant Indian population.  Having said that, however, the Dominion was distinctly British in character even while being distinctly Canadian.

Canada up until the mid 1950s was a nation that looked at itself and the rest of the world through distinctly different, quite British (and sometimes French), rural eyes.  Like a lot of areas the English had been, in some ways, it was "more English than the English", although using that phrase to attempt to define Canada at any one point would be highly unfair.^  Nonetheless it was a nation that, in spite of its small population, was steadfast in support of nearly every English overseas enterprise up to the end of World War Two.  Canada was left alone, for the most part, for most of the War of 1812 and had to fight against American invasion largely on its own, which it did very well.  It nonetheless rose to the occasions of the Boer War, World War One and World War Two, although in each instance it was largely its English speaking population that did so.  The French population opted to sit out, to the extent possible, all such English enterprises.

Memorial in Toronto to "Our Glorious Dead".

It's been almost forgotten by Canadians that this was the case.  Canadian troops served under overall English command in three wars of fairly close succession in impressive numbers and with impressive valor.  Other than internal wars against native populations, of which there were some, Canada's first war during which it was not part of an English army was the Korean War.  Since that time Canada, which has served more overseas than people care to admit, has never again served as part of a British overall army.

That 1945 departure date, i.e., the end of World War Two, would prove to be significant in more ways than just a coincidental separation from the United Kingdom in a military sense.  It proved to be a real bright line.  People who are familiar with the history of Quebec like to speak of the "Quiet Revolution", but in truth the entire country went through the same process and it was simply Quebec that entered it last and with a different character, as it was different.  Going into the war, Canada remained highly English in many ways.  Coming out if it, much of that Englishness was yielding to a type of Canadianism, but in a form that was different from that which exists today. That conservative Canadianism dominated from 1945 into about 1960, when it began to crack and yielded the liberal Canada that we have today. . . which isn't as liberal as it imagines.

This same process played out in different forms in different former English dominions and colonies, and the entire process seems fairly closely related to it.  Countries that had a distinctive separation from the United Kingdom prior to that time, such as Australia, were impacted much less.  Countries that were very closely tied to British Empire England, however, even if they resented it (or not) were much more heavily impacted by their separation from the UK and that story still plays out today.  The two most dramatic examples may be the Canada of today and the Ireland of today, both of which would regard themselves as now being long separated from the United Kingdom but which in fact, culturally, defined themselves with and against the British Empire so strongly that they continued to do so for some time after the Empire had actually fallen and they still are reacting to that today.

In both instances the countries were very conservative at first abut then began to experiment with a liberalism that in some fashions reminds a person of the occasional teenager that seeks to establish his or her self by being in total reaction to the values of his parents.  In this case, however, ironically, the parent had so many problems and became such an entity back into itself that the reaction was hardly noticed much at all.  In Canada, conservative political values yielded and are still yielding to increasingly liberal ones, as is the case with Ireland.  Ironically, at the same time, much of the population remains deeply personal conservative even while not wishing to publicly acknowledge it.  The entire thing is sort of a cultural house of cards that won't last.

Typical early 20th Century poster from Canada urging immigration for those who wanted to be farmers.  Canada remains an agricultural giant today even if Canadians tend not to think of the country that way and interestingly enough it still draws European immigrant farmers, frequently Dutch, who sell their European farms to purchase larger Canadian ones.

At the same time a very British Canada was turning its back on being British, it was also urbanizing at a blistering rate.  Canada had largely been settled as an agricultural enterprise in the first place, and it continued to focus on that for a time after World War Two. But soon after the war this changed and the country became highly urban. Canada is still an agricultural giant, but the overwhelming majority of Canadians live in urban areas and the country became both high urbanized and highly cosmopolitan.  As it did t his it developed a new sense of itself, largely centered on the Canadian concept of Canadianess based on the urban Canadian's view. At the same time, however, rural Canada, while depleted, did not disappear and an urban/rural, east/west divide developed.  All of this is true of the Untied States as well, but in the Canadian context the rural and Western divide is, if anything, stronger than it is in the US as its more extreme in nature.

Romanticized image of farmer in Canada in front of the first Canadian flag.

And that circles us back to this topic.

One of the features of the East/West and Urban/Rural device in Canada is that urban areas have become very powerful in terms of federal legislation and they have in turn proven to be extremely liberal post 1960.  Indeed, Canada in some ways defines the Jeffersonian view about what concentrations of populations mean.  Urban Canadians are not "liberal" in the classic Lockean libertarian sense but "liberal", or perhaps, "progressive" in the Social Democrat sense. Completely contrary to Americans, Canadians as a whole are much more accepting and even embracing of statism and government sponsored social control, although that will inevitably crack and retreat under the strain of the extreme lengths to which it has now been put.  Typically liberals claim to espouse the ideals of liberty within democracy but Canadians have accepted real controls of speech and expression that nearly any sector of the American public would regard as absolutely abhorrent.

And urban Canadians, in the same spirit, have embraced very extensive gun control.

Rural Canadians have not and indeed much of what I have noted above has not been embraced by Western Canadians or rural Canadians.  Canadian rejection, in rural areas, of gun control measures is known to be widespread even while at the same time urban Canadians are so ignorant of rural Canadian firearm us that urban Canadians will frequently claim that guns can't be owned in Canada.  This citation is made by urban Canadians often in accusation against the United States, with it being claimed that there is no violence in Canada, more or less, because Canadians are not allowed to own firearms.  In fact, this is completely false on both scores and shows a real lack of understanding on the part of people making the statement about actual laws and cultures (plural) in Canada itself.

Firearms most definitely can be owned in Canada and, like rural Mexico, simply ignoring more recent gun control measures is a widespread Canadian thing.  Indeed, while Canadians have somewhat sneered at the United States for its lack of extensive gun control, at least the press is now reporting things honestly in Canada in regards to criminal firearms usage an not blaming it on the United States.  It's known that most illegally used and owned firearms in Canada come into illegal usage through other Canadians, and indeed an entire lucrative black market has sprung up in which those who acquire firearms legally pass them into illegal hands at great profit. That same market once existed in a lot of American big cities but it has passed away over the years as restrictions on firearms ownership which fostered the black market, as all such restrictions on material ownership always do, went away.  And there are lots of firearms in Canada, which up until very recently had firearms that were considerably more lax than those of the United States.

And what this has shown, as the Australian example also did, is that gun control really doesn't achieve anything.  Indeed, Toronto just had another mass killing, with a van, just before this.  As with the Western World in general, violence in Canada has continued to decline, overall, at about the same rate as it otherwise was.  Horrific acts, however, still occur.  The real impact of gun control has been to make life difficult for rural Canadians.  In spite of this, the likely Canadian reaction, or at least that in Ontario, will be to boost the already existing calls for even stricter gun control.

And as with the United States, Canada is occasionally plagued with acts by those who are mentally impaired, as was apparently the case here. That does not, as far as I'm aware, happen with the seeming same frequency as it does in the US, but Canadian rates of violence were always lower than those of the United States, and no doubt for a variety of reasons.  Toronto's rate of violence, for what its worth, has been climbing in recent years, which says something but its not clear what.  The Canadian economy is in good shape so whatever is spiking it has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with gun access, and nothing to do with the United States.  Something else is going on.

So what all can we learn from this?  Well, whatever it is, we're probably not going to.  But if we were to, it perhaps should give those from one country pause about lecturing another about following its own example, as all the examples are pretty flawed.  Another is that restricting implements at the end of the day doesn't really accomplish much other than to burden people who are very unlikely to ever burden you.

What we might learn, however, if we learn anything, is that people can be violent and the mentally disturbed are more likely to be violent than others.  People can imagine that they can legislate that away, but they really can't, or at least not by "you can't own" type of laws.  That requires some other focus.

Well, there's been no "we're all Torontonians" movement.  A random act of senseless violence just doesn't draw them like ones that can seemingly be politicized.  But perhaps they should be, as those might say more than anything else.

________________________________________________________________________________

*In fairness, this process started with the Industrial Revolution, of which the Electronic or Computer or Information Revolution is a mere part.

**Quebec City was founded in 1608.

***The United States underwent the same transformation, it should be noted, but much more slowly and indeed much less completely.

****Except. perhaps, that it too was largely rural.  Indeed, it was the French Canadians rural character, not the couple of large cities in Quebec, that allowed it to remain distinct over the centuries.  Being primarily rurual in character, and supported by the Catholic church in every fashion including culturally, it withstood the solvent of English culture and administration. The same is true of Ireland.  In both instances the culture would not even exist but for the  Catholic Church.

^It's more fairly used to described New Zealand and what was Rhodesia.

Now I know how the cat felt.

The cat took rain personally.

He hated it.

He wasn't keen on snow either, but he really detested rain.

He held people personally responsible.

It's cloudy today.  All day yesterday my phone kept giving me storm warnings. There was a spectacular hail storm downtown.  There was a tornado north of town. 

The day prior the storms took out the power downtown.

I'm sick of it.

Collier's. July 27, 1918.

Um. . . no suprise. "14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming"

Food For Thought

14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming

And people are, of course, shocked and amazed.

But I'm not.

From the NPR story linked in above:

Amaia Arranz-Otaegui is an archaeobotanist from the University of Copenhagen. She was collecting dinner leftovers of the Natufians, a hunter-gatherer tribe that lived in the area more than 14,000 years ago during the Epipaleolithic time — a period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.

Natufians were hunters, which one could clearly tell from the bones of gazelles, sheep and hares that littered the cooking pit. But it turns out the Natufians were bakers, too --at a time well before scientists thought it was possible.

Why did scientist think that?

Because they always think whatever people routinely do in the modern world was discovered last Tuesday.

In other words, until now we thought that our ancestors were farmers first and bakers second. But Arranz-Otaegui's breadcrumbs predate the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. That means that our ancestors were bakers first —and learned to farm afterwards.

But that's never the case.

Now, with this shocking news, what does that mean for people who now eschew all breads at all costs?

Robert McGhee "Peaches" Graham, killed in France on July 27, 1918

For those who really wonder if there's a psychological difference between men and women. . .

my wife and daughter are watching a television show in which a couple with a large number of babies are enduring potty training them.

Why would anyone be interested in that?

Readership here tanks. . .

while picking on the Tribune, to an extent, I should note that readership here has, this past week, absolutely tanked.

Normally about 200 people stop in here per day.

Yesterday it was below 100.

Something must be causing it.  Not sure what.

Be that as it may, it's way down.

What might have caused it, however, is that I took the blog down for about 12 hours the other week to make some adjustments.  I couldn't recall quite how to do that, so I actually deleted it, knowing that I could reinstate it. I then figured out how to do what I wanted, and made it private while I adjusted it.

Why that would have made a difference, I don't know, but perhaps it did.

From National Archives Today's Documents: Blacksmith class at Benson Polytechnic School, Army Training Department, Portland, Oregon. 7/26/1918

An occupation that was as important to the Army, and society, in the 1910s as mechanics would be by the 1940s.

And one that was about to start to fade rapidly.

The End Of A Fully Local Paper

The classic view of the newspaper press. . . now really a thing of the past.  The inky, largely all male, domain of the those who put the papers out every day.  I've known a few printers and have been in the old Star Tribune printing room once, which had the atmosphere of Navy enlisted quarters in the old days.

The largest newspaper in the state of Wyoming is, and has been for a long time, the Casper Star Tribune.

I like newspapers.  Anyone who stops in here would know that due to the fact that I frequently post old papers here, and I make reference to newspapers here very frequently.  I've subscribed to The Casper Star Tribune since I was out on my own.

I come from a family of readers, and that includes newspaper readership.  When I was a kid my father subscribed to the Tribune and he picked up the The Rocky Mountain News every day.  On Sundays we typically had the Tribune,The Rocky Mountain News (now extinct) and The Denver Post.  At one time while I lived in Laramie I subscribed to the Tribune and The Rocky Mountain News.  At various points, in addition to the Tribune and The Rocky Mountain News, I've subscribed to The Catholic Register, The  Whitehorse Daily Star, and the Fairbanks Daily News Miner.  Papers I frequently read in the past, which I didn't subscribe to, included the college journals for Casper College and the University of Wyoming, the Laramie Boomerang (which shows up here a lot in connection with the 1910s) and the Stars and Stripes.  When I stay out of town somewhere, I always buy the local paper wherever I am and read it cover to cover.  Clearly, I like newspapers.

Indeed, I briefly pondered being a newspaper journalist for the same reason that a lot of others have been in that field.  I love writing, and I thought about trying to be an author of books (which I have achieved to a very limited extent).  I was writing for my high school journal, the Gusher, and it was interesting and we had a contact with the Tribune.  Having said that, I lost that interest quickly (and in fact a speaker who came over from the Tribune helped motivate my feelings in that direction, one of a few so so experiences I've had with newspaper journalists since that time). 

So it gives me no pleasure to note that since the first time since The Natrona Tribune started publishing in Casper in 1891 there will not be a locally published paper.

1897 edition of the Natrona Tribune, Casper's first newspaper.

Oh, I know, the Tribune will claim and is claiming that its not in trouble and that its still locally publishing. . . just from Cheyenne.

Bull.

The Casper Herald, one of the Tribune's actually ancestors.  The Tribune came about due to the merger of the Casper Star and the Casper Tribune Herald.

The Tribune is publishing from Cheyenne. That much is clearly true. And its decision makes business sense.  As its publisher, Dale Bohren, noted in an article in the Tribune, outsourcing the printing to a third party makes business sense. And that third party publisher, Adams Publishing Group, already prints newspapers for the Laramie (Laramie Boomerang), Cheyenne, Rock Springs and Rawlins markets.

Well, okay.

Casper not only had two. . . or more newspapers, even while having a smaller population than it does today, there were other newspapers printed all around the county, such as this one from the now completely disappeared Bessemer.

But any reader of the Tribune would realize that the paper has gone from a substantial daily down to the size of a small town paper over the past two decades.  During that time period it was often fairly rocky in appearance and quality, although Bohren, who came from the Casper Journal which was purchased by Lee, which owns the Tribune, puts out a consistently good product. But that product is now declining down to a small town newspaper.  A reader of the Tribune, if they weren't familiar with it, wouldn't find it all that much different than The Laramie Boomerang or the Riverton Ranger, quite frankly.  It's in trouble.

It claims more readership today than at any time in its history, due to its online subscribers.  Well, I have my doubts. Subscribing to the Tribune is really expensive as it has attempted to stay in the black.  And advertising, which is the king of newspaper revenues, clearly isn't what it once was in the Trib.  I'm not saying that the electronic subscriptions aren't there, but they clearly don't tell the full story.  I frankly wonder if electronic subscribers get a reduced price of some sort (in which case maybe I'll consider dropping down to that, even though I like holding the paper in my hands and being able to browse it).  It's really questionable at this point whether its worth the price.

One of two newspapers that served Midwest and Edgerton in the 1920s.

Indeed, with the rise in price has also come a drop both in content and in volume.  It used to be that subscribers to the Tribune also received Bohren's Casper Journal.  No longer.  Ironically, at least fairly recently, the Tribune would drop Journals off at the houses of non subscribers in hopes, apparently, that they'd subscribe to something.

Well, publishing a paper in a city that's 150 miles away is not publishing it locally.  Oh, I get it, reporters will submit their stories electronically and somewhere in the Trib they'll put the format of the paper together and then get it to Adams. But distance does mean difficulties and that's just not the same.  Moreover, getting the Tribune to Casper will mean getting the print edition out in sufficient time to haul the paper 150 miles to Casper, get it out to the distributors, and getting it to  your door.  Newspapers famously go "to bed" late so that they can be up to date. In order to do that, the Tribune reporter's deadline is going to have to be pretty darned early.  One more decline in the paper.

Second Salt Creek journal, also from 1923.

This also means that on bad weather days, and if this year keeps up the way its going right now we can anticipate a bad winter, there just won't be Casper papers in Casper. That's significant for more than one reason.  If you are publishing an advertisement, let's say "Big Snow Shovel Sale!", having the paper stuck in Cheyenne isn't going to do you much good.  Same thing is true if you are waiting on the fourth publication of that legal notice you need to foreclose on something. . . snowed in that day. . . run it again . . at expense.

Not good, and frankly, potentially fatal to the paper.

And then there's the human cost.

One story the Tribune didn't tell, and that's typical of the Tribune when it reports about itself, is what this means for the 25 full and part time employees of the press room. They're loosing their jobs.  People who worked in actually printing the paper have been told that August 5 is their last day.

Newspapers generally are relatively liberal in nature and tend to be, like plaintiff's lawyers, declared champions of the working man.  If you start laying off the working man, no matter how solid your economic reasons, your claim is weakened in that regard.  And something is going on down at the Trib in this area anyhow.  What it is, isn't clear, but the reporters unionized last year for some reason.  One reporter I was interviewed by was wearing his union button when he did it. That sends some sort of a message.

Its a real change for Casper.

Local paper?  

Well. . . .

Random Encounter With Marching Band

Letter From The Hygeia Antiseptic Toothpick Company to The United States Food Administrator Regarding Sugar. July 25, 1918 (from National Archive's "Today's Document" blog)

Checking on on what we in Wyoming were doing about sugar consumption. . . .

The Allies Intervene In Embattled Russia

Finding an actual date, at least on the net, for the commencement of the Allied intervention in Russia is difficult.  Generally, you'll just get "July, 1918".

Well, whatever the actual date was, it was obviously close to this day in 1918, as the Soviets were complaining about Allied landings on Murman Coast, near Murmansk.  That was in fact one of the two three locations for the Allied intervention and it may well have been the first location.

The landings near Murmansk would be made up of a joint Anglo American force of which 5,000 men were American troops.  6,000 were English, 1000 Canadian and approximately another 1,000 or so were French.  The force was under the overall command of an English commander and it actively participated in combat in the region, which was generally contrary to the vague instructions that the Administration had issued to the American forces that were going into Russia.  The fact that they were engaged in combat was not due to insubordination so much as it was due to poor communication of the intended restrictions on American troops.

A little over 160 Americans would loose their lives in the intervention, far fewer than the British loss which amounted to over 500.  It's always been speculated that some Americans may have been left behind due to the hasty nature of the withdrawal in 1919.  Following that withdrawal, White resistance in Northern Russia, which was not doing well by that time in any event, collapsed.

Because, of course, the Kreigsmarine couldn't have pulled that off on their own. . . .

that submarine in Cape Cod, that is.

Of course, German residents of that area had to be helping. . . . right?

Another example of the degree of ethnic paranoia in the US during World War One.

The Road Not Taken

When engaging in personal micro counterfactuals, its easy to forget that every act a person does, every choice, error, commission, or omission, has an impact of some sort.

And every significant such choice, error, commission, or omission has long term impacts.  Many life long.

The closer a person is to a fork in the road, the easier it is to backtrack down the road and take the other fork.  At some point, however, you are far enough down that road that going back isn't practical, or at some point even possible.

And at those point, all the impacts of that chosen trip are irrevocable to a certain degree.  People who have benefited or suffered as a result of that choice, did so as a result of that choice.  When people imagine the alternative counterfactual, that's often forgotten. Oh, the negative consequences are of course imagined as avoided.  The positive ones are imagined as retained. And that's the weakness of all such scenarios.

Which is why perhaps people should not engage in them.



At least not too much.

Or perhaps too wistfully retrospectively.

Gilovich, Medvec, and Kahneman (1998) have shown that real-life regrets for actions and inactions correspond to different emotional states. When people regret something they have done they experience painful “hot” emotions such as disgust or guilt, whereas when the regret is about a failure to act they rather experience wistful emotions. In four questionnaire studies, we have tested the hypothesis that regrettable actions elicit a particular subcategory of these hot emotions: the self-conscious emotions (i.e., guilt, shame, embarrassment, remorse, and anger toward oneself). These studies used different methodologies and all converged to show that self-conscious emotions were the only hot emotions to be systematically greater for action regrets than for inaction regrets. A similar pattern was observed for judgments of responsibility and morality. We emphasize the theoretical and methodological implications of these results in the discussion.

 From the Journal of Social Psychology.

Or not.  

The Allies Strike Back. The 100 Days Offensive. The idea starts to form. July 24, 1918.

At a conference of Allied commanders, Marshal Foch, on this day in 1918, proposed taking advantage of the disarray in the German ranks which had been brought about by the failure of German efforts in their massive 1918 Spring Offensive.  The idea was a limited one at first, but as it came to be evident that the German Offensive had effectively destroyed the cohesion of the German forces, and as Germany disintegrated at home, the Allies were able to do what the Germans were not.  A series of offensive operations flowed which brought the war to an end.

Oh for goodness sake, enough already

And the weather forecast for the week is. . . of course, . . more rain.

Boiling water. . .and maybe having a beer. A Hundred Years Ago: Drink Pure, Safe Water: Hundred-Year-Old Advice

This is a topic that we still hear about, but frankly it doesn't mean what it used to in almost every place in the developed world:

Drink Pure, Safe Water: Hundred-Year-Old Advice

Boil your water?  I'll bet  you don't.

Why would you have?

See that item about cholera?  That's why.

Oh, you're thinking. . .that was the 19th Century, not the 20th.

Well. . . .

See that item about the baby in 1919?

This sort of thing, by the way, is why humans brewed beer, in part, and fermented wine, in part.

Now, that's only part of the reason, to be sure, there are others.

But it was part.

Now, if you read the blogs and whatnot you'll see this notion challenged.  "Oh no, that isn't why people brewed beer".

Well, bull.

The modern challenge to this notion is based on a misunderstanding of prior conditions.  Alcohol won't make that water safe, the critics sneer. And they're right.

But, if you consider that water, even not all that long ago, was drawn from a pond where things lived and where cows came up and peed and the like, you'll have to appreciate that it was, well, dirty. 

And brewers and vintners, even if they didn't have degrees in sanitary design, did grasp that dirty water makes a bad product. So they did what the could to clean it.

And then they boiled the water.

And that did achieve something, whether it was intended to, or not.

Of course, in the U.S., in 1918, the government was about to make that illegal.

The Ventures - Walk, Don't Run (1960) HQ

Is it just me, or is there something oddly compelling, and yet oddly disturbing, about this really old video clip of "Walk, Don't Run"?

Aristotle. Universal law is the law of Nature.

Universal law is the law of Nature. For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other. It is this that Sophocles' Antigone clearly means when she says that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite of the prohibition: she means that it was just by nature:

"Not of to-day or yesterday it is,

But lives eternal: none can date its birth."

And so Empedocles, when he bids us kill no living creature, he is saying that to do this is not just for some people, while unjust for others:

"Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky

Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth's immensity."

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Vintage Stepside

An early 1960s Ford 1/2 ton pickup truck with a stepside box.

Two wheel drive, with very small box.  Very common at the time. . . not so much anymore.

Tonopah, Nevada. July 22, 1918.

A Hundred Years Ago: Barrington Hall Coffee Advertisement

An interesting advertisement link in on A Hundred Years Ago:

Barrington Hall Coffee Advertisement

Check this out over your morning coffee (I was typing this while enjoying my morning coffee. . . well that's a bit exaggerated as at the time I was killing time while working on a second pot of coffee as I was having a severe reaction to an allergy shot and I tend to rely on the older methods to address that stuff rather than the newer ones. . . so enjoying the context of "gee, I hope this keeps me from going into shock. . . don't follow this advice, it's stupid by the way).

Anyhow, check out the "steel cut" line and the commentary that follows.  Quite interesting.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Josephs Old Cathedral, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Churches of the West: St. Josephs Old Cathedral, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma...:  

 

This is St. Joseph's Old Cathedral in Oklahoma City, a Catholic parish church at the present time, having gone to parish status in 1931 after a new cathedral was built.  The church was built in 1905.  Like the First Church, a block away, it was heavily damaged in the Murrah Federal Office bombing.

Best Posts of the Week of July 15, 2018

The best posts of the week of July 15, 2018.

The Kaiserschlacht Ends. July 15, 1918. Operation Friedensturm

Why "Conservative" Judges aren't, and why "Liberal" Judges are. And why liberal angst over conservative judges is misplaced and not all that real, while the opposite is not true.

The Murder of the Romanov's, July 17, 1918.

The Kaiserschlach Fails

Lex Anteinternet: The summer that wasn't.

And one day later. . . the Battle of Soissons. July 18-22, 1918.

Can you trace the decline in an organization through the sad decline of its headgear (and its uniform in general)?

Boy Scouts, New York City, 1917.

Not feeling the maternal love for the Ol' Alma Mater. Me and The University of Wyoming

 

 

 

The 2018 Wyoming Election. Volume Four

We've discussed Boy Scout uniforms and caps. . . so we should take a look at the Girl Scouts. "“Activities at the Girl Scouts Camp, Central Valley, New York. Line of the Girl Scouts waiting their turn to get their wash basins full of water at the water pipes.” July 21, 1918.

Poster Saturday: Hunger Breeds Madness.

A U.S. Food Administration poster in the era of revolution.

The German Naval Attack on Orleans, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. July 21, 1918.

On this day in 1918 the large U-156 surfaced off of Orleans, Massachusetts and took shots at the tugboat Perth Amboy and the four barge it was towing, damaging the barge and sinking all four barges.  The U-boat also shelled the town with its deck guns.

The U156 was a Type 151 German submarine, the same type as this captured example on display in the UK following World War One.  These were abnormally large U-boats that had originally been designed to be merchant blockade runners.  Note the two deck guns.

During the attack, a Surfboat was launched by the United States Life Saving Service, which is now part of the Coast Guard, to rescue the sailors trapped on the tug and the barges and came under shell fire from the submarine as well.

Curtis HS.

Shortly, the Navy dispatched Curtiss HS flying boats and Curtiss Model R bombers from Naval Air Station Chatham and they attacked the submarine.

Curtis Model R dropping a torpedo.

The entire incident was the only example of a German U-boat surfacing to attack a coastal target during the war, let alone bombarding a town.  What exactly the U-boat commander had in mind isn't known, as several weeks later the submarine disappeared with all hands.  Chances are, however, that commanding a large submarine with two deck guns, he simply chose to use them, and fairly successfully at that.

Church ruined by shell fire but crucifix untouched. Lucy, France. July 21, 1918.

We've discussed Boy Scout uniforms and caps. . . so we should take a look at the Girl Scouts. "“Activities at the Girl Scouts Camp, Central Valley, New York. Line of the Girl Scouts waiting their turn to get their wash basins full of water at the water pipes.” July 21, 1918.

But I don't know much about them.

Girls Scouts on July 21, 1918.  Note the semi military uniforms, which pretty closely reflect the uniforms adopted by female auxiliaries of various types providing service during the Great War.

Except there's few hats in evidence.  Indeed, only one.

Is that a sailor's Dixie Cap?

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Addendum: 

I followed up on this thread with a new one actually on the evolution of Girl Scouts uniforms:

So, having babbled about Boy Scout uniforms, perhaps I should address the Girl Scouts as well.

And, in looking that up, I think I've come to the conclusion that the 1918 photograph that is featured in this photograph shows very early American Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls.  The white uniforms are probably Camp Fire Girls. The Camp Fire Girls were originally supposed to be a female version of the Boy Scouts and at this point in time there was a serious effort to unite the two organizations.  That effort ultimately fell apart, but my guess is that this camp had girls from both groups in anticipation of them being united.

Lieutenant Robert Obadiah Purdy, Jr., who was killed in action in France on July 21, 1918

Not feeling the maternal love for the Ol' Alma Mater. Me and The University of Wyoming

  Cowboy up! 🤠 I will always bleed brown & gold

Comment on a Facebook page. . . I don't feel that way.

In reaction to certain over sensitive, historically ignorant, politically correct faculty members having a snit about UW's new "The World needs more Cowboys" slogan, there is a Facebook thing going around right now where people post something along the lines of "proud to be a Cowboy", in UW colors, showing your support for the slogan, or perhaps more accurately against academic PC idiocy.

In the Governor's debate on Wyoming PBS, at least each of the first tier of candidates were all very careful to say "the World needs more Cowboys" and show where their feelings were in regards to this.  Of the second tier candidates, Foster Freiss called the marketing campaign a ridiculous expenditure, with which I must agree.

Good for all of them.

I graduated from the University of Wyoming twice.  Once in 1986 with a degree in Geology and once in 1990 with a Juris Doctorate.  I first attended UW, in a sense, in the Summer of 1983 when I took a field geomorphology class at UW's Casper extension, which in that case was indistinguishable from being at Casper College as the class was at Casper College and taught by one of my favorite Casper College geology professors.  At that time, however, I'd just graduated from Casper College and was admitted to UW, where I started attending full time in the fall semester that year.

 

Given that, you'd think that I'd be one of those folks with a brown and gold license plate and a member of the Cowboy Joe Club and all that.

I'm not.

It's hard to explain and it may be a mere personality quirk of mine but I've never really warmed up all that much to UW, in spite of spending six years of my life as one of its students, in spite of meeting some really good lifelong friends there, and in spite of sort of passing from very early adulthood to early adulthood, with all the attendant agony that entails, there.  And in spite of having a few really good professors there.

Nope.  It just didn't happen to me.

Now, let me admit this may just be, as already noted, a personality quirk of mine.  I'm not much of a joiner and there's a lot of things other people get really excited by, organization wise, that don't click for me.  For example, I've never become that much of a booster of my old high school even though my father went there, my wife went there, my kids went there, all my father's siblings went there, my wife's siblings went there, and my in laws went there.  Indeed, my family is so well represented there its not funny.  But I'm not really warm and fuzzy about it either (and I don't recall my father being either, for that matter).  Indeed, not until my kids went there did I really start to become that way a little.

But, oddly, I feel differently about Casper College.  I have always remained fond of it, and was while I was there.

 

T-rex at Casper College.  There's an older one at UW.

I also feel that way, perhaps oddly, about the Wyoming Army National Guard, or perhaps more accurately the 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard.

And in recent years I've been fairly miffed and from time to time even disgusted with UW or certain branches of it.

But I'm not wholly sure why.

I suspect that it might date back to the 1970s when a push was on to make Casper College a four year university.  I've written on that before but UW successfully parried that with its outreach program, but its fight back, or rather that of its legislative backers, did leave a lot of wounded feelings here.  Most Natrona County residents felt pretty slighted by UW at the time and for those of us in school who were looking at going through university there the fact that UW was basically telling us that our only option was to go to Laramie at some point or to take a hike out of the state wasn't really received all that well.  I suspect feelings are different now, but for those of us who spent two years in Casper College's geology program, which was fully friendly with UW at all times, our transfer down to Laramie came with a feeling that on our part that we were sort of conscripts in a way, there because we were left with no other realistic in state choice.  Of course, some of us could have gone out of state, and in retrospect UW's geology department was excellent so we really didn't suffer by going there.  Frankly, while Casper College's geology department was great, those of us who did two years at CC and then transferred did have some ground to catch up both in terms of classes we now had to take and were not able to a bit earlier and in regard to catching up with an academic standard that was undoubtedly significantly higher than what we'd previously experienced.  Having said that, I am pretty convinced that if I'd gone straight to UW I would have dropped out after about one year (everyone who knows me really disputes this assertion) so I'm grateful for CC being there.

Maybe that's part of it, as even after two years at CC, UW was a bit of a shock that first semester but I managed to get up and rolling pretty quickly.  I had friends down there as it was, including a couple who had transferred down from CC, as well as those who had entered UW right out of high school, so I wasn't exactly an orphan in a strange land.  I really didn't like Laramie much at first, but I acclimated to it relatively quickly.  My experience as a geology student in that regard, I'll note, was much different than what it is for those in other majors as being a geology student at UW in the 1980s was to be a member of one of the first ranked programs in the nation which, accordingly, kept you buried in study all the time.  It was extremely rigorous and if we went out for a beer on a Friday we really thought that we were living it up.

Indeed, that last fact may have been a little of it as going into the UW geology program at that time, as a transfer student, had a real sink or swim feeling to it.  We hadn't been there from the beginning of our studies and even though there was no hostility to us at all, we were right at the point at which the geology department started weeding students out.  The community colleges didn't do that, but UW sure did.  That first semester I had mineralogy, a required course, which failed 50% of the class as part of its grade curve.  That fact was announced on the first day of class.  If you took the class twice and failed both times, you were out.  And a D, for that matter, was a bar to remaining in the program.  I passed the first time but it was nerve wracking to say the least, particularly as the class contained students who were on their second try who had to make it through or be dropped and, additionally, as the class contained graduate students who had not taken it in their out of state undergraduate programs (one of whom I became very good friends with from the class). 

After getting familiar with the area I came to really like the Laramie Plains, for which I owe a real debt to a close friend of mine from Casper College who is still a close friend of mine.  Later when we added a couple of other guys to our circle of friends we fished and hunted in a great area of the state which remains fond in my memories.  I know more about rural Albany County than I do about any other area of the state other than Natrona County, and its beautiful.  And I learned a fair amount about northern Colorado, and even Denver, in the same time frame.  I really didn't care much for Laramie the town during my undergraduate years as I was a tenant in a town that was expensive to live in, but when I was a graduate student that changed as the graduate students had a different relationship with the town than undergraduates and, by that time, some of them were property owners and somewhat a part of the town themselves.  Moreover, at that time, one of my law school friends was from Laramie and his very nice parents were professors there, which gave me a different impression of the town than I'd had before. By the time I graduated law school I'd come to like Laramie quite a bit and I still do.

Looking back, I enjoyed the geology department a lot more than I did the law school, although what I've said about my time as a geology student is at least partially true of my time as a law student.  I had good friends in law school and some of my geology friends were still there.  I didn't get out to hunt nearly as much as a law student, and in retrospect my slow conversion from an outdoor creature glad to be outdoors to an indoor creature wishing I was outdoors really started, and that has a sense of gloom associated with it.  With two really outstanding exceptions the nature of my friendships changed as well as my friends had always been aboriginal, like myself.  Having said that, two of my law school friends met that definition, one from Laramie and another from Texas, and they remain my good friends (at least one other common friend of ours has simply outright disappeared).  And law school featured intellectual studies of a type that I'd never experienced before in that degree and hugely enjoyed.

So I should be a huge UW fan.

But I'm not.

As I noted above, there's no doubt a variety of reasons for this.  For one thing, just because of the time period in which I went to UW, it was a hugely disorienting and not particularly wonderful period of my life, even though I didn't look on it that way at the time.  For the entire time I was going there my mother was getting increasingly severely ill and that meant my departure left my father to deal with it all on his own, which I felt guilty about.  The oilfield economy was collapsing, followed by a coal collapse (sound familiar?) which meant that what I was working on so hard as an  undergraduate was becoming increasingly a dead end that looked as if it might end up being a non profitable one at that.  Working through university meant that I was working toward a definitive end of my schooling and a definitive launch into the working world and as I was engaged in that my career goals were being hugely, indeed, completely redefined and plans I had, both vague and concrete, when I graduated from high school were evaporating and in fact completely altered.  The entire time there was absolutely nothing available to fall back on career wise whatsoever, except for the National Guard, the latter of which kept me keeping on to an extent, but which also meant that after five years of hard scientific study the only occupation that I found I was qualified to fill was that of an artillery sergeant.  By the time I figured out what I wanted to do I had fallen into the situation of it not really being an option and the immediate fall back didn't pan out either.  It wasn't great.

 

But that's only part of it.  I think the bigger part is that at UW I felt, and I still feel, that I never really belonged for some odd reason, some of which I noted above.

Part of that might be just size.  I've read quite a few times that combat soldiers identify with their small units, rather than their big ones.  When we read of wars, for example, and the views of average soldiers are looked at, it tends to be the case that soldiers think of themselves as belonging to "C Company" or "Headquarters Battery", or maybe as a member of "3d Battalion". Rarely, at the time, do they think of themselves as being part of the "2nd Infantry Division" or even less "The Sixth Army". To an extent they do, but in more immediate terms they don't.  That is, they know that their in the 2nd Infantry Division, but they more closely identify with their company, platoon and squad.

Something like that works with big organizations as well, at least for some people. And maybe that's why at the time I tended to think of myself as being a geology student, rather than a UW student.  Indeed, I spent a lot of time in the geology building as I tended to study there and I used it as a my default during the day study location when I was a geology student.  As a law student I very briefly did the same thing; used the geology department library as a study location, but only very briefly before I switched to the law library.

But most UW grads seem to identify with UW a lot more than I do, and I'm sure that most law school grads identify much more closely with the law school than I do.

Which is all probably due to a personality quirk of mine, mostly.

But jumping back up to it, at UW there was sort of a lost in the crowd feeling, even though a lot of excellent teachers from every department clearly had their students constantly in mind.  And part of that is likely because as a hopelessly rural character the college life, with its focus on the campus and football, etc., never appealed to me very much.

Or maybe its a UW is about UW feeling, which sort of leaves you a part of it, rather than it being a party of you.  It can do just as well without you, is sort of the feeling you get.

Anyhow, something about the University of Wyoming has always been sui generis.  And that I think started being pretty clear in law school.  In the geology department we were pretty tied to the state as geologist are an integral part of Wyoming's economy that's tied to the land itself, much like agriculture in a way.

At the law school it was clear right away that about half or more of the students were there planning on going elsewhere, and that's increased over time.  So the law school was focused on teaching a student body that really wasn't focused on the state. Since that time the law schools support of the Universal Bar Exam has hurt the state's lawyers, showing that it can in fact operate in a fashion that's opposed to the interest of its graduates who remained here while acting in favor of those who departed.  Beyond that, even while I was there, there was one professor who was involved in activities that operated directly against the state's mineral industry.  He's since left, but another professor is a dedicated radical opponent of agriculture.

The fact that the state retains and even supports a university that has individuals who hold some of its key industries in contempt shows how deep, and even blind, support for the University of Wyoming really is in the state.  I'm afraid that sort of thing has reduced my feelings towards it however.  And since that time we've seen other acts, such as disposing of the Y Cross Ranch and now outright contempt for "cowboys" on what amounts to a radical bigoted view of what the world is supposed to be like. . .and that view shares almost nothing in common with the views of almost all actual Wyomingites.

And maybe that gets to it.

A recent study of UW raised some questions about how well it was fulfilling its mission, in a way.   The Equality of Opportunity Project, which studies tax data and converts those into "Mobility Report Cards" shows that UW's students aren't really accomplishing that.  The study concluded:

The report card for University of Wyoming (UW) indicates the majority of students come from higher-income families, while around three percent come from low-income families. And the number of students from middle and low-income families has slowly declined. The report shows that only 16 percent of UW graduates made notable economic gains.

Now, the headline on that might not actually reveal that much in the context of the finding.   What this may simply reveal is that "higher-income families" send their kids to college and, in Wyoming, lower income families send their kids into the oil patch.  Indeed, having deposed a lot of career oilfield workers who didn't even complete high school but who had incomes as high or higher than I do, I can understand exactly why they do that.

Anyhow, this drew some attendion down at US in any event, and that'll tie back in to my comments here.

UW professor Scott Henkel studies higher education’s role in labor and democracy. He said addressing the issues raised by the report card should be top priority for UW because it’s a land grant institution.

It’s written in the DNA of a land-grant institution, the need to serve low-income, first-generation, working-class students,” said Henkel. “Do we always reach that ideal? No, course not. But there are people here working very hard in the service of those ideals.

Okay, I agree wit Henkel in part.

Or actually, I don't.

The point of a land grant college in fact was not to serve low income, first generation, working class students.  A state university should serve low income, first generation, working class students.  Of course, in order to do that, you have to not run around insulting them.  There are going to be very few low income, working class, first generation, students, who come from the real world, who are really going to fall over and feint at the thought of a motto that boosts cowboys, nor are then even going to immediately assume that cowboys are white and that's bad, as some UW profs do.  Indeed, the low income, first generation, working class students in Wyoming are actually made up of the very demographic that those UW professors find to be offensive hideous symbols of oppression.

Which does get back to the point.

Land grant colleges (and at the time, that also included land grant high schools) were supposed to take and educate the common population of a state in fields of education which served the state.  Most early land grant colleges had really strong focuses on agriculture and mining because they were in the Western United States where those were, and to a large degree still are, the major economic engines.  When those same universities branched out into more advanced degrees this was still the focus in a way.  The University of Wyoming College of Law, for example, was established in 1920 with the idea of providing lawyers for Wyoming. . . not for Colorado.

Over time, in almost every upper academic realm, this sort of focus has become really lost.  In the old Ivy League schools that makes sense, although ironically retain elements of their traditional focus.  American universities of the Harvard and Yale type were not ever really focused on graduating individuals for the economic benefit to heir students more than they were providing them with a certain liberal, Protestant, class based, education.*  Later private institutions were modeled on them even where they did not include the religious focus, although having said that a religious association with a four year institution was darned near the rule for most of American history.**  Anyhow, these institutions seem to become all about themselves.  The Ivy League law schools, for example, seem to have become separate institutions for the declaration of what an imaginary "progressive" constitution should hold.  According to one recent book by a recent graduate of an Ivy League school this very liberal focus and the elimination of the old patrician boundaries that applied to these schools has given us the social mess we currently have, although he's optimistic that its self correcting.  I'm much less so.

Indeed, the same evolution has occurred in universities where it never should have. Some large Catholic schools, for example Notre Dame, have become quite non Catholic in practical terms.  Some may wonder why that matters, but as a school founded by the church, it's focus is supposed to relate to that of the churches, or otherwise it has little reason to really exist.

This same thing is true of land grant universities, such as the University of Wyoming. Why is there one? So we can support a football team?  So that we can employ a collection of over sensitive pseudo intellectuals?  No.

It's to support the state.

If it doesn't do that, something is in error.

That doesn't mean slavishly following the political whims of the state.  Not by a long shot. But it does mean that it can't act like an isolated benighted intellectual institution existing on some other plain.  The point at which it becomes irrelevant to the state, and treats its charges that way, is the point at which, when appreciated, the real decline really begins.

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*Early on they also were religious schools and most of them retained a very strong Protestant focus up until the 1960s.

**Catholic universities like Notre Dame were actually formed as it was basically impossible for a Catholic to attend a private university and remain loyal to his or her faith.