High Plains.
Easy Venison Meatballs - A good venison meatball recipe is something every hunter needs in their repertoire. They're easy to make, versatile, and a great way to use ground veniso...
1 day ago
Saturday, October 28, 2023
Thursday, October 28, 1943. Operation Blissful.
Operation Blissful, the Raid on Choiseul in the Solomon's, commenced.
The raid was conducted by Marine Corps paratroopers, although they landed by landing craft, and was designed to divert and confuse Japanese troops as to Bougainville. It is not known to what extent the raid achieved that goal.
Coal miner strikes in the US increase momentum.
Churchill addressed the Commons about rebuilding its damaged structure.
The Soviets established the military award The Order of Bohdan Khmelnitsky (Орден Богдана Хмельницького), the only Soviet Award written in Ukrainian. It was named after a Ukrainian Cossack Hetman.
Sunday, October 28, 1923. Ziegner clashes, Reza Khan rises
Saxon Premier Erich Zeigner rejected Weimar's demand that Communists be dismissed from his cabinet.
Reza Khan became prime minister of Iran. The existing Shah, whom he would ultimately replace, went into voluntary exile and Khan would become the first of two Shah's of Iran. An ally of the British, he was well on his rise to power at this time.
The Submarine USS O-5 struck a United Fruit Company steamship in the Panama Canal Zone and sank.
Some Gave All: Fort Gordon now Fort Eisenhower.
Some Gave All: Fort Gordon now Fort Eisenhower.:
Fort Gordon now Fort Eisenhower.
The post in Georgia has been renamed for Kansan and former President, Dwight Eisenhower.
It's somewhat surprising to realize that nothing had been named for Eisenhower until now. Eisenhower is so well known to Americans, he really needs no introduction here.
Gordon might.
A lawyer and a plantation owner, Gordon was a cavalry commander during the Civil War. Following the South's defeat, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Georgia, became its Governor, and then returned to the Senate. He never recanted from his racist views. He died in 1904.
Well that's odd.
Venison meatball day?
Food and Cooking Blogs
- Venison Swedish Meatballs - Walking down the isles of cheap Ikea furniture and your nose gets a whiff of something sweet, creamy and filled with bold spices. like one of those old t...1 day ago
Friday, October 27, 2023
Saturday, October 27, 1973 Ceasefire.
Israel and Egypt announced a ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War. Part of the agreement was for the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force. China declared it would not help pay for the force.
Nixon stated at a press conference; “So long as I can carry out that responsibility for which I was elected, I will continue to do my job."
A 1.4 kg meteorite hit in Fremont County, Colorado.
Wednesday, October 27, 1943. Navy Day.
Today in World War II History—October 27, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Oct. 27, 1943: New Zealanders land on and take Stirling, Soanotalu, and Mono in the Treasury Islands, their first opposed amphibious landing since Gallipoli in WWI. US movie premiere of Guadalcanal Diary. American musicians are allowed to record V-discs for the military, bypassing the recording strike. US celebrates Navy Day.
New Zealand mortarmen on Mono.
From Sarah Sundin's blog.
The British SAS raided Ancona and Pescara in Italy in Operation Candytuft and cut the rail lines between the two cities in Operation Saxifrage. The 8th Army took Montefalcone.
The first stainless steel airplane, the RB-1 Conestoga, made its first flight.
.jpg)
Only twenty were made.
Argentine Col. Juan Perón agreed to direct the nation's Department of Labor.
Saturday, October 27, 1923. Her aus.
The German government demanded that the Saxon government remove its two communist cabinet members.
In a Berlin bank on his day.
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.
Note: This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives. I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.
We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.
There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.
What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:
Which was:
Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing. This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did. Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.
Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs. Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves. Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.
Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned. Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves. Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.
Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it. Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O. Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.
Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.
What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:
Yeoman's Third Law of Behavior. I know why the caged tiger paces.
Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth. He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you." You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger. He wants out. He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.It's really no different with human beings. We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time. Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage. Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Yeoman's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers. Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well. I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case. A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly. Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women. Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a mammal. Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats. But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees. Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood. If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one. Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it. So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there. That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that. It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them. Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts. But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen. Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden. But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become. We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world. In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
We will also note that Pope Francis, timed with the opening of the Synod, issued a new Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum ("Praise God") on the environment.
Eh", you may be thinking. I thought this thread was on something else. One of these is not like the other.
Oh, they very much are.
Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics. He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either. The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch. It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.
Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic. Of interest, the document stated:
Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden. They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."
We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative. It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel. A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan. Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow. That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view. A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.
Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view. He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety. Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science. He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.
On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this. People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it. At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about. Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy. It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.
So the connection in all of this?
What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt. A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:
Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.
Kennedy Hall in Crisis.
We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.
Is there a world view that counters any of this?
The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.
Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature. Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above. We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.
People don't like the modern world. It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.
We really don't have to do this. Getting back from this, however, will not be easily. It would take a purpose driven societal effort.
The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past. It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not. It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.
It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air. It just isn't synthesized.
If it were. . .
Footnotes.
1. These Bushmen bands are not Christian, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.
Tuesday, October 26, 1943. Extending Conscription.
President Roosevelt extended registration for the draft beyond the 48 states to the territories of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Residents of those territories had until the end of the year to register.
Today in World War II History—October 26, 1943: US Thirteenth Air Force and US Navy bombers and fighters attack Japanese-occupied Bougainville in the Solomon Islands in advance of the Allied invasion.
From Sarah Sundin's blog.
They'd been arriving at various locations in the US this week as well.
The Polish Home Political Representation created Social Anticommunist Committee to combat activities of the Polish Workers (Communist) Party.
Today was the first flight of the Dornier Do 335 of which a mere 37 were built.
The U-420 was sunk by a Canadian B-24. She was one of 15 ships lost on this day.
The 1943 Hurricane Season came to an end when the last storm dissipated.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
The Palestinians and the Hard Economic Realities.
According to a relief official who was interviewed on Face the Nation, 80% of Gazans rely upon relief food daily.
80%.
This is the hard fact of this conflict that nobody wants to address. Palestinians are wards of the outside world, with nearly half unemployed, and 80% relying upon some species of the dole. They're trapped inside of Gaza behind closed borders. They have nothing to do, survive on the donations of others, and are encouraged to view themselves as horribly oppressed people by some of their suppliers. They have developed, in my view, a victims' culture in which everything is somebody else's fault, including the realities of reactions to their violence.
Those who suggest that, effectively, the Israeli's simply ignore what happen to them are also ignoring this.
People who live in the conditions that Gazans do specifically, and Palestinians in the Middle East do in general, turn to violence. It's not because they're Muslim. They do it for the same reason that people in American inner cities do, or Catholics in Northern Ireland did. Underemployed, unemployed, bored, but given handouts, it's easy to sit around and brood all day. And with time on your hands, joining a militia that promises to steal from somebody else, such as Hamas, MS-13, Vice Lords, or Barrio Azteca looks attractive.
So, at the end of the day, this needs to be addressed or there will not be peace.
Much of the advice being given out right now is pretty much shortsighted. If Israel just backs off, Hamas will come back, claiming that Israel was afraid of it. And the entire situation will repeat.
As hard as it sounds, Palestinians in Gaza need to be made to get a job and get off the dole. The extra hard part of that is that there are too many of them there to make that work in the current environment. City states can work, taken Monaco as an example, but they have to have an open border with their larger neighbor and something the world wants. In the case of Monaco, it's gambling. For Andorra, it's tourism. Others have port shipping, banking and even unique manufacturing. Gaza has none of that, and it's not going to as long as this is going on.
And it's never going to have it as long as its financiers just fork over money, and as long as the Palestinians harbor delusions of driving the Israeli's into the sea.
Getting over those delusions requires hard facts to be conveyed by their backers, and Iran, which is a major one, isn't going to do that as its equally delusional.
And to make the city livable, some of them are going to have to move, at least temporarily, and probably permanently.
And there's no reason to believe that we are anywhere near this suggestion yet.
Thursday, October 25, 1973. Ramping up to and backing down from war.
The US military was alerted that the Soviet Union was "planning to send a very substantial force" to intervene in the Yom Kippur War. On the same day, perhaps ironically, Egypt and Israel accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 340 creating a peacekeeping force between them that would omit US and Soviet troops.
The Local Government (Scotland) Act of 1973 was given royal assent.
Lebanon, which was not in a good place in relation to petroleum bans, provided that cars with even-numbered plates could only drive on even-numbered days, those with odd-numbered plates only on odd-numbered day.
Abebe Bikila (Amharic: ሻምበል አበበ ቢቂላ), Olympic marathon runner who won the1960 Summer Olympics in Rome marathon while running barefoot and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics marathon died as a result of an automobile accident sustained in 1969
Both his 60 and 64 runs were world records.
Monday, October 25, 1943. Another October day.
The Red Army's 3d Ukrainian Front captured Dnepropetrovsk.
From Sarah Sundin's blog:
Today in World War II History—October 25, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Oct. 25, 1943: Adm. Sir Bertram Ramsay becomes Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Expeditionary Force (ANCXF) for Operation Overlord (D-day).
The U.S. Army Air Force raided airfields near Rabaul destroying twenty Japanese aircraft on the ground.
Hong Beom-do (홍범도; Хон Бом До) Korean hunter who became a revolutionary, died on this day at age 75.
Reacting to the Japanese ban on Koreans owning firearms, which precluded hunters from their trade, he formed the 1907 Righteous Army of Jeongmi. Upon Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 he moved to China and became, by 1919, the commander of the Korean Independence Army. It did well, but ultimately was forced to retreat to the Soviet Union in 1921, which resulted in the disarming of the army. He joined the Red Army in hopes that it might liberate Korea from the Japanese, a forlorn hope at the time.
In 1937 he was deported along with other Koreans to Kazakhstan where he died on this day. His body was repatriated to Korea in 2021.
Akcja Fruhwirth (Operation Fruhwirth) was attempted by the Polish underground. The aim was to assassinate S-Scharführer Engelberth Frühwirth but SS-Scharführer Stephan Klein was shot by mistake. He was, however, also a target of the Polish underground.
The newspaper comic strip Batman and Robin debuted.
Thursday, October 25, 1923. Carlsbad Caverns.
President Coolidge proclaimed Carlsbad Caverns a National Monument. It is now a National Park. The proclamation stated:
WHEREAS, there is located in section thirty-one, township twenty-four south, range twenty-five east, and section thirty-six, township twenty-four south, range twenty-four east of the New Mexico Principal Meridian, in southeastern New Mexico, near the town of Carlsbad, a limestone cavern known as the Carlsbad Cave, of extraordinary proportions and of unusual beauty and variety of natural decoration; and
WHEREAS, beyond the spacious chambers that have been explored, other vast chambers of unknown character and dimensions exist; and
WHEREAS, the several chambers contain stalactites, stalagmites, and other formations in such unusual number, size, beauty of form, and variety of figure as to make this a cavern equal, if not superior, in both scientific and popular interest to the better known caves; and
WHEREAS, it appears that the public interest would be promoted by reserving this natural wonder as a National Monument, together with as much land as may be needed for the protection, not only of the known entrance, but such other entrances as may be found.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States of America, by authority of the power in me vested by section two of the act of Congress entitled, “An Act for the preservation of American antiquities,” approved June eighth, nineteen hundred and six (34 Stat., 225) do proclaim that there is hereby reserved from all forms of appropriation under the public land laws, subject to all valid existing claims, and set apart as a National Monument to be known as the Carlsbad Cave National Monument all that piece or parcel of land in the County of Eddy, State of New Mexico, shown upon the diagram hereto annexed and made a part hereof, and more particularly described as follows: lots one and two, section thirty-one, township twenty-four south, range twenty-five east, and section thirty-six, township twenty-four south, range twenty-four east of the New Mexico Principal Meridian.
Warning is hereby expressly given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy or remove any feature of this Monument and not to locate or settle upon any of the lands thereof.
The Director of the National Park Service, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, shall have the supervision, management, and control of this Monument as provided in the act of Congress entitled, “An Act to establish a National Park Service and for other purposes,” approved August twenty-fifth, nineteen hundred and sixteen (39 Stat., 535) and Acts additional thereto or amendatory thereof.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done in the City of Washington this 25th day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty-three and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and forty-eighth.
The Bulgarian air force's only aircraft, the limit of the size of that force under the Treaty of Neuilly, crashed.
In the US, aviation was going better.
25 October 1923: First Lieutenant Lowell Herbert Smith and First Lieutenant John P. Richter, Air Service, United States Army, flew a DH-4B from Sumas, Washington, to Tijuana, Mexico, non-stop.
This Day In Aviation.
A major medical advance was recognized:
October 25, 1923: Banting and Best Win the Nobel Prize For the Discovery of Insulin
The 118th Congress.
With as many entries as this was getting that were off-topic, it clearly deserved its own trailing thread.
The 118th Congress. A fairly sad state of affairs.
The Circus Maximus today.
September 14, 2023.
Ring Master, Kevin McCarthy, is expected to endorse an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Soon we'll have a government shutdown as well.
Let's be clear, Congress is no longer functioning. I don't mean there are problems, it's dysfunctional.
The country cannot continue this way. Those taking "stands on principal" are wrecking the county.
These actions are merely red meat for the dogs. They cannot pass, which means those proposing them are either lying to the public, or lying to themselves.
Lying is a sin, and in Catholic theology lying about serious matters is a serious sin.
September 29, 2023
California Senator Dianne Feinstein has died at 90 years of age, having served beyond that period of time during which a simple appreciate of nature and statistics should have led her to step down. Her replacement will now have to be chosen by the Governor of California.
While Feinstein will be widely lauded, there are those who have a less charitable view of her, including myself. Whatever a person's overall views are, however, she served in the Senate passed the point at which she should have yielded to a younger person and now choosing her replacement, and now it will come at a highly politically charged point in our recent political history.
October 1, 2023.
Crisis postponed.
The following crisis that is:
Subsidiarity Economics. The Shutdown edition.
Kevin McCarthy, prisoner of GOP populists, will not take up the Senate bill to fund the government, making a shutdown impossible to avoid.
The House of Representatives is, quite frankly, dysfunctional.
And given this, we will close out this edition of Subsidiarity Economics, even though its barely gone, and start one focused on that theme.
Kevin McCarthy should hang his head in shame.
What all will close, assuming that the House doesn't get its act together today, isn't clear. Some things will, but "vital" things apparently will not. Some Federal employees will be asked to work without pay, which is interesting, as working without pay is involuntary servitude, and was banned by a post Civil War constitutional amendment.
Congress, oddly, will get paid.
The mail will continue to be delivered, as the U.S. Post Office funds itself.
Arizona and Utah have voted to spend state funds to keep their National Parks open. Senator John Barrasso asked the Secretary of the Interior to use park entry fees to do the same.
Fat Bear Week is off due to the dysfunctional House of Representatives having been taken hostage by populists.
Government contracts and modifications to contracts will not be issued.
Medicaid will continue to be paid. Medicare will continue on.
The FHA will have limited staff and loans it processes will be delayed.
The SBA will shut down.
The ATF might not process background checks, which may lead to a complete halt on the sale of firearms by licensed firearm's dealers.
The latter is the thing that Wyomingites are likely to complain about right away. People in industries supported by tourism are likely to notice the closure of the parks rapidly.
All of this, of course, is because this will be a managed shut down, which is really a limited shutdown or a slow-down. If things continue for some time, and this time they might, a real shutdown may creep in, which Wyomingites, in spite of apparently disdaining the Federal Government, would really feel. A closure of the airports, for example, could be expected at some point, And a cessation of petroleum production on Federal lands due to a lack of Federal oversight. Perhaps a cessation of grazing on the Federal domain for the same reason. And a lack of highway funds.
None of that will happen rapidly, of course. Or maybe at all.
September 30, 2023.
We’re likely to avert a shutdown, but the clown show continues
Let the grousing now being.
Not from Reich, with whom I obviously have a love/hate relationship, but from the MAGA far right out in the hinterlands, who will be outraged, outraged I tell you, and they'll tell you on their way from the television to the refirgerator for a Coors Lite (can't touch that Bud, of course) who would, they'll say, have enjoyed the shutdown. . .right up until they didn't, and then somehow, it would have been the Democrats fault.Congress passed a 45-day stopgap spending bill yesterday. In doing so, Speaker McCarthy noted:
We’re going to be adults in the room. And we’re going to keep government open.
Well now he has 45 days to see if he can do that.
The bill omitted funding for Ukraine. President Biden noted that in his address regarding the stopgap bill.
Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. This bill ensures that active-duty troops will continue to get paid, travelers will be spared airport delays, millions of women and children will continue to have access to vital nutrition assistance, and so much more. This is good news for the American people.But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.While the Speaker and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been steadfast in their support for Ukraine, there is no new funding in this agreement to continue that support. We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.
McCarthy had to rely on Democrats to pass the bill, and will now surely face an effort aimed at his removal by his hard right.
October 2, 2023
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who was instrumental in defeating a Republican bill to keep the budget rolling that included many of the things populist are demanding, is going to try to remove McCarthy as Speaker of the House.
cont:
Gaetz filed a motion to vacate, which would replace McCarthy as Speaker of the House.
To survive, McCarthy now needs the cooperation of Democrats, maybe.
Meanwhile, there is a long brewing effort to remove Gaetz from Congress due to ethics concerns.
October 3, 2023
California Gov. Gavin Newsom selected Laphonza Butler, a Democratic strategist and adviser to Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, to fill the late Dianne Feinstein's U.S. Senate seat.
I know nothing about Butler, and she may be supremely qualified, but its hard not to assume there's a fair amount of box checking going on in the selection, something that Democratic politicians are particularly likely to do. Butler is black, fulfilling a Newsom promise, and she's gay, making her the first black openly gay U.S. Senator. Should that matter? No, but its statistically improbable while also fulfilling promises to one major Democratic demographic and also satisfying, maybe, the desires of another.
cont:
As the Democrats would not step in, a debate is now going on to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, even though the GOP has nobody lined up to replace him.
cont:
And now the vote is in and McCarthy has been removed, although it's not impossible he may be put back in the position.
Assuming that does not occur, McCarthy deserves his fate by trying to give too much to too many on the Republican right, a task that ultimately proved to be unworkable. He's a figure in Donald Trump's revival, and therefore deserves the disrespect given to him by Democrats in this recent drama. Who replaces him, however, is an open question. Things could go from bad to worse.
In any event, the U.S. House of Representatives now looks about as bad as it ever has.
cont:
Only 8 Republicans voted to remove McCarthy. The rest were Democrats. So, ironically, the hard right populists had to depend on the votes of the Democrats to remove him.
cont:
McCarthy has indicated he won't run for Speaker again.
And so his fate was sealed by Donald Trump, whom he kissed up to post Insurrection. He deserves his fate, and his place in history will not be a comfortable one.
It'll be interesting to see if his district in Bakersfield reelects him.
And it will be interesting to see if the Republicans retain the House next fall.
October 4, 2023, cont:
Jim Jordan is running for Speaker of the House.
As is Steve Scalise.
October 7, 2023
A vague draft Trump movement exists, although it appears that Trump himself has chosen not to support it. He's supporting Jim Jordan. Of course, he had supported McCarthy.
Liz Cheney gave a speech decrying the nomination of Jordan yesterday in Missoula.
October 8, 2023
Forty-five Republicans have signed a letter labeling the removal of McCarthy as "shameful".
October 12, 2023
Steve Scalise received the nomination of the GOP yesterday and has dropped out of contention today, showing just what a mess the GOP is.
October 13, 2023
Now Jim Jordan has been nominated, although as of yet, he does not have the votes to secure the position.
October 18, 2023
Cynthia Lummis' support for the SAFER banking bill is causing some in Wyoming o think she's a closet supporter of legalizing marijuana, which shows just how odd the times really are.
There's no way she's a supporter of legalizing marijuana.
Banking for marijuana entities, in those states where there are no prohibitions, is very difficult as it still remains against Federal law, even if the Federal government doesn't enforce the law. As a result, it's heavily a cash only business in which the Sinaloa Cartel has stepped into to launder the money. Given that, buyers of buds who think they're just supporting some innocent business, its health concern aside, are most likely financing organized crime. Hence the link.
As an aside, Sinaloa has ordered its fentanyl producers to stop making it under penalty of death in order to avoid increasing U.S. law enforcement.
cont:
Jim Jordan lost his second vote for speaker, with one more Congressman opposing him than previously.
October 19, 2023
Republicans in Congress, waking up like a dedicated drunk in a strange hotel room in a strange city, has looked at Jim Jordan and said "eh. . . how did we get here?".
Jordan, jilted by his date, has now pulled out of the Speaker race, and the republic is the better for it.
It looks like Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry is going to retain that role, until they just give the job to him.
cont:
Well, as the GOP has rejected the interim plan in favor of fully demonstrating its complete and total dysfunction, Jim Jordan sadly remains on the agenda and there will be a third vote on his canidacy to lead a body which he previously sought to undermine by supporting sedition.
If only ol' Jeff Davis had lived to see these days. . . ugh.
October 20, 2023
And Jordan, having lost a third vote, is back out.
The Freedom Caucus is taking a pounding in this drama and may very well lose some of its power as a result.
October 24, 2023
Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who voted to certify the election and who Trump has let it be known opposes, has the Republican nomination for Speaker.
This is interesting. I don't know much about Emmer, but this would appear to be a drift back towards reality.
Trump has already posted against him, setting this up for a test of his power over Congressional Republicans.
cont:
And Trump wins. Emmer must have decided he could not get to 217 votes so he pulled his name out of consideration.
This is now beyond dysfunctional, it's absurd. An out of office former President who is highly likely to end up in prison is able to control enough of the House to keep anyone from being chosen who doesn't bend to his will.
October 25, 2023
Continuing a Trump win, now is Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a lawyer by trade whose understanding of the constitution, his purported speciality, didn't prevent him from supporting sedition.
Sadly related threads:
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 47th Edition. Circus Maximus
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)