Today In Wyoming's History: November 28

Today In Wyoming's History: November 28: 1914 New Your Stock Exchange reopens for the first time since July, when the crises leading up to World War One caused its closer. 1916 ...

This is an interesting item. I hadn't realized that the New York Stock Exchange had been closed from some point in July, 1914, up until November 28, 1914. That's a long time for trading to be suspended.

This is undoubtedly an ignorant question, but if anyone should ever stop here (a rare occurrence, I know) and also be knowledgeable on the the stock exchanges of this period, how did they work? That is, if I was, say, in Casper Wyoming and I wanted to buy stock in a publicly traded company of that period, how would I do it? I presume that I'd need to find a stock broker, and place the order with him, but how we he do it? Telegraph? Telephone? Mail?

Heroes

"Hero" is an overused word these days.  The entire concept has, unfortunately, become devalued to the point of being nearly meaningless.  No sports figure is a "hero" for being a sports figure. Not everyone who serves in the armed forces is a hero either, no matter how much we may value their service.  No heroes are rare by definition.

Which therefore should cause me to question using it in this post, where perhaps the word "mentor" would be better, but I just don't like the word, so hero it is.

So here is the topic.  Do you have personal heroes?  That is, heroes in your occupation, or even your life, that you hold up as a standard?

The reason I've started thinking of this is that, as I recently noted here, is that I've been doing a little reading on some of the State's Founding Fathers, and I'm not too sure I like them.  It leads me to question why that is.  A lot of them occupied the same professions as I do, some of them occupying both professions I do, and yet I can't find myself really liking them, even though I'd like to.  Perhaps that reflects s deficit of the right kind of ambition on my part. Cal Thomas recently quoted a famous person (I've forgotten who) to the effect that ambition was the "road" to success.  Perhaps it is, but I think that perhaps that fails to acknowledge that some types of ambition lead to pretty rocky, rural, roads.  Thomas quoted those for the proposition that anyone could become financially independent if they had ambition and were willing to work hard.  Perhaps.

Anyhow, what this has caused me to ponder is people in my fields who I admire as examples.  Surely, I thought, I'd be able to find some and hold them up as historical standards.  I'm having a tough time of it, to some degree, however.

With law and lawyers I'm finding it quite difficult.  Maybe that's because the type of people I might admire just don't fit well into the mold of lawyers we might know.  In thinking on it, I can really only think of a few examples.  Abraham Lincoln is one, but I probably admire him more for other reasons than his career as a lawyer.  John Adams is perhaps another, as a man who was able to mix a career as a farmer with that of a lawyer.  Indeed Adams is probably the only example I can really hold up.  There are other lawyers I can think of, but they did not distinguish themselves as such.  John J. Pershing had a law degree, but of course he never practiced law.  Thomas Jefferson I somewhat admire, but in terms of his legal practice, which was slight, he might actually define the wondering mind nature of many who enter the field, and he never actually liked the law, and didn't have to to practice due to his circumstances.

Of course, if I go way back, I can think of a few, but they are all highly admirable for a variety of other reasons. St. Thomas More is the greatest lawyer of all time, but because of his dedication to the Truth.  He would not be an example of worldly success, as his dedication to the Truth and Faith cost him his life.   That tends to be the sort of example I really admire, but obviously that's not going to really inspire me while writing a brief.  St. Augustine is another, but he fits in to a whole hosts of such examples of bright, highly intelligent men of Faith who were lawyers, and left the law due to their Faith.  The same talents that they had as lawyers were useful in their subsequent careers, but their success was due to their following their calling.

Some people I know will sometimes mention individual lawyer they know.  Old well respected lawyers, old judges, etc.  I guess those provide good personal examples, but I can't really think of any myself.

Agriculture is a bit different.  I can think of lots of farmers and ranchers, some of whom I know, and some who were  historical figures, that I really admire. But here too, I can't use them for personal inspiration at my desk, as they didn't work at desks.  If I ponder them I'm going to want to go outside, and I have indoor work to do that I cannot avoid.

I suppose in this later category I'd note Wendell Berry, who is a farmer and an English professor, a poet and an author.  I do admire his writings. But I'd note here too that Berrys' philosophy is the antithesis of what most hold up as a philosophy of success.

I don't know where any of this leads to.  Perhaps this. Do you have any personal heroes?

The Food Network

What do people who watch all these cooking shows on television do with the information?

Unless we're becoming a secret nations of chefs, and I don't think we are, I think a lot of people are actually watching other people cook on television?  Why?

I suppose, if nothing else, perhaps its encouraging diversity in menus.

The CST gets testy

Casper's newspaper actually has an editorial today urging voters to kick everyone out of Congress.  They include our sitting Congresswoman and Senators.

This is amazing for a Wyoming editorial.  The Wyoming tradition is to re-elect people no matter what.  I'm fairly convinced that F. E. Warren, who has been dead for 90 years, could be reelected Senator today based on the fact that he was Senator from 1890 to 1929. Got that seniority thing going for him, you know.

Now, it's not really a logical argument that people should be booted out without even knowing who their opposition would be, and it isn't going to happen. And it probably shouldn't. At least Senator Enzi was in there pitching for a budget solution. But that a Wyoming  newspaper would urge voters to axe all sitting is remarkable.  People must actually be mad.

What happens when columnists don't live in the real world

Also in the Casper paper today is a column they ran by one Bonnie Erbe.  I don't know who she is, but she's apparently a political columnist.

She's horrified that Congress has reauthorized the slaughter of horses.  Based on her column, it's pretty clear that Ms. Erbe knows no more about horses than she learned when she had a My Pretty Pony. She insists they actually pack some of the horses alive, and that packing houses attract a criminal element, as that's the only person who would work in one.  Here's part of her bio:

Erbé was born in New York City, but moved to Washington D.C. after graduation from college to cover politics. She graduated from Barnard College in 1974, Columbia University with an M.S. in Journalism in 1975 and from Georgetown University Law Center with a J.D. cum laude in 1987.

Ms. Erbé is non partisan and toes no party line. She is not an affiliated Democrat or Republican, nor is she uniformly progressive or conservative. Labels of all types make her nervous. Ms. Erbé finds partisan politics tiresome and believes she represents the majority of Americans who think for themselves and do not subscribe to any partisan or ideologically-prescribed way of thinking. She believes the only people who think that way are either angling for political appointments or trying to impose their moral beliefs on the nation's laws.

She is, however, passionate about women's advancement in the U.S. and worldwide, about preserving green spaces and maintaining an environment that can support the human race and animal species for millennia to come. She is also a strong supporter limiting government spending and a proponent of individual and personal responsibility.

Whatever.

She's obviously stunningly ignorant of real horses and real packing houses.  If she'd like to actually get some green experience, she ought to herd sheep with a real horse for a year.  Then her opinions on an actual animal which is in overabundance and not a plush toy might be relevant to something.  Otherwise, the opinion of an urban lawyer aren't of much value.

Ambition and Ambition

I've been doing a little reading recently about  the founding personalities of this state.  And I'm not too sure I like them.  And, given as I know why I'm not too sure, I'm not too sure what this says about me.

The early history of this state's politics is heavily, almost exclusively, marked by men of high personal ambition. But that's what bothers me, their ambition was so personal.  None of them were from here, but then we couldn't expect them to be either, given as the native population was either truly Native, and therefore not recognized as US Citizenry at the time, as well as being an oppressed class, or otherwise very small in numbers.  That we would have to take as a given.

But the founding fathers, if you will, of the state, or at least those who obtained high political office, seem to be marked by a singular story.  They were from back east, they were often lawyers, they saw Wyoming as a wide open place where a person, often a lawyer, could make it big really quickly, as there were so few people and so many opportunities, and they translated this into political power.  Sometimes they stuck around thereafter, but often they did not.

I may be misreading them, but to those people this state was nothing more than a vehicle to personal success.  The state probably meant nothing more to them than any other place, and their own personal "success" was the goal.  They were highly personally ambitious.

But what about that sort of ambition?  It certainly doesn't comport with what Wendell Berry calls "becoming native to this place", and it isn't the sort of ambition that I have, or most long term residents of this state have.  People who have stuck it out here in lean times (and aren't all that happy to see people moving in, in spite of the pathetic babblings of the Casper newspaper calling 70,000 new residents something to be thankful for. . .hardly).  People who are really from here, love the land as a rule, and while we don't all agree with what means, we can all agree we love the state.

I suppose this might mean that my personal ambition is pretty skewed, or at least not very American.  I really don't get the thinking of people who move all over to follow a career.  And that seems destructive to me on top of it.  Never living anywhere, really, they never value anything other than themselves.

Enough with the idiot turkey "pardoning" thing already

This year, as every Thanksgiving, we've been treated to the stupidity of a Presidential turkey pardoning, an annual ritual that shows how really disconnected from reality we've become.  Today, no doubt, the President will have turkey for Thanksgiving Dinner from some other less benighted bird, probably a hormone free green "Heritage" turkey.

This is just stupid.

It isn't stupid that the President has turkey for the traditional Thanksgiving Day Dinner, like most Americans will save for Neo Pagans who will eat wheat grass or something, and then anemically proclaim their hatred of nature a love, and then go play the Xbox or something.  No, turkey is a fine meal. But this over sentimentality and anthropomorphism of a bird is really goofy.

The turkey being "pardoned" isn't guilty of anything.  It's a bird that is food, one of God's gifts to his people.  It has no soul, and serves the function of being sustenance for other things.  If it were in a state of nature, and it didn't become food for a human, it would become food for a bobcat, coyote or bacteria.  Turkeys in nature do not go on to retire to Turkey retirement homes. They go on to become meat. Always, with no exceptions.  The lucky turkeys become meat for humans, the only animal that cares how a thing is killed.  The unlucky ones go on to become food for bobcats, which like to play with their mortally wounded food, or for bacteria, which make for a rather gross death.

By "pardoning" a turkey we playfully give rise to an idea that we kill our food as it is guilty of something.  Given as it is a Presidential pardon, apparently the turkey is guilty of treason or espionage, about the only things you can get the Federal death penalty for.  But killing a turkey in the real world is not an execution, it's what all humans, even vegans, do to survive.

Besides, they go on and eat turkey for dinner anyway, and the fact that they pardon one on one day and eat one on another, is used as some sort of rather pathetic argument by the Neo Pagans in advancement of their hatred of nature.

I know I won't see it, but I'd love to see a year when they bring the turkey out on the White House lawn and the President says "looks great!  Kill and and roast him up!"

That vaguely uncomfortable feeling

I am not an opponent of technology by any means, but I don't unthinkingly accept any new technological development as unquestionably good either.  Simply accepting any new thing seems to be the American way now days, and that isn't a good thing. Still, I've been an early adopter of many office electronic devices, and chances are that a lot of people inaccurately think I'm a techi.

But recently certain things have been giving me a vague feeling of discomfort.  Usually I analyze any such feelings to see if its simply my naturally conservative nature reacting to a changing circumstance or if my feeling is based on something genuine.  And on more than one occasion I have conceded something as an improvement, even if I don't really like it personally.  Here, however, I can't really define the sense of discomfort, or why it persists.

But it does.

To try to define it, for reasons I can't really adequately explain, I have the sense that technology is moving us so far from the real, and natural, world that it's a threat to us at a core level.  We're obviously fascinated with technology, and it seems most (but not all) human cultures continually adopt all things new no matter what the utility or costs.  Our electronic devices are, I fear, becoming so advanced and distracting that the risk permanently enslaving us in the world of the fake.

And it isn't just Ipods, Ipads, and computer, but other things as well.  In this season of poultry fueled bliss most Americans do not realize that turkeys, the national Holiday bird,  have been rendered so deformed as a domestic species of avian livestock that they can no longer breed. That's right. Turkey breasts have grown so huge, through breading, that turkeys are actually incapable of reproducing naturally, in the case of the production variety, so that artificial insemination is needed to reproduce them.  I can't really say why I find this horrific, but I do.  In order to get a turkey that's not a freak of production nature, you actually have to buy a "Heritage Turkey".  I'm not inclined to do that, but it's one more reason that a person, if they can, ought to just harvest one of the wild ones.

I know I sound like a Luddite in saying all of this. But we are what we are, and I don't really think we were meant to be a couch sitting, Ipod using, "consumer". But we risk taking the whole planet there.

Starting one of the early ones.

Starting a biplane.

Penn State and a lack of moral standards.

There's been a lot of commentary on the alleged horror of sexual crimes against children by a member of the Penn State football coaching staff.  Like any well publicized crime, everyone is going to get their two cents in by the end, with some demanding Federal action, and no doubt a host of psychological babblers seeking to explain it.

I wasn't inclined to comment myself, and frankly I don't know that any comments are not necessarily off the mark by a bit simply for the reason that individual crimes are individual crimes, and we can draw broader lessons that are learned in error for that reason.  Nonetheless, I was struck by a couple of the comments, including one on national television, that are highly insightful, and highly unusual.

First there is this comment by David Brooks, on Meet teh Press

MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene. If--there's been a ton of research on this. They say people, they ask people, "If you saw something cruel, if you saw racism and sexism, will you intervene?" Then they hire actors, and they put it right in front of them. People do not intervene. It's called the bystander effect. It happens again and again, people don't intervene. That's why we need these scripts to remind people how, how evil can be all around.

and:

MR. BROOKS: Well, I think they obviously need to make the law more robust. But we can't rely on law and rules. It's up to personal discretion. We've taken a lot of moral decisions and tried to make them all legal based. But there has to be a sense of personal responsibility, regardless of what the rules are, "Here's what you do to stop it." And so if you try to make everything a matter of legalism and rules, you're going to get people doing the minimal, and you're going, going to have people thinking, "It's not my responsibility. It's, it's somehow lodged in the rules."

Brooks is, in my view, right on.  Frankly there are a large number of people in American, and Western, society who do not know what evil is, and beyond that do not even acknowledge it's existence.  Evil is. Some people are in evil's grip.  But you would not know that today if you listened to any popular media.  Sex crimes committed by adults upon one another are excused as "addictions", or the like.  And in the popular media it is now the in thing to popularize and glamorize the propagation of   sexual deviancy.  Homosexuality, which was defined as a mental illness up until the 1970s, is now hip, cool, and glamorous.  It's regarded as an unwarranted prejudice to even suggest that the existence of two genders with different reproductive origins might mean that sexual activity requires two sexes in order not to be deviant.

It's also now supposed to be the case that we're not to point out that the serial polygamy culture of the day, in which mating couples do not stick with each other for long, produces a horrific domestic situation for children.  Anyone hanging out at court for any length of time would realize that a very high percentage of violence in the home, including sexual violence, that is committed by adults is committed by an adult who shares no DNA with the child, but lives there.  I've never seen statistics on it, but based on observation I'd guess that the percentage of that feature of those crimes is well over 50%.  Simply put, the "boyfriend" (a term that ought not to apply to anyone over 25 years old) is typically the offender against a child he is not related to.  This is extremely, extremely, common.  But we are not to acknowledge it.  The "father", for that matter, simply moves on, without shame, and women will have multiple children by multiple fathers, as if this does not create a set of rather obvious problems.  In a prior era, this would have been regarded as a moral depravity, because it is a moral depravity, but those living it do not even know that now, as to mention it will provoke an active response from those whose only standards are the lack of standards of relativism. 

Conservative columnist Cal Thomas added this commentary in a column that's running this week which makes much the same point as Brooks did, but in an expanded form.  He starts off by aptly noting

Baseball may still be called the national pastime, but football has become the national religion. College football is played on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, while professional football is mostly played on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Fans of both often express themselves in ways that are more vocal than the wildest Pentecostal preacher. 

While denouncing what is alleged to have happened at Penn State as repugnant, we would do well to examine the reasons behind such things. Yes, it begins with human nature, but society — buttressed by religion — once did a better job of keeping human nature in check. 

Since the free-loving ’60s, we seem to have taken a wrecking ball to social mores. Today, anyone appealing to such a standard is denounced and stamped with the label of the day, usually ending in the suffix, “-phobe.”

This is exactly correct, and I'd note was the opinion of such widely ranging people as Thomas Jefferson, who is sometimes regarded as religiously eclectic, Theodore Roosevelt, who moved through a couple of Protestant religions during his lifetime, and Winston Churchill, who was born into the Church of England but whom rarely attended.  That is, they all felt that without the foundation of religious morality, no society would survive.  Right now we're running a big test to see if that's true, and so far the results do not look good.

Thomas goes on to note:

The medical and psychological professions have aided and abetted the cultural rot. Doctors once took an oath to “never do harm,” accompanied by a pledge never to assist in an abortion. Now the official position of the American Medical association’s “code of ethics” is this: “The principles of medical ethics of the AMA do not prohibit a physician from performing an abortion in accordance with good medical practice and under circumstances that do not violate law.” 

Doctors once led, now they follow cultural trends. 

On its website, the American Psychological Association brags, “Since 1975, the American Psychological Association has called on psychologists to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated with lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations.” It once considered such behavior otherwise and while even most conservatives no longer regard homosexuality as a mental illness, many still regard it as sinful. That theological diagnosis, too, has been discarded in our increasingly secular and anomalous society where everything is to be tolerated except those people who assert that, according to a standard higher than opinion polls, some things remain intolerable.

Again, he's quite correct.  Indeed, it's worth nothing that the ground breaking paper that lead the APA to change its mind on homosexuality was written by a homosexual, hardly a disinterested person in such a debate.  It may or may not be a mental illness, but it is certainly a deviance, in the context of deviating from the norm.  Now, however, a person is not even supposed to state that, as neutral as it is.

Thomas also goes on to state

What changed? Pressure groups aided by secular education and the entertainment industry. 

Last week, an episode of “Glee” featured two couples — one straight, one gay — “losing their virginity.” The show’s co-creator, Ryan Murphy, told Bravo’s “Sex in the Box”: “Hopefully I have made it possible for somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three years. Maybe that will be my legacy.” Some legacy.

Indeed, not only is Murphy likely to make sodomy and buggery  fare for children through television, but moral depravity already dominates on television.  The popular sitcom "Friends" has serial illicit sex as a routine topic, arguing that it was the cultural norm and to be admired.  The HBO show Sex and the City was a monument to immoral narcissistic behavior.  HBO followed upon this with what amounted to a campaign for polygamy, a cause with has now been taken up by "Sister Wives", a show on some other network, in which a strange acting fellow with a Cheshire Cat grin promotes his "marriage" to three women at one time.  It can be expected that polygamy will soon join with homosexuality in a campaign to dilute the meaning of marriage.

Does all this have something to do with Penn State?  Yes it does.  In a society in which there is no moral standard, and in which the popular media insists that serial sex is good, that homosexual sex is good, and which plural marriages are nifty, can such conduct as occurred at Penn State appear to be far more deviant that what the medial claims to be the norms?  Apparently it can be, according to the media, and we all should know that it is wrong. But by the same token, a society in which right and wrong is so debased as a standards will see many more such horrors.  Indeed, they've been going on for some time, and this one has only hit the news because football is such a big deal in our society.  At our current state, standards are only applied when they're applied to the nationally known.  Plural marriages are okay, but affairs by politicians are not, for example.

Any society that doesn't know right from wrong will see its debasement hurt the weakest first.  And all it takes for evil to prevail, as Neimoller noted, is for good men to do nothing.  In this case, good men and women have to say what they believe publicly.  It's time for that.

Courthouses of the West: Federal Courthouse, Sheridan Wyoming

Here's an another example of a disappearing Federal Courthouse presence. Courthouses of the West: Federal Courthouse, Sheridan Wyoming.

This topic, i.e., the construction, and then the abandonment, of Federal Courthouses in Wyoming was addressed here a bit earlier.

It's hard not to notice how nice two out of the three abandoned Wyoming Federal Courthouses are (I haven't seen the third, that I know of, so it may be just as nice, it's used as a library today). I'm sure the courtrooms were very small, and probably they'd be regarded as inadequate for most Federal courtroom usages today, but still, it's hard to understand why the Federal government would have abandoned such nice structures, and not preserved them for their intended use.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13:

1933 "(MONDAY) UNITED STATES: The first dust storm of the great dust bowl era of the 1930s occurs. The dust storm, which has spread from Montana to the Ohio Valley yesterday, prevails from Georgia to Maine resulting in a black rain over New York and a brown snow in Vermont. Parts of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa reported zero visibility yesterday. Today, dust reduces the visibility to half a mile (805 meters) in Tennessee. (Jack McKillop)" Attribution: The WWII History List.

Old Picture of the Day: Old Prospector

The Old Picture blog is having a week dedicated to prospectors. I've linked in one photo already, and here's another.

My great grandfather Hennessy was briefly a gold miner in Leadville, Colorado, in the 19th Century. Only briefly, however. He opened up a general store there, and then occupied that occupation.

Old Picture of the Day: Old Prospector: It is a been a while since we have visited the men of the rugged outdoors, so I think it is time we have an Old Prospectors week. We start ...

Old Picture of the Day: Prospecting for Gold

Old Picture of the Day: Prospecting for Gold: Today's picture was taken ni 1889 and it shows some Old Timers mining for gold. The picture was taken near Rockerville in the Dakota Terri...

Why?

Why is it:

1.  That television advertisements, and "entertainment news" think it's neat to have pitchmen/babblers with thick Cockney accents?  How did that happen?

2.  That soap operas pitched at teenagers, and twenty somethings holding on to their teen years in an undignified manner, like to feature male and female characters who appear to be well fed, well clothed, and good looking, who do nothing but mope?  If I didn't have to work, had lots of stuff, and was really good looking (okay, I am stunningly good looking) I wouldn't run around moping.  I'd probably buy cattle and work, but I wouldn't mope.

Heck, I don't have a lot of money, and most of the time I'm not moping. What's up with that?

3.  That television associated Italian men and French men with sophistication, beauty, and libertine, apparently sterile, sex?  I've seen, and even met, real French and Italian people. They're fine, really, other than a different standard of bathing (why doesn't tv associate them with that) but they're no more beautiful than anyone else, quite frankly. They're not as chubby as we Americans, but then who is?

4.  Why is that people (well, really mostly women) like to watch television dramas that are all about turgid messed up family relationships?  Do people like turgid messed up family relationships?  If so, why don't they just hang out at divorce court, where things are even more turgid and icky.

5.  That people with serial bad relationships seem to think that launching into another is a good idea?  Maybe they ought to just cool it and try hanging out with themselves.

6.  That people regard the opinion of any entertainment figure as relevant to anything?  After all, if you are in the entertainment industry, you make your living by putting yourself on display.  "Hey!  Look at me!"  If you make your living that way, that doesn't make you a great intellect by any means, and it doesn't qualify you to venture an opinion on diddly.

This is so much the case that I don't grasp it as to anything.  I don't care what Lady GaGa feels about homosexuality, and I don't care what Charlton Heston thought about guns.  Betty White's opinion on animals is meaningless as far as I'm concerned, and I don't care what any actor or singer has to say about any politician.  I'll give a rare pass to anyone who seems to be engaged in serious thought for a prolonged period of time, but in that industry, it has to be pretty demonstrated to bother with.

British Airways - Our advert 2011: To Fly. To Serve.

Normally I wouldn't post an advertisement, but this one is just so well done.