Attack on Machester: Reacting completely incorrectly.

I haven't commented on terrorist attacks for some time here. This doesn't mean that they aren't occurring so much as it may mean that I haven't had much to say about them that I haven't already.  Now, however, I find myself making a comment. But not so much on the terrorist attacks themselves as on a reaction to them.

This is frankly related in a way to a post I have on a different topic entirely, in a way, so my mind was on it, even though when I get to that one I doubt it'll be evident that the posts are in any way related.  Anyhow, I find myself making a comment.

And, moreover, I find myself making a comment to something I saw on Facebook.

I'll be frank that a lot of Facebook pat answers to things in the form of "click if you agree" or memes is absolute junk.  I was, in fact, getting ready to make another post on the absolute irony of people posting something that turns out to be directed back at them, and they don't know it.  You see that a fair amount.  But that 's not the topic here.

No, the topic has to do with not really thinking out what we're saying in reaction.  

More specifically, the post is in regard to this item that appeared on Facebook:

 

 Facebook Meme, put up here not because I approve it, I very much do not, but so that I can comment on it, and hence posted with "fair use".

This is a completely inappropriate reaction to the terrorist attack in Manchester in every conceivable sense.

First of all, let me state that I'm not a fan of Ariana Grande in any sense.  But what's this supposed to mean?  It comes very close to the "my country right or wrong" view that isn't really very American.  And it ignores the nature of the conflict, indeed, the war, we are now in. 

Indeed, I'm so little approving of Grande that one of my prior posts here in regards to her, the only prior post I have here in regards to her, was singularly harsh.  I'll still stand behind everything I stated there, including:

Hmmmm

Ariana Grande has a Problem with our culture's reductive view of women, and she's not going to be silent about it anymore.

Or so a news story on the net reported.

Later the net was reporting that she was reacting to pushback she was receiving from her comments.

Well, I'm sorry, but people like Ariana Grande are part of the Problem.  I agree that our culture has a reductive view of women. Pop Tarts who appear in videos displaying their butts in spandex and singing about sex contribute to that reductive view.  Indeed, Ariana usually has her wares on display so she's effectively prostituting her image for her career, which also contributes to that.  And if she's pushing back, she needs to wake up on that.  She's pushed herself in everyone's face already and she's pushing a view of the relationship between men and women, musically, that's deeply flawed.

So I'm not exactly a Grande fan.  And I absolutely  hate the pornographic trash of her most recent hit (in so far as I'm aware of what hits she may have), Side By Side.  Indeed, I'll stand stand behidn my comment that:

However, Grande, who has a decent voice, has made a career in part out of dressing like a tramp.  That objectified herself.

And I'll even concede something that is missed in comments like that above, and which is a very important aspect of the conflict that we are in.  Part, but only part, of the reason that ISIL is able to raise forces to contest us is that it is easily able to claim that the West is morally decadent and therefore ISIL's war on the West is a war on moral depravity.  In reality the vision of Islam that ISIL advocates is morally perverted, licensing the severe servitude of women, slavery, and extreme violence, but the degree to which the West has surrendered to the libertine allows ISIL to claim to be the only game in town in the moral arena in many areas.  Areas of moral conduct which at one time would have brought censure from advocates of the Natural Law or from the pulpit often tend not to much anymore, with this being all the more case in Europe than the United States, but there everywhere in the Western World nonetheless.

Which doesn't mean that the item above even comes close to any legitimate point.

I have no idea of Ariana Grande is a backer of the "Woman's March" or "hates Trump". Indeed, I hardly care.  I generally regard the entertainment industry as completely vapid and assume that most people in it are for whatever seems trendy at the time.  Generally, if a lot of people in the entertainment industry are protesting any one thing I figure it's probably reached the point where its really safe to protest it.

And I also assume that in the current moral atmosphere, and for decades for that matter, any broadly popular entertainer is probably going to advocate to some degree moral license.  It's always been a feature of that line of work for some reason and even in areas where that supposedly doesn't occur if you look hard enough, you'll tend to find it, and find it excused.  In female pop music male written music (which it mostly is) for female singers aims towards teenage male fantasy at that, with the singers acting quite often to prostitute themselves to the same through their singing.

So, claiming that Grande is somehow deserving of this disaster, or that her fans are, is really far beyond the pale.  We'd have to take her seriously in order to get that far.

But nowhere, I'm quite certain, did she ever do anything which somehow would be regarded as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  She's not Tokyo Rose or Lord Ha Ha.  If she has political views that argue against the current administrations she's entitled to them, and that doesn't invite attack any more than to claim that the isolationist Republican Part of the 1930s invited Pearl Harbor.  We are fighting ISIL in part because we believe people are entitled to say what they want safely.  To claim that once an attack comes that this somehow means everyone who doubts a current path should just shut up is really totally in opposition to what we claim we believe in.

Moreover, while I have huge problems with the left and "progressiveness" and its goals, indeed I think many of its social goals are fundamentally deluded at the deepest possible levels, to argue that support for some of these things means ipso fact that she "hates" the United States or should abandon them due this is flat out wrong.

None of which is to say that Western social views have no role in the fight that's occurring. They do.  But Western political views do as well. And the hardcore Islamic views that are circulating in the Middle East also have a great deal to do with them and must be taken absolutely seriously in terms of ISIL's motivation. 

So, if we're going to cite moral issues in regards to the Manchester attack.  This isn't the meme to post.  No, maybe this image would be:

 

With some discussion about what an image like this meant.

Indeed, while I haven't spent much time here speaking of things like that which occurred on May 13, 1917, the messages attributed to such things is never of the type posted above but much more introspective.

25% of the States' Employed.

From today's Casper Star Tribune:

Wyoming has the largest percentage of state, federal and local government employees than anywhere else in the country, despite a slight drop from last year.

From jobs in education to city and state offices, government careers account for about 25 percent of the Wyoming workforce, according to a report by 24/7 Wall Street, released Tuesday and based the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Other low-population, energy-rich states made the top five, including Alaska, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

I'm a bit, but not hugely, surprised, that we top the list.

There's a bit of irony here, and I've pointed this out in prior posts, that while the state tends to view government with a degree of animosity, it's actually a major economic force in the state.  That doesn't argue for something like socialism, but it does mean that state employment tends to be one of the things propping up Wyoming's economy in slack times, or even in regular times.

Some politicians this past year took a run at trying to acquire the Federal lands from the US with the concept being that Wyoming would somehow administer these better. What many in that camp really meant is administer less, with the odd idea being that somehow this would increase production of oil, gas and coal; whose prices are in fact controlled by the market, with regulation playing a fairly small role, in real terms, in those prices.  That's something to think about.  That likely would have done nearly nothing for production, but as the state can't afford to pay for the administration, it'd have just not done it and therefore not employed many who are in that field for the Federal government now.

If that sounds dire, the University of Wyoming has been busy laying people off for weeks.  Not a week has gone by in the last several in which we haven't seen a headline   The State government has a hiring freeze going on right now throughout itself.  Even at that government employment of all types is making up 25% of the workforce here.  If those who really feel that there's too much government of all types had their way, therefore, there'd be flat out less employment in the state.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, but I am thinking that the state's relationship with its own workforce, philosophically, tends not to really consider this.

The Millheisler Group

The Millheisler Group, published May 23, 1917

Monday At The Bar: Comparison and Contrast

I was supposed to start a trial in Laramie today, but as it settled at the last moment, I am not.

 

 Albany County Courthouse.

In preparing for that, I went to check out the courtrooms.  I've been in the Second Judicial Distric's courtroom before, but I haven't done a multi-party trial there before, so I thought I better see what the accommodations were like in that context.  I also thought I better update myself on the court's technology, which is increasingly becoming a big deal.

Here's the courtroom for the state district court there:

 Second Judicial District's courtroom.  As you can see in this photograph, the courtroom is equipped with two tables for the parties and and its now wired for computer access, with a big screen on the wall.

As we've previously discussed here, this courthouse was built in 1931, making it one of several Depression Era courthouses still in use in Wyoming.  Since 1990, when I started practicing law, these courthouses have had to be updated to take into account electronics.  It's interesting to note, I guess, that when I started practicing in 1990 none of the older courthouses, and I've tried cases in courtrooms considerably older than this, had such features, no did anyone think think they were necessary in any fashion.  Now a person wouldn't dare build a courthouse without such features and the old ones that are still being used are being retrofitted.

I also checked out the courtroom facilities at the law school as the space considerations somewhat concerned me and I thought I better inform myself on what else was around, just in case.  I had heard they'd put in a nice moot courtroom (they actually put in two), but I hadn't seen them.  Here's the big one, an intervening wall makes this somewhat confusing but that wall can be folded up to increase the size of the courtroom.

 Big Moot Court courtroom at the College of Law.  This bench has seats for multiple jurist so it was obviously built taking into account appellate arguments, but it also features a jury box.  Big screens can be seen above for electronic interface.

The wall here folds in, which would expand the size of the courtroom.  Looked at this way, what we're seeing here is the bar of the courtroom and some additional space behind the parties' tables.  In this configuration this courtroom is obviously set up as a lecture hall, which is what this space was when I was in law school.

It's interesting. The students, for trial practice, clearly have one of the nicest courtrooms in the state.  And I don't think that's bad.  And I'm not saying that the courtroom downtown in the same town is bad either. 

But field conditions, in all things, often don't match the school ones.

I'm sure such things will soon be a thing of the past here, and darned near are now, but I have tried a case in a 19th Century Wyoming courthouse (no longer in use) and at least one whose construction predated World War One.  In the former case neither counsel (me and opposing counsel) opted for any high tech things of any kind so the lack of electronics was not a hindrance.  But that's becoming increasingly rare.

But has the quality of the presentation of information  actually improved?

Some Gave All: Wyoming Veterans Museum: World War One Display

Some Gave All: Wyoming Veterans Museum: World War One Display: Display dedicated to George Ostron, who was an accomplished armature illustrator and who won a contest to design what became the unit ins...

Wet Subsidariaty

Distributism can be found, on occasion, in odd places.

I went to the grocery store over a couple of weekends ago (I started this post a couple of weeks back) and, on the way out, stopped in the liquor store.  There was a big display saying "buy local", and a huge selection of various alcoholic products made in Wyoming.

I was, quite frankly, quite surprised. There are now a lot of them.  As recently as a couple of decades back there were none.  Now there are several breweries and a couple of distilleries.  Indeed, there's one distillery here in town and there's rumors (I haven't followed it) that a second one will soon be here.  And there's going to be a couple of microbreweries here in town soon, something that has occurred all around the state.

According to Wikipedia we now have twenty three Wyoming breweries, and my guess is that list is probably a little light.  I don't how many distilleries we have but it'll soon be at least four and my guess is that there are more than that.  And there are even apparently a handful of wineries.

I'm not sure what all this says, but it is quite a reversal of the trend towards bigger and bigger just a couple of decades ago. Consolidation is still going on in the alcohol industry on the big end, with some giants seemingly buying up everything. But down on the consumer end the local is really making a comeback.

I like the trend.  I'm not going to go out and buy a bunch of local whiskey or wine, but I'll sample the beer, and I like that this is very local.  Subsidiarity in action, if wet.

Today In Wyoming's History: Como Bluffs: Dinosaur Graveyard and Train Robberi...

Today In Wyoming's History: Como Bluffs: Dinosaur Graveyard and Train Robberi...: These two historic markers are located at Como Bluffs, between Rock River and Medicine Bow Wyoming. I'm sure I've stopped at ...

The Dense Nature of Political Commentary---Just because you would think that way doesn't mean others would.

David Frum is a Republican Neoconservative.

Well, actually, and quite frankly, he's really a Canadian conservative (which would be a mild liberal by American terms) who has passed through Harvard and acquired naturalization, all of which may be fine but which doesn't make him a Conservative even if he thinks he is, or if his employer The Atlantic thinks so.

The reason Frum matters to this entry is that Frum is undoubtedly a super smart guy, but he's also a guy who shares about as much in common with the average American conservative as I do with the Imperial Japanese family.  Not much.  But he doesn't know that.  He thinks he does.  And he's not the only one in his boat.

Now, the reason I"m picking on Frum here is simple.  He's been showing up a lot recently on commentary outlets, standing in, in the eyes of the Press, as a Conservative against Trump.  In reality, he's part of the urban "I went to Harvard law school" elite and while he's on the conservative end of that, he's clueless on what the Conservative constituency actually thinks.

And he's not alone.

For that matter, the Democratic elite is pretty clueless on what the average liberal American thinks as well.

And that's a big problem.

I'm not commenting on any actual current event.   But the widespread, and it is very widespread, view that "I have analyzed the stuffing out of this and determined what is best for Demographic X and therefore I know that Politician Y has just slit his own throat" is complete and utter nonsense.

It can work that way. . . but it often doesn't.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Hanna Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Hanna Wyoming:

This is St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Hanna Wyoming, which according to the sign on the building was built in 1922.  They style is somewhat unusual, and not easily characterized, but it does have hints of Gothic styling.  The name "St. Mark's" is particularly associated with Episcopal churches in Wyoming.

Masterpiece

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

GK Chesterton

Poster Saturday: Lamp Day

The Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1917

Congress Passes the Selective Service Act of 1917 and the Wyoming Guard gets the word

On this day, in 1917, Congress passed, finally, a much debated selective service act, ushering in a new era of "the draft".

The bill passed was massive and covered a plethora of topics.

At the same time, the mobilized and mobilizing Wyoming National Guard got the news that it would be taken into Federal service in July.

The odd thing about this is that the National Guard in Wyoming, and pretty much everywhere else, had been called out just as soon as war was declared.  But the government did not Federalize it right away.  Another example of how things were quite a bit different in World War One as compared to World War Two.

Bike to Work Week in Bike Month

Bike Month Dates and Events

National Bike Month includes an ever-expanding diversity of events in communities nationwide — but the biggest day of the month is Bike to Work Day. In 2017, Bike to Work Week will be May 15-19, with Bike to Work Day on May 19.

I'd forgotten that May was Bike Month.

I did recall that there's always a Bike To Work Week.  Unfortunately, it's always in May, which means that it comes here in a month that's still slugging it out with winter.  Indeed, snow is predicted for later this week. . . just after I took the side panels off of the Jeep, of course.

I often do bike to work, but rarely in May.  The weather just doesn't accommodate it here.  So this week, I won't be biking to work, and will even miss bike to work day, May 19.  Of course, my schedule isn't allowing for it this week either.

Which is part of the problem in the task of restoring the bicycle to its former status that once rivaled the automobile.

 

Related Threads:

Riding Bicycles: 

Our big thread on this topic.

Bicycle Delivery Boy, aged 13, Oklahoma City.

A photograph.

The bicycle messenger

Another photograph.

Western Union Messenger No. 38. March 14, 1917

Yep, a photograph.

Mid Week at Work: Delivering the mail in Washington D.C., 1919.

Another photograph yet again.

On Riding A Bicycle

Commentary on riding a bike.

The high tech alternative to horses. . . . the bicycle

A look at the topic from a different prospective.

Bandits

Net Security calmly whacking the beast of hackery. . . or something like that.

From the New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers are discovering that it is far more profitable to hold your data hostage than it is to steal it.

A decade-old internet scourge called ransomware went mainstream on Friday when cybercriminals seized control of computers around the world, from the delivery giant FedEx in the United States to Britain’s public health system, universities in China and even Russia’s powerful Interior Ministry.

Oh great.

It would seem that things like this are getting more and more common, and will become an increasingly severe problem.  All we can do, it seems, is to be vigilant and hope that technology to counter such things stays apace, which it only does barely.  Today, and probably all week along, all sorts of companies and individuals will be paying ransom to recover their computers, basically.

Who are they, and where do they come from?  They aren't easily identifiable, like Pancho Villa or Baby Face Nelson.  They're more like vikings of old, or the endless groups of roaming bands that once rode out of the east. 

An example, I guess, of how the more things change, the more they stay the same, or close to it.

I've been missing a lot of the news, and commenting on it even less. . . .

as I've been super busy.

It's funny how when things are like that, you can put big events up on a shelf that you'd likely normally pay quite a bit of attention to.

For example, I'm not shocked and dismayed that ESPN has cancelled Garbage Time and has yet to assign a new role to Katie Nolan, as a news clip revealed  yesterday. . .

. . . so nobody is too worked up about that here? Well, okay.

More seriously, Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey.  That's big news, but I haven't had time to really pay much attention to it.  I do note that the New York Times is already after Trump about it, but I'm pretty much ignoring my NYT feed these now days. Ignoring gives some credence that the NYT is at war with Trump so much that they'd criticize his breakfast choices if they knew them, which doesn't mean that the Comey story isn't a big one.  Still, I find myself strangely disinterested in it as I haven't been able to catch up with it.

Likewise the passage of a new health care bill in the House.  That's big news, but I haven't had time to really pay much attention to it.

I wonder, quite frankly, for busy folks in 1917 if that's how all the grim war news was.  Just more news"  We look back and figure everyone must have been wrapped up in it every day, but not necessarily.  Super busy people, and there were super busy people, might have been just as distracted then as now.

Which doesn't mean I'm completely unaware.  No, I'm picking up the paper every day and reading it.  But I'm so busy on some other projects I just don't focus a great deal on it. Some of that is bad, and quite frankly, perhaps some good.

Blog Mirror: Decent Films: Our Lady of Fatima at the Movies

Our Lady of Fatima at the Movies

SDG Original source: Catholic Digest

May is the Month of Mary, and May 13 is the memorial day of Our Lady of Fátima. On this day in 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter’s Square, and he ascribed his survival to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, linking the attempt on his life with the “Third Secret” of Fátima. . .

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Malachy Catholic Mission Church, Medicine Bow, Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. Malachy Catholic Mission Church, Medicine Bow, Wyoming

Original caption:  "This is St. Malachy's Catholic Mission Church in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The Church is served by the parish in Saratoga Wyoming."

I'll note that I'm not too certain that this church is currently being used.  Indeed, I think it is not.  Medicine Bow's fortunes have declined in recent years.

Best Posts of the Week of May 7, 2017

A Mid Week At Work Query: How did you end up doing what you do? Is it what you expected?

Dog Pile

Female Railroad workers, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, May 14, 1917.

American Federation of Labor Conference, May 14, 1917.

Roads to the Great War: The Great War's Most Memorable Religious Event The Apparitions at Fatima

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The basis for democracy

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.

 GK Chesterton