Camp Devens, Ayer, Massachusetts. November 16, 1917.

MUGABE FALLS! ZIMBABWEAN ARMY STAGES COUP

The Zimbabwean Army deposed Robert Mugabe, a horrible human being and one of the worst leaders in Sub Saharan Africa.

Mugabe epitomized the "one man, one vote, once" Africa that followed the fall of colonialism, except that he was much worse than that. Coming to power on the strength of his faction and suppressing all others, his government was corrupt and ruined the economy of what had been a once prosperous nation.

That it took the Zimbabwean Army this long really says something about the level of his control.

May he be remembered for the horror he was and may he live long enough (he's in his 90s) to see the success of his rivals and repent of his horrible deeds.

November 15, 2017. Siberian rumors and Border battles.

Residents of Cheyenne were reading today about a rumored, and totally false, revival of the fortunes of Czar Nicolas II.  The Czar, they read, was crowned Czar. . . again. . . . in Siberia.

Not so much.

Russia was descending into complete chaos however. That was real enough.

And so was Villa's revival right on the border with Texas.  His troops had in fact taken Ojinaga. 

Having gone from desperate in March 2015, to pursued the rest of 2015 and 2016, he was back in top form and contesting for control of northern Mexico, to American consternation and concern, once again.  And now while we had a major war on our hands.

Evolution of the Jeep 4x4 Utility Vehicle | Donut Media

Back in the headlines. The Wyoming Tribune for November 14, 1917

Pancho Villa's forces were back in the headlines. . . with combat right on the US border. 

A battle significant enough that it was not only pushing the Carranzaistas out of a disputed town. . . it pushed World War One and the Russian Revolution aside a bit as well.

Not that both didn't also show up.  Include a hopeful headline that the Bolsheviks were going down in defeat.

The Introverts Lament. "I'd like you to meet. . . "

 "Lonesome" Charley Reynolds, one of the 7th Cavalry's well known scouts, and one who lost his life at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The son of a physician and sufficiently well educated that he was in college at the time the Civil War broke out (he left college as a result), Reynolds took up occupations which allowed him to lead a solitary life, such as being a hunter and a scout.  He was famous for keeping the details of his personal life, and indeed his entire interior life, to himself.  I get it, even if most historians don't seem to.  He was just an introvert.

"Oh no."

That statement, and that reply, are things I often hear, and then think to myself.

The reason is that I'm highly introverted.

It sounds odd, and many people who know me would be surprised by that statement.  For one thing I'm a lawyer and lawyers, even though it turns out a very high percentage of them are in fact introverts, are not associated with that.  Indeed, we're associated with the opposite.

Additionally, even highly introverted people such as myself can be "on" in context.  So, at work, I'm engaged and dealing with people.  I have problem addressing juries, clients, etc. etc., in context. I've served on councils and boards, and I often find that I'm the one speaking.  So, naturally enough, people assume that I must be extroverted.  How can you address a crowd of strangers on delicate topics and be introverted?

Well, you sure can.

One of the hallmarks of introverted people is that we really don't do well in social settings that have no discernible immediate purpose and are made up of people we don't know. Give us a setting and a purpose, and we'll more than rise to the speaking occasion, and likely take over it as well.

But give us no other discernible purpose other than to be with a lot of people we don't know and we'll calm up in personal agony.

Another character trait is that we need down time, in a major way.

That catches people off guard as we're often perfectly free to ramble on, as I so often don here, in person with people we know.  But that doesn't mean that we enjoy doing the same with people we don't.  Indeed, while that's apparently relaxing to other people, it's hugely distressing to us.

This in turn is a real problem for introverts in the modern American world.  We don't "network" well. We don't network at all.  There's nothing that sounds fun to me at all about being in a room full of people mingling with people I don't know.  I don't enjoy talking about myself ("so. . what do you do") and I don't enjoy offering opinions on political or social matters to strangers out of context.  While I could address a group on nearly any topic, if I'd been giving a reason or task to do that, I don't do that with people I don't know very well, in person.

I often am on the periphery, for example, of discussions on social issues, political issues or religious issues, or even scientific issues, out of a context and in which I'm with people I know, but not well.  I can listen to such conversations and be well aware that I know vastly more than the people who are talking, even debating, and that I could in fact crush one side, or even both, in a debate, if I entered it. But as I didn't go to debate, and just ended up the silent third partner in those discussions, I stay that way.  I don't say anything.  And if invited to, I'll usually say something that basically is neutral and leads me out of the discussion if possible.  It's not that I'm chicken about debating, I do it all the time, it's just that mentally, that's now where I was at the moment.  Just this past weekend I experienced when a debate or discussion arose between a rancher and a rancher/Protestant minister on references to Jesus in the Koran.  I know a lot more about that topic than either of them did.  I found that I needed to go to the kitchen to get myself some lunch rather than enter the debate. . .

Being an introvert also places me in the position of turning stuff down, which often strikes people as odd or rude.  For example, when invited to certain things in a business context, my instinct is to flee.  Dinners, sporting events, plays, whatever.  My first instinct is to bolt.

This can cause us to be mistakenly regarded as rude even as people who know us in workplace settings, where we're "on", think we're the life of the party.  It's all in context.  For example, I will not engage in small talk with people on airplanes or trains.  I won't.  Occasionally I'll have somebody try, but when I'm in that setting, I'm usually reading a book.  I like reading books and its one of the few chances I have to actually concentrate, uninterrupted, on a book. And as conversation on planes or trains is always the ultimate in small talk, and as I find that sort of talk absolute torture, I'm not going to do it, even if I'm capable of doing it.  Nonetheless, occasionally you'll get seated next to some extrovert who really really wants to just talk. I'm sure they think that the introvert, i.e., me, is rude.

Likewise, occasionally in restaurants somewhere when I'm traveling the same thing will happen.  "Would you mind sitting at the bar?"  The answer of course is no, as you want seated.  Next to you some happy traveler will soon attempt to strike up a conversation.  "Reading a book?".  "Yep". "Good book?"  Oh no. . .

And sort of related to this is the attendance declination.  As readers here can tell, I'm a fairly serious Catholic.  I tend towards being a fairly isolated or small group one as well.  So, occasionally I'll get a query like; "Why don't you join us for the out of town men's retreat this weekend in . . . ."  No way.  I don't know those guys and I don't like being locked up with a lot of folks I don't know.  There's a reason that I think the Desert Fathers are really cool where others like big communities of people.  Indeed, I'm so introverted that I've declined being a "greeter".  Greeters are people who are stationed at the entrances of churches as extroverts strongly believe that everyone entering a church needs to be greeted.  I try to avoid greeters if I don't personally know them as the "welcome!" and smile just appear to be invitations to me to get into a conversation that I don't want to get into on my way into church.  Being a greeter would have been a nightmare to me and I honestly simply told the person that.  She was likely surprised (and perhaps didn't believe me, maybe) as I'm a lector, and to extroverts that would seem inconsistent.  It doesn't to introverts.

Apparently all of this is highly common for introverts, and the explanation apparently is that we're wired to be really "on" in these situation in away most people aren't. While other people are decompressing by chatting, we're basically physically in the same place a lion is when its about to spring on a gazelle.  But nobody wants to be in that spot all the time. While others are engaged in light chatting, we're engaged in listening to every sentence, every pause in every sentence, and everything going on, analyzing it all in rapid succession.  When other are sad when the party ends, we're glad, its such a relief.

An interesting aspect of this is that people who know and are friends with introverts will often try to bring them "out of their shell", and according to some this is a good thing.  Left to ourselves, we'd tend to isolate ourselves, which we are told is not a good thing.  Who knows.

It's hard to tell, but as low as 16%, or as many as 50% of the population is introverted in varying degrees.  That means, of course, from 50% to 74% of the population is extroverted.  I have no ability to really tell where things really fall, but my guess is that well over half the population is extroverted.  Indeed, while I certainly know other introverts, amongst those I immediately deal with, I think only me, one person I know and work with, and some of the immediate members of my family are introverts.

I know that some members of my immediate family are.  That leads me to suspect its a genetic trait.  My father, who was an absolute genius, and who also dealt with members of the public all day long, was very introverted.  Probably few people outside of the immediate family knew that however as, like me, during the day, he was on and had to be.  My son is pretty clearly an introvert, but not as bad as I am.

Well, bad is the wrong word really.  It is just one of those things that is.  And probably for a reason.  Nature probably wanted a certain percentage of people to click on in an intense way most of the time, and that's how most of my interior life is.  I tend to be thinking all the time.  I don't like engaging in small talk as none of it is small to me.  If people complain about a problem my mind turns to solving it, and that's how most introverts are.  But by the same token you can't solve all the problems with a lot of background information going on, so we tend to crave that silent room. And, by the same token, being in a world where all problems must be solved, and apparently you must solve them as why else would people bring them to you, means that you would like a little alone time, and sometimes that means you are happy enough just sitting there saying nothing at all.

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: Wanted: Recruits for an Army of Kitchen Soldiers!

A Hundred Years Ago:  Wanted: Recruits for an Army of Kitchen Soldiers!

State Income Taxes. ..

can apparently be deducted from your Federal Income Tax.

At least that's my understanding.  My state doesn't have a state income tax and I'm not an accountant, so I really don't know.

However, that's my understanding. And, given that, as long as that is the case (and the current GOP Tax bill proposes to eliminate that), aren't we kind of being schmucks for not having a state income tax at some point?  It's not like the taxpayers actually save money, it's deductible. So you pay the same amount, we just pay it to the Federal government.

Unless I'm missing something.

Which I may very sell be.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13, 1917. The USS Wyoming becomes the flagship

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13:

1917.   The USS Wyoming becomes  Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman's, Commander Battleship Division 9, flagship. Attribution:  On This Day.

Main Street looking south, Camp Dodge, Des Moines, Iowa. November 12, 1917.

Camp Grant, Rockford, Illinois. November 12, 1917.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Augustine By The Sea Catholic Church, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Churches of the West: St. Augustine By The Sea Catholic Church, Honolulu, Hawaii

This is St. Augustine By The Sea Catholic Church just off of Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii.  The church dates its history back to 1845, but it's obviously been rebuilt several times, with the modern church's origin going back to 1910, with additions since then.  The current structure appears very modern, and I don't know of the date of its construction.

Did the Vietnam War wreck the country?

A theme of the recent Burns and Novik documentary on the Vietnam War was that rifts had developed in the country during the war and they've never been healed. That is, the war split the country between left and right, and the country's never come back together again.

It's an appealing thesis.  But is it true, and if it is, what does that mean?

Let's start with the common image of things.

The sort of general common background to this story is the belief that prior to the Vietnam War, American society was united and existed in sort of an Ozzy and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, state. This society, we're told, had a common set of conservative societal values.  Along came the Vietnam War and put that all under stress and fractured the country into a liberal and conservative camps that have diametrically opposed views on everything and are now further apart than ever.

 The Cleavers in Leave It To Beaver. . . the way that American society of the 1950s, and earlier, has sort of been imagined. The show ran from 1957 to 1963, so it was set as much in the early 60s as the 50s, but then the early 1950s are in the "50s", as imagined, and the early 1950s, aren't.  How realistic was this portrayal anyhow?  Chances are, not very, other than that they were a nuclear family.

Is that right?

Well, in order to analyze the central thesis of that, that the war drug a certain demographic (largely white, largely well educated) to the left, where it's kept on sliding to the left, and left another group on the right, which is going further to the right, I guess we'd have to look at the right and the left before that to make certain its true.

And we'd have to even figure out where to start to do that, and that wouldn't be easy, as it turns out.

We'll start therefore in the early 20th Century. We could start earlier (you could arguably start before the Civil War quite easily), or you could start later, perhaps in the 1920s or 1930s. But this is a good compromise point to start.

And the reason that its a good compromise point to start.

The early 20th Century was a time of considerable political and social turmoil. The Progressive Movement, a political movement that sought to address economic and social ills and to spread the vote to women, who mostly didn't have it, was in full swing.  Liberal in the context of its time, it was for a stronger Federal government to protect the rights of the average man against ever increasing corporations and against the abuses of local governments.  Varying widely in the scope of its views, it ranged from moderately Progressive to fully radical, sometimes during the political life of a single individual.  Probably the best example of Progressivism is Theodore Roosevelt, who went into his Vice Presidency and Presidency as a fairly pronounced Progressive, and who finished up his political career as a fairly radical Progressive. The success of the Progressive movement is perhaps also symbolized by the fact that Roosevelt's last campaign, the three way race in which he went down in final defeat, saw Woodrow Wilson, another Progressive, elected.

 Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette.  He'd more than given Bernie Sanders a run for his money on being a socialist. . . he was a real socialist.

Roosevelt and Wilson were not the only left of center politicians in that race by any means.  The Socialist Party was on the rise and a serious political party at the time.  Part of the rallying cry for Progressives, to Conservatives, was that if the Progressives weren't elected and didn't address the nation's ills then the Socialist would succeed and their medicine would be much more radial.  And while that vision was extreme, in reality Socialism of that time was as radical as it would ever be.

Socialism up to the mid 1920s at least was a global movement and it had more than a toehold in the United States.  It was a major force in Europe.  Communism was also a rising force in Europe, and getting a little toehold in Europe, and because it was a younger and less developed type of Socialism the distinction between the two, which would later become enormous, was not terribly clear at the time.  Parties in Europe, like the Social Democratic Party in Germany, weren't Communist but they were so close (prior to coming to power in 1918) that it was hard to make the distinction between Communism and Socialism.  And here's where we begin to get into really radical, but fairly widespread, movements that well predate the Vietnam War.

The Socialist movements of the World War One era were extreme in every sense, and also had a fairly large following amongst European working classes and a not inappreciable one amongst American working classes. Believing in the collectivization of labor, they also at their core held a lot of radical social beliefs that would sound familiar in certain circles of the far left today.  In Communist circles they were opposed to marriage and were open to "free love", but radically opposed (outside of what would soon be the USSR) to having children. They were open practitioners of abortion.  For a lot of their more radical views in this area, and so that I don't have to list them, I'd cite to Whitaker Chamber's life, but it's also worth noting that just about any significant Soviet spy ring of the 20s, 30s, and 40s exhibits a fair amount of conduct that's right out of a sexual sewer.  All this existed at a time at which there were genuine problems in the work force and real social inequality, particularly for African Americans.

 Whitaker Chambers, who came from a middle class background but had an extremely troubled childhood and early life, turning in course to Communism.  His biography on his life as a Communist, and his path out of it, including his efforts to expose it, is one of the greatest biographies ever written.  Witness details much of the truly radical nature of the Communist movement in the west, including its depraved nature.

World War One killed the Old Order in Europe leaving nothing to replace it and hugely radical movements came up in the wake of the collapse of the Ancien Régime.  The more powerful the forces of the old order had been, and the less democratic they had been, the more radical the movements that flowed in their wake were.  Communism took over in Russia and the USSR was born.  Communism made a run at the states that bordered the new USSR, resulting in war and civil war.  Civil war was fought in German streets where the contesting forces increasingly gave rise to a big swing in the right and the left.  Socialism in Italy gave way to a nationalistic socialist political force known as Fascism.  The same impulses gave rise to extreme right wing parties in Germany just as the Communist forces were rising and after a while, in the early 1930s, Communist and Nazis would battle in German streets.  Communist and Socialist elements in Spain sought to terminate the democratic fragile republic there and the Army rose up, allied with Spanish Fascists, in that country in a bitter civil war in the 1930s.  Never every European country had some sort of extreme right wing and extreme left wing political movements, all of which rejected notions of democracy, traditional religious views, and many traditional social views.  The time was as radical as any which have ever existed.

That, of course, was partially sorted out during World War Two which saw Fascism first defeated and then completely discredited it as the hateful product of its rule was exposed wherever it had been.  That left, of course, the Communist in place where they were.  The full horrors of Communism, every bit as lethal, and more, as Fascism would take decades to be really fully revealed and the whole horror of it all would not become fully evident until the 1990s by which time it was expiring.

In the 1930s that horror was not evident and hardcore leftism was therefore not fully discredited.  In the United States the Depression saw hardcore leftists come into the Federal Government in some numbers but more than that saw a large element of Federal experimentation in government in an effort to address the ills of that economic disaster.  This was followed by World War Two which required a really big government.

And this takes us into the era where we started out.

After the Second World War, we're told, Americans craved to return to normal.  And not doubt after the Depression they did.  But that view of normalcy may not be what we think it was.  Prior to the Cold War really ramping up there were quite a few Americans who retained fairly left wing political views on some things, products of the Depression, accepted left wing politics during it, and World War Two.  For example, at that time, a large percentage of Americans were actually favorably disposed towards the evolution of the United Nations towards being a truly world government of a type.  Truman was flirting, albeit unsuccessfully, with national healthcare, something the British brought in right after World War Two.  Communism wasn't seen as a real global threat up until 1947 or 1948.  While the United States was more rural then as compared to now, gun control was widely viewed favorably and according to older polls all the way through the 1950s and 1960s there was widespread support for banning handguns (and, it should be noted, there were considerably more violent deaths of all types then, as opposed to now).

But that doesn't mean that the nation was otherwise socially radical. The nation was coming around to completing the work commenced in 1860-65 in that making sure that blacks had full civil rights, but otherwise people held conservative social views.  Divorce was much rarer then than now.  Unconventional sexual behaviors were not looked upon favorably or even legal.

The idea however of a united country in favor of military intervention around the world is misconstrued and in fact much about immediate post war international history is misunderstood due to a very successful immediate revisionist effort on the part of the Democratic Party. At first, after World War Two, that was not the view of most Americans or really of either political party.  The GOP had been isolationist before World War Two and it still was following World War Two, although it had been anti Communist in both eras. The Democratic Party figured that the war had been won and the world was now in a liberal political state of bliss and wasn't too interested in any foreign involvement.  That all ended when China fell and Berlin was blockaded.  The shock of those events sent both parties on the same course in regards to international affairs.  At the same time the exposure of the penetration of Soviet agents into American government during the Roosevelt Administration was basically shouted down and buried by the Democratic Party which was embarrassed by it.

This takes us to the 1950s.  What we find is that the United States, in the 1950s, was internationalist in outlook, strongly anti Communist, and had expressed generally conservative social views while as the same time it was struggling to the bring blacks fully into society.  It's really the 1950s, not the 1960s that saw the real strong rise of the Civil Rights movement, but that would complete, at least for that phase, in the early 1960s.

Which we are now up to.

A lot of Americans hold a view of the early 1960s which is basically that expressed in the film American Graffiti, which is of course set in the early 1960s.  In that film all of the really significant people are, of course, teenagers or those immediately dealing with teenagers. Those young teens are out for a single evening driving around aimlessly in sort of a motorized courting ritual reminiscent of that which was once common in Mexican towns amongst young men and women of marriageable age in the public plaza on special days or Saturday market days.  And frankly there's quite a bit of truth to that (and I need to add that film to my reviewed Movies In History list).  The country, in the 1950s, was rich, much richer than it had ever been before, strong, relatively socially conservative, and faced with only one real rival, the Soviet Union.  

And then came the Vietnam War.

Well, not just the Vietnam War.  Quite a few other things arrived just about the same time the war did, and some other things arrived a little bit earlier and were really making an impact about the time the Vietnam War started to.

For one thing, for the first time ever, university became sort of an expectation of the middle class. That was a byproduct of World War Two.

The United States went into World War Two in the back stages of the Great Depression.  Like the United Kingdom, the expectation in the US is that once the war ended, the Depression would return.  That expectation proved to be wrong, and the world didn't slide into a global depression following the Second World War, in part because of the war itself an din part because the Depression had been so long, but those western nations that could plan around that expectation did so. That's why the United Kingdom introduced its national healthcare system and that's why the United States introduced the GI Bill.

The GI Bill allowed thousands of Americans to attend college who came from demographics that had no prior expectation of doing so.  That ended the era in which most college attendees in the US were white Protestants and opened up college and university enormously.  It also brought Federal money into education for the first time.  That meant, on the faculty level, that for the first time the paying customer was, in some ways, the public trough and in others a wider cross section of American public.  By extension it meant that, for private schools, the need to pay attention class distinctions, even if in a radical subversive way, were lessened and for public schools, the need to pay attention to local industries was reduced. And as any college degree meant employment at that time, the students' long term employeabiltiy didn't merit much attention as it was virtually guaranteed.

Hence, by the 1960s, a large, second and first generation student body that had much less attachment to the economically elite than ever before, and which was also much more certain of economic success, no matter what, than ever before.

They also had less connection with the demographics that produced them.  

The GI Bill not only flooded the colleges with new students and government money, it mean that there were now a lot of students who had been born into ethnicities for which college was previously nearly out of the question, in college.  First Catholics, and then blacks, started entering college for the first time in large numbers, followed by other formerly blue collar ethnicities.  As this occurred some of those ethnicities started to redefine themselves as white collar middle class ethnicities.  Irish Americans are a good example as during this period they exited what had been called the "Catholic Ghetto" and sought to redefine themselves as middle class Americans.  North of the border in Catholic Quebec the same thing was occurring on a large scale.  If the 1968 Chicago Police Riot has been portrayed as father against son, there's a real element of truth to that as Chicago was, to a large extent, as series of blue collar ghettos and the protestors of the 1968 Democratic Convention were largely the college educated sons and daughters of blue collar workers.

All that would have created enough turmoil but added into that there were peculiar social changes that were also afoot, some of which would have been quite disruptive in their own right and others which contributed to the mix. Two of these involved women.

The big change involving women is well known, but grossly misunderstood. By the 1950s (not the 1960s, as so often claimed) women's roles in the office and at home were changing.

This is usually claimed to be a byproduct of World War Two, but it isn't.  It was rather the result of the onset of really effective domestic machinery in the home, a process that had been going on since the early 20th Century but which had been retarded by the Great Depression.  Greatly improved domestic machinery that would have come onto the market fairly rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s instead simply bust onto the market in the 1950s.  This meant that much of the necessary heavy labor performed by women in the house was no longer as labor intensive. For the first time, many women and even girls could seriously consider entering the workplace and not really have to make a choice between a domestic life or that of the "spinster" life.

The same machinery, washing machines, massively improved kitchen stoves, dryers, etc., also meant that younger women could actually leave the household as they were not required for domestic labor. That was a huge change in and of itself.  And it also meant that young men were free to live on their own without the close support of their families or living in boarding houses, all of which had been true before and all of which were due to the daily amount of domestic labor just to stay alive.  Young men had expanded personal freedom in an age in which there were still a lot of good jobs that didn't require a college degree, even if many were receiving them.  Young women were really free to opt for work for the first time. So were married women.

It is really with married women, we should note, that the change was the most revolutionary, although it was generally across the board.  Many younger women who entered the work force actually did so only temporarily at the time.  But the change was setting in fairly quickly, even if the fact that it was a change was clear to everyone.  Using television as a mirror, by 1970 television had gone from the Cleaver family as a subject to the office life of Mary Tyler Moore.

The cast of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which included several women characters, only one of whom was a homemaker.

Mary Tyler Moore (in the 1970s television sitcoms were sometimes simply named after the actual names of the principal actor) was centered on the life of a young female single professional.  The casting of Moore, who had previously been casts in roles based on her physical appearance in no small part, was both brilliant and intentional.  Moore was the new young working woman of the age, surrounded in part by accepting men and in part not.  Betty White was portrayed as an older somewhat radical woman worker, perhaps the first female character cast that way and definitely contrary to her later roles.  While using television as a reflection of the times is dangerous, the huge success of the show does demonstrate the extent to which it reflected a contemporary world that was just recently changed.  That it was recently changed is evident just from watching it, as so much of the old world remained as a point of reference.

As noted, that would have been disruptive in and of itself, but added to that a combined pharmaceutical discovery and the ooze that Hugh Hefner released operated in concert with a lot of young men and women no longer living at home to start what would ultimately become a disastrous social change that reflected itself differently in different demographics.  As has been addressed here before, including quite recently, Hefner managed to exploit an already existing market that had been expanded by World War Two by making it male mainstream. In essence he portrayed the girl next store as dumb, heavy chested, and available.  In 1953 when the magazine hit the girl next door was in fact largely unavailable and her reputation would have been ruined had she been, but the male expectation was created.  By 1963 however she was living outside of the home in increasing numbers and the birth control pill came out.

Hormonal birth control pills created a revolution in human behavior in the western world that had real negative impacts.  Had the same pharmaceuticals come out only today, chances are high that they would not be allowed by the FDA as the physical dangers of them are so well known.  At the time, however, that they'd have an impact on behavior to the extent that they would was not anticipated by many (it was by some), nor was it the case that it was known that pressure would develop, and fairly rapidly, for female behavior to be libertine in response.  Certainly not all of it was, but in some sectors it increasingly became so over time and ultimately arrived upon a very widespread social expectation.  

Now, it should be noted, there's been retreats and adjustments to much of this, so a person can't assume that this is all a straight line in any fashion.  But what we're doing is simply setting the stage to ask the question that Burns and Novik posed, and then assumed an answer for.

So, by the late 1960s we have the general conditions described above. And then along came the Vietnam War.

The war did put a section of young people, and some not so young people, out on the streets protesting against the war.  And as all of these things hit at one time, there was a section or two of the American population that really formed its ideas about the world at that time.  Those sections were largely white (which most Americans were, and are).  One section was located in increasingly large cities and the other on their peripheries and outside of the cities.  One section was well educated and, over time, increasingly came to have very small families, if any families at all, and had a fair amount of surplus cash and highly liberal views. The other section had more traditional family structure, although decreased from earlier times, and suffered from economic up and downs extensively.

Now, there was a lot of crossing over from one to the other. And both sections had their roots quite clearly in earlier times.  But the times did change them as well.  Prior to the 1970s real political radicalism in the United States depended upon a radicalized and Unionized working class. That simply ceased to be the case after the 1970s, and indeed unions died themselves.  The concept of social change and justice being based on the lives of the common man ended, as instead it came to be centered in the social views of a fairly rarefied section of the wealthy white urban class that had previously made up what were termed WASPs.  And that's where we are today.

And, indeed, I've noted how that reflects today in our current politics.

But is that the fault of the Vietnam War?

Well, at least partially.  The war did create a rift that seems to have grown bigger over the years, if we take in a lot of years at a time. But it can't be said that it wouldn't have occurred anyhow.  Perhaps the desire of a white upper middle class student body to avoid serving in the war got us to the rift, or maybe it only accelerated it.  If it created it, Richard Nixon's behavior in expanding the war late in its unpopularity and then in trying to cover up the break in of the  Watergate Hotel didn't help it much.  Rampant inflation in the 1970s didn't help much either.

But where this plays out, and how much of the current social viewpoint disparity is directly related is another question entirely.  Technological innovation and advancement, changes in the global economy and the like have all played a role and, from the long view, maybe a greater role than something like the Vietnam War.  

And I suspect that much of this turmoils is reaching a high tide point, and will start to recede.  It always seems to over a long period of time, but that it takes a long time is often missed.  Even with all of the current truly odd developments, many of which are deeply opposed to human's actual nature on one hand, and deeply politically regressive on the other, the overall culture of the nations, struggled for as it is, remains there.

So, while Burns and Novik can Quixotically hope that their documentary starts to heal the political and social rift of the country, chances are that something will slowly change all that anyhow, even if it doesn't completely heal any rift, as some rifts have always been there.

Ugg.

I could tell when I went to bed that something was going on.  My throat was swollen up and hurt.  I hoped I'd just sleep whatever it was away.

But then I didn't plan on waking up every hour or so all night long.

I'd planned on working today.  Sometimes a cold is a forced day off.

Best Posts of the Week of November 5, 2017

Bests posts of the week of November 5, 2017

Go Donna! In a week of revelations, Donna Brazile exposes the Clinton Campaign.

October 24, 1917 (Old Style Russian Calendar). Lenin declares the Communists to be in revolt against the Russian Provisional Government

The Yeomany Charge at Huj, November 8, 1917

Lex Anteinternet: Go Donna! In a week of revelations, Donna Brazile...

Looking like a bum. A "No Shave November" Rant.

A few random thoughts about recent assaults

Mad dogs and other pondering.

A few random thoughts about the recent terrorist attack in New York City.
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President Trump has gone after the fact that the terrorist came in on a "diversity visa".  Well, while Trump will now be attacked for mentioning that, visas for the purpose of achieving diversity are flat out odd, particularly for the United States which is the most diverse nation on Earth.

What's a diversity visa?

Well, according to the US:

Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants,” from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. A limited number of visas are available each fiscal year. The DVs are distributed among six geographic regions and no single country may receive more than seven percent of the available DVs in any one year.

Why do we need to do this?  We don't.  It's not the business of the United States to try to make immigration "diverse".  A sane approach would be to base immigration on something else, which we've already discussed.  That may cause diversity to occur accidentally, as in when refugees are taken in, or people with particular needed skills, and that's fine. But to decide that "gee, nobody comes here from there, and we got to address that" isn't an immigration policy.  It's just a feel good, and naive, social policy.

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The New York policeman that hit the suspect fired nine time.

The press has been quick to declare the policeman a hero, and he may very well be, but I have to wonder, why do big city policemen exhibit such crappy marksmanship?  Nine times and he hit a man sized target once?  Not that this is unusual.  The New York City Police Department some time ago infamously shot a Haitian man nineteen times after firing forty one times.  Pretty bad.

Now, I may not know a lot about his shot.  Maybe it was at long range, which with a pistol is tough.  Maybe the target was seeking to evade skillfully.

But it seems to be the case that any time we read about New York City policemen using their firearms, they shoot a lot but hit little.  That would frankly not occur in most of the Western states in the same circumstances (I wrote this, I'll note, before the recent incident in Texas).

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On the last item, while I don't know the circumstances so I'm commenting only in general, the modern definition of hero has become so loose that simply being subjected to violence causes somebody to be branded a hero.

The last big Eastern city to be attacked by deluded Muslim terrorist who hailed from a former Soviet republic was Boston, and the entire city was branded as "heroic" for that. But the city basically holed up for a day while the police eventually found the guilty parties.  That's not cowardly, and it may be wise, but it's not heroic.

It's also likely not the result the authorities would have received in most localities West of the Mississippi, FWIW. That might not be heroic either.

Anyhow, this policeman might be a hero.  I don't know.  Or he may have just been doing his job which, as harsh as it is to say, doesn't make you a hero.

On this, by the way, there was a situation back East where a policeman being held at gunpoint begged for intervention from a passerby who was armed and who shot the hostage take (it didn't take him nine shots either).  That strikes me as heroic, but I haven't heard it proclaimed to be.  Maybe it has, however.

Last night when I turned on the news, I saw where later Entertainment Tonight was going to have an expose on how easy it is to rent a truck.

Seriously?

This is a bit of a revelation as it shows the same mindset that tends to go into ever instance of there being a shooting.  A truck used in a crime? Gosh, we have to do something about the lack of truck rental policies in this nation!

Like what?

Fill out a form where you promise not to use a pickup in an attack?

As a local wise sage I'm related to closely pointed out, if you can't rent one. . . you can probably steal one.

Sheesh.

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Okay, I know that this is an ISIL/ISIS inspired attack and I've been quick to point out again and again that Islam has a problem with violence, but as I noted the other day, when you are at this level I think you are forfeiting your Holy Warrior card.  That is, no matter what Mohamed thought about jihad, I'm pretty sure he didn't have this in mind.

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On Islam having a problem with violence, I'd note that it seems well established that some of the people who attended Islamic services with this fellow thought he was a really unhinged radical. They said nothing to anyone.

Nor can we expect them to.  Violent extremists of every stripe are very rarely exposed by their ethnic fellows.  Most Sicilian immigrants were not in the mafia but it took forever to crack the mafia.  Criminal organization from Boston Southies has been hard to expose forever even though most Southies are not in criminal organizations.  Strong ethnicities, particularly recent arrivals, generally will not reveal problems amongst their own. They just won't.

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And some random thoughts on the assault in Texas.
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This dude had a violent domestic assault on his record, had escaped from a mental health facility in 2012 after he was caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base and had been regarded by the USAF as having attempted to carry out death threats towards his military superiors.

Given all of that you'd think that the USAF would have made sure that he ended up in the records for criminal searches so that he was ineligible to purchase a firearm, right?

Nope. They didn't managed to get that done.

Not that this is really uncommon.  It isn't. We pretty much let loonies be loonies until they do something really bad. And that's nuts.

We'll have lots of talk now about banning instrumentalities, but the fact of the matter is, this guy should have been in prison or a mental institution already.

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I wonder how many shots the armed citizens, who hit this guy twice, took?
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The Texas assailant wouldn't have been stopped as soon as it was but for two civilian Texans, one of whom was armed.

Of course, you can argue that if the assailant didn't have access to arms, the attack wouldn't have happened (although you really can't be sure).  But then, he wasn't supposed to have access as he was in the category of people that can't legally own firearms.

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Some Takeaways:

We live in the least violent era in history, ever.

That's easy to forget due to stuff like this, but we do need to remember it. Of course, that doesn't mean that we have license to ignore real problems.

But not having license to ignore real problems also means actually analyzing the problems.

And what would that teach us?

Maybe somethings that are true, but which don't fit the cuddly view we in the west have of the world.

One thing it would teach us is that even if most of the world is in its least violent period ever, some big patches of the world, characterized by a lack of development and close adherence to the Islamic faith, remain in the 7th Century more or less, in terms of their world outlooks and willingness to be violent.  There's really no reason for everyone else to participate in that by importing it.

Immigration can be to aid the oppressed, but its more properly to aid the country where people are immigrating to, in most of the world. As the world isn't infinitely large, taking that approach, with allowance for humanitarian reasons to other goals, is the sensible policy.  Taking in radical nutjobs in the name of diversity is stupid.

People can talk about gun control all they want, but what you have at the end of the day, in regards to the type of violence we still have, is control of a really violent element.  Islamic radicals are some, but people who are just flat out nuts and violent are another.  Waiting until they become unglued before anything is done is really not very smart.

Both of these acts could have been entirely avoided.  One by leaving the disgruntled Islamic radical in his home of origin to be a pest there.  The other by putting a violent mental deficient in the stockade for years. 

Related Threads: 

 Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Veterans Day 2017 (Did you get it off?)

Veterans Day remains November 11, of course, but this year a lot of agencies and some individuals will observe it on Friday, November 10.

I never get Veterans Day off, but that's my own fault.  I could take it off if I wished to, as simply a day off.

How about you?  Did you get the day off?

Leavin' Cheyenne. (For Friday Farming, an actual "Western" song. . . not that honky pop stuff)

Looking like a bum. A "No Shave November" Rant.

From Gillette, the razor company's, website:

SCRUFFY BEARD STYLES: THE 3-DAY STUBBLE BEARD

The 3-day stubble beard, or scruff look, is a great way to get that manly rugged style without growing a full beard. With the All Purpose Gillette STYLER, you can achieve this style and still look well-groomed.

Oh bull, it's a great way to look like you spent the past three days sleeping on the table of seedy bar.

One of the things that has struck me about the recent Harvey Weinstein revelations is the the fact that, for such a rich and successful guy, he looks like an absolute bum.

Which brings me to this. Maybe its time for modern American men to retire the stubbly bum look.  I sure hope so.

 Yassir Arafat, left, with the original stubble look. At least Arafat, who basically never slept in the same place twice, had an excuse.  On the right is Ghaddafi, who liked a lot of varied costumes, but who at least shaved.

I took this on once before in a thread called:

Shaving

West Point Cadet shaving with a straight razor in the field.

That thread was mostly in the nature of observation, and it obviously had no impact. The carefully studied "I'm too busy to shave look" is more popular than ever.

Now, to be clear, I'm not writing about men with beards.  I'm not even writing about men with short beards.  I'm fine with beards and mustaches, all of which, of course, are part of the natural appearance for the majority of the males in our species (but not all, of course).

 John Gibbon, U.S. Army, with a fine short beard.  Observe this, stubble aficionados.

For that matter, I'm even okay with beards that have somewhat taken on a personality of their own.

William W. Cooke of the 7th Cavalry.  Shoot, I don't even mind a somewhat eccentric beard.

But the stubble "I haven't shaved for four days" look? Well, unless you are on your way to a beard, there should be a reason for that.

In a fair number of cases, Weinstein's being a prime example, it make the person too busy to shave look like a bum. I mean truly, did Harvey Weintstein think that the stubble make him appear more attractive to the budding starlets he hoped to bed?  If he did, he was delusional. Shoot, it made have been a deterrent to his lecherous objectives.  The guy looks like a disheveled bum.  At least Clark Gable, who was mentioned here in the other day for a bad act, looked good.

Clark Gable.  Notice, he's shaved.

Of course, perhaps in Weinstein's case, that was the point.  Maybe he figured he was so rich and powerful he could look like a bum and still grab any starlet he wanted.  And the movie industry being what it is, that's probably close to true.  Maybe he was just flaunting his status the same way a lot of Hollywood figures and entertainment industry figures affect outrageous styles.  

But I doubt it.  I think he was following a fashion.

The odd thing about this is that there are plenty of men who have in the past, and still do, who work in conditions where even if they normally stay shaved, they'll go for several days without doing so for genuine, and fairly rugged reasons.  Cowboys (yes, there are still cowboys) who work outdoors for days in a row often aren't in a position to shave.  Hunters in the West will often forgo it as well as shaving in cold water isn't much fun and packing water even less fun.  Soldiers provide another example, even though most soldiers in most armies have been required to shave since some point in World War One.

SOF troops in Afghanistan.  These troops have likely grown beards for cultural reasons as part of their mission, but soldiers omitting shaving in combat has been something that has occurred forever.  U.S. Army Photograph, SSG Kailly Brown.

Indeed, I think those occupations have a lot to do with the popularity of the stubble look now.  Men who work in cubicles in the antiseptic rather female world of today are striving to look like their rougher ancestors.  The stubble look is intended to send the message, look, I'm too busy to shave in  my rugged occupation.

But it doesn't really succeed.  It just looks stubbly.  And it would take work to keep the beard at that lengthy which seems sort of, well, unmanly.  Better just to grow a real beard or, alternatively, shave.

Military Review. Camp Custer, Michigan. November 9, 1917.