Monday, April 29, 2019

A headline a person shouldn't have to be reading in 2019


Nebraska Is Avoiding Measles Outbreak With Its High Vaccine Rate

No kidding.

April 29, 1919. Germans Arrive. Americans Departing. Spring Horse Show


The German delegation arrived in Paris to start their negotiations with the Allies.  Of note, it had taken the Allies all this time from the Armistice to come up with a treaty to present to the Germans.


In New York, more traditional peacetime events were going on, albeit interesting to benefit a martial one, and a one that represented a different technology, making for an interesting contrast.

Still in France, Americans were coming home, or otherwise moving on with their lives.

Enlisted men and officers at a dance with Red Cross personnel in Brest.

 Canteen Directeress Florence (Henderson) Payne a few days after her marriage to Col. E. V. R. Payne of the 25th Engineers.  Some of the service personnel relationships with Red Cross personnel obviously had moved on to new levels.

Walking wounded embarking at Brest.

The U.S. suspended its "black list" of nations outside of the declared belligerents who traded with the enemy in the U.S. view.  The list, promulgated under the Trading With the Enemy Act, had been hard on companies in some regions, such as South America.

Sunday, April 28, 2019

I just can't muster up any concern over . . .

Game of Thrones.  I'm totally disinterested.  It strikes me, frankly, as just flat out silly and a little dim.

Why watch a pseudo Medieval England when you can read about the real one?

Alfred the Great's father AEthelwulf.  Why did his young son take office over his elders?  Why did Alfred go to Rome as a boy?  Why did Alfred's parents name him "Advised by Elves".  Why do people watch a goofball television show with an actress who is hopelessly clean in a Medieval setting and looks like an albino?

I also can't muster up any real interest over UW's most recent president Laurie Richards being demoted back to professor.

I really ought to. And I did care when Sternberg was demoted.  It seems to me that Richards did a good job, but I really can't muster up a snit about it.

Old geology lecture hall at the University of Wyoming.  I've noted before that I have an ambivalent relationship with my two time alma mater that I don't have with my first one, a community college.  Indeed, post public schooling warm feelings, I have stronger ones for that college and the Field Artillery training school at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for some reason.  I really have no idea why.  Perhaps that's why I recall can't muster up a snit about the current UW president situation.

And I'm also disinterested in the scandal in which Felicity Huffman and Lori Loghlin are accused of paying bribes to get their children into competitive private universities.  I'm generally disinterested in actors and actresses anyhow, and frankly I have always simply assumed that baksheesh is an element of getting into the big dollar schools.  Wasn't this always obvious?  It seems to me to be pretty clear, but perhaps I was naive in thinking this was a scandal as society at large is. . . well apparently naive.

Mabel Normand, actress.  She died at age 37 in 1930.  I just like the photo.

Blog Mirror. Daily Tasks of the Priest and Parochial Solipsism

Catholic priest from Taos, New Mexico, helps a parishioner value his land.

A very interesting podcast from a Catholic prospective, including an interesting item on the history and early purpose of the diaconate.

The office of Deacon goes back to the very early days of the Church.  Indeed, the creation of the diaconate is described in the Acts of the Apostles.
At that time, as the number of disciples continued to grow, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.  So the Twelve called together the community of the disciples and said, “It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table.  Brothers, select from among you seven reputable men, filled with the Spirit and wisdom, whom we shall appoint to this task, whereas we shall devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” The proposal was acceptable to the whole community, so they chose Stephen, a man filled with faith and the holy Spirit, also Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. They presented these men to the apostles who prayed and laid hands on them.  The word of God continued to spread, and the number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; even a large group of priests were becoming obedient to the faith.
Act of the Apostles, Chapter 6. As can be seen, in the very early days of the Church, Deacons hold what we might regard as a a temporal service role to their congregation, as well as a spiritual role, which we will discuss below.  And as we can also see from the above, they were ordained in that role.  

The qualifications they had to hold from their office were set out from the earliest days.
Similarly, deacons must be dignified, not deceitful, not addicted to drink, not greedy for sordid gain, holding fast to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. Moreover, they should be tested first; then, if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons. Women, similarly, should be dignified, not slanderers, but temperate and faithful in everything.  Deacons may be married only once and must manage their children and their households well. Thus those who serve well as deacons gain good standing and much confidence in their faith in Christ Jesus.
Timothy, Chapter 3.

We know that they preached, and in fact we know that the first Christian martyr was a Deacon.
Now Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people.  Certain members of the so-called Synagogue of Freedmen, Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and people from Cilicia and Asia, came forward and debated with Stephen, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke.  Then they instigated some men to say, “We have heard him speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God.”  They stirred up the people, the elders, and the scribes, accosted him, seized him, and brought him before the Sanhedrin. They presented false witnesses who testified, “This man never stops saying things against [this] holy place and the law. For we have heard him claim that this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses handed down to us.” All those who sat in the Sanhedrin looked intently at him and saw that his face was like the face of an angel.
Acts of the Apostles.

We also know that they preformed Baptisms,.
As they traveled along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “Look, there is water. What is to prevent my being baptized?” Then he ordered the chariot to stop, and Philip and the eunuch both went down into the water, and he baptized him.
Acts of the Apostles, regarding Philip the Evangelist, who is not to be confused with Philip the Apostle.

They occupied a role different from that of the Priests, but still an ordained one, with, at first, a service role that freed the Priests from that same role.  Quite soon, the Deacons obtained an assisting role to the Bishops, and assisted the Bishops in liturgy, administration, and distribution of alms to the poor.  St. Ignatius of Antioch noted about them, in his Letter to the Trallians;
Let everyone revere the deacons as Jesus Christ, the bishop as the image of the Father, and the presbyters as the senate of God and the assembly of the apostles. For without them one cannot speak of the Church.
The association with the Bishops resulted in their office, in the early centuries of the Church, growing in importance and they became the local representative of the Bishops, something that was restored when the diaconate was restored in recent decades.  I.e, they work for the Bishops, not the local Priest, at least in a technical sense.  In the very early days, and indeed for a very long time, we need to keep in mind that there were many more Bishops per parishioner capita than there are now, although its been suggested that this situation also be restored to a more prior patter.  In the Latin Church, however, the diaconate began to decline in the 400s, something that did not occur in the Eastern Rites however.  To some extent, moreover, the rise of monasticism in the West and its strong emphasis on taking care of the poor caused their role to decline.  By 800 their role was reduced to being a temporary one on the way to ordination as a Priest.  Again, this was not something that was experienced in the East.

Concerns over various things, most interestingly the overstretched burdens of Priests in South America, lead to a restoration of the office in the 1960s in the Latin Rite.  Now Deacons are once again common as a third order of ordained clergy in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.  A rarity even in the 1980s, they are fairly common now.  As a rule, they're from the local community they serve.

So, in this interesting podcast with a complicated name, a Catholic Priest discusses possibly restoring their original role in an updated format, replying on the work of another Catholic Priest from some decades back:

07 FEB 2019 · #376 PAROCHIAL SOLIPSISM

Highly decorated Belgian Priest during World War One.

The thing I'd add to this, is that what's discussed here probably not only explores "why your priest friends don't call each other", but also why they don't call you either.  I.e., Catholic priest are incredibly busy, but also incredibly isolated.

I have another post I've semi drafted regarding Pope Benedict's recent article, and in some ways this is vaguely related to that one, but I'll plow forward none the less rather than wait, which would possibly be a more prudent thing to do.

Anyhow, one of the things I've noted over the half century that I've been around is that Priests of more recent generations can be really hard to get to know, at least if they're Americans.  I've probably only known three Priests fairly well, and I'd state that this observation was true of 1/3d of those Priests, which when I state that somewhat cuts against what I just stated.  Of those three, one was from the region and was very easy to know.  A fourth I can claim to quasi know.  A second had come out of Sub Saharan Africa and was also easy to get to know, ironically in fact because his rural African origin made him a lot more like a lot of us around here than Priests who come from elsewhere.  The other one I'd say was extremely difficult to get to know.  Of the one I can state to have quasi known, it was simply his highly unique and aesthetic personality that probably contributed to that.

In contrast to this, when I was a kid I recall my father being very good friends with a Priest who had a lot of the same outdoor interests and who in fact grew up in the same region as my father had.  He'd come over for dinner and a frequent conversation of their topics was bird hunting.  Perhaps somewhat related to this, I can also recall my father picking up two Priests and the Bishop when their car broke down on the highway and we happened to drive by. The conversation on the way home was about fishing.

If all this seems odd and has a "where is this going"? quality to this, it's this.  I've also observed that the administrative burdens of a Parish are enormous and I really don't think that the average Priest probably enters the seminary with that in mind.  If we regard the Priesthood as not only a vocation, but an occupation, it would share that feature with a lot of other occupations.  Lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, etc. etc., don't enter their fields of professional responsibility thinking that they're going to be office managers, but very frequently that takes up a lot of their daily tasks.

But because Priests aren't simply an occupation, it makes sense to me that this could indeed become a problem in more ways than one.  Indeed, most parishes have a parish administrator of some sort and is assisted by a Parish Council and a Finance Council.  But the administrators are in turn oddly burdened as their secular role doesn't feature a clerical one at all.

I guess that the podcaster in this instance received a fair amount of flak from his fellow Priests for this suggestion.  But in my view, as a layman, it's one worth considering.  The substantial problem I see with it from the onset is that almost nobody who is currently a Deacon would have entered that state with this role in mind, and therefore may be no more prepared for it than the Priests may be.  On the other hand, as they are otherwise laymen, they likely have more day to day experience in the administrative role than Priests would ever have.  The ones I know off hand, and I don't know very many well, would tend to potentially demonstrate that, as they've occupied such varied roles as insurance broker to lawyer.  And indeed I've seen a couple of them take the position of Parish Administrator when it came open, so perhaps things are somewhat headed that way by default.

When the Permanent Diaconate was established following the 1960s it didn't mean that those seminarians progressing towards ordination in the Priesthood no longer experienced that stage, so we already have two types of Deacons in the Church now.  Perhaps establishing a third type of sorts, a Permanent Deacon with a permanent administrative role, a servant of the Bishop but serving on a career basis locally, is a good idea.  He could assist the Priest in the clerical areas he's entitled to, and free up the Priest in the administrative role so that the Priest could be focused only on the spiritual mission he's charged with.  Perhaps then, a Priest could find the time to "call his friends", or even go fishing or bird hunting now and then.

And I think, frankly, that's important for a variety of reasons.  And one is this.  It's been common to note that while the Church has an all male Priesthood, women occupy lots and lots of the various roles in the daily role of the Church and accordingly men can feel they don't identify well with things (something that's claimed not to be the case in the Eastern Rite or in the Orthodox churches).  If a Priest joined you at the fishing hole or in the bird fields now and then, I suspect that might be a bit different.  Christ, it might be noted, had a group of dedicated male friends.

Something to consider.

Blog Mirror: DON GIUS AND THE NEUROSCIENCE OF COMMUNITY

A really interesting podcast on the nature of community:

14 MAR 2019 · #381 DON GIUS AND THE NEUROSCIENCE OF COMMUNITY

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Best Post of the Week of April 21, 2019.

The best post of the week of April 21, 2019.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the East: Notre Dame de Paris, Paris France


Notre Dame de Paris, Paris France



The 2020 Election, Part 1




Earth Day, 2019


Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day, 2019


George Wuerthner as an example of American Movement Politics Senility.


Today In Wyoming's History: Oops. Errors and Omissions.


The Kiwis had the coolest hats.


Sunday, April 27, 1919. Movie releases, Marching Americans in Russia, Disbanding Reds in Limerick, Wyoming National Guardsmen to Remain In Germany


It was a car racing movie.

As we've noted here before, in the teens it was common to release movies on Sunday, taking advantage of the fact that most people had the day off.  The Roaring Road was an exciting car racing movie, in which the protagonist pursued his love interest and auto racing with equal vigor, showing how automobiles were really coming in.

If car racing wasn't your thing, on the same day Select Pictures released "Redhead".


I suspect that this is a lost film as details on the film are really sketchy, but movie taglines for it are really odd.  Alice Brady's character is described as such a tantalizing beauty that men "didn't care what color her hair was".  Eh?  And an alternative poster states "This is the girl he found himself married to".

I suppose a person would have to see it to figure that one out.

Other romances were also released to the sliver screen on this day.


Wow.  What a turgid plot.

Comedies were also in the offering, including a short featuring a wealthy man whose is a victim of mistaken identity.


Well, while people back in the states were seeing the latest pictures, soldiers were doing what they have for time immemorial.  Marching.

31st Infantry marching near Vladivostok.

The area around Vladivostok in this photo looks a lot, quite frankly, like winter scenes in Wyoming.

Those same troops had recently been fighting.  And fighting was still going on most definately, including between the Estonians and the Reds.

Anton Irv

Estonian officer, and former Imperial Russian enlisted man and then officer, was killed in action on this day in 1919 in that conflict.  He'd been one of the organizer of Estonia's armored trains, something that featured prominently in that war and in the Russian Civil War.  In the East, armored trains would continue to be a feature of conflict into World War Two.

Elsewhere some other Reds or proto Reds went home.

Members of the Limerick Soviet

The goofball Limerick Soviet came to an end after a little over week of being in existence when the local mayor and the local Bishop asked them to knock it off. They then voluntarily closed up shop.

Readers of the Cheyenne papers learned that Wyoming artillerymen would not be coming home soon.


Among other things they also read that Carranza could not hold out much longer.  The author of that article suggested American help to keep him in office would be required, which was a shockingly bad suggestion.

Chicago had its selection of Sunday cartoons of course, including ones that were not really intended to be funny.



I's interesting that even in 1919, gas mileage was a topic.


And some folks in Alaska had their portrait taken.

The Kiwis had the coolest hats.


Today In Wyoming's History: Oops. Errors and Omissions.

Today In Wyoming's History: Oops. Errors and Omissions.:


Oops. Errors and Omissions.

Occasionally we get things wrong.



And when we do, we appreciate corrections.



We had just such a correction come in, in a comment, which is the best way to draw things to our attention.  This came up in an entry here on the the May 16 entries, in which we had the following:



1946  USS Wyoming decomissioned. (This entry is doubly in error, check the comments below).





A Navy veteran pointed out for us:



  1. I'm not sure you intended that image of the ship to be the USS Wyoming. It is not. USS Wyoming has had four incarnations. The one from 1946 was a WWI battleship that was used in WWII as a gunnery training platform. The ship shown is definitely not a battleship. I'm not positive but I think that might be a destroyer escort. Kim Viner CDR U.S. Navy (ret), Laramie, Wyoming. 
    ReplyDelete
  2. p.s. USS Wyoming was officially decommissioned on Aug 1, 1947, according to the the U.S. Navy: https://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/battleships/wyoming/bb32-wyo.html

    Kim


The weird thing about this is that I actually had the event correctly noted on the correct date, which was pointed out to us in the comment.



1947  The USS Wyoming, BB-32, is decommissioned.



Even weirder yet, the USS Wyoming, BB-32, shows up on this blog a lot, along with the other ships named Wyoming.  The USS Wyoming in question was a pretty important ship at that, playing a significant role in World War One.



I'm going to take the error down here shortly, but I'm leaving it up long enough to acknowledge the correction, which I appreciate.

From when Social Security was new.


A poster from 1935.

Friday, April 26, 2019

George Wuerthner as an example of American Movement Politics Senility.

Legendary, and frequently radical, civil rights leader W. E. B. Dubois who when once asked about his early sympathetic feelings for Communism stated, "Only a fool never changes his mind".  Unfortunately, few seem to have the wisdom of Dubois.

George Wuerthner is busy trying to ensure the destruction of wildlands in the United States by operating under the delusion that he's trying to save them.

That's because, for people like Wuerthner, it's always 1972.

For those who don't know who he is, Wuerthner, in his delusion, believes in kicking livestock off the public lands and that this results in them essentially being a big park.  That's because he believes that the county is inhabited like it was in 1972. . . the population must be about 250,000,000 people, outside interests don't buy ranches. . . and the ranches go on ranching on their deeded land. Truth be known, he doesn't care about those people much, so that doesn't fit in his equation.  He'd be harmless enough, but the fact that the Western Watersheds Project was formed in 1993, and he's a figure in it, means he has an annoying and dangerous public voice.  Articles written by him show up in newspapers, at least in the west.

Cattle in deep grass, for the West.

In reality, of course, what would occur if livestock were removed from the public lands is quite the opposite.  It'd kill off local ranching, vest the land in the wealthy, many of whom could block up access to public land, and it overall it would be a wildlands disaster.

But dense twits like Wuerthner, stuck in 1972 like they are, live in a fantasy land where this won't occur.

Wuerthner is 66 years of age.  That's not ancient by any means, but it puts him in the Archdruid years of the environmental movement.  If you recognize that reference, you are old enough that you may fit in it too (obviously I recognize it).  If you don't, good for you.

One of the real problems of any sort of movement is that they tend to get stuck in their founding years, and then when central concepts adopted in those years become obsolete, or false, their adherents absolutely refuse to change them.  Usually that dooms them for extinction, but if it doesn't, it can cause tremendous problems for the movements and worse yet the public.


In this case, the environmental movement really dates back to the 1960s and fully flowered in the early 1970s.  The views it adopted at that time were heavily peppered with the left wing ethos of the era.  Certain central tenants in individual branches of the movement have become absolutely fixed to the point where, ironically enough, they're anti-environmental.

Perhaps the best example is the locked position nuclear power.  The movement's view on nuclear power was always completely naive.  From the very onset, nuclear power was safer than any then available alternative and in fact it offered a way to clean energy.  It still does.  A sane environmental movement would be screaming for coal fired power plants all over the globe to be replaced with nuclear ones within a decade.  It could very easily be done.  Those nations that are the prime energy consumers on the planet all have nuclear technology.  Indeed, if somebody is really worried about climate change, the argument is to go to nuclear power and electric transportation, solving almost all of the problem overnight.  By and large, however, most larger environmental movements would rather be wrong about nuclear power than adopt such a straightforward and easy solution.

Cattle being fed in the winter. . . away from a creek bottom.  If they were buffalo, they'd be in it.

Wuerthner isn't an opponent of nuclear energy, as far as I know, but he's a hater of livestock on the public lands, a position he shares with at least one University of Wyoming law professor. The stupidity of that position is perhaps best demonstrated by an article written by that law professor in the last decade or so in which she laments seeing cattle outside of her kitchen window in Laramie, which means she lives in a house on the edge of Laramie which is likely new, as that's where the new houses are.

The idiocy of that position, and it is idiotic, is that if you see cattle in the west, those lands are at least somewhat wild.  And the transition is very well known.  If you remove the public lands from livestock use, you make the ranches non viable, they become housing subdivisions of some sort, and the wildlands are destroyed.

High country pasture, during the period of the year its grazed.  Cattle were in this pasture at the time this photograph was taken.  Places like this remain places like this due to livestock.

But to people like Wuerthner and the Western Watersheds Project it's still 1972 in a series of dry years when there was overgrazing in some spots. There never was in every spot.

And moreover, their view is weirdly devoid of historical knowledge.  It's very well known that large cottonwoods bottoms in the western United States were destroyed in the late 19th Century principally by buffalo.  Buffalo are every bit as destructive on watersheds as cattle and exhibit largely the same behavior in regard to them.  When its noted that cattle replaced buffalo, that's just what happened. The cattle replaced them. They're both big ungulates.  But buffalo are benighted, as they were here  prior to European Americans.

Working men doing work that's actually worth doing, which very little modern work actually is.  Another factor in keeping agriculture viable.

Now, in the case of buffalo the destruction of cottonwoods bottoms was brought about as they wintered in them and the Cheyenne started to as well. So there was a human factor.  But its different from any current one and it'd be largely politically incorrect to criticize the Cheyenne for that.  Indeed, it's be intellectually incorrect as well as you can't blame them for doing that with the state of knowledge then possessed by them.

Chopping ice for bulls. . . and deer.  It's been well established that the deer population in the west is dramatically larger than it was prior to the mid 20th Century as ranchers have done things like this.

But what you can do now is look at the facts and how they operate.  Ungulates are natural to the land and the land doesn't care that much if the ungulates are buffalo or cattle.

Modern ranchers, and for that matter most ranchers all the time, move cattle from pasture to pasture and place things like salt blocks out in places to require them to move. Ranchers are, on a day to day basis, much more concerned with the state of the land and watersheds than anyone else is.  So they've addressed the situation in a natural way.

Indeed, at least one African born cattle advocate, Allan Savory, has taken this to another step and argued not only are cattle that are rotated on pastures fully comparable with nature, but necessary to it, even maintaining that only livestock can reverse desertification.  Savory is hugely controversial among environmentalist for that reason who just can't accept that this could possible be correct.

Joseph Stalin.  During the 1930s a writer for The New Republic wrote to Stalin to warn him that it seemed people were doing really bad things under his watch. . . .unable to grasp that Stalin was doing really bad things under his watch.

During the 1920s a lot of the American movement left developed an admiration for Soviet Communist and kept it all the way into the 1950s and even beyond, well after it was proven that it was a bloody mess.  All kids of stupid radical ideas that came up during the 1970s remain around now and are still wreaking destruction well after both science and experience have proven them wrong.  A concern for the planet or regions of it doesn't exempt a person from this

Wuerthner is flat out wrong.  Their views are ossified.  It's time for him to retire from public life.  MeTV has plenty of 1970s vintage sitcoms on, so he should be right at home.

Friday Farming: A Hundred Years Ago: Coachella Date Trees a Hundred Years Ago

Coachella Date Trees a Hundred Years Ago

April 26th, 1919. Sgt. York brought to nation's attention, Orlando goes home, 26th Division photographed.


The Country Gentleman and The Saturday Evening Post both featured Norman Rockwell illustrations on this Saturday, April 26, 1919.

The Saturday Evening Posts would be a significant issue, as it brought Sgt. Alvin York's heroism to a national audience for the first time.  The article, entitled "The Second Elder Gives Battle" made York a national hero.


In Paris, Italian Prime Minister Orlando packed up and left as the conference would not give Italy the port city of Fiume.  That failure would doom Orlando's leadership and he would be out of office within a month.  Fiume became a free state in 1920.  It would last until 1924 when the Kingdom of Italy absorbed the city by way of a treaty which the Free State regarded as invalid.  Today the town, known as Rijeka, is the third largest city in Croatia.

Closer to home, a a "war tank" was going to arrive on Sunday in Casper.

And units of the 26th Division were photographed.

Supply Company, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division, April 26, 1919.

Company I, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division

Company F, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division.

Company M, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division


Thursday, April 25, 2019

Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day, 2019

Ranch kids at work.  Not because it was take them to work day, but because they're ranch kids.

Today is National Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day for 2019.

I don't think this day is observed as much as it was, at least in the press, as it was a few years ago.  I'm not sure what that means. Times have been rather odd for the past few years and perhaps that has something to do with it, or perhaps not.

One of the great, and actually truthful, career recruiting posters.


At any rate, I have to wonder how many people even have occupations where they can really do this.  I don't, and it's not like I'm operating heavy machinery.  It just wouldn't be practicable until your kids were old enough to know more or less what you do anyway.

Not that I haven't done this on odd occasion, the most notable of which is when my son traveled with me to an argument in Tribal Court some years ago.  And they stop in from time to time for one reason or another.  And, I suspect, like all children of trial lawyers, they hear a lot of practiced debates and see their lawyer parent working from home.

Of course, they've been exposed a lot to ranch work as well, which brings me I suppose to my point. That participation is not in a "take your . . .to work", but work.

It's an odd world we live in now in which by and large our kids don't really see us work.  It's part of the transition of the Industrial Revolution and the migration of people from the rural to the urban.  And as that's occurred, work has become very self isolating.  Most people spend at least a third of their day working, usually more, five days out of seven.  In the United States, where work has a manic level of devotion, a lot of people spend more time there than that. And as they do that, they associate themselves with their coworkers, some of whom are their friends, if they are lucky, but many of whom are just people they meet at work.  


And most modern work isn't fun.  It's interesting how that well known fact.  Forbes Magazine has called the line "It's not supposed to be fun, that's why they call it work", a "Business Lie", but for many people it isn't.  Young people are counseled to find careers that they will love, but at least if people who keep statistics on it are correct, most don't.

Now, this isn't to say that some don't, and it isn't to say that the counselling is bad.  What it might be is to say that a lot of career field propaganda is just that, propaganda.  People are coaxed into "fun and exciting careers in. . . ", when they aren't all that fun or exciting.

Of course, a lot of people simply fall into a career as well, they start off to be African Underwater Ornithology Scientist but things happen and they end up the IT guy at Big Boxes Dun Be Us, Dude.  Life has always been that way, and there's not much you can really say about that.  Early planning and changes in it have long term consequences.

Which is a good reason that careers and those in them shouldn't lie about them, and why society at large shouldn't do the same and encourage misdirection. But both do.  There's the common American story that you can be whatever you want, at any age, and have it all.  None of that is true, but the first statement is closest to true.  The second and third are absolute bald faced lies.

So too are the numerous statements individual careers make about themselves.  For odd reasons, we subscribe here to the New Zealand Air Force's magazine, and I love it. For one thing, I like airplanes. But to read the issue the RNZAF is the Royal New Zealand Fun Corps and you'd be left with the impression that the RNZAF does nothing but fun and games at government expense all day long, with an occasional break to rescue kittens.

My exposure to other careers is fairly broad because one of my occupations, my day job so to speak, exposes me to a pile of other ones.  That makes it pretty plain that some careers are a lot more honest about their natures than others.  The military is semi honest, but rarely is it fully honest that its job is to kill people and break things in service of the nation.  

Rhodesian bush war era recruiting poster.  "[I]nteresting and varied career. . . "?  Well, maybe, in a way.

Oddly enough, because it receives so much criticism for its "romanticism", agriculture, particularly ranching, is extremely close to its public image.  Whether you would like doing it or not, the way cowboys are portrayed is surprisingly close to what its like to actually do the job, right down to the outdoor work in all weather, being around animals, and the low pay.  If you've seen the movie The Cowboys, you actually have a decent concept of what cowboys actually do.  Perhaps that's why nearly 100% of the adults I've found who in agriculture absolutely love it. They knew what they were getting into when they got into it.  And perhaps that's why I've also observed that a lot of young people who move off the ranch to go into other careers, come back around and back onto the ranch after their exposed to the fabrication of what other careers are like, or they work in those other careers for decades attempting to get back into what they left.


The law is notorious about lying about the nature of its career to outsiders.  Law schools like to put out the absolute nonsense that "you can do a lot of things with a law degree".  You can, as long as all of those things are practicing law.  Otherwise, a law degree is about as broad as a diesel mechanics certificate.  You can do a lot of thing with that as well, as long as they all involve diesel engines.  That's not bad if that's exactly what you expected to do, and you knew the actual nature of the work and what it entailed.

Romantic?  I've seen this actually happen.

Of course, part of what work entails involves what its like to actually experience it, and that's really hard to explain.  People like depictions of certain activities, including some of them which are in fact careers or occupations, but that doesn't mean that they would actually like to experience them.  To give a rather extreme example, I like watching what's depicted in Saving Private Ryan, but that doesn't mean I'd want to experience it.  Not really.  That's often forgotten.  People actually join the military because they've watched military films and been enthralled.  The character portrayed, for example, in Born On The Fourth Of July claimed that he joined the Vietnam era Marines after watching John Wayne films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima.  Taking that at face value, it would have been wise to recall that John Wayne was an actor, not an actual Marine, and his character, Sgt. Stryker, is killed in the film.  Indeed, there's piles of death in the film.

Lawyer researching the law.  What doesn't come across is that he may be researching a desperate cause in which his client has pinned all his hopes on this research and it looks really bad.

The same is more or less true of other professions. To use the law as an example again, watching a movie about a trial, such as The Verdict, Anatomy Of A Murder, or A Civil Action, or even A Few Good Men, may be enthralling but that doesn't really mean that you'd really enjoy the high stress of being a trial lawyer.  Maybe you would. But before you engage in it, you ought to appreciate whether you endure high stress well or not.  But it's frankly nearly impossible to appreciate that without experiencing it, and a lot of folks don't until they're in the situation.  

All of these factors have been around for men at least from the point where some fellow left his peasant village in Paderborn Westphalia and headed off to the university in some Medieval town, but I think the added factor, and difficulty, is that its now been foisted upon women.  That may sound like an odd thing to say, but since World War Two we've gone from a world in which most women worked at home, but could have some kind of job, to one where they could have careers if they wanted, to one where carers are now demanded of them.  With that has been the whole absurd Cosmopolitan line that "you can have it all", which wasn't ever true of any occupation to start with.  Every occupation, even the one that's absolutely the best for you individually, entails compromises and generations of acclimation or perhaps genetic predisposition predisposes men to that reality.  It hasn't really done that for women which means that the uploaded expectations are necessarily met with massive failure in realization.  Added to that is the several decades long abandonment of male responsibility in general which leaves many women with the choice to either occupy the traditional role of mother alone while also working, or forgo it entirely, and their burdens have been increased enormously.  At least recently, although ironically coincident with their being pushed into traditional male roles where they're often subsequently sexually exploited, there's also been a return to allowing for them to assume a more traditional role if they wish.  By the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was massive social ridicule if they wished to attempt that.


Of course, part of the problem here is that society is now so geared to this that it's almost impossible for society at large to imagine anything else.  Trades jobs go unfilled as the young are pushed away from them.  People are pushed from local jobs to ones in big cities far away.  A student loan system has been created to fund the pursuit of degrees that are known to be unlikely to result in employment, and currently its faddish in the Democratic Party to suggest that this system should be expanded into one in which the taxpayers at large will fund that on a society wide level.

So, it's take your daughters and sons to work day for 2019.  But be honest.  And kids. . . choose well.