Blog Mirror: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Wolf Reintroduction Makes Colorado Ballot — Who Wi...

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Wolf Reintroduction Makes Colorado Ballot — Who Wi...:   In the video, wolf teachers encourage a grizzly sow to reduce her carbon footprint by not having too many cubs. Last month, supporters...

January 13, 1920. Strife and change

German soldiers guarding the Reichstag following violent Communist demonstrations on January 13, 1920.  The troops ultimately ended up opening up on the crowd with lethal effect.

In Germany a massive demonstration in front of the Reichstag took a turn for the worse when violence erupted and troops opened fire.  Over forty people were killed.

And in Oregon ratified the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  

The New York Times, always on the right side of history, published a cartoon lampooning Robert Goddard for claiming that a rocket could make it to the moon.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This is a hard to describe recent Netflix film by the Coen brothers which lives up to their eclectic reputation.

A series of vignettes, the movie is the cinematic equivalent of a collection of short stories and is presented in that fashion.  Each vignette, set in the American West, is presented through a filmed page in a book, shown in the style of books in regards to illustrations and printing that predominated for the first half of the 20th Century.

The opening story is the one that contributes its name to the movie.  It's a send up of the old singing cowboy movies but with a plot turned on its head. Buster Scruggs, the singing cowboy, is also a cheerful misanthrope who is essentially a cartoon in character.  Amusing but overdone, the first scene is accordingly not one of the better ones in the film.

The second one, entitled Near Algodones, is much better, featuring James Franco as a would be bad man who cheats death repeatedly.  The opening of this story is improbable, but its a comedic role which somewhat serves to point out in more than one way the absurdity of spaghetti westerns.  It's well done and serves to start to revive what the first scene somewhat lost.

The third act is the extremely dark Meal Ticket.  It's frankly disturbing in content and would have been better left out of the film as it doesn't contribute to it and is very odd and disconcerting.

The fourth, All Gold Canyon, starts off as a charming study of an elderly prospector before taking no less than two Saki like plot twists that are very well done.

After that comes the best episode of the film, The Gal Who Got Rattled, which in spite of its dark and morally objectionable conclusion probably better depicts characters on the actual Oregon Trail better than any other movie or television show ever made, including its depiction of a frontier 19th Century marriage proposal.  Again, its depiction of suicide is morally objectionable, but the rest of the episode is a surprisingly accurate look at the characters of the time and in context.

The final scene, The Mortal Remains, is a purely allegorical depiction of a trip over the River Styx which I suspect a lot of viewers won't quite get.  For those who do, however it's well done.

The reputation of the Coen brothers is well established by now and this film fits right in with their prior works.  It is, as noted, difficult to review in the fashion of the films normally reviewed here as it it doesn't intend to be an accurate historical movie.  Nonetheless, in one scene it manages to go further than other movies depicting the same events and in terms of comedic effect, Near Algodones is well done in the Coen brothers style.

And now Iranian protests against its government

The Iranian people's level of trust for their own government is low and has been waning for a long time.

Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran.  And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.

The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage.  President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.

It failed.

Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life.  It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War.  The US was shown to be impotent.

Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane.  The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down.  Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion.  In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.  

Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly.  It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.

And now they've shot down their own airliner.

A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988.  Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it.  Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly.  The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time.  The Iranian government is going to change.

The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly.  Now that seems to have already eroded.  Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist.  Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed.  The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident.  And Iranians are back to protesting their government.  The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.

Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.

Blog Mirror: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: CPW: New Wolf Pack Appears in Colorado

 Michigan timber wolf, 1930s.  This must be in a controlled setting as there's a person in the background.

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: CPW: New Wolf Pack Appears in Colorado: Wolves -- our spiritual teachers (stock photo). I have a longer blog post in the works about the upcoming Colorado ballot measure on the...

This should be interesting.

It now appears nearly certain that wolves are now in northern Colorado.  I'm of two minds about it.

Indeed, I've always been of two minds about wolves.  When I was a law student I worked as a researcher for a professor who was studying the then proposed introduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park.  The following school year he kept me on in the project and we became co-authors of an article that was published as a law review article.  As a result of that I interviewed some figures who were involved on both sides of what was then a debate.  I recall the Secretary of Agriculture for the state declaring that wolves would never be introduced under his watch, a prediction that would fail within less than a year.  A wolf advocate of the time who was a big figure at the time has completely disappeared.  A Federal government figure who was very much involved and who had wolves on his thin wooden business cards is now no doubt long retired, assuming that he's even still living.

Anyhow, at the time I was in favor of wolf reintroduction, but not for the Granola way that so many were.  I figured that wolves were good for wild lands, and that was good for people who like wild lands, including hunters, and also, probably to some people's surprise, ranchers.  I figured there's be hunting of wolves when they were reestablished, which means that I thought that the claims that they'd stay in the park were absurd.

I proved to be more right than wrong.  The wolves left the park almost immediately and they can now be hunted, although that process turned out to be one that took much longer and involved much more drama and litigation than I imagined.

What I also thought about wolves, and said many times thereafter, is that wolves weren't the problem so much as the people who come with wolves, and I was also quite correct on that.

Way back then there were those I knew down in Albany County who swore that 1) wolves had never really been fully eradicated from Yellowstone and 2) that they had seen wolves in Albany County.  I was sure that #1 was probably wrong and I'm now sure it was wrong.  On #2, I'm not so sure now, although my guess is still that it was wrong.  The people I knew then who claimed to have seen wolves had a lot of outdoor experience and insisted that a wolf was unmistakable.  Having seen wolves now in Teton and Natrona Counties, I have to agree, they aren't mistakable for anything else.

So what do I think of wolves in Colorado?  Well, I guess my opinion hasn't changed that much.  My suspicion is that they'll be a pain for stockmen in a state that's rapidly going from being a Western one to a large suburb of Los Angeles in some ways, but has lots of wild left still.  That may be a good thing as a dose of what's really wild helps keep thing wild.  And a dose of reality, wolves aren't kind, may be a good thing for The Centennial State as well.

The artist here must have never actually have seen a moose.

As for the ballot initiative to introduce them?  Well, if they've introduced themselves, that ought to be avoided.

The Natural

I made a reference to this film the other day and was surprised to see that I'd never added it to our Movies In History list.  As its a great period movie, I'm correcting the omission.

Nearly anyone who reads this will have seen this movie already.  Released in 1984, the film was based on a 1952 novel by the same name, meaning that the book had taken a surprisingly long thirty years to reach the screen.  The plot surrounds a single baseball season in 1939, but the very early part of the story set in 1923 is critical to the story.  We learn, early on, that in 1923 the then 19 year old protagonist, Roy Hobbs (played by former university baseball player Robert Redford) has a chance to enter the major leagues as an absolute stand out baseball player.  On his way to his tryout as a pitcher he strikes out a Babe Ruth like figure as a demonstration, and then has his tryout disrupted by the intervention of a literal femme fatale (played by Barbara Hershey). The story picks up again in 1939 at which time Hobbs is 35 years old and has lost contact with those back home.

Much of the film is allegorical involving the struggle between good and evil, with evil personified in the form of dramatically beautiful women played by the aforementioned Barbara Hershey and a young Kim Basinger, and good likewise personified partially in female form in the character of Hobb's teenage girlfriend (Glen Close).  The remainder of the roles are all male as they make their way through the season and through a battle of good and evil metaphorically.

This is a great film and its likely the best baseball movie ever made.  It's a great American movie.

Regarding material details, having viewed it again just the other day, I was struck how accurate the details are.  Period baseball uniforms are exact, but more amazingly crowed details are incredibly well done.  The crowd looks more accurate and more in place for a 1930s vintage crowd that crowds in sports movies made in the 1930s do.  It's simply amazing.

As this is a very studied film, like all films, there are some errors in material details. But they are very minor.  Once scoreboard depicted in actual stadium, for example, is noted not to have been present in 1939.  The Star Spangled Banner is sung before an opening ball was thrown, which wasn't actually done before every game until World War Two (it was done during World War One and then discontinued and reinitiated during World War Two). But these are minor errors. All in all, the film is amazingly well done.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral, Billings Montana.

Churches of the West: St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral, Billings Montana...:

St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral, Billings Montana

This is St. Patrick's Cathedral in Billings Montana. The Catholic Gothic Revival Cathedral was built in 1907.

The best posts of the week of January 5, 2020

The best posts of the week of January 5, 2020.

The Oppressed and the Vapid

Asymmetrical War and Gross Overreaction

An Iranian American Conflict was something. . . .

Angst. A Then and Now Analysis

According to the New York Times it was Mike Pompeo who urged the targeted strike on the Iranian general. . .

Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

The Royals. M'eh

The Royals. M'eh

According to the Canadian news paper the National Post about 60% of Canadians hope that Prince Harry will become the next Governor General of Canada.

The Governor General is the representative of the Queen, and we've discussed the Queen in Canada once before.  Indeed, that topic was once one of the most favorite ones here:

Queen Elizabeth II in Canada

This is a young Queen Elizabeth II in Canada, but what else does it depict?  I frankly don't know.  Its a photo from my mother's collection, and unfortunately, I no longer know the story behind it.

Does anyone stopping in here know?

Anyhow, the National Post had this headline the other day:

'Celebrities': Will Prince Harry take over the post of governor general? Canadians are hopeful, poll says

Here's hoping there isn't a next Governor General at all and that the Windsors simply fold up shop and become private citizens.

Something I don't mention here very often is that I'm a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.  Now, I'm a resident of the US and have been my entire life, but I hold dual citizenship because my late mother was from Quebec and only became a US citizen late in life.  Indeed, my father had already passed at the time.

I guess that gives me somewhat of a right to comment on this as a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, but only somewhat.  While I may hold Canadian citizenship I'm not going to pretend that I'm Canadian in the same way that somebody who really lives in Canada does.  It's a legal oddity, I guess, in my case but I will confess that I do feel a closeness to Canada in a way that most Americans are not likely to.  I have a large collection of Canadian relatives and my mother was always very Canadian.

Indeed, in a sort of way, Canadians like me, who hold citizenship because of an ancestral connection, are remnants and reminders of what Canada is and was perhaps more than current residents are, which is probably both instructive and irritating to current residents of the country.  I don't appreciate it when people whose grandparents once lived in my home state feel free to spout off in the local letters to the editor section about the way the state ought to be and I doubt born and raised Canadians appreciate being treated in the same manner. 

None of which keeps me from occasionally commenting on Canadian affairs. .  . or Commonwealth ones.

Which is what this is.

Canada is of course a fully independent nation but it's also part of the English Commonwealth and the Queen is the sovereign of the country.  The Queen of England, that is.

This is somewhat of a confusing topic for people who aren't in the Commonwealth but, to reduce it to the point where it's probably deceptive, the British Empire recognized at some point after the American Revolution that not eventually establishing political independence for colonies was a bad idea and made the residents of them very crabby.  It therefore established a dominion status for them at some point which meant that what had been colonies, like Canada, were converted into self governing dominions.  In that system, those dominions governed their internal affairs completely while their external affairs were largely governed by the United Kingdom, the mother country.  The jurisprudential concept was that there were lots of English dominions but only one Empire.

In the late 19th Century this view became highly developed and there was a lot of talk of Empire in sort of a glorified fashion, in which it was imagined that one big happy British Empire would exist with lots of happy smaller British states.  An English Commonwealth of Nations.  Naturally the mother Parliament would continue to govern foreign affairs, as it was the Parliament of the empire.

Well, this started to really fall apart after World War One.  The UK had declared war for the entire Empire in 1914 so countries like Canada and Australia, both dominions, went to war because of that. They didn't do it themselves.  They raised their own armies, to be sure, along with other dominions like New Zealand and South Africa, but after the war the obvious problem of a nation asking its sons to die in a titanic conflict that they had no say about getting into caused the British Parliament to loose that extra national status.  The Commonwealth was still real, but it became more of a cultural union with strong international economic, immigration and emigration benefits for the members.

The Commonwealth took an additional blow when Ireland basically disregarded its dominion status in the Second World War and refused to enter into the conflict.  India showed little interest i dominion status after the war.  Lots of nations joined the Commonwealth after World War Two as they became independent, but the economic advantage evaporated when the UK entered the European Community.  Ironically, it's just left.

Maybe that'll give a boost to the Commonwealth again, which had real economic features to it.

At any rate, because of this history Canada retains the position of Governor General.  That's because the Queen remains the sovereign.

What's that mean?

Well, Queen Elizabeth II has the constitutional right as the sovereign to act much in the same way, indeed beyond the same way, that the President of the United States can. She calls the Canadian Parliament into session and she approves or disallows the legislation it passes.  Therefore, she can veto any Canadian bill.

The Governor General holds the powers of the sovereign in her stead.  Queen Elizabeth, as with all the royals, has no real desire, I'm sure to open the parliaments of all fifteen Commonwealth countries nor to preside in some fashion over the legislative process of all of them.  Indeed, in modern times the Crown has been careful not to really become involved in politics anywhere, including in the United Kingdom, quite wisely.

Indeed, no modern Governor General has ever denied ascent to a bill of the Canadian parliament.  A provincial one (yes, there are provincial ones) last operated to do so in 1961 in Saskatchewan.  It'd be phenomenal if any of them did so now, although the thought of it occurring in the form of an act by Prince Harry is amusing.

It's amusing as royalty itself is sort of amusing.

The current Governor General is Julie Payett, who was appointed to that role by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  They serve at the Queen's pleasure, but in practice it tends to be a five year appointment.  So the PM could choose to appoint Prince Harry to the role after Payett runs her course in 2022.  The Queen, for her part, could turn Harry down, but that would be odd and he's in need of a job.

Does any of this make any sense in the modern world?

Well, it makes a little, but none of that does anything to remove the fact that royalty is really odd and the English monarchy is quite odd, as an institution.

People really like to imagine that the English Royal Family and all its impressive majesty and ceremony date back to ancient times.

That's because they haven't studied it.

In reality, the early English monarchs were from different royal lines, although supposedly the current Queen is a distance ancestor of one of the very first monarchs, but that's only because huge numbers of the English now are.  Early on, simply being king didn't mean you'd occupy the position until death, and death tended to come pretty early for them. Some made it into what we'd now regard as old or at least late middle age, but of the early ones, more than a few died in their 30s. 

And more than a few had to constantly fight other claimants, as it was recognized that the heads of strong families had just about as much right to the thrown as any one occupant.  About the time of Ethelred the Unready (which meant "ill advised") the practice started of trying to incorporate sacred oaths into the process of choosing an heir to the thrown so that powerful men, subject to those oaths, wouldn't take a run at the crown, but that was only partially successful. 

This whole process went on seemingly forever and even the seizure of the thrown by the Normans in 1066 didn't stop it.

King Henry VIII, the Vandal.

During the Reformation the entire process took on an odder twist when King Henry VIII, not intending to make England a Protestant country, separated from Rome to establish what he naively thought was something like the Catholic Church of England.  Henry, who was constantly distracted by the topic of what babe ought to be in his bed chambers, listened too much to some of his Protestant advisers and the country went into prolonged religious strife during and after his death.  While the Church of England was established and slid around between being quite Protestant and not so much Protestant, while being challenged by the more Protestant and while suppressing the actual Catholics, the Crown itself was worn a couple of times by Catholic monarchs, who had the embarrassing role of also being head of head of the Church of England.  Ultimately the Parliament imported the really Protestant William of Orange from Holland, who had nothing else to do, and made him king.  For this reason the current family occupying the thrown had a really, really German last name (and a pretty good German bloodline) up until World War One, when they changed their last name to Windsor.

By the Great War the powers of the Crown had been reduced to a largely ceremonial role.  Indeed while Americans still like to claim they rebelled against King George in 1774, they really rebelled against the Parliament as by that time the King's role was vague and it was really Parliament that held real power.  Indeed, Parliament held real power by the time of the English Civil War in 1642-1651, as that was the original point of the war, before it began to feature a strong religious element to it.  The Crown reclaimed some  powers during the Restoration in 1660, but by that time it was pretty clear who was really running the country.

King Charles II of England.  He got the crown back his father had lost, but he made the Parliament nervous by his heavy partying, crypto Catholic ways (ironic in light of the former) and deathbed formal conversion to Catholicism.

After World War One the Crown went into a real crisis when King Edward VIII, who was an oddball who also complained about the heavy burdens of being a prince before he was King, abdicated when he became king in order to marry Wallace Simpson. We've dealt with that elsewhere, so we're not going to here.

Okay, with all that, what's going on now?

Well, I don't really know but of all the royal families in Europe the English royal family really gets the attention. There are other royal families. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands all have them.

But no nation needs one now and frankly the history of royal families is embarrassing.

If you follow reddit you can find the surprising communities of people who are enamored with monarchy.  Indeed, there's more than one blog dedicated to following old royal families and imagining a return to an extremely conservative social order if only they had more of a role in the world.  

But that's baloney.  In truth, monarchs tended to be just as likely to be weird and icky as they did noble and saintly.  In modern royal families its easy to find the history of affairs and scandal.  And some born into it, like Harry, don't like being captive royals.

And why would we imagine otherwise?  This collection of people is born into vast wealth with no real obligations.  Idle if they wish to be, the roles they fill are only filled by the pressure of their own families or by increasingly limited constitutional roles. And some of those roles should have caused eye rolling from the onset, such as the retained English one of being head of the church in England.

So now, Prince Harry, who seemingly has never done well with being a royal, basically wants out.  But in wanting out, because he's a royal, he gets privileges that other people do not.  He may be entitled to a share of the family's vast private wealth.  He and his wife get to move to Canada simply because he's a royal.

Well, let him out, but do away with the whole absurd charade.  Having a royal family hasn't made sense for well over a century, maybe two centuries.  The English aren't defined by their royal family anymore and Canada having one, given its current culture, is flat out odd.  

There's no reason not to make Queen Elizabeth II the last royal.  The Parliament should declare it and start working on sorting out what is really theirs as opposed to Britain's. They'll still be rich.  When she dies, she should be the last one.  Everyone else can go get a job, or not.

And the American Press can focus on something else.  We haven't had a royal since the Declaration of Independence. Why the close attention to them here?

January 11, 1920. The League of Nations recognizes Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia

On this day in 1920 the League of Nations recognized a collection of small states that had once been part of the Russian Empire and which had declared their independence in the wake of the collapse of that empire. 

These were Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

All three would prove to be examples of how Soviet Russia was just as much of a despotic empire as any old regime empire ever had been.

The Azerbaijani Democratic Republic would be invaded by the USSR on April 28 of the same year, after having surrendered the day prior under threats from its own Communist Party which made it clear a violent Soviet invasion would be coming if it didn't do so.  The Soviets promised independence for the country and then broke the promise.

Armenia also was invaded by the Soviets in 1920 but some ares held out until 1921, bringing to a temporary end the republic of a nation that dated back into antiquity but which has repeatedly suffered due to the actions of larger neighbors.

Georgia would be invaded in 1921, after several putative prior Soviet efforts.

It'd take the fall of the Soviet Union to restore the independence of all three nations.

All three countries had plenty of problems during their brief existence, including simply being next to their large former imperial master which was engaged in civil war.  They all engaged in wars over their borders.  They were beset by internal Communist who sought to bring them down and unite them with Soviet Russia.  But, in spite of that, they had emerged as real states until the Soviet Union, which theoretically recognized the rights of small nations, terminated their statehood.

Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran this week, after its retaliatory missile strikes on US facilities in Iraq.  The plane was carrying Iranians mostly bound for Canada, which has a large Iranian immigrant population.

To make this plane, Iran's military shot down a civilian aircraft over their own capitol city.

This is because the Iranian military isn't great.

Iran has universal male conscription at 18 years of age.  Interestingly, prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it also conscripted women, but stopped at that time.  This means it has a large conscript military.

And while it has obtained arms, as the greed and stupidity of nations exceeds their best interests all too often, their military is basically a 1970s vintage force.

We don't know what happened to lead to this tragedy, but my guess is that a tired and scared group of Iranian conscripts had been harangued by officers and seniors about expecting an American attack to the point they were worn out and scared.  So they fired on what they thought was an American military aircraft and 176 completely innocent people, most of whom were their fellow countrymen. We don't know what happened to the men who fired the missile, but we can be assured that it is or was bad.

Nothing will happen to the men ultimately responsible for the tragedy, which is the Iranian Islamist leadership that has governed the country for forty one years and kept in on a violent path of regional Shiite dominance. That government will ultimately go down in an Iranian revolution of some sort, and much of their theocratic views forever with it.

Where this leaves the Iranian American Conflict is not known, but what has turned out to be the case is that an extremely risky course of action the US embarked on due to an order of President Trump and under the apparent urging of Mike Pompeo has been surprisingly effective so far.  Nearly everyone agrees that Gen. Soleimani was a terrorist whose demise should not be lamented.  That he was a uniformed officer of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and the method by which it occurred really ramped up the risks, but Iran's response was ineffective, perhaps intentionally so, or perhaps simply because it was.  And Iran managed to put the period on the entire event by following up an ineffective missile strike by shooting down a Ukrainian airliner.  The U.S., in the meantime, has essentially declared the matter over.

Either as an example of truly masterful strategy, or by accident, the U.S. has effectively moved the bar on state sponsored terrorism and, due to the past week, managed to make state employed uniformed terrorist a routine target in wars on terrorism and to have exposed Iran's conventional forces as less than impressive.  Iran may have in fact suffered a set back as a sponsor of terrorism and given its history, that's a large part of its diplomatic approach to the world. Without it, it's not much.

At least not much until it acquires a nuclear weapon, which it is now working on.  Indeed, exposed as conventionally incompetent and now with a reduced military portfolio because of the changed nature of the game, it may be stepping back because it knows this has become a must for it.

Or so it probably believes. The irony of it is that nuclear weapons for small nations are, frankly, completely worthless.

Maybe its about farming. . .

It's odd how you can pick up new things from a great movie no matter how many times you have seen it.  Indeed, perhaps you are more likely to pick up subtle things if you've seen a movie more than once, and some time has passed since you last saw it.

Anyhow, in the great Robert Redford film The Natural, the first reference to farming is vague, in the for of a youthful Roy Hobbs leaving the farming Midwest to try out in baseball.  We are soon years later when he appears at a dugout as a middle aged rookie for a team coached by Pop Fisher, who is lamenting not having become a farmer.

Towards the climax, an injured but seemingly recovered Hobbs reappears when Fisher is again delivering a version of the same speech about lamenting not having become a farmer.  Hobbs relates that "there's nothing like a farm" and discusses farming romantically.  Fisher relates that "my mother wanted always wanted me to be a farmer" to which Hobbs relates "my father wanted me to be a baseball player".

In the end, Hobbs is back on the farm, having returned to it, and his first love.

Something going on there.

January 10, 1920. Germany signs the Protocol and the Great War officially ends (except for the U.S.). . .

And thereby avoids an Allied occupation.

It read:

PROTOCOL SIGNED BY GERMANY JANUARY 10, 1920

At the moment of proceeding to the first deposit of ratifications of the Treaty of Peace, it is placed on record that the following obligations, which Germany had undertaken to execute by the Armistice Conventions and supplementary Agreements, have not been executed or have not been completely fulfilled:
(1) Armistice Convention of November 11,1918/5 Clause VII; obligation to deliver 5,000 locomotives and 150,000 wagons. 42 locomotives and 4,460 wagons are still to be delivered;
(2) Armistice Convention of November 11, 1918, Clause XII; obligation to withdraw the German troops in Russian territory within the frontiers of Germany, as soon as the' Allies shall think the moment suitable. The withdrawal of these troops has not been effected, despite the reiterated instructions of August 27, September 27 and October 10, 1919;
(3) Armistice Convention of November 11,1918, Clause XIV; obligation to cease at once all requisitions, seizures or coercive measures in Russian territory. The German troops have continued to have recourse to such measures;
(4) Armistice Convention of November 11, 1918, Clause XIX; obligation to return immediately all documents, specie, stocks, shares, paper money, together with plant for the issue thereof, affecting public or private interests in the invaded countries. The complete lists of specie and securities carried off, collected or confiscated by the Germans in the invaded countries have not been supplied;
(5) Armistice Convention of November 11, 1918, Clause XXII; obligation to surrender all German submarines. Destruction of the German submarine U.C. 48 off Ferrol by order of her German commander, and destruction in the North Sea of certain submarines proceeding to England for surrender;
(6) Armistice Convention of November 11, 1918, Clause XXIII; obligation to maintain in Allied ports the German ~arships designated by the Allied and Associated Powers, these ships being intended to be ultimately handedover. Clause XXXI; obligation not to destroy any ship before delivery. Destruction of the said ships at Scapa Flow on June 21, 1919;
(7) Protocol of December 17, 1918, Annex to the Armistice Convention of December 13, 1918; obligation to restore the works of art and artistic documents carried off in France and Belgium. All the works of art removed into the unoccupied parts of Germany have not been restored;
(8) Armistice Convention of January 16, 1919/6 Clause III and Protocol 392/1 Additional Clause III of July 25, 1919; obligation to hand over agricultural machinery in the place of the supplementary railway material provided for in Tables 1 and 2 annexed to the Protocol of Spa of December 17, 1918. The following machines had not been delivered on the stipulated date of October 1, 1919. 40 "Heucke" steam plough outfits; all the cultivators for the outfits; all the spades; 1,500 shovels; 1,130 T.F. 23/26 ploughs; 1,765 T.F. 18/21 ploughs; 1,512 T.F. 23/26 ploughs; 629 T.F. 0 m. 20 Brabant ploughs; 1,205 T.F.o m. 26 Brabant ploughs; 4,282 harrows of 2 k. 500; 2,157 steel cultivators; 966 2 m. 50 manure distributors; 1,608 3 m. 50 manure distributors;
(9) Armistice Convention of January 16, 1919, Clause VI; obligation to restore the industrial material carried off from French and Belgian territory. All this material has not been restored;
(10) Convention of January 16,1919, Clause VIII; obligation to place the German merchant fleet under the control of the Allied and Associated Powers. A certain number of ships whose delivery had been demanded under this clause have not yet been handed over;
(11) Protocols of the Conferences of Brussels of March 13 and 14, 1919; obligation not to export war material of all kinds. Exportation of aeronautical material to Sweden, Holland and Denmark.
A certain number of the above provisions which have not been executed or have not been executed in full have been renewed by the Treaty of June 28, 1919, whose coming into force will ipso facto render the sanctions there provided applicable. This applies particularly to the various measures to be taken on account of reparation.
Further, the question of the evacuation of the Baltic provinces has been the subject of an exchange of notes and of decisions which are being carried out. The Allied and Associated Powers expressly confirming the contents of their notes, Germany by the present Protocol undertakes to continue to execute them faithfully and strictly.
Finally, as the Allied and Associated Powers could not allow to p'ass without penalty the other failures to execute the Armistice Conventions and violations so serious as the destruction of the German fleet at Scapa Flow, the destruction of U.C. 48 off Ferrol and the destruction in the North Sea ofcertain submarines on their way to England for surrender, Germany undertakes:
(1) A. To hand over as reparation for the destruction of the German fleet at Scapa Flow: .
(a) Within 60 days from the date of the signature of the present Protocol and in the conditions laid down in the second paragraph of Article 185 of the Treaty of Peace the five following light cruisers:
Konigsberg,
Pillau,
Graudenz,
Regensburg,
Strassburg.
(b) Within 90 days from the date of the signature of the present Protocol, and in good condition and ready for service in every respect, such a number of floating docks, floating cranes, tugs and dredgers, equivalent to a total displacement of 400,000 tons, as the Principal Allied and Associated Powers may require. As regards the docks, the lifting power will be considered as the displacement. In the number of docks referred to above there will be about 75 per cent. of docks over 10,000 tons. The whole of this material will be handed over on the spot;
B. To deliver within 10 days from the signature of the present Protocol a complete list of all floating docks, floating cranes, tugs and dredgers which are German property. This list, which will be delivered to the Naval Inter Allied Commission of Control referred to in Article 209 of the Treaty of Peace, will specify the material which on November 11, 1918, belonged to the German Government or in which the German Government had at that date an important interest;
C. The officers and men who formed the crews of the warships sunk at Scapa Flow and who are at present detained by the Principal Allied and Associated Powers will, with the exception of those whose surrender is provided for by Article 228 of the Treaty of Peace, be repatriated at latest when Germany has carried out the provisions of Paragraphs A. and B. above;
D. The destroyer B. 98 will be considered as one of the 42 destroyers whose delivery is provided for by Article 185 of the Treaty of Peace;
(2) To hand over within 10 days from the signature of the present Protocol the engines and motors of the submarines U. 137 and U. 138 as compensation for the destruction of U.C. 48;
(3) To pay to the Allied and Associated Governments before January 31, 1920, the value of the aeronautical material exported, in accordance with the decision which will be given and the valuation which will be made and notified by the Aeronautical Inter-Allied Commission of Control referred to in Article 210 of the Treaty of Peace. In the event of Germany not fulfilling these obligations within the periods laid down above, the Allied and Associated Powers reserve the right to take all military or other measures of coercion which they may consider appropriate.
Done at Paris, the tenth day of January, one thousand nine hundred and twenty, at four o'clock p.m. [For Germany:] V. SIMSON FREIHERR VON LERSNER

The ongoing refusal of the United States to ratify the Versailles Treaty meant that for the U.S., World War One technically remained ongoing.

Today, due to the treaty, was the beginning date for the League of Nations, which technically remained in existence until 1946.

Senate Minority Leader, Oscar Underwood.

In the U.S., the House of Representatives refused to seat Victor L. Berger, a duly elected member from Winsconson, who had been convicted under the Espionage Act.  Berger was an Austrian American member of the Socialist Party whose newspaper had been opposed to the war. The Supreme Court would overturn his conviction in 1921.

 Victor L. Berger after Congress refused to seat him in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1920.

World War One, therefore, remained very much a thing.

In Washington D. C., representatives of the Soviet Union were in town.

Mr. L. Martens, Representative of the Russian Soviet Republic and his party photographed in Washington, D.C., January 10, 1920. Left to Right Mr. G. Nuorteva, Secty. Mrs. Nuorteva, their son Matti Nuorteva, Kenneth Durant Publicity Representative and Mr. Martens.

In Russia, a platoon of American soldiers under Sheridan Wyoming's 2d Lt. Paul Kendall defeated an attack by a Soviet armored train near Posolyskaya, Siberia (entry from WyoHistory.org).  Armored trains had become a strange but big feature of the Russian Civil War.

Kendall had been born in Kansas but raised in Sheridan.  He entered West Point in 1916 and graduated in 1918, due to the shortened class cycle World War One caused.  He received the Distinguished Service Cross for his action in Siberia on this day.

Kendall would go on to a career in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of Lt. Gen., commanding troops in World War Two and the Korean War.  

I've decided to follow Prince Andrew's lead and . . .

reduce my responsibilities to the Royal Household.

I'm hoping that this isn't too inconvenient to the realm.

President Trump addresses the nation on Iran.

President Trump addressed the nation yesterday on the conflict with Iran.  He stated the following.

As long as I’m president of the United States Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Good morning.  

I’m pleased to inform you, the American people should be extremely grateful and happy. No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime. We suffered no casualties. All of our soldiers are safe,, and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.  

Our great American forces are prepared for anything. Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world. No American or Iraqi lives were lost because of the precautions taken, the dispersal of forces, and an early warning system that worked very well. 

I salute the incredible skill and courage of America’s men and women in uniform. For far too long, all the way back to 1979 to be exact, nations have tolerated Iran’s destructive, and destabilizing behavior in the middle East and beyond. Those days are over. Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism, and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world. We will never let that happen. Last week, we took decisive action to stop a ruthless terrorist from threatening American lives.  

At my direction, the United States military eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Quasem Soleimani. As the head of the Quds force, Soleimani was personally responsible for some of the absolutely worst atrocities.  He trained terrorists armies, including Hezbollah, launching terrorist strikes against civilian targets. He fueled bloody civil Wars all across the region. He viciously wounded, and murdered thousands of US troops, including the planting of roadside bombs that may him and dismember their victims. Soleimani directed the recent attacks on US personnel in Iraq, that badly wounded for service members, and killed one American, and he orchestrated the violent assault on the US Embassy in Baghdad. In recent days, he was planning new attacks on American targets, but we stopped him. 

Soleimani’s hands were drenched in both American and Iranian blood. He should have been terminated long ago. By removing Soleimani, we have sent a powerful message to terrorists. If you value your own life, you will not threaten the lives of our people. As we continue to evaluate options in response to Iranian aggression, the United States will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime. These powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes it’s behavior. In recent months alone Iran’s sea ships in international waters fired an unprovoked strike on Saudi Arabia, and shot down to US drones. Iran’s hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013, and they were given $150 billion not to mention $1.8 billion in cash. Instead of saying thank you to the United States, they chanted death to America. 

In fact, they chanted death to America the day the agreement was signed. Then Iran went on a terrorist spree, funded by the money from the deal, and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The missiles fired last night at us, and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration. The regime also greatly tightened the reins on their own country. Even recently killing 1500 people, at the many protests that are taking place all throughout Iran. The very defective JCPOA expires shortly anyway, and gives a ran a clear and quick path to nuclear breakout. 

Iran must abandon its nuclear ambitions and end its support for terrorism. The time has come for the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, and China to recognize this reality. They must now break away from the remnants of the Iran deal, or JCPOA, and we must all work together toward making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer, and more peaceful place. We must also make a deal that allows Iran to thrive and prosper and take advantage of its enormous untapped potential. Iran can be a great country. Peace and stability cannot prevail in the Middle East as long as the Iran continues to foment violence, unrest, hatred and war. The civilized world, must send a clear and unified message to the Iranian regime. Your campaign of terror, murder, mayhem will not be tolerated any longer. It will not be allowed to go forward. 

Today, I am going to ask NATO to become much more involved in the Middle East process. Over the last three years. Under my leadership, our economy is stronger than ever before, and America’s achieved energy independence. These historic accomplishments shades our strategic priorities. These are accomplishments that nobody thought were possible, and options in the Middle East became available. We are now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. We are independent and we do not need Middle East oil. The American military has been completely rebuilt under my administration at a cost of two point $5 trillion. US armed forces are stronger than ever before. 

Our missiles are big, powerful, accurate, lethal, and fast. Under construction, are many hypersonic missiles. The fact that we have this great military and equipment, however, does not mean we have to use it. We do not want to use it. American strength, both military, and economic is the best deterrent. Three months ago after destroying 100% of ISIS, and its territorial caliphate, we killed the savage leader of ISIS al-Baghdadi who is responsible for so much death, including the mass beheadings of Christians, Muslims, and all who stood in his way. He was a monster. al-Baghdadi was trying again to rebuild the ISIS caliphate and failed. Tens of thousands of ISIS fighters have been killed or captured during my administration. 

ISIS is a natural enemy of Iran. The destruction of ISIS is good for Iran, and we should work together on this and other shared priorities. Finally, to the people and leaders of Iran, we want you to have a future and a great future, one that you deserve. One of prosperity at home, and harmony with the nations of the world. The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it. I want to thank you, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

This then is the stated reason for the new situation with Iran.  As we noted yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems to be instrumental in this new direction.  What is clear is that the Administration targeted Solemani because he was a principal Iranian paramilitary commander involved with Iran's sponsorship of foreign, illegal, terrorist militias. 

What isn't clear is if nature of Iran's response was really contemplated.  It might have been, and should have been, but it might not have been.  Those over acclimated to terrorism may have thought that Iran would simply regard this as costs of the game and then recalculate the costs.  And indeed, we don't fully know that they won't do that.

If they don't, we also don't know if the Administration war gamed this matter to contemplate a dramatically increased conflict with Iran, which doesn't mean that I'm predicting a full scale conventional war (I'm not, and I think that extremely unlikely).  And it doesn't seem that Iraq's parliament asking us to leave was contemplated, and we don't know how that will play out.

One thing I don't think will occur, in spite of the President's reference to it, is an increased role for NATO in the Middle East.  Indeed, I can't even see where such a request would make sense.  We didn't run this strike against NATO when we did it, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while it has been more active in global affairs since the fall of the Soviet Union, is for the defense of Europe.  A person can rationalize that taking on the problems of the Middle East fits that model, but it's really a stretch. And the NATO country that is in the Middle East, Turkey, no doubt has a different view on many things in comparison to the United States, although this Administration has been accommodating to Turkey as the recent events in Kurdish Syria have demonstrated.

According to the New York Times it was Mike Pompeo who urged the targeted strike on the Iranian general. . .

that has upended everything in the Middle East.

If that's true, it means the underlying scenario about what has occurred differs considerably from the way the story at first appeared.  Like Pompeo or not, he doesn't seem to be a gadfly.  Therefore, this is a calculated ramping up which President Trump bought into.

An interesting thing here is that this is the sort of event which people worried about in regard to Bolton when he was in the Trump Administration, given that he is a hawk in general and very hawkish in regard to Iran.

Pompeo is 56 years old, a few months younger than me, and is a West Point graduate.  Given his age and first occupation, he'd have the memory of the tail end of the Cold War as well as the first crisis with Iran, and have it from a partially institutional sense.  He entered active duty, if a person doesn't regard West Point itself as active duty, in 1986 and served until 1991, when he left the service to attend Harvard Law School.

He practiced law for only four years before entering a private venture.  He entered Congress, from Kansas, in 2010 and became head of the CIA in 2017.

What does this tell you?  Well, maybe not very much, other than that the appearance of this being a surprising unilateral decision by Donald Trump appears to be wrong.  Pompeo is from the right wing Tea Party wing of the GOP and is an evangelical protestant.  He's highly educated, and has a military background (the latter of which usually makes a person hesitant to use force).  All of which may inform us on current events not at all.

In the late 1950s. . .

Egypt and Israel engaged in an artillery war.  My recollection is that it was mostly in 1958. 

During this period the two countries shelled each other over disputed territory, with Egypt doing most of the shelling.  It came to an end when Israel chose to use air power to bring it to an end.

I note that as I suspect that's what we're entering into now in Iraq, with Iran.  And if that's the case, a person should be somewhat concerned about the probably escalating course.  I.e., if they rocket us, we'll surely sooner or later take out the rocket sites, somehow.

Assuming we aren't ejected from Iraq, which is a very serious likelihood.  Indeed, if this develops, my guess is that it would be a probability, as no host nation wants to be rocketed repeatedly.

Of course, maybe they'll stop with their recent rocket strike. And maybe we won't retaliate for it.  But that seems unlikely.

All of which brings up why taking out a uniformed officer of an opposing nation, even where he is not supposed to be, in a targeted fashion isn't wise, no matter how problematic  he may be.

January 8, 1920. Snippets.

Anna Manson, a Russian woman who was arrested in the offices of a Russian publication in New York City and sent to Ellis Island to be deported. The New York Herald, January 8, 1920.

William Jennings Bryan, photographed at Democratic National Headquarters in Washington.  January 8, 1920.

Wilbur W. Marsh, Treas. of the Democratic National Committee and S.W. Fordyce of Saint Louis, photographed at Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. January 8, 1920.

Angst. A Then and Now Analysis

I don't know that anyone has ever attempted a history of stress and anxiety, and if they have, it might be tough to do and therefore questionable in the first place.

Indeed, it might in some ways be impossible, in part because the nature of stress and anxiety and related conditions have been perceived differently in different eras, if noticed at all.  In the 18th Century the Melancholic personality, which we'd regard as a Depressive one, was celebrated as a romantic condition as it was perceived that such people simply felt everything too deeply, an observation that was perhaps not entirely inaccurate.  Shakespeare made Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane, the subject of his famous play of no later than 1602.  It's a justifiably famous play, but in recent years its hard not to find the character of Hamlet a bit too mopey, and the character of Ophelia as oddly undeveloped.  

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, 1870.

King Henry VI slipped into such a deep funk, perhaps caused by the monumental strain of being a monarch in an era when somebody was always looking to depose you from inside the country or attack you from without, that he slipped into severe mental illness episodes starting in 1453 and he was deposed in 1461 (and murdered shortly thereafter).  While he attempted to lead on occasion, for much of that period, he was completely incapacitated by his condition.

King Henry VI. While Sheakespeare's Hamlet may have been a depressed fictional prince, King Henry VI was a real one, which lead to periods of complete incapacity and ultimate his death.

Genetics and stress may have pushed King Henry VI over the edge, but it's not too hard to find other examples of lesser figures who similarly suffered.  "Soldier's Heart" was identified as a condition that afflicted combat veterans during the Civil War, which means that it must have existed in prior conflicts as well, as the combat soldier of the American Civil War wasn't really all that different than the combat soldier of the American Revolution or the English Civil War.  Certainly by the end of the Great War Shell Shock was well identified as a psychological condition, from which some afflicted never recovered.

Australian first aid station, World War One.

Less dramatic but just as well noted, the condition described as a "nervous breakdown" was well attested to from at least the early 20th Century up through its third quarter.  The term "nervous breakdown" was once widely used as a medical term but now no longer is, although its still used as a non medical one.  It's generally regarded as a period fo itnense anxiety, stress and depression (hmmm. . .just what we're talking about here) leading to a period of incapacitation.  While the term is no longer used, the condtion described still occurs, so its still something, sort of, at least.  The term has been used to describe periods of mental incapacitation in such famous varied people as Marilyn Monroe to Kanye West.

Indeed, one of the oddities of nervous breakdowns is that while they were hardly limited (or more particularly are hardly limited) to the famous, at one time quite a few well to do people reportedly had them, which routinely lead them taking "the cure", which was usually a very long vacation.  We'll get to that later on, but that's oddly modern in some ways.

On nervous conditions not being limited to the famous, a close friend of mine once related how her grandfather, a railroad worker with a large family, had a nervous breakdown over the birth of her mother, as he was realtively advanced in eyars at the time (60s?).  Having had a large family already, he just couldn't deal with the stress of an added child late in life.  Closer to home, it's family lore that my mother's father suffered from something like a nervous breakdown when young and as a result was sent for "the cure" in Hawaii. Whatever was the case, it's clear that he was a high strung fellow in lifelong poor health and he certainly suffered from high anxiety, a condition that lead him to drink quite a bit until he suddenly one day simply quit drinking entirely.  As my grandmother's late in life poor health also resulted in her being unable to, shall we say, engage in marital duties that was lost to him as well and yet he was, late in life, pretty much universally cheerful, which says something about his personality and perhaps provides a lesson in this overall thread.

Given all of this above, there'd be real reason to doubt that stress and anxiety are really on the rise. And yet it is reported that in recent decades they are, and there does seem to be good reason to believe that stress and anxiety, let's call it Angst, are on the rise.  Indeed, mental health professionals commonly report it so, and we see all sorts of societal reactions, most probably wholly ineffective, but a few that are likely on to something, being floated here and there.

So what's going on here?

We'll, we aren't licensed to really opine, but that's never stopped us before, so we'll add our thoughts about what is going on to cause this modern plague here in this thread.  Before we do, however, we'll note that we sort of touched on this before, here in this thread:

A Western World Modern Crisis: Suicide

Indeed, that thread directly deals with this topic and is worth revisiting.  And shoot, it's less than a year old as well.

Indeed, that thread noted much of what we're noting here, even though our reason for posting this one, a series of recent news articles, isn't directly the same.  Our earlier item, anyhow, noted the following:

The first one was a headline which noted that Americans are dying of suicide and alcoholism at all time record highs.

U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began

Alcoholism, if that's correct, would be amazing, and I'd at least somewhat question that figure as the alcoholic rates before Prohibition were stunning.  But the suicide one deserves some attention, and an increasing rate of alcoholism also does.

Of course, we have to be aware that statistics are only relevant in the context of the period they address, and this one only addresses a fairly compact period of time.  The USA Today article noted:

The number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide in 2017 hit the highest level since federal data collection started in 1999, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by two public health nonprofits.

The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America's Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.

Deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000, a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.

Anyhow, let's start with something obvious.  And in doing so, we'll link in a few things here that we've noted before.

Let's start with our Third Law of Behavior:

Holscher's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth.  He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you."  You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger.  He wants out.  He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.

It's really no different with human beings.  We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time.  Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage.  Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Holscher's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers.  Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.

That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well.  I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case.  A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly.  Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.

This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women.  Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a  mammal.  Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats.  But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees.  Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.

That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood.  If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one.  Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it.  So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there.  That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that.  It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.

The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them.  Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts.  But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen.  Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden.  But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become.  We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world.  In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.

Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.

In short, you may have forgotten nature, but nature hasn't forgotten you.

Here's something we noted earlier on this topic.

There's a seeming epidemic of suicide in the Western World.  In at least one area of the East, Japan, suicide has been at blistering levels for decades.

This is not true, however, of all societies everywhere.  Most specifically, it isn't true of those areas of the world that remain more rural than the West, and frankly more agrarian, and more authentically religious.  And by religious, I mean in the real sense, not the vague meaningless "spiritual but not religious" sense that Western "moderns" sometimes profess or in the Western Hollywood Buddhist sense.**

Our species has been around for a really long time.  It'll turn out, I'm confident, that as a species we've been around a lot longer than we now believe we were. But we have only lived the way most of us do now for a very, very, brief time.  For almost our entire history as a species we were nomadic.  Following that, we were agrarians for a long time.  We've become what we are not, urbanized, only very briefly and we've become urbanized in our current massive way only very, very recently.

In fact, nature is giving moderns the dope slap.  You weren't made to live in a giant city of millions working in an office of thousands for a company of thousands with a rootless career. But that's what we've come around to and what we celebrate.  No, nature figures you ought to be out in sticks, maybe the veld, or the steppes, or in short nature, living a natural life and nature isn't interested in any of your wacky diets of the moment, vegan, essential oils, baloney.  Kill a deer and eat is what nature figures, and that doesn't take 40 hours every week to accomplish.

Put another way, Great Thunberg, age 16, just reported that her recent fame pulled out of a year long depression.  She's 16 years old

No doubt, you figure, her intense angst over the environment is causing this depression?

No, it's probably her moronic diet and deeply unnatural lifestyle.

Just fifty years ago most Swedes, which is what Thunberg is, were farmers or fishermen.  They're famous for being dour, but that was a product of their combined think resources and the harsh brand of Evangelical Lutheranism that came to dominate in Scandinavia in the late 19th Century. Strict adherence to the Evangelical Lutheran Church has greatly waned as the Swedes became wealthy (like lots of people, the Swedes found the Gospels inconvenient when they had money and the pill), but in another way it lingers on in a dour view of life, now added to through the messed up concept that one diet or another will extend your life forever, the more unnatural it is the better.

Now, I don't really mean to pick on the 16 year old directly as I figure her stupid diet and her being used in the manner she is, no matter what you think of the cause, isn't her fault or even really doing.  Left to their own devices and a chance to run their own households a sizable minority of 16 year olds would make bad decisions.  No, the point is that now that we've lost contact with nature in a direct form, the entire Western World is making bad choices.

This blog has, obviously, focused on the past and the past of a century ago.  Let's not fall into the illusion that everything in the past was perfect.  That's far from true.  But let's also not pretend that evolutionary biology has skipped us. We're not really made to do what we're doing, in the examples of most people.

And, to take it out further, in the very modern world, the intense devotion to money and material goods has unhinged us.

The post World War Two world has been vastly rich.  When the free market economy nations, which of course were the democratic nations, by and large, of the post war era triumphed over Communism in the Cold War, that process of wealth ramped up even more than it had.  Capitalist like to point out, and quite rightly, that capitalism has lifted huge swatches of the globe out of poverty.  Indeed, again only fifty or so years ago, the majority of human beings once lived in poverty.  And as we've noted here before, prior to World War Two most Americans were middle class, but lower middle class on the edge of poverty constantly, and even when things were good.

Economically, therefore, we're now far, far better off, globally, than every before. But at the same time the real question now is whether we can handle that wealth.  The evidence isn't good.  We've clearly become obsessed with it and we've become extremely narcissistic about it.  We live in hideous conditions, in real terms, for wealth, we enter career occupations solely due to it, we live in cities because of it, and we avoid children and dump spouses due to it.  More recently, a lot of younger people avoid marriage entirely and simply live in a series of sad shacking ups, which implies the ability to leave somebody who nature has bonded, through their conduct, at the drop of a dollar bill.

Nature doesn't like that.  Not any of it.

Indeed, as we earlier noted:

Well so what, you may ask.  Haven't sociologist determined that agrarian life was miserable and people moved to the cities to be super happy?

No, well not any more anyhow.

There was at one time a running line of sociological thought, propaganda really, that basically ran just that way.  But more recent research has determined that nomadic people today, who are admittedly very few in number, are the happiest people on earth hands down.  Next to them, people who are basically agrarian in nature fit that category.  The least happy people on Earth are those who live in highly urbanized societies.  And as we now know Western suicide is beginning to become a plague, meaning we're joining the highly urbanized Japanese in that tragic classification.

Depression and anxiety are nature's wake up calls.  Nature is giving us a dope slap.

As we earlier put it:

It really doesn't require all that much thought.  But we won't think about it as it runs entirely contrary to the concept of "progress" and the intellectual dictatorship of progressivism we are now in.

Let's break it down even further.

We're a really smart animal, but an animal none the less, and we were evolved to live out in the wilds.  That's where, it truly turns out, we are the happiest.  In our native state we hunted and gathered, which more accurately means we hunted, gathered and existed in subsistence nomadic agriculture.  We at some point evolved the latter into a more fixed form, but often missed in that is that early agriculture was an adjustment of the existing pattern, not an abolishment of it.  In hunter gatherer societies, the men principally engaged in hunting and the women in gathering and both in some farming, quite often.  In agrarian societies, even fairly modern ones, the men engaged in the farming, the women supported the farming, but the men were almost always still hunters.  If you look at a society that was agrarian fairly recently, such as Finland or Norway,  you'll find that hunting and fishing is always common.  Even in Ireland, which was agrarian to a large extent up until the Celtic Tiger changed that and began to change Ireland to its ultimate misery, that was more true than we might suppose, with fishing, bird hunting and small game hunting common in a land that was otherwise obsessed with depriving the population of the means of rebelling in the same fashion which it had only recently against the English.

What are the features of such a life?

Close connection to nature is one thing.  Nature for such populations is everyday and immediate, not something that they encounter, probably in a sanitized form, on vacation somewhere.  Not the safe nature that people who pay to ride on a zip line in Costa Rica encounter either.

To add to this, one of the things contributing to our anxiety is forgetting the past, along with forgetting evolutionary biology, which gets us to this:

Holscher's Fourth Law of Behavior.  Old standards existed for a real reason.

Not every standards that used to apply to human behavior and institutions needs to be retained for all time, but it's a mistake to believe that they existed at whim.  There's trend, fashion, and fancy, and then there's long term standards.

From time to time, almost every society throws off a bunch of old standards.  When they do that, they usually declare them to have been irrelevant for all time, but they hardly ever are.  They were there for a reason.  Sometimes, they no longer apply, but that's because something deeply fundamental has changed.  Other times, the underlying reason keeps on keeping on and the reason for it tends to be rediscovered, slowly, as if its a new discovery.  People fail to think about the deep basis for standards, the really deep ones, at their behavior.  Again, that doesn't mean that some shouldn't be changed, or should never have come into existence, but even in those rare instances careful thought should be given to the matter so that the basic nature of the underlying error can be understood.

Out of combination of desperation, narcissism and wealth, the tail end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st have been marked by a dumping of old standards in celebration of what amounts to a new "Me Decade" on steroids.  It's been taken to the absurd level.

At almost any earlier time in history people who  lived well defined themselves by things outside themselves.  The now highly celebrated "Greatest Generation" is celebrated due to the imperfect and inaccurate memory of them as a class of men who left their homes, families and their lives, for the greater good of 1) their nation and 2) the world as a whole.  In other words, they're remembered as people who gave up something for everyone and not for themselves.

In contrast to that, we now have the absolute celebration not only of the individual, but the interior mind of the individual, no matter how poorly formed.  Wealth and the pill have given individuals in the Western World time to do not much other than feed their inclinations.  This has in recent years been focused on sex, one of the most trivial things imaginable to be obsessed on an existential level about, although this trend, in fairness, started as long ago as the during the influential period of Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud, unscientific weirdo.

Truth be known, if approached from a scientific prospective, and again from evolutionary biology,t he entire sex thing sorts out pretty easily.  There are two genders and only two.  Human beings are possessed of a high sex drive.  In a state of nature people pair up generally in their twenties and the resulting bond, while perhaps beset by the assaults of time and trials, is generally lifelong.

Humans are also a species that's best by lots of individual deviations many of which are destructive and cause us misery.  Eat too much you get fat and can die, which doesn't mean that certain people aren't super driven towards food.  Alcohol may have made the water safe but drink too much of it and you'll die.  You should sleep around eight hours every night but some people can't and that shortens their lives.  

Modern life contributes to all of that.  It would have been really hard to become a fat Cro Magnon. There probably weren't any.  You don't see any photographs of chubby Native Americans in Edward Curtis films, nor do you find any of chubby yeoman farmers in anyone's photographs, nor of obese 19th and early 20th Century cowboys.  But they had extremely active lives and they didn't eat a lot of process high fat, high sugar, food.  Likewise, there have been alcoholics for a long, long time, but chances are that the numbers in the Middle Ages, even when alcohol was hte normal drink for most, weren't that high.  Most yeoman farmers and Native Americans no doubt slept the whole  night through peacefully.  And so on.  And, no matter what their inclinations on an individual basis was, nobody went around demanding that they be identified by who they wanted to bed, or how many, or under what terms, at any time in human history right up until the 21st Century.

The fact that we make such demands now is a symptom of our misery, idleness and purposelessness.  The biographer of Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery was of the opinion that the Field Marshall was a homosexual, and indeed his son likewise had that opinion.  But they were also of the opinion that Montgomery, who was an extremely busy man, wasn't even aware of it if he was.  John Ford, the filmmaker, routinely fell in love with multiple actresses according to his biographer, but in spite of rumors that exist to the contrary, his biographer was of the opinion that while he fell deeply in love with some, he remained loyal to his wife Mary, and his Catholic faith, and deeply devoted to his craft. Roger Casement may have had very strong homosexual inclinations, or he may have been framed by British agents so that people believced that, but his defining characteristics were his dedication to humanitarian causes and Irish indpendence.

The point of all of this is something that Max Hastings, the famous British historian, noted at a speech he delivered to American university students following the release of his book on the Vietnam War.  When asked how students of the 1960s who opposed the war compared to students today, Hastings simply noted that he hoped current students would think about something that wasn't as trivial as sex.

My point is a little broader, however.  The absolutely manic focus on everyone self defining in every single way  is because that same 60s generation tore down the concept that the old standards meant anything. They very much did, and we keep trying to grope our way back to them. At the same time, society is also engaged in the absurd concept that everyone can self define what they are and who they are. They can't, as we're all members of the same species, and that actually defines most of what we are, and who we are.  The differences we otherwise see are very often extremely trivial and, beyond that, may simply be erroneous and inaccurate self assumptions based upon living in unnatural conditions without much to do.

Straying off of this a bit, another aspect of this is the manic emphasis on career.

There have always been "careers", but for much of human history most people occupied a fairly manual labor set of careers and the emphasis on career was limited to a few, and even then it was rarely expressed at the manic level things are now.

Now, you simply must have a career.  You must.  You won't be fulfilled if you don't have a career.

Well, we've long known that careers don't fulfill anyone.  And yet the lie continues on.  Indeed, not only does it continue, it's spread to where now women, who formerly weren't under the same pressure that they must have a career, are.  The great lie of female advancement is that men have let them into the fulfillment of careers.  In fact, due economic developments, they've been forced upon them.

As noted, careers have always been around, but the emphasis on careerism was not present in the same degree, except really among the upper economic classes, where oddly the truly wealthy were exempt from it.  Now, everyone is subject to the continually pressure of career success.

I've seen this among the young, but even among the old.  In some fields the career pressure has reached the point where people of retirement age are expected not to.  Indeed, I just oddly had a conversation with a lawyer (I'm not of retirement age) on this myself, in which they suggested that I should switch party emphasis in the law field and could have a "long career as a plaintiff's lawyer ahead" of me.  At my age, 56, I don't have a long anything ahead of me, but why would somebody even conceive of a person approaching 60 years of age as wanting to have decades of future hard work in front of them?  That's an odd thought, but not odd anymore in the legal field where people really aren't ever supposed to retire. That same view isn't unique to this field, however, but is common in business as well.

As part of all of this the old, and normal, focus of people on having "jobs" to support their families is gone.  Now people actually talk about their families or their spouses supporting their careers.   That's really messed up, and people know that at their core.

Then there's the news:

Holscher's Sixth Law of Behavior.  A lot of folks believe they live in the worst times ever even if they don't.Human historical memory is amazingly short.  As a result of that, people often think that they're enduring epic hardship and live in hideous times, even if they do not.Current times are a good example.  Many people believe the entire world is awash in a sea of massive violence such as the world has never known.  In actuality, things have never been so peaceful. Crime of all types is down all over the globe.  Warfare between sovereign states has almost disappeared.  Civil wars continue to rage on, but not at the level they once did.  Consider the 1930s and 1940s. For much of that time every major nation was engaged in a war so violent that destroying entire cities was regarded as okay.  Now, if we look at sovereign states  at war we'd find. . . well, only one example.  North and South Korea are in a legal state of war, and have been since 1950, but in which they don't shoot at each other.Or consider crime.  In the US, in spite of a recent horror, murder, the worst crime, is way, way, way down.  This doesn't seem to make the news, but its' the case.  For folks with long memories, you should be able to recall a time a couple of decades ago in your own neighborhoods where your town was much more violent, because it was.  But most people don't have memories that really stretch back that far.

Part of the reason we moderns are so stressed is that we have unparalleled access to information. 

The news media has existed for a long time, and indeed since the introduction of the wire service early in the 20th Century the ability to get up to date news daily has been very much there.

But what only became the case recently is the screaming immediacy of all news.  Fires in Australia, Ebola in Africa, all the way down to major car wrecks in distant cities and crime in places that we don't live come screaming through to us all the time.

We aren't really built to take that and it contributes to the idea that everything is a disaster, when in fact in spite of the bad things we have to contend with being bad, things really aren't as bad as they once were.

So what to do about all of this?

Well, there's plenty of advice, and much of it just leads to more stress.

One of the most pronounced characteristics of the current age is to find problems that are rooted in fairly recent changes in our societal behavior, and then suggest that we need to do something new to address them, when in fact what we might need to do is the one thing that never occurs to us. . . go back.

There's a widespread western belief that you can't go back.  But you most definitely can, and history has shown that again and again.  And even if we won't go back to a prior era completely (and we wouldn't want to), we can revive and apply those things from nature and our natures that were proven to work as they were part of nature and our natures.

That means, however, giving up a lot of narcissism, which has come to nearly define western values.  We aren't the center of everything.  It also means giving up the idea that you can have it all or that you even should.  You can't, you won't, and you shouldn't.

Slow down and get out there.  Try the old things that worked before espousing the new ones, which often don't.  Things existed, including standards and ways of life, for a reason.