Sunday, January 5, 2020
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Operation Vengeance. The targeting of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
The crash site
On April 18, 1943 United States Army Air Corp P-38 Lightening's,operating out of Kukum Field on Guadalcanal intercepted two Japanese G4M "Betty" bombers and shot them down on the Bougainville coast. The action is notable as it intentionally and successfully targeted Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who died of woulds before the planes crashed to earth. The American action was a remarkable tactical success in that the distances and time involved made such an action more likely to fail that succeed. It was only possible in the first instance as the US was intercepting, famously, Japanese encoded message and, because of that, the mission was risky in that it risked alerting the Japanese to that fact. To cover up that aspect of it, the US created a fictional story of coast watchers having seen the plans and the action simply being fortuitous. Amazingly, the Japanese seem to have been convinced by that questionable deception.
But did it do any good?
The US got Yamamoto as he was know to be the central figure of the planning of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was a major and celebrated Japanese military figure in Japan, but we now know that he was not terribly enthusiastic about fighting the United States. It's not clear that he opposed it either, contrary to the sometime popular view.
His death deprived Japan of Yamamoto, to be sure. Maybe it deprived the US of him too as it is clear, now, in retrospect, that Japan couldn't have won the war. Maybe it meant that brilliant planning he would have done in defensive campaigns in the Pacific would now not occur. . . or maybe it meant that a voice that was familiar with the United States and the American mind was now silenced. It's known that Yamamoto feared what getting into a war with the US would mean, although its not really clear if he uttered the words attributed to him following Pearl Harbor, "I fear we have awoken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.".
Maybe his death made no real difference in the progress of the war at all.
I note all of this as the historically minded are now looking this event up to draw conclusions from it. Maybe it offers no real comparisons with the just occurred strike on an Iranian general in Baghdad. The killing on Yamamoto was tactical and strategic, but it also had an element of revenge to it and of propaganda to it, as had the earlier Doolittle Raid. The killing of Qasem Soleimani was more of a strategic decapitation.
Both events are extraordinary. Yamamoto was the only senior officer in World War Two that I'm aware of that was the specific target of a mission. Such an action is not an illegitimate act of war, but it's a risky one. In taking on Japan in that fashion, the US was targeting an enemy that lacked the capacity to reply and, although largely unknown to us at that time, was in the progress of starving senior officers that it held in captivity. Nobody attempted any such actions against senior German military figures except, as it would turn out, the German army, unsuccessfully, itself. We were vulnerable in the west to a counterattack.
Just all things to consider.
Hubris and Hostilities. The Death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani
Gen. Qasem Soleimani was a bolt and brave man.
Which doesn't make him somebody we should admire.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brave and bold man, but he served an evil cause and went on to found the Klu Klux Klan.
Joachim Pieper was a bold and brave man. But he was a nasty Nazi as well. His special SS commandos were responsible for the Malmady massacre, for example, the 75th anniversary of which was just passed.
The aptly named USAF MQ-9 Reaper.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brave and bold man, but he served an evil cause and went on to found the Klu Klux Klan.
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Joachim Peiper
And indeed, both men are good comparisons in some ways. They were radicals for causes they believed in deeply, and they were willing to die for them. They had personal bravery, an attribute we widely admire, and applied it in the service of causes we deeply oppose.
Soleimani has been an instrumental figure in Iranian proxy wars all over the Middle East. A person cannot feel sorry for his death and he died the way that people who live the way he lived die. He who lives by the sword, as St. Matthew noted, die by it.
Islam of course was spread by the sword and for a very, very, long time its two principal Middle Easter branches have contested it other in manners in which swords were occasionally drawn. Iran, for its part, has had no problem whatsoever about violently spreading its Shiia theocracy's point of view violently from day one.
And hence the irony. Soleimani had been allowed to do what he did, mostly because the West tolerated. There are certain rules to war, even dirty wars and proxy wars, and one of them is that you don't assassinate the uniformed general officers of your opponent.
Not that doing such is an illegitimate act of war. Soleimani was a solders. Killing soldiers is legitimate. We've been at war in Iraq now for 20 years, attempting to prop up a government we installed while Iran attempts to completely co-opt it. Iran has no right, or at least not any more right than we do, to have proxy armies in Iraq. At least we have a relationship with the legitimate government. So Soleimani flying into the Baghdad airport was based on the assumption that his Western opponents would abide by the unwritten rule of not targeting the general officers of an opponent even if Iran itself has widely ignored the laws of war.
Apparently the current administration has determined that it won't abide by that rule.
Which brings us to this.
Nobody should weep for Soleimani. Probably even Soleimani wouldn't want people to do that. And he received a fate which, through is life, he had advocated for.
But now what?
Clearly, we're on to some sort of new stage in the long slow struggle with Iran. Iran hasn't played by the written rules and now we're not playing by the unwritten ones. Iran will be obligated to retaliate somehow, but in asymmetric war, they're uniquely exposed as a large established state. Their ability to act as a sponsor of terrorism and proxy militias depended upon the grace of their opponents, which now seems to have been removed. It will try to act, not doubt, but in doing so, it can no longer be certain of anything.
Still, the question remains. What on earth was Soleimani thinking in pulling into an airport in a country where you are maintaining an illegitimate military effort?
A note on yesterday's camel image
Yesterday, we published this:
Lex Anteinternet: January 3, 1920. A Roaring Start:
1920 was certainly off to a "roaring" start.
The image was cross posted on Reddit's 100 Years Ago subreddit, where I learned that the camel, which was baffling me, is the symbol of the Prohibition Party.
I had no idea.
The party still exists.
It's an interesting party and slightly reminds me of the American Solidarity Party in that it takes positions from the left and the right. It's "liberal" on its environmental positions, for example, and "conservative" on social issues. It still runs a presidential candidate for every Presidential election, but since 1976, it's received less than 10,000 votes per year. It peaked in the 1904 Election when it received 260,000 votes.
It's nominees for the 2020 Presidential Election were determined in a telephone conference, which shows how small it is. Phil Collins of Nevada and Billie Joe Parker of Georgia are their Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates.
Camels, it should be noted, are never thirsty in the popular imagination.
Lex Anteinternet: January 3, 1920. A Roaring Start:
January 3, 1920. A Roaring Start
1920 was certainly off to a "roaring" start.
The image was cross posted on Reddit's 100 Years Ago subreddit, where I learned that the camel, which was baffling me, is the symbol of the Prohibition Party.
I had no idea.
The party still exists.
It's an interesting party and slightly reminds me of the American Solidarity Party in that it takes positions from the left and the right. It's "liberal" on its environmental positions, for example, and "conservative" on social issues. It still runs a presidential candidate for every Presidential election, but since 1976, it's received less than 10,000 votes per year. It peaked in the 1904 Election when it received 260,000 votes.
It's nominees for the 2020 Presidential Election were determined in a telephone conference, which shows how small it is. Phil Collins of Nevada and Billie Joe Parker of Georgia are their Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates.
Camels, it should be noted, are never thirsty in the popular imagination.
Friday, January 3, 2020
Today In Wyoming's History: January 3, 1920
Today In Wyoming's History: January 3:
1920 The last of the U.S. troops depart France.
1920 The USS Cheyenne (Monitor No. 10), which had originally been commissioned as the USS Wyoming, was decommissioned.
1920 The last of the U.S. troops depart France.
1920 The USS Cheyenne (Monitor No. 10), which had originally been commissioned as the USS Wyoming, was decommissioned.
January 3, 1920. A Roaring Start
1920 was certainly off to a "roaring" start.
The news on January 3 was all about the Palmer raids of January 2, which came one day after the first Palmer raids on January 1. A huge sweep of the nation had rounded up a lot of "Reds", which in this context were simply radicals of all stripes. Indeed, in Russia, where the civil war was raging, the Reds of the Communist Party had proven to be bad news for the socialist left, even the radical socialist left, as well as for anarchists. In the US, however, they were all being rounded up together.
Radicals were even reported lurking in Denver stores.
The Press, which was generally Progressive, didn't shed any tears for the radical right. Now the Palmer Raids are regarded as an embarrassment, but the time, not so much. . . at least for awhile.
Mexico was showing up again on the front page and had been for some time, we'd note. Fighting was still ongoing and an election was scheduled. In the midst of it, Carranza had decided to try to reorganize the Mexican Federal army.
Radicals in store or no, the National Western Stock Show, a big even that's still held annually in Denver, was about to get rolling.
In Washington D. C., famous figures of the recent war continued to visit.
Admiral Jellicoe with Admiral Niblack on the latter's arrival at the Union Station, Washington D.C., January 3, 1920
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Last night, I had a dream in which
a Chinook helicopter, which was very beat up, was landing.
That's all I recall about it.
Odd how that works.
That's all I recall about it.
Odd how that works.
Did you work January 1?
Laborer working a press, January 1, 1920.
Yesterday was a Wednesday, but I didn't post a Mid Week At Work item because it was a holiday.
But I did go out to see if I could find a parts store open so that I could buy oil to change the oil in my truck, as it was overdue. I found that all the chain stores were open, so I spent my day doing that.
When I say I spent my day, I mean it. I haven't changed my own oil for awhile so I couldn't find a tool I needed and had to go to the store twice. And it was a cold day and the 3500 won't fit all the way into the garage, so it was a project. I bought a fuel filter too, but I'd forgotten that getting to the 3500's fuel filter is nearly impossible, so I didn't change that, even though I have the water in the fuel system light on. Chances are a I have a loose connection.
Anyhow, so I spent the day doing something that I thought would take me just half a day, which was a disappointment, but probably not as much of one for people who worked a full day.
Did you work?
January 2, 1920. The peak of the Palmer Raids . . .
came today, although the news was reporting on the raids of yesterday. Technically, the raid of January 1 was a Chicago Police Department raid, although in coordination with the Federal government. Chicago was complaining today about the lack of help from yesterday.
By the end of the raids about 10,000 people would be arrested.
A lot of the warrants were soon cancelled as illegal. 556 resident aliens were deported. Originally the government reported having found a couple of bombs but later the news on that stopped, so whatever the truth of it is, it's vague. Only two pistols were seized. Public opinion turned against Palmer quickly and he went from being a probable contender for the Presidency to not being one.
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
January 1, 1920. New Year's Day. Revelry and Raids.
And so the violent 1910s had end and 1920, not yet roaring, was ushered in. . .ostensibly dry although efforts were already being made to evade Prohibition, both great and small, as the Chicago Tribune's Gasoline Alley made fun of.
January 1, 1920. Gasoline Alley: Happy New Years On Avery
On this day in Chicago undoubtedly sober agents conducted raids on suspected Reds in various gathering places they were known to frequent, arresting 200 people. The same was conducted across the country under J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, with about 6,000 people being arrested as a result.
U.S. Attorney General Alexander Palmer.
New Years Resolutions For Other People (and maybe some for everyone) 2020.
In some years I've done a post entitled this, in other years not.
Usually its satirical, with some seriousness. This past year, and perhaps its just my current perception, the year has been so odd and generally negative that it'd be impossible to do one that isn't negative.
Indeed, while I've never done this before in this thread, maybe this recent article by a Wyoming journalist simply sums things up better than any article here could do:
We'll give it a try anyway.
1. For everyone.
A. Accept that "I feel it", "want it" or "desire it" doesn't make it anything other than an individual feeling, want or desire.
Your own particular desires of any kind don't rise to a level of a societal need that society needs to personally ratify.
They may not even be legitimate. Just because you want something, no matter how deeply you feel it, doesn't mean its disordered. Just because you want to eat all the cake, for example, doesn't give you a protected right to do so and it doesn't mean you really should, for a multiplicity of reasons. And if you do eat it all, that doesn't mean that you have to demand everyone else accept that you ate it and agree that the problems its causing you aren't real problems.
B. Consider The Fourth Law of Human Behavior.
In addition, the time has really come for everyone to reconsider our fourth rule of behavior and really ponder it, it is:
Along these lines, it might be worth actually noting that a lot of the recent horrible behaviors of all types we have "discovered", we didn't. They've been horrible all along, but we started pretending they weren't and ended up bearing the consequences.
We had less of the "Me Too" movement in 2019 than we did in 2018, but it still provides a good example. All the misbehavior violated an old, old law of societal conduct. Much of the reason that it doesn't go away is that those noting the misbehavior and decrying it the violation an old, old law are busy violating other old, old laws, and don't want to stop. You really can't accept something as deeply wrong if you don't stop to ponder why it is, that its deeply wrong.
C. Time to consider some evolutionary biology.
When I was young I was a geology student and, as a result, I was in that class of people who studied evolution in detail. I know that there are those who don't accept evolution, but evolution is a natural fact and denying that doesn't make it less of a fact.
In keeping with that, we have our place in that picture and we're really busy denying that right now. It's time to get over it. This relates strongly to the item discussed in Paragraph B above, and there's another one of the laws of behavior governing it. We'll set that item out here:
Holscher's Third Law of Behavior. I know why the caged tiger paces.
I frankly don't know why it is that so many in our day and age can't accept this fact and believe instead that our realities are self described and self made. They aren't, any more than they are for a jackrabbit on the plains.
C. Time for some Distributism
I've written about Distributism here a fair amount, but this year the need for a reassessment of economics is really evident. On one had we have the Democrats embracing Social Democracy and all the vast cost and expenses associated with it, on the other we have a roaring economy which Republicans are telling us is the best for decades. In the middle is everyone else with a vague feeling that things just aren't right.
They aren't right as not everything is about money. Neither the "let's all move to cubicle jobs in Big City" view of the economy or the "Government will fund all the needs you can't fund yourself view" is making people satisfied.
Having something of their own, close to home, might.
2. The Political Parties.
It's tempting to say "just stop it", but that's too flippant.
At any rate, however, the insanity of the two party system is now more evident than ever. You'd think that with this being the case, a third party or fourth party or something would come along, but that's not going to happen rather obviously.
With that the fact of the matter, this polarity is too much for the country to endure long term. It has to end.
In order to end it, however, some basic facts have to be accepted by both, and one is that the absurd level of name calling can't keep on keeping on and, moreover, whoever is in the Oval Office was put there through the process we have. Eight years of Republicans asserting that President Obama was illegitimate have been followed by (now) three of the Democrats yelling that President Trump is illegitimate. And it goes on down from there.
As party of the need for real change, party purity tests need to stop. The Democrats are initiating this on a national level, informally, and locally the GOP has done this formally. Parties aren't religions and there should be room within them, particularly in a two party system such as we seem to be captive to.
Finally, government can't solve everything. The Democratic platform basically is that it can, and that's absurd. The GOP one isn't, but the thought there is that the economy solves everything, and that isn't correct either.
Having discussed politics, let's move to religion
3. Confusion of Faith
I know that this is a topic that people aren't even supposed to discuss, save on Twitter and Facebook and I guess on Blogs, but this is a history blog, supposedly.
None the less, we've strayed into this topic a fair amount and so we're going to discuss it here.
A. Pope Francis
I don't know what Pope Francis' overall theme on things is, but if we were to give him a grade on his overall Papacy so far, it'd be a C at best. His vague comments, refusing to answer questions, and the like, are causing turmoil.
It's seemed lately that the Pope has an unfortunately Eurocentric view which is missing the real story of what's going on in Christianity in general and Catholism in particular, which is exploding in growth in the third world. I get the concern over the Western World, but the sort of weak leadership we're seeing and suggestions that we're retreating in one way or another while leaving things vague isn't helping.
I don't know what he can do about it as it seems ingrained in his personality. But a course correction seems in order.
B. The German Cardinals
One group that needs the course correction is the German Cardinals who are practically acting as an independent body. Somebody needs to point out to them the fact that their leadership hasn't been working and, moreover, the day in which people really listen to the Germans on about anything is over. What African Cardinals gather and say is more important now.
C. The Coffins and the Marshalls
Lest this seem exceedingly one sided, the Patrick Coffins and Dr. Taylor Marshalls of the world need to really re-assess their tone and what they're saying. I don't think any new schism are on the horizon, particularly from the Rad Trads, but if there were to be, Coffin would have to at least pause and consider to what extent his comments pushed some in that direction. Shows that come close to stating that the Pope may be illegitimate encourage schism as are shows that are blisteringly opposed to the current Pope.
You don't have to agree with a Pope, or a President. But that doesn't mean they're illegitimate. A person has to work within the system if its a system they declare themselves to have faith in.
D. The Irreligious Religious
Those of all faiths who proclaim to be faithful but then omit the tenants of their faiths need to knock it off.
This is particularly pronounced in Protestant Christianity, although it shows up in "liberal" Catholicism as well, at least in the United States. Boatloads of Christian churches proclaim themselves loyal to the Gospels, except where the Gospels address sex, for example. They say what they say and mean what they mean. If you don't like it, that means you have something to work on, not that you just omit it.
4. The Movie Industry
Stop it with the Marvel comic movies. They're stupid. Enough already.
I should note that I've typed out the start of a thread eons ago asking why movies have become so juvenile, but I've never finished it. I should.
5. The Television Industry
Television is stupid, and one of its stupidest acts is an assumption that its to be on the cutting edge to race to the bottom in the depictions of human behavior that involve morality in any sense. We get it, television, you don't believe morality of any kind exist. You are part of the problem (see above regarding the old standards).
Additionally, it's time to admit, Television, that graduates of the Harvard Lampoon aren't really funny. Quit hiring them as script writers for television and fire the ones you have.
6. Colorado fishermen
Is there no place to fish in Colorado? Look for one.
7. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit Posters
You are only heard, by and large, by a small limited audience. Posting vitriol of one kind or another just feeds our polarization. Take the year off on that and post on some interest other than politics or your concept of social justice. Posts on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook change nobody's minds on those topics whatsoever.
8. Militarism. Enough already.
A person has to be really touch saying anything about this as they come across as not being a patriot or not supporting the military, or the like, but the United States needs to be at the point where it seriously reconsiders the nature and status of the military it created to deal with the Cold War.
From the countries earliest history, as colonies, up until 1947 when the Cold War started, the US based its defense on having a very small standing Army backed up by state militias, combined with a standing Navy. The Navy developed into a global force first when the age of sail yielded to the age of steam at the turn of the prior century. That made sense, as ships take years to build, last for years, and it isn't really possible to build a Navy from scratch during wartime, although we came pretty close to doing a bit of that during World War One and World War Two.
Armies, however, we pretty much built by having a small professional Army, very small, backed up by state militias. Early on, membership in the state militia was compulsory, but in later years it became voluntary. If the war was a big war, like the Civil War, World War One or World War Two, we built a large citizen Army while the Regular Army and the militia, the National Guard in later years, held the line. That's basically the way we fought the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War One, World War Two, and the Korean War.
The problem became that for much of the Cold War we were somewhere on the brink of a hot war a lot of the time. Sometimes the Cold War broke out into hot wars, as in the examples of Korea and Vietnam, other times it just threatened to. It's now known, unbeknownst to us, that the US and the USSR became very very close to to going to war by accident in the early 1980s, and its likely only the fact that the Soviet Union's aged leadership remained cautious about war due to their memories of the Second World War, even though they were pretty convinced that NATO was about to invade them.
The USSR is gone and the wars we're now in are much, much smaller than those of the Cold War were. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while definitely real wars, are minuscule compared to Vietnam and Korea.
The size of the military has very much decreased since the end of the Cold War, but it's still pretty darned big. The U.S. Army has 476,000 soldiers in it, with the National Guard adding an additional 343,000 and the Army Reserve another 199,000. In 1990 when the Soviet Union folded up its tent, the Army had 750,000 men and the national Guard nearly that, combined with at least 400,000 in the Reserves.
So the military is much smaller, but it has a lot of problems and those problems are highly concentrated in the bureaucratic culture that naturally came about as a result of the Cold War. The pre World War Two U.S. Army lacked that to a significant degree as it was so small and had so much to do. The bureaucracy now ingrained in the military is highly corporate and it hurts the nation's defense. It's not surprising that the Marine Corps, the nation's smallest military branch, is the branch that is the most martial, if you will. Even it, however, is restrained in its internal nature by an infection of social politics that has gotten into it.
In the post Vietnam War period the Army really suffered as its cohesion was destroyed by the war. This was much less the case for the other branches of the service but they all suffered to some degree. Ronald Reagan, however, put the Cold War service back on its feet in its final years and in a lot of ways the military we have today dates to that period. Reagan deserves a lot of credit for what he did at that time, but the vestiges of it have become a problem.
One of the ways that's constantly exhibited is the absurd flood of money that enters the service's coffers on a continual basis that should't. The Army has been working on a replacement for the lousy AR rifle platform for decades now when just about anyone who knows anything about service rifles well knows that adopting something in the 6.5x55 range with an action that's something like the G3s or the FALs is what is needed. Floods of money, however, have gone into what nearly amounts to a permanent project that produces no results. To make matters worse, nearly any small arm adopted by the infantry branch of the Army is rejected by the Marines, whose budgeting allows it to buy something else, which is absurd. The Army and the Marine Corps can't even agree on what boots to buy, so they don't.
The most flagrant example of things being out of control is the recent creation of a United States Space Force, which was created last year in anticipation of a need to defend our interests in space. This is flat out absurd. Right now the Air Force is perfectly competent to do that, to the extent we need to. And there isn't much of a need to.
The Space Force ends up becoming our eighth uniformed service, including the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA and the Public Health Service. This excludes, of course, police branches of various government agencies of which there are now a plethora, but which is a separate topic entirely.
We don't need a Space Force and never will. If we ever need something like that, we have it handled right now. And we also need less of a military in general and one that costs a lot, lot less.
That sounds pretty radical in this day and age, particularly with two wars still going on. But the service needs to be cut down to size now that the Cold War is over. We could once again get by with an Army of 250,000 men backed up by a National Guard twice that size. I won't opine on the size of the Air Force or the Navy, as I don't know enough about their war fighting needs to do so, but scaling back the cash register at this point is really necessary.
So, I guess, that's a 2020 budget resolution.
_______________________________________________________________________________
So what did we say on this before? Well, here's the prior editions:
Usually its satirical, with some seriousness. This past year, and perhaps its just my current perception, the year has been so odd and generally negative that it'd be impossible to do one that isn't negative.
Indeed, while I've never done this before in this thread, maybe this recent article by a Wyoming journalist simply sums things up better than any article here could do:
Resolve to Childish Rules
We'll give it a try anyway.
1. For everyone.
A. Accept that "I feel it", "want it" or "desire it" doesn't make it anything other than an individual feeling, want or desire.
Your own particular desires of any kind don't rise to a level of a societal need that society needs to personally ratify.
They may not even be legitimate. Just because you want something, no matter how deeply you feel it, doesn't mean its disordered. Just because you want to eat all the cake, for example, doesn't give you a protected right to do so and it doesn't mean you really should, for a multiplicity of reasons. And if you do eat it all, that doesn't mean that you have to demand everyone else accept that you ate it and agree that the problems its causing you aren't real problems.
B. Consider The Fourth Law of Human Behavior.
In addition, the time has really come for everyone to reconsider our fourth rule of behavior and really ponder it, it is:
Along these lines, it might be worth actually noting that a lot of the recent horrible behaviors of all types we have "discovered", we didn't. They've been horrible all along, but we started pretending they weren't and ended up bearing the consequences.
We had less of the "Me Too" movement in 2019 than we did in 2018, but it still provides a good example. All the misbehavior violated an old, old law of societal conduct. Much of the reason that it doesn't go away is that those noting the misbehavior and decrying it the violation an old, old law are busy violating other old, old laws, and don't want to stop. You really can't accept something as deeply wrong if you don't stop to ponder why it is, that its deeply wrong.
C. Time to consider some evolutionary biology.
When I was young I was a geology student and, as a result, I was in that class of people who studied evolution in detail. I know that there are those who don't accept evolution, but evolution is a natural fact and denying that doesn't make it less of a fact.
In keeping with that, we have our place in that picture and we're really busy denying that right now. It's time to get over it. This relates strongly to the item discussed in Paragraph B above, and there's another one of the laws of behavior governing it. We'll set that item out here:
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.
I frankly don't know why it is that so many in our day and age can't accept this fact and believe instead that our realities are self described and self made. They aren't, any more than they are for a jackrabbit on the plains.
C. Time for some Distributism
I've written about Distributism here a fair amount, but this year the need for a reassessment of economics is really evident. On one had we have the Democrats embracing Social Democracy and all the vast cost and expenses associated with it, on the other we have a roaring economy which Republicans are telling us is the best for decades. In the middle is everyone else with a vague feeling that things just aren't right.
They aren't right as not everything is about money. Neither the "let's all move to cubicle jobs in Big City" view of the economy or the "Government will fund all the needs you can't fund yourself view" is making people satisfied.
Having something of their own, close to home, might.
2. The Political Parties.
It's tempting to say "just stop it", but that's too flippant.
At any rate, however, the insanity of the two party system is now more evident than ever. You'd think that with this being the case, a third party or fourth party or something would come along, but that's not going to happen rather obviously.
With that the fact of the matter, this polarity is too much for the country to endure long term. It has to end.
In order to end it, however, some basic facts have to be accepted by both, and one is that the absurd level of name calling can't keep on keeping on and, moreover, whoever is in the Oval Office was put there through the process we have. Eight years of Republicans asserting that President Obama was illegitimate have been followed by (now) three of the Democrats yelling that President Trump is illegitimate. And it goes on down from there.
As party of the need for real change, party purity tests need to stop. The Democrats are initiating this on a national level, informally, and locally the GOP has done this formally. Parties aren't religions and there should be room within them, particularly in a two party system such as we seem to be captive to.
Finally, government can't solve everything. The Democratic platform basically is that it can, and that's absurd. The GOP one isn't, but the thought there is that the economy solves everything, and that isn't correct either.
Having discussed politics, let's move to religion
3. Confusion of Faith
I know that this is a topic that people aren't even supposed to discuss, save on Twitter and Facebook and I guess on Blogs, but this is a history blog, supposedly.
None the less, we've strayed into this topic a fair amount and so we're going to discuss it here.
A. Pope Francis
I don't know what Pope Francis' overall theme on things is, but if we were to give him a grade on his overall Papacy so far, it'd be a C at best. His vague comments, refusing to answer questions, and the like, are causing turmoil.
It's seemed lately that the Pope has an unfortunately Eurocentric view which is missing the real story of what's going on in Christianity in general and Catholism in particular, which is exploding in growth in the third world. I get the concern over the Western World, but the sort of weak leadership we're seeing and suggestions that we're retreating in one way or another while leaving things vague isn't helping.
I don't know what he can do about it as it seems ingrained in his personality. But a course correction seems in order.
B. The German Cardinals
One group that needs the course correction is the German Cardinals who are practically acting as an independent body. Somebody needs to point out to them the fact that their leadership hasn't been working and, moreover, the day in which people really listen to the Germans on about anything is over. What African Cardinals gather and say is more important now.
C. The Coffins and the Marshalls
Lest this seem exceedingly one sided, the Patrick Coffins and Dr. Taylor Marshalls of the world need to really re-assess their tone and what they're saying. I don't think any new schism are on the horizon, particularly from the Rad Trads, but if there were to be, Coffin would have to at least pause and consider to what extent his comments pushed some in that direction. Shows that come close to stating that the Pope may be illegitimate encourage schism as are shows that are blisteringly opposed to the current Pope.
You don't have to agree with a Pope, or a President. But that doesn't mean they're illegitimate. A person has to work within the system if its a system they declare themselves to have faith in.
D. The Irreligious Religious
Those of all faiths who proclaim to be faithful but then omit the tenants of their faiths need to knock it off.
This is particularly pronounced in Protestant Christianity, although it shows up in "liberal" Catholicism as well, at least in the United States. Boatloads of Christian churches proclaim themselves loyal to the Gospels, except where the Gospels address sex, for example. They say what they say and mean what they mean. If you don't like it, that means you have something to work on, not that you just omit it.
4. The Movie Industry
Stop it with the Marvel comic movies. They're stupid. Enough already.
I should note that I've typed out the start of a thread eons ago asking why movies have become so juvenile, but I've never finished it. I should.
5. The Television Industry
Television is stupid, and one of its stupidest acts is an assumption that its to be on the cutting edge to race to the bottom in the depictions of human behavior that involve morality in any sense. We get it, television, you don't believe morality of any kind exist. You are part of the problem (see above regarding the old standards).
Additionally, it's time to admit, Television, that graduates of the Harvard Lampoon aren't really funny. Quit hiring them as script writers for television and fire the ones you have.
6. Colorado fishermen
Is there no place to fish in Colorado? Look for one.
7. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit Posters
You are only heard, by and large, by a small limited audience. Posting vitriol of one kind or another just feeds our polarization. Take the year off on that and post on some interest other than politics or your concept of social justice. Posts on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook change nobody's minds on those topics whatsoever.
8. Militarism. Enough already.
A person has to be really touch saying anything about this as they come across as not being a patriot or not supporting the military, or the like, but the United States needs to be at the point where it seriously reconsiders the nature and status of the military it created to deal with the Cold War.
From the countries earliest history, as colonies, up until 1947 when the Cold War started, the US based its defense on having a very small standing Army backed up by state militias, combined with a standing Navy. The Navy developed into a global force first when the age of sail yielded to the age of steam at the turn of the prior century. That made sense, as ships take years to build, last for years, and it isn't really possible to build a Navy from scratch during wartime, although we came pretty close to doing a bit of that during World War One and World War Two.
Armies, however, we pretty much built by having a small professional Army, very small, backed up by state militias. Early on, membership in the state militia was compulsory, but in later years it became voluntary. If the war was a big war, like the Civil War, World War One or World War Two, we built a large citizen Army while the Regular Army and the militia, the National Guard in later years, held the line. That's basically the way we fought the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War One, World War Two, and the Korean War.
The problem became that for much of the Cold War we were somewhere on the brink of a hot war a lot of the time. Sometimes the Cold War broke out into hot wars, as in the examples of Korea and Vietnam, other times it just threatened to. It's now known, unbeknownst to us, that the US and the USSR became very very close to to going to war by accident in the early 1980s, and its likely only the fact that the Soviet Union's aged leadership remained cautious about war due to their memories of the Second World War, even though they were pretty convinced that NATO was about to invade them.
The USSR is gone and the wars we're now in are much, much smaller than those of the Cold War were. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while definitely real wars, are minuscule compared to Vietnam and Korea.
The size of the military has very much decreased since the end of the Cold War, but it's still pretty darned big. The U.S. Army has 476,000 soldiers in it, with the National Guard adding an additional 343,000 and the Army Reserve another 199,000. In 1990 when the Soviet Union folded up its tent, the Army had 750,000 men and the national Guard nearly that, combined with at least 400,000 in the Reserves.
So the military is much smaller, but it has a lot of problems and those problems are highly concentrated in the bureaucratic culture that naturally came about as a result of the Cold War. The pre World War Two U.S. Army lacked that to a significant degree as it was so small and had so much to do. The bureaucracy now ingrained in the military is highly corporate and it hurts the nation's defense. It's not surprising that the Marine Corps, the nation's smallest military branch, is the branch that is the most martial, if you will. Even it, however, is restrained in its internal nature by an infection of social politics that has gotten into it.
In the post Vietnam War period the Army really suffered as its cohesion was destroyed by the war. This was much less the case for the other branches of the service but they all suffered to some degree. Ronald Reagan, however, put the Cold War service back on its feet in its final years and in a lot of ways the military we have today dates to that period. Reagan deserves a lot of credit for what he did at that time, but the vestiges of it have become a problem.
One of the ways that's constantly exhibited is the absurd flood of money that enters the service's coffers on a continual basis that should't. The Army has been working on a replacement for the lousy AR rifle platform for decades now when just about anyone who knows anything about service rifles well knows that adopting something in the 6.5x55 range with an action that's something like the G3s or the FALs is what is needed. Floods of money, however, have gone into what nearly amounts to a permanent project that produces no results. To make matters worse, nearly any small arm adopted by the infantry branch of the Army is rejected by the Marines, whose budgeting allows it to buy something else, which is absurd. The Army and the Marine Corps can't even agree on what boots to buy, so they don't.
The most flagrant example of things being out of control is the recent creation of a United States Space Force, which was created last year in anticipation of a need to defend our interests in space. This is flat out absurd. Right now the Air Force is perfectly competent to do that, to the extent we need to. And there isn't much of a need to.
The Space Force ends up becoming our eighth uniformed service, including the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA and the Public Health Service. This excludes, of course, police branches of various government agencies of which there are now a plethora, but which is a separate topic entirely.
We don't need a Space Force and never will. If we ever need something like that, we have it handled right now. And we also need less of a military in general and one that costs a lot, lot less.
That sounds pretty radical in this day and age, particularly with two wars still going on. But the service needs to be cut down to size now that the Cold War is over. We could once again get by with an Army of 250,000 men backed up by a National Guard twice that size. I won't opine on the size of the Air Force or the Navy, as I don't know enough about their war fighting needs to do so, but scaling back the cash register at this point is really necessary.
So, I guess, that's a 2020 budget resolution.
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So what did we say on this before? Well, here's the prior editions:
New Year's Resolutions for Other People, 2015
New Year's Resolutions for Other People. 2016 Edition
New Years Resolutions For Other People, 2018
New Years' Resolutions for Other People. 2019 Edition
End of the Decade and Ten plus Years of this Blog. A retrospective
Ostensibly, the first entry on this blog was made on May 1, 2009, so we officially crossed the ten year mark, by adding ten years to that date, on May 1, 2019, i.e, several months ago.
That first post looked like this:
May 1, 2019, in contrast, looked like this:
But it's likely ten, as this one was formed very early on, and indeed may have been the first one formed. At that time, as noted above, it was to aid in the writing of a novel. The novel is still unfinished, and risks never being finished, even though I still intend to. In the meantime, due to another one of my blogs, I did write and complete a book on Wyoming's history.
This month I'll also enter my 29th year of practicing law, and in fact my association with where I work goes back thirty years in the form of my first legal job, which morphed into my permanent legal job about a year later. In the interval my second legal job, the only other one I've ever had, in the minor form of being employed to write a paper with a professor that was published in a law journal, occurred. So in that sense, this month commences my 30th year in the profession I currently occupy, or I should say one of the two professions I currently occupy. It is of course the profession that I shall occupy until retirement, should I live so long, assuming I retire, which few lawyers that I know do. Prior dreams of entering the judiciary are now slaves to the passage of time, where they'll accordingly remain dreams unfulfilled. A path not taken not because of a choice not to do so, but because fate burned the bridge before I could cross it, that in fact being the fate of the majority of people who contemplate that career, and therefore being a fate that cannot be lamented.
The lack of progress on the book can probably be lamented, however, at least by me. It may have to wait until the aforementioned retirement. At least I'm not making much progress on it, other than in my mind, where I write almost everything that I write long before I commit it to the visible form. So perhaps in that sense, there is progress.
Certainly this blog has made it much improved. I know a lot more about the era its set in than I did before. And it's been fascinating indeed.
I've enjoyed this blog. I hope have as well, and are continuing to.
No, robots are not coming for your jobs
So says Robert J. Samuelson.
I hope he's right. Artificial Intelligence and electronic automation are something I do worry about. I'm glad that I'm not young in an era in which I'll have to face it really.
Indeed, frankly, I think technologically we're over the point where our technology is helping us and its clearly hurting. Tragically, people can't go back as they can't imagine doing so. But things are not improving in this area, in my view.
While Japan no longer has an empire, it does have an emperor (an odd thought), and as of today, it has a new one.* Emperor Naruhito.
It has a new Empress as well, Empress Masako, who was a career Japanese diplomat prior to marrying Naruhito. For reasons that aren't clear to me, Empresses don't go through the formal investiture ceremony in Japan. That may have something to do with the traditional role of the Emperor as a Shinto Priest.
Naruhito, age 59, is the first Japanese Emperor to take office since World War Two who was not alive during World War Two. Having said that, there's only been three Japanese Emperors since World War Two, if we include Hirohito, who was of course Emperor during World War Two and up until 1989. After Hirohito came his son Akihito, who just resigned, making Naruhito the first Emperor in 200 years to take office following a resignation of his predecessor. Akihito was born in 1933 and was therefore 12 years old when World War Two ended.
That's significant as well in that Akihito was born into a Japanese royal family whose heirs had a technical claim to an expectation to be accorded an official deity status, although that is really fairly grossly exaggerated in the West. The Japanese royal family dates back to vast antiquity and its origins are so ancient that they frankly aren't very well known. The first generally recognized emperor is Jinmu, who reigned starting in 660 BC, which is a very long time ago. Not surprisingly, with a family tree that ancient, the claim to the title of Emperor isn't completely unchallenged and there have been competing lines over time. Having said that, the fact that the Japanese imperial family tree can be traced back that far is really impressive.
The role of the Emperor has been a hard one for westerners to figure out. At various points in Japanese history the Japanese crown had nearly no power at all. In the history of modern Japan, it really acquired power with Emperor Meiji, who reigned from 1867 until 1912 and who, with the aid of his supporters, both modernized Japan and restored the power of the Imperial crown. Following the Meiji Restoration the crown had power of some sort, but it's always been difficult to discern. During the 1920s that power may or may not have waned following what amounted to a sort of right wing military coup following an attempted young officers left wing military coup. Everyone acting in both coups claimed to be acting with the interest of the Emperor at heart.
From the 1920s until the end of World War Two a confusing era resulted in which various historians claim that Hirohito had more or less power. He clearly had a fair degree, no matter which view a person might take. That came to an official end in 1945 when the Imperial crown was really saved from termination by the Allies, who found it useful to preserve it. Hirohito retained his position as Emperor for a very long time after that, but with no real official power, although as late as a couple of decades later it was discovered that high ranking officers of the Japanese Defense Force still consulted with him on matters, resulting in a scandal.
Hirohito, as noted, had been required to renounce claims to a divine status following World War Two but the claim was rather vague in the first place. A more significant role was that of Shinto Priest, which the emperor always was. The Imperial heads of state always receive the treasures of the Japanese crown, which date back centuries and into antiquity, that have Shinto significance, but I don't know if the Emperor remains a Shinto Priest as they once did.** At any rate, the strong claims, to the extent they existed, of divinity were boosted by the Japanese military in the 20s through the 40s and post war surveys by the Japanese government found that the Japanese people had never actually believed the Emperor had divine status anyhow. His renouncement of the claims, therefore, had no real impact on their views.
In any event, for the first time in modern history a Japanese Emperor has ascended to the thrown who was 1) born after Japan was no longer an Empire; and 2) was born after the crown had disclaimed any divinity. A new era of some sort, in an era when monarchy remains, but its hard to tell why.
________________________________________________________________________________
*Having said that, it's hard to figure out exactly why the Japanese Empire is historically regarded as such prior to the 20th Century, unless you take the view that the consolidation of power in the crown in the Japanese islands themselves constitutes an empire.
As there is some ethnic diversity in the overall island holdings, that's not an illegitimate view. Hokkaido was in fact the home of an ethnically separate people. The Japanese started colonizing the island in the 1330s. Okinawa is also the home of an ethnically separate people. It didn't become part of the Japanese Empire until 1879.
**Like a lot of things surrounding Japan, the Japanese Imperial Regalia are mysterious. They consists of a named sword, a named mirror, and a jewel. They are not as impressive, reportedly, in appearance as a person might suppose.
The sword is known to have existed as far back as the 680s, but it's older than that. The mirror is also ancient and may or may not have been destroyed and replaced in a fire in 1040. The jewel is likely prehistoric.
These items are not revealed to the general public and its sometimes speculated that they've been lost or destroyed. Japan, however, is remarkable in its ability of preservation of artifacts so the better bet, in my view, is that they're all original. They're all absolutely ancient as well.
That first post looked like this:
Lex Anteinternet?
The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new.
What the heck is this blog about?
The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?
Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.
May 1, 2019, in contrast, looked like this:
Ten Years?
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet?: The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new. What the heck is this blog about? The intent of this blog i...Maybe even a little longer, as this blog was at first a highly inactive blog while I had a couple of others. Indeed, I've wiped out versions of this blog at least twice, or rather other blogs that represent what this one became.
But it's likely ten, as this one was formed very early on, and indeed may have been the first one formed. At that time, as noted above, it was to aid in the writing of a novel. The novel is still unfinished, and risks never being finished, even though I still intend to. In the meantime, due to another one of my blogs, I did write and complete a book on Wyoming's history.
This month I'll also enter my 29th year of practicing law, and in fact my association with where I work goes back thirty years in the form of my first legal job, which morphed into my permanent legal job about a year later. In the interval my second legal job, the only other one I've ever had, in the minor form of being employed to write a paper with a professor that was published in a law journal, occurred. So in that sense, this month commences my 30th year in the profession I currently occupy, or I should say one of the two professions I currently occupy. It is of course the profession that I shall occupy until retirement, should I live so long, assuming I retire, which few lawyers that I know do. Prior dreams of entering the judiciary are now slaves to the passage of time, where they'll accordingly remain dreams unfulfilled. A path not taken not because of a choice not to do so, but because fate burned the bridge before I could cross it, that in fact being the fate of the majority of people who contemplate that career, and therefore being a fate that cannot be lamented.
The lack of progress on the book can probably be lamented, however, at least by me. It may have to wait until the aforementioned retirement. At least I'm not making much progress on it, other than in my mind, where I write almost everything that I write long before I commit it to the visible form. So perhaps in that sense, there is progress.
Certainly this blog has made it much improved. I know a lot more about the era its set in than I did before. And it's been fascinating indeed.
I've enjoyed this blog. I hope have as well, and are continuing to.
Mid Week At Work: The good the bad and the ugly - Work for a living
Blog Mirror: No, robots are not coming for your jobs
No, robots are not coming for your jobs
So says Robert J. Samuelson.
I hope he's right. Artificial Intelligence and electronic automation are something I do worry about. I'm glad that I'm not young in an era in which I'll have to face it really.
Indeed, frankly, I think technologically we're over the point where our technology is helping us and its clearly hurting. Tragically, people can't go back as they can't imagine doing so. But things are not improving in this area, in my view.
May 1, 1919. A Red May Day
May 1, May Day, has long been associated with the far left as its the International Workers Holiday. In 1919, with Communism on the rise everywhere, May 1 was notably Red everywhere.
The evening Casper newspaper noting the riots in Cleveland as well as the anarchist bombing campaign. This paper also discussed the acquisition of property with a future eye towards social services. Costa Rica and Mexico were trying to get into the League of Nations, the paper also noted, but weren't admitted due to political instability.
In the United States, the Communist Party USA was founded, rapidly gaining membership (while always remaining a minor political party) in the wake of the decline of the Socialist Party in the United States, which had come under the eyes of the law for its opposition to World War One.
The CPUSA would have its glory years, if they could be called that, in the 1920s and the 1930s, during which it not only was a serious, if minor, political party, but during which it was also an organ for espionage for the Soviet Union. It never had more than 80,000 members at its peak. It's role as an arm of the efforts of the NKVD were already known, if not fully appreciated, by some who tried to bring it to the government's attention by the 1930s, and indeed a precursor to what later became known as the McCarthy Hearings actually occurred in the late 1930s and focused on some of the same people who would be examined later, but it was not until the end of World War Two when the full horrors of Communism in Russia were revealed that the CPUSA really started to decline to the trivial, where it remains today.
In Cleveland riots occurred on this day, springing from a Socialist march that was supported by Communist and Anarchist. The imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs was the spark that ignited that flame. There were about two deaths as the result of the riot, and about forty injuries.
In Winnepeg construction workers went on strike. It would soon expanded to be a general strike.
In Bavaria, German forces, supported by Freikorps, breached the Communist defenses in Munich bringing the Bavarian Soviet Republic to an end.
Cheyenne was having an air show on this day in 1919.
In the U.S. the news was also still breaking about the anarchist bombing campaign that had been started but detected. The campaign would revive later. It wasn't connected with any other radical group, although it likely had the appearance of that to the general public at the time.
All of this would contribute to making the summer of 1919 the "Red Summer", as it was termed by James Weldon Johnson. It would also fuel an ongoing "Red Scare" that had commenced during World War One. With the summer beginning the way that it was, that the scare would occur was pretty predictable. And in fact, the far left of 1919 was not only radical, but seeing a fair amount of global success. It's chances of success in the United States were frankly slim and always would be, but the combination of the news produced a predictable reaction.
A New Japanese Emperor
Japanese Imperial Standard.
While Japan no longer has an empire, it does have an emperor (an odd thought), and as of today, it has a new one.* Emperor Naruhito.
It has a new Empress as well, Empress Masako, who was a career Japanese diplomat prior to marrying Naruhito. For reasons that aren't clear to me, Empresses don't go through the formal investiture ceremony in Japan. That may have something to do with the traditional role of the Emperor as a Shinto Priest.
Naruhito, age 59, is the first Japanese Emperor to take office since World War Two who was not alive during World War Two. Having said that, there's only been three Japanese Emperors since World War Two, if we include Hirohito, who was of course Emperor during World War Two and up until 1989. After Hirohito came his son Akihito, who just resigned, making Naruhito the first Emperor in 200 years to take office following a resignation of his predecessor. Akihito was born in 1933 and was therefore 12 years old when World War Two ended.
That's significant as well in that Akihito was born into a Japanese royal family whose heirs had a technical claim to an expectation to be accorded an official deity status, although that is really fairly grossly exaggerated in the West. The Japanese royal family dates back to vast antiquity and its origins are so ancient that they frankly aren't very well known. The first generally recognized emperor is Jinmu, who reigned starting in 660 BC, which is a very long time ago. Not surprisingly, with a family tree that ancient, the claim to the title of Emperor isn't completely unchallenged and there have been competing lines over time. Having said that, the fact that the Japanese imperial family tree can be traced back that far is really impressive.
Jinmu with a long bow, as depicted in the 19th Century.
The role of the Emperor has been a hard one for westerners to figure out. At various points in Japanese history the Japanese crown had nearly no power at all. In the history of modern Japan, it really acquired power with Emperor Meiji, who reigned from 1867 until 1912 and who, with the aid of his supporters, both modernized Japan and restored the power of the Imperial crown. Following the Meiji Restoration the crown had power of some sort, but it's always been difficult to discern. During the 1920s that power may or may not have waned following what amounted to a sort of right wing military coup following an attempted young officers left wing military coup. Everyone acting in both coups claimed to be acting with the interest of the Emperor at heart.
The pivotal modern Japanese Emperor Meiji.
Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito in 1945.
Hirohito, as noted, had been required to renounce claims to a divine status following World War Two but the claim was rather vague in the first place. A more significant role was that of Shinto Priest, which the emperor always was. The Imperial heads of state always receive the treasures of the Japanese crown, which date back centuries and into antiquity, that have Shinto significance, but I don't know if the Emperor remains a Shinto Priest as they once did.** At any rate, the strong claims, to the extent they existed, of divinity were boosted by the Japanese military in the 20s through the 40s and post war surveys by the Japanese government found that the Japanese people had never actually believed the Emperor had divine status anyhow. His renouncement of the claims, therefore, had no real impact on their views.
In any event, for the first time in modern history a Japanese Emperor has ascended to the thrown who was 1) born after Japan was no longer an Empire; and 2) was born after the crown had disclaimed any divinity. A new era of some sort, in an era when monarchy remains, but its hard to tell why.
________________________________________________________________________________
*Having said that, it's hard to figure out exactly why the Japanese Empire is historically regarded as such prior to the 20th Century, unless you take the view that the consolidation of power in the crown in the Japanese islands themselves constitutes an empire.
As there is some ethnic diversity in the overall island holdings, that's not an illegitimate view. Hokkaido was in fact the home of an ethnically separate people. The Japanese started colonizing the island in the 1330s. Okinawa is also the home of an ethnically separate people. It didn't become part of the Japanese Empire until 1879.
**Like a lot of things surrounding Japan, the Japanese Imperial Regalia are mysterious. They consists of a named sword, a named mirror, and a jewel. They are not as impressive, reportedly, in appearance as a person might suppose.
The sword is known to have existed as far back as the 680s, but it's older than that. The mirror is also ancient and may or may not have been destroyed and replaced in a fire in 1040. The jewel is likely prehistoric.
These items are not revealed to the general public and its sometimes speculated that they've been lost or destroyed. Japan, however, is remarkable in its ability of preservation of artifacts so the better bet, in my view, is that they're all original. They're all absolutely ancient as well.
Therefore, rather obviously, something that really occurred over the decade was the massive expansion of daily posts. One short one started us off, and that was how things ran for a long time, with days and days between entries, and now there are days when three or four posts aren't unusual.
Having said that, anyone who stops in here has probably noticed that there are now fewer posts. The centenary of the Punitive Expedition gave us a chance to explore the topic on a daily basis, something of use to the ostensible purpose of the blog. That naturally flowed directly into World War One and that, in turn, to the immediate post war era. But now that's gone and the daily posts have also declined. There are no doubt those who are interested in the railroad crisis and the strikes that followed the war, and we are as well, but not enough to turn the purpose of the blog to them. It's not as if, of course, that blog is ending, but its returning more to its original format. . . sort of.
But only sort of. Early on this blog expanded to include a lot of other topics and it in fact absorbed a couple of other blogs that were contemporaneous with it. We originally didn't post on social issues, news of the day or politics here. We did that on another blog we once had. We shut that one down and much of it is just flat out gone, but quite a bit of it was incorporated into this one. Based on what we can find left of it, the very first blog didn't survive at all, so there are lost posts that would go back to 2009 if we did. But the successor blog's posts have been picked up here and incorporated in earlier years.
But what about those years?
I wasn't young when I started this blog. I would have been 45 years old, and that's not youthful. But I do frankly feel older now even though I'm in pretty good shape for somebody who is 56. Indeed, I'm in a lot better shape.
I'm a faster writer as well, although I was fast to start with. Typing here has honed my speed which has been at use to me in all sorts of ways, although it hasn't been in terms of getting my book done.
I've published a book since I started this blog and was commissioned for a second, but work (It ell myself) kept me from getting the second done. In truth that book, and the novel I'm working on, don't get done in part because I write here. It's time to devote more attention to those other efforts. That won't stop the blog either, but it is time to see if we can get those done, if we're going to. Who knows, we may very well not. As I often tell people when it comes up, in spite of the fact that Americans are made massively uncomfortable with it, once a man is over 30 years old, you are really living on borrowed time. Indeed, I'm now well past the age of my father's father when he died, nearly the age that my mother's father as when he passed away, and not that much younger than my father when he passed. That's the way thing are. On the other hand, I'm just a bit under half the age my mother's mother was when she passed away, and my own mother lived a long life. Only God knows how many years a person has been allotted, but they pass much quicker than a person could ever imagine.
The last decade has not, to my way of looking at it, passed nay quicker than any other for hte most part. Where I really notice it is in terms of work, in that matters I worked on a decade ago often don't seem that long ago. But the country and society has undergone enormous changes, it seems to me, in the past ten years and most of them are not good.
It's not that uncommon for people who are past mid stream to look back and think things have gotten worse. A lot of things have not. But the nation's social structure has as its evolved in a contra-scientific and contra-natural manner. At some point in the last decade the political philosophy of relativism triumphed in such a manner that its now the case that people's whims, delusions and even baser desires are regarded as all important even when they rebel against the laws Darwin first set out so long ago. It's not possible to continue to go in this direction indefinitely, and while I would have regarded as absurdly alarmist earlier on, it's now possible to seriously ponder if the very long domination of the west in the affairs of the world is ending as the western world just isn't serious any more, even if it regards itself as such. If that's the case, the western world at this point would be in a place where it deserves that fate and would even benefit from it, being replaced on the stage by more serious cultures, many of whom have taken the best of what the western world developed over two millennia and have incorporated it into their own thinking in a serious manner. If so, it would be the acting out, as has happened so many times before, of what Tennyson noted in stating:
The old order changeth yielding place to new And God fulfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me I have lived my life and that which I have done May he within himself make pure but thou If thou shouldst never see my face again Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
Of course, it's easy to have such glum thoughts in an era in which the nation's politics seem to be hopelessly adrift and the nation with it. I recall as a child hearing such things stated during the Administration of Richard Nixon and the following Ford Administration, which was characterized by the Watergate episode and the following impeachment drama, and then capped off by the nation's obvious defeat in and abandonment of South Vietnam. Much of the past few years has had that feel to it, and indeed much of the past decade has been like living through a second 1960s. The 60s, which really lasted from 1964 to 1975, was an awful decade full of societal drama and decay combined with a losing overseas war that seemingly had no end to it, followed by a political disaster. As some say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, and the 2010s have had that feel to them, with societal institutions of ancient origin redefined outside of the election of the culture, an ongoing set of wars that stretch all the way back to 2001, and two political parties that are moving away from each other faster than the opposite ends of the universe. Fatigue from that alone would be inevitable, and the pessimism that fatigue brings about.
So perhaps the 2020s will be better, and in some ways they nearly have to be. Some things may have reached bottom or will in the next decade. But others are not likely to.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne*?
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely ye'll be your pint-stoup!
and surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak' a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,
sin' auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
sin' auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And there's a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak' a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
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