Blog Mirror: The Ants and the Grasshopper

 

The Ants and the Grasshopper

Lex Anteinternet: Casualties of War. The Attu Islanders and their i...

Lex Anteinternet: Casualties of War. The Attu Islanders and their i...: 

Casualties of War. The Attu Islanders and their island.

Attu woman and child, 1941.  She'd never see another summer on her home island again. By Malcolm Greany - https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/2667001144/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17118121

On June 7, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army landed on Attu Island, ferried there, of course, by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Attu is part of the Aluetians.  It's 344 square miles in size.  For comparison's sake, that's a little bigger than Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, and a little smaller than Kauai.  

It's relatively large, in real terms, 35 miles by 20.

It has an Aleutian climate, with average temperatures below 60F in the summer and in the mid 20s in the depth of winter.  It's coldest temperature ever was -17F, in 1902, and the hottest temperature ever, 77F in 1925.

The island has been inhabited since antiquity, and it's estimated that prior to contact with Europeans, the island had a native population between 2,000 and 5,000 souls.  Archeologists believe that settlement came from the east, not the west, even though it's the closest of the Aleutians to Asia and very distant, today, from the nearest Alaskan settlement of any kind.

It's one of the "Near Islands", as its near Asia.

Attu, along with the other Near Islands, seems to have first had settlements about 3,000 years ago, surprisingly late if it's considered that the arriving populations had spread throughout North America far before that.

The first contact with  Europeans came from Russian fur hunters in 1745, when they actually went to Attu after being confronted by a large body of armed natives on the first island they attempted to land at.  The first Russian contact on Attu violent, withe Russians taking an old woman and a boy hostage, oddly keeping the boy as an interpreter, although it has to be presumed he spoke no Russian.

A few weeks after that, the Russians raided an Attu village and killed fifteen men, with the purpose of the raid to take Attu women as sex slaves.  The location has ever since born the name Massacre Bay.

In 1750, the Russians introduced Arctic Fox to the island.

The Russian presence caused the decline of the local fauna rapidly, a devastating event for the natives, and the Russians also introduced disease, playing out a story that is often associated with the European conquest of North America. By 1762 the population was estimated at about 100 natives, which would mean that the population decline had been unbelievably massive in just a twenty or so year span.

The decline in fortunes for the Russians on the island meant that it thereafter largely skipped the Russian colonization of the Aleutians, to the extent it could be called that, and it remained free of Russian economic control.  The Russians reappeared in the early 19th Century, and the Attu population remained very small.

Christianity was introduced at least as early as 1758, but a chapel was not built until 1825, with a Russian Orthodox Priest being assigned to it, along with other island churches in 1828.  He made his first visit to the island in 1831.  By 1860 the native population had rebounded to 227 plus an additional 21 individuals who were "Creole", i.e., of mixed heritage.  When Alaska was sold to the US in 1867, services to the island dropped off massively, and by 1880 the population had declined by half.  Nonetheless, visitors to the island in the early 20th Century, who were few, were impressed by how happy the residents were and how clean the two villages were.  In the 1920s the sod structures were replaced by the natives with wooden ones, with imported wood, which included building a wooden Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and a school, without a teacher, in the 1932.  The teacher first appeared in 1940.

In the 19th and 20th Centuries, and indeed before, the men worked as trappers part of the year and moved to the hinterlands to do that.  Again, in the 20th Century, visitors were uniformly impressed by how happy the people living on the island were. And why not? Free of the chaos of the outside world, living a natural life, and with a Christian world view, they were as close to living in a paradise on earth as any people could be.

And then the Japanese came on June 7, 1942.

The Japanese removed all of the Attuans and kept them on Hokkaido.  By the war's end, half of them had died.  The US retook the island itself in May 1943.

The survivors wished to return to their homes when the war ended, but the US government did not allow them, garrisoning the island instead for a long range navigation site.  Truly, the government really did not have an existential right to deprive the Attuans of their home, but it did so.

The U.S. Coast Guard left in 2010.

In 2018 the descendants of the dispossessed Attuans were allowed to visit Attu.

Lex Anteinternet: BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new st...

Lex Anteinternet: BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new st...:  

BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper

 This major public access story hit the news here Thursday.

BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper

I'm quite familiar with this stretch of property. As a kid, before the recent owners who owned transferred it, I used to hunt part of it.  I never asked for permission, even though I'm sure I should have.  In those days, in the 70s, we asked for permission a lot less, and it was granted by fiat a lot more.

This is a real boon to sportsmen.  It'll open up miles of river to fishing, and miles and miles to hunting.  I've passed by deer and doves in this area a lot as I didn't have permission to go where they were.  Now I'll be able to, although I hope the BLM makes as much of this roadless as possible.

I hope they also lease it out for grazing.

Indeed, I have some mixed feelings about this as I really hate to see a local ranch go out of production.  The family that owned it had started off as sheepmen in Johnson County and moved down to Natrona County when their land was bought for coal production.  Now they'll just be out of agriculture entirely, and I really hate to see that, even though I'm glad to see this didn't go to out of state interest.  Indeed, what occurred is more in keeping with the purpose of the original Federal land programs, including the Homestead Act, than what often does occur with land sales now days.

I will note that, of course, in the age of the internet this of course resulted in moronic comments, including the blisteringly ignorant comment that its somehow unconstitutional for the Federal Government to own land. That comment is so dense that it should disqualify a person from going onto land in general until some education occurs.

Lex Anteinternet: The Mental Health Crisis. Okay. . . but why?

Lex Anteinternet: The Mental Health Crisis. Okay. . . but why?: 

The Mental Health Crisis. Okay. . . but why?

In the current debate, discussion, etc., or whatever it is on violence in the United States, we continually hear that the country has a "mental health crisis".

Vagrant sleeping on the street in Denver, a common sight.

Nobody seems to doubt this, and indeed it seems true.

We hear a lot of other common things stated by Americans about the United States, including that it's the "greatest nation on Earth". But does a great nation have a massive mental health crisis.

What's going on?

Well, it should be apparent that the crisis is an existential one.  If we have a massive crisis, it's because there's something massively wrong in the culture itself.  Other nations have lots of firearms in circulation without having what we're experiencing, and that alone tells us something.

And we also know that, contrary to what we often hear, our society is getting less and less violent, but at the same time our mental health is getting worse.  But mental health getting worse isn't a good thing by any measure.

And here's another fact of this crisis. From at least an external view, nobody whatsoever is going to do anything about this, really.

And here's why.

What is going on is that we've erased a set of standards that governed our society that were nearly wholly based on a Christian world view, on everything.  In their place we've erected nothing at all, other than a concept that whatever pleases you, you should do, even though every indicator is that this in fact doesn't make for a happy society at all.  Most recently we've even tried to erase biological lines written into our DNA, and simultaneously flooded our society with new intoxicants of all types, as the old ones apparently were sufficient.  Lines that at one time, if they were crossed, resulted in some sort of institutional intervention, no longer do.  Those in society crying for help aren't going to get it, as our new libertine society simply holds that their crying is simply an expression of their soul, rather than a desperate cry for help.

To add to it, we've wiped out meaningful and productive labor for an entire class of individual, which was often all that kept them tethered to something.  For many more, we've erased the change that tehir employment and daily endeavors are their own, rather than some board of directors living far away who care little about them. And the dream of working on the land, the most elemental dream of all, is just about dead in the United States.

And, added to that, the erasing of the natural bonds of family in an aggressive way means that entire generations of children are essentially raised in conditions that no human being has been since some prior variant of our genus started to become really intelligent.

Mental health crisis?

Yes, indeed.

Are we going to do something about it?

Probably not more than doping up as many people as we can and sending many more to bogus therapy.

Lex Anteinternet: Jury finds you can cross corners in Carbon County.

Lex Anteinternet: Jury finds you can cross corners in Carbon County.: 

Jury finds you can cross corners in Carbon County.

Elk Mountain as viewed from Shirley Basin.

Big news on the public access to lands front:

Jury finds four corner-crossing hunters not guilty of trespass

Now, what this isn't.

It isn't a court declaration that's binding precedent on the whole state.  It's one jury, in a circuit court case. That's it.

It does mean that these four guys are not going to be convicted.

And beyond that, it shows that juries, quite frankly, are unlikely to convict anyone for corner crossing.  Not only in Carbon County, but anywhere in the state.

And it doesn't end the issue, actually.  A civil suit remains, and it's far more likely to have a bigger impact, as it will likely be the one that ultimately goes to the Supreme Court and the Wyoming Supreme Court will then determine the issue.

It does send a signal, however, both to courts (of course) but to the legislature on how average Wyomingites view these issues, and that likely is summed up by a comment made in court by the defendants' lawyer:

He believed the whole mountain was his and that no one but [he] was allowed to be there … like a king.”

DEFENSE ATTORNEY RYAN SEMERAD ON RANCH OWNER FRED ESHELMAN

Eschelman is an entrepreneur who is noted for his charitable donations. . . and his donations to right wing politicians as well.  He's apparently humble and generous. Not so generous, however, that the South Carolinian saw fit to just turn a blind eye to this matter or to generally allowing some of the less well funded access to public land, not his land, on his Wyoming ranch.

The original encounter, moreover, was caught on audio and video, with Eschelman's employee stating to law enforcement;“Do they realize how much money my boss has? …and property?”

And indeed, his having a Wyoming ranch brings to mind Thomas Wolfe's comment on that in his book A Man In Full.

On the topic of decisions, this also points out the dangers of pursuing something best left untouched, something that was pointed out a couple of years ago in the Wyoming ve. Herrera case.  Sometimes, there are issues that you'd rather leave undecided.

Indeed here, the County Attorney, an elected official, made the decision to prosecute, no doubt based on prior interpretations of the law, which would have favored the same.  But in doing so, she's accidentally taken the side of a wealthy out of stater against the interest of common Wyomingites.  This probably never crossed her mind, but it likely has crossed the mind of a lot of locals by this point, and the effective statements of the defense now doubt have taken root.  Eschelman, in the words of the defense, is a would be king and oppressor.  I've now seen public comments that the County Attorney prosecuted as she was influenced by his wealth.  That's extremely unlikely, she was probably influenced by the law, and may very well not be in the class to whom this issue is dear to the heart, but she's no doubt aware that it is to many now.  How this also plays out is yet to be seen.

And indeed, this takes us back to the topic of allmannsretten, which we've addressed elsewhere.

As noted, this story is still playing out.  It'll be very interesting to see where it goes ultimately.

Lex Anteinternet: Earth Day, 2022

Lex Anteinternet: Earth Day, 2022: 

Earth Day, 2022

Human beings are the only species in the world that is not happy being themselves.

Fr. John Nepil (What Say You Nature/Grace, 25:30).

That's certainly the case for modern Western man, to be sure.

Today is Earth Day for 2022.

Take a closer look at that pile of ashes.  All those silver things are nails.

Given the recently and ongoing news, my prediction is that this will be a gloomy Earth Day.  War rages in Eastern Europe, with Vlad Putin working on going down as one of history's worst people.  In the future, Vlad the Impaler will have to take second fiddle to Vlad the Would Be Czar for Bad Vlads, reputation wise.  Now, war is a pretty obvious glum thing to start with in this thread, and I don't want to get into the sappy type poster crap, but war is a pretty big environmental insult in certain ways.*  We're not going all maudlin and frankly goofy superficial with a Mothers Against War type of theme here, and we're sure not going to put up a "War is not healthy for children and other living things" poster, the same being one of the stupidest sentiments ever put up on a serious topic, emphasized by constructed juvenility on a topic that's not very juvenile.

But that's part of the problem here.  More on that as we carry on.

Earth Day is something that gets politicized, for obvious reasons, pretty quickly.  The irony is however, in its heart of hearts, it's a deeply conservative, and conservationist, thing, and not really much in sync with the liberal ethos.  Because of the ultimate problem, however, that being narrow self-interest, we tend never to realize that, and for that reason, we don't make the progress in this area that we really ought to.

What we ought to be thinking of is 1) things are defined by our narrow self interests; and 2) ultimately in order to protect nature, we have to realize our own actual natures, and that isn't defined by us.

And hence the photo above.

This might seem to be on the superficial Earth Day level.  I.e., don't pollute.  And indeed, that point certain needs to be made. The photo depicts ashes and nails. But more than that, the ashes are dead center on a very heavily travelled county road that's closed for the winter.

More precisely, it's right where the road is closed.  And I'm certain that I know what happened here.  A group of somebodies traveled down to the end of the road and had a huge bonfire, with the firewood being made up of pallets.

Now, who did that?  I don't know.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that there are two logical groups of suspects.  One are young adults.  Young adults do stuff like this all the time.  A group may have gone out for the night, camped, probably, built an enormous bonfire on a space where it was safe to do it, and stood around and drank beer.  A probable guess.

The second guess would be similar. This area is heavily frequented by snowmobilers. So much so that when I saw something at the end of the road, I immediately associated it with them.  Maybe a group of them decided to have a late winter gathering, along the same lines.

My guess is that it's more likely group number one. Snowmobilers are already carting in a lot of stuff just to do that, and probably don't want to cart in pallets. Besides that, they're already pretty sensitive, in this area, to being dissed by people who just don't like snowmobiles.  Chances are pretty good, therefore, it was group number one.

Now, there's no reason to believe that they intended to hurt a soul. Rather, the evidence is actually the opposite. The road is wide here, and by building a fire there, they built it on a surface that wouldn't burn.  Moreover, it was shielded on the windward side by a high wall of snow.  All in all, that was pretty good thinking, fire risk wise.

Not lingering nail wise.

Probably just an overthought.

And hence the problem.

Our actions have consequences, even if we intend to them to be harmless.  Some thinking and consideration is in order.

Here, now, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of nails on one of the most heavily travelled rural roads in the county.  

On the way out, I saw two highway patrolmen and reported the situation. They said they would head up as "we have shovels". Well, no matter how diligent their efforts, they won't be able to shovel up all those nails.  People will be getting flat tires all summer long.  Mountain bikes go by this area all the time, they'll get flats too.  Hikers go by, and hikers with dogs go by. And it's still in an area where mounted horsemen occasionally go by.  Nails pose a threat to them all.

Indeed, dating back to Roman times a device made of nails, the caltrop, was used to disable horses.  They're still made today to disable car tires.  

They didn't stop to think of that.  Or, if they did, they brushed it off.

And we all do both of those.

And here's the first thing to consider.  Just because it's in our own interest, whether for enjoyment, or for wages, doesn't mean it's good, long term, for everybody and everything.

That doesn't always mean we can avoid it.  Indeed, in someways, our daily actions are inevitably a secular example of what Catholic theology defines as "cooperation with evil".  Save for those who live cloistered lives, that will be hard to avoid.

Which gets to the topic of acting individually and collectively.

Now, individually, that's basically a don't build bonfires in the road sort of thing to some degree.  But in others, it's a be honest sort of thing.

And that means being honest with yourself, including where you are in cooperation with things. Beyond that, however, it's being honest that just because it profits you in some fashion, doesn't mean it's great for everyone in all senses.

To give an example of sorts, just because Colorado can tax weed doesn't mean getting a bunch of people stoned out of their heads and destroying their lives is really a good thing.

There are lots of other examples, to be sure.

But beyond individual, there's collective, and that has to do with community, and at the end of the day, that ultimately had to do with nature in a real, and existential, way.

We may all be individuals, and indeed we are, with each being unique, but beyond that we are all individuals within a single species, and therefore much more alike than different.  Our individualism takes us only so far.  It's easy to get diverted into "community" at this point, but the fact of the matter that our members of a species in fact defines our nature, and much of our modern, or as some would have it, "post-modern" individualism is a perversion of that.

It was in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia that the central character grabbed his own flesh and stated that a man could "be what he wants, but not want what he wants".  This is true of the entire species.  As a species, we're little removed from nature, and when we act, on Earth Day, or any ohter day, as if we are not, even if we are the most rabid of environmentalist, we act in a fashion that's an insult to nature and does it harm. We must be of nature, in nature, part of nature, and consistent with our natures, to act on any fashion that's really beneficial to nature, including our own natures.

And that's a deeply conservative thing, as well as a conservationist thing.

And it's something that modern Western society doesn't want to be about.

Footnotes:

*". . .sappy type poster crap".  This and the following line referred to the famous poster depicting a highly juvenile drawing of flowers and the lines that "War is not healthy for children and other living things". 

Well, d'uh.

Related threads:

Be who you are.

Mehr Mensch Sein

The Agrarian Lament: A lamentation. The modern world

Knowing where you are.

Young Diognetus in the modern world.

Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Today is Earth Day for 2021. . .

Earth Day, 2020

Earth Day, 2019

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

It's All Natural! Except for us.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for t...: 

Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Last year's entry on this topic was particularly good, so I'm repeating it:

Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on ...: 

Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

All of which are in the "little things mean a lot" category.

Quit buying bottled water.  It's almost always packaged in plastic and varies hardly at all from tap water.  Just get tap water.  If water in your area really sucks, okay you can do something, but bottled water isn't it.

I'll note, I don't include carbonated water, which is its own drink, in this. But buy it in the glass bottles or the aluminum cans.

By the way, if you live in the US, you don't need to pack around water constantly.  Americans carry more water on an individual daily basis than the British 8th Army used in the desert in all of World War Two.  You are hydrated just fine.

If you must pack water around with you like a desert explorer on an extended expedition, get a good metal container. We used to call these "canteens", but now water bottles are called something else.  Anyhow, get one of those.

Plant a garden.

Go hunting.

Go fishing.

Grow it, harvest it and process it yourself.

Switch to fountain pens, if you use pens.  Disposable ballpoint pens have gotten to the point where they write really nicely, but they're an entire industry based on disposal.  It's wasteful.

Don't buy it just because its new and you have an old one.  I don't know what it would be, but the buy it as its new ethos is wasteful also.

Walk there if you can.

Ride a bike there if you can.

If you are an outdoorsman and use an ATV to get to the sticks, get rid of it.  There are legitimate uses for them to be sure, and of all sorts, but hunting and fishing aren't two of them.  If you need a mule, get a mule.

Skip the sanctimony.  Almost all environmental sanctimony is handed out by people who have bought into theories of environmentalism that suffer in the face of reality, and tend to be, beyond that, virtue signaling.  Some people living really simple quite lives are much more green than people who make a big deal of claiming to be green.

If your clothes are synthetic, switch, when they wear out, to ones that aren't.  And buy durable ones.  That means buying plain or classic ones.  A good pair of Levi's lasts for eons, a Sheepskin coat is going to outlast a synthetic one by decades, a beaver felt broadbrimmed hat will last for 20 or more years when your high tech synthetic one has had to be replaced two or three times.

And your Levi's (and that's not the only thing) don't need to be washed nearly as often as you think they do, unless you work an occupation that makes them routinely dirty.

To add to that, quit buying the laundry soap that's perfumed.  It's just some weird chemicals and it just makes stuff smell weird, not clean.

Same thing with "laundry sheets".  You don't need them.

On perfumed stuff, I wish I could say the same thing about deodorant, a useless product that made its real appearance in the late 60s, but its now so ingrained in society there's no avoiding it.  At least it means that we have to put up with perfume, and even more useless product, less than we used to have to.

Make it yourself, if you can, whatever it is, from dinner to durables.

Go to church on Sunday and, if you are open to it, go to one that's an Apostolic Church.  An institution that has its eyes on the really long future and the really long past, and regards them all as pretty much the present, has a lot more going on for it than whatever organization you might be pondering joining.