This the final part of a twelve part series by Fr. Joseph Krupp on the war against Japan during World War Two, culminating in the decision to drop the two atomic bombs in August, 1945.
So why am I linking this in here?
Indeed, this entire series is teed up to appear on Lex Anteinternet in August, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two and the dropping of the two bombs. This 12th installment, however, deals with post war Japan for the most part.
A lot of people know that Douglas MacArthur wrote the Japanese constitution, or caused it be written. Fewer know that he reworked the Japanese economy, although I did. Japan is one of the few modern nations which is regarded as having incorporated a significant degree of agrarianism and distributism into its modern economy, although that's long enough ago that a lot of it is likely lost now.
The discussion on that is well worth listening too here, and goes beyond the situation of Japan itself, and into a agro distributist economy to some degree in general.
I remember many years ago see a cartoon depicting young people with, basically, mid 20th Century style winter farm clothes that had the caption "It is to be wished that the fad of dressing North Dakota will soon pass", or something to that effect.
The satirical cartoonist accidentally sort of anticipated the fad, if it is one, of dressing Hipster.
I saw this couple recently at a City Brew.
Clothes are meant to send a message, whether we mean them to or not, and we normally mean them to. What's the message here?
This was, I note, on a Sunday. My gess is that the young, probably dating, couple had just come from church.
By any measure, this is tragic. And the story is well written, and sympathetic. Indeed, it provides some details about Hageman that I was unaware of, including the size of her very large family I didn't realize that she was one of six siblings.
That frankly explains why she's a lawyer. The law was, and to some extent still remains, the occupation that agricultural parents often want to see a child go into, often due to the erroneous belief that lawyers don't really work.
That's not the point here, however. At some point in her post high school life Hageman turned to the very hard right, or at least seemed to, and has been part of the Wyoming position that's all in on unaltered fossil fuel production.
The degree to which agriculturalist refuse to accept the science on this in Wyoming is itself really remarkable. Farmers and ranchers depend on the land being sustainable, worry about drought and heat, and then go on to dismiss what they're seeing with their own eyes.
The article notes that the Hageman's tragically lost their early home on the ranch, with this one currently belonging to a nephew. I believe that nephew may have appeared in her campaign ads. It also related:
About 8,000 acres of Hugh Hageman’s 25,000-to-30,000-acre spread burned, taking away some of the pasture needed for his 1,000 head of cattle.
“It’s devastating,” said Hugh Hageman when reached by Cowboy State Daily late Friday.
I'm sure it is.
Reality calls up on us to recognize it, not hide from it.
And a common political theme in Wyoming, albeit here from a doomed attempt at displacing the current incumbent Senator, with the incumbent right below him:
Wyomingites claim, and very often really do, have a deep love of the wildness of our state and nature. And yet, at the same time, the economy of the state, and its reliance upon extractive industries, causes a deep loyalty to the fossil fuel industries, beyond that, very ironically, which those industries have themselves.
Speak to any of the more knowledgeable and powerful people within the coal or petroleum industries, and you will not tend to get debate on anthropocentric caused global warming. They accept it, and frankly accept that they're going away in their current forms. They will debate how rapidly they can go away, with quite a bit of variance between that. Many in the industry are realpolitik practitioners in regard to energy, accepting the decline as inevitable, but cynical about how fast it can occur. Some, however, are nearly "green" in their view, and see a rapid phase out.
It's at the wellhead level, and the coal shovel level, that you have those who can't accept it. The same people will look forward to elk season, but can't imagine that what's happening is happening, and that it's bad for the elk. But then many of the same people imagine themselves being outdoorsman while planted on the back of an ATV.
Politicians, some genuine, and some not, emphasize the wallet end of this. "America needs", "America depends", etc. Well, it's passing away.
Passing away with it may be the town of Heartville Wyoming, but not due to economics, but due to catastrophic fire.
Human memories are flawed, and that's where we get into false debates and the The Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. The flipside, interestingly enough, is the Imposter Syndrome, in which highly competent people imagine that they are not.
Combine the Dunning-Kruger effect with poor memories, poor education and dislocation from your native place, and you get what we have here.
Add in economic self interest, and well you really get what we have here.
I'll hear all the time that the weather today is the same as it always was. BS. My memory on these things is good, and I can recall that 100F days were so rare when I was a kid that entire years went by in which we didn't experience them. Nor did we experience constant year after year fires like this. Indeed, as a National Guardsmen I was sent to two fires, back when resources were so thin on this topic, as they weren't really needed, that this was routine for the Guard.
Two fires in six years.
I've never heard of a Wyoming town being evacuated for a fire until now.
Yes, fires have always occurred, as the naysayers will note, but not so often and not like this.
And to add to it, whether Wyomingites want to believe it or not, coal in particular is on its way out. It simply is. 500,000 people can sit in a corner of the country saying "nuh uh", but that's not going to make it change. It's been on the way out for a century or more:
Petroleum is less vulnerable than coal, in part because of the often forgotten petrochemical industry. A friend of mine who was a geologist and and an engineer was of the view that the consumption of petroleum for ground transportation ought to be phased out simply for that reason, to save it for petrochemicals. But big changes are coming here too. Electric vehicles are coming in, like it or not. The switch to green, and all that means, some good and some bad, is coming.
Denying that and maintaining that the rest of the country must pretend its 1973 isn't going to change that.
