Victory Farm Volunteers registering in Lane County. Oregon. Lovina Wilson, farm labor assistant, routes the first three children, and that is what they are, to register during the Mobilization Day program at the Frances Willard School in Eugene. The enrollees in the photo are, left to right, facing table front row: Glenn Cash,13; Howard Cash, 11; and Don Mickelwait, 13. This photo was taken in 1946, right after World War Two, demonstrating that wartime manpower shortages were ongoing. This would be, quite frankly, more than a bit much today, as these individuals are way to young to seriously work on a farm, unless they are working on their family farm, and they were frankly way too young then. Note the boys are wearing white t-shirts, with nothing emblazoned on them, and that girls are in the crowd as well.
There are a lot of varieties of this argument I keep seeing:
If you’re out here talking sht about immigrants but still going to the grocery store to feed yourself, that’s clown sht of the highest order.
Stop being lazy & get your hands in the dirt or shut the fck up.
From, of course, Twitter.
This is baloney.
To distill the argument, it is that the US must dare not get control of its border with Mexico, or at least not a fair degree of control, as the US is dependent upon those illegally crossiong for food production.
That argument is first and foremost baloney, as it somehow makes the assumption that the huge number of immigrants arriving from Central and South America are in fact arriving in order to work on farms. That isn't happening. They want to work, no doubt, but the migrant farm system is well established, and they aren't seeking to get jobs in cabbage fields this summer and then go back home.
In reality, most are economic migrants or migrants from Central and South American failed states. The US is racing towards becoming a failed state itself right now. Our government isn't working, and we're about to elect an imagined Caudillo who will have to turn on migrants like a health inspector turns on expired milk.
But economically, the farm sector isn't employing them.
Lots of other things are, such as the construction industry, local small businesses, and back door employment, which explains who we got in this mess. Democrats imagined, wrongly, that all future migrants are Democratic voters.* Republicans imagined them all as somebody who was going to mow their lawn for cheap. Turns out that they are none of those things.**
In reality, they take entry level manual labor jobs which, frankly, would go to Americans who need them, but for the price depression impact this has.
Which gets to the next thing.
The "agriculture depends on migrants" argument is, really, that American agriculture is habituated to cheap farm labor because the Federal Government, with apocalyptic visions of the future after World War Two, created a cheap food policy.
Frightened that Depression Era conditions would return after World War Two, and then frightened that conditions were going to go into the waste bin due to the Cold War, from 1945 on the government has done everything it can to keep foods as cheap as possible. Americans bitch about food prices, but they spend about 9% of their budget on food, and it generally keeps going down. The U.S. Government has tracked food prices since 1929, and it's the lowest ever, generally. From 1929 to 1952 Americans spending on food consumed generally above 20% of a family's income. In 1932, it was 22%. In 2008, in contrast, it was 5.6%.
That's great, for family budgets, and it has ancillary impacts on a lot of industries. Cheap food means that people can go to good restaurants (where you are actually a lot more likely to run into an illegal alien than in a cabbage patch) and have a really good dinner for pretty cheap, and then sit there over dinner and bitch about food prices. This hasn't always been the case. When Americans "ate out" well into the 1970s, they probably meant that they went to a diner for lunch. Growing up, trips to restaurants for dinner were so rare that they only occured, normally, when it was some sort of special occasion, like a birthday or anniversary. To take a date to a restaurant was a big deal, even when I was a college student. You were trying to really impress a girl if you took her out for a meal, and later you assessed the damage to your finances that had ensued.
Even fast food joints to some extent expressed this. We would often hit the burger joints on the weekends, but not daily. By the time my son was in high school, however, high schoolers hit the nearby fast food joints every day. Indeed, when I was in high school I ate in the cafeteria, the first time I'd eaten routinely at school. I didn't particularly like it, but that's what there was. When our high school cafeteria was condemned during my first year of high school, and prior to their building a new one, I briefly ate downtown, but it was too expensive, and I took up just brining a bad sandwich I'd made myself at home and sitting in the football stadium to eat it.
Glory Days indeed.
Now, fast food fare is absurdly cheap. Quite a few people I know hit Dirty Ron's Steakhouse every morning for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a cup of Joe on the way in to work, and frankly, they're not bad (and no, that nickname aside, that establishment is not dirty at all). And I've met working adults, including professionals, who go to Subway, or whatever, every day for lunch. "Value Meals" and the like are incredibly cheap. All of this because of a "cheap food" policy. Part of that policy is related to legal farm migrants, but they are not flooding across the Rio Grande or the desert and claiming asylum.
Nor, frankly, is an ongoing "cheap food" policy a good thing.
The cheap food policy has helped make Americans increasingly fat while driving smaller agricultural entities out of business. It's contributed to the concentration of everything, and not in a good way. It's made food prices unrealistically low, while divorcing Americans from the reality of the actual cost of things. It should end.
Part of that would be, quite frankly, to end the modern version of the Bracero program that has depressed the value of farm labor. When it came in, in 1943, it made a little bit of sense, maybe, perhaps. But eighty years later, it doesn't. Americans will work any job, contrary to what is claimed about them, but at wages that are realistic. Immigrant farm labor wages won't attract them, as the wages are too low.
In an era in which thousands of Americans are out on the streets without jobs, and in which there are rural areas that are basically depopulated save for the injured and left behind in smaller towns, lying between the consolidated farms, and in which we have urban areas and reservations that are hardcore reservoirs of poverty, if people were paid real wages, there's a ready-made source of labor. Sure, they aren't the best jobs in the world in some ways, but they are jobs. And they're also jobs for middle class younger people, who have a demonstrated interest in topics of the soil.
The numbers involved are not small. The US takes in 3,000,000 migrant farmworkers per year. Ending a program such as this would result in a big impact to farm production, and it'd jump food prices for sure as the positions were, and they ultimately would be, filled with American residents. It'd frankly also spur mechanization, which I'm not particularly keen on, as right now there are very expensive agricultural implements that are not employed as migrant farm labor is cheaper.
But ultimately, the principal of subsidiarity should come into play here for lots of reasons.
None of the reasons involve the thousands crossing the US Southern border, who are people facing an existential crisis that must be addressed. They aren't the migrant farmworkers however. That's a completely different topic.
Footnotes:
*Democrats have long assumed that Hispanic immigrants are natural Democratic voters, without learning the lessons of demographics or history.
Immigrants tend to be Democratic voters early in their demographic's migration history. Irish immigrants were. Italian immigrants were. This frankly had a lot to do with patronage. But as they became established, this became much less the case. To declare yourself "Irish" today doesn't mean that somebody should automatically assume you are a Democrat.
And that's true even if you have 100% Hibernian heritage, or to take the Italian example, if you can trace your lineage back to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus' third cousin, once removed. Truth be known, in a species in which Joe Cro Magnon pretty quickly asked Lucy Neanderthal out on a date, those straight lines of lineage don't last very long. To declare yourself "Irish" today, in the US, might merely mean that you think the Irish drink green Budweiser with corned beef sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day.
Moreover, Hispanics in the US have and retain (although they are rapidly losing it) a very distinct culture which is existentially Catholic and conservative. This is so much the case that the radicals of the Mexican Revolution, in the form of the Constitutionalist, sought to stamp it out, much like their semi fellow travelers the Bolsheviks went after Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917. And they had a similar success rate, which means lots of Mexican Hispanics, which is what most Hispanics in the US are often only semi observant, but culturally Catholic still. Given that, the darling issues of the Democratic Greenwich Village set, which forms the central corps of Democratic thought, are deeply at odds with what most Hispanics believe. And this only becomes more the case when Hispanics from outside of Northern Mexican ancestry are considered. So, not too surprisingly, they're turning Republican.
They are also due to the border crisis itself. Hispanics along the border whose ancestors settled there two hundred years ago, or in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, or even in earlier recent migrant waves, are not really of the same culture, no matter how dimwitted Americans are about it, as those now crossing and the flood is wrecking their communities. Americans may see Hondurans and Guatemalans, as well as Venezuelans, as being the same as people from Chihuahua, but people from Chihuahua who live in Eagle Pass do not.
**And they are people, which oddly seems forgotten, except as an argument over the crisis. Democrats thinking they were mindless sheep who could be herded into the voting booths and Republicans thinking they were something akin to slaves is inexcusible.
Some of it is related to costs. Energy, fertilizer and transport costs have risen in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while at the same time, governments and retailers, have moved to reduce rising food prices in what basically amounts to a joint wartime effort to keep "cheap food" rolling.
It's partially a "cheap food" policy, then, which the US has had since the Second World War.
And ironically, in that wartime category the cost of Ukrainian agricultural imports are down as the EU waived quotas and duties following Russia’s invasion in order to try to make up for the impact on the huge Ukrainian agricultural sector which was stressed due to Russian control of the Black Sea.
And extreme weather, which is been very notable in Wyoming this year, and if things don't turn around will lead to a major drought this summer (although we're not supposed to talk about that here), is impacting production in Southern Europe.
And then just as with Franklin Roosevelt's Depression Era agricultural programs, and the post World War Two cheap food policy in the US, Europe's six decade old common agricultural policy (CAP), a huge subsidy system designed for food security. . . for the consumer, massively favors economies of scale.
That has resulted in farm consolidation, just as it has here, with the number of farms in the EU dropping off by 1/3d since 2005.
Somewhat ironically, however, a EU program designed to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, based on a "farm to fork" or "farm to table" model, has been unpopular, as such things usually are with farmers, even when, if they stop to think about it, it'd help them. Anyhow, the EU has the ability to impose rules, and its imposing rules to force this.
Among the rules being imposed are ones to cut the use of pesticides by 50% by 2030, cutting fertilizer use by 20%, and allowing land to be idled up to the rate of 25% of all European farmland.
That latter, which sort of resembles some policies in the US, no doubt is seen as a shocker, but as agricultural production has become more efficient, and the European population is rocketing into decline, it makes sense.
And environmental programs in individual countries, such as ending tax breaks on agricultural diesel to balance the budget in Germany, or reducing nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands, have been unpopular.
Well, what of this?
Interesting, at the same time, in Southern Europe there's been a trend of people returning to small agricultural holdings and making a go of it. This has been occurring in France and Greece. And maybe there's a thought there.
Farmers are among the most resistant people in the world to change. So much so, that it must be an inherent part of the nature of farming. At the same time, they're also among the people who are most wedded to doing things in an expensive way, once they adapt to it. The disaster that fence to fence farming would bring to individual farmers was something that Willard W. Cochrane warned about in the early 1960s, and he also worried about the evolving scale and expense of farm equipment. He actually proposed to regulate it in favor of small farmers, but of course that's something that Americans, who are addicted to economies of scale to their own detriment, would never do.
European farmers, who were still principally equine powered until the end of World War Two, have become addicted to the petroleum fueled agriculture that the US brought in starting in the 1920s. Sadly, we're likely to go to more and more automated farming, and by extension make large number of Americans more and more miserable. Europeans are likely to follow suit.
Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village. Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.
Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".
"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.
We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures. This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings.
I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.
For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.1
The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world. That just isn't the case in this instance.
A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing. Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true. That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.
In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing. Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization. And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.
We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again. Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time. Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.
This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.
Food is a good example.
Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat. In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations. Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad. People took measures they normally wouldn't.
Not everyone did, however.
At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't. People would starve instead.
Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight. Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things. Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.
As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:
Sergeant Chillum: Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.
Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?
Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.
This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one. Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight. No culture in a state of nature does.
When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people. When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.
So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.
Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.
Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand. While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families. Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well. Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.
In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio. Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time. A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days. Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.
Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours. Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game. There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.
Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:
Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.
Emperor Haile Selassie
Married men, take your wives. Not married? Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.
It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true. Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable. War provides a pretty good example again.
Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known. If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder. Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.
Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war. This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.
Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt. That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go. Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.
Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time. The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers. However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.
So too are much of our current living patters.
Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.
And that's deeply unnatural.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours. And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses. In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.
It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:
Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches. But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life. AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours. They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.
Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like. Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor. Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.
By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s. Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars. Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed. Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period. The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.
Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice. Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating. When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did. Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.
Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.
Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses. This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it. That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured. While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak. Secretaries and assistants. Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses. One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.
There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature. Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife". I've even heard a person refer to herself that way. Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.
Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.
In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none. As we earlier posted:
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?
We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear. We should be looking at how it comes about.
Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.
Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this. Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks. It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.
Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .
The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated. It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual. It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual. Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.
Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies. It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy. A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will. As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution. Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.
It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class. In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy. In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.
English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason. Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease". Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender. Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school. Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to. Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.
It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.
In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally. But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis. People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.
Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution. We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one. While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost. The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating. Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.
None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.
But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about. And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.
All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.
And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.
But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything. This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.
The evidence supports the contrary.
Which gets us back to our original point. African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have. But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.
And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle. Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about. We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.
Footnotes:
1. Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed. My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.
When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has. Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change. The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage. In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.
On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.
His points were really good.
Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern. It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016. Well, guess what, she has a right to do that. You have a right to ignore it.
She also expressed support for abortion being legal. I feel it should be illegal. That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.
But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out. He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.
Indeed, they are.
Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club. Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex. Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.
Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed. Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.
And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.
Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private. It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues. And we really don't need to. But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper. As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.
It's not that there's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about. They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do. No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.
Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.
The Andy Griffith Show
I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun. It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.
It's interesting.
The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much. It ran from 1960 to 1968. It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964. Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.
But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here. The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago. That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.
Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means. But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers. To some degree, that world view had returned.
Epilog
The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.
CODY - Worland Wildlife Biologist Bart Kroger retired last month, bringing his 35-year career with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to a close.
“Bart has been referred to as the ‘core of the agency’, meaning through his dedication and continuous hard work, he has significantly and meaningfully impacted wildlife management within his district and throughout the state,” said Corey Class, Cody region wildlife management coordinator. “Throughout his career, he has been a solid, steady and dependable wildlife biologist, providing a foundation for wildlife conservation and management in the Bighorn Basin.”
After obtaining 72 months of service, you are eligible to elect a monthly benefit at
retirement age. The 72 months of service do not have to be consecutive months.
Retirement Eligibility
You are eligible for retirement when you reach age 50 and are vested. There is no
early retirement under this plan. You must begin drawing your benefit no later than
age 65.
Which means, as a practical matter, if you are to draw retirement as a Wyoming Game Warden, you need to take the job no later than the beginning of your 59th year.
Of course, if you started at age 59, you wouldn't be drawing much, if anything.
That doesn't mean, of course, that you couldn't be hired after age 59. You'd just draw no retirement.
The actual statute on this matter states the following, as we noted in a prior thread, from 2023, quoted below:
This differs, I'd note, significantly from the Federal Government. The cutoff there is age 37. That's it.
Have a wildlife management degree? Spend the last few years in some other state agency? Win the Congressional Medal of Honor for single handled defeating the Boko Haram? 38 years old now? Well, too bloody bad for you.
Anyhow, I guess this says something about the American concept that age is just a number and the hands of the clock don't really move.
They do.
On a somewhat contrary note, I was in something this week when a 70-year-old man indicated he might retire in order to take a job as a commercial airline pilot.
He's never been employed in that capacity, but he's had the license for 50 years. It wouldn't be carrying people for United or something, but in some other commercial capacity.
He's always wanted to do it, and has an offer.
Well, more power to him.
I did a lot of what this lawyer is doing here, when first practicing, in front of barrister cases just like this. No young lawyer does that now.
I spoke to a lawyer I've known the entire time I've been practicing law, almost. He's four years younger than me, which would make him 56 or so. He's worked his entire career in general civil, in a small and often distressed town, in a firm founded by his parents. When I was first practicing, it was pretty vibrant.
Now he's the only one left.
He's retiring this spring. This was motivated by his single employee's decision to retire.
I was really surprised, in part due to his age. I'm glad that he can retire, but it was a bit depressing. We're witnessing, in Wyoming, the death of the small town civil firm. Everything is gravitating to the larger cities, and frankly in the larger cities, they're in competition with the big cities in Colorado and Utah. That's insured a bill in the legislature to try to recruit lawyers to rural areas.*
It's not going to work.
The problem has been, for some time, that it's impossible to recruit young lawyers to small rural areas. The economics don't allow for it. The economics don't allow for it, in part, as the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam down on the Board of Law Examiners, and that resulted in opening the doors to Denver and Salt Lake lawyers. It's been something the small firms have been competing against ever since.
And not only that, but some sort of demographic change has operated to just keep younger lawyers out of smaller places, and frankly to cause them to opt for easier paths than civil law in general. I know older lawyers that came from the larger cities in the state, and set up small town practices when they were young, as that's where the jobs were and having a job was what they needed to have. I've even known lawyers who went to UW who moved here from somewhere else who took that path, relocating from big Eastern or Midwestern cities to do so.
No longer. Younger lawyers don't do that.
Quite a few don't stick with civil practice at all. They leave for government work, where the work hours are regular, and the paycheck isn't dependent on billable hours. And recently, though we are not supposed to note it, young women attorneys reflect a new outlook in which a lot of them bail out of practice or greatly reduce their work hours after just a few years in, a desire to have a more regular domestic life being part of that.
I guess people can't be blamed for that, but we can, as a state, be blamed for being shortsighted. Adopting the UBE was shortsighted. Sticking with it has been inexcusable. I'm not the only one who has said so, and frankly not the only one who probably paid a price for doing so. The reaction to voices crying in the wilderness is often to close the windows so you don't have to hear them. Rumor had it, which I've never seen verified and have heard expressly denied by a person within the law school administration, that it was done in order to aid the law school, under the theory that it would make UW law degrees transportable, which had pretty much the practical effect on the local law as Commodore Matthew Perry opening up trade with Japan.
Wyoming Board of Law Examiners bringing in the UBE.
The lawyer in this case is worried, as he has no hobbies and doesn't know what he'll do with himself. I'm surprised how often this concern is expressed. To only have the law, or any work, is sad. But a court reporter, about my age, expressed the same concern to me the other day.
Court reporting has really taken a beating in this state, more so than lawyers. When I was first practicing, every community had court reporters. Now there are hardly any left at all. Huge firms are down to just a handful of people, and people just aren't coming into the occupation. It's a real concern to lawyers.
It's always looked like an interesting job to me, having all the diversity of being a lawyer, with seemingly a lot less stress. But having never done it, perhaps I'm wildly in error. We really don't know what other people's jobs are like unless we've done them.
A lawyer I know just died by his own hand.
I met him when he took over for a very long time Wyoming trial attorney upon that attorney's death.
The attorney he took over for had died when he went in his backyard and put a rifle bullet through his brain. He was a well known attorney, and we could tell something wasn't quite right with him. Just the day prior, he called me and asked for an extension on something. I'd already given two. I paused, and then, against my better judgment, said, "well. . . okay".
I'd known him too long to say no.
He was clearing his schedule. If I had said no, I feel, he wouldn't have done it, and he'd be alive today.
The new attorney came in and was sort of like a goofy force of nature. Hard to describe. A huge man, probably in his 40s at the time, but very childlike. He talked and talked. Depositions would be extended due to long meandering conversational interjections, as I learned in that case and then a very serious subsequent one.
He was hugely proud of having been a member of a legendary local plaintiff's firm. That didn't really matter much to me then, and it still doesn't. My family has always had an odd reaction to the supposedly honorific. My father never bothered to collect his National Defense Service Medal for serving during the Korean War, I didn't bother to get my Reserve Overseas Training Ribbon, or my South Korean award for Operation Team Spirit, I don't have my law school diploma's anymore. . . It's not that they aren't honors, it's just, well, oh well. We tend to value other things, which in some ways sets standards that are highers than others, and very difficult to personally meet.
Anyhow, the guy was very friendly and told me details of his life, not all of which were true. He was raised by his grandmother, his grandmother had somehow encouraged him to go to law school, Both true.
He was from Utah and grown up there, but consistently denied being a Mormon. His wife was Mormon, he said. He was an Episcopalian. As I'm very reserved, I'm not really going to talk religion with somebody I only casually and professionally know, as opposed to one of my very extroverted and devout partners who will bring it up at the drop of a hat, and his religious confession didn't particularly matter to me, given the light nature of our relationship. As it turns out, and as I suspected, that wasn't even remotely true. He was and always had been a Mormon. Why did he lie about that? No idea.
I suppose this is some sort of warning here, maybe.
The first lawyer noted in this part of this entry had suffered something hugely traumatic early in his life and never really got over it. Some people roll with the punches on traumas and some do not. We hear about combat veterans all the time who live with the horrors they experienced, and which break them down, all the time, but I've known a couple who didn't have that sort of reaction at all, and who could coolly relate their combat experiences. Others can't get over something that happened to them, ever.
With the second lawyers, there were some oddities, one being that he jumped from firm to firm, and to solo, and back and forth, all the time. That's unusual. Another was that he seemed to have pinned his whole identify on being a lawyer. It's one thing, like the retiring fellow above, to have worked it your whole life and have nothing else to do, it's quite another to have that make up everything you are. He'd drunk deeply of the plaintiff's lawyer propaganda about helping the little guy and all that crap, and didn't really realize that litigators often hurt people as often as they help them, or do both at the same time. Maybe the veil had come off. Maybe he should never have been a lawyer in the first place. Maybe it was organic and had nothing to do with any of this.
Well, the moral of this story, or morals, if there are any, would be this. You don't have endless time to do anything, 70-year-old commercial airline pilots aside. You probably don't know what it's like to do something unless you've actually done it, but you can investigate it and learn as much as possible. The UBE, which the Wyoming Supreme Court was complicit in adopting, is killing the small town civil lawyer and only abrogating it, or its successor, and restoring the prior system can address that. The entire whaling for justice plaintiff's lawyer ethos is pretty much crap. And, finally, you had some sort of identify before you took up your occupation. Unless that identity was what you became, before you became it, don't let the occupation become it. It may be shallower than you think.
Footnotes:
The bill:
SENATE FILE NO. SF0033
Wyoming rural attorney recruitment program.
Sponsored by: Joint Judiciary Interim Committee
A BILL
for
AN ACT relating to attorneys-at-law; establishing the rural attorney recruitment pilot program; specifying eligibility requirements for counties and attorneys to participate in the program; specifying administration, oversight and payment obligations for the program; requiring reports; providing a sunset date for the program; authorizing the adoption of rules, policies and procedures; providing an appropriation; and providing for an effective date.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:
Section 1. W.S. 33‑5‑201 through 33‑5‑203 are created to read:
ARTICLE 2
RURAL ATTORNEY RECRUITMENT PROGRAM
33‑5‑201. Rural attorney recruitment program established; findings; program requirements; county qualifications; annual reports.
(a) In light of the shortage of attorneys practicing law in rural Wyoming counties, the legislature finds that the establishment of a rural attorney recruitment program constitutes a valid public purpose, of primary benefit to the citizens of the state of Wyoming.
(b) The Wyoming state bar may establish a rural attorney recruitment program to assist rural Wyoming counties in recruiting attorneys to practice law in those counties.
(c) Each county eligible under this subsection may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program. A county is eligible to participate in the program if the county:
(i) Has a population of not greater than twenty‑five thousand (25,000);
(ii) Has an average of not greater than one and one‑half (1.5) qualified attorneys in the county for every one thousand (1,000) residents. As used in this paragraph, "qualified attorney" means an attorney who provides legal services to private citizens on a fee basis for an average of not less than twenty (20) hours per week. "Qualified attorney" shall not include an attorney who is a full‑time judge, prosecutor, public defender, judicial clerk, in‑house counsel, trust officer and any licensed attorney who is in retired status or who is not engaged in the practice of law;
(iii) Agrees to provide the county share of the incentive payment required under this article;
(iv) Is determined to be eligible to participate in the program by the Wyoming state bar.
(d) Before determining a county's eligibility, the Wyoming state bar shall conduct an assessment to evaluate the county's need for an attorney and the county's ability to sustain and support an attorney. The Wyoming state bar shall maintain a list of counties that have been assessed and are eligible to participate in the program under this article. The Wyoming state bar may revise any county assessment or conduct a new assessment as the Wyoming State bar deems necessary to reflect any change in a county's eligibility.
(e) In selecting eligible counties to participate in the program, the Wyoming state bar shall consider:
(i) The county's demographics;
(ii) The number of attorneys in the county and the number of attorneys projected to be practicing in the county over the next five (5) years;
(iii) Any recommendations from the district judges and circuit judges of the county;
(iv) The county's economic development programs;
(v) The county's geographical location relative to other counties participating in the program;
(vi) An evaluation of any attorney or applicant for admission to the state bar seeking to practice in the county as a program participant, including the attorney's or applicant's previous or existing ties to the county;
(vii) Any prior participation of the county in the program;
(viii) Any other factor that the Wyoming state bar deems necessary.
(f) A participating eligible county may enter into agreements to assist the county in meeting the county's obligations for participating in the program.
(g) Not later than October 1, 2024 and each October 1 thereafter that the program is in effect, the Wyoming state bar shall submit an annual report to the joint judiciary interim committee on the activities of the program. Each report shall include information on the number of attorneys and counties participating in the program, the amount of incentive payments made to attorneys under the program, the general status of the program and any recommendations for continuing, modifying or ending the program.
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, any attorney licensed to practice law in Wyoming or an applicant for admission to the Wyoming state bar may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the rural attorney recruitment program established under this article. No attorney or applicant shall participate in the program if the attorney or applicant has previously participated in the program or has previously participated in any other state or federal scholarship, loan repayment or tuition reimbursement program that obligated the attorney to provide legal services in an underserved area.
(b) Not more than five (5) attorneys shall participate in the program established under this article at any one (1) time.
(c) Subject to available funding and as consideration for providing legal services in an eligible county, each attorney approved by the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program shall be entitled to receive an incentive payment in five (5) equal annual installments. Each annual incentive payment shall be paid on or after July 1 of each year. Each annual incentive payment shall be in an amount equal to ninety percent (90%) of the University of Wyoming college of law resident tuition for thirty (30) credit hours and annual fees as of July 1, 2024.
(d) Subject to available funding, the supreme court shall make each incentive payment to the participating attorney. The Wyoming state bar and each participating county shall remit its share of the incentive payment to the supreme court in a manner and by a date specified by the supreme court. The Wyoming state bar shall certify to the supreme court that a participating attorney has completed all annual program requirements and that the participating attorney is entitled to the incentive payment for the applicable year. The responsibility for incentive payments under this section shall be as follows:
(i) Fifty percent (50%) of the incentive payments shall be from funds appropriated to the supreme court;
(ii) Thirty‑five percent (35%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by each county paying for attorneys participating in the program in the county;
(iii) Fifteen percent (15%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by the Wyoming state bar from nonstate funds.
(e) Subject to available funding for the program, each attorney participating in the program shall enter into an agreement with the supreme court, the participating county and the Wyoming state bar that obligates the attorney to practice law full‑time in the participating county for not less than five (5) years. As part of the agreement required under this subsection, each participating attorney shall agree to reside in the participating county for the period in which the attorney practices law in the participating county under the program. No agreement shall be effective until it is filed with and approved by the Wyoming state bar.
(f) Any attorney who receives an incentive payment under this article and subsequently breaches the agreement entered into under subsection (e) of this section shall repay all funds received under this article pursuant to terms and conditions established by the supreme court. Failure to repay funds as required by this subsection shall subject the attorney to license suspension.
(g) The Wyoming state bar may promulgate any policies or procedures necessary to implement this article. The supreme court may promulgate any rules necessary to implement this article.
(h) The program established under this article shall cease on June 30, 2029, provided that attorneys participating in the program as of June 30, 2029 shall complete their obligation and receive payments as authorized by this article.
33‑5‑203. Sunset.
(a) W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 are repealed effective July 1, 2029.
(b) Notwithstanding subsection (a) of this section, attorneys participating in the rural attorney pilot program authorized in W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 shall complete the requirements of the program and shall be entitled to the authorized payments in accordance with W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 as provided on June 30, 2029.
Section 2. There is appropriated one hundred ninety‑seven thousand three hundred seventy‑five dollars ($197,375.00) from the general fund to the supreme court for the period beginning with the effective date of this act and ending June 30, 2029 to be expended only for purposes of providing incentive payments for the rural attorney recruitment program established under this act. This appropriation shall not be transferred or expended for any other purpose. Notwithstanding W.S. 9‑2‑1008, 9‑2‑1012(e) and 9‑4‑207, this appropriation shall not revert until June 30, 2029.
This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.
It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew. Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.
Everything about this is wrong on an existential level. AI, frankly, is wrong.
And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest.
There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift
I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing. She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.
I suppose that's the root of it.
Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift. This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.
Swift is dating some football player. I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me. Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting. Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers). Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy. There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.
And so now we have this total weirdness:
Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec:
People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly:
They’re elevating her to an idol.
Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!
Far right activist Laura Loomer:
The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.
Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …
And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion.
This is insane.
Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics. What more evidence of this is required than this?
Celebrity endorsements.
Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden. I read something that claimed she had in 2020.
I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.
There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump. Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it. So why the concern.
Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of. I.e, she's young and an independent female.
Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?
I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow. I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything. Freaking out about it is just silly.
Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.
This is a tragedy.
It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight. We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news. Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.
But this serves as a warning. Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps. And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not. Most families find this out.
But what about when they're running for office?
The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park. Heart attack.
This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?
A concluding thought. We're getting scary stupid.
Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.
Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this. It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.
That's not happening in the country now at all. Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness. This is out of hand.
