Lex Anteinternet: Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.

Lex Anteinternet: Things in the air. Some observations with varying...:

Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.

 

Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Therefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.

St. Philip Neri.

I've recently had the opportunity, or rather no choice, but to observe some interesting personalities at work.

The first one I'll note I've known for a very long time, and over time I've watched this person sort of crawl into themselves.  

They're mad.

I'm not really sure at what.  But I'll make an observation below that may explain it.

This person had a really rough early life, but it picked up considerable in the person's teens.  Still, coming from a "blended" family, this person sort of got the short end of the stick on a major family deal, and was quietly resentful about it.

Now the non blood "step" is seeking to address it.  The person is middle aged, and the other person is in early old age, as am I.  The middle aged person is now outright refusing to accept the fix.

What the crap?

"They could have done that years ago. . .".

Dumbest excuse for being a difficult pain in the ass ever.

Same person has something much like this shorter term.  

I've also had the occasion to observe a really angry person.  The really angry person is obviously pretty intelligent, but also obviously very uneducated.  It's a bad combination.

A lot of fairly intelligent, but uneducated, people like to use words that they don't know the meaning of, so they use them incorrectly.  This person does that repeatedly.  If you know what the words actually mean, it's really very sad.

It's also a bit sad to see how this works when the bloom is off the rose of righteous, if misguided, indignation.  When lots of people have their pitchforks out, a person in this situation is sort of a leader.  But real people, with family, jobs, children, move on.  They have to.  New things develop, olds things go by the wayside.  

Watching somebody getting into a one sided yelling match while everyone else is just bored is sad, in an odd sort of way.  You can tell they know that themselves.  The spotlight moved on.

There's a lot of Twitter Twits raging about how pastors didn't preach on Charlie Kirk last week. As I've said before, why would they?  And if they did, in a truly Christian fashion, what would they have said.

Mind you, I'm a Catholic, not a member of a do it yourself protestant church that is heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.

Truth be known, Americans always have been.

If you did preach on Kirk, the preaching probably would be awkward for all.  You could simply make it:

We see today the horror of the Western world's perversion of our God given natures, and how that warps the mind and leaves it prey to evils of all kind.  Let us keep that in mind in our society, as we address such lies as transgenderism.

But that's only one such ill that warps our nature.  How did we get there?  Allowing for mass societal infanticide, which Kirk complained about?  Yes.  But also making our reproductive organs chemical cesspools designed to destroy nature from the onset, and ignoring the injunction against divorce, warping marriage into a  big party for "fulfillment"  Those of you in the pews contracepting, or living with third or fourth "spouses", you are as much to blame for the death as transgenderism is.

So too those who now identify their religion with any political party.  Our  home is in the next world, not this one, and the Republican Party or Democratic Party are not an apostolic synod.  If you are finding your politicians to be saints, you need to sit alone and pray for yourself.

Bear in mind also that our time will come like a thief in the night.   We cannot rely on a future to repent, as we may not have that future.  The sins we commit for any reason, including with our words, may find themselves still on our souls.  Let us resolve to be right with God today.

Probably everyone would be mad

Which gets me to this.

Charlie Kirk, I'll fully accept, was Christian.  He said some very Christian things, and some very non Christian things.  He was a provocateur, and that's a dangerous thing for a person's soul.

As for the other two people mentioned here, I don't know about one, but I do know about the other, that being the first one.  That person is a Christian but more or less a lazy American sort of Christian. They believe in God, have a grasp of Christ, and figure if you don't steal or shoot people, you are probably good with God and they don't want to know much more than that.

That describes most Americans, quite frankly.

That hasn't always been the case, however.

Those Christians who are all upset about Kirk not being mentioned from the pulpit are too heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.  When the next world arrives for them, and it will soon, and they're not recognized, saying "I left my church as there was no preaching about Kirk" won't make up for not feeding the poor, letting people die in droves in Gaza, and the like.  Presenting your "I'm a real read blooded (white) American card" isn't going to get you a free pass.

And, additionally, the pastors whom they want to preach on Kirk probably ought to instead preach instead on greed, divorce, shacking up, and other stuff that the American Civil Religion is pretty okay with.

And, also, here's something else.

I saw a Twitter Twit who was outraged as a transgendered person murdered his parents in Utah awhile back, and the news, he thought, had not paid any attention to it.

Well, I'm sure they did in Utah, but that's not a national news story.  Part of our contemporary problems in this country are that we treat local stories as if they're of global importance, while ignoring global stories because they don't pertain to us.

Christians, mostly Catholics, are being murdered in droves in Africa. That is important. Why don't we hear about that?

Well, they're black, African, and Catholic.  Ho hum. . . 

But there's more to this, Outraged Twitter Twits.  Charlie Kirk was murdered last week.  Most Americans no longer care one bit.

That may be uncomfortable for those who are a member of the populist Sturmabteilung, but it's the truth.  Charlie Kirk isn't going to become their Horst Wessel as most Americans just don't care.  They're desensitized to killing, which is actually at a record low in any event, and by now most average Americans are sick of the right and the left and worried about groceries, while starting to watch the national opiate, football.  Sydney Sweeney's cleavage falling out of her jeans jacket will have longer legs than this.

We aren't going to have a civil war. There's not going to be a lot more violence.  And they'll be disappointed.

Speaking of crawling into one's self (you'll have to go back up to the top for the reference), I've seen that happening to somebody I know, whose husband I know better.

And frankly I sort of see this in a fair amount with younger Boomer and older Gen X women . . . women who bought the lie that careers will make them happy.

Frequently it plays out with the same script.  Well educated middle class women of this vintage married well educated men.  The men of the same generation were still part of the "you need to get a good job to support your family" culture, as we've seen before, but the women were part of the "a career will make you happy".  What seems to have happened to a lot of them is that work didn't make them happy, no surprise, and at some point many, but not all, dropped out of it.

Kids grew up and moved on, if they had kids at all.  Now they're getting to what would normally be retirement years and they feel cheated and lost.

The story for a lot of men isn't much different.  I see it with professional men all the time.  Earlier this week a lawyer in his 70s told me gleefully how he loves his job.  Oh horseshit.  There's just nothing left.  The thing is, however, for women who bought off on this, there's really nothing left.  Quite a few of them, however, are in pretty good economic situations due to a husband that worked for decades to support everyone, and who has kept on.

Anyhow, in this case, the spouse, probably of over 30 years, packed up and left basically with no warning.

She'd been seeing a counsellor, a profession that does so much damage to people it isn't funny. The counsellor had told her to work on herself, which is pretty close to instructing somebody to be a narcissist.  She moved out, moved away, and is camping with her adult daughters.  They're getting a "grey divorce".  

The husband, whom in my view should have retired some years ago.  There's some fault there.  A lot of times when I see some old male lawyer keeping on keeping on, I really wonder what his relationship is at home.

All in all, I suspect, he worked too much, she got lonely, and wondered why life hadn't turned out like Cosmopolitan promised it was supposed to.  

Well, it was never going to.

I'd also note that he was raised Catholic, while she was not, but he fits into the Catholic satellite category. That is, the lessons of the faith were just too inconvenient for him to apply.  He, and his siblings, remain cultural Catholics, basically, but not practicing ones.  It clearly tortures him as he knows better.  Probably not that much should have been expected out of her, however, as she was never Catholic.

And so you have a couple living the 1970s version of the American Dream, which turns out to be a pretty shallow dream at that.  Same with the folks mentioned above.

And the shallowness of that dream explains a lot about post Boomer generations abandoning it and returning to more foundational existential beliefs.

The State bar convention is going on.  I never go it in person.  I don't have the time, and I'm such an introvert that I don't want to go to the dinners and the like just on the random chance one of my lawyer friends might be there, but now you can attend some of it electronically.  I did that yesterday as I needed the CLE credits. 

I wish I hadn't.

The first CLE I attended I picked up as I needed the ethics credit.  It was an hour of "mindfulness" which is usually a bunch of bullshit suggestions on how to deal with stress that you really can't implement in the real world.  That's what it turned out to be, in part, but it descended into "this job really sucks" for an hour.  All of the panelists, including a judge and a justice, had to have counselling at some point in their careers for work stress.

I hope some students were in the audience to see that.  If even Wyoming Supreme Court justices say the practice is so bad they need psychological help to endure it, well that's pretty bad.

The last CLE of the day was the legislative panel.  Usually I think of that as being new laws that are coming down the pipeline, which it partially was, but the first part started off as a plea from a lawyer/legislator for lawyers to run for office, noting how in Wyoming that's declined enormously.  That turned into an outright dumping on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which needs to be dumped on.  The last part of that session, however, dealt with the ongoing massive decline in civil practitioners putting in for judgeships.  They just aren't doing it.  They were urged to do it.

As noted, I wasn't there to ask a question, but if I had been, I'd have asked why should they, when Governor's have agendas and the current Governor is only really interested in appointing prosecutors.  It's extremely obvious.  The one before that would almost always pick a woman, if possible, and was very open about that.  If you are a male civil practitioner, just forget it.

Justice Kautz, who is now the current AG, noted how being a judge, and particularly a justice, was a great job for a law nerd.  The last panelist, a current Fed defender who was a private lawyer with a very wide practice, noted how he had put in many times and urged people to do so, even though it was disappointing if you did not make it.

It's disappointing for sure.

For me, hearing Justice Kautz talk was outright heartbreaking, as what he expressed made up the very reasons I wanted to be a judge and replied repeatedly, with no success.  I never even got an interview, even though at one point I was being urged by judges and members of the judicial nominating committee to apply.  I'm frankly bitter about it even while knowing that I should not be.  It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the system has become a bit of a fraud, frankly, particularly now that the committee has been rounded out to include non lawyers in it.  I've felt for some time that the Governor's office had an influence on who was picked, even though I have no inside knowledge on that sort of thing.  It's just a feeling, and not a good one.  When judges are picked which leave almost all the practitioners wondering what happened, it's not a good thing.

It leads to me listening to everything Justice Kautz said about the reasons he wanted to be a judge, and myself realizing I once felt those things, but I no longer do.

Back on the stress part of this, a lawyer I've known for a long time, but who is quite a bit younger than me, recently took a really neat vacation.  He came back to the office and announced he's leaving the law.  I was so surprised I called him.  He revealed that being on vacation had taught him he didn't have to live a miserable life.

Labels: American Civil Religion, Career Myth, Catholic, Charlie Kirk, Christianity, Education, Marriage, Politics, Protestant, religion, Sex, Sunday Morning Scene, The Practice of Law, transgenderism, Twitter Twits, Women

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Lex Anteinternet: Wednesday, September 15, 1915. Counsels leave Nor...: 

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Attention span deficit.

Something I hadn't expected, but which really says something about our times, is that the murder of Charlie Kirk is already, for the most part, in society's rear view mirror.

Yes, there's a lot of discussion about it still, but it's in the chattering class, which I suppose includes this website.  Otherwise, things have already moved on.

The speed at which news moves, and the lack of attention to it, is a very bad thing.

Of course, now that it doesn't really appear to be a politically motivated killing, it's lost its attraction as a story to some degree.

A fictional narrative

The story, as noted, is now in the domain of the chattering classes, but also the possession of right wing myth makers, which are really working on it.  The odd thing here is that the media has an incentive to downplay what is being learned about the killer, and to an extent, the MAGA myth organ does as well.

What we now know about the killer, Tyler Robinson, is that he was a homosexual living with another homosexual who was in the process of being mutilated to take on the appearance of a woman.  Unless this isn't clear enough, they were in a "romantic" relationship, which means they were engaged in sodomy.  The "transitioning" roommate was apparently shocked by the killing, but according to one family member, that person was deeply anti Christian and hated political conservatives.

Now, the reason that this isn't getting this much press as the "transgendered" aren't particularly associated with crimes of any kind, let alone violent ones, and homosexuals certainly are not, but this story is deeply weird.  A man trying to become a woman is deeply weird, and it is not the same thing as homosexuality.  One man screwing another man who is trying to take on female morphology is very weird as well.

We touched on this in a post about Robert Westman, who was an actual "transgender" figure who committed a mass shooting recently.  Indeed, he's the only "transgender" figure I know of to commit one, the overwhelming majority are white hetrosexual men.

Anyhow:

A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

I explored the topic pretty fully there, and I'm not going to repeat it here other than to note that finding a transgender person hating Christianity isn't surprising. Real Christianity holds that to be wholly immoral, even while real Christianity still loves the person. And such a person hating conservatism isn't surprising either, as conservatives hold a similar view.

Robinson wasn't the transgendered person here, but the whole story of this relationship would lend to the theory that he was pretty pliable as a personality.  The point is, therefore, this likely wasn't really an act of domestic terror in the conventional sense, so much as it was a person reaching out  under the influence of a sexual partner.  In an odd sort of way, this killing is more comparable to Dr. Carl Austin Weiss Sr.'s murder of Huey Long, which was over redistricting that impacted his father in law.  I.e., a personal connection is likely to have motivated it more than any overarching weltanschauung.

That's a story that's not really going to get explored, I suspect.  The right wing wants Kirk to be a martyr, the left doesn't want to talk about the mental health issues this really brings up.

Groypers?

I'd never heard of this term before, but apparently they are followers of Nick Fuentes.  As I don't pay any attention to Fuentes, I didn't know that.

Apparently they've drawn a lot of attention following Kirk's murder as there was some peculiar speculation that they were responsible for it.  They obviously are not, but that speculation was there, and I'm not sure why.

Fuentes, whose movement is outwardly anti homosexual, as well as anti a bunch of other stuff, has said some really odd things in this arena, one being that having sex with women is gay.  Eh?  Another apparently was that homosexual sex doesn't mean what it used to, as women aren't living up to their reproductive responsibilities.

Not in homilies

Apparently, at least according to Twitter, a lot of people are mad today as their parish priest didn't include a reference to Kirk's murder in their homilies yesterday.  

Why would they?

For Apostolic Christians, Catholic and Orthodox, yesterday was the Feast of the Cross, and homilies probably largely had to do with that.  Moreover the Catholic Church is just that, catholic, i.e., universal, and this is a domestic American matter that remains unclear.  Kirk wasn't attacked because he was Catholic, he wasn't, and the attack upon him may only have a tangential relationship with his Christianity.

Nonetheless, I saw one person who was irate at the Pope for having not mentioned it.

Spencer Cox

The guy who is really coming out looking good after all of this is Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox.  He's spoken multiple times and has been a calming voice every time.

This isn't the first time he's waded into these issues.  Following the killing at an Orlando gay bar some years ago he appeared at a vigil and stated:

How did you feel when you heard that 49 people had been gunned down by a self-proclaimed terrorist? That’s the easy question. Here is the hard one: Did that feeling change when you found out the shooting was at a gay bar at 2 a.m. in the morning? If that feeling changed, then we are doing something wrong.

Cox's comments are clearly against the stream of the MAGA mainstream. He was originally a never Trumper but claimed to have changed his mind and voted from Trump in his Presidential contests.  I suspect we'll be hearing more out of  Cox going forward, and he may very well be a Presidential candidate in 2028.

Ballroom Blitz

King Donny went from being outraged by the Kirk killing to bemoaning how it interrupted his might fine, in his mind, ballroom from being the focus of everyone's adoring attention.

That's pretty weird.

Also weird is how quickly this is going up.  It's apparently under construction right now.  Trump clearly wants it up before he leaves office, on the theory that will mean nobody will take it down.

The monstrosity will now be 40% bigger than originally planned.

Quite frankly, I thought this vandalization of the White House would not actually occur, as it would, in normal times, take quite a while to design and engineer a building. Indeed, I was frankly planning on just that.  I never thought the monstrosity would go up, as whomever is Present next won't be stupid or narcissistic enough to bother with a Trump "look at me!" ballroom.  It's really moronic.

But it's going up.

If I were President, which of course I never will be, my first executive order would be for the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the offending pile of dogshit within twenty foour hours of my being sworn in.  I'd have the resulting trash hauled and upmed in front of Trump Tower.  But that won't happen.  Trump is probably right.  A giant cancerous growth will be there forever.

Here is the oldest photo of the structure, and what it's actually supposed to look like:

Of course, as it might be noted, the building has been altered before, most notably the addition of the West and East Wings.  Those additions were made due to legitimate working concerns, however.

Again, if it were me, I'd be tempted to take it back to purse original.  It's just supposed to be a big house.

The architects for the vandalization are McCreery Architects, whose website has an image of the interior of the structure as its first slide.  The following slides show a lot of other impressive structures they've worked on.  They do seem to favor heavily classic styles, which is nice.  The site oddly doesn't have any text, but maybe if you need to hire a  heavy duty architect, you don't need text and the equivalent of architectural headshots works better.

A rational question would be why does this bother me so much?  Well, perhaps I just have an irrational reaction to all things Trump by this point.  But the ostentatiousness of the whole thing smacks of trying to be The Sun King.**Have we reached that point in this country?  I fear we have.

We've always had rich men, of course, but this is the era of fabulously wealth men.  It's not right.

Ah, sic transit gloria mundi.

Something we may wish to consider a bit. . . 

Maybe we have it too darn good (so we're self sabotaging).

It sounds absurd, but there's something to it.

The current Wyoming Catholic Register has an article pointing out that, in 1980, the year before I graduated from high school, 40% of the world's population lived in desperate poverty, an improvement from the mid to late 19th Century when it was 90%.

Now, just 10% does.

Big, huge, improvement.

By any objective measure, the condition of the world has massively improved. 

Why do we believe otherwise?

Evolutionary biology has a lot to do with it.  We evolved to live in a state of nature, and nature if pretty rough on everyone.  So we're acclimated to things not being quite right, and trouble being just around the corner.  Now, for most of us, that's not the case.

Gershwin wrote:

Summertime and the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'

So hush little baby, don't you cry

Well, it turns out that in summertime when the cotton is high and the fish are jumping, we're looking for a thunderstorm and worried about work on Monday.  

I know that I do.

And a super rich society, like ours, seems to make up its own problems.  

This is all the more the case when the gates are off the door, as they are.  Now, not only are there all our real and imagined problems, but we just go ahead and make new ones up.  Woman trapped inside a man's body?  Not if the Goths are at the city gates planning on killing everyone.  

Anyhow, it seems like we're busy, now that we are in the richest period of our existence as a species, making sure that real problems appear.  Apparently we missed them.

Footnotes

*Ballroom Blitz is an early 1970s, rock song by the band The Sweet.

**King Lous XIV.

Related threads:

A deeply sick society.Labels: 1960s, 2020s, AR15 Effect, Commentary, Health, Politics, Weapons, Zeitgeist

Last edition:  

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 101st edition. The Vandal in the museum.

Labels: 20th Century, Agnes Repplier, Americanism, History in politics, It was because of the Vietnam War, Politics, Populism, Red Scare of 1919, Red Scare of the 1950s, The Second Trump Administration, Zeitgeist

Lex Anteinternet: A deeply sick society.

Lex Anteinternet: A deeply sick society.: 

A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

Let's start with a couple of basics.

You were born a man, or a woman.  We all were, and you can't change that.  If you are a man, no amount of surgery or drugs is going to make you bear life and bear all the consequences of the same, from hormonal storms on a monthly basis, to monthly blood loss, to a massive change of life, mid life.

Thinking that you can, and even wanting to makes you deeply mentally ill.

And a society that tolerates that attempt, is deeply sick.

An account I follow on Twitter notes the following:

22 years old Was 17 years old when Covid hitI wonder when he started going down the trans path

It's worth asking that question, and we'll touch on it in a moment. 

Part I.

Robert Westman,¹ who tried to be Robin Westman, but failed.  The photo alone shows you can't choose to be a woman if you are man, and that he was accordingly deeply mentally ill.  "You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows"  Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan.

Robert Westman, mentally ill young man, raged against the reality of life that had tolerated his perverted molestation of himself and lashed out against the existential nature that doomed his molestation to complete failure, and a deeply sick society now will wonder why.  Moreover, even his final act shows how deeply he failed in his effort. Women nearly never resort to mass violence in frustration.

That's a male thing.

And so we start, again by finding myself linking back to some old threads on this blog, unfortunately.  This was the first time I tackled this topic. 

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

And I did again here:

Lex Anteinternet: You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence an...: (Note.  This is a post I thought I'd posted back in November.  Apparently not, I found it in my drafts, incomplete.  So I'm posting...

The first time was intended to be the magnum opus on this, and indeed it likely still is.  It's still worth reading:

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

And on that, I'm going right to this:

Who does these things?

It's pretty apparent that you could go to the average gun owner, and actually equip him with a machinegun, and he'd never do anything with it.  It's also apparent, from a recent mass killing in Casper Wyoming, that if you arm some people with medieval implements, they'll use them for murder.  That's correct; recently in Casper Wyoming, there was an event that fit this pattern that was committed with a bow and arrow and a large knife. Grisly, to be sure, but telling.  It isn't something new in the arms that's causing this, it's something new in the mind. But what?

I'm not qualified to be a psychologist at all, but I am trained to observe human behavior and to analyze it, and there are certain things that seem quite connected here, but which are ignored.  These are the things that need to be looked at prior to our doing anything, as the solutions are to be found here.

What we're seeing in many of these murders is that the killers are mentally unstable in a truly insane sense. The attempted assassin of a politician in the US seems to fit this category.  Others, and here's where the New York Times article is helpful, are not so much insane, but they fit into a category of people who, by some means, are subject to a personality disorder that renders them socially marooned, and it would seem, it renders them also incapable of empathy, but fully capable of despair.

Some of these individuals are quite smart. The recent killer in Newton Connecticut, apparently afflicted with Aspergers Disease, seems to fit this category.  The killer in the Denver theater shootings also very clearly had some sort of personality disorder and was very well educated and intelligent.  Others are not so smart, but a consistent strain of some sort of very pronounced personality disorder runs through these stories.  The killer in the Casper Wyoming murders was self-diagnosed with Aspergers, and based on his personal history, I suspect his self diagnosis was correct.

Does this mean that everyone who has these conditions is a time bomb waiting to go off?  Absolutely and clearly not.  And, if we assume (perhaps quite incorrectly, however) that incidents of these conditions are not increasing in frequency (which they very well may be), what that tells us is something else.  If we've always had people who have been so afflicted, but haven't had this particular set of problems, something else has changed. What could it be?

First, before moving on in this, however, what is it about these conditions that make them unique. That's important. What we know is that the conditions make these people socially awkward. In some cases, they divorce them of empathy.  That seems to be all the more to the conditions that we can discern, that's relevant here.  But, as the vast, vast, majority of people who have these conditions also have moral standards, and usually go on to live fully productive lives, it tells us something is also wrong at the societal level, and not as much the individual one.

And also this:

Maybe the standard was destroyed

There's been a lot of commentary the last few years about the lack of prayer in school, and as recently noted on the Ramblings of a Teacher blog, there's been an email and Facebook item circulating that promotes the return of daily prayer to public schools.  Like the author of that blog, I think that idea misses the mark.

What I do think, however, is that we've seen an evolution from a loosely recognized general standard, which was frankly religion based, into the concept of "tolerance" for other ideas, which has now slipped into complete moral relativism that lacks any standards at all.

This is, I think, fairly demonstrable by history and the result isn't good.  A brief look at that history is instructive.

This is not to suggest that the country had a uniform Christian history and that this suddenly fell apart recently, that wouldn't be true.  And it wouldn't even be true to maintain that the country has been uniformly religiously observant throughout its history.  What would be true, however, is that a loose set of Christian standards was generally recognized, even by those who were not religious, or even a-religious, and even though the degree to which people closely identified with religion has changed varied enormously over the country's history.

Early in the nation's history the country was almost uniformly Protestant, although there was more than one Protestant church that was present in the country, and the doctrinal differences between them were in some instances quite pronounced.  It would be false to claim that they all had the same theological concepts, and indeed some of them had radically different theologies.  Indeed, even those several Protestant faiths that were present in North America had acted to strongly repress each other here, on occasion, and had been involved in some instances in open warfare in the British Isles..  Catholics, and Jews, were largely absent from the early history of the country, except with Catholics nervously present in some very concentrated regions.  The Catholic presence in the country really became pronounced first in the 1840s, as a result of the revolutions in Europe and the Irish Famine.  This actually created huge concern amongst the Protestant sections of the county, who were often very anti Catholic.  This started to wane during the Civil War, however.  Jewish immigrants came in throughout the 19th Century, some from Europe in chief, but many from Imperial Russia, where they sought to escape Russian programs.

The purpose of this is not to do a treatise on religion in the United States, which would be a massive work and which, at this point, would pretty much cease to be illustrative of anything relevant to this discussion, but rather to note something else.  Even though the degree to which the American population was adherent and observant of their Faiths, and even though the country has had, at various points, very strong doctrinal differences in the population, to the extent that it impacted public policy, the country had a culture that loosely recognized a very loose set of Christian principals as social principals.

This was so much the case that everyone, even members of non-Christian faiths, and even those who were members of no faiths at all, recognized what the standards were.  Interestingly, up until quite recently, people who chose to ignore those standards, and in any one era there are plenty of people who do, often recognized that they were breaching the standard and sometimes even that doing so was wrong.  To use a non-violent example, people generally recognized that cheating on a spouse was wrong, even if they did it.  Most people were a little queasy about divorce even if they divorced and remarried.  Nearly everyone regarded cohabitation out of wedlock as morally wrong, even if they did not attend a church.  Sex outside of marriage was generally regarded as wrong, and indeed even the entertainment industry used that fact as part of the risque allure when they depicted that scenario.

The point of this isn't to suggest that various topics regarding marriage and non marriage are somehow related to this topic. Rather, the point is to show that there was more of a concept of such things at work in society, and that's just an easy one to pick up on, as the changes in regards to it have been quite pronounced.  But, if the argument isn't to be extremely strained and fall flat, other examples would have to be given.  So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

The point of this is that, even though there were multiple Faiths, and people of no faith, there was a general concept of a set of standards that were almost universally accepted and they had roots that went way back into the country's early history..  Included in that set of beliefs was that you didn't harm others.  It isn't that people didn't do it, it's that they knew it was wrong to do it.

Starting in the 1960s, however, American society really began to break a global set of standards down.  The concept of "tolerance" came in. Tolerance means to tolerate, not to accept, but over time the two became confused, and it became the American ideal to accept everything.  Even people with strong moral beliefs were told that they must accept behavior that was previously regarded as morally wrong, or even illegal in some places. There are many present examples of this that a person could point to.  The point here is not that toleration is bad, but rather that confusing tolerance with acceptance, and following that a feeling that acceptance must be mute, probably isn't good.  Toleration sort of presupposes the existence of a general standard, or at least that people can debate it.  If they can't openly debate it, that' probably is not a good thing.  If self declared standards must be accepted, rather than subject to debate, all standards become fairly meaningless as a result.

The overall negative effect this has on a society would also be a major treatise in its own right and I'm not qualified to write it..  Most cultures do not experience this, as most are not as diverse as ours. Whether any society can in fact endure an existence without standards is open to question,  and the very few previous examples that creep up on that topic are not happy ones.  It is clear that most people do in fact continue to retain  bits and pieces of the old standard, and perhaps most people are very highly analogous to our predecessors who lived in eras when standards were very generally held, and there were decades of American history that were just like that.  But for some people, who are otherwise self-focused, and with problems relating to other people, the weak nature of the standard is now potentially a problem.  Unable to relate, and in a society that teaches that there are no standards, they only standards they have are self learned, in a self isolation.

But what are they learning then, and how?

No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment.

Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace  And, frankly they still are.  That's quite a burden on both, however, as a society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot of the school and the workplace.  Truth be known, there was never an era when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be done there.  Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect.  It's even more unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be taught there, save by individuals through their own examples.  But is there even a workplace to go to? 

There is a school to go to, that much we've made clear.  And as evident, I'm not keen on the trend in some quarters to blame schools.  I doubt very much that the average public school of 1912 was teaching a lot more in the way of a set of standards than the school of 2012.  Kids came into school with one, and as noted, it was re-enforced.  And I'm not keen on expecting schools to teach what parents and society simply earlier did.  I don't even know if that's possible, but it doesn't seem really reasonable.   At any rate, what about after school? That is, after graduation?  What do people graduate into?

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

So what do they do with their time?

As noted, there was once an era when even the severely socially disabled generally worked.  People didn't know not to encourage them to work and having to work was presumed as a given.  Not all work is pleasant by any means, but the irony of this is that many of these people were well suited for fairly meaningful work.  Some men silently operated machine tools day after day in a setting that required a lot of intelligence, but not very much interaction.  Others worked in labs. Some on rail lines, and so on. This isn't to say that everyone who had these jobs fit into this category, which would be absolutely false.  But my guess is that some did.  And some ended up as career privates in the Army, a category that no longer exists, or similar such roles.  They had meaningful work, and that work was a career and a focus.

Now, for some of these individuals, this is all gone. The expectation of work probably isn't, but the ability may very well seem to be. So what do they do?

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Nibelungenlied is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckinpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

All of that is still valid, and in particular, I think, we need to consider again:

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

Over the coming days and weeks pundits will ponder this event, and mostly spout out blather.  The explanation here may have deeply disturbing aspects to it, but the underlying root of it is not that complicated.  Robert Westman fell into the trap that ensnares some of the young in our society and hoped to completely change his nature by changing the outward morphology of his nature.  He was mentally ill.

A just society treats compassionately the mentally ill.

We do not live in a just society.

By and large, we just turn the mentally ill out into the street to allow their afflictions to grow worse until those afflictions kill them. Go to any big city and you'll see the deranged and deeply addicted out in the street.  This is not a kindness.

Gender Dysphoria is a different type of mental illness, but that's what it is.²

And its deeply delusional.

To put it bluntly to the point of being crude, no man, no matter what they attempt to do, is going to bear children and have the risk of bearing children, bleed monthly, and be subject to the hormonal storms that real women are subject to.  And, frankly, men generally become subject to some, if varying, degrees of drives that are constant and relenting, and never abate.³ 

No woman, no matter what she attempts to do, is going to hit a certain age in their teens have their minds turn to women almost constantly, as men do, in a way that women do not understand, and frankly do not experience the opposite of themselves. 

Indeed, no man really wants to be a woman, or vice versa.  What those engaging in an attempt to pass through a gender barrier seek is something else, and what that more often than not in the case of men likely is to drop out of the heavy male burdens in an age in which it increasingly difficult to meet them.  In spite of everything in the modern world, women remain conceived of as more protected, and therefore not as subject to failure for not meeting societal expectations.

Being a man has never been easy.

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man

And now I've reached that age

I've tried to do all those things the best I can

No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam

Good Times, Bad Times, by Led Zeppelin.

I don't think lectures on what it means to be a man occur anymore.  I  know that I've never delivered one, but I didn't need one to be delivered either.  The examples were clearly around me, including all the duties that entailed.  We knew, growing up, that good men didn't abandon their families, and provided for their families, and were expected to protect women to the point of their own deaths.  Women weren't expected to protect men, at all.

Some men have always sought to escape their obligations, of course, and we all know or new those who did.  Most aged into disrepute over time.  Others got their acts together.  

You can’t be a man at night if you are a boy all day long.

Rev. Wellington Boone.

And some have always descended into madness.  But society didn't tolerate it, and it shouldn't have to.

So what do we know about Westman?

Not that much, but what we do know is revealing:

• He killed himself after his cowardly murders.
• He'd developed an inclination towards violence.⁴
• He once attended the Catholic school whose students he attacked,  leaving in 2017 at the end of Middle School.
• He started identifying as a female in 2019, age 17, and his mother signed the petition to change his name.⁵
• After middle school attended a charter school and then the all-boys school, Saint Thomas Academy, which is a Catholic military school. ⁶
• An uncle said he barely knew him.⁷
• His parents were divorced when he was 13.
• He worked at a cannabis dispensary, but was a poor employee.⁸

What can we tell from this?

Maybe nothing at all, but the keys are that in spite of they're being Catholic, his parents divorced, and his mother thereafter tolerated to some degree his drift into delusion, while at the same time there's evidence they were trying to correct it.  After school, he drifted into drugs, which is what marijuana is.

Blame the parents?  Well, that would be too simple.  But societal tolerance of divorce and transgender delusion is fostering all sorts of societal ills.

It's notable that he struck out at a childhood school.  That may be all the more his violence relates, but probably not.  His mother had worked there.  He was likely striking out at her too.  And he was striking out an institution that doesn't accept that you can change your existential nature, because you cannot.  He likely was fully aware of that, which is why he acted out with rage at it, and then killed himself.

There may, frankly, be an added element to this, although only recently have people in the secular world, such as Ezra Klein, began to discuss it.  Westman may have been possessed.

Members of the American Civil Religion don't like to discuss this at all, and frankly many conventional Christians do not either.  Atheist and near atheist won't acknowledge it all, of course.  But Westman's flirting with perverting nature may have frankly lead him into a really dark place, and not just in the conventional sense.

Part 2. What should we do?

Well, what will be done is nothing.  Something should, however, be done.

The topic of gun control will come up, which brings us back to this:

You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)

We're going to hear, from more educated quarters defending the Second Amendment, that firearms have not really changed all that much over the years, society has. This is completely true.

But we're at the point now that we need to acknowledge that society has changed.  And that means a real effort to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill needs to be undertaken.

When the Constitution was written, Americans were overwhelmingly rural.  Agrarianism was the norm everywhere.  People generally lived in a family dwelling that included everyone from infants to the elderly.  Normally the entire community in which a person lived was of one religion, and everyone participated in religious life to some degree.  Even communities that had more than one religion represented, still had everyone being members of a faith.  Divorce was not at all common, and in certain communities not tolerated whatsoever.⁹ 

Westman was mentally ill.  Transgenderism is a mental illness. He was a drug user.  Cannabis is a drug.

In 1789 the mentally ill, if incapable of functioning, would have been taken care of at home by their families.  Transgenderism would not have been conceived of and not tolerated.  Alcohol was in heavy use.  Marijuana was not.  The plethora of narcotics now in circulation were not conceived of.

Yes, this will sound extreme. Am I saying that because a tiny number of transgendered might resort to violence they shouldn't own guns?  Yes, maybe in a society that simply chooses to tolerate mental illness, that's what I'm saying, although it also strikes me that the people who have gone down this deluded path might be amongst those most needing firearms for self protection. So, not really.  I am saying that attention needs to be focused on their mental state.

Am I saying that marijuana users shouldn't own guns?  Yes, that is also what I'm saying, along with other chronic users of drugs, legal and illegal.

And as we choose to simply ignore mental illness, perhaps the time has come to see if a would be gun owners is mentally stable and societally responsible before allowing them to own guns.  People in chronic debt, with violent behavior, with unacknowledged children in need shouldn't be owning firearms.

Of note, at the time the Second Amendment was written, none of these things was easily tolerated.

Part 3. Getting more extreme.

Knowing that none of this will occur, I'll go there anyhow.

Societal tolerance of some species of mental illness should just end. There shouldn't be homeless drug addicts on the street and gender reassignment surgery and drugs should be flat out illegal.

For that matter, in the nature of extreme, plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons should be banned.  Your nose and boobs are fine the way they are, leave them alone.

No fault divorce should end, and for that matter people who have children should be deemed married by the state, with all the duties that implies.  Multiple children by multiple partners should be regarded as engaging in polygamy, which should still be regarded as illegal.

Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial. It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.

St. John Paul II.

Yes, that's rough.

Life is tough for all of us.  Ignoring that fact makes it harder on all of  us.

Part 4. Doesn't this all play into Dementia Don and his Sycophantic Twatwaffles?

Unfortunately, it does.  I fear that this may prove to be the Trump Administration's Reichstag moment.

Indeed, this event is like a gift to people like Stephen Miller who will now assert that this came about due to the liberal policies of Minneapolis, and moreover, as proof that outright attacks on transgendered are needed, the same way the Nazis asserted that dictatorship was necessary in Germany after the Reichstag fire.

Isn't that what' I'm stating?

I am not.

I think we need to address mental illness as a mental illness, and do what we can to treat it.  And rather obviously, what I've stated above doesn't square with Second Amendment hardcore advocates.

And as part of that, we need to get back to acknowledging that the mentally ill are mentally ill, rather than "tolerating" it.  

And we need to quite tolerating "personal freedom" over societal protection, right down to the relationship level.  A married couple produced this kid.  Once they did that, they were in it, and the marriage, for life.  That included the duty not to make dumb ass decisions for their child, like changing Robert's name to Robin.

Part 5.  What will happen?

Absolutely nothing.

People on the right will argue its not the guns, it's the sick society.  People on the left will argue that the society isn't sick, except for the guns, and the guns are all of the problem.

Nothing, therefore, will occur.

Well, maybe.

If anything occurs, it'll be that Dementia Don will use it as an excuse to send the National Guard into Minneapolis.

Footnotes

1.  His name was Robert, not "Robin". The free use of female names for men afflicted by this condition and the press use of "she" for what is properly he, is part of the problem.

2  By gender confusion, I"m referring to Gender Dysphoria, or whatever people are calling it, not homosexuality.  Homosexuals don't fit into this discussion at all.  For one thing, homosexuals are not confused about what gender they are.

3.  This does not advocate for license, although some men argue that it does.  Inclinations are not a pass for immorality.

Anyhow, I'd note that even honest men in cebate professions acknowledge this.  Fr. Joseph Krupp, the podcaster, frequently notes having a crush, for example, on Rachel Weisz.

4.  Again, some women grow violent, but its a minority and, when it occurs, tends to be accompanied by something else.  There are exceptions.

5. I don't know all of the details of his personal life, of course, but that was inexcusable on his mother's part.  I'll note, however, that by this time his parents were divorced and no woman is capable of raising children completely on her own.  Again, I don't know what was going on, but this screams either extreme "progressive" views, or a mostly absent father, or extreme fatigue.

6.  I didn't even know that there were Catholic military schools.  

Military schools have always been institutions for troubled boys, and this suggests that there was an attempt to put him in a masculine atmosphere and hopefully straighten him out. The school had both a religious base and a military nature.  Both of his parents must have participated in this.

7. The modern world fully at work.  People move for work, careers, etc., with the result that nuclear families basically explode, nuclear bomb style.  People more and more are raised in families that are the immediate parental unit, or just one parent, that start to disintegrate the moment children turn 18.  This is not natural, and is part of the problem.

8.  I don't know of course, but I'd guess that in order to be a poor employee at a cannabis dispensary, you have to be a really poor employee. There are bars with bartenders who don't drink, but I bet there aren't any dispensaries with employees that aren't using.

The impacts of marijuana use are very poorly understood, but as it becomes more and more legal, that there are negative psychological impacts for long term and chronic use is pretty clear.

9.  Contrary to widespread belief, not only Catholicism prohibits divorce.  The Anglican Communion does not either, and at that time particularly did not tolerate it.  Divorce occurred, but it was not common.

Also, and we've touched on it before, the United States at the time of its founding was a Christian nation.  It was a Protestant Christian nation, but a Christian nation.  Protestants of the 19th Century would not recognize many Protestant denominations today at all, even if they are theoretically the same.  A 1790s Episcopalian, for example, would be horrified by many Episcopalian congregations today.  In contrast, a Catholic or Orthodox person would find the churches pretty recognizable, save for the languages used for services.