Lex Anteinternet: The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, Inconveniently Moving Easter for Convenience, and Oliver Cromwell, fun sucker.

Lex Anteinternet: The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, I...: 

The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, Inconveniently Moving Easter for Convenience, and Oliver Cromwell, fun sucker.

I started this post right at the start of Lent and then didn't finish it, and was going to trash it, but due to a late Lent event, I'm picking it back up.

The United States and Canada are Protestant nations. They don't really notice it as a rule, and quite a few cultural Protestants like to deny it, but if you are an adherent member of an Apostolic Christian religion, or for that matter probably if you are Jewish or Muslim, you'll definitely notice it.

One of the ways that it oddly comes up is the annual "it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you can't eat fish on Fridays" discussion that Protestants in particular, and some very weakly evangelized lapsed Catholics, like to have.  It's ironic as some of the same people will insist that grape juice was served at The Last Supper (nope, definitely wine) or that the Bible says once you accept Jesus into your heart you can go back to sinning (nope, St. Paul in particular warns you can do that and still go to Hell).

Of course, it doesn't say that you must abstain from meat on Fridays.  It's a law of the Church, not biblically imposed. The Bible discusses fasting and gives lots of examples, and it left the office of Bishops to bind and loose.  This is a rule of the Church, which has been bound. 

It only applies to members of individual Churches.  I.e, Catholics are bound, not Lutherans, or members of make it up as you go Christian churches.  Moral laws bind everyone.  Church laws bind the members of the church.

Also, FWIW, fasting and abstention from meat go way back in Church history and used to be much stricter as a practice than it is now.  It's still much stricter in the Eastern churches.  In the East, fasting involves abstention from alcohol, eggs, dairy, fish, meat, and olive oil for the 40 days of Great Lent and Holy Week.  So the Orthodox, for example, are really down to a very bland menu at this point.

That group of people who like to claim that the Latin Rite practice was made up to support the fishing industry are really out to lunch on this one, particularly as the claim is based on a grossly misconstrued concept of what the food economy was like in the ancient world.  If you lived, for example, in a Sardinian fishing town in the Middle Ages, fish is what was for dinner every night.  The fishing industry didn't really need anyone's help to be economically viable.  And at one time the Latin Rite fast more closely resembled the Eastern one.  Claims like that are generally myths of the Reformation, created in jolly old England to justify carrying on with the Reformation when they couldn't come up with any actual good reasons to do so.

For most non-Catholics and non-Orthodox, however, this isn't in the forefront of people's minds.  Restaurants get it, as there are a lot of us, which is why fish based fare shows up this time of year darned near everywhere.  But rank and file Protestants, particularly of the Christmas/Easter variety, really don't ponder this much.  If you live in a state like Wyoming, that's really obvious, as we have very low religious observation here anyhow.  There are a lot of Catholics, but we're a minority.  Protestants who don't go to church often are no doubt the majority, followed by Protestants who go to the new "non-denominational" churches, which is to say the quasi Baptist, churches (there are no "non-denominational" churches).  They can't be expected to know Canon Law.

When you go to a function of any kind during Lent, this becomes pretty obvious.  "Here's your entrée". . will come the server, serving the beef sandwich between two slabs of beef served with beef fries.

Oh, well.

That you can't suspend this and just go to meatless on Saturday is something people don't grasp.  "You can skip it this time".  No, you can't.  Violation of the rule is a mortal sin.  That seems extreme to non-Catholics, and probably has for a long time, but by the same token we live in an era when a host of other mortal sins, the sexually and marital ones in particular, are ignored by even devout church going Protestants.  If you can convince yourself, getting married for the third or fourth time doesn't mean that you are an adulterer, you can pretty easily convince yourself that eating a hamburger on Fridays in Lent is okay this one time.  Indeed, in some odd ways, the logic isn't that much different.  They both involve appetites and excuses. 

This does make Catholics stick out, and the Orthodox even more, maybe.  In some ways, as the Catholic Church has suspended so many of these rules, the fact that there are some remaining makes Catholics stick out all the more and, in turn, the few remaining rules offend people all the more.  And that is in a way part of the point in the modern world.  It sets us apart, and it should.  Like those who appear with ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday, it's going to mark you.

This came to mind as when I got home last night, Long Suffering Spouse announced, "my mother proposed to have Easter Dinner this Friday. . ."

Eh?

Now, by way of an obvious point, we're clearly a "mixed" family.  My side of the family is all Catholic.  LSS's is all non-Catholic.

I don't know where the dinner suggestion stands right now, as LSS isn't saying, which means it must be in the air. She protested this as we have "town jobs" which means that a Friday gathering really isn't a viable option anyhow.  And one of the things about being married to a Catholic means is that the Catholicism will start to be picked up by the non-Catholic party, no matter what.

Beyond that, however, under the current rules for Latin Rite Catholics, (and I'm sure for Eastern Rite Christians as well) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the fasting rules allow Catholics to eat only one full meal and two smaller meals which, combined, would not equal a single normal meal.  We've already seen that the Eastern Rite is fasting by this point every day. Catholics may not eat meat on these two days, or on any Friday during Lent.

Now, I'm over 60 years old, which means the fasting rules no longer apply to me.  As it is, however, that's my normal daily routine anyhow.  I never eat big breakfasts or lunch.  I used to often skip both, but thanks to my thyroid medication, I'm hungrier than I used to be.  Be that as it may, I'm not comfortable with a feast on Good Friday. That's weird, from an Apostolic Christian prospective.  "This is the day our savior was murdered. . . let's just skip ahead to the day he was raised".  

You can't really do that.

Of course, in Cromwellian influenced Protestant America, you probably can.  He wouldn't, as he didn't approve of observing things anyhow, but he so messed stuff up it's never recovered in the English speaking, non-Catholic, world.  Another reason that they've had to hide his head.

Anyhow, I love my in-laws, who are great, but this is pretty much something I'm not going to be able to do.  I can't go to a big Easter dinner on Good Friday and do something like, "wow, that ham looks great. . . I'll just have the mashed potatoes. . . thanks".  The meatless rule still applies to me, and there's probably not going to be a giant cod for an "early" Easter dinner.

That would be weird.

Also weird is that on Good Friday, I have people trying to make appointments.  Most law offices are closed on Good Friday.  But most Americans work as Oliver Cromwell was a theologically deficient fun sucker and our Puritan heritage is ruining everything. Working to the grave is one thing that our Protestant founds in this country really gave to us, and it's one of the things that's really wrong with the culture.  Now, I usually do work, but I've long looked forward to most of the office being out, and only working a partial day.  And it gives me a chance to take Holy Saturday off.

I'm going to have to handle this today.  In prior years I think I would have just said yes, to somebody wanting in, or "the office is closed".  But instead I'm going to just say, the "office is closed for Good Friday".

I'll let the Puritans ponder it.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The Staff of Life: Bread

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The Staff of Life: Bread: 

Lex Anteinternet: The Staff of Life: Bread

Lex Anteinternet: The Staff of Life: Bread:      

The Staff of Life: Bread

 The preparation of loaves of bread.

Bread is the staff of life; in which is contained, inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard: and to render all complete, there is intermingled a due quantity of water, whose crudities are also corrected by yeast or barm, through which it means it becomes a wholesome fermented liquor, diffused through the mass of bread.

Jonathan Swift, to whom I'd related on my mother's side.

Recently I heard a homily delivered referencing the Lord's Prayer and bread.

Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

The Lord's Prayer in contemporary English.

The Priest, an African native, noted that for a time he'd served as a Priest in Rome, and during that time he was thrown into a bit of crisis due to the massive  variety of Italian breads (twenty kinds, he related) and that so much of it was thrown away in a location that was just across from him.  At home, in Zambia, bread was consumed still just once a month, when his father was paid.  How, he wondered, could he relate the scarcity of bread in his native land, with the over abundance of it in his new location, and the scarcity of it referenced in the Lord's Prayer (my summation, not quite the way he put it)?  He figured that very few Americans or westerners thought of it in terms of scarcity.

Pater Noster, qui es in caelis:

sanctificétur nomen tuum;

advéniat regnum tuum;

fiat volúntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra.

Panem nostrum cotidiánum da nobis hódie;

et dimítte nobis débita nostra,

sicut et nos dimíttimus debitóribus nostris;

et ne nos indúcas in temptatiónem,

sed líbera nos a malo.

The Lord's Prayer in Latin.

Well, it might be just me, or perhaps more the family I come from, but that thought, the scarcity of bread and what it means in the context of the prayer, is something that I have thought of before.  Perhaps because I can recall my father mentioning, in reference itself to the prayer, that in the ancient world "bread was truly the staff of life."

Padre nostro che sei nei cieli,

sia santificato il tuo Nome,

venga il tuo Regno,

sia fatta la tua Volontà

come in cielo così in terra.

Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,

e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti

come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,

e non ci indurre in tentazione,

ma liberaci dal Male.

The Lord's Prayer in contemporary Italian.

And indeed it was.

Bread was the basic foodstuff that fed great masses of humanity all around the world for centuries.  The diet we have today, with lots of variety, didn't exist in many localities, particularly after civilization, i.e., the construction of towns and cities, started in ancient times.  Not that any ancient society really had the variety of foods we have today, but hunter gatherer societies can have a more varied one than we suppose, with a fairly balanced diet.  In many ancient societies, however, once towns were built and crop agriculture set in, and indeed many societies right up until relatively modern times, bread was one of the basic if not the basic stable food item.  A person might have meat often, but they could hope to get by on bread.

Notre Père qui es aux cieux,

que ton Nom soit sanctifié,

que ton règne vienne,

que ta volonté soit faite

sur la terre comme au ciel.

Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain de ce jour.

Pardonne-nous nos offenses,

comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.

Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation,

mais délivre-nous du mal. 

The Lord's Prayer in French.

That's quite a change, indeed, from what we experience now.  I suppose there may be exceptions, but by and large I don't know of any society that depends upon bread the same way that all peoples once did.

Πατερ ημων ο εν τοις ουρανοις·
     Pater hēmon ho en tois uranois;
αγιασθητω το ονομα σου·
     hagiasthēto to onoma su;
ελθετω η βασιλεια σου·
     elteto hē basileia su;
γενηθητω το θελημα σου, ως εν ουρανω και επι γης·
     genēthēto to thelēma su, hos en urano kai epi gēs;
τον αρτον ημων τον επιουσιον δος ημιν σημερον·
     ton arton hēmon to etiusion dos hēmin sēmeron;
και αφες ημιν τα οφειληματα ημον,
     kai aphes hemin ta opheilēmata hēmon,
ως και ημεις αφηκαμεν τοις οφειλεταις ημων·
     hos kai hēmeis aphēkamen tois opheiletais hēmon;
και μη εισενεγκης ημας εις πειρασμον,
     kai mē eisenegkēs hēmas eis peirasmon,
αλλα ρυσαι ημας απο του πονηρου.
     alla rhusai hēmas apo tu ponēru.

The Lord's Prayer in Greek.

Which is, I suppose, why ever culture around the world seems to have its own variety of it, with some societies in the wheat growing regions of the globe having multiple vareities of it.  Indeed, Italy and France seem to have a profusion of bread types, and good ones too, which we've only recently caught up with after basically importing their types.

Unser Vater in dem Himmel!
Dein Name werde geheiliget.
Dein Reich komme.
Dein Wille geschehe auf Erden wie im Himmel.
Unser täglich Brot gib uns heute.
Und vergib uns unsere Schulden,
wie wir unsern Schuldigern vergeben.
Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung,
sondern erlöse uns von dem Übel.

The Lord's Prayer in German.

And thank goodness for that, I'd note.  American breads of my youth were lousy, in my opinion. So packed with sugar that they are basically a really bland cake, the left a lot to be desired.  Those industrial breads are still around I'd note, but I don't have to buy them and I don't.

Отче наш, Иже еси на небесех!

Да святится имя Твое,

да приидет Царствие Твое,

да будет воля Твоя,

яко на небеси и на земли.

Хлеб наш насущный даждь нам днесь;

и остави нам долги наша,

якоже и мы оставляем должником нашим;

и не введи нас во искушение,

но избави нас от лукаваго. 

The Lord's Prayer in Russian.

Ironically, some of the really fancy breads of today started off, oddly enough, as poverty foods.  Italian walnut based breads and pastas (basically a species of bread, really) were the food of the really poor, who gleaned walnets.  Irish soda bread, which I really like and which I used to make on occasion, is a "short" bread with no or little sugar and no yeast.  Easy to make with only flour, just as the Irish poor were likely to not have.

Ranch cook making what is probably soda, or sheepherder's, bread in a cast iron pan, the way it is made at camps, and the way I even make it 

 

Оч͠е нашь ижє ѥси на н͠бсєхъ . да с͠титьсѧ имѧ

твоѥ да придєть ц͠рствиѥ твоѥ · да бѫдєть воля

твоя · яка на н͠бси и на земли хлѣбъ нашь насѫщьиыи ·

даждь намъ дьньсь · и остави намъ · длъгы

нашѧ · яко и мы оставляємъ длъжникомъ нашимъ

и нє въвєди насъ въ напасть · иъ избави ны отъ

нєприязни

The Lord's Prayer in Old Church Slavonic.

But I can see how many would have never considered this.

أبانا الذي في السّماوات

ليتقدَّسِ اسمُك

ليأتِ ملكوتُك

لتكُنْ مشيئتُكَ

كما في السَّماءِ كذلكَ على الأرض

خبزَنَا الجوهريَّ أعطِنا اليوم

واترُكْ لنا ما علينا

كما نتركُ نحنُ لِمَنْ لنا عليه

ولا تُدخِلْنا في تجربة

لكن نجِّنا مِن الشرير

آمين

The Lord's Prayer in Arabic.

Although I suspect that quite a few still do, even in spite of a modern condition in which foods supplies are so vast in the Western World that bread is sometimes regarded by some as a dietary enemy.

我們在天上的父，

願人都尊祢的名為聖，

願祢的國降臨，

願祢的旨意行在地上，

如同行在天上。

我們日用的飲食，

今日賜給我們，

免我們的債，

如同我們免了人的債，

不叫我們遇見試探，

救我們脫離兇惡，

因為國度、權柄、榮耀，全是祢的，

直到永遠。阿們！

The Lord's Prayer in Chinese.

And, in the context of the Lord's Prayer, if a person does, the deeper meaning of the prayer on that line is quite evident.

E ko mākou Makua i loko o ka lani,

e ho‘āno ‘ia Kou inoa.

E hiki mai Kou aupuni.

E mālama ‘ia Kou makemake ma ka honua nei,

e like me ia i mālama ‘ia ma ka lani lā.

E hā‘awi mai iā mākou i kēia lā i ‘ai na mākou no nēia lā;

a e kala mai ho‘i iā mākou i kā mākou lawehala ‘ana,

me mākou e kala nei i ka po‘e i lawehala i kā mākou;

a mai ho‘oku‘u ‘Oe iā mākou i ka ho‘owalewale ‘ia mai,

akā e ho‘opakele nō na‘e iā mākou i ka ino. 

Hawaiian.

Vår Far i himmelen!
La navnet ditt helliges.
La riket ditt komme.
La viljen din skje på jorden
slik som i himmelen.
Gi oss i dag vårt daglige brød,
og tilgi oss vår skyld,
slik også vi tilgir våre skyldnere.
Og la oss ikke komme i fristelse, men frels oss fra det onde.
For riket er ditt,
og makten og æren i evighet.

Norwegian

Faþer vár es ert í himenríki, verði nafn þitt hæilagt.

Til kome ríke þitt, værði vili þin

sva a iarðu sem í himnum.

Gef oss í dag brauð vort dagligt,

Ok fyr gefþu oss synþer órar,

sem vér fyr gefom þeim er viþ oss hafa misgert

Leiðd oss eigi í freistni, heldr leys þv oss frá öllu illu.

Old Norse

Faðir vor, þú sem ert á himnum.

Helgist þitt nafn,

til komi þitt ríki,

verði þinn vilji, svo á jörðu sem á himni.

Gef oss í dag vort daglegt brauð.

Fyrirgef oss vorar skuldir,

svo sem vér og fyrirgefum vorum skuldunautum.

Eigi leið þú oss í freistni, heldur frelsa oss frá illu.

[Því að þitt er ríkið, mátturinn og dýrðin að eilífu, amen.]

Icelandic

Ár nAthair, atá ar neamh: go naofar d'ainm.

Go dtaga do ríocht.

Go ndéantar do thoil ar talamh

mar a dhéantar ar neamh.

Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniu,

agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha,

mar a mhaithimid dár bhféichiúnaithe féin.

Agus ná lig sinn i gcathú,

ach saor sinn ó olc.

[Óir is leatsa an Ríocht agus an Chumhacht

agus an Ghlóir, trí shaol na saol.]

Áiméan.

Irish

Isä meidän, joka olet taivaissa,

Pyhitetty olkoon sinun nimesi.

Tulkoon sinun valtakuntasi.

Tapahtukoon sinun tahtosi,

myös maan päällä niin kuin taivaassa.

Anna meille tänä päivänä

meidän jokapäiväinen leipämme.

Ja anna meille meidän syntimme anteeksi,

niin kuin mekin anteeksi annamme niille,

jotka ovat meitä vastaan rikkoneet.

Äläkä saata meitä kiusaukseen,

vaan päästä meidät pahasta.

[Sillä sinun on valtakunta

ja voima ja kunnia iankaikkisesti.]

Aamen.\

Finnish

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” ...

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” ...: 

Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe

From the always excellent A Hundred Years Ago blog, a Meatless item from a cookbook of the period which included Lenten recipes.

“A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe

As will be noted, the recipe included "drippings", which caused some confusion in the secular sense.  How could that be "meatless".  My comments on the same:

“I assume that “drippings” refer to the fat created when cooking beef or pork – though I am a bit foggy why meat drippings would be called for in a recipe for a meatless dish. Maybe a hundred years ago “meatless” just meant that there were no chunks of meat.”

It wasn’t because of that so much so as that vegetarianism was relatively rare a century ago and it remains distinctly different from “meatless” in the Roman Catholic sense. In the latter, for example, fish and seafood is not included as “meat” either, where as quite a few vegetarians would regard it as meat, although some do eat fish.

A person would have to delve into the topic, but generally you’ll find that broths are “technically” not classified as meat for Roman Catholics, and some animal derived foods, such as gelatins, are not. Probably the author of this recipe didn’t regard drippings as in the meat category and at the time perhaps they weren’t either, form this prospective. In more recent years, as the number of Catholic meatless days had declined in some regions and is limited to Lent, in those regions, people have tended to define meatless more strictly and expanding on the meatless category has been discouraged.

Of note, people often associate this with “Catholics”, by which they usually mean Roman Catholics, but the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholics also observe days of fast and abstinence and their practice is much more broad. It progresses in time over Great Lent and ultimately they abstain from not only meat, but dairy products, fats, and alcohol as well.

As an side, during World War One the U.S. government declared there to be an entire series of “meatless” days and while it didn’t enforce it through a law, it pretty heavily pressured Americans to observe them. If I recall correctly one such day was basically beefless and an other was porkless. None of these days was on a Friday, so I’ve always thought that if you were a Catholic that must have been a bummer as you would end up with three meatless weekdays during Lent rater than one.

I should note that the thought of using broth in a "meatless" meal bothers me from a Catholic prospective, and I suspect it does quite a few others as well.  I'm not completely certain how most modern Catholic apologists would look at this today, but I think they'd at least discourage it.

Anyhow, some of what I've noted there, I've noted before, that being the situation that existed during the Great War which would have caused Catholics to be eating meatless about half the week during the war.  One day of the week (Monday if I recall correctly) was meatless, which apparently meant beefless (it's somewhat difficult to tell). Tuesday was porkless.  Another day was wheatless  For Catholics, every Friday at the time was meatless, excluding only seafood, which was difficult to obtain for many people at the time, and for the Orthodox the rules were even stricter.  It's interesting to note that the government never, at any time, proposed "hey, let's just adopt the Catholic rule and make Fridays meatless. . . "  Indeed, in 1917-18, they wouldn't have as the obvious reference to Catholicism wouldn't have gone down well with American society at large at the time.  It probably sill really wouldn't.

I'm publishing this, it might be noted, on a Friday, which remains meatless during Lent for Catholics all over the globe (not all of whom are otherwise, like American Catholics, lacking in that obligation in the rest of the globe).  Oddly enough, today isn't meatless.

That's because today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, the day dedicated to Jesus' temporal adoptive father.  As Canon Lawyer Edward Peters has pointed out regarding this day, as a solemnity:

This year, the solemnity of my Confirmation saint quashes not only one’s personal Lenten penances but the canonical obligation of abstinence on Friday. Canon 1251.

Canon 1251 provides:

Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

This is so such days can be celebrated.

I have to admit again, I'm a bit squeamish about it.  However, noting that this is in fact the Canon Law, and for a good reason, I had corned beef has made with leftover corned beef this morning.  This is in part because I didn't want to waste it, but I also take the suspension of the obligation for celebratory reasons seriously.

At any rate, I've pointed out elsewhere on this blog, from time to time, the interesting interaction of fasting and abstinence in out largely Protestant society.  Even Catholics often don't understand the nature of these penitential observances and Protestants, to include the large number of secularized Protestants in American society, clearly don't.  But none the less some of the very people who will mock the Catholic observances impose extremely strict similar dietary practices upon themselves.  As recently noted, I've watched people I know go through an endless number of "cleanses" which supposedly are health based, but which are generally based on bogus pop "science" and which really serve as a way of self deprivation by people who feel they need it.  People are atoning for something, even if they don't know what.^[1].

Vegetarianism and even more so veganism are extreme examples of this.  Like societies of Medieval Monks that undertook similar dietary regimens as a way of penance and sacrifice for the entire world, such people often really imagine themselves doing the same somehow, although without the science or logic to back it up, and not grounded in any metaphysical footing, they're mostly making themselves suffer, simply figuring, deep down, that suffering must be good for something in and of itself, rather thank linked to something.  

This really comes across in the occasional lecturing the proponents of such diets make along the lines of quit eating meat in order to save the planet, as cows are directly responsible for global warming.  Large ungulates have been a feature of the planet since day one so they're certainly not responsible for global warming in and of themselves. To the extent that is true at all, and I'm pretty skeptic of a bovine role in that, it would be due to feeding practices, not the cows themselves or their consumption.  Indeed some types of crop farming (in particular rice farming) directly contributes to CO2 in the air as well and frankly meat free diets contribute a lot of CO2 in a secondary fashions, and are otherwise pretty environmentally iffy in some instances so a vegetable based diet is at least as environmentally harmful, potentially more so, than one that isn't.  If a person really wanted a to have a diet that was as environmentally benign as possible, they'd plant their own garden, hunt, and fish.

Of course part of all of that is based on the American belief that there must be something that an individual can do so that they can personally live forever, or if not that, personally escape the ravages of old age.  Suffering from the lack of logic noted in Fairlie's The Cow's Revenge, here too we see some interesting things at work.  To a surprising degree preserving ourselves at all cost for old age, at least right now, preserves ourselves for the torment of dementia. That's not an argument at all for taking up smoking cigarettes, drinking a quart of whiskey per day, and wrestling bears, but it is simply a fact. The common cheerful view that if I "cleanse" for a month and then go on the all Kiwi fruit diet I'll live to 100 with the body of a 20 year old is, frankly, baloney.  The traditional Catholic acknowledgment of the terminal nature of life is something not too many secular self sufferers engage in.  Lots of people hitting the gym every day and running marathons may well extend their lives a bit, and I hope that they do.  They may well be fitter in old age as well, and I hope that they are.  And they may stave off dementia, which exercise and a good diet will help do.  Or they may be sliding into a world of mental torment by age 60 irrespective of all of that.

Nor, for that matter, is imposing the more difficult, perhaps, aspects of traditional morality that goes along with Lenten observations.  Abstaining from meat on Fridays is a pretty minor deal, rather obviously, and for secular abstainers, abstaining from meat in general or going on a cleanse may involve self suffering, but I rarely hear of anyone determining to abstain from conduct that everyone knows is existentially destructive.  People don't do that, and indeed I imagine that some people imagine themselves preserved in good condition in order to be able to engage in their vices until very old age.  Not too many who are wrapped up in an accepting a Big Bang Theory or Friends concept of personal morality, for example, are going to abstain from that sort of conduct for forty days.  Giving up carbs, going on high carbs, abstaining from meat, easting all meat, abstaining from alcohol, or whatever, for a few weeks is one thing.  Society approves. Abstaining from courser conduct? Well society says you can't.

Anyhow, all of this amounts to simple observation, much strayed from where it was originally going.  It's interesting, however.  As noted once before, secularized America isn't a society of self restraint in any fashion, which interestingly causes people, at least as to diet, to self restrain.  But often, they don't really know why.

Footnotes

1. This argument can obviously be taken too far, and it isn't meant to be an eat everything you want, and in as big of quantities as you want, argument.

Indeed, it's clearly the case that Americans eat too much processed food  and food with way too much sugar.  American bread alone is really cake, as a rule.  

Lex Anteinternet: A Stream

Lex Anteinternet: A Stream: 

A Stream

Some mental meanderings, if you will.

ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία*

1 Timothy.

I have to admit that I'm disappointed by the failure of Senate File 103, the bill that would have increased the number of hunting licenses reserved for for in state hunters.   That is, of course, open to skeptical retort as I'm an instate hunter, and I would have potentially benefitted from that.

But more than that, as I've noted here before, I'm basically a subsistence hunter and I'm serious about it.  I'm not a "head hunter".  Indeed, I don't personally grasp the amount of money that people will spend to hunt out of state, but I suppose that its based on retaining a connection with the wild they've lost through urbanization.  Maybe that is what makes sense of it.  What I think would make more sense, personally, is to hunt locally, and if that's too expensive, they should focus their efforts accordingly to make it less so.  But because they don't, and because their expenditures in Wyoming are part of the economy, we cater to that and the bill didn't pass. 

Setting aside the tourist dollars aspect of it, and just the monetary and subsistence aspect of it, this is one of those putting values over money type of judgments that seems to be lacking a lot in the modern world, and indeed, in fairness, is generally lacking in any one era.  The point of outfitters and the opponents of the bill in the legislature is that outfitting and out of state hunting is a business in the state, it brings dollars into the state, and we shouldn't hurt business.  And there's a lot to be sympathetic about in that argument, particularly as the state is really hurting for cash. But there's philosophical reasons to set monetary concerns aside on some things.  There are things that we should value over money in ways that are hard to define as they're all intellectual.

Also, pure monetary arguments can be really bad ones, and generally almost every really awful idea that has made the world worse has some economic aspect to it.  Henry VIII gained support fraudulently usurping Papal authority in the English church not so much by brilliant theological arguments, which were lacking for his campaign, but by driving monks out of monasteries and handing them over to his supporters.  It was devastating in every way and reverberates through society today, but when you get right down to it, temporal monetary considerations trumped the concerns stretching out to eternity.  Money often wins.

Still, it shouldn't.

Monetary considerations played into a legislative argument this past week on another topic.  Not that this is surprise, that plays into a lot of arguments in Cheyenne.  This one was about marijuana.  There's a bill to legalize it and regulate it basically like alcohol.  "The state would generate a lot of money from taxing it" came up as an argument.

That's true, but the state would also generate a lot of money by legalizing heroin and taxing it, or legalizing prostitution and taxing that.  You get the point.  Things aren't made illegal because they have a negative taxation aspect to them.

Indeed, most of the "we'll tax it" type of arguments for legalizing something that has as association with vice are not well thought out anyhow, as rarely does anyone balance the taxation against the costs the vice creates.  Nobody, that is, figures out how much caring for those who are permanently wasted on dope will cost, and contrary to what people assert, that will happen.

When I was a National Guardsmen I ran into one of my former soldiers on the street, after he was discharged.  He asked what I thought he should do as he was so badly addicted to marijuana he couldn't get off of it.  I guess it was nice to be asked, but still in my 20s, even as an NCO, I didn't really know what to tell him.  I offered some advice, but I don't recall what it was.  More recently somebody I know related to me how one of their daughters had gone to school, dropped out, and came home a wreck as she was addicted to it and in a state of severe depression.  They got her off of it, but she's now working in a hopelessly low paying occupation and likely will live a really marginal life.

I don't see a reason to encourage any more stupefaction of our society than we already have.  If it were up to me, I wouldn't have repealed prohibition in the 1930s, and I'm not a teetotaler.  

I know why we do these things, however.  We've built a world that we don't like much, and its easier to spend our cash blotting it out from our consciousness than to really address it.  Or, and probably more accurately, those who benefit from the society we've created are profiting mightily from it and they'd resist any changes.  It's easier for them to just hand you a joint.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. 

Edmund Burke

I was stunned this past week to learn that the United States has now authorized more money to be spent on pandemic relief than it spend on the New Deal.  It's also more money than the United States fought fighting every war we've fought since the end of the Cold War combined.

That's insane.

I get that something needed to be done, but that didn't need to be done. There's no way to spend that sort of vast amount of money well or wisely.  It will be wasted.  It will also be inflationary.

I'm not yet 60, but I can see it approaching and I pretty much figure, with this sort of vast injection of cash into the economy, inflation is inevitable  Goodbye retirement.

Now, that's sort of a selfish view, but at some point a person must be realistic.  In looking at the actual impact of pandemic on the economy it turns out that most of the economy was hardly impacted at all.  What was massively impacted was the service sector.  No matter, relief checks are going out to people who never lost their jobs and were never in danger of losing them.

The section of the economy that did find their work impaired is fairly large, around 10,000,000 people.  That's a lot of people, but it's actually a small percentage of workers.  And the money being thrown around to everyone won't help them much, as a large percentage of those jobs are never coming back.  Lots of people acclimated to working from home where they are comfortable, don't have to buy as many work clothes, can be around their cats, dogs and families, and don't have to put up with the guy three cubicles down who thinks that basketball is interesting.

Because they aren't coming back, not as many restaurants and bars are either. They just aren't.

Focusing that money where it was needed would have been a good idea. Throwing out checks to everyone on the assumption that people are going to run out and buy 500 cups of Starbucks doesn't make any sense at all.

As a further aside on this, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives seems set to act on a bunch of social policy bills of a "progressive" nature.  I haven't heard of their acting on a "Green New Deal" slate yet, but if they ever intended to, this probably shot their bolt.  It's not really possible to have any kind of New Deal when you just spent way more money than the New Deal itself cost, unless you are willing to super heat the economy.

The irony of all of this is that it can't really be said that the current occupants of Congress don't remember the inflation of the 1970s and how awful that was.  They must, as a lot of them were there then, or at least in politics.  The same generation that came up in the awful early 1970s has never left power.

 

He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I had an interesting conversation with a coworker the other day who is somewhat obsessed about his graduating high school senior's plans.  I can understand that, the future of children when you have them, particularly those whose future you can not accurately foresee, is a constant and deep worry for parents.

It lead in a strange direction, however, and that lead me to ponder something further.

My father's father left home when he was 13 years old to go to work.  My mother's grandfather started working as an office boy, the same occupation my father's father started off as, when he was still a child.  I don't even think he was a teenager at the time.  My father's grandmother came to the United States from Ireland when she was 3 years old, accompanied by her 19 year old sister who raised her.  She never saw her parents after age 3 again.  My mother was descendant in part from Quebecois, which in turn means that she was also descendant almost certainly (and certainly my DNA would support that) from orphans from Ireland adopted right off the docks in Quebec, the survivors of Coffin Ships who lost their parents in the journey from Ireland and who would be raised as French speaking Quebecois.

I note all that for a tricky reason.

All of the people here I can identify went on to successful lives.  My father's father ultimately briefly came back to Iowa and then went on to Colorado as a businessman, married, and then pursued his career successfully to Nebraska and then Wyoming.  My father's grandmother moved, probably with her sister, to Colorado and married a shopkeeper in Leadville, and retired to Denver.  My mother's grandfather ultimately came to be the CEO of the company he started off as an office boy for.  They all had successful, and moral, lives and had successful families.

They also all lived in an era when the impact of immorality was pretty obvious and, while they were not the recipients of advanced degrees, the plain facts of biology were known and obvious to all.  We've lost all of that.

Wealth seems to be a lot of the reason why.  They all spent part of their lives living hand to mouth, although not all of them by any means.  Very few people do that now, which is overall a good thing.  But it's also the case that society has become so rich that there are now a lot of people who are made miserable by it.  Part of that is that people have a lot of time and money to spend on what are really basic urges, and to stray off in ways in which they come to try to self identify themselves by things that were in the background, but not self defining, in earlier eras.  People are now identifying themselves by their diets and sexual urges, for example.

Only a vastly rich society can spend so much time thinking about food and sex and define individuals in society that way.  If you move from Cork to Victorville Colorado and its 1890, for example, self defining yourself as a vegan would not only not occur, it'd be regarded as stupid, as it would have been stupid.

This doesn't mean that our vast wealth has liberated us from such things, but rather its seemingly enslaved us to our basest instincts.  Free from nature and distant from nature's God, we want to be gods ourselves, but can't seemingly think of a better way to do that than to redefine the most basic nature's that God has given us.  

That can't and won't go on forever, but the longer it goes on the worse the fall and recovery will be.

With luck, it might even snow for us.

Haruki Murakami

It wasn't snowing when I got up.

All the second half of this week the weather report has been promising a massive amount of snow.  The southeastern part of the state is supposed to get up to three feet of snow.

I'm really skeptical that will happen.  It isn't snowing here yet.  We'll see.  Anyway you look at it we really do need the snow or we're going to be in a severe drought this summer.

The thing that always surprises me in these circumstances are the reactions to the weather.  There's lots of complaining about it.  But other than drive to work in it, we don't really have to deal with it for the most part, unless you are employed in an outdoor profession, which is indeed totally different.

Lawyers who do litigation used to have to contend with the weather constantly, but now that everything is done via the internet, this isn't the case anymore.  The last major winter legal trip I made was to Baker Montana, and that's now over a year ago.  The weather wasn't great when I did that, to be sure, but I used to contend with winter travel constantly.  Not now.  And I wonder if the days of travel will really ever come back.  They probably won't.  It's changed much about work, including even the psychology of it.

Not that I haven't done some traveling, even during the pandemic.  And indeed, I've managed to catch bad winter weather twice while doing it, although both were daytrips.

Anyhow, for most people, winter snowstorms merely mean that you drive to work in the snow.  Not everyone does that well, however.  I was nearly killed earlier this week when some person on a snow day rocketed through a red light and nearly hit me.  They never slowed down.  And I've been seeing my fair share of out of state license plates on cars of what may well be new residents in which they're driving in an obviously scared condition.  If we get hit again COVID refugees will likely start rethinking their relocation.

Indeed, the weather in Wyoming is just flat out bad in ways that don't occur to most Wyomingites but which are actually bad and difficult to explain.  A Texas friend of mine once pointed out to me that Wyoming's northernmost latitude is still further south than northern France, which it is.  Indeed, much of Wyoming's latitude is on the same plain as northern Italy or southern France.  The reason he pointed this out is that he was convinced that because this is our latitude we must have the same weather than the south of France does.

Not hardly.

We're deep in the interior of the plains and our winters are long and summers short. We have wind constantly all year long.  Ft. Fetterman, outside of what is now Douglas Wyoming, had the highest insanity rate in the Frontier Army, and the wind and weather conditions are often blamed for that.  Every other year its noted that Wyoming has a high rate of depression and that this contributes to it as well, most likely for immigrants who come in here thinking that the nice conditions they saw in June are what we have all year long.  Indeed, I once read a deluded comment by somebody who bought some land outside of Bosler Wyoming about how they intended to retire there from their university job in California and then the only worry they'd have is which horse to ride that day.  Well, they don't ride horses outside of Bosler in January except by absolute necessity.  My guess is that person, if they moved out at all, hated Wyoming by March.

Be that as it may, our indoor life everywhere has insulated us from really dealing with the weather.  Last week the county shut its offices and the school district did as well.  I simply drove to work, not realizing that it was that bad.  Right now, the State of Colorado, which likes to have a massive fit about everything has mobilized the Colorado National Guard for the storm.

Well, like Dire Straits sang, "Money for nothing and kicks for free".

One thing that weather like this usually brings up is a comment to the effect that "on days like this it sure is nice to work indoors".  I've honestly never thought that.  Maybe its growing up here and being a semi feral person, but as long as I don't have to brave the highways, I like the big storms.

__________________________________________________________________________________

* "[F]or the root of all evils is the love of money."

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