Lex Anteinternet: "We all do things we said we never would"

Lex Anteinternet: "We all do things we said we never would": 

"We all do things we said we never would"

So said a sticker that was on a car that belonged to somebody who parked in the same parking lot I've been parking in for 30 years.  The quote was attributed to "Soccer Mom".

For some of that 30, I've parked a real car there.  The cars were, in order of ownership, a 1954 Chevrolet sedan I once owned, a 1973 Mercury Comet, and a 90s vintage Mercury Cougar.  The Chevy I bought when I was still a college student.  I loved it, but owning it turned you into a part time mechanic and I didn't have the time. Additionally, at the time I sold it, I also had the Comet, which I had inherited, which was a nicer and more modern car.

I regret selling the Comet, but I did just that when we had our first child as I was able to buy a 1995 Ford F250 diesel for a good price, part of which was trading the Comet and a F150 to the person who sold it to me.  I  had too many vehicles anyway, I thought, and it was a good deal. The Cougar came along later when we picked it up from a friend of my wife's.  It had a lot of miles on it but it was in good condition and I drove the stuffing out of it, even though the heater didn't work.  

Otherwise, I've driven 4x4s to work.

Often they've been pretty heavy duty ones that could do ranch work as well as sporting transportation.  More recently I've added an old Jeep.  The Jeep is my current daily driver, but my Dodge D3500 4x4 takes me to work a fair amount and to out of town work when I go out of town.  None of these vehicles is new by a longshot.

Most of them look like I'm ready to go pull a trailer full of bulls or go into the hills. But there they are, in the parking lot.

The point of the quote above?

Today is the opening day of turkey season.

I won't be going today. The weather is awful anyway, cold and lots of snow on the ground, but that's not the reason why.  

I'll be heavily engaged in work.

When I was first practicing law, I cancelled an elk hunting trip here in the state (a Wyoming type of trip, not a guided something) as a partner in the firm assigned me something that conflicted with it.  Another partner later apologized and noted that one of the advantages of being a lawyer was "the illusion that you could take time off when you wanted to."  I've found it to be just that, an illusion.

I've been introspective a lot recently.

An old friend. . . my oldest friend, reminded me the other day that when we were in high school I maintained I'd never have a job in which I'd wear a tie.  The conversation came up as we were at a funeral, his son's funeral, and he wasn't wearing a tie as his son always tied it for him.  He doesn't wear them often.  I was wearing one, and I know how to tie one, as I wear them so often.

My youthful declaration about ties was because I didn't want an indoor job.  At that time I was going to be a game warden.  I've written about that before, so I'll forgo doing so again, but I didn't take that path.  Instead I pursued geology, but the bottom fell out of that.  Then I went into law.  I didn't know much about the practice of law and I didn't know any lawyers.

A different friend of mine, who is a lawyer and who is married to a lawyer maintains that law was the only occupation, other than the clergy, that would suit me, and as I'm Catholic, and married, obviously the clergy wouldn't be for me (unless, of course, I was Easter Rite, but that's another story).  Religious are called in any event, and I lack that calling.  Anyhow, that fellow is a German and has a more ordered sense of the world, I think, than I do.  Maybe he's right.  I hope so, and that would give an element of necessity to the otherwise complicated way we govern or our lives.

At any rate, as a lawyer, I've been a litigator.  It's not that I pursued that, but fell into it.  Lots of lawyers used to say that "the law is a jealous mistress", meaning it would take all your time, and whether or not that's true of all branches of the law, its certainly true of litigation.

Or perhaps my personality just works towards devotion to duty and work over anything else.  But after two weeks with two untimely deaths, thinking back on the younger me, I've found that the sticker has been true to my personality more than I would have ever have guessed.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Realities of the marketplace. Discrimination, the Old Law, Circumstances and Nature

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Realities of the marketplace. ...: 

Mid Week At Work: Realities of the marketplace. Discrimination, the Old Law, Circumstances and Nature

I had one item here I was going to cautiously blog about, and then a second came up by surprise.  I'll start with the second and take it first.

I ought to note that these are both items that figure into the "fools rush in" category of things.

Dissing the Guard

National Guard M88, South Korea, 1987.

A friend of mine called me up mad.

He and I had been National Guardsmen together at about the same time.

"Yeoman, you and I both took basic and advanced training at the same time and you know that we were at Ft. Sill so long that we received discharges from the Regular Army".

"Um, yeah. . .?"

"Then why aren't we veterans?"

"Um, well Phil, we are. . . "

Phil went on. What he meant was that while we are both veterans, with honorable discharges from the U.S. Army, we don't qualify as veterans for Federal employment consideration.

Phil is correct. According to an online Guard publication that's supposed to be in the nature of good news for former Guard members:

ARLINGTON, Va. – A recently signed law gives official veteran status to National Guard members who served 20 years or more. Previously, Guard members were considered veterans only if they served 180 days or more in a federal status outside of training.

Twenty years or more. . . 

Phil lost his job in the oil slide that's been going on over the past year and he's been looking for a new one.  He's not out of work actually, he's a handy guy and one of those people who seems to pick up employment even with things are in the dumps.  Having worked at the same place for now 30+ years I'm not a handy guy, that way, and even though I can do a lot of things, I know that if the same thing happened to me, I'd be doomed.

"Thirty years as a lawyer?  Go apply at the U.S. Attorney's office. . ."

"But sir, I'm the only living person who knows how to plow a field with a California Plow and a mule named Sparky and. . ."

"U.S. Attorney's office. . . "

You get the picture.

California plow.

Or so I suppose.  I haven't seen any job openings for plowmen and for that matter, while I know what a California Plow is, I don't actually know how to plow with one with any sort of equine, let alone a mule named Sparky.

Which raises another point, one touched on below, but I'll get back to that.

I loved being in the National Guard and was in it for six years.  So was Phil.  That is, he was in for six years.  I don't know if he loved the Guard but he didn't complain about it.  Anyhow, we were in during the Cold War, which is significant here as it means that during our six years of service we were trained in, and told to expect, fighting the Red Menace.

It wasn't really obvious at the time that the Red Menace was having serious problems.  Reddit Marxists would claim that's because "real" Socialism has never been tried, but the experiment wasn't working well and Poland left the orbit, followed by the collapse of the USSR.  China was still a menace at the time, of course, but it wasn't acting like Wilhelmian Germany yet and was mostly a menace in its own neighborhood.  Of course there was North Korea, like now, which makes a theme out of menacing.

Anyhow, during the Cold War era reservists didn't see much activation for small wars as, for one reason, there weren't very many small wars that the U.S. directly got into, as once it did, they turned into big wars.  So, while the US messed around in central Africa and in Central America, it mostly did it in the late Cold War stage through proxies or clandestinely.  

Once the USSR collapsed, that changed.  In 1980 going into a war in Iraq would have been dicey with the USSR so near.  In 1990, with the Soviet Union folding up, not so much.

So we drilled and trained and went to war games.  But we never shot at Ivan, or Lee, or Chan.  

Which is just fine.

But apparently that's not good enough for the Federal Government if you are seeking employment.

Cold War reservists can't claim veterans status of Federal employment forms.

My supposition is that post Cold War ones called into active service for various wars we've fought since 1990 can, because they were activated and therefore qualify.

Which is odd as Phil and I are veterans for other things.  Indeed, it was once suggested to me that for some sort of vaccination I ought to go to the VA, which wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.

Is Phil right that this is unfair?

Well, my instinct is that he's right.  We served for six years in a climate which actually was dangerous to some degree.  If there'd been the war we were training for, we would have had to go, and there's a good chance a lot of us wouldn't have come back.  Our combat rating was as high as the Regular Armies, and just because we were also training from home doesn't really make an intrinsic difference in that.  Sgt. Smith serving in the RA at Ft. Sill and Sgt. Smith working at Haliburton in Wyoming both would have seen the same combat experience.  But only one of them is eligible to claim veterans status for Federal employment.

Without knowing for sure, I suspect that some of this is a legacy of really long prejudice in the active military against the Guard, and some of it is lingering prejudice from the Vietnam War.  Thanks to Robert Strange McNamara and his bad of deluded technocrats combined with the bumbling of Lyndon Johnson the Guard was not deployed to the Vietnam War until late.  The irony is that the US used the Guard in every major war of the 20th Century and couldn't have fought any of them, save for Vietnam, without the Guard.

The mishandling of the Army, including its reserve components, during the Vietnam War nearly destroyed the entire Army during the war and didn't lasting damage to the Guard's reputation.  Often missed in the story is that by end of the Vietnam War the U.S. Army was in such bad shape that it was rapidly reaching the point of combat ineffectiveness in the war and it was in a very sorry situation everywhere else.  The Guard had declined during the war as well as it became a haven for those trying to evade active service, although following the war it rapidly became a haven for combat vets that weren't able to adjust back to civilian life, meaning that it had an inordinate number of combat veterans.  By the late 1970s both forces were rebounding and today they're both excellent.

Be that as it may, the intentional decision not to deploy the Guard during the Vietnam War in order to avoid community discontent by removing a large number of men from any one town lead to some prejudice against it that lingered really until the Gulf War.  Never mind that those soldiers who served in it during the Cold War would have been just as likely to die in any major conflict as a soldier of the Regular Army, and also never mind that by and large the US avoided the small wars that its fought since the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, out of a fear that they'd turn into big wars.  And, as noted, the Regular military has had a prejudice against the Guard that runs back to the 19th Century, even though time and time again its proven unmerited.

So, while I don't know this for certain, I suspect that Guardsmen and Reservists whose Regular service was for training, no matter how long, are dissed in Federal employment due to a legacy of this prejudice.

Or maybe because I was a Guardsmen who holds an Honorable Discharge from the Regular Army, I just think its unfair as Phil does.  A personal connection with things will do that.

I'll note by the way that for some of us, that six years meant a lot more than "drills on weekends and two weeks in the summer".  For one thing, some summer ATs actually run three, not two, weeks in length.  Be that as it may if I include time in which I was simply employed at the armory by the unit in the summer, it's add about eight months of service to my original RA three, which would give me element months.  Add to that actual drill times and training periods outside of the summer, I'm up over that.  I figured once that I had about two years of time, cumulative, serving.

No matter, it wasn't twenty reserve time.  So you can't claim the status for Federal employment purposes.  It doesn't matter if your job was combat arms and the guy you are competing against manned the soft serve ice-cream machine in San Diego. . .he's getting the status and you are not.

Oorah.

The Old Rules on Male/Female Employment remain more than people imagine.

It's really common for articles to appear once per year decrying, and legitimately so, the inequality between the pay of men and women.

It's not that easy of a story, however, as often men's pay is due to their being in occupations that men gravitate towards and women do not, and often they're hard, physical and dangerous jobs.  In Wyoming, where the income inequality is huge, lots of men have in recent decades worked as oilfield roughnecks.

Very few women have.

But it's a well paying job.

Statistics report that women still make less in truly equal positions, such as, supposedly, female lawyers making less then men, but I somewhat doubt those figures and if that was true, it's rapidly ceasing to be true.

The point may be that, in spite of the efforts of the Woke to compel people to believe that all occupations are gender neutral, in reality they aren't, and men and women tend to gravitate towards certain types of employment.

And one of those areas is the home, for women.

I don't mean to suggest that this is a poor choice in any fashion whatsoever, but rather note that this is a reality.

The reason that this came to mind, although I've thought about posting on it before, is also due to a discussion with a friend. The friend just turned 50 years of age and is now really focused on retirement.

It's an odd focus in his case as he has five children and none of them are out of school yet.  None. That means that he has years and years to go in which they'll be in school, and then in university.  I don't know the ages of his younger kids so I don't really know how that plays out, but it would mean that he'd be at least 60.

I'd also note that his wife opted to stay home to raise the five.

In our conversation, he mentioned age 55, but that's not realistic in his case at all  Be that as it may, it turns out to be the case that at age 55, or maybe 55.5, a person can start drawing on their 401K in some fashion.

Now, this isn't retirement advice as I haven't studied this and I don't know what the parameters are, but I hit 55.5 over two years ago and that therefore was an interesting fact.  It was an interesting fact right up until it dawned on me, which was pretty quickly, that my long suffering spouse is a little over ten years younger than I am.

That's significant as when people look at retirement they ought to be looking at the burn rate of their retirement savings.  Will you have enough, that is, to last until you die? 

Nobody really knows when they're going to die, of course, but a person retiring at age 55 probably ought to expect to live at least to their point of life expectancy, if not longer, even though they very will might not.  It'd be the pits to burn through retirement by 65 and then be waiting for the Social Security check to arrive to buy groceries.  Of course, that may well mean that a person in that position may die by 57 and never have retired.  That may sound extreme but my father died at age 62 and he never retired.  For that matter, his father was in his 40s when he died, and my long lived mother's father was 58 when he died.  He was medically retired, however, at the time, not a pleasant situation either.

Anyhow, if you are happily figuring "hey, I'll have enough to retire at 55 if I plan on living until 80, when the last drop of my savings runs out", but your wife is 45. . . . , well perhaps you better rethink that.

And here's where the basic nature of the sexes comes back in.

At least in my generational cohort, a lot of women aren't as well educated as men, and their employment choices are therefore much more limited. They aren't absent, but they're limited.  My wife's a good example.  She has some post high school education, but not at the same level that I do.  

Now, lots of professional men I know have a wife that's also a member of the same profession. They probably met at school or work.  But here's where the difference comes back in again.  I've known a fare number of women who have dropped out of their professional employment in order to stay home with children.  I've known exactly one man, and only one, who has done the same.

Why is that?

Well, that's because its a feature of The Old Law.  It may be the case that society holds that men and women should each have equal employment, but in reality, biology makes this a different matter.  Men can father children, but they can't give birth to them, they aren't physically equipped to feed them when they are infants, and they aren't really emotionally equipped to nurture them when they are young.  They just aren't.  Women are.

Which is an application of biological reality and therefore, fine.

It also means, however that the iron law of male employment is always at work.  

Men have fewer options on employment than women, in existential terms.  Sure, by nature men can be roughnecks and by biology and temperament they're suited to be soldiers, which women are not, in my view.  But they can't just drop out of the work force and stay at home like their wives can.  They cannot.

They also at some point are not only pulling the freight, but for a lot of them are pulling it after they probably shouldn't be, as they have no choice.

Is that unfair?  Well, probably some people reading this, if anyone does, are assuming I'm endorsing unfairness.  Rather, what I'm doing is noting the way of the world.  We may deem it personally unfair in all sorts of ways, but that's the way of the world.  The fact that I have to wear glasses may strike me as unfair, or that the prior two generations of my male ancestors died young and diverted the agricultural directions of our family into the office, twice, may strike me as unfair. But universal fairness isn't part of the deal.

Basic biological reality, i.e., the difference between the sexes, isn't unfair, however.  It just is.  The fact that we ignore this to the extent that we do is because; 1) in an a period of unprecedented societal wealth we can get away with ignoring that to some extent, and 2) in the advance stage of the industrial revolution we live in, we've forced, for a bunch of reasons (many just societal) women into the work force full scale the way we did with men in the late 20th Century and 3) with really advanced technology and outsized industrial might, we haven't had to fight and evenly matched wars or quasi evenly matched wars since the end of the Vietnam War (which was evenly matched in part due to the competence of the NVA, and in part due to the fact that we also had to worry about full scale wars in Europe and South Korea, and elsewhere, the entire time).

So what of that?  Well, not much.  Just that the old existential laws are never far from the surface, no matter how much we might imagine that we're exempt from them.

Lex Anteinternet: Easter 2021. Next Year In Jerusalem.

Lex Anteinternet: Easter 2021. Next Year In Jerusalem.: 

Easter 2021. Next Year In Jerusalem.

This is Easter on the Latin Rite liturgical calendar for 2021, thereby being the date that almost everyone who observes it will observe it on.  Orthodox Easter this year is nearly a month away, on May 2.

It's a second sad Easter in a row.

For the second time we're facing an Easter in which the gloom of the Coronavirus Pandemic lingers overhead.  Perhaps, in that way, we're looking at an Easter that actually fits historical times, i.e., most of human history, more than our own times, and therefore should give us more to look forward to with the oncoming advance of Spring.

Still, it probably doesn't, and in no small part due to the really odd and unsettled times we're generally in.  

For those in the Diocese of  Cheyenne, such as myself, we still have a dispensation in place if we feel we should use it.  I've noted myself earlier in this blog that I wasn't really happy about Mass's being suspended in the first place, although I'd perhaps now reluctantly concede that it was necessary. As also earlier noted, when they opened back up I resumed going, but when infections started to climb and the vaccine was on the horizon, I dropped back out and made use of the dispensation.

Throughout this entire pandemic, my wife has really been the one who managed our approach to it, being diligent and careful and making me the same.  I take the pandemic very seriously and frankly I'm at the point where those who casually deny its anything anger me.  It truly is.  I've known, as we all do by now, a host of people who have had it and a couple of them are dead.  People who give the flippant "it's no worth than the flu" don't seem to realize that the flu isn't a cold either and that its a real killer.  The reason we tolerate the flu like we do is that we have no choice.  Here we do, but we're rapidly losing out on that choice in part because people who want to believe that it amounts to nothing or wild theories about its original or the vaccine are being slow to get vaccinated.  And in our modern society, in which we've elevated the individual and his rights and beliefs to a near religion we aren't willing to use any form of compulsion in order to make sure the appropriate number of vaccinations are accomplished.

That day may never have been possible in any event. We may have lost out on that opportunity from the very first instance, in which case SARS-CoV-2 will be an endemic disease and go on killing.  

At least one person I know who takes the disease very seriously, but who is younger and therefore able to bear more risks, has just become numb to it.  That is, it's real, they got vaccinated, but they're otherwise too fatigued to observe much in the way of any other precaution.  As noted, some people never took any as they refused to believe it was real.  Others, and I find this approach the oddest, accepted it was real and took some precautions, unless they were personally inconvenient.  

The level of precautions a person took and wear tends to reflect a person's beliefs. The Catholic Church in Wyoming obviously took it very seriously in shutting things down, but I frankly think the Church really dropped the ball in regard to outreach to parishioners.  Even on my end, as a former lector and a former council member, I received very little contact during the pandemic from my diocese.  If I've received this litter, and have been a faithful and loyal Catholic my entire life, I have to think that marginal Catholics are in no better position than I am.  One thing the Church is really going to have to answer for, and I mean in this realm and the next, is the complete and utter failure, it seems to me, to try to reach out during the pandemic.  A parish priest is actually responsible for all of the souls in his diocese.  If the Catholic souls aren't getting any contact. . . well. . . there's going to be questions that will have to be answered.

Anyhow, at Mass I noticed that almost everyone was very observant about wearing masks, which were required, although there's always the few who will pull them down below their nose at which point they're pointless.  Sometimes that's ignorance and in others its a form of protest.  Be that as it may, they were there.

I'm told, but don't know, that in some Protestant churches following the COVID guidelines were simply suspended completely.

In a civil context, in some places I've been too that's very much the case.  One local sporting goods store had signs about wearing masks but few on the staff did. A few men who work in the store do and have, but the huge army of 20 something girls that loiters near the cash registers grossly overmanning them never did.  Sporting goods stores here are almost a center of civil protest/COVID denial.

Circling back around, during the pandemic my wife has lead the charge and we've both been very good about doing what we should. We haven't been to a restaurant in a year, with one noon meal that was a work invitation, and two for out of town depositions, being the exception.  I've been invited to "go get a beer" after work, but I declined, something made easy by the fact I decline that invitation usually anyway.  

Anyhow, I've now had both of my COVID 19 vaccinations.  My wife has had her first.  My kids have both had theirs.  Only my son and my wife are in the window of non protection, as they're either waiting for their second shot or have just had theirs.

I was going to resume Mass attendance last week, but my daughter pointed out that my wife had been so good about her observation of the rules and just had her shot, so we should probably abstain.  She didn't come home for Easter due to school and work and will make Mass where she is.  Here we debated it last night and ultimately decided, for the same reason, to wait one more week.

Locally it turns out that of the three parishes two were requiring reservations, but once again due to the phenomenally bad outreach the Church's have, that wasn't apparent at the one we were going to go to until this morning when I happened to find that was on their video feed.  For goodness sakes, is there any excuse for not getting this out in some other fashion?  So we likely would have been turned away.  That would have lead us to the parish across town which is not requiring reservations, but which was anticipating putting overflow in the poorly ventilated basement so that those there could watch it on television.

Next year, for those of us still in the temporal realm, Mass in the normal fashion will have resumed as life in the normal fashion will have had to.  The country can't keep being shut down forever and the entire population, save for those who really have the resources to do nothing at all, has to get moving again and patience has worn thing.  My guess is that we will not reach the "herd immunity" threshold as there will be those who steadfastly refuse to believe that the disease is serious or who will continue to believe myths about vaccines which are allowed to circulate in the post Cold War scientific age.  Those who are vaccinated will get yearly boosters which will be more or less effective. Some will get sick and some of them will die and for some people that will come as a surprise.  But life will return to normal, with normal in this instance begin an unfortunate blend of the 1970s inflationary era, brought on by profligate government spending, and 2010/20s moral sinkage.

On that latter item, there were those who hoped that the pandemic might refocus society and cause some reflection on where we were going and what we were doing.  Perhaps some of that did occur, but there does not seem to be much evidence of it now. And to the extent it did, a lot of that was swept away by political forces that refused to acknowledge defeat and countervailing ones that accordingly came into power seeking to bring in every "progressive" item on that laundry list that's been thought of since the late 1890s.  Things are really not looking that good, and in a lot of ways.

But next year, at least there will be Mass.

Jews traditionally end the Passover Sedar with "Next Year in Jerusalem", signaling an obvious deep religious hope.

Next year in Jerusalem. ^[1].

__________________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes:

1.  I don't think this is incapable of being misunderstood, but just in case, and because I'm occasionally asked, this is meant symbolically here.  I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in visiting Jerusalem.  I.e., none.  This isn't mean to be rude, but I know it baffles people, and as I have a friend whose been once and who is planning to return again, I know I'll be asked that along these lines; "I'm going on the church trip to Jerusalem. .  . wouldn't you like to go?" followed by all the things that a person could see in Jerusalem.

That's great for people who want to see it, but I don't.  I don't have any interest in going anywhere in the Holy Land, which may be odd for a Christian, but I don't.  None.  Indeed, if I were to go to anywhere in the Middle East the locations would be limited to certain big desert areas as I like big deserts.  I'm not keen on cities in general, and particularly not large crowded ones.

FWIW, I often give the same reaction to other venues that feature lots of people.  "Wouldn't you like to go to China?".  No, I would not.  "London?".  M'eh.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy ...: 

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: 

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

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."

Lex Anteinternet: Get the vaccination.

Lex Anteinternet: Get the vaccination.:

Get the vaccination.

I don't have a photo of a shot record to post, but I received my first COVID 19 vaccination shot on Monday. I'll be looking forward to the second. Over the years, I've been vaccinated for every virus common and rare known to man (I've been vaccinated for small pox three times, twice after the disease was extinct) and the reaction to the vaccine was mild in comparison to to some prior vaccinations I've had (yellow fever was the worst one). Since the pandemic started one lawyer I've worked with and against died of COVID 19, the father of another one I know, and a court reporter that had reported in court for me before. I'm glad, for more than one reason, to have received the shot.