Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...:   

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

 

Basically- Save the tomboys, let little boys paint their nails, don’t be a jerk to your kid because there are bad people/groomers in the world- protect your child and teach them they’re great the way they are and doing those things doesn’t mean they’re a different gender

Luka "Bunny" Hein.

Last Sunday I had a long item on community, and how we're lacking it, and need to restore it.

In that, I also noticed the operation of synchronicity.  And here I find it at work again.

Among the various bills pending in front of the state's legislature are two regarding the horrific abuse of minors in the name of "gender affirming care".  Chemical and surgical attacks on gender and surgery to "reassign", or at least partially remove, a person's gender characteristics is "care" in the same way that the Holocaust was a "solution".  It isn't, it demonstrates extreme moral depravity, and it's an absolutely insane rejection of nature.

Some of this topic, and that one, started off with various items I'd read or heard, which was then followed, by what I just noted here:

Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.

And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.

I noted in that I'd post another one on this particular topic.

And then the very brave Luka "Bunny" Hein testified in front of the legislature, saying a lot of this stuff more bravely than I could have.

I so thoroughly killed off my younger self to become what I was, what I am, that I truly feel as though trying to find any part of her left in me would just feel like resurrecting someone else’s corpse 

I suppose that metaphor is appropriate with how Frankenstein-like I feel now

Luka Hein.

Hein isn't alone.  She's joined by Chloe Cole, whose name has been given to one of the proposed statutes, "Chloe's Law".  Cole, like Hein, is an activist against this horror, but she's gone further and is crusading generally against what we might call the perversion of youth.  If you want to know why there's so much furor over a certain book that keeps getting mentioned in regard to school libraries, look at her Twitter feed. She put the pages of the book up, complete with the male on male dick sucking images, which are the reason people are complaining about the book.¹

I've known little boys who played with dolls who grew up to be men's men, and I've known plenty of girls who took up what had been formerly regarded as very male activities, or male habits.  Indeed, ironically in our day and age, younger women who have retained highly traditional ideas, or perhaps I should say highly feminine behavior, have been ridiculed and belittled, while women as a whole have been pushed into entire roles that are not only traditionally male, but in some (limited) instances, such as combat soldiers are likely genetically so.  Up until just recently, however, it wasn't the case that the conclusion was made on some societal level that this must mean those boys want to be girls, or those girls want to be boys.  

Now that's being shoved down upon them.² 

What's really going on here?

We discussed some of that just the other day, but there are a number of things going on, the first of which is the complete rejection by the WASP class of the concept of nature and standards, which we touched on in our earlier essay.  That's left them a ship adrift, and subject to the winds of forces which very much have an agenda.

As we've already gone into it in some depth, we won't here. But basically to sum it up, up until after the Second World War the dominant American culture, the WASP culture, was rooted in a Protestant sense of Christianity, which means that it was rooted in a Christian world view.  Even people who were not Protestant Christians picked up large portions of this world view, given us the oddity of Protestantized Catholics and Protestantized Jew, as well as Protestantized Agnostics and even Protestantized Atheists. Humorist Garrison Keiller has a joke in one of his monologues about claimed non believing bachelor farmers going to Lutheran Easter services and noting that "it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in", but there's something to that.

As part of that, or related to it, American society, and European society wasn't all that far removed from nature in a way up into the early 1960s.  You certainly can find examples of people who lived an urban life for generations by the 60s, but more often than not you'd tend to find some recent rural connection.  People's parents, or grandparents, had been farmers quite often.  And certainly in North America, as Gene Shepherd noted in one of his essays, even urban people retained outdoor activities to some degree if they had no farm connection.³

Why does this matter? Well, for a couple of reasons.  Starting in the 60s, this really started to breakdown.  The Spirit of 1968 essentially rejected all conventions, existential or otherwise, and started society on a path of radical self defined, "if you feel good, do it" type of thinking, inroads into which were already being advanced by the Playboy culture that started attacking the family, in essence, in 1953.  Things were well advanced in this direction by the time Tom Wolfe redefined the Boomers as "The Me Generation" in 1976, by which time the Greed Is Good ethos was also taking root.  By the late 1970s the WASP culture was so diluted it was already about individual self definition, as long as that also included monetary success.  Ties to the land were being lost, in spite of efforts to revive it in an unrealistic idealized sense, so lessons that are plain in nature, were gone.⁴ 

With the guardrails removed, it's no wonder where things ended up, but it didn't happen, of course, overnight.  Indeed, it really took until the Boomers children raised in the larger WASP culture started having their own, and passed on only a very diluted sense of anything whatsoever, with that mostly being "be yourself" and "be successful".  Nobody was a loser, everyone (up until you needed to make money) a winner, and whatever you wanted to do was okay.

Well, nature is nature, sometimes cruel, and that's not the way things work.

And hence we see the fork of a dilemma here, which is impacting the modern age, and the rise of transgenderism in confused, mostly female, adolescents, and confused males in their early 20s.

And that means the root is likely not the same.

The Confused Girls

Luka Hein describes this, having lived through it, about well as anyone can.  By and large, what we see with these girls, and that's what they are, is this.  They're mostly distressed female teenagers with ADHD, some of whom are Tomboys, who are pushed in this direction or find temporary refuge in the identifier.  Totally lacking a community, with parents who are about as firm as milk toast and who have no existential concept of anything, they head that way and then are pushed that way.⁵

In a society grounded in nature, let alone the existential, they'd get real support from their families, which would like be sports, the outdoors, and a community with external standards.  Instead, they get "support" which amounts to pushing them into mutilation.

The big root in this is the lack of a community, combined with an exposure to the perverse early on.  Girls this age don't want to be pushed into sex, let alone pushed into sex, which up until very recently was regarded as extremely weird.  Now they are.  They're pushing back and away. Getting away is the real desire.  Given enough time, and support, to realize that they don't have to yield to whatever weird conduct Reddit is boosting at the moment, or appearing on the cover of "teen" magazines, and they'd be okay.  Moreover, being somebody like Hein, whose Twitter photo is a baby rabbit sitting on a large caliber handgun, doesn't mean you have interest which mean you have to be a closet male.

Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, Tomboy extraordinaire, difficult personality, married woman, and a real woman.  Polish Olympian Maria Magdalena Andrejczyk provides another, very contemporary, example.

The Confused Young Men

Some of what we noted above applies to men as well, but I suspect that we have more often is a cry for attention, or the Laying Flat culture, or both, at work.

While it's not popular in any fashion to say it (although it is being said), it's always been hard to be a man.  This is not to say that it's been easy to be a woman, but frankly the burdens of life have traditionally fallen on men and women quite differently. The historical burden on women is indeed tied to their biology, bearing children is dangerous, or at least was up into the 20th Century, and hard on the body.  And up until the Government stepped in to be the husband of women who cared not to marry the father's of their children, having even one child tied a man to the father if she kept the child permanently as there was no other economic option for the most part.  People have tended to therefore look back and be wistful on the "patrimony".

Truth be known, however, male roles in societies have been blisteringly simple traditionally, if not always easy.  Men were expected to take a societally defense role, with their first obligations being to protect their families first, protect women and children in general secondly, and protect their nation last.  On that last one, you can put in tribe if you are thinking of a more aboriginal society.

Men were also expected to "provide" for their families.  When I was young, it was still the case that people would excuse some other real or imagined failure of a man by stating "he's a good provider".  This had all sorts of meanings in context.  In one hand, a man might have some real moral failings, perhaps he hit the bars a lot, or perhaps he dallied with other women, but if he made a good income and brought it principally home to his family, that was regarded as excusing a lot of other conduct.

Conversely, it was also used in the instances in which a man might otherwise be regarded as boring, plain looking, or not an otherwise romantically attractive person.  "He's a good provider" would be regarded as excusing those failings on one hand, or be used as a basis for suggesting to an unmarried woman why somebody should be regarded as a prospect for marriage.⁶

This goes back to the dawn of the species and reflects the original genetic dimorphism, physically and psychologically, that our species exhibits.  In modern industrial times it reflected itself in a number of interesting ways that directly made, if you will, men's life "hard".

Men working themselves to death wasn't really regarded as abnormal and in certain societies with thin resources, such as Finland, men died much earlier than women did. Men in general still generally die younger than women for that matter.  And dangerous work was a male role, including not only industrial work, but the most dangerous work of all, war.  Indeed, in spite of feminism and a general societal effort to suppress this, this is still largely true.

Much less true, however, is how society reflected this.  

Men were expected to respect women in a much more formal manner than they do now, where this is very much no longer the case.  They were expected to defend them, even in a situation in which they really didn't know them.  They were expected at some point to plan to make a living which "would support a family", or if they didn't feel up to that, and not all did by any means, to drop out of the family raising role for some other societally acceptable one.  They were expected to support families if they had one, including marrying a woman if they got her pregnant and were not married. And they were expected to bare arms if need be.

A good example of this in the early 20th Century is interestingly the Titanic.  A monument in Washington D.C. introduces to us the reason why on its front and back inscriptions:

TO THE BRAVE MEN WHO PERISHED IN THE TITANIC

APRIL 15 1912

THEY GAVE THEIR

LIVES THAT WOMEN

AND CHILDREN

MIGHT BE SAVED

ERECTED BY THE

WOMEN OF AMERICA

Back:

TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD

THE RICH AND THE POOR

THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED

ALL

WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY

TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The men on the Titanic, rich and poor, stepped aside so that women and children would live.  This was the traditional expectation, and they fully fulfilled it, stupid modern movies notwithstanding.

The reward, so to speak, for the role was in part simply genetic.  Husky's, the dog, are happy pulling sleds, which coyotes would not be.  Much of this just worked the same way.  Additionally, however, male life tended to result in male societies, formally and informally, going all the way back to tribal society.  Membership in them was part of being male, and amazingly universal.⁷ Indeed, it started off in childhood, with the first "band of brothers" usually being a "band of boys", and later some formal organization, like the Cub Scouts.

Now all of this is shattered.  A society that confused equality of the sexes, which existed much more than imagined prior to feminism, but which has been confused by the failure to understand how technology impacted that, with samism, has created a societal requirement that, save for professional sports, the physical differences between women and men are not to be mentioned.  Men have become shy about defending women the way they once did, least they receive a rebuke. Well-intentioned government subsidies combined with the society wide adoption of the "Playboy Ethic" has blinded society to the physical and psychological impacts of sex so that not only are men not really expected to take care of any children they cause, or the women who bare them, but they're actually expected to put out irrespective of the consequences.  This is so much the case that in a fairly recent notorious event in which somebody was unjustly killed, the press was full of his being a "good father", which in real terms simply meant that he'd fathered a lot of children, and not all by the same woman.  Not that he was acting as a parent.

Added to that, the traditional role of "defense" has seen female intrusion as something that must be accepted, although in reality it hasn't gone that far at the armati homines level.  

Male societies now are completely verboten. You can't do that.  The Boy Scouts must admit girls, and is the Scouts.  Men, basically, have no larger societal refuge from their male lives.

And the point of those lives is now warped. The "get a good job" pressure is still there, but point is missing. Getting a good job is supposed to occur, so you can buy toys.  In the WASP end of things, many of the upper middle class WASPs avoid children entirely.  Ultimately procreation, a reality of earlier years, is just regarded as recreation, and therefore the object of it on the giving and receiving end easily disposed of.

As feminist author Susan Faludi has put it, men have been "Stiffed".

That gets to this.

If young teenage women, on the cusp of becoming young women, have been freighted by the Reddit/Internet portrayal of their expectation that they serve as harem concubines for men in general, and have opted out through transgenderism, young men, a little past their early teen years, and perhaps fully past them but still in their very young 20s, have looked at this in some instances and looked for the door out.

In the past, as noted, there was an outdoor, even before much of this became so perverse.  In rural societies, bachelor farmers, who often weren't terribly good farmers, were a pretty common and accepted thing. Farming, and ranching, was good honorable work, and not getting married as part of that was more common than a person might suppose.

The unmarried industrial worker was also surprisingly common.  A sort of portrayal of this, combined with one man's desire to get married, is shown in the movie Marty.  Enlisted men in the Army, with the exception of senior NCO's, sometimes, tended to be unmarried.  Indeed, junior officers were usually unmarried, and in some militaries, such as the British Army and, while a bad example, the Imperial Russian Army, marriage was highly frowned upon. Moreover, certain male occupations tended to fall towards unmarried men by default, and some, such as the Catholic priesthood, required it.  Just as male society tended to accept the mentally off a bit into it's ranks in the larger group, it accepted unmarried men into it as well.⁹

With the rise of the societal acceptance of homosexuality as ostensibly normal, this dynamic completely changed. While there have always been people with same sex attraction, unmarried men were not assumed to be "gay", they were assumed to be unmarried.  Homosexual men did fall into the categories mentioned, as the wealth in society started to rise mid 20th Century and certain low paying occupations became increasingly societally unacceptable to obviously intelligent men, this increased. But the postwar economic boom, the Playboy culture onset, the Sexual Revolution, and Feminism completely destroyed what had been.

At some point, by the late 1980s, society would no longer let men who wanted to basically drop out of things, for whatever reason, do it.  A couple of decades prior society accepted that a guy could take an industrial job, for instance, and work it his entire life as a single man, with a single dwelling, and not be homosexual. By the late 80s, no longer.  And no longer was such a person really even allowed to peaceably dwell in that condition, but an absolute need for sex of some sort was presumed.  Such people were presumed to be homosexual and if they were younger, relationships they might not really want were forced on them.  The Friends and Big Bang Culture had arrived.

At the same time, the rise of the Me Generation meant that money for individual hedonistic purposes was now the point of being.  You needed a "career" so you could live well, even if living well really meant that everything was for entertainment, including other people.

How do you get out of that?

Well, "transitioning" will work.

Based at least on some observation, young men just getting ignored in their plight, with parents who aren't going to provide any guide rails, is a big factor in this.  They aren't really seeking to change genders, they're trying, ironically enough, to get back to the 1950s.

How does this end?

I'm usually pretty cautions about quoting Rod Dreher.  I like some of his stuff, and not so much others.  Be that as it may, he's spot on here:

There will be no justice until every damn doctor, hospital, and medical association responsible for this atrocity has been sued into the ground, and some of them imprisoned. Forgiveness? Yes, in time (though that's easy for me to say, as I have not suffered what this father has suffered) -- but only after full lustration, only after Nuremberg-like tribunals, only after the trials, only after utter and complete shame shattering all the luminaries and the institutions -- including the Democratic Party, the TV networks, the major newspapers -- which brought this evil onto the lives of American children and their families.

Those who did this to young women like her -- people like Dr. Gallagher above, who revels on social media in her success in slicing the healthy breasts off of women -- God willing, they will pay within the limits of the law for what they have done. As evil as the Tuskegee Experiment was, this is even more damaging, because it has created, and is creating daily, thousands of more victims.

He's exactly right.

Indeed, it's already happening. Chloe Cole has filed suit.  My prediction is that if she doesn't win, somebody soon after her will.  And like the Opioid lawsuits that are now so common, they'll drive this out of the societal field by litigation force and judgements.  In the meantime, the same society that was just lately pushing pills will be "oh my, oh my, how could this terrible of thing have happened.

But that won't solve the larger problem.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.

Philippians; 3:19.

This pretty much defines where we are, even though's worshiping their stomachs and glorifying in their shame don't recognize it.   That has to change, and changing that is a tall order.

Because in order to do that, the lens, in society has to be turned back to me, towards the whole, and the existential.

Footnotes:

1.  I really haven't tracked the library debate much and have discounted it, but Cole's posting makes it plain how far things are gone.  The book clearly illustrates the author's descent into homosexual conduct and is frankly pornographic.  It shouldn't be in a school library, and it does amount, intentionally or not, to transgender propaganda.

At no point prior to our current era would there even been a debate on whether a book which graphically depicts sexual acts, let alone homosexual acts, should be available to be checked out of a public school library. The fact that there is such debate now is a sign of how far gone things really are, and additionally how entrenched certain interests are that not only want to defend their contra natural lifestyle, but actually promote it.

2. To state this bluntly, what people feared about the Obergefel decision has not only come to pass, but it's surpassed those fears.

This should not have surprised anyone.  Many years ago the homosexual book After the Ball, according to those who have read it, and I have not, not only argued for the normalization of homosexuality, but apparently for the dismantling of marriage and the traditional and long-established incidents of male/female relationships.  Presently, not only are those campaigning for the normalization of transgenderism, but campaigning for it, which is accompanied by foisting medial "treatments" upon the very young, and the accompanying large-scale transfers of cash that entails.  

This has happened before with other industries.  Think, for example, this:

3.  Shepherd noted in one of his books how the men in the Indiana city in which he grew up all subscribed to Field & Stream, even though they largely were not outdoorsmen.  It was a retained desire.

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

5.  Both Hein and Cole have been reluctant to criticize their parents, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be criticized.  These strong daughters honor their parents by providing the backbone that their parents completely lacked.

Having said that, this illustrates the point I noted above.  These young women are roughly in their early 20s, which means they were born either in this century, or the tail end of the last one.  This means that their parents were likely born in the 70s or 80s, to parents who had come up in during the 60s.  So in effect they are the grandchildren of Boomers whose children were often raised with the ethos of the 60s and 70s, which combined would be there are no standards and your goal is to make money.  Additionally, their parents came up during the GOP's gutting of science funding in schools.  So they were born to parents whose grasp of the physical and metaphysical is weak, and whose principal world view is that it's nice to be nice to the nice.

6.  While citing to fiction is always dangerous, an interesting example of this are well depicted in the fiction of Jane Austen.  Not really intended for wide circulation, and limited to the concerns of her class, they nonetheless demonstrate the basic nature of male and female relationships across the ages, which is why they remain incredibly popular, particularly amongst young women who tend to see themselves in the characters.

A feature of this is the "provider" aspect.  Tending to focus on families made up of women, the unmarried women are the concerns of their parents and concerned themselves.  Finding a suitable match, to so speak, dominates the novels, with tension between that and romantic love.  An example in Pride and Prejudice, her best novel, is found in the character of Charlotte Lucas, the protagonist close friend, who opts to marry the Episcopal Churchman, William Collins, who is the epitome of boorish and overbearing, as she's 27 and has no other prospects, and his position is secure.

7.  An example of this given that at some point, it must have been in the 1950s and perhaps early 60s, my father was a member of the Knights of Columbus.

Now, my father was not a joiner by any means, but in the 50s and 60s a man would almost by default be a member of some organizations.  He was the President one year of his profession's statewide professional association, which means that he had been active in it.  And based on some recollections he related to me over the years, he'd been a member of the Knights when the Knights still had a downtown clubhouse.  So had two of my uncles, at least.  Maybe, and probably, all four of them were.

The Knights were a much different organization then, at least locally, than now.  Now I know that they act as a mutual benefit society, as I am sure they did then, and I note them most frequently for having pancake breakfasts at one of the parish churches every Sunday after the early morning Mass.  They may have done that then as well, but the big difference is that their clubhouse, like most men's clubs of the day, had a bar, and it could get a little rowdy.  The long serving Parish Priest of the era stopped in every night at closing time to make sure that they were actually closing, and their St. Patrick's Day parties were legendary.

Be that as it may, it's almost impossible to imagine my father in that setting. Probably after he married, or at least after I was born, he chose not to be, which was in keeping with his character.  Still, it's interesting that you pretty much had to be a member of some social club, probably male only, if you were a man prior to the 1970s.

I've never been a member of anything like that, really, although when I was first practicing law the county bar association was amazingly active and often met one evening, right after work, in a bar, ostensibly to present a CLE.  My enduring memory of one of those meetings was getting there in time, but just in time, and having to squeeze into the back row of table seating, only to have one notoriously rude female lawyer saying something like "so you think you can get around my fat ass?"

She later was subject to a scandal when her husband turned her over to the authorities for molesting him when he was a minor.

9.  This is reflected back to us by the culture of earlier eras in some odd ways.  

For instance, in cartoons, an unmarried male character was really common. Gasoline Alley's central protagonist was, at first, unmarried, with this changing as female readership was low.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...: 

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

For a variety of reasons, I've been pondering the topic of community recently.

Russian children, 1909.

Indeed, this is one of those threads I've taken up, put down, and it's lingered on.  Looking at my list of draft posts, there are a bunch of related ones that I ought to fold in.  This may reflect that.

Added to that, so much so that a whole string of random community related items have sort of floated by me recently, with it rising to the level that synchronicity is getting hard to ignore.

For anyone who knows me well, that might seem pretty odd.  I'm highly introverted, and posted a recent thread relating to that just the other day. But that might give me an insight into community that others lack.  Indeed, in thinking on this, part of the problem with people who tried to "build the community" in certain groups is that they treat a community like a club.  I think they actually can't see the distinction between clubs and communities, quite frankly.  And because those people are extraverted, I can see why they can't grasp it.

This doesn't mean that extraverted people are shallow or anything. According to at least once source, extroverts are "people people", i.e,. they really really like people.  I do think, however that they don't grasp at all that not everyone wants a giant bear hug and to be compelled to go to parish pizza and bowling night, and that even having a pizza and bowling night doesn't do much for community.

Put another way, there are people who should be part of the community that would be, in an existential manner, if a solid community existed. Building that, however, is tough, and impossible if not done in a fundamentally natural way.

Want to join the man's parish bowling league and Chesteron night?

Crowd of miners in Mogollon, New Mexico.  Note the wide vareity of ages.

No, I don't.

Anyhow, while it sounds weird for an introvert to be saying it, the lack of authentic community is a crisis.

I'm not licensed as a homilist, rather obviously. Shoot, I'm not a cleric.  But something occurred to me the other day when pondering the topic of transgenderism, which has been constantly in the news of late.

Eh?

Bear with me.

The topic is, again, community.

And what occurred to me is the story of the rich young man who approached Jesus, which was addressed in a homily.

Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”

He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good.* If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and said, “Who then can be saved?

Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” 

Then Peter said to him in reply, “We have given up everything and followed you. What will there be for us?”

Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you that you who have followed me, in the new age, when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory, will yourselves sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.

But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

Matthew, Chapter 19.

Now, the meaning of this seems pretty clear. But for the first time something else struck me.

Students of scripture often note that individual passages can have multiple meanings and that they can all be true.  Here, it's clear enough, that the promise is that the individual's sacrifice for the Lord would result in eternal life.

But note that what was also indicated, in a way, that those sacrificing weren't going to be abandoned.  Yes, they were giving something up, but they were getting something right away, which was membership in the community.

I'll get back to where I started above, but consider this in relation to recent legislation down in Cheyenne.  One legislator, who represents herself as some sort of Christian, made this statement the other day in regard to a bill to extend medicare coverage for recent mothers:

"Arguing that if you’re pro-life you have to be for the expansion of entitlement programs does not follow,” Ward said. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”

That statement, which we've already addressed, is blisteringly anti-Christian, and coming from the Old Testament, as it does, it also flies in the face of a basic tenement of all three Abrahamic religions.  You are your brother's keeper, or in this case, your sister's.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims all agree on this, even if certain self-declared Christian legislators don't.  But the reason we raise this again here is this, when somebody in the situation these women are in are expected to do something, as we tell them to, it is of course reminding them of their moral obligation as human beings, but it's also the case that those who comply should be part of the community.  Rep. Ward's statement basically would kick them out of the maternity ward and then let us ignore them.  That's not the way thing should be.

Back to the transgenderism item.  

Studies of this tend to show that transgenderism is mostly concentrated in young teenage women, I.e., girls who are young teens, although just the other day I was in the book store and ran into a young man who was attempting to affect, quite unsuccessful, a female appearance.

Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.

And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.

The teenage girls who exhibit this are pretty much all mildly ADHD and have been pretty much all exposed to pornography.  Basically, what they're doing is reacting to that.  Too young really to even be thinking about sex, they're getting a dose of the weirdest thought of our fallen species right off the bat.  Women doing weird things to men, and vice versa, and saying they want no part.

Indeed, for those who watched the recent documentary on Playboy, a similar thing happened to its early "bunnies" in clubs, who were pretty routinely sodomized, with the reaction that a lot of them came out of the experience heavily traumatized.

The point is this. The young girls live in a society that doesn't protect them at all, and they have no place to turn.  If they turn to their parents, who are mostly white, educated and liberal, the Americans who have no community at all, they'll get "support" by verification, which in reality is no support at all.  Same with the young man at the bookstore or the young man otherwise mentioned above.  The one is definitely a child of a white, liberal, well-educated household and is receiving "support".  My wager would be that the other young man, who was definitely white, could be described the same way.

Set another way, the WASP class that runs the country has completely abandoned any concept of community.  They've abandoned their own community standards in favor of a sort of unthinking soft nihlism. There's no place for distressed people to go.  If they do go somewhere, they'll simply get verification that their "feelings" are okay.

And community is community oriented.  Not individually oriented.

Let's state that again, the community is community oriented.

Kith and Kin, Tribe and Identity.

The thing is, we're a "social animal", as some folks like to note.

But what does that mean?

In our early, early days, when we looked out on a sleepy morning, after the dog got us up early, as dogs are wont to do, we'd see, once we cleared our tipi/lodge/tent/lean to, a group of identical dwellings inhabited by people we all know.  Not only did we know them all, we were likely to be related to all of them, and pretty closely at that.  

Indeed, the inheritance of language even demonstrates that.  The English word "King", comes from "kin", a word that survived in English as sort of a folk word, not too surprisingly, for close relatives.  People who are your "kin" are related to you.  At one time the King was related to you also.  A king was just a tribal chieftain, and a tribe was just a band of cousins, basically.

Over time this obviously changed, but even today, if we stop and think about it, an element of the "nation" in nation states, which the U.S. is not, is that everyone is actually related.  The Swedes, as an ethnic group, all descend from less than 40 people, for example.  The Sámi and Finns, who are routinely regarded as the happiest people on earth, have an ancient, ancient origin and have been living basically where they are since the Bronze Age. They're definitely all related.

Indeed, the Finns provide a good example of what we're trying to get across here.

All Finns are descended from tribal folks who moved into Finland, from Siberia, thousands of years ago, and whose relatives stretched far out into northern Siberal for a very long ways, forming the native and majority people of the region until the Rus moved in.  There are still small populations of Finno Ugeric people in the very far north for a long ways who can really be regarded as left behind Finns.  And as we would suspect, the Finns share a common culture with a common Weltanschauung, a common history, and very significantly for their happy status, a close association with nature in a real sense. 

Sociologist constantly try to figure out what makes the Finns such a happy people, but there you have it to a large degree. They're living their with their kin, in a common culture, and are pretty close to nature for a modern nation. Most people living in that state would be pretty happy too.

Indeed, all would be.

Note that this doesn't say that things can't go badly, they certainly can. But what this does demonstrate is that community, in a real sense, matters, as we're all communal in a way.

Looking outward

But what that also means is that as members of a community, it has expectations and standards that dominate over the individuals.  There are no individualistic communities.

Americans worship a cult of individuality, and over time, we've infected the rest of the western world with it, or at least helped to spread the infection.  We don't like any standards that are inconvenient to us, and have worked to defeat them.

The problem with that is that some standards, indeed a lot of them, exist for a fundamental reason, even if we've forgotten what they were.  At some point, in the advancement of the concept of liberty, we failed to consider Chesterton's Fence.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

That gets us back to our "transgendered" friends.

Conventional culture held that there were two genders, and if you "felt" yourself to be outside of them, you should conform to them, or get help as you might have something else going on.  Modern liberal thought, being libertine in all such matters of personal conduct, has said no, go ahead and take it down.  The results have played out in suicides, increasing definitions of what a person "feels" as the felt change didn't make a person happy, later life regret, and the destruction of social institutions to the determent of the individual and children in particular.

Culture is a library of answers.  Not all of the are right.  But a lot of them are.  The species has been around for a long time, 250,000 to 750,000 years, and a lot of the answers are baked into our genes or were worked out long, long ago.  Telling you to ignore hte culture, and hence the community, is a lot like handing somebody a book and them telling them to interpret the words they way they should feel them to be.

Destroying the community.

The United States has always had a multiplicity of cultures, although nothing like what it currently does, but it also had communities.  The Frontier often really strained this, after the Mexican War, but communities managed to reestablish themselves pretty readily.  

In a large sense, the overall community standards were set originally loosely on Protestant Christianity.  As time went on and the country took in large numbers of Catholics, and then Jews, it changed, in an overall sense, to some degree to accommodate the newer immigrants, but it never really went away.  The newer communities of people, moreover, formed communities within the larger community.  Put another way, Catholics in Wyoming in 1940, let's say, were part of a distinct community and knew it, in the overall larger Protestant, and not terribly religious, Wyoming of that period.

This is not trivial.  Being part of such a community came with a Weltanschauung, a set of expectations, and an expectation of help.  I just ran across such an example of the latter which, in today's' world, would have had a very different ending, but which had a happy one, in context, at the time.  It also had a very Catholic one, and one heavily based on the support of a large close net family spread over three states, but which remained close nonetheless.

After the Second World War there was a sort of super heated concept of the proverbial "melting pot".  Ironically the desire that everyone be an American (and then later a European, in Europe) lead from what was essentially an anti diversity position to a hyper diversity position, to an extreme individualistic position in the society at large.  Whatever it was about the times, and I tend to think it was a reaction to the murderous fanatic nationalism of the Axis powers of World War Two, there was a very distinct "there's no difference between people" and "we're all alike" which didn't celebrate diversity at all, but hugely opposed it.  Indeed, this was evident in the early opposition to the Civil Rights movement which opposed integration partially on the basis that African Americans, one of the oldest demographics in the United States, present since 1619, were "not yet ready" to enjoy full American citizenship. When John Wayne stated in Playboy magazine in 1971 that “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility", he was speaking for a huge percentage of Americans and ironically on the right wing backside of a left wing program of melting everyone and every culture into a single American one.  That goal had been there for decades, but in the post-war economic boom it took on a new, and quite successful, form.

The overall problem with that is that it not only sought to incorporate every element of American society into one, it sought to diminish the differences between individual cultures down to nullities.  The American Civil Religion, never really dominant until that time, came to be, with a sort of loosely Judeo-Christian, Protestantized, pantheism, which held that all religions were basically the same, as long as they more or less were related to Abrahamic faiths.  This isn't true at all, but it became a very dominant line of thought and remains one in the US today, followed by, during the 60s, the same line of thought to include all religions of all types.  All people's cultures, all people's faiths, everything, was all the same.

That logically lead to the point that, if everything was the same, an individual person's view on anything was just as legitimate as anyone else's, no matter informed or ill-informed that opinion might be. Strong cultural elements which operated as brakes towards the dilution of anyone culture, and strong ancient presumptions about certain conducts, were then regarded as being okay to yield to an individual belief, no matter how anemic or poorly thought out it may be.

A rich society can tolerate this for a while, but not indefinitely. As the elastic balloon fo behavior and conduct began to stretch to its limits, weak points in the balloon began to develop.  We're pretty much at the braking point for those now.

Evidence of that is that people who need help, just don't get it.  The mentally ill are simply allowed out on the street under the belief that their life choice is as valid as anyone else's, essentially meaning mental illness doesn't exist.  Prohibitions on drugs that are known to destroy people's lives are removed on the same basis.  And individuals who previously would have been part of tight families that were part of tight communities, are now basically left on their own to try to fit into a world in which options are really massively decreasing, rather than increasing.  When they cry for help, they don't get it.

The anti community

At the same time, the same forces, developed into sort of an anti community.  

The overall WASPish American culture did have a central existential Weltanschauung, that of a combined Christian worldview of Protestant reformers of the Reformation and American religious evangelist of the Awakening movements.  Catholics and Jews were clearly outside those traditions, or even in philosophical opposition to them, but to a surprising degree they adopted some of the core tenants while retaining their own beliefs.

After the Second World War, however, the WASP order began to breakdown, again for reasons that aren't really clear.  The United States remained a majority Protestant country, but the various Protestant faiths, much more than others, began to suffer serious erosion while also abandoning core tenants.  Over time, this has happened to such a degree that Protestant faiths that now retain them are regarded as subcultures, while mainline Protestant Churches careen towards irrelevance.  Catholic intellectuals who like to worry over these topics in the Catholic world should take note that the problem is actually much more expressed in the Protestant world, in which it also saw a universal retreat from orthodoxy toward liberalism.  Some Protestant churches today have so weakened on long-established tenants that they basically only really stand behind the concept that we shouldn't kill each other, and we shouldn't steal, tenants that are easy to adhere to.  Otherwise, they pretty much license going for it, with many members simply going out the door never to return.

There's definitely a lesson in there.

Anyhow, as this occurred mainline Protestant churches that started off with trying to be more accommodating started to simply evolve towards total non judgmentalism, and the members of their now mostly lapsed congregations adopted that world view.  In many cases, highly Protestantized Catholics and Jews did the same.  In the end, the only thing that this class is now willing to be judgmental on is seemingly being judgemental.  A person could literally have all of the vices listed by St. Paul and be accepted as A OK, while a person warning someone not to do those things will be condemned.

That has lead us to where there's no help for those who really need it.

Take again our transgendered example.  Exposed to pornography, as nobody is willing to do anything about it, and raised in a world in which the only thing that really matters is your financial success, grossed out by what they see on the net, and freaked out by the expectation that they have to move away and take jobs as major league accountants, or whatever, they're looking for answers from a community.  If their parents won't provide an answer, and they won't, as they don't want to be judgmental, and if the society at large has been told to shut up, least it be judgmental, at least they have refuge in the intentionally self marginalized.   That'll get attention from somebody, sympathy from somebody, and nobody is going to step in to keep them from falling.

The counter community

At the same time, certain groups that move counter to this direction have done well, often to the surprise of the larger culture, which is telling.

Some years ago, for example, there was a definite trend in Europe in which European women were becoming Muslims.  The number wasn't gigantic, but it was notable. Some even moved to the Middle East.

To the liberalized, no community, Westerner this was astounding.  But by becoming Muslim they were opting for a community which provided support, comfort and answers.  Indeed, the trip to transgenderism, and Islam, isn't really all that much different, although it would shock both groups to hear that.  These women had found a place where their appearance wouldn't be a major factor in their lives, where they weren't going to be expected to act like porn stars, and where they could act according to their long held ingrained DNA based behavior without criticism.

While I'll address orthodoxy more below, in another context, the same forces have seen the move of an appreciable number of main line Protestant Christians into the Orthodox Church.  Faced with coming into churches in which the message was it's nice to be nice to the nice, and we're all nice, and don't be judgmental, they're opting for a Christian religion whose adherence to tradition is open and obvious.  Some Catholics, while I lament it, from liberal dioceses have taken the same path.

Other Protestant have moved from the main line churches or the old "Reformed" churches that have softened, into really hard core Protestant churches.  Indeed, from the outside, it's obvious that the Reformation, which never claimed the majority of Christians, is dying, but in that process the most "reformed" of the Protestant churches and the most lax are simultaneously growing, as the adherents of the center either drop out of attendance all together, comfortable that they are still Christian but okay to do that, or they opt for either a clear message, or ratification that all of their personal vices are completely okay.

It's also worth noting that the LDS have maintained and gained during this period.  Knowledgeable Apostolic Christians have a hard time grasping this, as it's clear to them, with their knowledge of the Apostolic Fathers, that they are the original Christians and there was never a Great Apostasy, but that' probably doesn't have much to do with the attraction to the LDS by those who join it.  It offers a solid community with a clear set of answers, irrespective of whether they are based on truth, and which again provides cover for acting very traditionally.

And they're not alone.

Most Sundays I drive from a well attended Catholic Church, early in the morning, past a well attended Lutheran Church.  I've been to a wedding there.  It's pastor clearly bears the flag of orthodoxy and against the world (so much so that I really wonder why he isn't a Catholic priest).  At the wedding reception, a large group of young people all danced certain dances they'd learned in the church's wider community, of which they're very clearly part.

In contrast, I also drive past an old Presbyterian Church here, which has declined. They proclaim themselves to be reformed out of that church itself. There's never anyone there.

Is this the General Proselytization Thread?

Well, it hadn't started out to be.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting that religions are so much a part of the deposit of knowledge in a culture that if they're centrality to a culture is destroyed, the culture follows.

Indeed, it's interesting to note that some deep lovers of certain cultures who were either agnostic or non-believers so appreciated that, they were nonetheless deeply appreciative of their culture's religion.  Roberto Rosellini, the Italian film director, was not religious himself, but he was enormously attracted to the Catholic Church, its traditions, and ethics, which were central to his world view. Catholic Priest play a heroic role in one of his Rome Trilogy movies, and the centrality of a Catholic world view is obvious in his films.  He lamented the rise of materialism in opposition to Catholicism.  George F. Will, who is agnostic to some degree, is the same way in regard to Christianity in general.  And of course there are many examples of individuals who returned to their faiths, or converted to faith, mid life or even late life, such as C. S. Lewis, William Butler Yeats, and Ernst Jünger.  These individuals stand in stark contrast to "insiders", if you will, who attempt to take their faiths in the opposite direction.

And societies that succeed in ripping religions down often end up reinstating their elements in any event.  The Russian Communists espoused a highly libertine world view as revolutionaries, but by the 1930s Soviet Communists had become as conservative on some matters, particularly on sexual behavior, as any Christian religion ever had been.

It's often noted that religion is nature to human beings, and that very humans actually fail to have one, even people who proclaim they do not.  Even with avowed lapsed or agnostic, the confession of resort to prayer is pretty common.  In theological terms, theologians hold that humans, a creation of God, are built for their creator, and look for him naturally.  The widespread belief in the divine, if not in a universal concept of that divine, is too large to be ignored.

That comes close, of course, to returning to an argument for universalism, which we're not making.  All humans may have some concept of religion, and in reality true atheists are probably so rare as to not exist at all, but not all religions are equal.  Ultimately, there's only one truth on any one thing, religion included.  That's not the point of the thread.

What is the point is that religion is part of culture and is central to it.  No religion, no culture, and no culture, no community.  Wipe that out, and you basically have yourself in the world, and your appetites. And while modern culture may tell you that you are the center of the universe, you aren't.  Your appetites will never be satisfied in that fashion, and you'll always be adrift in that situation.

Indeed, you'll look for a community, and you'll probably find one, make one, or end resort, like so many, to dulling the mind somehow.

The debased community 

Because forming and living in communities is man's natural state, when one community is destroyed, others will spring up in their wake.  Where a community has intentionally been destroyed or suppressed, and it's a natural community, the result is that the community that fills the vacuum will be debased and dangerous, either individually or collectively.

Criminal communities provide an example.  Nearly always formed of the dispossessed and disadvantaged, they offer an income, and community.  Indeed, often made up of strong ethnic ties (kin and kinship) and having strong rituals, they offer a warped substitute of what a stronger more natural and metaphysical community would otherwise offer.  And they stand in stark contrast to the dissolved nice to be nice to the nice ethos that WASPish culture has come to offer.  They're ancient, in a way, recalling tribal bands of the raiding type that existed in the larger European culture before Christianity caused it to fade.

In cultures where religion has been strongly attacked by modernity, and culture accordingly decayed, Communism and radical fascism offer another example.  Communism, it is often noted, was practically as civil religion wherever it took hold, in contrast to its nature when it was revolutionary.  Modern North Korea has actually managed to cross over the line and actually deified Kim Il-sung (김일성), giving him mystical and postmortem divine qualities.  Everywhere it took charge, irrespective of its stand as a revolutionary body, it recreated a structure that was essentially religious in nature in order to create a false community in the place of the one it destroyed, centered on a theoretical universal "working man".

Nazism, in contrast, which is sometimes claimed by some to be a species of Socialism, attacked, but with less success, Christianity in its own land, and then with some more success Christianity in the lands it conquered, and directly proposed to establish, ultimately, a new religion based on the Germanic myths of old. Center to its ethos, however, was the worship of the German Volk, an idealized tribal identity which argued that the Germanic peoples were superior to all others.  Suppressing the Christian culture of Germany, which was already split into two due to the reformation, it sought to supplant it and went a long ways towards creating alternative community expressions through first the party and then the state.

All of this should serve as a warning as to what happen when a culture is torn down.  The German culture had been under attack for decades prior to its fall to the Nazis in 1932, and had not done a very good job of defending itself.  First attacked from the left, and then the right and the left, its experiment with democracy in the 1920s was undertaken at a bad time during which adapting the German culture to democracy was a tall order.  In the end, the Nazi's co-opted the German identity with a shallow cartoon like reflection of it which turned nearly instantly murderous.

Communism worked much the same way.  Coming into power principally where large industrial classes had been marginalized and left out of their cultures, it created a culture based on nothing more than labor which required the murderous suppression of more natural communities based upon anything else.  Communism, however, would not have come about but for the corruption of the culture itself that first occurred in Imperial Russia and which went down in collapse in 1917 due to World War One.

In both instances, the left and the right operated to pervert and destroy the wider culture.

In the US right now, we see ourselves in the same dangerous position. The left has outright gone against the culture from which it sprang, hating the foundation of all the liberties and philosophic thought that made it possible.  A populist right with a very shallow base in the traditional culture seeks to reclaim what it thinks that culture was, but in an extremely shallow manner.  Put another way, a populist right that thinks itself based in Christianity has no more understanding of the culture than the left does, which is all that can allow it to think that it's not its brother's keeper.

Restoring the community.

Well, how do you do that?

I.e, once you've destroyed the community, how do you restore one?

I won't pretend to have the answer to this, but I think there are at least some clues, some of which I noted above.

One thing is to remember Yeoman's Third Law of History, which holds:

Yeoman's Third Law of History.  Culture is plastic, but sticky.

Eh?  What could that mean. Well, just this.  Cultures mold themselves over time, to fit certain circumstances and developments, but they really persevere in ways that we can hardly appreciate.

We like to believe, in the West, that all cultures are the same, but that is very far from true. And we also like to believe that they "modernize," by which we mean that they "westernize."  They can, but their basic roots do not go away, and they don't even really change without the application of pressure and heat.  Cultures, in that sense, are like metamorphic rocks.  It takes a lot of time, heat, and intense pressure to change them, and even then, you can tell what they started off as.

Examples?  Well, when I was a student in school it was often claimed by our teachers that citizens of the USSR liked their government, having known nothing else, and that everything of the old Russian culture was dead.  Man, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When the lid came off the USSR in 1990, all sorts of old cultural attributes of the various old peoples of the Russian Empire came roaring back. Cossacks remembered that they were Cossacks.  Lithuanians remembered they were Lithuanian. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a spectacular revival.  Even protests in Russia remain uniquely, and strangely, old Russian.  Nothing had actually gone away.

This is true of all cultures. Even here in the US.  The old Puritans may be gone, but much of their views towards our natures and work very much remain.  Even when cultures take big vacations from themselves, they tend to find their way back over time, at that, and will surprisingly reemerge when thought long gone.

People do retain a lot more cultural knowledge than we might suspect, and when things begin to fall apart, they reach back towards it.

One of the interesting examples of this over the years has been the "Traditional Latin Mass" in the Catholic Church.  It never really fully went away, but it was pretty darned hard to find in any form whatsoever after "the Spirit of Vatican II" went to work in the Church.  The altar rails went out, things were moved, and Latin left the premises.

Except it didn't, and when allowed, it tended to come roaring back in.  When Pope Benedict allowed it to be used fairly freely, it exploded.  Pope Francis (dob 1936) had now taken it back out in a controversial and lamented move which is likely a mistake.  At any rate, no matter what the situation with it was, it tended to attract the young in some areas much more than the old.

There's definitely a lesson in that, and in the overall picture.  A post Boomer generation that was largely abandoned, in cultural terms, by the Boomers, tested orthodoxy and found it meaningful, and not just in the way noted.

And that may well be the point we're at now.  The Boomer generation's "if it feels good, do it", mentality yielded into the "greed is good" mentality in the same cohort.  Both are now fighting it out in what is practically a house to house fight, with lots of casualties.  In the meantime, people are reporting to the hospitals of orthodoxy, which is a trip back into conservatism.

The problem is there's no roadmap, lots of blind alleys, and not too many to lead the way.

And yes, that doesn't really offer much in the way of a suggestion on how to proceed.

What I do know, however, pizza and bowling night isn't it.  And orthodoxy looks outwards at a much greater whole, not inside at your own individual self.  In order to get there, you have to accept that you end up giving up a lot, including the illusion of the primacy of yourself.

However, you secure a hundred times more.

Lex Anteinternet: A reminder that the last shall be first, and some of the people who figure they are in the front of the line, may not be in it at all.

Lex Anteinternet: A reminder that the last shall be first, and some ...: 

A reminder that the last shall be first, and some of the people who figure they are in the front of the line, may not be in it at all.

I earlier posted this item regarding certain people who profess to be Christians who are sitting in our legislature:

Lex Anteinternet: Hypocrisy?: Hypocrisy? Or just not really thinking things through? As noted here before, although it might not always be very obvious, I'm conservat...

I addressed in that, the bill to extend Medicaid, noting:

The bill to extend Medicaid, which only aids the poor, to mothers past 60 days to a year passed its committee, but barely.  

It was supported by Governor Gordon.

It was supported by physicians.

Deacon Mike Lehman, lobbyist for the Diocese of Wyoming, spoke in favor of it.

None of which kept some of the legislative guardians of public morals from speaking against it.  Jeanette Ward of Illinois spoke against it as an "entitlement program".

Eh?

Not hardly.

Deacon Lehman noted:“that not every government program is an inevitable slide into the fiery pit of Socialism.”  He further noted, according to the Cowboy State Daily: “We’re talking about a segment of the population that qualifies for Medicaid coverage while pregnant, then, when the mother and child are still extremely vulnerable, they no longer qualify.”

The physicians noted they were supporting it even though the program really doesn't pay them very well at all, just barely, in fact.

I don't know, I'd note, Ward's religious affiliation, but I’m sure she's some sort of Christian.  Prior to coming to Wyoming, she was very active in Illinois politics, where she was predictably controversial.  An example of that is as follows:

Do you know what your children are being taught: Muslims believe in the same God as Christians and Jews?

My 6th-grader came home with this assignment today. She was supposed to read the article and answer the questions. (She will not be completing this assignment). The full text of the article is below. Quiz questions are depicted in the pictures. This article is utterly incorrect and false on many levels. This is one of the many reasons I voted no on this curriculum resource.

Well, Christians, Muslims and Jews do in fact all worship the same God.  Their understanding of God's nature if quite different from each other, but they all worship the same God.

Are we really willing to deny this small class of women and their infants medical help?  Seems really mean.

It's also the sort of thing that causes some people to slam the Pro Life folks on the basis that they don't care at all once people are born.  That's actually completely false, and indeed many of the more dedicated pro lifers do indeed support helping mother and infant post birth.

Indeed, while often missed, there's a strong streak of liberalism in at least the Catholic pro-life crowd, which is not only opposed to abortion, but opposed to the death penalty as well.  It's not actually easy to politically pigeonhole it.

Which unfortunately doesn't appear to be the case for Ms. Ward.  She's pretty predictable.

So, frankly, this doesn't surprise me very much.

Without knowing more, I sort of guess that Ms. Ward is a fundamentalist of some type.  I don't want to pick on fundamentalist too much, as they are highly varied, and the term is one that is put on them, rather than one they adopt, but fundamentalist of any type, and there are Islamic Fundamentalist, Hindu fundamentalist, etc., risk reducing their religion to a set of sort of Pharisaic type rules and becoming mean thereafter.  Abortion is wrong because it is, premarital sex is wrong, aborting the results of premarital sex is wrong, but after that you are your own and if you get sick and die, well that's your problem.

I'm not saying that all fundamentalist of any type hold that view, but the fundamentalist of any stripe, and I'd note that for the Apostolic religions as well, run that risk.

Note, orthodox, and fundamentalist, are not the same thing.

There's a real element of solidarity and subsidiarity missing in that thinking.  Yes, just the other day I criticized free school breakfast and lunches, on the basis that it encouraged parents in irresponsibility, but here a different concern exists, which is helping the most helpless in the most efficient fashion.  I.e, both solidarity and subsidiarity apply here, and they argue strongly for extending Medicaid here.  To argue against it as an unwanted "entitlement" really misses the boat.

Now, I learn from the Casper Star Tribune, that Ms. Ward stated the following:

“Arguing that if you’re pro-life you have to be for the expansion of entitlement programs does not follow,” Ward said. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”

Yes, Ms. Ward, you are your brother's keeper. That was the very point, and to a significant degree, of the entire Christian Gospel.  And in terms of the Torah, that was actually the point of the lesson.  Cain was Able's keeper. That was his obligation, not merely not killing him.

If you cannot grasp that, you've missed the message of the New Testament.  If you cannot be your brother's keeper, at least on occasion, you're claiming a crown that may well be beyond your grasp, if that is truly what you believe.¹

Truly, this is such a shocking position, that a person would have to be either blisteringly ignorant of the entire point of Christianity, or such a flaming Calvinist that even John Calvin would find your position abhorrent.

Appalling.

And a calling to repent.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’

And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’

He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’

And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Matthew, Chapter 25. 

Footnotes

1.  Indeed, there has been in recent years a Catholic Bishop, perhaps still living, who took his obligation to the poor so seriously that he always carried money so as to give to every beggar.  When asked why, he replied "How am I to know which one is not Christ?", recalling the Gospel line that Christ would recall that whenever you gave to the least, you gave to him.

Lex Anteinternet: Live by the sword. Some legislators propose to take us back to 1889 once again.

Lex Anteinternet: Live by the sword. Some legislators propose to ta...: 

Live by the sword. Some legislators propose to take us back to 1889 once again.

Then Jesus saith to him: Put up again thy sword into its place: for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

Douay-Rheims Bible, Matthew 26:52.

The Invaders.  Back again after 130 years.

It would seem that some old wars which seemingly were behind us are not.  

Once again, the forces of "property" wish to exclude. . . violently.

And once again, they have the legislature behind them.

We recently posted on this item:

 HOUSE BILL NO. HB0126

Trespass-removal of trespasser.

Sponsored by: Representative(s) Crago and Washut and Senator(s) Kinskey and Landen

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to crimes and offenses; providing for the use of physical force against a trespasser as specified; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 6‑3‑303 by creating new subsections (d) and (e) is amended to read:

6‑3‑303.  Criminal trespass; penalties; justification.

(d)  A person who is the owner or legal occupant of land or a premises upon which a criminal trespass is occurring, or their agent, is justified in using reasonable and appropriate physical force upon another person when and to the extent that it is reasonably necessary to terminate what the owner, occupant or agent reasonably believes to be the commission of a criminal trespass by the other person in or upon the land or premises.

(e)  Section (d) of this section does not supersede or add to the responsibilities applicable to the defense of self or another as provided by law. 

Section 2.  This act is effective July 1, 2023.

Frankly, as this bill is based on what one “reasonably believes”, basically authorizes murder, or could, and probably will be, read that way.

I know Washut who due to his prior career as a policeman ought to know better.  I don't know the remainder of them.

This bill, if passed, will get somebody killed.

Let's start with this. What is criminal trespass?

Well, under Wyoming's law, it's the following:

TITLE 6 - CRIMES AND OFFENSES

CHAPTER 3 - OFFENSES AGAINST PROPERTY

6-3-303. Criminal trespass; penalties.

(a) A person is guilty of criminal trespass if he enters or remains on or in the land or premises of another person, knowing he is not authorized to do so, or after being notified to depart or to not trespass. For purposes of this section, notice is given by:

(i) Personal communication to the person by the owner or occupant, or his agent, or by a peace officer; or

(ii) Posting of signs reasonably likely to come to the attention of intruders.

(b) Criminal trespass is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than six (6) months, a fine of not more than seven hundred fifty dollars ($750.00), or both.

(c) This section does not supersede W.S. 1-21-1003.

So, under Wyoming's law, if a person comes up to you, and says "you are trespassing", and you remain, and you really are trespassing, you are guilty of criminal trespass. 

And, under the proposed amendment to the law, this would be added to it:

(d)  A person who is the owner or legal occupant of land or a premises upon which a criminal trespass is occurring, or their agent, is justified in using reasonable and appropriate physical force upon another person when and to the extent that it is reasonably necessary to terminate what the owner, occupant or agent reasonably believes to be the commission of a criminal trespass by the other person in or upon the land or premises.

(e)  Section (d) of this section does not supersede or add to the responsibilities applicable to the defense of self or another as provided by law. 

So the new law would be such that Landowner or Landowner's agent could come up to you and say, "get off", and if they didn't, they could use "reasonable and appropriate physical force" to remove you when they "reasonably believe" that you are criminally trespassing.

Seriously, "reasonably believed"?

What if their reasonable belief was wrong?

Several years ago I was on public lands when a couple of goons for a large Natrona County landowner approached me and informed me that I had to leave as I was trespassing.  I had a GPS, and I knew I wasn't.

I was also deer hunting and carrying a rifle and a handgun.

Did the goons believe that I was trespassing?  I don't know.  It's hard to penetrate the minds of saps who take jobs as regulators.  Their belief may have been based on what their employer told them.  Mine was based on the United States Geological Survey.  

I didn't want to bother with it, and I cleared off.

I frankly wouldn't now.  Now, I would have told them to pound sand, particularly as they warned me it was a $10,000 fine is I stayed, which was bullshit.

I got my revenge, I guess, by voting against the guy, a long with a lot of other locals, when he stood for reelection for a local office he was also holding.

But back to the scenario.  I'm armed.  If they were too, and they believed I was "criminally trespassing", and had invoked the element by telling me I was, could they then draw down on me?  Would that be reasonable force, as I was armed?

And if I did, would I have been justified in blowing them away in self defense?  I wasn't trespassing, and now I'm in danger of my life.

I probably wouldn't. . . but if I were with my son, wife, or daughter and felt they actually might use the weapons?  A scared person resorts to violence quickly, and men protecting their families do as well.  

And if that happened, would I be found to have acted in self-defense?

This scenario, if this bill passes, will play out just this way.

Now it'll be incumbent upon anyone going afield to pack heat, least some hired moron tries to drive them off land they believe they have a right to be on.  And sooner or later some asshole, probably a landowner on public land, or some out of state landowner's hired flunky, will challenge a fisherman, hunter, or hiker and get gunned down, dying for a moronic belief in the absolute nature of property rights that are, in fact, not absolute, never have been, and never will be.

What about the corner crossing case?  Even the Game Warden couldn't tell if it was a trespass or not.  The landowner's hired traitor to the state believed it was.  Would he have drawn down on them?

Those guys were gentlemen in the whole affair.  Most people are.  I've known of at least one friend of mine who was confronted in such a fashion and kept a rifle on the jerk confronting him, as he was armed.  The armed jerk didn't realize that he was about to meet the business end of a .30-30 if he went too far.

Life preserved by a clam reactant.

Not everyone is calm, and not everyone cares either.   Some asshat is going to tell somebody to get off some land, and that person is going to stand their ground. Somebody will probably get killed, and it'll probably be the person yelling "get off my land".

Lots of people now days imagine themselves to be Matt Quigly in the final scene of Quigly Down Under, gunning down the baddy. Some have even taken up carrying all the time so that they can affect the visage of Pistol Pete or maybe Yoesimite Sam.  Take our recent wholly unqualified interim Secretary of State, Karl Allred, who packed heat on to the UW campus as he wanted to make a point.

Direct link to WyoFile, "Uinta County committeeman Karl Allred reviews documents at a Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee meeting in Riverton in September 2022. Gov. Mark Gordon appointed Allred as secretary of state. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)"

Mr. Allred, seen packing here complete with a handgun that has an extra magazine, may imagine himself freedom's brave sentinel. but if he had to draw that, let's be honest, he'd be lucky to get it around his gut.

Being fat is no crime, but frankly not one person in fifty knows how to use a handgun in combat, and a lot of those are people who would have the high side of the fight if confronted by a good.  Pistol Packing Regulators may imagine that they can draw down on a whole passel of criminal trespasser, but the result is far from certain, particularly if they aren't trespassing.

Think that guy can outdraw and gun down a 20-year-old carrying a .357?  I don't think it bloody likely.

And FWIW, there's a whole lot of people now who are packing for self-defense, including a lot of young, agile, men, and women, who actually don't have enormous waste lines to clear, and who the goons aren't going to know are packing.

What the crap has gotten into people?

Wyoming was built on go where you want, when you want.  The last time somebody tried to change this, it went badly.

But we're right back at that point once again. Property rights, real or imagined, enforced at the barrel of a gun.  Indeed, when we fought that battle before, the legislature was on the wrong side of it then as well.

Moreover, any property, including your very own house, that you own, you are merely renting for, at most, the extraordinary short period of your life.  You don't really have a moral right to go around bullying trespassers on the open range or fishing stream. Yes, you can call law enforcement, but do that.  That's their job in a civil society.

And let's be honest, if we're returning to that day, equitably, turnabout can be argued to be fair play.

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Seek the Truth

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Seek the Truth: Truth is when our minds correspond with reality.             https://youtu.be/FleRnoLsMTY         

Lex Anteinternet: A Papal Homily.

Lex Anteinternet: A Papal Homily.:  

A Papal Homily.

 CAPPELLA PAPALE

MASS

«PRO ELIGENDO ROMANO PONTIFICE»

HOMILY OF HIS EMINENCE CARD. JOSEPH RATZINGER

DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS

Vatican Basilica

Monday 18 April 2005

At this moment of great responsibility, let us listen with special attention to what the Lord says to us in his own words. I would like to examine just a few passages from the three readings that concern us directly at this time.

The first one offers us a prophetic portrait of the person of the Messiah - a portrait that receives its full meaning from the moment when Jesus reads the text in the synagogue at Nazareth and says, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing" (Lk 4: 21).

At the core of the prophetic text we find a word which seems contradictory, at least at first sight. The Messiah, speaking of himself, says that he was sent "to announce a year of favour from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God" (Is 61: 2). We hear with joy the news of a year of favour: divine mercy puts a limit on evil, as the Holy Father told us. Jesus Christ is divine mercy in person: encountering Christ means encountering God's mercy.

Christ's mandate has become our mandate through the priestly anointing. We are called to proclaim, not only with our words but also with our lives and with the valuable signs of the sacraments, "the year of favour from the Lord".

But what does the prophet Isaiah mean when he announces "the day of vindication by our God"? At Nazareth, Jesus omitted these words in his reading of the prophet's text; he concluded by announcing the year of favour. Might this have been the reason for the outburst of scandal after his preaching? We do not know.

In any case, the Lord offered a genuine commentary on these words by being put to death on the cross. St Peter says: "In his own body he brought your sins to the cross" (I Pt 2: 24). And St Paul writes in his Letter to the Galatians: "Christ has delivered us from the power of the law's curse by himself becoming a curse for us, as it is written, "Accursed is anyone who is hanged on a tree'. This happened so that through Christ Jesus the blessing bestowed on Abraham might descend on the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, thereby making it possible for us to receive the promised Spirit through faith" (Gal 3: 13f.).

Christ's mercy is not a grace that comes cheap, nor does it imply the trivialization of evil. Christ carries the full weight of evil and all its destructive force in his body and in his soul. He burns and transforms evil in suffering, in the fire of his suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favour converge in the Paschal Mystery, in the dead and Risen Christ. This is the vengeance of God: he himself suffers for us, in the person of his Son. The more deeply stirred we are by the Lord's mercy, the greater the solidarity we feel with his suffering - and we become willing to complete in our own flesh "what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ" (Col 1: 24).

Let us move on to the second reading, the letter to the Ephesians. Here we see essentially three aspects: first of all, the ministries and charisms in the Church as gifts of the Lord who rose and ascended into heaven; then, the maturing of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God as the condition and content of unity in the Body of Christ; and lastly, our common participation in the growth of the Body of Christ, that is, the transformation of the world into communion with the Lord.

Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards "the maturity of Christ", as the Italian text says, simplifying it slightly. More precisely, in accordance with the Greek text, we should speak of the "measure of the fullness of Christ" that we are called to attain if we are to be true adults in the faith. We must not remain children in faith, in the condition of minors. And what does it mean to be children in faith? St Paul answers: it means being "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph 4: 14). This description is very timely!

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceipt from truth.

We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith - only faith - that creates unity and is fulfilled in love.

On this theme, St Paul offers us as a fundamental formula for Christian existence some beautiful words, in contrast to the continual vicissitudes of those who, like children, are tossed about by the waves: make truth in love. Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like "a clanging cymbal" (I Cor 13: 1).

Let us now look at the Gospel, from whose riches I would like to draw only two small observations. The Lord addresses these wonderful words to us: "I no longer speak of you as slaves.... Instead, I call you friends" (Jn 15: 15). We so often feel, and it is true, that we are only useless servants (cf. Lk 17: 10).

Yet, in spite of this, the Lord calls us friends, he makes us his friends, he gives us his friendship. The Lord gives friendship a dual definition. There are no secrets between friends: Christ tells us all that he hears from the Father; he gives us his full trust and with trust, also knowledge. He reveals his face and his heart to us. He shows us the tenderness he feels for us, his passionate love that goes even as far as the folly of the Cross. He entrusts himself to us, he gives us the power to speak in his name: "this is my body...", "I forgive you...". He entrusts his Body, the Church, to us.

To our weak minds, to our weak hands, he entrusts his truth - the mystery of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; the mystery of God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (Jn 3: 16). He made us his friends - and how do we respond?

The second element Jesus uses to define friendship is the communion of wills. For the Romans "Idem velle - idem nolle" [same desires, same dislikes] was also the definition of friendship. "You are my friends if you do what I command you" (Jn 15: 14). Friendship with Christ coincides with the third request of the Our Father: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven". At his hour in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus transformed our rebellious human will into a will conformed and united with the divine will. He suffered the whole drama of our autonomy - and precisely by placing our will in God's hands, he gives us true freedom: "Not as I will, but as you will" (Mt 26: 39).

Our redemption is brought about in this communion of wills: being friends of Jesus, to become friends of God. The more we love Jesus, the more we know him, the more our true freedom develops and our joy in being redeemed flourishes. Thank you, Jesus, for your friendship!

The other element of the Gospel to which I wanted to refer is Jesus' teaching on bearing fruit: "It was I who chose you to go forth and bear fruit. Your fruit must endure" (Jn 15: 16).

It is here that appears the dynamism of the life of a Christian, an apostle: I chose you to go forth. We must be enlivened by a holy restlessness: a restlessness to bring to everyone the gift of faith, of friendship with Christ. Truly, the love and friendship of God was given to us so that it might also be shared with others. We have received the faith to give it to others - we are priests in order to serve others. And we must bear fruit that will endure.

All people desire to leave a lasting mark. But what endures? Money does not. Even buildings do not, nor books. After a certain time, longer or shorter, all these things disappear. The only thing that lasts for ever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity.

The fruit that endures is therefore all that we have sown in human souls: love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching hearts, words that open the soul to joy in the Lord. So let us go and pray to the Lord to help us bear fruit that endures. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.

To conclude, let us return once again to the Letter to the Ephesians. The Letter says, with words from Psalm 68, that Christ, ascending into heaven, "gave gifts to men" (Eph 4: 8). The victor offers gifts. And these gifts are apostles, pro-phets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Our ministry is a gift of Christ to humankind, to build up his body - the new world. We live out our ministry in this way, as a gift of Christ to humanity!

At this time, however, let us above all pray insistently to the Lord that after his great gift of Pope John Paul II, he will once again give us a Pastor according to his own heart, a Pastor who will guide us to knowledge of Christ, to his love and to true joy. Amen.

From the Vatican Website, emphais added..

Lex Anteinternet: New Years Resolutions for Other People

Lex Anteinternet: New Years Resolutions for Other People: 

New Years Resolutions for Other People

I don't do this every year, and usually when I have, it's been tongue in cheek.

This will try to be, partially, but this one is more serious than most.  Indeed, for the most part, there's no jest in this at all, and I'm going to do it in a different format, partially for that reason.

Donald Trump need to retire and go away.

Based on something I read the other day, in his personal life he nearly has. As the limelight fades away, he's spending a lot of his time at a nearby golf course he owns, rather than at Mar-a-Lago.  

Even Theodore Roosevelt, the Old Lion, reached a point where he really didn't care about politics anymore, and that included his very last run for office.  The fire had gone out.  It'd dangerous to compare Roosevelt, who was a highly admirable man, to Trump, who isn't, but that seems to be happening. 

Reportedly Trump's favorite film is Sunset Boulevard, which I've never seen, but which is reportedly a masterpiece about a fading silent film movie star. Trump, according to the article I read, will rarely pay any attention to anything, including films, but he loves Sunset Boulevard and will sit through it even after having seen it a zillion times.

That tells us something.

Gracefully fading away is hard to do.  Truman did it, I'd note.  Jimmy Carter seems to have done it.  Douglas MacArthur did it, and the odds were against it.

Of course, Trump's problem is that he's disgraced himself and soiled his legacy.

Anyhow, he really ought to simply keep making that golf course trip and leave everyone alone, for the good of the country, and for the good of what little dignity he has left.

I noticed this morning that Elsie Stefanik is taking all sorts of flak due to a Washington Post expose.  There's a lesson to be learned here, but it's probably too late for her to benefit from it. She could still learn from it.

Elon Musk needs to go back to South Africa, and whatever immigration loophole that was exploited to allow him to come in to the country and take up U.S. citizenship needs to be examined.

I can't think of a single qualification that Musk may have legally met to enter this country permanently. Somebody ought to look into that, and if he really didn't meet it, his citizenship should be revoked as a fraud and whatever person assisted this process looked into. And I feel the same way for all of the entertainment figures that hang around in this country as well.  Go back.

Whatever weird, weird, loophole in our immigration system let Musk come in needs to be fixed.  South Africa can use him. Go home, Elon.

Harriet Hageman and Chuck Gray won their elections, fair and square, but based upon the lie that something was wrong with the last election.

Now that they're in office, they have a lot to make up for, given that.

One thing they both can do is stop feeding the bogus rage machine.   The other thing they ought to do is to admit that times are changing and the concept of hanging on to the 1970s economy, which we've only had in this state for the last 50 years, not forever, is dying.  

Hageman, also, who is no dummy, ought to do some serious introspection before raising her right hand, once again, and swearing to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  She's done that at least once, and yet she was willing, although not at first, to boost a lie in favor of somebody who was willing to, and is stilling willing to, usurp that same Constitution.  Gray probably has taken a similar oath upon becoming a legislature, but I don't know him, and I frankly hold him to a lesser standard.

Hageman when a large number of her fellow bar members reminded her of her duty to tell the truth advanced a really wild fantasy regarding that.  If she believed that, she needs to spend about a week in the hills, perhaps with Thoreau, or perhaps with the Book of Tobit.  It'd do her good.

The Grand Old Party in Wyoming needs a serious shake up, I'd note, but it's not going to happen. The Democratic Party of Wyoming needs one as well. At this point, that's only going to come through Independents, I'm afraid.  My Resolution, therefore, is for them.  I hope, and hope they resolve, to take over the state's politics.  The Democrats have become so mired in left wing goofiness, there's nearly no saving them.

Interestingly, the Libertarian Party, nationally, recently seems to have taken a step to the middle.  Maybe there's hope for them yet.

There's a huge percentage of the country that need to resolve that science is not its enemy, and Newsmax is not the place to get the news.  If the news just fuels your preformed beliefs and, simultaneously, makes you mad, you need to get your news somewhere else.  Actually, what you need to do, is get the news.

Vladimir Putin needs to go to confession, and then go to a monastery.  I'm not joking.  Russia needs to join the modern, democratic, world.  The Russian Orthodox Church needs to end its schism with the rest of the Orthodox, and the Eastern Orthodox need to end their schism with Rome. This has gone on too long.  The German Catholic Bishops, for their part, need to end their drift into wherever they are going.

Something needs to be done regarding the condition giving rise to an epic level of attempted migration into the United States.  If conditions in Central America are that bad, we need to figure out why, and do something about it immediately.

In large part, in many ways, we all need to look forward, by looking back.  Being perpetually angry doesn't serve any interest at all.  Pretending it's 1973 won't either.  Turning to grifters, caudillos, snake oil salesmen, and those selling anger won't work.

We all know that.  It's doing something about it that seemingly is difficult.  But once we get moving, momentum is a force until itself.

Speaking of 1973, left wing American economists like Robert Reich need to realize that they continually espouse another economic option, and then pull back to the current one.  They're basically in the position of being a concerned stranger walking up to a desperate drunk in a bar, giving him a temperance lecture, and then suggesting he switch to beer.  That's not going to cut it in an economy that truly needs adjusting.

On a minor notes, would people on Twitter stop using this stupid cartoon for points they're trying to make:

There are all sorts of version of this, and they're all hideous and bad.  Whatever you think you are trying to prove this way, you are not.

An addendum.

Let's start 2023 with some basic consensus on proved things.  If we do, we'll have a productive year.  

If we don't, it suggests that we really prefer blinding ourselves to truth and arguing for sport/self-satisfaction.

And that would certainly merit a sense of pessimism.

Okay, first of all, some lingering political things.

Donald Trump lost the election.  Believe whatever you want about who should have one, whether the electoral college makes any sense, whether we're a republic or democracy (as if the two are mutually exclusive), but he lost.

There's no point in arguing otherwise, unless you just like arguing, much like the fellow I know who insists the Women's NBA "isn't a sport".  Why, well because a 50-year-old overweight guy who couldn't play basketball against a junior high team can safely take that position for self-satisfaction.  Same here.  Trump lost, and arguing that he won at this point is really just insisting the opposite isn't true.

Vaccinations are safe.  We really don't need to argue about this anymore, but we really don't need to be arguing about vaccinations in general.

Note that I didn't limit this to the COVID-19 vaccination.  People out there who don't vaccinate their kids for things we haven't seen for years, only to have the kids get ill, are acting criminally.  If there's one thing we have COVID-19 to thank for, and I don't believe it is, it's that it shut people up like Jenny McCarthy on this topic.

Let's resolve to follow the science on stuff, no matter how scary that may be, or how much that impacts our self interests, or our narcissistic desires.  If that leads to "you know, what I want isn't okay", or "my own impulses aren't ordered", well, so be it.

Let's also resolve that the end point of being a human isn't to be a consumer.

Let's completely skip altering our natures this year. Whether that's dying our hair some color it isn't, or inflating our boobs, or changing our gender, or whatever.  

Feel that you really want to be in touch with who you really are?  Well, be who you really are, and that starts with the body nature gave you and all that means.

Face the basic fact that you are going to die.  Hopefully not soon, but you will. And that's okay, as long as you are in the right place when you die. Eating the All Kale Diet won't stop it.  Don't accelerate it, please, we need you around, but we need you who you are, and as part of us, as we really are.

Don't be mean.  I've come to realize that there are certain people who revel in being mean.  Don't be one of them.  Don't take joy in other's suffering, or inflict it in them.  Meanness, I'd note, is often masked in arrogance, or self-righteousness, or even ignorance.  

Don't follow the mean, either. If somebody seems perpetually pissed off, there's something wrong in that.

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

St. Philip Neri.

Mehr mensch sein.