Blog Mirror: Ten Common Misconceptions about the Constitution.

The ABA writes about ten common misconceptions about the Constitution.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: US Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of Oklahoma...

Courthouses of the West: US Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of Oklahoma...

 

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Name Roman Catholic Church, Sheridan Wyoming

Churches of the West: Holy Name Roman Catholic Church, Sheridan Wyoming:
 

The Best Posts of the Week of September 13, 2015

Big Town, Small Town.

Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: What If?

Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: What If?: What If? What could a fence post tell us if   fence posts could talk? That's how I most often come up with ideas, what if? W...

Big Town, Small Town.

"I grew up in a small town"

Everyone has heard this comment, probably a million times, and let it pass on without comment.  Indeed, the American background story is, almost invariably, "I was born in a small town" or "I grew up on a farm".  So archetypal is it, that rocker John Cougar penned a song called "Small Town" which is entirely about the virtues of small towns.  Iris Dement, on the other hand, penned the heart breaking "Our Town" about a town that's clearly a small, and dying, small town.  John Prine went one step further and penned "Paradise" about Paradise Kentucky, a real small town, that he somewhat fictionally claims was "hauled away" by the Peabody Coal Company, to their enduring irritation.

The small town of Paradise Kentucky, in the late 19th Century.

Leaving the "I grew up on a farm" comment aside for a moment, it might serve to actually look at the statement. What's it mean?  That is, what is a small town, and do we really recognize one when we see one.

Do we really recognize a small town when we see one?

I grew up in Casper Wyoming.  It's not a small town, it's a medium sized city.  Because it is a western city, however, it's a medium sized city that's an island in the prairie to some extent, although this is now less true than it once was. Suffice it to say, however, the entire time I've lived in Casper, it's been a medium sized city, although my father lived in it when it was a small city and he lived through its growth to be a medium sized city, something he never commented on but which I'm glad in a way hasn't been my experience, as I would have lamented the change.  Having said that, I have lived in a small city, Laramie Wyoming, for a period of several years, and because it too is an island in the prairie, or more accurately the high plains, the geographic feel of the city doesn't vary tremendously from Casper in some ways.

While Casper is a small city, or rather a medium sized city, I've heard time and time again, both in the past and currently, that Casper's a "small town".  Far from it. It's definately not.  It has ample population to be regarded as a medium sized city, and if the greater metropolitan area is included, there's no doubt of that at all.  So why do people think that?

I wonder if it is, in part, because true "towns", at least in this region, have taken such a hit.  A lot of them are mere shadows of their former selves, if they are there at all.  For example, in this county, the small town of Powder River at one time spread across both sides of the highway and the town featured a church, post office, bar/restaurant, another restaurant, a hotel and a store.  It also had a railroad station.  It was never more than a small town, however.

Today, Powder River retains a church and a post office (and maybe the hotel is functioning, I'm not sure), but nothing else I've mentioned above still exists.  A person cannot even buy gasoline there, and the  nearest station is over 20 miles away.  It's not a town that a person could live in and expect to have any local services.

 

House of Our Shepherd Church in Powder River, Wyoming.  This Assemblies of God church is served by a pastor who is a local rancher, which adds another element to this story, as this town was always so small as to have a single church, in so far as I'm aware.  Slightly larger towns, like Shoshoni Wyoming, had considerably more services, including churches of more than one denomination.  The blue building to the left is or was a hotel.

Arminto, just up the railroad, may provide a better example.  It was always quite small, but none the less it was at one time very active.  It was the largest single railroad loading facility for sheep on earth, at one time.  It had a famous bar, a store, and a population that served the railroad.  Now, the bar is gone (burned down), there is no store, and the railroad doesn't stop there any more.

Arminto Wyoming, looking towards a grove of trees that stand where the bar and a hotel once did.  This town has the Disappearing Railroad Blues.*

And I could go on.  But, suffice it to say, in order for a small town to really survive now, it has to have a reason independant of isolation and the railroads, and even then things might be rough for it.  Shoshoni Wyoming, for example, hangs on, but it's at a junction for two state highways near a very busy recreational reservoir.  And even it is a mere shawdow of its former self.

For that reason, I think small cities, like Riverton Wyoming, get confused for "small towns" fairly frequently.  A true town, like Lander Wyoming or Thermopolis Wyoming, is probably a larger town by historical standards. Small towns that really hang on, for example something like Hudson Wyoming, or perhaps Dubois Wyoming, are exceptions, and exceptions for a definite reason.  We hardly recognize a real small town when we see one.

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*From the lyrics of The City of New Orleans, about a train named that, on its last run.

Blog Mirror: Unplugging My Way to Recovery

Esther J. Cepeda writes on Unplugging as a way to recovery, and somewhat ironically she means unplugging electronic media.

There's a lot to be said for this, and not just from a health perspective, but also from a mental health and philosophic prospective.

Sounds Of The Past

Jenny, of the 1870 to 1917 blog, before her tragic passing, observed on M. L. Wright's blog:

The difference between sound of a jet and the sound of any kind of prop plane, let alone the differences between various kinds of prop planes, is striking. It dawned on me at some point that the world we live in now has completely different sound effects than the worlds of the past. To take a trivial example, the cash registers of the past had a very distinctive “ka-ching!” when the transaction had been punched in and the cash drawer shot out. A lot of this difference in sounds has to do with the change from mechanical to electronic. Mechanisms gave us the distinctive rhythms and pulses of objects made of metal moving in some fashion. Even where the item in question remains essentially mechanical—say the diesel locomotive that replaced the steam locomotive—the sounds are different. The sounds of steam—that is a whole other story.

Right she was.

Is it smokey in here?

I ran this item last week, at the time that the Casper City Council reinstated a complete ban on smoking in public buildings, following the victory of an initiative movement in the Wyoming Supreme Court.  That movement, backed by former city council woman Kim Holloway, achieved the Court's declaration that some signatures had been improperly rejected.

Lex Anteinternet: Today In Wyoming's History: September 8: Today In Wyoming's History: September 8 : 2015  In a controversial move, the Casper City Counsel reinstated a tavern and restau...

Subsequent events have brought to light the truth of Otto Von Bismarck's comment that "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

Last night, making the first of three required votes on three readings, the City Council went on to officially repeal the amendment to the City's smoking law which had exempted bars. The thought was that by doing that, and restoring the original ordinance's complete ban, the need to hold the special election the initiative would have required would evaporate, as the goal of the petition was therefore met.  So, we must note, there was a degree of cynicism in the vote, as the councilmen, as shown by their next vote, did not wish to genuinely reinstate a complete ban, as the petitioners did.  Having said that, a couple genuinely supported the restoration of a complete ban.

Next the council voted to completely repeal the ban, thereby allowing smoking everywhere once again.  Only two councilmen voted against that.

The debate heavily focused on property rights and on the plight of tavern owners whose patrons have fled to Mills, Evansville and Bar Nunn, neighboring towns which those from outside of Casper no doubt generally regard as part of Casper, but which have separate legal status and governments. The arguments against repealing a ban were weighted heavily on public health issues.  I saw the council meeting on television, and the sides were well behaved and presented their views quite well.

The instinctively sympathetic view, around here anyway, is that a business owner should be allowed to do what they will, and the patrons can vote with their feet. There's some logic to that, but it does miss the point, raised but often not really well developed, that employees of any one workplace often are in a position where they have to work where there's work.  I know that there's people who really like and aspire to be bar servers and tenders, but there's also a lot of people who find there way into those jobs, often temporarily, but sometimes long term, and have to stick with them for one reason or another.  The "you can always quit" argument doesn't work for most other occupations anymore in recognition of that, but it's a common one for these occupations, which are often occupied by the workplace demographic that's least able to switch employments readily.

It also somewhat applied to patrons of restaurants and bars, although people rarely recognize that.  If you are in business and everyone breaks for lunch and the nearest establishment is Smokey Joe's Bar Grill and Smokapalooza, you're gong there with everyone else working on that big project, as you'll have little other choice.  No matter what your health situation may be.  I well remember, for instance, being on breaks in trials for lunch where the only nearby restaurant, or the one the client recommended, featured smoke and being very conscious that I was now heading back to court smelling like cigarette smoke, something that non smokers are extremely conscious of but which smokers seem not to notice at all.   This doesn't touch on the numerous people who are allergic or have reactions to cigarette smoke in one form or another.  These folks don't really have the option of making a big deal out of their situation in a lot of instances.

I guess that makes it obvious that I wish they keep the smoke ban in place, but then I also feel that they shouldn't have voted to eliminate their compromise position that allowed smoking in bars, not because I want to smoke in a bar (obviously I don't smoke), but because it seemed to be a compromise that was working.  

Which brings to mind the Italian proverb "Le meglio è l'inimico del bene", or "the perfect is the enemy of the good".  It really is.  

Passing a smoking ban was difficult in Casper in the first place.  When it first came up around 2002 it was voted down, but then a decade later the full ban (oddly called the "fully leaded ban" in the debate) was passed, but thereafter shortly amended to exempt bars.  That law was no doubt not perfect from anyone's perspective, but then the perspectives are so radically different that no law could satisfy that.  For those who take the "property rights" position, no ban, perhaps on anything, would be ideal. For those who a radically opposed to cigarettes, I suppose banning cigarettes entirely would be ideal.  No compromise is going to make everyone happy.

Which brings us to a likely ironic result of all of this. When Kim Holloway, a former city councilwoman, took to the streets with her petition to take this to the voters, the goal was to restore a full ban.  But what now appears likely is that her actions have killed off the partial ban, or soon will.  No doubt a new petition drive will start, and I'd guess Holloway will be leading the charge, but just listening to the city council and those who came to speak, I suspect that the tide has turned on this issue and the voters will side with the property rights argument.  That will likely have less of an impact than supposed, as smoking is slowly declining in the population anyhow, and my guess (and hope) is that most of the restaurants aren't going to restore smoking, indeed a lot didn't allow it before the ban, and more than a few busy bars aren't going to allow it again either, now that they know that they can survive without smoking in the premises.  So the hard feeling that we must ban smoking to have an impact is likely gone, and as our local economy declines, the feeling that we shouldn't mess with business owners will increase. But some bars that did allow smoking recently will go back to it, and I'd guess a few small cafes in town will also. The petition backers who sought to fully ban smoking, may have in fact restored it.

Lex Anteinternet: A few Labor Day observations. But wait. . . .

 I recently ran this item:

Lex Anteinternet: A few Labor Day observations.: World War Two vintage Labor Day poster, produced by the Office of War Information. Labor Day was made a Federal holiday in 1886, when ...

This sort of touched on the decline in labor, and the reduction of blue collar labor as a demographic in the US.

But is that really true?

Perhaps, or almost certainly, it is, but as the Labor Day article by George S. Will pointed out, there's a lot of labor in the US, and a lot of it in the traditional categories.  Lots of car manufacturing, and not just by the big three, for example.  Indeed, a quiet story has been the re-industrialization of the US, often by foreign companies, coming in to take advantage of a skilled labor pool and shorter distance to their markets.  All sorts of "European" and "Japanese" cars, for example, are made here in the US.

What is different about that, however, is that the workers aren't nearly as heavily unionized as they once were.  Indeed, to some extent, heavy industry went overseas, shook off the unions, and came back. But in coming back, they largely were careful to preserve the gains the unions had made in many instances.  It's been an interesting evolution over time.

Blog Mirror, for MId Week at Work: Quit Hating on Your Job

Esther J. Cepeda on Quit Hating On Your Job.

Definitely not the sort of career advice you commonly hear in the modern economy, but more realistic?  And interestingly sort of a throw back to an earlier era.

Mid Week at Work: Standard Oil strikers, Bayonne, New Jersey 1915.

Evidence of changes in technology and transportation in geography.

The photograph above depicts a United Methodist Church in Hillsdale, Wyoming.  Hillsdale is a really tiny town, with a population of under fifty people.  It's on the Union Pacific.

By rail, it's less than 15 miles from Cheyenne.  It's less than five miles from Burns, another little town, albeit one that's bigger than Hillsdale.  Another five miles down the Union Pacific is the town of Egbert.  And a few more, maybe eight or so, is the town of Pine Bluff.  In Pine Bluff, I know, there's a Catholic Church.

I've been in Hillsdale (as of yesterday) and Pine Bluff, but I've never been in Burns.

Of these towns, only Pine Bluff and Cheyenne on are the Interstate Highway.  Hillsdale is probably four miles or so off the Interstate Highway, effective marooned out there in the rolling hills of Laramie County, Wyoming.

I was actually amazed that this United Methodist Church is active.  The Catholic church in Pine Bluff also is.  So these communities are obviously keeping on keeping on, but what a change this evidences.

All of these towns were built on the Union Pacific Railroad.  Only Pine Bluff and Cheyenne are on the Interstate.  Coming in from Nebraska, I'm sure that well over 90% of all travelers go right by Pine Bluff.  Leaving Cheyenne (and no, not the song, that takes you to Montana), probably nearly 100% of travelers go right by Pine Bluff.

All of these towns, save for Cheyenne, must have been built as farming towns along the Union Pacific.  They're not far from each other today, but when founded they would have been just far enough to travel to each other, by wagon, and get back home, which is how they served the area farmers. That is, towns in this area where just far enough from towns so that you could get into one, conduct your business, and go back home.  Saturday was traditionally the big "into town" day for farmers and these towns were probably pretty big on Saturdays.  I'd guess that their populations swelled during Sundays as well, but how farmers got to services I don't know.  In some regions of the country the population prior to World War Two heavily reflected a single faith or perhaps only a couple of faiths (and this is still the case in some regions), and perhaps that was the case in this region of Wyoming, but it wouldn't be the case for Wyoming in general at any single point.

These towns remained viable in the early automobile era, but clear by the 1950s the handwriting must have been pretty visible on the wall.  Cheyenne is the dominant city in the area, and it always has been, but for all practical purposes its the only one that is truly fully viable now. That wouldn't have been true at one time.

If I could eliminate one thing from the planet for all time. . .

it would be the cell phone.

I hate them.

It's not that I don't use them, I do, a lot, but I really dislike them.

I dislike them for more than one reason, but my principal reason is that everyone under 25 years of age, and increasingly more people in older age brackets as time goes on, are glued to their little screens actually missing life.  It's amazing.

People can't avoid checking Facebook or Instagram at the drop of a hat, on their little screens. They sit in restaurants and meetings with other people, looking at artificial electronic life over real life.  They've grown unable to enjoy passing scenery from a car or airplane window.  It's a sickness.

I also hate the degree of connectivity they have caused, although I enjoy that too.  Now, people are tied to their apron stings to each other as never before, even while they also are able to preserve bonds that our highly mobile lifestyle would otherwise strain.  There's a balance of considerations there, and I don't know how it comes out, but which ever way it comes out, it doesn't save this technology, which "improves" darned near every day, from being an overall bad development.

Judge Posner writes on the Federal bench

The legendary Judge Richard Posner, whom I'm not really a fan of, has just released a book on the state of the law in the United States.

For those not familiar with Posner, he is a well regarded Federal judge who writes a great deal.  Once mentioned as a possible candidate for the Supreme Court every time a Democratic President was in office, that no longer seems to be the case, but his output has not diminished.  Nor has it become less accute in tone.

Now, I'm not really a fan of Posner, quite frankly.  He's heavily associated with the economic school of thought in law, and I'm not a fan of that type of reasoning.  He's generally left of center, and at least his recent critique of the Scalia was regarded as sufficiently unfair that one of his admirers on the Federal bench took after him on his own blawg.

But at least in his current book, if the Wall Street Journal comments on it are any guide, he may be spot on.  Indeed his comments sound a lot like, well, mine.

Consider his comment that relates to the aging on the bench, a topic that's been discussed here more than once.

Not being subject to compulsory retirement and able to delegate much of their work to staff, federal judges sometimes fail to retire even when old age and its related ills have greatly impaired their judicial performance. To be blunt, there is a problem of judicial senility and it is growing with the general increase in the longevity of the American population.

Hmmm. . . Posner sounds like, well. . . . me when I worried about the Wyoming Legislature taking out the state mandatory retirement age for judges.

Or his comment on lack of diversity at the Supreme Court:

I believe that the average quality of justices back then was slightly higher than that of the current justices, that the current justices are overstaffed, talk too much at oral argument, and devote excessive time to extrajudicial activities, but that what made the earlier Court better despite its meager resources by current standards was mainly the diversity in the Justices’ professional backgrounds. Today. judged by educational and professional backgrounds, and despite pronounced ideological differences, the Justices are peas in a pod.

Interesting comment, and I can't disagree.

Here's one where I suspect that Posner must be following me around and reading my blog:

The increase in the number of law schools has caused a reduction in the average quality of law school graduates and a concomitant reduction in the average quality of lawyers who practice in the federal courts. And the increased size of laws school faculties has resulted in an increased number of the faculty members whom I’ve term “refugees” from more competitive or less lucrative fields and who have little interest in the actual judicial process and little ability to contribute to that process.

Law professors as "refugees", well in my entire quarter century of work as a lawyer I've heard one, and only one, lawyer use that term this way, that being. . . me.  Judge Posner, is that you there in the shawdow?  Hey, wait. . . .  Well, good observation.

I may have to buy his book.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Tulsa Municipal Building, Tulsa Oklahoma

Courthouses of the West: Tulsa Municipal Building, Tulsa Oklahoma:

This is the Tulsa, Oklahoma Municipal Building which housed Tulsa's government between 1917 and 1960.  While I'm not certain that it housed a courthouse, it has that appearance, and I strongly suspect that the city's municipal courthouse was located here.  This building no longer houses Tulsa's city offices.

What's with the all the hugely overblown football movies?

My long suffering spouse loves football.

I don't hate it, I just can't develop an interest in it.

But my patience with football movies is strained to the extreme.

One of the things that I don't get is the plethora of simply over the top football movies. As my spouse likes the games, she likes the movies, so when they are on television, they're on here, even if we have seen them a million times.

The age of melodrama may be over in all other forms of movies, but not in football movies.  Villains no longer tie damsels to tracks, women don't faint at the sight of violence, war films are cynical even when patriotic, but football movies are the exception.

The coaches are so noble that the films encroach on being hagiographies.  In an era when we've seen real coaches reputations tainted by icky scandals, they aren't in football movies.  The players are noble in the extreme, and rise above adversity in a way that used to be the case for boxing movies.

Sigh.

What happened to The North Dallas Forty?

That annual reminder you just don't get it on the great American national past time.

Conversation with a lawyer down in Oklahoma.

He:  "So, who do you guys follow up there this time of year?"

Me:  "Huh?  Um. . . ."

He:  I suppose you all follow UW, eh?  Are there any other teams?

Me (now realizing that we're probably talking about university football):  "Oh, yeah. . we follow UW, it's the state's only four year university and the only one up here with a team. . . ."

He:  "Are they still coached by that coach. . . oh you'll know the name, who coached in Iowa (or some such place)?"

Me (now realizing the game is up):  "Um, well I don't know. . . I don't really follow football so I'm not sure who the coach is or where he's from. . . "

Embarrassment.

I wish I did follow football, as I'm always odd man out this time of year. But try as I might, I just can't develop an interest in it, and I've given up trying.  I did use to try nearly every year, but I conceded.  It's hopeless.  I don't know what teams are good or bad, and I don't even know how UW is doing or going to do.  Oh well.

Defeated People: The Old Believers

 Church of St. Nicholas, Old Believer (with clergy) church in Nikolaevsk Alaska.

As the very few readers of this blog know, I was recently in the Homer Alaska area, and I happened to enter one of the small communities there made up of Old Believers.  That there even were Old Believers in the area came as a surprise to me, so being curious of mind I looked some stuff up about them.

Not that I wasn't previously aware of them, or unaware that there were some in Alaska.  They fit this category nicely.

So, who are the Old Believers?

To understand this story requires some familiarity with Russian Orthodoxy. Given as this isn't a theological article, and as even it were it would have to be written by somebody other than me, I won't discuss that at length, but what I will simply note is that Russia was Christianized by the Eastern Christianity.  That isn't, I'll note, the same thing as saying that it was Christianized by the Orthodox, as that was prior to the Great Schism.  The Russian branch of the Eastern Church became autocephalus in 1589, however, which was after the Great Schism had occurred, and after the periodic efforts to repair it ultimately failed.  It's a complicated story, and it wouldn't be true that all Russian bishops have always been outside of communion with Rome, but most have been and that is all a separate story.

Anyhow, between 1652 and 1658, the  Russian Orthodox Church made a number of reforms, most of which, quite frankly, seem quite valid as they corrected errors between Greek and Russian translations, and the like.  Some of the differences in practices changed were so slight, that modern readers can hardly believe that they would have caused a schism, but they did, and the Old Believers were having none of it.  They were fairly immediately repressed with their refusal to go along declared an anathema.  

Now, to many in the western world today this story would seemingly play out with this group causing a splinter, but that being principally the end of the story, except of course to them. But, in 17th Century Imperial Russia, this could not have been the case, so they were accordingly repressed.

"Vasily Surikov - Боярыня Морозова - Google Art Project" by Vasily Surikov - ogHGQgd1Ws9Htg at Google Cultural Institute. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.  Created on 31 December 1886.  Published before 1923 and public domain in the US.  T his work depicts noblewoman Boyaryna Morozova at the time of her arrest, depicting in her hand the old way of giving the sign of the cross, rather than the new way, one of the sticking points of the Old Believers.

So there were arrests and repression.

But they kept on keeping on, and in fact, although a minority of Russian Orthodox, they kept on keeping on all the way up to the Russian Revolution.  And this in spite of the fact that no bishops went with them, which meant  that what clergy that did go with them died off within a relatively close time to the schism, leaving them it what would seemingly be a true crisis for a member of any of the apostolic churches.

They even kept on after the Russian Revolution during which time the Russian Orthodox Church was enormously suppressed.  At that point, some fled, going to China, and ultimately from there to South America.  While some remain in South America, many later relocated to the United States, with some subsequently relocating to Alaska.

Cafe in Nikolaevsk, Alaska, an Old Believers village.

They're still around, although this story has evolved a bit in the last forty years.  Some groups around the world have reincorporated clergy, being satisfied, in their view, with the orthodoxy of at least some bishops.  The Russian Orthodox Church has, for its part, issued an apology for the early repressions of them, although that has not served to bring them back into the Russian Orthodox fold.  But the modern world has been a challenge for them, in retaining their ongoing viability.  Some villages remain extremely isolated and exclusive, while others do not.  It'll be interesting to see what becomes of them.

Be that as it may, if the much more numerous Amish have managed to remain a distinct group, one would suppose the Old Believers will as well, unless the solvent of modern western life, combined with a reproachment with Orthodoxy, causes things to slowly break down, and perhaps even provide redress, for their complaints.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Congregational Church, Sheridan Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Congregational Church, Sheridan Wyoming: