Happy (one day late) birthday Jeep!

 

Well, sort of.

The contract to produce the 1/4 Ton truck was given by the United States on July 15 in 1941. The contract went to Willys whose principal competitor for the contract was Bantam.  As it was, Ford would end up getting a contract to produce the Willys variant as well.

We've written about Jeeps a fair amount here.  It's become a 4x4 standard and the Jeep has outlasted all of its competitors, surviving competition from numerous companies that made near Jeeps. Willys didn't last however, and the brand has gone from company to company.  Still, the modern Jeep looks a whole lot like the original, even though improvements have definitely been made over the years.  Truly an amazing vehicle.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Jackson Wyoming

 All in all, maybe I'm just one of those guys who is most comfortable at home.

I posted a comment on this item on Wyoming Fact and Fiction the other day:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Jackson Wyoming: At times I have people say to me, “Jackson, that’s not even Wyoming, I hate it when people come to Wyoming and only visit Jackson Hole, Yel...

Now, by way of background, at the time  I posted it, I was getting ready to head out on depositions in Jackson.  When this appears, I will just be back from them.

 The view out of my recent hotel room.  This is how I see a lot of places.  But one hotel room, as long as its fairly decent, is pretty similar to any other.  At least in Jackson, where I know my way around, I operate mostly on foot and get in some walking.

Oh, how neat, is the common reaction to something like that, but traveling for legal work, at least for me, is not at all the same as traveling for fun.  That might not be apparent to the folks who stop in here, as I post a lot of photographs that derive from that travel, and that probably makes it look like a lot of fun.  But, placed in context, I left Casper around 8:00 am on Monday, drove to Big Piney, worked there, and then drove to Jackson, and worked that night.  I worked every day and night after that.  So, by the end of the trip, what I'd seen was mostly the Snow King hotel, where I stayed (which is a nice hotel) and the route where I walked to depositions, and then inside of the law firm where their depos were taken (a very famous firm, fwiw).

Very nice conference room of very well known law firm. That's my large briefcase.  It is not well known.  My old beat up one, however, had a reputation of its own.

Folks who see my entries on Facebook, which are not numerous, would have seen a couple of photographs of glasses of beer from the Snake River Brew Pub, where I ate a couple of times.  It was on the way to and from the depositions.  Easy to get to for a guy who isn't driving.  When in Jackson, I generally walk, as it's hard to find a parking spot.

Glass of Snake River beer.  I never drove to the pub, I walked.  That's not too unusual for me, however.  Once in Portland I walked several miles everyday to depositions as I didn't have a rental car.

Now, I'll be frank that not everyone experiences their work travel this way.  I've been a lot of places for work where I never saw a thing, and I know that this is very common.  I've been to Houston a lot of times, but I've never seen the USS Texas.  I've been to Dallas and haven't seen the sites.  And so on.  I'm focused on work for work travel, as I'm working.  Maybe too focused, according to some people who know me and worry about me.  But that's what most work travel is like.  Having said that, I will hear from some traveling lawyers who go do fun things where they go, depending upon what their view of fun is.  I'm not one of them.

So that taints my view of Jackson, as a lot of the times that I'm up here, that's why I'm up here.

Snow in the Tetons, as viewed from my hotel room.

But I also don't like it much as its so touristy, and things touristy always strike me as fake.  That's why I like places like Maui better than Oahu.   I'm not keen on touristy places, as I don't like fake much.

It isn't that there isn't something real here, or a reflection of the real.  The area itself is beautiful.  The park is real. The wildlife is real.  During hunting season, the hunting is real (although a lot of out of state folks for any one purpose strikes me as strange).  The skiing is real.   The lawyers, the law firms, the courts and the state offices are all very real, and made up of very real people.

But the doormen dressed as cowboys?  That's not real and I know that.  All the young people in their twenties hanging around being cool, for Jackson is like a college town without a college, are at the height of their unreal periods.  I know that those same hipsters in the brew pub with dirty t-shirts and weird hats, sporting hip testators, are going on to be accountants and lawyers and the like, even if they don't know it yet.

And then there's the sad aspect of any tourist town, which Jackson has a lot of.

The hostess in the morning is some sort of Slav.  The tiny pretty girl has an accent so thick (she apologized for it) that I can hardly understand her.  The Arab boy who served coffee can hardly understand what I'm saying.  The local Catholic Church serves a large population of Hispanic immigrants who sit right alongside the very wealthy.  What happens to all these displaced people?  What happens to a girl who lives the Ukraine (or wherever) and ends up in a really expensive tourist town? Can the Mexican families find a decent place to live in this super expensive region in which they are employed in construction and the service industry?  Do their lives work out?

Stuff like that bothers me.

Maybe it shouldn't.  The immigrants have always struck out in hope.  Jackson has been fakey as long ago as the 1940s, as The Cocktail Hour in Jackson Hole illustrates.  Maybe the Ukrainian girls' fate isn't really that much different from any other young persons' at that age, certainly her looks are in her favor anyhow.

So maybe I just think about it too much.

Pacific Aero Products incorporated: July 15, 1916

Pacific Aero Products incorporated by William Boeing in Seattle Washington.  The company would later be changed to be named after its founder.

Where have all the farmers gone?

Recently we posted an item about a conference in Wyoming seeking to address the increasingly high age of farmers and ranchers. Naturally, in this day and age, the conference seems to be focused on technology as the solution.

It isn't.

Land prices are the big problem.  Technology, oddly enough, is also a problem.  But land is the huge one, with prices driven up and up by various conspiring factors in our economy, improvements in transportation, the concentration of wealth, and the enormous increase in population over the decades.  I.e., in 1916 a person still needed a pretty substantial investment to get into agriculture, but it wasn't impossible and you could still homestead.  Now, you might be able to scrape and invest for the tools of the trade, but land is priced so high, there's no earthly way in much of the country you can actually make a living at it, if you have to buy land.  This is certainly the case for ranching anyhow.  You can't buy a ranch, if  you want to be a real rancher, and ever pay the land off or even make a living on it.

That's what agricultural conferences address.

Wringing hands over youth not entering agriculture won't solve any problems at all.  How can they, really?  Unless their family has land, and the family is already dedicated to staying in agriculture or at least not selling the land, their task is daunting and they have to accept never being able to own what they are working.

Not that the golden alternatives are all that great, they're just more obvious. Those "good" "town jobs" that are so often the alternative have plenty of their own problems.  In the ones where you actually own things, there are all sorts of problems associated with them, they're just less obvious and you have to really be a part of them to know what their downsides are.  Your dentist, doctor, lawyer, accountant, or whatever, isn't going to really tell you the bad sides of what  he's doing.  His incentive is completely in the opposite direction.

Not that it has to be this way. This actually can be addressed, we just won't do it.  Land prices for agricultural land could be depressed overnight by restricting the ownership of it to people who make a living from it.  That would change it, as most of your out of state executives that fly in to "their ranch" aren't going to walk out of their offices for ever to take up the life of a real agriculturalist.

The problem with that, however, is that doing this is deeply contrary to the American concept of "I can do anything I want" and "I can own anything I want".  Those values made a lot of sense, quite frankly, in the world of 1916 for the US. They're pretty obviously false in the world of 2016.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: SIDETRACKED

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: SIDETRACKED: Sidetracked Often, okay, way too often, I get distracted when doing research. This was just too good to pass up. Yesterday I was lookin...

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: Bastille Day in Paris

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: Bastille Day in Paris: One hundred years ago, despite having its army deeply involved in a double death-struggle – both at Verdun and on the Somme – the cele...

What is Pokemon Go and why would I care?

Just asking.

Roads to the Great War: Major General William S. Graves and the American E...

Roads to the Great War: Major General William S. Graves and the American E...: Contributed by John M. House World War I was in its final months, though no one knew that was the case. One of the Allies was caught i...

Roads to the Great War: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Sold...

Roads to the Great War: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Sold...: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel Princeton University Press, 2010 ...

Posner, Law Schools, and the Constitution

Justice Posner.  Just when he starts saying things you really like, he goes off and says something way off the mark.  Uff.

In the really like category:

I think law schools should be hiring a higher percentage of lawyers with significant practical experience. I think, for example, of Benjamin Kaplan at Harvard Law School, who went into law-teaching after 14 years in practice. There used to be many like that; there are many fewer now, especially at the leading law schools.

Here here!

I don't know anything about Kaplan, and I don't regard fourteen years as a long time (seriously?), but I do agree that law profs all too often have a career of being a law prof.

Too often professors have careers that read like this:

Professor Escargot graduated from Big Law School and then went through the front and back door of Leget, Leget, and Lex on a Thursday.   While there he said "ooo, ick, the law is hard. . . "  After that, he started teaching at Blogordorp School of Law where his trial experience (he saw all the episodes of LA Law on Netflix) trained him for. . . 

I think law profs should have a background of actually practicing, and indeed some do.  A good twenty years under their belt should be a minimum, in my view.  And I think that teaching law should be something it requires admission to the bar to do, in the state where you are teaching.

So Posner is right on the mark on this one.

But then he goes off and says this:

And on another note about academia and practical law, I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation (across the centuries—well, just a little more than two centuries, and of course less for many of the amendments). Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc., of the 21^st century. Which means that the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14^th), do not speak to today. David Strauss is right: The Supreme Court treats the Constitution like it is authorizing the court to create a common law of constitutional law, based on current concerns, not what those 18^th-century guys were worrying about.

In short, let's not let the dead bury the living.

Two centuries? That's nothing in historical terms, Justice Posner.  Shoot, as a member of the bar since 1962 you've actually been practicing law for a statistically significant portion of that time.

However, the "let's not let the dead bury the living" may have some merit, but not the way the Justice meant. Justice Posner is 77 years old and sitting on the bench.  On the current U.S. Supreme Court some of the Justices are so old that they might have been appointed by Lincoln.  If the dead are burying the living, it's the nearly dead hand of justices who are absolutely ancient, including Posner.  I've long maintained there should be a mandatory retirement age for judges of all types, including Supreme Court judges, and I'd set it at 65.  I'd support 60 if I thought anyone would listen to it. And yes, I know that there's a lot of judges who are more than competent at that age, indeed most are. But are they when they are 70?  80?  Age catches up.  One really admirable thing, I think, that a circuit judge did around here awhile back was to retire in his 60s, specifically noting that he wanted to retire while his mind was sharp.  Anyhow, the comment about the dead burying the living is really ironic for a justice who is 77 years old.  While Posner is right on the mark about law professors needing to have practiced, he hasn't practiced himself for years and years, which is one of the downsides of letting Federal judges practice forever.

Not that Posner isn't without a slight point, albeit a very, very slight one.  The Constitution is not holy scripture.  I've heard some speak of it, however, in such reverent tones that I think they truly do, in fact, believe that it's a Divinely inspired document.  Usually these people are laymen.  Most laymen who hold the Constitution in high regards do not go that far, however, but they do awfully darned far.

The United States Constitution is one of the most amazing laws in the history of mankind, and in some vastly distant day, it would be my guess that it stands with the Code of Hammurabi as one of the most significant bodies of law ever written.  It already stands with the Magna Carta in that regards.

But it is a law, and people would do well to really remember that.

Certain people I occasionally run into forget that arguments about applying the Constitution descend into the invalid if they simply become "the founders wrote it." So what?  I'd agree with Posner that far, but only that far.

Even that sounds harsh, but indeed, so what. They also wrote in slavery as part of the Constitution.  The document was flawed enough that they had to go back and put in a bunch of amendments right off the bat in order to really protect individual liberties, and it wasn't until decades later that the document was read to protect those liberties from both Federal and State intrusion.

Now, I'm not arguing for ignoring the Constitution, as Posner is at least somewhat suggesting be done.  Not at all.  I'm actually for interpreting it according to the original meaning, granted that this does require some development for some things that simply didn't exist at the time.  I frankly think that's a much easier exercise than many let on, and I do not respect courts taking liberty with the document, including the United States Supreme Court, which quite recently has done just that.  So I guess I'm actually taking the opposite approach to Posner.  I feel you have to do that, as otherwise the law has no structure and becomes the property of nine ancient justices who are not democratically elected and who are immune from the direct influence of the people.  In some ways, therefore, the Constitution stands as the shield of the people against the legislatures and against the Justices themselves, although applying them to it by getting them to correctly apply it can be difficult.

I feel that if you don't like the results or correctly applying the Constitution you have an option; amend it, or pass a law where you can.  Arguing about the meaning at that point isn't the correct road, as that does violence to the document and renders it meaningless.  If you are upset that the document provides for the protection of privately held firearms (and it does), or that it doesn't mandate same gender marriage (and in spite of what five justices recently declared, it does not), your remedy is at the ballot box, not with some fanciful interpretation of the document or the courts.

I am also a bit tired of those who find secret meanings in the document.  A fair number of people seem to have read a secret Constitution which enshrines all sorts of things meaningful to them, but which aren't in the documents.  As a person heads towards extremes, this becomes more and more common.  Some people argue that the document is paced full of "rights", or restrictions on the Federal government which simply are not there.  Indeed, some seem to feel that the document either restricts the Federal government from operating at all, or that it enshrines any rights that you can imagine as long as you can imagine them.

I don't mean to pick on the right or the left here.  But I am arguing that the Constitution is a much simpler document than many imagine, and that it is a law.  No laws are prefect, and it isn't either.  It shouldn't be easily amended, to be sure, but it certainly can be amended.  Arguing for vague secret or implied meanings, of any kind, don't do the document or society, as a democratic society, any justice.

But as a foundational document, its absolutely excellent. And I do have a lot more faith that the serious set of individuals who drafted it are people whose hands I'd rather be in, whether or not they are now dead, than nine unelected justices who can't seem to get around to retiring.

Note:  Last week Posner apologized for his remarks on the Constitution.

Sunday Morning Scene: First Baptist Church, Jackson Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Jackson Wyoming:

This is the First Baptist Church in Jackson Wyoming. The photograph was taken in poor light, but the church is an impressive modern wooden
structure.

The 1916 Olympics?

June 8, 1913, parade for the opening of the Deutsches Stadium in Berlin, the intended Olympic stadium for the 1916 Olympics

There's something about Olympic games that are supposed to occur in Germany, or that do.  They seem to be afflicted by hideous history. 

The Olympics are held, as we well know, every four years.  And we've recently run a post on an early Olympic game in the context of golf being part of the early games, but having later been omitted, and now returning.  People of a mathematical bent could easily deduce, of course, that there should be a 1916 set of games. Was there?  No. Why not?

Well, of course, World War one.

Those games were supposed to be in Berlin, but they obviously couldn't be held due to the Great War.  The Germans had built a stadium and everything for it, in Berlin, and they'd dedicated it in 1913 in anticipation of the games.

Well, they didn't come off.  No worries, they did get games eventually.

In 1936.

That set of games is infamous as the Nazi government of Germany tried to use it as a Nazi showcase. Well, I should not say "tried".  They did.  And while we remember the instances in which American athletes did well, the whole thing really was pretty much a Nazi hootenanny.  Not good.

Some of thought everyone should have refused to attend, but that wouldn't have really been realistic in context, and the boycott of the Moscow games in 1980 didn't exactly achieve much.  

After World War Two, the West Germans, in part hoping to point out how much they'd reformed, asked for and received the 1972 Olympics. Those where held in Munich.  And, as those who are old enough to remember will recall, those Olympics were marred by the Black September terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes which resulted in seventeen deaths, if we count the five Palestinian terrorist who died in the event.  One German policeman also died.  The rest were Israeli athletes or coaches.  

Anyhow, there were no Olympics in 1916.  The horror of the Great War prevented them from occurring.

The German cargo submarine Deutschland docked in Baltimore. July 9, 1916

American ports were open to ships of all countries as the United States was a neutral nation.  Germany's simply couldn't get to US ports in 1916.

Submarines could, and therefore the Germans actually constructed the Deutschland, a cargo submarine, which completed its first Atlantic crossing to the US on July 9, 1916.  The crew was celebrated due to the novelty of its passage.  It would make one additional crossing prior to the United States entering World War One. Amazingly, the submarine, even after being converted to a fighting vessel, survived the war.

Roads to the Great War: Are You a Victim of Optimism?

Roads to the Great War: Are You a Victim of Optimism?: Selections from the Wipers Times Source:  The BBC History Website

Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M3 Grant. Part 2

Wyoming should adopt subsistance hunting regulations

Alaska has them.

Canada also has them for "first nation" and Metis hunters.

Subsistance huning is hunting which is, by definition, hunting "for the pot" or "for the freezer".  That is, it acknowledges that the hunter is hunting in order to provide himself food for the year.

Now, truth be known, much hunting in the US is of this type anyhow.  People tend to focus on "trophy hunting", which in the case of big game animals (which is the only type of game it applies to) means animals with impressive antlers, but most hunters actually don't hunt in that fashion.  Most actually are hunting for meat.  You always have to use the meat that you take, of course, so trophy hunting is mixed purpose anyhow.

So, then, what's my point?

Well, the following is.

This year, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, I did not draw an antelope tag.  I've been hearing from friends about not drawing them the past several years, but I was, so I didn't pay too much attention to it.  I could have put in for a landowners tag but I didn't (maybe I should check and see if I still can), but assured by the past that I'd draw, as I always have, I didn't worry too much. 

Well, I flat out didn't draw.

In Wyoming you get to put in for three areas, so what this means is that not only did I not draw, but all three of my choices didn't pan out. 

Now, to put this in context, antelope has been part of my diet now for almost forty years.  For a time in the 1980s and early 1990s, antelope and deer (and maybe elk) provided 100% of the ungulate meat that I consumed in a year, with protein supplemented in the form of rabbit, duck, grouse and fish.  I.e., it was my subsistence.  This only changed when I married, as at that point my ranch girl wife insisted that we incorporate beef, which she was much more used to.  If we could go back and omit the beef (which I like, I'm not complaining) and only do the wild game, I'd do it.

Indeed, I like antelope, a meat that quite a few people complain about. The complainers, in my observation, wreck it by trying to prepare it like beef, which does do it in.  Treated as its own thing, it's good.  In fact, when I first started having beef again, after years of not having it as I was hunting for all my meat, beef tasted rather odd.  I later read that Plains Indians, when they started receiving beef rations, had the same reaction as I did. Beef was too sweet.

Anyhow, this year I didn't draw.  I may be able to pick up a left over tag, but I might not be able to.  It depends on whether I have time that day to apply, and given my schedule, I likely won't.

I did draw an elk tag, but elk are hard to get and most years I don't have ample time to devote to it.  I always go, but I fill out only about 1/3d of the time.

So the whole thing is really disappointing.

So why didn't I draw?

Well, I suppose a variety of reasons. One likely is that the population of the state has grown over the past decade, thanks in part to the oil boom we were having and in part to the uniquely weird American view that any country in the world is capable of having the population infinitely expand without that place eventually become a hideous blight, like Denver.  Now, before I'm accused of things, I'm not advocating all sorts of social engineering and persona pharmaceuticals (which I oppose), but rather noting that a country really can't sanely take in 1,000,000 immigrants every year without it looking, eventually,  like the hideous blight of Denver Colorado.

Part of it too, however, is that the state sells quite a few out of state tags, and antelope tags are a popular one.

Now, I'm not opposed to out of state hunters coming in here to hunt. And I understand that its important for our economy. But I frankly do think that the state ought to heavily favor the local residents.  All states should, in what ever they have.  I don't expect Alaska to give me the same rights in halibut fishing that natives would have.  I don't expect Nebraska to favor me with the same waterfowl hunting opportunities it gives its citizens.  I don't expect Colorado to favor me in. . . um. . . well I can't think of anything that I might compete with a Coloradoan in, in Colorado, but if there was, I'd expect the residents of the hideous blight to have rights to it over me.

If that sounds like favoritism, it is, of a type.  It's localism, and it conceded the nature of local resources.  It's also a species of agrarianism in this context.

Of course, what does that really mean?  

Well, I think Wyoming can and should take a page out of the Canadian playbook, or the Alaskan one, here.  If you have held, I'd say, Wyoming big game permits for a consistent ten years, and if you put in for antlerless as well as antlered in that time, your application should be weighted so that, after the first round of draws are done, those who have not drawn in this category, and who have put in for a classification of "subsistence hunter", should have their applications gone back over and if they didn't draw, they should have their licenses then bump out any anterless out of state, or second license (we have those too) drawn by a resident hunter, so that they get one.  

It would be fair, and it would be based on what hunting is really about.

I'd make that apply, I note, to all game animals.  Yes, I understand that might mean that somebody from Ohio who put in for a high dollar elk tag doesn't draw, but it probably won't mean that as it's probably the case that Ohioans don't put in for cow tags.  But if it did mean that, oh well.  Its fair and it focuses things on the very point of why we hunt.

Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M3 Grant. Part 1

Roads to the Great War: Lucien Jonas: Master War Illustrator

Roads to the Great War: Lucien Jonas: Master War Illustrator: By Tony Langley Jonas at Work Painting Indian Soldiers Lucien Jonas was one of the more prolific Great War illustrators. A gifted...

Roads to the Great War: The Plattsburg Movement Where General Pershing Fou...

Roads to the Great War: The Plattsburg Movement Where General Pershing Fou...: General Pershing's full expeditionary force was to be over four million men by 1919, requiring hundreds of thousands of officers....

Roads to the Great War: A Surprising Newspaper Headline from 1 January 1914

We've looked a lot in 2016 at the Punitive Expedition of 1916. But, of course, the crisis with Mexico started before that.  Here's an interesting example of how things were developing before the events of 1916.

Roads to the Great War: A Surprising Newspaper Headline from 1 January 191...: Click on Image to Expand On New Year's Day in 1914 there was simply no awareness in the United States that an unprecedented ...