-25F
That's the temperatures as I write this at 6:06 a.m.
And yes, that's cold. Dangerously cold, in fact.
But it's not "once in a generation", as the spastic news broadcast on this topic would have it. I've seen it colder than this, nearly doubly so, right here where I live. And I've seen -25F lots of times.
This, frankly, is a normal winter temperature.
No, we don't get down to -25F every winter, but we always get below 0F and at one time we'd get down below -10F every year. What's not normal is that we don't see high Arctic temperatures every winter.
People's reactions to cold are interesting.
In recent decades, a lot of men have taken up wearing toddler's knee pants all year long. You know, those trousers designed for little boys called "shorts". Wearing them in the summer, if you don't have a job that requires protection from horse, thorns or the sun is allowable, if you are a guy, and definitely allowable if you are a gal, the latter being part of the patriarchal conspiracy, so men can see your legs, is okay. But the "I’m a really tough toddler, look at me in my knee pants" look that has broken out in recent years is a bit much.
One nice thing about weather this cold is that those people actually put some trousers on.
Interestingly, women did weeks ago.
Another interesting thing about it is that people behave abnormally, particularly if it's accompanied by snow.
On that, by the way, as these things are so well predicted in advance anymore, if a big cold snap is coming in, you are going to hear somebody say "there won't be any snow as it'll be too cold to snow".
It's never too cold to snow.
I was pleased that this storm was accompanied by a blizzard. It was -15 and white-out conditions due to the snow.
I hope everyone who, two days ago, said "it'll be too cold to snow" had their friends and relatives call up and say LOOK LUIGI! IT'S SNOWING!
Harumph.
Anyhow, when it snows around here, a certain number of people forget everything they ever knew about driving. Yesterday I was provided with a minor example when a Subaru hatch back, a good 4x4 car, decided that all four lanes of a four lane two-way road were now his travel lane. It finally came to a head when I pulled up to a stop light in which he was crowing all the lanes, and got in the only left-hand forward lane room he had left. That clearly surprised him, and he had to speed up to reclaim all the lanes.
Some people, I've noticed, won't slow down for conditions at all. Some, on the other hand, assume that the conditions merit driving at 2 mph.
In recent years, I've also noted that snow days have expanded to offices. It's bizarre.
When I first worked in an office, if there was a titanic late day blizzard such that mastodons were travelling the streets and polar bears were threatening to eat the runner, we'd let people go home about 4:00 p.m. The only time we ever let people go home early due to cold was one year when the temperature got down to -40F and the boiler went out. You really can't work in a building when it's -40F and there's no heat.
Now, however, if we start getting a decent snow, people start asking if we're going to dismiss the employees from work.
Eh?
Yesterday, by early afternoon, I was getting that question due to the cold. "Are we going to let people go home early?"
No, we're not. It's cold outside, and we're inside.
The Bureau of Land Management, I noticed, did go home.
What the heck?
Impertial Perogative
While I have no personal beef with him at all, the hiring by Secretary of State elect Chuck Gray of Harriet Hageman's nephew as his government funded SoS attorney bugs me.
I really don't know why the Secretary of State has an in-house lawyer at all, other than that in spite of what the Republicans like to spout about limiting the expansion of government, the Republican administration of the state, like every other state, has expanded the staffing of governmental offices enormously.
I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that as late as the 1960s, the Secretary of State's office, which does the same job that it currently does, was probably staffed by the SoS, a full time assistant, who probably did the actual work, and about four women clerks who did the heavy lifting. Yes, the job involves a lot of things that involve the law, but they probably made it go that way. The SoS, if he had a legal question, probably walked down the hall and asked somebody at the Attorney General's office what the answer was.
Now, however, the SoS has a full time dedicated lawyer, and I think the Governor may too. If this keeps up, the janitorial staff at the Capitol Building will have one also. Why not?
Now, that Chuck Gray might need a lawyer to advise him, I don't doubt. That office deals with a lot of legal filings. But there's utterly no reason that the AG's office can't dedicate a lawyer to the office, amongst that lawyer's other duties. Chuck can go down the hall, read the latest issue of Bureocratic Quarterly in the lobby, and ask some AG his question, something probably like "how can I call out the National Guard to make Kari Lake the Gauleiter of Arizona?"
But, no, he's going to have his own full time lawyer in an office, we might note, where almost everyone at the executive level is new, most likely as they didn't care to serve under him.
And that lawyer has one year of experience.
It's a rule of thumb in the law that a lawyer isn't really fully functional on his own until he or she has been working for a decade. They call it practice for a reason. Like everything else, this is just a rough rule. Some people don't take that long, some take a bit longer.
Nobody is capable of really efficient practice after a year of work.
If the new hire's tasks are limited to strictly research projects, something that's a huge waste of money for the State of Wyoming, this might be okay. But if it's anything else, it's problematic.
Harriet Hageman was apparently just down in Phoenix talking at something called "Turning Point". The organization that sponsors this is a Trumpite one and likely thought of the name meaning a turning point in the nation's history, rather than the recent off-ramp into the political dumpster that Trump is causing to conservatives. She gave a short speech that included the "deep state".
Whatever she said about this, something older than the deep state is the "it's not what you know, it's who you know state".
Hmmmm.
There's only three real reason for Hageman Nephew to go to work as the Consigliere to the Capo de Regime at the SoS, either to be a reliable yes man, an insider to the Deeply Trump State, or as a favor. Or perhaps a combination of all three.
"You aren't a wartime Consigliere, Tom".
Well, I'm sure that the state's GOP will rise up in righteous indignation and tell Chuck he doesn't need his own special legal council and that the lad can just go back into benighted private practice. Shoot, maybe Constitutional Lawyer Hageman know of a firm where there's going to be one less lawyer.
Stammtisch
We've had some posts regarding Rev. Todd Schmidt and his table in the University of Wyoming Student Union recently.
A lawyer I know asked me a question I hadn't thought of. Why are outsiders allowed to have reserved tables in the Union at all?
I have no good answer for that.
Rev. Schmidt's table was reserved, which is something I hadn't followed. That would mean, amongst other things, that Rev. Schmidt must have had a lot of free time on his hands so that he could dedicate that time to hanging around in the Student Union.
As noted in an earlier post on this topic, when I went to UW, the Union didn't really have a place to put up a table. It was mostly a hall. There was a small lobby that was part of it that had a television, but people rarely hung out in it. Organizations of any type didn't put up tables.
Now, after reconstruction, it has a lot of room, including room for tables, but what didn't occur to me is that its really odd that those tables can be reserved by outsiders.
I don't think they have to be.
I have no problem at all with any legitimate student organization having a table, staffed by students, in the lobby. Most of these would be of a predictable type, but some would probably be organizations that I'd find personally irritating. So be it, if they're student organizations or university related.
I.e, I don't have a problem with the rugby club being in there, or sororities recruiting for membership, ROTC recruiting for recruits, or the Students Against The ROTC recruiting for recruits. But I think it should be limited to student organizations, or the university itself.
What I don't grasp is how we got to the point that a minister from an off campus church can have a full time table in the Union. It invites any group that is off campus that wishes to proselytize to do the same. Would the same people that are okay with Rev. Schmidt be okay with an Imam setting up a table next to him? Or would the university be okay with really radical groups, of any type, doing the same?
UW got itself into this pickle by allowing outside groups to hang around in the lobby of a land grant college that's really supposed to be dedicated to education and education only. This wasn't necessary.
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