Ah geez. . .
The ultimate boomer act.
Politics completely aside, does anyone actually like the music of James Taylor?
I thought not.
A lot of people claim to, but nobody actually does.
M'eh.
And yet, in spite of that, he's three years younger than Donald Trump and six years younger than Joe Biden.
And yes, the phrase came from a legislature, albeit not ours.
A bill.
HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION NO. HJ0001
Supreme court justices and district judges-retirement.
Sponsored by: Joint Judiciary Interim Committee
A JOINT RESOLUTION
for
A JOINT RESOLUTION proposing to amend the Wyoming Constitution by amending the retirement age requirements for Wyoming supreme court justices and district court judges.
BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WYOMING, two-thirds of all the members of the two houses, voting separately, concurring therein:
Section 1. The following proposal to amend the Wyoming Constitution, Article 5, Section 5 is proposed for submission to the electors of the State of Wyoming at the next general election for approval or rejection to become valid as a part of the Constitution if ratified by a majority of the electors at the election:
Article 5, Section 5. Voluntary retirement and compensation of justices and judges.
Subject to the further provisions of this section, the legislature shall provide for the voluntary retirement and compensation of justices and judges of the supreme court and district courts, and may do so for any other courts, on account of length of service, age and disability, and for their reassignment to active duty where and when needed. The office of every such justice and judge shall become vacant when the incumbent reaches the age of seventy (70) seventy-five (75) years, as the legislature may prescribe.; but, in the case of an incumbent whose term of office includes the effective date of this amendment, this provision shall not prevent him from serving the remainder of said term nor be applicable to him before his period or periods of judicial service shall have reached a total of six (6) years. The legislature may also provide for benefits for dependents of justices and judges.
Section 2. That the Secretary of State shall endorse the following statement on the proposed amendment:
Currently, the Wyoming Constitution requires Wyoming Supreme Court justices and district court judges to retire upon reaching the age of seventy (70). This amendment increases the mandatory retirement age of Supreme Court justices and district court judges from age seventy (70) to age seventy-five (75).
The Constitution also currently provides an exception to the mandatory requirement to retire upon reaching age seventy (70) for justices and judges who had not yet completed six (6) years of judicial service as of December 12, 1972. The proposed amendment would remove the now-obsolete six (6) year service guarantee.
Seriously?
At some point, why don't we just declare the Boomer Generation the only one that is qualified to run the government, the courts, and industry, so that they can have unchallenged control of absolutely everything until the last one passes at age 120.
Why does American Society hate youth with such burning passion?
This has already reached the absurd level. The retirement age in our society, for positions such as this, shouldn't be moved up.
It ought to be moved down.
Give the youngsters a break, man.
LSAT Baloney Sliced Thick
In the latter category was a recent question from some poor soul along the lines of whether only studying for a couple of years for the Law School Admissions Test was too little. Some law prof came in and said yes, and not only that, but that you had to have been studying for it basically since grade school.
Bullshit.
I didn't study for it at all and scored high on it.
I'm not the only one. I heard of one instance in which a fellow took it (and didn't go to law school after being admitted) even though he didn't study and spent the prior night partying rather heavily.
Frankly, the test is supposed to test your ability to think logically. If you don't have that, maybe you can train your mind to it, but studying for the test probably isn't the best way to do that.
Anyhow, study away. Probably you should. Most people seem to. But you don't need to be doing it during recess at Public School 97.
Of note, one of the Ivy League schools recently dropped the LSAT as an admissions requirement, and I don't blame them. When a test like this, which tests your mental process, is studied for, people are studying to defeat the test. And they're probably accomplishing that to a large degree. Hence, it no longer has any real meaning.
Out of Jurisdiction
One revelation was that the positions associated with the court are different, which surprises me. Here, judges used to have a Judicial Law Clerk, who was a recent law school grad who served as a lawyer for the bench, and during trial a representative of the Clerk of the District Court always sits in the trial. In quite a few courts the Judicial Law Clerk is now the Permanent Law Clerk, i.e. a lawyer for whom that is a career option. A bailiff sits in the trial as well.
Where I was, however there was a "Clerk" during the trial. We also had to hire our own court reporter. There was no bailiff, the clerk sort of acted in that role. On the last day, a representative of the Clerk of Court's office was there for the verdict.
I was sufficiently confused about it later that I looked the "Clerk" up, and it's clear that the clerk is a Judicial Law Clerk. I don't know if it's a permanent position in that court or not.
It might be. The reason I note that is that in doing that I was surprised that the young lawyer had moved around in the lawyer's infant career a lot. That lawyer has only been licensed for about two years (a little less) but had already clerked somewhere else, had been an associate with a large multi state law firm for a year, and then had moved on to the court.
That's remarkably different from when I was first a lawyer. Lawyers who went on to be clerk's did it as a career move knowing that they'd occupy the position for only a year. It was normally their very first job out of law school. Very rarely did a practicing lawyer leave practice to become a clerk, although I do know of two who did that to become Federal clerks for a year. There were no full time career clerks, which now are common. Federal clerks are pretty much all career clerks, I think. Those who entered private practice didn't leave it after just one year, and if they did leave their first jobs rapidly, it was because they went to work as public defenders and had planned on other employment to start with.
Differences in views towards employment and employers have been noted by older lawyers for quite a while, but in some ways this is something that's always the case. When I was young, which seems like just yesterday but which is actually quite a while ago now, it was extremely common for the Baby Boomers to comment on how everyone below them in age had no work ethic and expected to move up the ladder as an entitlement. I always thought this the height of irony coming form a generation which actually had an enormous sense of entitlement and which was actually given a massive amount of everything by their parents, whom had endured the Great Depression and World War Two and who accordingly didn't really know, to a significant degree, what real life was actually like. That generation, which Tom Brokaw mislabeled "the Greatest Generation" in his hagiography devoted to them, knew crisis and suffering and wanted their children to be spared that. As a result, we got the generation that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc., are in that won't let go of anything. They actually were allowed to skip entire rungs on the ladder, and then later on kept people from climbing up it, imaging that they'd pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps when, to a significant degree, their doting parents were there tying their shoe laces the entire time.
Clearly, I'm painting with a broad brush, and unfairly, and this doesn't apply to every member of the generation.
Anyhow, when the Millennials and the older Gen Y folks started to enter work, including the legal field, there really was something different about them. The Gap Generation folks, like me, who fit in between Gen X and the Boomers pretty much felt we had to find a job and plug on. It was our only option in life, really. Gen Xers and older Gen Yers, like what is described about the generation that fought World War One (the "Lost Generation"). had much less job loyalty and pretty much took the view that they had to fend for themselves. Boomers repeatedly accused them of being unrealistic and lazy, but they were neither. They were highly realistic and far from lazy, they just didn't have dog like loyalty to an employer master. Indeed, they didn't really expect anything, including employment, to last.
Now, however, we're seeing the younger Gen Y and older Gen Z people in the workplace and their views truly are different, at least it seems to me. Hardly any prior generation would have skipped through that many employers right off the bat, in the example of the Clerk, but I don't think that's uncommon.
I'm not sure what that means, but again, I don't think they're lazy at all. I think their view towards work is much different, and they don't expect anything to really last, employment wise. I don't know what their views are, as a whole, on much else.
While I find that rapid employment change a little distressing, as a now older lawyer who hopes that people will stick around, I think I get it a bit, and that their views may be much more realistic than the Boomers really. Indeed, I think we're seeing a retrograde attachment to work that takes us back to prior generations over a century ago. If the Gen Xers were like the Lost Generation, the current 20-year-olds in the law and everything else seem more like those workers from the 19th Century, whom you'll often find went through quite a few jobs in a course of a lifetime, or if they were professionals went through quite a few positions.
I hope some other trends reflect that as well. For one thing, I'm sick of the uber bloated massive law firms that have become a feature of American law. The fact that younger lawyers bolt pretty readily should operate against that, as those firms depend upon a stable supply of sheep to be corralled to mow the grass of the company pasture. If the sheep are wild, and take off, that sort of corralling can't occur.
Money, Time and Life
This comes up in the context of said person speaking to a younger Gen Xer about that person's work, which is with a legal agency. The older Xer treated the younger one's work as surely a stepping stone on to other work for "more money". The younger person didn't see it that way at all.
Indeed, the younger person liked their job, which had relatively low stress, okay wages and really good hours. He couldn't see whereas he was suffering, as the older one thought other work, in the private sphere, offered a "chance to make more money".
What was clear in the conversation is that the older of the two viewed making more money as the be all and end all of any job. That was the whole point, and the only point, of employment. . a chance to make more money. The younger one saw his job as a job and was content with that.
I'm seeing a lot of that with younger workers, particularly the younger Gen Xers and the Gen Yers. Again, they're like the Lost Generation that way. They want to have a job, have a family of some sort (that hasn't completely returned to the Lost Generation view. . . yet), and to be able to enjoy life, often in a small way. These younger folks feel that the ability to go fishing after work or watch a ball game is as important as the Dollar.
And they're right.
The March of Technology
I lasted tried a case in February, which was the first post pandemic trial I've done. In that Wyoming bench trial, neither side used anything high-tech. The case just wasn't that suited for it, sort of, although there were photographic and text exhibits.
In this recent trial, however, all the exhibits were shown to the witnesses electronically and they were all published (shown) to the jury in the same fashion. A technician attended the entire trial in order that this could be seamlessly accomplished.
The technician was fantastic and did a super job with pointing out the text and going through the electronic exhibits. While I've done a lot of trials, this was the first one I've ever done that was 100% high-tech in this fashion.
I'll admit that I've been skeptical, or perhaps just reluctant, to acknowledge the effectiveness of this, but it's now clearly here and that's the standard.
Like automatic transmissions being in everything, I guess I can accept reality, however, without liking it. I don't like it.
But that's where we now are.
Going on and on
One thing that I really liked that the other jurisdiction did was to limit opening statements and to constrict voir dire (questioning of the jury).
Various Wyoming courts take different approaches to this. Most ask the lawyers "how much time do you need for openings?" and then debate how much time will really be given. I just had a proceeding in which that question was asked, and the plaintiff's lawyer said he needed 1.5 hours.
In the other jurisdiction the court simply informed us that we had 20 minutes. No debate, you have 20 minutes. And this was in a highly technical case.
I'm really good at public speaking, and frankly I was relieved. Anything over 20 minutes is an exercise in hubris and boring the jury. It might have been in the case at the time of the Gettysburg Address that people were ready for an hour-long speech, but that was in a day in which people had spent half the day getting there, were going back tomorrow, had no phones to check, and weren't getting back to their work right away, and weren't used to 30 minute television shows. No modern audience is going to listen to an hour-long speech from anyone, let alone a lawyer. Even if you have super wonderful graphics in which the entire accident is reenacted by Kate Upton and Billie Eilish with background music from Iris Dement are they going to do that. Just forget it.
None of which keeps lawyers from asking for all kinds of time. We're stuck in the past that way.
Suiting up
As a Wyoming lawyer, but a lawyer, I've watched the slow decline in clothing standards while participating in it.
At my first day of work in 1990 I reported to work wearing a double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit. The first partner who came in was wearing wool khaki trousers and a blue blazer, and he was dressed down. He told me that I didn't have to wear a suit every day.
For years and years, however, I normally wore a tie and clothing appropriate for a tie. Then COVID 19 hit.
For much of the prior spike of the disease (we're in a spike now, of the unvaccinated, but of course the entire state disregarding that) I kept coming in the office. I was often the only one there when we were at the point where the staff didn't have to come in. I pretty much quit dressing in office dress at the time as there wasn't much of a reason to do it. Nobody was coming in, I was there by myself, what the heck.
I've not made it back to normal, and not everyone else has either.
And of course normal in 2019 was not the same thing it was in 1999, or 2009. We'd already slid down the dressing scale in the back of the office, where I am. I never used to wear blue jeans in the office, but by 2019 I already was a fair amount. Starting with COVID 19, I am all the time.
One of the things about that is that in 2019 I already had a selection of older dress clothes that were wearing out I hadn't replaced. Probably the inevitability of their demise would have caused me to replace them on in to 2020. But I didn't have to. Additionally, the long gap in time meant that I pretty much didn't do anything about the fact I'm down to two suits now.
Two suits isn't much if you are a trial lawyer.
Well, running up to the trial I was going to go down to Denver and get new ones. But I ran out of time. I still haven't done it.
I need to.
I'll confess that part of my reluctance to get new suits is that I'm 58 years old. I don't wear suits daily at work, and I'm not one of those guys who is going to claim "I'm going to work until I'm 80". Any new suit I get now will still be in fighting shape when I'm 68, and that's reasonably enough, but to my cheap way of thinking, emphasized by the fact that I have two kids in college, its something that is both easy for me to put off, and in the back of my mind I tend to think "maybe I won't really need those if . . . "
Well, I probably better remedy that.
or so conservatives must think.
Donald Trump has been invited to speak at CPAC in Orlando, this Sunday.
Why would they do this? This will confirm Democrats and Independents, and traditional Republicans, in their choice not to go with the GOP this year, further decrease its influence, and make it harder for those who hold populist views seriously without it looking like simply Trump worship.
People like Victor David Hanson like to speak of "Trump Derangement Syndrome". While that may be worth talking about, the fact is that Trump didn't win the popular vote by any measure either time he ran. He's not a popular man with the majority of Americans and by inviting him, the issues that concern populist Republicans are being fused to Trump in a way that will guaranty their electoral decimation in upcoming elections.
This is a serious matter. Populists do have a collection of valid concerns and valid points about them. But Trump's effort at overturning the election and failure to distance himself from extremist are tarring all of them and the entire movement with the same brush. The tighter the grip Trump has on any section of the GOP, the less likely it is to win anything at the national level going forward, and the more likely that the result will be a permanent shift of the American political center to the left.
McCarthy may have been right about most of the things he was complaining about in the 1950s. But he was easy to dislike and has become permanently disliked. There's a lesson from history here and we all know what happens to people who fail to listen to history.
Nonetheless, what is clear at this point is that the traditional conservative wing of the party is now in full retreat. Mitch McConnell, who only a couple of weeks ago sounded like he wanted to have Trump arrested, has stated he'd vote for him if he ran in 2024. And right now, quite frankly, it looks like such a run is really likely, something that even a few weeks ago would have been regarded as highly unlikely. As it remains unlikely that Joe Biden will run again, that would likely pit Trump against Kamala Harris, if . . .
Doesn't anyone notice how old these people are?
If, that is, Trump hasn't passed on simply due to old age, or become mentally feeble due to the same reason.
It's bizarre to see how even at this late state of the Baby Boom generation, people remain seriously entrenched in the seeming view that only they can lead the nation. A person would have had good reason to believe that Joe Biden would have been the last Boomer President. Now, that's not all that certain, as nothing in this political climate is very certain.
Restricting Balloting.
In Wyoming, legislators have a couple of bills floating on the topic. Senators Barrasso and Lummis have signed on to a Federal bill that will fail which will basically prevent States from making the reforms they did to address the still ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic. The law proposes to eliminate unmonitored ballot collection boxes (one of which I saw in Rawlins just last week) and to require states to send absentee ballots only to those requesting them.
This is another issue that will come to haunt the GOP. There's no evidence of widespread ballot fraud at all, and this plays into the Democratic claim that the Republicans are seeking to restrict the vote. While this will play to the Trumpite base, it won't play to the traditional wing of the party, which is now simply leaving it.
XX Chromosomes and Scouting
The first group of female Eagle Scouts received that status this week.
First of all, that's great for this group of young women. Achieving Eagle Scout status is hard to do, and they deserve praise for their accomplishments.
But it's also sad in a way in that its a further erosion of, well dare we say it, manliness.
Girls can be girls, but boys can't really be boys anymore, even virtuous boys, which was what the Boy Scouts were all about originally.
Let's be honest. Because human nature remains human nature no matter how woke some may be and wish for everything to be, there are fundamental differences between men and women, and boys and girls, at every level. Scouting recognized that, and hence that's why there was a Boy Scouts and a Girl Scouts.
While I note that I'm not an adherent every time I cite them, and then I go on to cite them, Strauss and How, in their generational theory (there's a category link to it below) argue that the character of men is different in different cycles as a whole (not necessarily individually) due to the views of women in any particular period. So, for a lack of a better way to illustrate it, in some eras women want a bunch of touchy feely wimps such as featured on This Is Us. In others, they want Ethan Edwards from The Searchers.
This makes sense from a evolutionary biology prospective, as women's role in elemental societies is, well, more societal than men's. But rather crudely, if you live in a society that's about to be attacked, you want guys who are capable of handling that. If you live in one where there's no risk of being attacked, you might now want guys who are looking for fights.
There's a lot more to this than that, but we live in an oddly emasculating era which has superseded a highly masculine one. If Strauss and How are right, generational succession goes from Hero, Artist Prophet to Nomad. They also figure the categories of generations by years a bit more differently, which is to their credit, as they would have the Baby Boom Generation ending earlier than some others do. You can read all about that elsewhere, but they also have a concept of cyclical crises and periods of stability that impact generations, with women generally being the cultural influencers that impact male character patterns, if not necessarily individual males, at any one time.
Okay, so what?
Well, we are living in a very female influenced era culturally. One that has even seen the intrusion of women into roles that are not only traditionally male, but arguably biologically male, from an evolutionary biological prospective and even attacks on the concept of gender itself, biologically unsounds though that may be. And part of what occurs, when this occurs, is that men, and before that boys, really have no refuge in which they can be just guys.
This doesn't mean there's some previous era in which everything in regard to male/female roles was perfectly defined, although in a lot of ways that changes much less than people like to imagine, and perceptions of change have more to do with economic changes in broad economies at any one time then the do with actual changes in cultural views. And it doesn't mean that there should be some sort of strict segregation between boys and girls at all times. Indeed, at least in my view, strict segregation at the primary school level actually tends to encourage vices, and the societies that practice that usually see the results later on in men and women who never learned about the others in their formative years with resulting permanent impacts on their characters.
But it does mean that there ought to be at least some places where boys can go just to be boys, and to learn, well, many things. And the same is true in the opposite direction for girls. And indeed, for girls, it still is. There's been no male penetration into deeply female roles or organizations in any meaningful sense. Find a boy in the Girl Scouts and chances are high that you are going to find an odd storty behind it, and one that is probably vested in that person's parents.
Find a girl in the Boy Scouts, or now just the Scouts, and what you'll find is high achieving girls. You'll also soon fine less manly boys in the same organizations, which have been having troubles recently anyhow, and soon just fewer boys in general. Some will remain, but they won't be the same group that would have been there otherwise, and those who are there, aren't going to learn the same lessons they would have otherwise. Overall, everyone will suffer for that.*
They forgot what society they lived in
Lindell is the founder of the My Pillow company. I don't know anything about the pillows and not that much about Lindell, other than his personal story is really a classic rags to riches type tale.
In the U.S., that's enough to cause people to love and hate you, which is something to keep in mind. He's also a vocal Evangelical Christian, which also will draw praise while drawing some dislike as well. None of that, however, is what he's now in trouble for.
Lindell has been sued by Dominion Voting which is sick and tired of its voting machines being slammed. Lindell made claims that Dominion rigged the election for Joe Biden, a statement for which not only is there no evidence, it's demonstrably false. Dominion is a business and they don't like their product being hammered by falsehoods, no deeply believed by those who are asserting those falsehoods.
People like Victor David Hanson like to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome which they claim causes people on the left to be completely irrational about Donald Trump. An argument can be made that some of that did in fact exist during the Trump Administration, particularly early on. The problem is that the same term can also apply to Trump's diehard supporters.
One of the things about Trump is, quite frankly, that while he had real accomplishments he has major character defects. He's boorish, crude, and has had a history of questionable behavior with women. He's also a prima donna and narcissist who simply can't stand the thought of public criticism or losing.
In normal US politics that would doom a person, but it didn't with Trump. A lot of his base supporters originally didn't care about any of that as long as he acted as a wrecker. Over time, he's developed a personality cult that nearly worships him, in spite of all of his obvious faults. People in that category suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome as well as they can't be objective at all about Trump.
This doesn't apply to every Trump supporter by any means. But it applies to some. Guys like Lindell and Patrick Coffin seem to have simply fallen off the reality wagon and are willing to endorse all sorts of conspiracy theories about one thing or another. Coffin, who used to be an objective conservative religious voice now hosts people who see Bill Gates conspiring to create a pandemic in order to create a new world order. Lindell boosted the Dominion nonsense.
Lindell is now one of several figures getting sued by Dominion. Dominion no doubt doesn't hope to be reimbursed by them for their losses, whatever those may be, but is out to repair its reputation through litigation. The litigation will achieve that.
Dopey New Jersey
Not that New Jersey is by any means alone in this, to be sure. It's just following the pack.
It does say something that in early 21st Century America, however, one of the biggest movements of the day is one that allows people to be oblivious.
Exit Franco
A statute honoring Francisco Franco's role as a commander in the Rif War, put up in 1978 was taken down this past week. Apparently it was the last one, which is remarkable in part as it was put up in the 1970s.
Franco had his supporters in Spain during his long dictatorship, as well as his supporters elsewhere. All that now seems definitively in the past. Having said that, this has been a strange trip. Franco had his supporters in the west during the civil war period that proceeded World War Two, and even had some after that. Indeed, quite a few. During much of the 30s he was, however, disdained by the American left including the popular media. World War Two certainly increased that disdain, and for good reasons, as he crept up on joining Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the war. By war's end, however, he was courting the west. His regime died with him, which he was aware would occur, but he retained sufficient support for a monument to his command in the Spain's colonist Rif campaign was still erected, which is pretty amazing really. And we just passed the 40th anniversary of the attempted 1981 Fracoist coup, which of course failed.
Nobody in Span is going to try a Francoist coup now.
Streaming
Paramount movies has announced it will provide movies for streaming 45 days after their initial release.
Sign of the times.
Footnotes
*And, no, I wasn't an Eagle Scout.
I was in Scouting so briefly that I usually say I was never a Boy Scout. In actuality I was, but as noted, very briefly.
This has nothing to do with what's good for baseball and everything to do with greed.One of the teams slated for the axe, we'd note, is the Vermont Lake Monsters.
It would destroy thousands of jobs and devastate local economies.
