The 2026 Election, 25th Edition. The casting the vote edition. More Labels.

 

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 9, 25th Amendment Watch, 23d Edition. The Canadian Harvard and Oxford doctor in economics vs. the Wharton playboy. The Trade War with Canada edition.

By Self-created photograph by Jonathunder - Own work, GFDL, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64543672

If this is a match of intellects, and it likely is, Canada has already won the trade war. 

Carney is undoubtedly a genius and the only international leader currently in office, maybe ever in office, to have run the economies of two different countries.  Trump is increasingly obvious of rather low intellect and a real estate developer with a very narrow understanding of the economy, who is in turn heavily influenced by Peter Navarro, a 77 year old economic theorist who uniquely champions tariffs.  To make matters worse, Trump is suffering a rapid dementia related mental decline.

The US right now is destroying its own economy.

August 26, 2026

Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. steel, aluminum, furniture and clothing (50%),  cheese, appliances and some seafood, (25%) and on electronics and tools (15%), effective September 8.

It also pledged aid to Canadian workers.

It was a dollar per dollar match on US tariffs, which it basically offsets.

As a side effect of this, the price of household paper products, toilet paper and paper towels, is climbing.

Thanks Don.

On the contest of intellects, the petulant baby in the Oval Office threatened to rename Lake Ontario the Lake of America or something.  Trump actually thinks he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, even though it remains the Gulf of Mexico in reality.  The Lake Ontario thing is incredibly stupid.  Nobody reacted positively to it, although I'm sure that administration flunkies will pretend it's a great idea.  Curtis Hertel Jr., chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, stated:

Donald Trump has been America first in name only his entire presidency. He promised lower prices, higher wages, and no foreign wars … all of that is bull shit.  Renaming th fourth best Great Lake isn’t going to change that.

Americans aren't impressed with the latest Trump stupidity.

Trump shitposts fail to win support for Canadian trade war

On Trump dumping American cattlemen, John Barrasso, Senator from Trump, oh, um, Senator allegedly from Wyoming, posted this on Twitter:

Americans want US beef on the table – not foreign imports. Wyoming ranchers produce the highest quality beef in the world. Our ranchers don't ask for special treatment. They simply want a fair marketplace. It needs to be easier – not harder – for Wyoming ranchers to feed America. I will continue to fight for policies that strengthen Wyoming beef producers and invest in the American cattle herd.

Barrasso is a Trump suck up and hasn't really done much for Wyoming in years.  During election cycles he's for whatever he thinks Wyomingites are for and is otherwise a rank cowards pretending he thinks Trump is brilliant when he knows that he's not.  Last time he ran he became worried about gadfly candidate Reid Rasner and accordingly pulled to the hard right.

Barrasso must regard the Wyoming livestock industry as sufficiently powerful enough to actually hurt the GOP, or this an issue near enough to the hearts of Wyomingites, that he needs to speak up.  He didn't do that when public lands were on the table.  It's interesting in part because the Wyoming range cattle industry in particular, and agriculture in general, have been so pro Trump and pro GOP that it's quite literally actually stupid.  We posted on this the other day.

The GOP's useful idiots in agriculture.

Neither Hageman or Lummis have said anything.

Hageman, of course, has incentive not to.  She's a Trump endorsee and is now running against James Byrd tof Lummis' seat.  This makes her exposed on this issue.  If she speaks up, and she's going to have to, it puts her between somebody that supports here that she probably thinks is a heaping bowl of stupid in reality, but then exposing her to voters who she probably figures are more heaping bowls of stupid.  Byrd is perfectly suited to exploit this as Hageman comes from a farm/ranch and can't stay silent before she looks like a traitor.

Lummis, of course, comes from a ranch too, but as she's nto running, she doesn't have to say anything.  She seems to be bucking for a Trump cabinet post, anticipating that people will jump the Trump ship post election.

Anyhow, on Dr. John:

Beefing over foreign beef plan, Barrasso breaks with Trump administration

Closer to home, businesses have been closing right and left in Casper.

Casper’s Outback Steakhouse closes permanently after nearly three decades of business

Little Shop of Burgers announces closure at end of month

Two locally owned Casper small businesses closing permanently

And, good riddance:

Enough! Evanston Man Says He's Leaving The State Over Property Rights Fight

On other economic fronts, the US came out with its "Economic D-Day" against Iran, which are really sanctions against Iranian trading partners, but not really.  It delayed the imposition of them to January 1, 2027, which means they won't happen at all.

August 27, 2026

Will Trump's latest beef plan make your hamburger cheaper? Not much, experts say

Of course it won't.  It's not enough of an addition to the supply chain to matter.

But it could impact other things, depending upon where the beef is sourced.

August 28, 2026

INVOKE THE 25TH AMENDMENT YOU COWARDLY BASTARDS

Seriously, we have a fool ordering that Lake Ontario be called Lake America.

The GOP is a complete fucking joke.  Trump is the worst President in the American history and is destroying the country.

Headline in the CST:

Officials issue inflation warnings

This is at the big economic summit in Jackson Hole.

I wish they'd have this in Scranton or the Bronx.  Jackson is already full of rich carpetbaggers as it is.

400 Southwest Wyoming Trona Mining Jobs On Hold As China Floods Soda Ash Market

August 31, 2026

The US has entered into some sort of deal with Venezuela that has a 25 year life span which supplies the US with oil.

This is frankly naked, rank, colonialism.  My predication is that the deal will be voided as soon as this horrific administration is out.

September 1, 2026

Cattle imports from Mexico resumed.

They've been shut down for fifteen months.

Mexico normally imports 1,000,000 head of cattle into the US every year.

This is actually the resumption of importation that had been occurring until the screwworm outbreak.  The Trump administration blamed that on the Biden administration, like it does everything else.  

Closer to home, yet another Casper restaurant is biting the dust.

House of Sushi in downtown Casper permanently closes

There's been a real rash of these recently. Something is going on.  An article in Oil City notes that the list includes Little Shop of Burgers, Benny Montanaro’s Pizza (which I'd never even heard of), and Outback Steakhouse.

GiGi’s consignment store in Casper is also closing.

Next to House of Sushi it appears an entity called Jae's Place is opening in the old Wonder Bar space.

I don't really understand Jae's Place, but apparently its a wester wear store that supports a charitable mental health foundation.  That's admirable but frankly opening in that location is desecrating a Casper landmark. The space had been the Wonder Bar more or less continually since 1937, having originally been located in another space.  It became a steakhouse under the name C85 a decade or more ago that sold out to Wyoming Rib and Chop which became, you guessed it, another Casper restaurant that closed.

I understand that Jae's Place is a charity so I should not have a non charitable attitude about it, but there's a really old Western Wear store just a block away that I hope is not hurt by this multi state entity and for a long time Casperite seeing this converted into retail is disappointing.  Workmen have been busy for weeks molesting the interior so the damage will likely be permanent.

This is the sort of thing that happens when a place has no sense of itself.

The Wonder Bar

These photographs are of the "World Famous" Wonder Bar. The Wonder Bar has operated on Center Street for decades, although it has had short periods of time in recent years in which it operated under a different name (Tommy Knockers, Dillingers, and very briefly, "Sludge and Eddies"). Still, the bar has been around so long that even efforts to operate it under a different name do not deter the locals from continuing to refer to it as the Wonder Bar.

Downtown Casper once had a vast number of bars. This are of downtown had multiple bars on a single block. Only the Wonder Bar survives as a bar.

At some point in time, decades ago, Lee Riders paid to paint an advertisement on the side of the bar. The sign is still there, although an effort to paint over it was made at some point. This reflects the stockman heritage of central Wyoming, and indeed at one time quite a few cowboys and sheepherders spent time in the Wonder Bar.

As an aside, it's hard to see how a town that has a microbrewery every other door can't keep a legendary bar open.

September 2, 2026

The House passed another stopgap budget bill to keep the government running.

Data centers are becoming a big topic in Wyoming.

Pitching 940-acre data center, Prometheus Hyperscale asks Natrona County to bypass state review

Frankly, I"m not a big fan, meaning not a fan at all, of the big expansion of data centers and I'm absolutely opposed to them being constructed on vacant agricultural land.

This was a hearing in front of the County Commissioners.  It looked like each of the current sitting commissioners made some sort of comment at the end, as the Oil City News reports:

In their closing comments, Nicolaysen and Chair Jim Milne said the board must balance community concerns with the rights of private landowners. Laird framed the current technology infrastructure race as an issue of national defense. He said that domestic computing facilities keep American technology out of foreign hands.

“[President Donald] Trump has said it too,” the commissioner said. “He says we have a war going on with China and Russia over who’s going to take over with this AI business. And that’s what this data center is all about. … Do you want China running your AI or Russia running your AI or do you want Natrona County commissioners and the state of Wyoming and America running AI?”

Commissioner Casey Coates cautioned against reacting with panic instead of focusing on tangible facts.

“When we ask for the protection of the government, we really ought to be careful because government at times can be overreaching and those protections that we ask for can be overly applied to ourselves,” Coates said. “Do we not like something because of what it is, or do we have real impacts? If we have real impacts, let’s address those.”

Commissioner Dave North said that state environmental regulators handle water rights and industrial pollution under state statutes.

“The state engineer is the one that takes care of the water,” he said. “That is not our responsibility. That’s not our job. That is up to the state. The DEQ takes care of a lot of stuff. That’s their job. That is not our job.”

Of the five sitting commissioners, only Laird is on the ballot this election.  Laird is correct on Donald Trump's position.  Trump basically called communities that don't want data centers stupid as life is all about money and he loves money and you should love money because Trump loves money and you should love Trump, and money, but Trump most of all.

This must be a nightmare of Chuck Gray, who has been trying to hate things Wyomingite's claim to hate, and they seem to hate data farms, but Trump, who Gray loves, loves them.

On something Trump and Gray presently hate, wind farms:

Scaled-Down Laramie Range Wind Project Gets Go Ahead After Intense 2-Day Hearing

Something else that's been a topic in the news.

Uinta County Ranch Family Builds USDA Meat Processing Plant From The Ground Up

The Donald Trump beef story gets worse:

Driskill Blasts Trump Meeting World's Largest Meatpacker Before Beef Import Deal

Driskill is in the legislature and has been consistently clear thinking.

September 4, 2026

Maybe Wyomingites will wake up about Trump:

Wyomingites, Trump Differ On Whether Data Center Foes Will Be ‘Backwards And Poor’

Sending more money out, than they're taking in.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 8. $40,012,700,535,679.44

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Agriculture, Canada, Disaster, Donald Trump, Economics, Food, Government, Kyla Scanlon, Republican Party, Taxes, The Second Trump Administration, Wyoming's boom and bust economy

Additional Labels:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 9, 25th Amendment Watch, 23d Edition. The Canadian Harvard and Oxford doctor in economics vs. the Wharton playboy. The Trade War with Canada edition. First set of Additional labels.

 

Labels: 2026 Election, Agriculture, Cowards, Cynthia Lummis, Food, Harriet Hageman, Health, James Byrd, John Barrasso, Reid Rasner, restaurants and bars, The Second Trump Administration, Wyoming, Wyoming (Casper), Wyoming (Evanston)

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 9, 25th Amendment Watch, 23d Edition. The Canadian Harvard and Oxford doctor in economics vs. the Wharton playboy. The Trade War with Canada edition. Second set of Additional labels.

 

Wharton, you owe us an explanation and an apology.

The Agrarian's Lament: Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food

The Agrarian's Lament: Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Proce...: Trump tries to backstep after a major screw up. Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food While this will aid beef...

Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food

Trump tries to backstep after a major screw up.

Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food

While this will aid beef producers, it doesn't address the existential problem of the packing industry monopoly.  Breaking that, and particularly breaking that on Distributist principals, would have a massive impact.  That won't be happening, however.  

Instead, this basically would allow producers to sell their own beef across state lines.  While some people will buy beef in that fashion, most people won't, and that doesn't do much at all for the cost of beef sold at restaurants and the like.

As noted, applying the Sherman Anti Trust Act to the meat packing industry would have a real impact.  A bigger one would be limiting corporate ownership to a single packing facility.

All of this will have no immediate impact on meat prices. The US cattle inventories, i.e.., the herd size, have not been this low since 1941.  The reasons for that are varied, by herd reduction due to drought caused by climate change is a major part of it.  In some ways, this is just a minor way of trying to repair the damage done by Trump allowing the importation of foreign beef, which has the added theater element of being introduced, supposedly, by Glenn Beck in an interview, something that just screams out the entire thing being something that is pitched towards farmer and rancher ignorance.

Small herd size is a problem, but it will take years to address.  By that time, given the very small herd size, we may very well be seeing a meat production climate that hasn't existed since the introduction of refrigerated rail cars in 1878.  The massive increase in the Western herd during the Civil War and the invention of the refrigerated rail car shifted the American diet from pork to beef.  Various factors have been making inroads on beef for years, and the price at the counter, which this will certainly not immediately address, is shifting it once again, and has been for many  years.

Whether this will serve as a salve on farmers and ranchers so they can justify voting for a party that has screwed them for years is yet to be seen.

Related thread:

The GOP's useful idiots in agriculture.

Labels: 1920, 1929, 2020s, 2026, Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Great Depression, Ignorance, Kevin Christensen, Predictions, Republican Party, Stupidity

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 4. Economics in the Dementia Ward.

May 1, 2026

We're constantly told that tariffs are good for everyone.  But then monarchs come and they're lifted.

He's lost his mind.

Cont:

cont:

Well, war not only changes everything, as we've noted in our laws of history, but the law of unintended consequences applies in spades:

World’s Top Producer of Condoms Raises Prices as Iran War Rattles Supply Chains

The Malaysian company Karex, which produces about five billion condoms a year, said it was raising prices by 30 percent because of higher raw material prices and global shipping disruptions.

May 3, 2026

Discount airline Spirit dissolves.

 It was a victim of high aviation fuel, something brought about by Donald Trump's illegal attack on Iran.

May 4, 2026

Trump gives go-ahead to major new oil pipeline into Wyoming

This has been in the news for awhile, but I haven't posted it yet.

Frankly, the impact of pipelines is mostly in their construction, to it's temporary.  At least for the state.  These pipelines tend to transport Canadian oil, so the impact is less than it might seem.

And the state has got to get over its addiction to petroleum.

Regarding petroleum, the U.S. is now exporting a record amount due to the war with Iran, which doesn't help U.S. citizens whatsoever, as it cause the price of the product to rise, and accelerates U.S. depletion of the resource.  Export of it, save for conditions in which the petroleum cannot be refined here, should be banned.

For that matter, as a resource that nobody contributed to putting in the ground, some thought should be given to nationalizing the resource in some fashion.

Some members of Congress are threatening to ban the import of Chinese electric vehicles as the GOP searches for ways to make a bad situation worse.

May 7, 2026

Headline:

Trade Court Rules Trump’s 10% Global Tariff Is Illegal

A panel of federal judges found that President Trump could not legally impose the tariff on most imports.

No surprise whatsoever.

Anyhow, now this money will have to be refunded too. And Mad King Donny still hasn't refunded the money owed from the last such ruling.

May 13, 2026

Inflation rose to 3.8% last month with the fastest rise in prices in three years, caused by an illegal war with Iran which the demented Mad King Donny has no idea how to end.

Mad King Donny has gone to China.  It'll be a disaster. The best possible result would be if he just gets lost over there, thinks the Chinese babes are cute, decides to marry one, and stays.

June 4, 2026

Casper's car radio store, Car Tunes, is closing after forty years.

And now this:

As an Agrarian, I really hate this.

June 5, 2026

And another one I hate:

Trump Sending $700 Million To Coal Industry, Boosting Wyoming Coal Mines

If we're going to be Socialist in regard to coal, which we shouldn't be, why not just nationalize the industry?  I ask this seriously, as now we're spending public money on a dying industry.

And not one that's just dying, the rest of the world is racing beyond fossil fuels while the ancient leaders of the United States continue to believe its 1954.

With this pathetic news, we'll start a new edition of this thread.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 3. The Wharton Way.

Labels: 2020s, 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu, Chuck Gray, Economics, Iran, King Donald's War, Petroleum, Stupidity, The Ivy League, Trump War Inflation, United States and Israel v. Iran, Weird, Wyoming's boom and bust economy

Blog Mirror: Why I support independent businesses: Mutual benefit

 

Why I support independent businesses: Mutual benefit

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The brave men and women of the USCG are pleased to be able to buy Trump wine and cider tax free.”

Announcement confirming that Trump wine and cider is now stocked at Coast Guard BX's.

Sigh.

Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State.  The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.

Oligarchy is now where we are at.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 107th Edition. Tacky Crap, Delusion, and the Sgt. Schultz defense.

Labels: 2025 Election Post Mortem, 2025 White House Vandalization, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, The Sgt. Schultz Defense, White House, Zeitgeist

Here's Six Ways Trump’s Budget Will Hurt Rural Americans

Here's Six Ways Trump’s Budget Will Hurt Rural Americans: Right now, Congress is working on a giant, fast-track bill that would make historic cuts to basic needs programs to finance another round of tax breaks for the wealthy and...

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus and its self-inflicted wounds

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus and its self-inflicted wounds: In a move that pokes holes in its "we the people" posture, the group of state elected officials is going after groups of local elected officials, columnist Rod Miller writes.

Work with meaning and the meaning of work.

You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.

Blondie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I have a theory that certain work is existential by nature.  My post on that from several months ago:

A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.

Why do I note this?

Well I've had a bunch of synchronicitous events happen recently that perhaps demand it being noted, assuming that anything must be noted here at all.  Because they're all sort of circular, I'll start in one spot and gather the round corral, noting that these recollections are all recent, but not chronological.

I was walking out of the sporting goods store and ran into a law school colleague.  For some reason or another, for much of my life, I've always been the youngest person in a group as a rule, even when I really shouldn't have been.  Anyhow, this fellow, like two other of my law school friends, was an older law student, in law school, although I'm not sure how old he really was then,  Two of my other friends, both Vietnam War era veterans, were in their 40s, so they're in their mid 70s now.  I think this fellow was probably in his mid to late 30s.  He remained remarkably the same looking all that time.

He kind of bounced around at first as a lawyer before landing in a firm where he practiced for maybe 20 years.  He's retired now, and has been for awhile.  He asked me if I was getting ready to retire, which I indicated I wasn't, but I did ask him about the process, and he gave me some details of how he'd gone about it.  

Good to know from somebody who has done it.

He doesn't miss practicing at all.

In contrast to this, a close friend of mine, well really a relative, who is a lawyer who must be crowding 70 told me the other day he's not going to.  He'd miss the collegiality of being a lawyer.

That answer shocked me.  Not that he wasn't going to retire, but the collegiality.

Eh?

It may be just me, but only a handful of my friends are lawyers.  I do have some lawyer friends.  But most of my friends aren't lawyers and never have been.  I wouldn't miss most lawyers whatsoever.  Indeed, I miss a lot of my genuinely close friends due to the practice of law.

This, frankly, is probably an exception to the rule.  Law is a unique profession, litigation with in the law even more so, and by and large the onliy people who have a grasp on what it is like are other lawyers.  It is, I suppose, kind of like being a combat veteran that way.  Lawyers hang out with other lawyers as they're lawyers.  

Indeed, being heavily introverted, I've often noted how much lawyers enjoy professional gatherings. They really do.  There are organizations that we're all part of and we'll go to a conference and there will be a big dinner or something, everyone goes.

Unless my spouse is with me, or one of the few lawyers I really know well and like, I tend to avoid those gatherings.

Anyhow this takes me to a second point.

I know a couple of lawyers who have lost their souls.

I don't mean in a metaphysical sense.  That is, I'm not saying they're condemned to Hell.  What I'm saying is that their personalities are gone and been absorbed by false ones in the pursuit of nothing more than money.

It happens to people.  It's not a pleasant thing to see.  

I was never friends with either of the ones I have in mind.  Interestingly, however, one seems to be trying to emerge.  One, who sank into this a long time ago actually started talking to me the other day about what he was going to do "next", something he's never said before.

A really good lawyer friend of mine is mostly retired.  Like the fellow I mentioned above, while he had his doubts, he hasn't missed the practice at all.

Another good lawyer friend of mine, a woman, is trying to transition from one practice to another.

Two women I know otherwise recently lost their jobs. They weren't lawyers.

I note that as I think women in particular are subject to the Capitalist lie that careers are existentially defining, a completely modern notion.

St Paul was a tent maker.  St. Peter a fisherman.  I don't know if there are any classic Medieval or Renaissance paintings of St. Paul making a tent, but there should be.

Why do I note that?

Well, for this reason.  You don't think much about St. Paul being a tent maker as his occupation didn't define him.  His sainthood did.  

But a lot of us moderns sure have made our occupations define us.  And women are very much doing so now.

This takes me back to the item I linked in above.

In this case, unlike my uncle, he was much younger.  My age, in fact.  I hadn't seen him for many years, and before his troubles really set in.  He hadn't been able to adjust to them well.  The most common comment from people, none of whom were surprised, was that his torment was over.

I don't have any big plans, like one of my friends, for retirement.  I hope to be healthy, and just become more of an agrarian-killetarian than I presently am.  Funny thing is that recently I've been running into people who claim "you're looking really good". Somebody asked me the other day, indeed at the funeral gathering, "you're working out", the question in the form of a statement.  Not really.

Indeed, I've gained some weight I seemingly just can't lose, which I think is the byproduct of my thyroid medicine, which has made me hungry, and I know that I'm not in the physical condition I was before my recent health troubles commenced.  People close to me just won't accept that, which brings me to the other side of the retirement coin noted above.  Some lawyers I know are already planning for me to work into my 70s, as that's the thing to do, apparently. Long-suffering spouse, for her part, won't say something like that, but from an ag family, she doesn't really accept the concept of retirement anyhow.  Having said that, I wouldn't plan on my retiring from the ag operation either.

It finally occured to me, however, what's different about agricultural jobs as opposed to others, at least if you are an owner of the enterprise or part of it.  The occupation itself is existentially human.  It is, if you will, an Existential Occupation, or at least it is right now. The mindless gerbil like advance of "progress" may ruin that and reduce it to just another occupation.

Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species.  Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being.  It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grown them on their lots.  And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens.  It's in us.  That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.

It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note.  Clerics are in that category.  Storytellers and Historians are as well.  We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time.  They're all existential in nature.  Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that.  The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.

Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.

If I were to retire from my career, which I can't right now, I wouldn't be one of those people who spend their time traveling to Rome or Paris or wherever.  I have very low interest in doing that.  I'd spend my time writing, fishing, hunting, gardening (and livestock tending).  That probably sounds pretty dull to most people.  I could imagine myself checking our Iceland or Ireland, or fjords in Norway, but I likely never will.

That's more than I really need for my point here, but it ties in, this way.

Most careers are just jobs. They're an industrial way of separating you from your homes to make money for somebody else, in exchange for which you make some money too.  This was done to men first, and then with the "women's liberation" movement of the 1960s, women drank the KookAide and have been wondering when the good feels will arrive.

They won't.

Most jobs have no greater existential meaning than that.  If you define yourself by them, you are defining yourself as a fiction.

Which is why I worry about the lawyers who collapse into the cartoonish litigation personality.  It makes you a cartoon, and not a very interesting one.

It's also why lawyers who become deep dive into the Whaling For Justice personality, or something like it, sort of boil off the people they were and become somebody nobody is interested in.

And I also think that's why old lawyers have a hard time retiring.  After selling your life away, is this it?  It must be. This must be it.  I must love this as otherwise. . . .

I will note, and strongly, that I'm not advocating here for something that seems to be a current rage.  Don't get any post high school education and hope for the best.

Indeed, the advocates of that, don't mean that.  They mean don't forget to look at occupations where you work with your hands.

Now listen to me, all of you. You are all condemned men. We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.

Quintus Arrius, Ben Hur.

The truth of the matter is that we sell our lives for a living, but we shouldn't sell our souls.  A lot of career propaganda emphasis the nifty life you are supposed to have, but not the risk of losing your soul, and here I mean in both senses.  Being able to sell the minutes of your life away for a decent return means that you need to have skills of some sort that are valuable.  People should try to acquire those if for nothing else their own protection.

Women, I'd note, are particularly vulnerable here.  A woman with a professional degree, such as law, is armed against loss of employer.  A woman who doesn't have some sort of valuable skill is at the mercy of her employer.  They're the ones who lose their jobs readily, and who are subject to all sorts of risks.  

The trick, I guess, is to get those skills and remember that we shouldn't lose who we are.

One group of people who tend to make that career choice are people who work for the government. They're often grossly underpaid, but they also tend to have weighted the options and elected towards "quality of life".  Lawyers who work for the AG's office, or biologists who work for state and Federal agencies provide such examples.  

Interestingly, people on the outside in the same fields tend to hold these people in contempt.  I guess people working 80 hours a week to make a go of it are naturally resentful towards those who do not.  But those people are often very dedicated to their professions and even more purist than those who sell their labor in the private market.  A dear cousin of mine who recently died was one such example.  She was a research biologist at a university.  

We're about to head into a Federal administration here that seems to contain a contempt to government employees.  Indeed one recent campaign featured somebody who wants to limit the amount of time you can work for the Federal government.  The same campaign repeatedly noted the candidates rural roots.

The rural roots are real, but what an irony.  Descending from homesteaders means that you descent from the biggest American welfare program ever, one that used the U.S. Army to violently expel land occupants due to their race, to hand it out to European Americans.  Don't mistake my point, I love agriculture and regard it as an existential occupation, and if I'd been alive when you could have homesteaded, I would have.  But people who loved the land so much they fought for it, and lost, had the moral high ground on that, and those who came in behind them benefitted from the Federal largess and murder.

If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?

Tuco, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Genesis tells us that since we sinned in the Garden, we've condemned ourselves to work.  But it's also obvious that work was always part of the plan.  It's interesting how well this comports to how evolution and societal development worked.  We were likely a very happy group as aboriginals, and we know now that depression and modern angst is unknown in hunter gatherer societies.  But we ate from the tree of knowledge and acquired it, 

Well, now we have to work.  Make the best of it.