Friday, June 25, 2021
Monday, June 21, 2021
Tuesday, June 21, 1921. Sinking
On this date in 1921, the U.S. Army Air Corps and the U.S. Navy sunk the captured German U117 as a demonstration of air power.
Saturday, April 10, 2021
The Agrarian's Lament: A Tribune op ed and some thoughts on outfitters and locals.
A Tribune op ed and some thoughts on outfitters and locals.
We recently ran the item below.
The Agrarian's Lament: Two Hunting Season Reflections
A column appears in the Tribune today, by an outfitter, congratulating the Legislators involved in this matter (voting the bill down) for their thoughtfulness. Interested folks can find it here:
Outfitters: Senators deserve our thanks for taking a thoughtful approach
The argument basically is the one I noted. The bill would have reduced, the way the op-ed termed it, "hunter tourists" by 50%. And that's true.
That doesn't rise to the level a good argument in my view. After all, legalization of marihuana was subject to the same pocket book interest. And Colorado was, and probably still is, getting stoner tourists. But that is the way that a lot of people tend to look at any question, and this question in particular.
The bill claims the Senators were verbally attacked, which if true is inexcusable, but which probably does show the deep seated cultural feelings on this issue here in this state. Natives, of which I am one, tend not to be too sympathetic to this argument.
Why would that be?
It's not, by and large, that most natives and long time residents are opposed to people keeping their jobs and we generally don't want to hurt the owners of restaurants and hotels and the like. And we're keen on sporting goods stores. So none of that is it.
What is it, is being locked out.
Hunters and fishermen have sort on odd admiration/aggravation relationship with farmers and ranchers (quite a few of which, we should note, are hunters also). And outfitters have made this worse. It has to do with access to land.
Now, I'm not going to wax too romantic about this and there's always been places that hunters and fishermen, and from here out we'll just refer to both as "hunters" as fishermen are simply fish hunters, could not go. But they were much fewer before outfitting became a big business in the state.
That wasn't until the 1980s and the impact wasn't immediately felt. But by the 90s it was. Outfitters were part, but not all, of that.
Indeed, out of state land ownership was also a big part of that. Rich people would buy ranches in Wyoming and lock them up, if they could, whereas the same lands before had been ones of ready access for hunters. Outfitters, however, came in and bought the hunting access, often locking up public lands that were landlocked by private lands at the same time.
Ranchers and farmers of course participated in this for a variety of reasons, simple economics being one but also because that often meant that they didn't have to deal with the minority of hunters who were some sort of a problem to them. The outfitters guided their clients and hence controlled them.
The entire development has impacted the local land culture a lot. Access to private lands is harder to come by than it once was. Given that, local hunters are unlikely to love outfitters if they've been pushed off of their former hunting lands.
The Game & Fish, for its part, has tried to redress this and has done so fairly successfully by effectively becoming sort of an outfitter, sort of, itself, by buying access to hunting lands under various agreements with landowners. That's a great program that I highly encourage, but of course it still isn't going to engender love by the locals for outfitters.
With only so much wildlife to go around, and so many places that it can be found, reserving licenses for out of state hunters, while generally supported by the locals, loses some of its appeal when the argument fails to ignore the impact of what outfitting has helped to create in the state.
It's a classic agrarian conflict.
Indeed, it very closely replicates the agrarian conflict that took place in the 30 years following the Civil War in the South, to some extent, a conflict that came near to violence on multiple occasions. That won't occur here, but that local hunters will back such bills if they can, and that the outfitting industry will oppose them, should be no surprise.
All of which gets back, in some ways, to my earlier arguments about creating a subsistence hunting license in the state, but that's not seemingly too likely to happen any time soon, and if it did, chances are that those with a trophy focus, and outfitters, might oppose that. Or might not.
Monday, April 5, 2021
What's that voting bill actually say?
I confess, I haven't read the entire bill, and there are some distressing bills out there, but the Georgia bill is getting a lot of heat, without much light shed on it. Here it actually is:
Much of this bill really isn't as horrific as portrayed. It pretty much just regularizes practices just informally put into practice last election in Georgia. It does have a couple of bad provisions, including that its 95 pages in length. The no water aid in line, which may or may not still be in there (this thing is way to long to fully read) is horrific, but apparently was in it in order to try to stop electioneering at the polls.
By the same token, while I want to be suspicious of the new Wyoming bill because of the times, I can't really find anything objectionable to having to present a photo ID when you vote and I'm really sort of surprised that this isn't the law already. I do find the provision that a Medicaid Card will work to be laughably Boomer patronizing. . . that's not a photo ID. But overall, asking for a photo ID at the polls, while probably not really necessary, isn't really burdensome either.
Indeed, by and large the Wyoming legislature did a good job of defeating the really bad bills this session. The really absurd bill that sought to give the legislature veto power over interpretation of the Constitution, which was flagrantly unconstitutional, didn't make it out of committee, even though it had the backing of most of the county GOP committees. The horrific bill to limit juries to six, rather than twelve, which was snuck in and supported by the plaintiff's bar made it past the House and died in the Senate. The WICHE bill did pass, but the Governor caught the foul ball on that one.
Things aren't over yet and there are still some bills out there that I have no idea as to their status, and no doubt some I've never heard of. Most of the gun rights bills this session were wholly unnecessary or unconstitutional, but I don't know where they are at. The bill allowing out of states to carry concealed without a permit did pass and I'm not for that and don't think it a good idea as I think Wyomingites deserve some level of control, such a reciprocal permit, on people we don't know traveling through here. I'm probably in the minority on that one. The one hunting bill I was tracking failed, which was too bad.
Anyhow, there's all sorts of yelling on various bills around the country, and in Congress, but do people read them? Probably not. Probably most people don't have the time. But the reporting on them lacks nuance and can create misimpressions.
Sunday, April 4, 2021
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgist Part 12. Play Money, Cheyenne to Denver (and beyond) by rail, Prisoners of the State
It's all play money anyway, right?
The connection between reality and government spending is pretty much completely gone in the present administration.
This simply can't go on. The government has already spent more money during the Biden Administration on COVID relief than the government spent during the Great Depression, and the economic stimulus/infrastructure bill hasn't even been touched yet.
Cycling back to wiping out student debt, or a portion of it, I can't help but note Elizabeth Warren's support of it. Warren, who went from private practice to law professor, and therefore landed ultimately in academia, is of course for it. Her earlier specialty, oddly enough, was in bankruptcy, and she should therefore be familiar with the concept of "moral hazard". Forgiving student debt disrupts moral hazard.
While this is just one topic in the cranking up of the money press going on right now, it ought to be really obvious that there's no real reason for government backed loans for education to exist except where a course of study fulfills a national need. That's it. Otherwise, it ought to be up to individuals, who will bear the moral and fiscal hazard. Of course, that would pretty much wipe out most student loans, but it would also stop the tempting of students into areas where there is no work, and therefore no ability to pay back the loans.
On Education the Public. . .
As noted in our thread on a bill impacting WICHE, the law of unintended consequences visited the legislature this session, as did throwing the doors open to out of staters. That item appears here:
As a disclaimer, I was a member of the Wyoming National Guard for six years and I'll never regret that.
Having said that, this bill fits into yet another example of how we can foolishly lose money. The university isn't exactly flush with cash right now, nor are the community colleges, and while the number of people this will apply to is small, ever penny counts.
I don't know how many out of state Guardsmen there are, but there will be some. The reason is that: 1) some live in Colorado, where they also work, but are in a relatively nearby Wyoming Guard unit and 2) they moved to Wyoming to attend university and were already in their home state's Guard and had to transfer.
I appreciate their Guard service but I frankly don't see why that entitles an out of state resident to in state tuition. Apparently the legislature does, however.
This is the second bill this session that extends benefits to service members or their families that are poorly thought out. The other one lets licensed professional spouses of service members who move in evade Wyoming licensure laws simply because they're married to a service member. If being qualified simply by marriage is a real qualification, there are no real qualifications at all.
While we're at it, the legislature passed a bill on WICHE funding which appears to have the results of requiring recipients to return to Wyoming upon the completion of their funding.
No doubt the legislators, who approved this overwhelmingly, were of the mind that this was good for the state but its bad for the students. The hope was always that most of them would, and they're all holders of professional degrees, but now it means they're essentially slaves to the state. As the state doesn't directly employ many of them, it will mean that those who have received such funding can now look forward to depressed wages as their first employers will know that there's a pool of applicants whose supply will exceed demand, and who have nowhere else to go.
It's really hard to figure out what the state's current theme on this stuff is. On one hand, if you are in WICHE and become a dentist, or a doctor,, you have to come back no matter what, and no matter what the job situation is. On the other hand, if you are a licensed professional who is married to a service member, hey, just come on it. And of course we've written in the past about the Uniform Bar Exam which threw the doors open to Colorado lawyers en masse.
It's like we're compelling people to come back here to work while we're simultaneously wiping out their ability to get jobs.
Weird.
Green New Deal?
I heard a commentator on Meet the Press or This Week, I can't recall which, comment a couple of weeks ago in response to a query from the moderator about the "green New Deal" if that would be proposed, and the commentator replied that the stimulus package was that.
Shortly after that, I started reading about bridges, which aren't green anything, one way or another, and sort of slightly dismissed that. Then, however, the proposed $80B to Amtrak was announced, and I started to really wonder. I've posted on that here:
Amtrak Expansion. Cheyenne to Denver, and beyond!?
I have real problems, I'll admit, with the scope of the proposed infrastructure spending proposals that President Biden is looking at, but if they go forward, I really hope we do see rail service restored (and that's what it would be) between Cheyenne and Denver.
Like this idea or not, railroads are green. Even the diesel powered ones are. They're so much more efficient than any other means of transportation, it's absurd.
This raises a lot of interesting questions that need to come up in one way or another, most of which deserve an other thread, maybe on Railhead, or maybe here (it'll show up on both no matter what). Anyhow, no matter what a person things about the topic of climate change, railroad provide a real solution to desires to reduce emissions. This is true even in the diesel age in the US we're in, but if we went to nuclear power, which there is no reason not to, this would be all the more the case.
That gets into the topic of over the road transportation, which is basically subsidized by state and Federal highway money. . . although we tend not to think of it that way. The state's expense on the interstates was, however, a topic in this past legislature, which thought about putting in a toll on Interstate 80, but didn't.
This also gets back to the Biden spending frenzy and "pork". When you are spending zillions, everybody gets something, and it makes the medicine go down easier. That's part of the problem. I'm frankly aghast at the level of spending going on right now, but I think Amtrak is cool. It's a something for everyone a circus tonight, type of situation.[1].
We have an upcoming thread on the infrastructure bill, which is truly massive, and interesting.
Nuclear!
And it turns out that the Biden Administration is including nuclear power in its clean energy mandate.
As nuclear is the central piece of any "green" energy policy that isn't propaganda or fantasy, that's real progress.
The other side of the gun control debate?
If I were an Uber driver of any kind, I'd want to be carrying a gun.
It probably ain't the guns, or at least not so much.
I thought about doing a new post on the gun control (not gun safety, it's a debate about gun control) debate. And I might do one later. But for the time being, I'm going to link in an old post I did on this topic and make a few random observations.
Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.
And also:
You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)
Maybe the last entry has more to do, overall, with this one.
Some random observations.
As long as we continue to build a society that drops out marginal, for lack of a better way to put it, males from it, so that they aren't participating in meaningful work, and thereby aren't participating in society, this will keep happening and no set of laws is going to fix that.
Not everyone is excited about a career in IT or finance, or whatever. Some busy work best with their hands, even if they aren't master artisans at what they're doing. Some of those guys aren't the sharpest tools in the shed and aren't even mentally okay. But they'll be more okay if they have something to do of value.
When we exported darned near every job in this class overseas, we imported this problem.
A libertine society has no real values, and sooner or later that extends to life. Our society has become as libertine as can be and we're busy taking off what few guardrails exist, even if those guardrails are natural ones.
In the mind of the radicals, a society without boundaries of any kind is one in which everyone is free to be what they want. A lot of people don't know what they want, and some of those people need lots of guardrails up or they'll go over the edge. Values can be instilled at home, but again, not everyone has the same mental makeup, and when people get out on the streets those guardrails can fail.
It's an American bromide that one of "America's strength is its diversity' but that's a statement that's nearly without any evidential backing and contrary to the original concept of the United States as a melting pot.
We no longer use the melting pot analogy as we feel that its insulting to various cultures and we don't want to do that. That's naïve to start with as the level of tolerance of certain things in various cultures is antithetical to what we'd regard as widely accepted values such as they remain in our society. I'll skip listing some of the practices and values of various cultures in the past, or even the present, but this is simply the case.
I note this here, however, as while "there's strength in diversity" is a nice thought, there's also violence in it. That doesn't make it right, but it's such an age old demonstrative human trait that is obviously ingrained in our makeup, unfortunately.
This is not to say there should be no diversity. But wholly ignoring the role of mixing and non mixing at a large level isn't necessarily very smart. Small minorities that come into the country can be targets of violence and helpless due to their small size, and that's bad and even evil. But causing largescale diversity always causes tensions that tend to slide into violence. Indeed, while during times of debate we'll frequently be compared to European countries that "have much lower levels of violence", we don't pay too much attention to the fact that even in those fairly homogenous cultures there's been horrific acts of violence on this sort of tribal nature.
This isn't an argument for segregation by any means, but rather an argument to at least acknowledge that this is an aspect of this problem.
That all has a lot to do with massive immigration levels at a time of massive technological and employment change, with a big dose of COVID 19 thrown it.
Easier just to think, however, on what we might ban or spend money on.
It's not about the deer
One final thought on the gun control debate.
I've really decried the militarization of the sporting firearms culture here on these pages, and have done so over a period of years, so this may seem like a surprising entry, but people who say "you don't need an AR15 to hunt deer are ignorant".
Not stupid, ignorant.
Of course you don't need an AR15 to hunt deer. You don't need a Second Amendment to protect firearms to hunt deer either. Hunting, which I support on an existential level, has nothing to do with the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment was entirely about precluding the Federal government from restricting ownership of small arms. The framers of the bill of rights were fearful that a future Congress would create a state religion, penalize political speech and seize arms from the people, among other things. It was a restraint on the government as there was a history of the Crown doing things just like that.
Opposite Directions.
Iowa just passed a bill easing background checks and making concealed carry easier.
This is the theme of the era in some ways. In Washington D.C. and on the coasts, retractions are getting tighter while states are trying to go in the opposite direction.
Record
Arrests at the Mexican border are at a fifteen year high.
M'eh
A South Korean couple vandalized a piece of alleged graffiti art, created in the US but on display in South Korea, as they thought brushes out in front of it were for spectator use.
It was understandable. And the "art" was a piece of crap anyway, so no harm, no foul.
Banning vaccine passports.
Florida's Governor just signed a bill prohibiting Florida's businesses from requiring proof of vaccination.
That's a mistake, and one that will likely be challenged in court in some fashion. Requiring workers in places like Disneyland or at Florida's crowded beaches to risk death is not well thought out.
Going forward, vaccine passports are going to be routine. That's the that's going to be, and sticking an entire state's head in the sand on it won't be changing that.
United Airlines puts out the "Help Wanted" sign.
United Airlines, looking at rebounding air travel, has put out the news that it's hiring hundreds of pilots.
That's good news for everyone.
Footnotes
1. We've made dual musical references there, which we should note.
The first, "When you are spending zillions, everybody gets something, and it makes the medicine go down easier" is to Spoonful of Sugar from Mary Poppins. A review of the lyrics makes this song particularly applicable here. The second; "It's a something for everyone a circus tonight, type of situation." is from Something Funny Happened On the Way To The Forum.
Saturday, April 3, 2021
Blog Mirror: Two Hunting Season Reflections
Two Hunting Season Reflections
I went out to the Game & Fish this week as I didn't quite grasp the turkey regulations.
It was my fault, I just wasn't reading them correctly. The reason for that, in part, was an element of hypervigilance on my part due to recent in the field discussions I've had with young game wardens, and also being acclimated to the regulations the way that they were, rather than the way they currently are.
Anyhow, the pleasant surprise is that there are now so many turkeys in Wyoming that you can get two or even three licenses. The bad news is that the extra licenses were already all taken. Indeed, that surprised the very helpful warden who was helping me, as he had hoped to get an extra tag himself.
I meant to get around to checking this a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't as I was too busy.
I also meant, fwiw, to apply for a buffalo license, the deadline for which was yesterday, but I forgot to do so. I tend to do that.
This gets back to this bill in the Wyoming legislature, and my earlier comments on it:
Sometimes you learn of these bills in surprising ways.
Resident and nonresident hunting license issuance and fees.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:
(xv) Nonresident deer license; one (1) deer
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372.00 655.00
(xxvii) Nonresident moose license; one (1) moose
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,980.00 2,750.00
(xxxviii) Resident turkey license . 14.00 20.00
(xxxix) Nonresident turkey license . 72.00 75.00
23‑2‑107. Wild bison licenses.
Section 2. W.S. 23‑2‑101(f) is repealed.
I don't know why the bill failed, but I'd really hoped it would pass.
Later I heard that Wyoming tends to be unique in regard to out of state licenses in holding more for out of states than other states.
I don't know why the bill failed, but I'd really hoped it would pass.
Later I heard that Wyoming tends to be unique in regard to out of state licenses in holding more for out of states than other states. I don't know why we do this, although I do know that some years ago an asshole who lived out of state sued the state under the Equal Protection Clause claiming that the Game & Fish should make no distinction between in state and out of state licenses. That suit failed, and I hope that his lawyer was charging that guy something like $5,000/hour and he went bankrupt, but I've wondered if the G&F has been a bit gun shy since that time about adjusting these numbers. After all, they've withstood the test of litigation, so I'd get that.
If that is it, I'd yield to their considerations of those factors.
On the other hand, a common argument has to do with the dollars that out of states bring in for hunting, fishing and everything else they come in for.
Wyoming has undoubtedly been in the economic dumps for some time, due to the state's reliance on fossil fuel extraction for income. Everybody knows this, but nobody is willing to do anything much about it, yet. There are things that could be done. We have other raw products, beef, wool, etc., we produce, but we don't bother to finish them as we prefer to live like a colony. . . oh wait, that's not it. We don't do that as we're used to the petrol and coal bucks and can't really grasp anything else, even though we didn't always rely on those things. We had sheep, cattle, wheat, etc., before we ever had oil and coal in a marketable fashion, and we have uranium right now in addition to the fossil fuels. We're not, however, going to look at state sponsored meat packing plants, wool processing plants, or nuclear power, and if we started to somebody, probably somebody from somewhere else, would start decrying a "slide into socialism". So we're going to wait for things to get really bad.
In the meantime we're going to make reference to tourist dollars, such as in this instance. This rings the money in, the argument goes. And I suppose it does.
But money isn't everything and to the extent changing these percentages would impact things I doubt it would do so in a very harmful way.
Outfitters, as noted, were very much against this bill, but here too we have to consider the oddities of this. Right now, in order to go on the public land hunting in some areas of the state you need an outfitter by law. This is the case, as a friend of mine pointed out, even if I am from Alaska and hunt in the wilderness all the time. And its also the case if I come into the state to fish, rather than hunt, or to hike. The argument that out of state hunters will get lost is a dog that doesn't hunt, and we know that. The law is just a way to help guaranty employment for outfitters.