Be who you are.

Be who you are and be that well.

St. Francis de Sales

Musings of the Ancient Agrarian. Climate Change, Bucking the Winds of Change, and Food from a Factory

I've generally avoided the topic of global warming here as I'm a coward and don't want to take the heat on it (hah, hah).  But, at this point, the majority of people in most places accept that man caused climate change is occurring.  This is very much the case around the globe.  For instance, just the other day, Conservative British Prime Minister gave a speech regarding it that contained an apocalyptic warning about not addressing it . . . and he's a conservative.  Germany's Angela Merkel, who just stepped down as that country's head, is also a conservative (Christian Democratic Union) and was plain on her views.  Really, only in the US is there any kind of argument that it's not happening.  Indeed, just the other day, one of the oil producing nations in Arabia announced its plans to deal with it.

Now, this isn't going to be a screed agaisnt oil companies, I'll note right now.  This is one of those winds of change type of articles.

In Wyoming, you still have a lot of public sentiment going the other way, but here too things are changing.  Just last weekend, the Tribune ran an op ed excoriating local policymakers for not advancing the new energy producing technologies that are coming, arguing that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end.

And as a practical matter, it is, irrespective of people's views of it..  Even if you are a diehard opponent of the concept of global warming, alternative means of producing energy are over the tipping point.  I still hear people here say, all the time, "electric cars won't work here", but 1) they will, and 2) carmakers don't care about works in Wyoming.  You don't build an auto industry around 250,000 drivers, after all.^[1].   

Indeed the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, of which I'm a member, ran an entire issue of their explorer magazine on completely switching the planet over to "alternative' forms of energy. The AAPG can't be accused of being made up of radical greenies.  In its two big articles it had one that sought to point out the difficulties, but they both mapped from a scientific prospective how to do it.

Since then a cooperative made up of large power generation companies has announced that its going whole hog with power generation station for automobiles. That's really darned similiar to the old "oil companies" sponsoring gas stations, which of course they did in a major way.

Anyhow, I was surprised recently to see farmers and ranchers begin to get up and running on this, but they are.  They very much are in other states. Wyoming is isolated and things like this are slow to get a foothold here, and on top of it, while nobody really wants to say it, we're still in the outgoing tide from the last oil boom, and therefore it remains the case that a lot of what seems to be the viewpoint of the state is really a vicarious view from the oil producing states much to the south of us.  Politics tend to change here when busts get deep and last, as that's when the locals are most notable.  And it's also the case that change is massively unsettling, and it's always instinctive to argue for the familiar rather than plan for the change that's coming.

But that's starting to occur.  Indeed, the Ladder Ranch has an entire series of posts on their blog about their attendance of the recent warming conference in Scotland. That's really remarkable.  When Wyoming ranching blogs start posting about things that need to be done, it's not very long before you see a rancher driving up to the feed store in an electric pickup truck.  As in, like, maybe next week or so.

And they're not the only ones.  Citing a need to preserve Wyoming's environment and economy, a couple of commentators in the Tribune recently posted an interesting oped, as noted. 

Hutcherson, Smitherman: We’re betting Wyoming’s future on Wyoming’s past

That article commented:

One of coal country’s biggest lessons is that the greatest threat to communities’ long-term vitality is not change but waiting too long and trying to make the transition too late. Wyoming can dither away our savings at this crossroads, putting our youth and our future at risk. Or we can embrace change on our terms with a bold vision. The consequences are clear. The path of familiarity will continue to hurt Wyoming’s youth. A new path is needed... before it’s too late.

As odd as it may seem, that reminded me of an Army Jody Call we learned in basic training, which went

Ain't no sense in going home; Jody's got your girl and gone.

Ain't no sense in looking back; Jody's got your Cadillac.

Ain't no sense in looking down; Ain't no discharge on the ground.

I guess that's all the antitheses to the bumper stickers around here that use to plead for "one more oil boom" with the promise "I won't piss it away".  It's a lot like a hard core drinking asking for one more drink, you're not going to stop

Thatts a big part of the problem with Wyoming's economy, actually.

What I mean by that is looking back, and looking back to the immediate past, rather than the longlasting and enduring past.

Anyhow, getting back to the Ladder Ranch blog entry, that post has this comment.

If the goal of no more warming than 1.5 degrees centigrade has a hope of being met (we’re currently at 1.1), it will take all sectors. The solutions are not simplistic,

I guess it shows a contrarian streak, but as a geologist/amateur historian, in addition to being an officer of the court, it actually is pretty simplistic.  It just requires doing it.  That may require a sudden public consensus, but if this blog here shows anything, people are actually amazingly capable of doing that.  People can, and do, change their opinions on things on a large scale, overnight.

And young people are.  Young Republicans, who otherwise don't share much in point of view with Democrats, agree that this is a big problem.  Given as the politics of the country is in the firm grip of the nearly dead hands of ancient, ancient politicians, that may not be obvious, but as we literally have a political leadership that's so old that the barque over the River Styx will soon be threatened to be full to overcrowded with American politicians, we may see a change in views here much quicker than we might otherwise be inclined to suppose.

None of which is what this post is about.

Due to Twitter, I ran across some items where soy boy metrosexuals are imagining an agricultural free world with all food made in labs.

As in 100%.

This, they imagine, will solve the whole problem.

First of all, that would create a new problem.  The modern world is antithetical to our natures to start with.  We're born to be hunters, farmers, and pastoralists, not cubicle dwellers and office workers.  Most Americans hate their jobs because modern work sucks.

Secondly, dimwitted people who imagine stuff like this are Americans or Europeans, and most people on the globe aren't.  The average farmer is a lot more likely to be riding to his field on a single piston engined light motorcycle while wearing a conical hat than driving a F350 to the feed store.

Bangladeshi farmer.  Wikipeda photograph by Balaram Mahalder   .  All rights reserved to original author.  If this guy looks happier at work than you do, that's because he is.  Yes, he lives in a dirt poor country, but he's working outdoors with his family wh

And not only that, part of the solution to this problem is more people in agriculture, not less, and more agriculture of a distributist  and agrarian nature.

It's not necessary to have the fence to fence massive implement farms that dominate today that are fueled not only on petroleum (although that will soon change) but on debt (that won't be changing).  

Which gets, in the end, to this.  Hutcherson and Smitherson have a point about betting Wyoming's future on the past, but maybe we're not betting on the current future which is embedded with the past, but in a way that for some reason we can't really see.

It's odd, but even saying it requires some explanation, so perhaps that this is missed, and the fact that you have soy boy cubicle backers suggesting that everyone sitting inside in the solution to things isn't too surprising.

Wyoming has always bet its future on the extractive industries, but it wasn't those industries that built and ultimately sustained much of it.  The first industry in the state was the trapping industry, which is so feral, if you will, that we don't even recognize it as such.  The second one was ranching and farming.  Even by the time they entered, however, there were those who promised that the future was all carbon based.  And it came to very much be.

But all the while, Wyoming remained wild and it was agriculture that really preserved the land and made the state what it is and was.

Now we've entered odd times.  They're odd politically, and they're odd trend wise.  It's making people doubly obstinate.  But larger trends don't care about obstinacy, even if they do about arguments.

Anyhow, maybe it's time to look back a bit.  And by looking back, look locally, and with a Chestertonian and Leopoldian frame of mind.

That would mean accepting some limits to things.

Indeed, fairly recently, on the same day, two different blogs linked in two things about limits in the form of mobility.

The British Adam Smith Institute linked in this:

SIR SIMON INSISTS THAT WE'RE ALL TERRIBLY NAUGHTY PEASANTS

The New Mexico Place of the Governors posted this:

Group on horseback and wagons, near Cimarron, New Mexico

What Sir Simon said, was:

Travel was the great beneficiary of the leisure society. Only now are we appreciating its cost, not just in pollution but in the need for ever more extravagant infrastructure. Cities sprawl when they should be densified. Communities have become fragmented. British government policy still encourages car-intensive settlement in countryside while urban land lies derelict.

It is an uncomfortable fact that most people outside London do most of their motorised travel by car. The answer to CO2 emissions is not to shift passengers from one mode of transport to another. It is to attack demand head on by discouraging casual hyper-mobility. The external cost of such mobility to society and the climate is the real challenge. It cannot make sense to predict demand for transport and then supply its delivery. We must slowly move towards limiting it.

Here's the thing.  Sir Simon may be, well, . . . right, but maybe not for the reasons he imagined.   And in an era in which a contagen breaks out in South Africa, and is Colorado just a few days later, well. . . 

But beyond that, looking towards more a more localized, distributist, foods system, and simply system, makes sense.  We don't need food from factories, in other words.We probably need it from the backyard, and from local farmers and ranchers. And where it needs some processing, where it can be done locally, it should be.

Now, that can't be done in every instance.  You probably can't grow coffee beans in Montana in your backyard, for example.^[2].   But you can grow vegetables if you have much of a yard, and that's a better and more sensible product than bluegrass, which doesn't do much other than suck up water.  And you can get some of your protien from fields and streams yourself.  That ties you to nature and you see what's going on.

Shoot, I'd have things back at the mule power plow level if I could, which I know isn't going to be happening.  But rethinking the industrial cubicle complex sure can be argued, and a lot of those who are coming up with some really radical ideas, well they need to spend a little time outdoors.

Footnotes:

1.  I'm continually amazed by the argument, which you hear from all kids of people, that "well electric vehicles won't work here", with the person next citing the example of driving across the state and back in a day, or going high up into the hills.

Well, here's the thing.  Cars and trucks are made for Denver Colorado, not Douglas Wyoming.  We'll have to get used to electric vehicles for that reason if no other.  And the fact of the matter is that they're improving so rapidly that pretty soon you will be able to drive across the state and back in a day with them.

Added to that, I've watched farmers and ranchers adapt to solar chargers readily. Solar-powered livestock pumps are common, and so are solar-powered battery chargers for trailers that stockmen use when living in the sticks on drives.  If you can plug your trailer in while it's sitting there, well pretty soon you'll be able to do the same with your truck.

2.  Coffee does provide a good example, however, of how changes can be made by looking forward and back.

Coffee isn't grown in North America and must be shipped in.  It's different, therefore, than lettuce, for example, or cattle.  Indeed, in the last instance there's no earthly reason that beef should ever be shipped into the US, but it is.

Whenever something is shipped in, it's got a long carbon footprint.  Even condensing that impact, it's obvious.  Things often get on a boat.  If they don't get on a boat, they're loaded in a truck. Anyway you look at it, they in fact end up on a truck. The truck goes thousands of miles before, in a roundabout way, and on subsidized roads, things end up on your grocery store shelf  

There's no reason that things that can be grown locally shouldn't be.  Variety may be sacrificed, but truth be known a lot of Americans don't eat a very varied diet anyhow.  Indeed, at least some suggest, and my observations support, that it's become less varied over time.  Most people are down to a few, very few, basic foods that they're used to and which are more or less cheap.  Not too many people nationwide, for example, are having rabbit tonight even though rabbits are mowing down much of the nation's massive blue grass crop every day that people are growing for them.

Things grown in the backyard don't need any transportation to the table at all, other than to walk them into the house.  Things grown locally could easily be transported to market in electric trucks.  Things coming a long distance, like coffee, could easily be transported by electric trains.

This simplifies this, rather obviously, but you get the point.  The irony is that this "greener" approach would more closely resemble the one that existed prior to 1950 than it does the one that exists today. 

Related Threads:

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of Wyoming and Alaska.

Supply Chain Disruption and Other Economic Problems

This past week was another one for which the weekend news shows are well worth watching.

Both Meet The Press and This Week dealt with the economy and what's going on with it. Part of what's going on is inflation, which, in spite of earlier Administration projections, is becoming a problem.

Part of that problem has been caused by "supply chain disruptions".  Both shows, both of which featured Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, agreed on this point. The problem seems to have been caused by people basically foregoing purchases of many things "during" the still ongoing pandemic, and then seeking to buy them all at once.  The Port of Los Angeles can't get all the stuff unloaded.  It's now gone to twenty-four hours per day operations, which surprises me actually as I would have thought it already had that.  

Port of Los Angeles.

So, while nobody is putting it this way, this is in part what happens when your own country no longer makes anything itself and instead relies upon China to produce everything.

There's discussion of calling out the California National Guard to act as dockworkers, which would suck if you were in the Californian National Guard.

That's not all of it, however.  Added to this is the post Covid change in how American's view work.

There are presently 11,000,000 unfilled jobs in the United States.  These are jobs that were filled before the COVID Recession.  People aren't going back to work.

And laborers are also demanding better wages and benefits in order to do the work they're doing.

This represents a dual fundamental shift in the thinking of the American work force.  Part of it is old-fashioned, and part not so much.

As for better wages and benefits, following the Reagan Administration and the economic woes of the 1970s, American labor really faded from the scene as an organized entity.  Of course, we lost a lot of labor to overseas as well.  Now the remaining labor is fed up and taking advantage of the situation, for which it cannot be blamed.

The second part of this situation, however, is remarkable.  Forced out of work during the pandemic, stay homes, lots of people discovered that modern American work sucks. They don't want to go back, as their lives were better without the work.

Some of those who don't want to go back are truck drivers. The country is short 20,000 truck drivers right now.

In recent years the country has actually imported a lot of truck drivers, something the general public seems largely unaware of.  Anymore, when I read the names of people involved in truck driving accidents, I expect the drivers to be Russian, and I'm actually surprised when they are not.   What happened here overall isn't clear to me, but over the last fifteen years technology has developed to where it's much easier for trucking companies to keep tabs on their truckers while on the road and things have gotten safer. At the same time, this means, as it always has, but perhaps more so, that these guys live on the road.  According to Buttigieg the industry has an 80% annual turnover rate.

An 80% annual turnover rate doesn't sound even remotely possible to me, but that there's a high one wouldn't surprise me.  It's a dangerous job and contrary to what people like to imagine, it doesn't really pay the drivers that well as a rule, or at least fairly often.  Often the drivers are "owner operators" who own their own super expensive semi tractor and who are leasing it to the company they are driving for.  That in turn means that they're often making hefty payments on the truck.  I don't blame anyone for not wanting to do it.

I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.

Trucking is a subsidized industry, but people don't think of it that way.  Its primary competitor is rail. Railroads put in their own tracks and maintain their own railroad infrastructure. When you see a train, everything you were looking at, from the rails to the cars, were purchased by private enterprise. When you seem a semi tractor, however, it's always traveling on a public conveyance.

It's doing that fairly inefficiently compared to rail.  Rail is incredibly cheap on a cost per mile basis, and it's actually incredibly "green" as well.  It's efficient.  Trucks are nowhere near as efficient in any fashion.  Not even in employment of human resources.  Trains have, anymore, one or two men crews, the same as semi trucks, but they're hauling a lot more per mile than trucks are with just two men.

Well, sooner or later people are going to have to return to work.  When the money runs out, that's the choice you have.

But this isn't going to return to normal. Whether we'll stabilize soon in a new economy, and we better hope that we do, or keep on enduring this, which will be wiping out savings and destroying earning capacity, remains to be seen.  The current Administration will be a key to that. 

Biden can't be blamed for the current economic situation.  And people who seem to think that Trump did all things well should be aware that we'd be looking at this if Trump had won the election.  But what the government can do now is really screw things up for a long time.

Part of screwing things up would be to invest heavily in nonsensical "infrastructure" spending.  Right now in Congress there remains a massive infrastructure bill that would fund lots of construction in an economy in which there's a shortage of laborers, not a surplus.  Where are those workers going to come from?

Well, they'll only come with much higher wages, which is inflationary.

And frankly a lot of this spending is misplaced.  Spending on "roads and bridges" particularly is. That's part of the problem, not part of the solution to anything.  A "supply chain" based on highways was never a good idea, and its weakness is now demonstrated.  And frankly, roads and bridges are mostly a local problem.

Of course, it might be pointed out, the Federal government had a big role in causing those roads and bridges to come in. That's both true and untrue. When you look at big urban bridges, those mostly were local money.  States and cities that funded those bridges don't, apparently, have the money to maintain them, which is a local problem.

But Federal highway funding does certainly exist, having really started in small but significant ways as far back as the 19th Century. The Cumberland Road was authorized by Congress in the pre railroad days of 1806.  Others followed, and then rail received a lot of support when it was first going transcontinental. So it can be justly maintained that there's never really been a time when the US government didn't have a role in transportation.

It was the early 20th Century, however, when Congress started to encourage highways. It soon followed the automobile.  The Lincoln Highway was the first big national effort at that, as we've discussed on this site and elsewhere.

This is a monument to one of the founders of the Lincoln Highway, located along its successor, Interstate 80.  The art deco memorial was created in 1938, the "L" cement markers are markers for the Lincoln Highway that can be found here and there along its route.

While this blog started out with war memorials, it's covered quite a few trail markers over the years, and indeed I will now be adding that as a category here, meaning I have to go back and edit quite a few old posts.  This marker, however, is only the second one I've posted on any of my blogs to highways, the other being the Black and Yellow Road near Gillette.

This marker is quite elaborate and very nice, being both a suitable marker for the Lincoln Highway and a nice example of an art deco piece of art.

Wyoming has also commemorated the highway, the noted individual, and the marker, with its own highway sign.

All of this is located at the same rest stop on Albany County that the Lincoln Memorial is located at.  Of note, this marker was moved from its original location, which might have been one that was preferred by the individual commemorated by the marker.

The Lincoln Highway ran, at least in Wyoming, right astride the Union Pacific, the original transcontinental railway.  This isn't surprising either as that followed the route used by the 1919 Motor Transport Convey when it did an experimental cross-country trek showing that the nation's roads were, well, junk, at least in the west.  That experiment lead in no small part to the funding of the Lincoln Highway.  Be that as it may, the nation's roads were still too dicey to be used for real transcontinental transportation, as the Second World War demonstrated.  

Things moved by train.

Following the war, however, President Eisenhower sought to change that with the Defense Highway system, which the nation's cynics, myself included, have always maintained was just a thin excuse to get highway funding done, as in the 1950s, with the Red Army on everyone's mind, you just didn't vote against a thing like that.  So we got interstate highways and with them, you got a teamster supplied nation.  You also got an annual bill as, unlike the railroads, they were public conveyances that had to keep being paid for by somebody.

So now we have them well established, but the days of Convoy are over, and the driver is as likely to be a displaced Ukrainian baker as a cowboy hat wearing part-time farmer.  In 1964 the Willis Brothers sang Give Me Forty Acres To Turn This Rig Around.  The drivers didn't get heir 40 acres, but a lot of them have apparently gotten sick of the job.

And it even, apparently extends down to local hauling.  Massachusetts called out the National Guard to serve as school bus drivers, a call-up that would suck nearly as much as being called out to be a dockworker.

Electrifying the rail system, however, would be a really good idea.  I don't see anyone purposing that, however.  If you don't have drivers for trucks, well haul things by train, and start funding that as part of the infrastructure bill.  That would more or less take us back to the hauling infrastructure that existed before the mid 1950s, but in a more modern, clean, and more efficient way.

Probably not going to happen.

Predictably Buttigieg, who is just back to work from being off for family leave, is pushing Biden's "paid family leave" as a partial solution.  That's doubly wrong.

Paid family leave, of course, is paid for by employers.   Indeed, in some unionized occupations this has been a recent point of negotiations, which is fine.  That's where that belongs.  Otherwise, what it amounts to is compulsory employer subsidization of forced female employment.

Nobody, of course, will say that, even though it's completely true.

The official line on this left wing concept is that.  Make employers pay employees family leave when they have children, or adopt a child, or sometimes something else.  Usually this has been spoken of in regard to female employees, but in the new false genderless era in which the science of baby making has been lost and babies suddenly materialize out of the ether, and human reproductive organs are simply toys, like the Atari control stick or something, its male or female.  Then, having secured family leave, the parent doesn't have to make the painful decision on whether to return immediately to work after having had, or acquired, the child, or staying home with the infant.

All that of course is a completely erroneous way of looking at this topic.

To start with, people want to stay home with their infant as they love their infant.  Prior to the second half of the 20th Century the forced industrial bargain was that men didn't get to stay home, but women could.  Prior to industrialization people simply lived with their families, as nature would have it.  The industrial revolution couldn't tolerate that, so men, the stronger part of the couple, was drug out and away from home to work and "be the breadwinner" while women still largely stayed home with their families, save for poor women who worked as well.  Mid 20th Century feminism, however,r bought hook line and sinker into the industrial line, probably not too surprisingly as all left wing thought in the early 20th Century was heavily industrial in its outlook, and thought that happiness meant being in the work place.

Turns out it's not, and COVID laid the lie bare.

Anyhow, that old fable keeps on keeping on in liberal circles, so they keep pushing this industrial idea.  The basic gist of it is "get to work, female wage slave, and leave that waling infant at home or in the collective child warehousing center. . . "

Now, nobody wants to say that, and most don't even think it, but that's the reality of it.  So is this:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

May 6

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

Now, thanks to COVID 19, a lot of women have effectively voted with Kay (momma of two) with their feet. They aren't coming back. And forced infant warehousing funding isn't going to change that.

But to the extent it did, and for various reasons it would somewhat, it'd be inflationary.  People would take the leave, employers would pay for, and pass the cost of a non-working employee on to the consumer.  The Transportation Secretary probably didn't realize that, although he should have as he received a taxpayer subsidized period of time off from working.  Somebody paid for that.

Well former Mayor Pete wants to "build back better".

Or maybe President Biden does. That's part of the sale pitch for the infrastructure bill, the future of which is now in doubt.

Okay, so be smart about that.  And so far, we've indicated what one of those smart things is.  Rail transportation, and electric rail transportation at that.

Another smart thing, or in the vernacular "better" thing, would be not relying on a 19,270 nautical mile transportation run to a Communist country with a government that's destined to collapse sometime in the next tent to twenty years.

We only buy from China, we'd note, as the country's leaders from both parties, from the most part, have engaged in a quiet policy of exporting jobs to wherever basic production is cheapest, and its cheapest, right now, in China.

It's not cheapest in China as China has any sort of free market economy.  It has a command economy that is at least somewhat analogous to Lenin's NEP.  Given as it and depress wages to achieve its goals, it's cheap.

The US population has no vested interest in propping up the Chinese command economy at all.  There's a basic human interest in seeing that everyone, everywhere, receives a fair wage. That can only come from one of the various free market systems.  Therefore, if we're not going to make it here, we ought to buy it from folks who adhere to that basic system. Preferably, we ought to buy stuff from people working in that basic environment who also have the same basic set of economic, labor and environmental rules we do. That would be fair trade.  

That's not what we're doing.

I'll skip how we could assure that, but we could assure that. Various administrations just rather didn't, as they were okay with cheap costs, not matter what that meant.

If we had done that, a lot of our manufacturing base would never have left. And the part that did would probably have gone south, to Mexico, and probably further south than that as well.

Mexico's achieved a modern middle-class economy, but you have to wonder if it would have achieved it earlier if a true fair trade policy had been the policy of the US.  Mexico's economy may have now been much like ours, and for that matter, the rest of Central America's might be better.

And we wouldn't have a giant bottleneck at the Port of Los Angeles now.  For that matter, we might not have a giant immigration crisis going on either.

Which I suppose bring us to our having depressed wages through a policy of ignoring illegal immigration now kicking us in the teeth.

This has been going on for quite some time with the net result that we now have 12,000,000 illegal aliens in the country.  This is a separate topic, but it's bound to be the case that somebody will say that if we have 11,000,000 unfilled jobs and 12,000,000 illegal aliens, what that shows is that we need an even more unsustainable immigration rate. Quite the opposite is true.

The giant immigration rate, legal and illegal, has had the impact of unnaturally depressing wages in the construction industry, farm economy and service industries. All of these industries would have had higher pay rates for decades but for the high immigration rate, with the wage depression being particularly true in the case of those working illegally.  It's not that Americans wouldn't have taken these jobs. .. we know for certain that Americans have been taking a lot of jobs they really didn't like, its that they wouldn't take them at the low pay scale that was being offered.

If those jobs had paid a basic American pay rate, Americans would have taken them. That would have meant that the economic impact would have been adjusted decades ago, with a probable result that average wages were higher and very high pay rates were lower, both of which would have been a net benefit, at least from distributist terms for the economy.  So here too we're dealing with decades of neglect, but not of road sand bridges that local governments could have addressed, if they needed to, but with a complete lack of an honest approach to the immigration system, one that would have brought many fewer people in, and have actually enforced the laws that were there.  This of course has also given us a massive humanitarian crisis, inflicted problems on our neighbors, and presented a massive moral dilemma for those now in power.  Building back better would probably mean looking honestly to the south towards our neighbors, rather than simply hoping to "out compete" a nation on another continent whose government will ultimately collapse but which right now has a command economy, but that doesn't even seem to have entered anyone's thoughts.

What also doesn't seem to be entering people's thoughts, at least around here, is that some things can be addressed locally.

We read an article elsewhere that beef producers in Nebraska are organizing to build a packing plant. Food prices, including meat prices, are up, but as usual, stockmen aren't seeing the benefit of it.

So why not cut out the middle man, the packing industry?  This can obviously be done, and elsewhere they are doing it.

And the state could help.

Rather than violently hurl money at fruitless lawsuits, which the state has been good at doing recently, why not instead have the state build a packing plant and organize it like South Dakota Cement or Dakota Mills?

Gasp, the reaction may be, that would be socialism!

Well, it need not be.  It could simply be an investment by the state in a cooperative effort with the ownership to be transferred to participating stockmen.  It'd be fairly easy to do.  We've addressed it elsewhere and this would be the time to do it.  Retail prices are high, ranchers don't see the benefit of that, cutting out the middleman would help.

But I'm sure we won't be doing that.

The legislature, of course, is going into a special session.  There it's going to look at illegal bills to address OSHA mandates on vaccination that haven't even come into effect yet.  A rational look at that would reveal that this will accomplish nothing, other than adding the expense of legal defenses of all sorts to the state's bills for taking an act calculated not to work.  Instead of doing what it's going to do, the legislature could look around and do something about the times we do live in, and try to take advantage of them.  But it won't, as those who want to protest the upcoming mandates will be fired up about that instead.

Storms

The predictions started last week sometime.  Epic snowfall.

It's supposed to start tonight.

What's really large snowfall is open to debate.  I'm pretty skeptical.  Seems like in predictions, it's always going to be huge. Sometimes it really is. We had one last year, for example, that was.  

My prediction is that this one won't be.

I went out on the back deck and looked to the west anyway, the direction storms nearly always come from around here. The sky was dark, the air was calm, and it wasn't really cold.  Not that unusual for this time of year.

In another entry, I posted an item about a really funny article written in the local bar journal.  It's hilarious.

The same issue has an article about a recently appointed circuit court judge in another city whose also an author.  He's written and published several books.  Good for him.

The article has sort of sat a little heavy on my consciousness, however, as I read it and I'm probably a little envious, or jealous, assuming the same isn't exactly the same thing, or even slightly upset in a way that I ought not to be.

The judge is a recent appointee.  He's been practicing about half the time I have, having had a twenty-year military career before he went to law school.  I don't know where he's from, but it's not here.  Anyhow, after twenty years in the military, he took retirement, which you can do in the military system.  It's not full retirement, I'd note, but you get a percentage of your highest career pay as your retirement pay.  It's a system designed to encourage early retirement, actually, as the service needs a continual supply of young agile soldiers who can be described that way both mentally and physically.  You have to take retirement at age 60, in the service, if you are still in.

Anyhow, an officer who retires after twenty years is usually in his 40s, still young enough for a second career, and that's what this veteran did.  He went to law school, clerked a little after that, was in private practice a little, and became a circuit court judge.  His kids are grown and he's always had an interest in writing, so he started writing novels, based on legal themes, and several have been published.

So what's the problem?

Well, there isn't one, really, save in my view of things, which is likely wrong.

At one point in my career I would like to have become a judge too, and was often encouraged to apply.  Now I'm too old, so I stopped.  Having said that, a person can't expect such an appointment as they're rare anyway you look at it.  It'd be like a Priest expecting to become a Bishop, or a City Councilman expecting to become a Senator.  Yes, it occurs, but those stories are very much the exception to the rule.

None of which keeps you from hoping for it.

Now, I can't complain.  I've had a super busy practice and as a long time lawyer friend of mine recently noted, and I've heard many other litigators note before, we get into a lot of very interesting things.  Most lawyers who do this kind of worth are polymaths, to be sure, and litigation suits a polymath in many ways.  You get to study a lot of things and get paid for it which, as my colleague noted, we'd probably study anyway, if we ran across the topic.

Still, it's disappointing to hold a goal and not meet it, and he's holding two of them.  Judge and author.

Now, I'm an author, but I haven't had time, or at least I think I haven't had time, to finish my novel.  

No, I really haven't had time.  I worked all day yesterday, Sunday, in order to meet a deadline, and that isn't uncommon at all.  

Well, those are the breaks really, and a person can't really complain about them rationally  It's not like if you got to be a major league baseball player the breaks operated so that you never made the Hall of Fame, and you have a rational compliant, for example.

And part of the overall situation is that ultimately the Governor appoints the individuals who are the finalist, after the committee appoints a finalist.  I've never made the finalists, but I thought a few of the lawyers who did make it were shoe ins, only to find that the Governor didn't look at things the way that I did.

In some of those instances, you could discern why or, in the case of Governor Mead, he was clear about his Judicial appointment agenda, and he did have one.  He made that plain.  In other instances the reasons were less clear, but you could sort of puzzle them out, and they weren't all the same.  And too, the various nomination committee  have sometimes had a philosophy or view themselves.  One former member flat out told a colleague of mine that she wished civil litigators would quit applying as she felt they didn't need a career advancement while other lawyers did, an interesting way to look at it.

Anyhow, it's not my call, and really none of my business.  Clearly the judge is a multitalented guy of diverse experience. Still, it's an odd thing if your age is more or less the same, but your experience about double, and you know that you wouldn't have made the cut, as that wouldn't have really mattered.

The Game & Fish has been tormenting me recently.

Again, not intentionally.

Their recent electronic newsletter has been featuring wardens and others on horseback.

I've often wondered why they haven't used horses more, but to ponder that requires a knowledge of horses.  For rural looking about, they can't be beat.

Anyhow, one of the things I've always admired about ranchers is that they spend their lives around animals.  Other occupations still do to varying extent, and at one time people who worked in the sticks did.  They still have a lot of uses out there and are underused. . . horses that is.

Anyhow, as also noted here, at one time, and that time would be decades ago, I pondered becoming a game warden and didn't.  I'm not the only lawyer who pondered that, which must be that polymath thing again.  Anyhow, when working long hours and weekends, seeing people working, with horses, well it helps sort of irritate you a bit when  you read about less legally experienced lawyers being appointed to the bench and having time to write books.

It probably ought not to.

At least it's not Denver.

I'm going to be super vague, but I got a look at that big-city practice recently, remotely, and from the outside.  Lawyers with super credentials and the like.

Indeed, years ago I went to a deposition in Denver with a lawyer from Wyoming who had been hugely successful in the law.  He retired to Hawaii, and unfortunately he died relatively young.  Anyhow, during a noon break I went down to the Tattered Cover. When we came back, he asked me what I'd done over the noon hour and I told him.  He told me he'd speant the hours wandering around downtown observing people.

And then he observed, "Everyone around here looks like somebody is jamming a stick up their ass all the time.".

Frankly, the lives of some of the urban successful can suck, and they have the visage of people whose lives suck.  This isn't true of everyone.  I have several friends who are lawyers in Denver, and its not true for them.  I really like them and admire their skill, but they do the same sort of work that I do.  But the really "LA Law" or "Boston Legal" type practice.  Ick.  

Which serves as a reminder that society at large, which so admires that sort of career path ambition, wants your life to suck.

Mehr Mensch Sein

October 9, 2021

President Biden restored the The Bears and Grand Staircase-Escalanete monuments in Utah.

The Agrarian Lament: A lamentation. The modern world

 

A lamentation. The modern world.*

Every once in a while, when I go to post, I know exactly what I want to cover, and even know in my mind what I have covered, and yet have no idea exactly how to start it.

This isn't the way this usually works.  I.e., I normally form a concept, but I can see and imagine the words I'll write.  This, however is the full concept with no words, which makes it difficult to start writing.

Maybe that's because, as they say, in some ways, this is "the whole enchilada".  Of course, by now, as I rarely type these out in one single day, that sense has dulled, but I post none the less.

So, where to start.

And what got this started?**

I think what did was being out of the office for a day, just a day, for my daughter's surgery, and knowing that I had to go back the following morning in spite of all that was on my mind at the time.  I.e., as a professional occupying one of the country's "good jobs", I had just one day in which to try to be some help.  And, not to my surprise I'm afraid, a surgery that was supposed to be in and out, with rapid recovery, isn't going as well as hoped for in regard to a quick return to normality. [1]. Things will ultimately be fine, and I was really skeptical of the "back up on your feet quickly" stuff I'd been told, but I'm disappointed, worried, and stressed anyhow.

And maybe it was the news that Else Stefanik, House Minority Leader, powerful woman, and 36 years old, is pregnant.  There's something mind bending about the youthful Stefanik who, while I shouldn't say I will anyhow, is cute, being not only a charming looking power broker, but a central figure in a struggle inside the Republican Party whose central questions is whether or not the GOP is going to continue to endorse Donald Trump's lies about the January 6 assault on the capitol or not.  Stefanik is, of course, backing the fable.

Or maybe it was this post:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

Jun 8

People at work are discussing why no one should get married until they’re at least 25 and I’m over here with 2 children at 21

This is the second time that "Kay (momma of two)" has shown up in comments here, or rather on Lex Anteinternet.  The first time I'd actually replied to a tweet she'd posted.  That tweet ached with her open desire to be home with her children, rather than working.  I set it out again here:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

May 6

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

The tweet above relates to this topic really.  And so does powerful Elise Stefanik's being with child, while in Congress.  And so does my heading off to work on the morning I started posting this, the day after my daughter's surgery. [2]. 

Or maybe it was all of the above combined.

All of which relates to agrarianism, truly.

And the fact that the modern industrial world (don't give me that "post industrial crap", this is the modern world, computerization is just one more facet of the Industrial Revolution bucko), fails miserably in existential ways.

Put another way, we're at war with nature and the nature we're at war with is our own nature, at least partially (and probably only partially).

While if you look around and listen to people it's not obvious, this isn't how we evolved to live.  Politicians argue about jobs, good jobs, getting jobs for everyone, and how to achieve it all the time.  Educators, in various fields, counsel their students that various endeavors and activities will help them get a "good job". [3]. 

And they should.

The economy is, in fact, and obviously, incredibly important.  And finding employment, and good employment at that, is not a matter to be taken lightly.  Worrying about your kids finding employment that will support them, and a potential future family, is a central concern of parents from children's mid teenage years up until they find it, if they do, and forever, if they don't.

Money won't buy happiness, to be sure, but poverty is its own misery, and there really aren't very many carefree, sane, unemployed.

Be that as it may, at no time whatsoever does a person's DNA really fully suit them for most modern jobs, at least to their full extent and nature.  Oh, there are exceptions to be sure in some lines of work, although decreasingly so, but for the most part this is true.  And many people's DNA does suit them at least partially, or even mostly, for their occupations.  Nonetheless, some people widely admired for their success in the world or for being standard-bearers for modern life are living lives deeply disordered in regard to their natural inclinations.  Those smiling faces likely have genes active in their brains that scream at them at night, if not in the day.  Some have compressed their personalities into molds in order to suit their roles as well, leaving them something akin to wounded people.

Or maybe its just me.  Maybe I'm just a lot more feral than a lot of other people.  Or more introspective.

At this point I'm never going to get over that as part of my nature either.  I'm not going to end up being one of those people who are really enamored with the concept that success means moving into a super large house in a hot zone after a career of making loads of money.  It ain't going to happen.  Indeed, in being honest with myself, while I'm outwardly successful by conventional measures, I'm not by my own measure, and I'm never going to be.  Not even close, and not in any way whatsoever that I use as a yardstick.  Not personally, professionally, or morally. [4]. 

There never was a time in the world, at least since the fall, in which it was perfect.  It's vitally important to remember this.  People who look back into the past and state "I wish I'd lived back in . . . and everything would be perfect" are fooling themselves in varying measures.  And that can be a dangerous way to think.  You are born into the world, and its conditions, that you are born into.  Lamenting that fact won't change it.

And it is not possible in any sense for a Utopia to be created.  Indeed, the amount of human misery caused by Utopian movements, whether they be 20th Century Communism or 21st Century woke progressivism, is epic.  We're not going to be able to recreate the world in a perfect image, ever.  Indeed, movement progressivism is ironically so locked into the spirt of its own times that it always looks to some degree foolish retrospectively.

But we can acknowledge something that's critical. We can't recreate the world to suit our personal natures, nor can we really recreate our natures. What we can do, however, is acknowledge that our natures are meant to be in a certain natural world, and that's where we are most happy. We know this for a fact.

We are a large brained, very smart, mammal that's capable of more intellectual diversity than any other creature.  Culture and invention are natural to us, so that's part of our nature.  We have to keep that in mind as well.  Given that, we can't say that we'd all be better if we living in the year (Fill In Blank Here).  At any one time there are always different cultures and inventiveness.

At the same time, however, it's also the case that at our root, we're an aboriginal agrarian people.  We're meant to live in nature, and we're evolved to it.  We aren't happy if we aren't in it.

Our departure from that is part of our messed up state to start with.  Most humans for most of our existence lived in some sort of association with nature, whether as hunter gatherers or farmers.  When we began to rise beyond that is when our lack of equality in things really started.  Misguided Reddit Catholic romantics, for example, who imagine things being prefect in the Middle Ages fail to realize that already by that time, in most places, the rise of and concentration of wealth had deprived the average person from his true ancestral connection with the land.  Once you couldn't hunt unless you were a poacher or had license from a liege, and once you started farming somebody else's land, you were well into the modern world and an unnatural situation.

Indeed, it's worth noting that even for those who didn't make their living from the land, a close association with the land, or nature, was the norm for a long time.  John Adams, who was as farmer, was also a lawyer, and wrote on the joys of riding the circuit, which literally involved riding a circuit on horseback.  Urban policemen walked outdoors all day long, unless they rode a horse outdoors all day long. Deliverymen drove wagons pulled by teams.  Much of this occurred until very, very recently.

Now it doesn't.

As this evolution occurred, people were severed first from their ownership of the land, or their right to use it, and then later from their families and the natural world. This didn't happen in clean steps, or all at once, or even everywhere at once.  Indeed, in some instances people instinctively sought to reverse the trend and were successful for awhile in doing that.

The severance of ownership of the land from the person working it has already been mentioned, and was a major step in this progression. [5]. The Industrial Revolution was a giant leap in it.

The Industrial Revolution, which we're still in, in spite of the concept of it being complete, at first operated to take men out of their homes, where they had primarily worked with and in the presence of their families, and place them in a separate place of work.  Relatively early on it began to do that to poorer women as well.  By the mid 19th Century it was so successful in this transition that in Europe most men worked outside of their family homes for somebody else, and even those independent of third party employment worked "in town".

This was so successful that it enculturated the concept of men's work being outside the home, and work that was outside the home as being men's work.  In reality other factors governed that, including the traditional role of men in the family necessitating it and the fact that a lot of early outside the home work consisted of backbreaking labor.  Additionally, as we've dealt with in numerous other threads, the division of labor necessitated that women's work be primarily domestic before the advent of domestic machinery lessened that need.  

Looked at that way, the entire "women's liberation" movement of the 1970s wasn't so much a liberation of women as a means of redirecting their employment outside the home now that it was no longer required there as much as it had been previously. That wasn't liberation at all, but the propaganda associated with it made it seem so.  If you accepted that men's careers had unique intrinsic value that was superior to any any domestic role, and that this was defined primarily if not exclusively by cash, then it must be the case that allowing women to enter into that world was liberating them from some captivity that precluded them from doing that.

Of course, the liberation turned into a requirement over time. The reality of it is that men and women are captive of the industrial economic system, irrespective of what other value their occupations have, and there are numerous other values.   The majority of women now work outside the home, which is supposed to be a sign of social advancement, but at the same time we now know that most families can't get by on one income.  Hence the reality of:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

May 6

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

The female worker has no choice.  Neither does the male. They have to work, and that work will be invariably outside the home, and indoors, for most.  People talk about choosing careers, and they do (or hopefully they do, but the choice to have a career is one that is necessitated by the need for everyone to serve the economy.  Individuals of course have to live in the economy that exists.

We're so acclimated to this that we don't even begin to grasp how profoundly unnatural it is.  In any but an industrial society (and again, we are one, no matter what "post" thesis a person might wish to insert into this), the family and work would not be separated.  Farmers worked, and still do, making them a rare exception, around their families.  People who worked trades typically worked them from their home.  When we read, for example, of St. Joseph being a carpenter, and Jesus learning the trade, that work and that education was done at home.  Even many professionals worked from their homes, or if not at least not far from them.[6].

Disrupting this has disrupted us from our natural order and its pretty easy to see it.  Children are dropped off in their formative years with people whose values and views their parents may not share.  At one time parents dropped their kids off at school and then recovered them at the end of the school day, thinking that separation was long.  Now it starts earlier and lasts longer and is regarded as a natural part of life for many, maybe most.  Men used to spend eight hours, or longer, every day from their family in a nearly all male environment, which had its own vices, but starting mid 20th Century they started spending many of those hours with women who were not their spouses.[7]. The term "office wife" has arisen to describe platonic relationship that end up having a marriage like behavioral aspect to the, which is alarming enough, but in reality the office affair is massively widespread and nearly any office of any substantial size is going to have one at some point in time.  If Kipling's men in barracks didn't grow into "plaster saints", men and women working outside the home for hours upon hours every day aren't going to universally either.

This gets back, I suppose, to Elise Stefanik, age 36, and House minority leader.  She's presently pregnant with  her first child, which is to be celebrated.  But that child is going to be born into the reality of her mother being a Republican power broker in a time of enormous stress.  It's certainly not impossible to be a female leader and a mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria was, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with (Frederick the Great called her the "greatest man I ever met), and she had sixteen children.  Indeed, she wasn't above using her status as a mother to shame her government into supporting her in time of war, once bringing her large brood into an assembly debating war and demanding to know if it was going to save her and her children. But somehow her role as a mother wasn't inconsistent her status as Empress.  Will the young child of the House Minority Leader receive the full attention that a child is really entitled to.  Maybe.  If the child doesn't, however, that would certainly be the American norm.

Indeed, paternal neglect has long been a feature of modern life.  The rebellious teenager is practically a trope, it's so common, but the role of the absent father in that is rarely noted.  It's interesting to note, in that context, how often the sons of really famous hard driven men don't do well.  There are exceptions to be sure, such as Theodore Roosevelt's for example, but then TR is an example of a many who largely lived without the problems noted here and who did in fact actively live with his family and children, even when President.

At any rate, institutionalizing this further, so that we can squeeze the last ounce of human productivity out of workers, it is a feature of the proposed infrastructure bill, or at least it was.  Free child care was a Democratic wish. Conceived of by progressives as aid to working women, what it really amounts to is subsidized aid to industry so that no excuse remains for women with children to stay home.  No excuse for men has existed for over a century.  It's interesting in that in the same era in which the concept of a Universal Basic Income, and "free" university education has been debated and discussed, and in which some advanced societies are trying to figure out how to encourage women to have more children, the one thing we get pretty far with is a subsidization of industry in this fashion so that more women "can", i.e., "must" go to work.[8].   There's no equivalent subsidy that would allow one member of a family, male or female, to be assisted in not going to work outside their homes.

All of which relates to the fact that people who are receiving COVID 19 benefits aren't gong to back to work in the numbers expected.  Why would they?  It may not be that they're' receiving more staying home, just that they're staying enough not to have to rush back to work.  And by doing that, maybe there just being more human.  Ironically, those payments may be the assistance, albeit temporary, that allowed them to do that.

Indeed, many people during COVID 19 who remained employed worked from home.  This has now become such a part of work in some areas of employment (it never was for me) that I typically assume if I'm calling a professional that they're probably at home.  This is becoming less true now, but only to a slight degree.  Indeed, it was already the case that in certain occupations this trend was developing anyhow with it being notable in heavily computerized industries.

Indeed, here it must be noted that even though I barely worked from home during the pandemic, that says more about me than anything else. While I may be noting all of these problems, at this point in my life I can probably legitimately be accused of being a "workaholic" and I never really adjusted to the new work at  home world.  Like an old lawyer of our firm, dead before I started working there, who used his Dictaphone when it was introduced for one day, I may be incapable of adjusting to a different world.[9].

So, what's the way out of here toward a better balance of things?  Well, there is one, but it'll take a long time to get out.  At the present time, with the world developed and developing as it is, all we can really do is to create that world for ourselves, if we can, and hold on to the idea, if we can't.  And most of us can't, at least not completely.  Quite a few can, partially.

Footnotes

*This is one of two posts I wrote, more or less at the same time, in which I was pretty angry about something but which I won't detail here.  It's vaguely alluded to in the other post, which was completed before this one, but which will go to press, so to speak, after it.

I note that as writing while angry, like going to the grocery store when hungry, going into a bar while thirsty, or operating heavy machinery while taking narcotics, isn't necessarily a really good idea.  Sometimes you say stuff you don't mean, really.

**See footnote above.

1.  This post might frankly be also partially inspired by an event which lead me to draft a post on Empathy that will go up the morning of June 14, on Lex Anteinternet.  Suffice it to say, at the time that I am writing this I'm completely disgusted, and disillusioned, by the conduct of a certain specific person.  So much so that next time I'm in a certain venue where there's an audio association with that individual, I'll have a really hard time not reacting to it.

2.  Which might mean that I'm one of those people who can't tear myself away from work under any circumstances, a character defect rather than an indicia of the state of the world.

I'll note, unconnected with the sentence immediately above, I had on the day I returned to work, after one day off, a remote contact with a lawyer in another matter which made me pretty angry, and which is addressed in the top note above.  I'm still angry about it.

I don't have an Irish Temper, in spite of being nearly 100% descendant of Irish blood.  I tend to think that's misunderstood anyhow.  I'm extremely slow to anger.  But once I get angry, I remain angry.  People who cross a certain threshold of expectation with me, and its a pretty high threshold as I really don't expect much of people, have pretty much broken my tolerance for them permanently.  This is a vice on my part, not a virtue.

3.  When my son was in high school, an English teacher used to try to recruit students to debate with the claim that it would help you potentially become a lawyer.  I now actually know, for the first time, a kid who intends to become a lawyer who is in debate, or "forensics" as it is sometimes bizarrely inaccurately referred to.

I once did a minor survey of lawyers I immediately knew to see if any of them had been in speech and debate, or anything of the kind, the result was a resounding "no".  Indeed, the closest I could find is that one lawyer had been a university English major, which he majored in with the express intent of becoming a lawyer.  Otherwise, nope, nobody had been in debate.

As noted in my upcoming post on Empathy, I've become very cynical about some things and this spills over to this, but the type of debate and whatnot that is taught in that academic endeavor strikes me as being of little practical value for anyone is a legal pursuit, save for it does get you used to speaking in public, I guess.  Having said that, generally people who are attracted to the law because of the claim "I like to argue" should stop and think, as that makes them assholes, and the law has enough assholes as it is.

4. But then, perhaps nobody who is introspective thinks they are.  And a lawyer should be introspective.

5.  While not to sound like the 1619 Project, slavery was also part and parcel of this.  Serfdom and slavery, aspects of the same unnatural deprivation of a person from their own freedom, is critically tied to the advancement of a society based, in some ways, on wealth.

6. As late as the 1970s I accompanied my father to a trip to a lawyer's home for some reason.  I don't recall what the reason was, and it wasn't a lawyer that was my father's lawyer. But my father knew him.  He was a retired judge, I recall, and I was surprised that his office was in his home, with it having a separate entrance.  I also recall my father telling me that this was illegal, but somehow the lawyer was getting away with it.

Along a similar lines, a plumber my father knew had a huge old house on a major downtown road in town that he inherited.  I don't think the fellow married until he was in his 50s.  Anyhow, his company was on the main floor, he lived in the rest of the house.

7.  One of the byproducts of the all male work environment, and maybe a vice depending upon how you look at it, was a sort of tribal society nature to a lot of work.  Men who worked together bonded in a way that they don't, usually, now. That was a good thing but it also had a distinct element to it that developed where they outright ignored their family.  Men spent all day at work and in some cases even started spending time together before work for breakfast, worked all day, and then hit the bars right after work, not getting home until after several beers, by which time some of them were pretty messed up.  My own father never ever did this, but I was aware that it had been the culture in years prior to my growing up and in actuality still was to some degree.

The degree to which this culture existed varied substantially by region and it was really common in blue collar areas. It might still be a bit.  I've seen this, interestingly enough, in the instance of somebody I somewhat know who descends from that region who has that tendency to extend the work day on into the post work  hours in such a fashion.

8.  I'll forego here discussing in depth a welfare system which has evolved, in numerous different ways, that encourages men to abandon their offspring and which in other areas further subsidizes children in ways that are socially questionable, as that's a different topic, but both of those are features of the modern welfare system.

9.  The lawyer in question wrote out, by hand, his work product.

I actually did that when I was still a student and working where I now work. But upon become a lawyer, I pretty rapidly gave that up and dictated my product. When computers came in, however, I went back to writing them out myself, which is what I find that most lawyers under 60 years of age now do.