Flap de jour: Dick Cheney at the Wyoming State Bar Convention

Okay, so you've had enough of celebrities and their inappropriate photos, and "artists" who appropriate those photos to protest Google, and even of people famous for being famous who keep the spotlight on themselves by appearing on magazine covers in an inappropriate fashion?

Well, in a week featuring such flaps, plus new concerns over an Apple product associated with them, we have a meatier, or at least better attired, flap.

Dick Cheney at the Wyoming State Bar Convention.

 Former Vice President Dick Cheney, smiling in this portrait, but will he be smiling after the State Bar Convention?

Dick Cheney, formerly the Vice President of the United States, has been invited by the Wyoming State Bar Association to speak at its 2014 Annual Convention in Cheyenne.

Yawn. . . big deal, right?  Well, its turning out to be a minor local controversy.  How could that be true.

First a word about the State Bar.  I don't know how it works in every state, but as Wyoming has a "self governing" bar, every Wyoming lawyer is a member of the State Bar Association.  We're all assessed annual fees to the bar, and the bar performs a variety of services that make it a quasi governmental entity, one of two such entities of which I'm aware of in Wyoming's history, but the only surviving one (the Wyoming Stock Growers Association was also, at one time, a quasi governmental agency as it regulated the round ups and employed the stock detectives, who were law enforcement officers.  Like every state bar everywhere, it holds an annual convention.  And like every bar convention everywhere, it has an annual banquet as part of it, which features a keynote speaker. This year's in Cheney.

Now, I should note that I don't attend the bar convention, unless it happens to be in town. The reason for that is that this is September, and if I was going to take a week off of work, I'd go hunting, not to the state bar convention.  Indeed, as I recently noted here, I have to think the choice of September as the annual meeting month, which it has been forever, demonstrates that who ever came up with that choice was leading an incredibly dull life.  July when its too hot to do anything, or January when its too cold, would have been the sane choices.

 What lawyers with time off in September should be doing.

At any rate, however, its in September, and this September the choice is Cheney as speaker.

I'll confess that when I received my flyer for the convention, as all members of the bar do, I was a bit surprised.  For one thing, I was surprised just by the choice of Cheney. For another, I was a bit surprised it was somebody so interesting as a public figure.  Then I put my flyer in the round file, recalling that the convention was in September, and moved on.

Well it turns out that some lawyers are upset, some by the choice of Cheney and some by the biography that he supplied and which was published in the flyer.  

This just hit the newspaper today, but I've known about it for awhile, as a subscriber to the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association list serve was telling me about the heated exchange on that list, much of which seemed to be centered on Cheney as a choice himself. That's the more interesting part of the reaction.

Cheney is a large public figure with an association with Wyoming (he is not, contrary to the widely circulated error, our "native son", he was born and partially grew up in Nebraska, coming here in his teens).  As a figure who represented Wyoming in Congress, served in the Ford Administration, then served in the George Bush I administration, and who went on to serve as Vice President, he's a hero to some in the state and is widely admired in this heavily Republican state.  Locally there are at least two structures named for him, one being the Federal building and the other being the NCHS stadium (or perhaps its the field, I can't recall exactly which).  So his choice is really fairly logical, as long as we don't assume that the speaker at a bar convention must absolutely be a lawyer, which I don't assume, and which is a misplaced assumption.

Indeed on that, law belongs to the people and lawyers should be cognizant of that.  Therefore, interesting public figures, lawmakers and former lawmakers should make good choices, irrespective of whether they are controversial or not, and in some cases particularly if they are controversial.  For a profession that prides itself on independent thinking if we don't want a controversial speaker, we're making ourselves into hypocrites.

And, like him or not, Cheney is a very good speaker.  I saw him speak at the NCHS graduation some years ago, and he was frankly excellent. And I say that as a person who isn't really a Cheney fan otherwise.  

This is how I think the bar should view it.  You don't have to love him to listen to him, and he is intelligent and does speak very well.

Of course, some don't want him as they politically disagree with him, which is also a dangerous reason to silence somebody.  And its a huge mistake for lawyers to do that.

This state is very Republican and very conservative.  The average man suspects, in the back of his mind, that all lawyers are Democrats and members of the extreme left.  In truth, the lawyer demographic is much more left leaning than the general public, here and pretty much everywhere.  We're not really a popular profession, and if we appear to be wanting to shut up Dick Cheney as we disagree with him politically, it doesn't speak well of us in terms of our dedication to our stated principals.

It also confirms, in an era when we've opened up the floodgates of admission to the bar to out of staters, that the legal community is way out of touch with locals. It really isn't.  Lawyers are in fact in touch with their communities and their members, but for a despised class to appear to be shutting somebody up for political reasons sends a message that we probably don't really want to be broadcasting right now.

As to the second part of the reason that people are upset, however, there's a point, although a minor point, there.  Cheney's self published biography was included whole in the flyer, and it included a statement about how President Obama's policies are making  the things more dangerous for the United States.  That's a blatantly political statement, and one that's consistent with Cheney's views, but it is an opinion, not an established fact, and the Wyoming State Bar appeared to be endorsing that view.  Cheney shouldn't have included that in a submitted biography, but the State Bar should have read it and taken that statement out.  The State Bar has now, however, apologized for that, and that's good enough.

Again, as I have things to do, and if I had the time available, I'd invest it in more pleasurable and personally meaningful pursuits, I'm not going to go to the State Bar and I've only gone to the banquet one single time.  But for those who are going anyway, they ought to go and listen.  They may not like what they're hearing, but frankly if they don't, they'll be experiencing what litigants, courts and jurors frequently do. And we expect all of them to keep an open mind and listen.

Saturday, September 5, 1914. The start of the First Battle of the Marne.

London Opinion, September 5, 1914.

The First Battle of the Marne began when troops of the French Sixth Army encountered German cavalry east of Paris at the River Ourcq.

On that day, the enigmatic and deeply Catholic but imperfectly practicing French poet Charles Péguy was killed in action, serving as a lieutenant in the French Army.

The Japanese Imperial Navy launched three Farman seaplanes from the Wakamiya to bomb German fortifications at Tsingtao in its first combat use of aircraft.

The HMS Pathfinder was sunk by the U-21 in the Firth of Forth, the first sinking of a ship by a locomotive torpedo in history.

Last edition:

Friday, September 4, 1914. No separate peace.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Antwerp Belgium, Arctic, Austro Hungaria, Belgium, Canadian Arctic Expedition, German Army, Imperial Russian Army, Poland, Triple Entente, World War One, Wrangel Island

Agricultural references where you might not expect them

 Bauer

This is a common German last name, and therefore a common last name in many other regions of the globe.  It means "farmer."

Category:  Name.  Agricultural category:  farming.
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Boer

This, like Bauer, means "farmer," but in Afrikaans, a variant of Dutch.  Most people know it from the southern African demographic group, which at one time had two republics in southern African and which fought two wars with the United Kingdom.  As Dutch settlers in Africa were almost all farmers, that name attached to them as a group, and to their republics.

Category:  Name.  Agricultural category:  farming.

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Corn Huskers

The nickname of the University of Nebraska's athletic teams derives from a corn farming operation, husking corn.

Category:  Sports mascot.  Agricultural Category:  farming.  

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Farm Bureau Insurance

Farm Bureau Insurance is owned by the National Farm Bureau, a farming organization.  Creating of insurance companies was very common on the part of farming organizations, as well as some other entities, at one time.

Category:  Insurance Company.  Agricultural Category.  Agricultural organization.

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Grange Insurance

Grange is an insurance carrier that, like some others, was started by a farming organization.  In this case, that organization is The Grange, which still owns the carrier.

Category:  Insurance Company.  Agricultural Category:  Agricultural organization.

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National Farmers Union

National Farmers Union is an insurance company that is current a branch of QBE.  The company, like many insurance companies, had its origins in a farmers association, the National Farmers Union.  Today the insurance carrier, while it still writes in the agricultural area, is no longer associated with an organization.

Category:  Insurance company.  Agricultural Category:  Agricultural organization.

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State Farm Insurance Company

Unlike National Farmers Union, State Farm was never owned by an agricultural organization, but as its name implies it too has a farming origin.  State Farm started off as an automobile carrier writing policies for farmers.

Category:  Insurance company.  Agricultural category.

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Friday Farming: Itinerant farmers. October 1913

Been sort of a grim week, labor wise, here, eh?  Well, to finish out the week on that them we have this, for our Friday Farming feature.

"Renters." Itinerant Texas farmers who rent a farm for a year or so and then move on, giving them nomadic habits and everything is temporary. House unpainted and ill-cared for. The children from five years old upward pick cotton and help with the farm work, but get little or no schooling. It is estimated by State University that 300,000 children are thus affected in Texas alone. See Hine report Texas. Beginning with the five year old girl here who picks some, all work including the women. The nine year old girl picks one hundred and fifty pounds a day. Father is in town. Farm comprises fifty acres and they get about twenty bales of cotton, this year which is not a good year. Been here one year. Farm of J.W. Vaughn. Route 6. Location: Corsicana, Texas.

And just when the flap seemed to pass. . .

This blog is supposed to be on historical topics, but strays more than a bit, as the occasional reader would well know.  A couple of days ago, I blogged on the flap de jour, the saga of the young celebrated and good looking females who found that their private embarrassing photos had been posted to the planet on the Internet.  I was amongst those frequently criticized people who caste a measure of blame on the naive. . . well not so naive, young women who undertook photographing themselves without the benefit of clothing or allowing it to occur.  Well, I'm still criticizing them, but for the same nuanced reason I was at the time, which is now amplified today.

 

Rosy the Riveter, who remains a popular American image. . . and who forms a better role mode now some 70 years after the image became popular than the current crop of pop icons do.  Or at least I hope she does.

Yesterday the celebrated female adult child of a well known Armenian American deceased lawyer, who rose to fame as a celebrity lawyer, was announced to be fully appearing, if you follow me, in the British edition of an American journal that ostensibly caters to "gentlemen".  One of the British newspapers, which are themselves rather sleazy on occasion, proclaimed that now at least the voyeur would not be engaged in voyeurism, and could partake in the view "all night".

Great.

Okay, why does this matter and why do I care.  So some offspring of the well known and successful wants to sell her looks? So what?  So young women pose for the compromising and it gets distributed, so what?

Well, here's why it matters.

I have a daughter, and I have a large number of female cousins. They're all extremely intelligent women, and I want them to be judged that way.

Now, I know that we as a species do take note of looks. And men do more than particular.  But how those looks are presented, and in what form, really matters.

There is a reason that at one time if you wanted the same images that you can now ogle for free on the Internet you had to go to a sleazy little hole in the wall store and buy a journal that was wrapped in a paper bag.  It was regarded as indecent and the contents were likewise regarded as indecent.  And the fact that they were regarded as indecent meant the standard was clothed decency.

Women certainly weren't held equally in society, but its the women who grew up in that atmosphere that were able to benefit from the slow change in the work place that came about for women.  If the only image of women that had existed at the time was that which appeared on war machines of the era, it wouldn't have happened.

Starting really in the 1950s, but getting really grossly amplified in the 1970s, the image that women have had to contend with has become really corrupted.  By the 1990s, in spite of their advancement in the work place, women had become so objectified that there was an expectation that they'd give of themselves cheaply in ways that they once held absolute.

So that's why this matters.

It's well known that amongst young women today disappointment is endemic.  No wonder, treated as objects and subject to expectations that they'll consent to be toys, they live in a world in which their appearance is taken more seriously than their views and brains.  That's wrong.

Every time a woman sells her image, if its an image of that type, to appear as a toy in a journal, it reinforces that view.  Any many, no matter how debased his situation, is now free to view her as his property, in his mind.  And every time an image gets released that reinforces the idea that men are able to capture images of their girlfriends in that fashion, it reinforces the expectation that every girl must do that.  

The biggest obstacle that women face in western society, is women.  Just as blacks had to contend with the Stepin Fetchit's of their era, which reinforced a stereotype of them that they had to work desperately hard to overcome, as they were trying to overcome it, every woman famous for being famous who sells her images for public gaping does the same thing.  And, to make matters worse, in an era of global communications and interactions, every western woman who does that, in an era when the west remains the richest region of the globe by far, reinforces that view of women in spades where it's part of the local culture to start with, and provides ammo to those societies that hold women down in the name of protecting them.

So, sisters. . knock it off.

Postscript

I wasn't going to update this post, and for right now I'm not going to bump it up, in light of really important things going on in the world, but as I can't help but comment on something I saw in print, I'm converting the comments I made into postscripts, and adding a new one.

Postscript II

 This seems to have largely died down, thankfully, as a crisis de jour, replaced one again by the more serious topics of Russia in the Ukraine and the Islamic State's Caliphate ambitions, but on one final note, I saw a comment somewhere in a journal about how this will not impact the careers of the two most famous individuals who were depicted in this nonsense.

I hope it doesn't, but it will forever, I'm afraid, impact our view of them. The phrase "loss of innocence is way overdone, but here there's clearly an element of that when we have two young women, both who, to some degree, are portrayed with a clean, intelligent image, and in one case at least is found in photos she's apparently sharing or were designed to be shared with a male whom she's dating, so to speak. Granted, that's all private conduct, but for a person barely out of their teens, it really wipes away in a blunt and cheap fashion the aura of innocence that people would prefer to have, and forces us all to acknowledge another.

Now, granted, there a lot of people, apparently, who have committed the same trespass and don't have to be subject to public view, even with that view is essentially forced, but that's the point. The lesson here is probably to reflect on the conduct in its entirety.

Postscript III

Froma Harrop, an independent columnist whose columns I generally enjoy, wrote on this article in a column appearing in today's paper.

Harrop, who is nationally syndicated, took a position quite close to mind, putting us both in the "blame the victim", in part, camp that has received a lot of criticism. Indeed, Harrop goes further than I have here in blaming those who took photos of themselves, even suggesting that the release of such material might not be wholly due to theft, or perhaps the theft was somewhat invited. I doubt that, but at any rate, Harrop, a liberal writer, comes down here in the same area that I have.

Friday, September 4, 1914. No separate peace.

The Triple Entente declared that its members would not arrive upon a separate peace.

The Germans attacked Belgian fortressed at Antwerp, worried about the probable progress of the British who had landed in France and proceeded to Belgium.

The Russians seized Lemberg in Galicia (Poland).

Captain Robert Bartlett requested of  American fur trader Olaf Swenson that his chartered fur trade vessel King and Winge stop at Wrangel Island to look for the survivors of the Canadian Artic Expedition.

Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith encouraging military recruitment at Guildhall, London.

Last edition:

Thursday, September 3, 1914. Pope Benedict XV starts his reign.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Albania, Austro Hungarian Army, Battle of Rawa, Catholic, Christianity, France, Francs-tireurs, Imperial Russian Army, Monarchy, North Dakota, Personalities, Pope Benedict XV, religion, World War One

Society of the Military Horse • View topic - 35th QM Pack Troop 1944

Society of the Military Horse • View topic - 35th QM Pack Troop 1944

Looking at labor past: Boy sailor, U.S. Navy, approximately 1865.

Boy sailor, i.e., a "powder monkey", probably during the Civil War.  Hard work, grim duty, and only a child.

The Big Speech: Winston Churchill. September 3, 1939. House of Commons.

In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere. This is of the highest moral value--and not only moral value, but practical value--at the present time, because the wholehearted concurrence of scores of millions of men and women, whose co-operation is indispensable and whose comradeship and brotherhood are indispensable, is the only foundation upon which the trial and tribulation of modern war can be endured and surmounted.   This moral conviction alone affords that ever-fresh resilience which renews the strength and energy of people in long, doubtful and dark days. Outside, the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace.   Our hands may be active, but our consciences are at rest.

We must not underrate the gravity of the task which lies before us or the temerity of the ordeal, to which we shall not be found unequal.   We must expect many disappointments, and many unpleasant surprises, but we may be sure that the task which we have freely accepted is one not beyond the compass and the strength of the British Empire and the French Republic. The Prime Minister said it was a sad day, and that is indeed true, but at the present time there is another note which may be present, and that is a feeling of thankfulness that, if these great trials were to come upon our Island, there is a generation of Britons here now ready to prove itself not unworthy of the days of yore and not unworthy of those great men, the fathers of our land, who laid the foundations of our laws and shaped the greatness of our country.

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. Perhaps it might seem a paradox that a war undertaken in the name of liberty and right should require, as a necessary part of its processes, the surrender for the time being of so many of the dearly valued liberties and rights. In these last few days the House of Commons has been voting dozens of Bills which hand over to the executive our most dearly valued traditional liberties. We are sure that these liberties will be in hands which will not abuse them, which will use them for no class or party interests, which will cherish and guard them, and we look forward to the day, surely and confidently we look forward to the day, when our liberties and rights will be restored to us, and when we shall be able to share them with the peoples to whom such blessings are unknown.

But is it theft?

I've already blogged on the topic of the recent internet publication of embarrassing photographs.  An interesting element of this is that the photos were looted, somehow, from Apple's Cloud.

This brings to lgiht an itneresting aspect of taking the property of another.  In this cyber age, there's just a lot of people who feel that if its in the net or the cloud, taking it isn't theft. 

Well, is it?

Property is property, and you have a right to your property. That right is pretty broad, including keeping what is yours no matter where it may be.  Taking that without color or fight, even if you leave it on the street, or in the Cloud, may be theft, if you know it belongs to another.

This is another way, slightly, that the whole story may serve some ironic good.  People take all sorts of things on the net because they can.  Content, both literary and image, is routinely taken and re-posted, just because it's easy to do it.  That doesn't mean it isn't theft.  The current example is notable mostly because so much public attention has been paid to it, but perhaps closer attention should be paid.  If it isn't yours, it isn't yours.  Taking it because it can be taken, doesn't mean its right, even if in the end its only electrons.

Thursday, September 3, 1914. Pope Benedict XV starts his reign.

Giacomo della Chiesa became Pope Benedict XV, the 258th Pope.

His papacy would be short, ending upon his death in 1922.  He had to endure the disaster of the First World War and its aftermath, including the Anglo Irish War and Irish Civil War.

Prince William of Albania left he country after a mere six months on the throne.  He was a Prussian by birth and was really a remnant of an earlier era, a Lutheran monarch in the Balkans making no sense whatsoever.   Having said that, he refused to throw Albania into the Great War as an Austro Hungarian vassal.

He returned to Germany and served in the German Army during World War One under a pseudonym, as his reign had not officially terminated.  That termination came in 1925, but when Albania was reestablished as as monarch in 1928, the former Prime Minister becoming its Islamic King, he attempted to be declared the king, which had been his title inside of Albania.

He'd been a pre war Imperial German officer, so that made sense, but oddly he relocated after the Great War to Romania, where he died in 1945.

The Russians exploited Austro Hungarian gaps at the Battle of Rawa.

French composer Lucien Denis Gabriel Albéric Magnard died defending his property from the Germans.  His actions made him a hero in France, but the actions truly would have made him a francs-tireurs.

Sioux County, North Dakota was established.

Last edition:

Friday, September 2, 1914. Staging for Tsingtao.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, 1940s, 1946, 1948, 1949, Battle of Tannenberg, China, German Empire, Germany, Japan, Propaganda, Republic of China, The written word, Tsingtao (Qingdao) China, United Kingdom, World War One

Mid Week At Work: Child Teamster, 1916

Caption notes:

Edgar Kitchen 13 yrs. old gets $3.25 a week working for the Bingham Bros. Dairy. Drives dairy wagon from 7 A.M. to noon. Works on farm in afternoon (10 hours a day) seven days a week--half day on Saturday. Thinks he will work steady this year and not go to school. See previous labels in June. Not in Div. 5 or 6. Lives in Bowling Green. Location: Bowling Green [vicinity], Kentucky

I wonder how his life played out?

The illusion of second chances

Today is the first day of school here.  It's also the day after Labor Day (kudos to the School Board, as an aside, for not making kids go back to school right before a three day holiday).  So, the kids are going back to school, and the parents and others back to work.

 

As they do, a lot of the kids are looking forward to a year of new things and new opportunities (while some are also lamenting the start of another school year).  A lot of those parents and other adults, however, don't view the start of the workweek on a Tuesday the same way. There's a cautionary tale here.  Indeed, I meant to post this awhile back, but a question I heard the other day caused me to ponder it again.

Americans love the happy ending story. This is so much the case that Europeans call these type of movie endings "American endings".  Americans usually don't like a story that ends on a sad note, although there are exceptions.  One I can think of off hand is the movie Will Penny, which ends on a bit of a downer, and which sort of taps into the them of this post.. But we don't find too many of these types of endings, however, in American films.

Anyhow, included in these stories, and broadcast on television every year, is the late happy education or career story.  You know, woman who dropped out of school at 16 years old graduates with high school degree in her 50s.  Man who left school at 14 receives honorary high school degree at 90.  These heartwarming stories confirm our belief that "it's never too late" to do this or that.  And indeed, for some things it is never too late.  It's probably never too late to make healthy lifestyle choices, within the confines of a person's present health.  It's never too late to turn from a life of vice or depredation into one that has virtue and meaning.  So, to some extent, this is true.

But with these stories that have economic implications, for most people, there actually is a statute of real limitations, like it or now.  If life is like a river, you might be able to get out and back upstream, but it's more likely that your boat can just be beached, by design or accident, and you have to put back out from where you are.

Getting a person's GED or a college degree, late in life, is often quite pointless.  Worse than that, it often tends to prove nothing whatsoever.  A person, for example, who is obtaining a GED late in life has already had their economic course set, and a GED is going to do nothing for them.  It might validate their sense of self, but that's a purely internal matter.

The same is often true, in my view, to late in life degrees.  News channels like to run stories about people obtaining advanced degrees in their 60s or older, and if a person simply wants to, the more power to them. But if we think that this actually gives them a break in life, forget it.  Obtaining your JD at 60 years old, if you actually want to practice law, is, for example, darned near pointless.  A relative of mine obtained his, after a successful university teaching degree, in his 40s and rapidly discovered that nobody was going to hire him.  He clerked for a year and then returned to academia, grateful for his first career and a bit wiser about the law, lawyers, and the practice of law, but with no hope of a legal career.  Having said that, a couple of my good law school friends were 40 when they graduated with their JDs and went on to successful careers.  One is now retired, and the other about to.

And, in things like the law (but not in everything involving higher education by any means) sometimes the elderly or older occupant of that school chair has bumped out some younger person.  I have no problem with people applying for such spots up into their 40s, although frankly if they're going to be crowding their mid 40s when they graduate they are occupying a space that a younger person might more justly occupy.  Or at least that can be the case (in law schools it probably isn't, given the 50% decline in applications to law school over the past few years).

Moreover, and not so obvious to the young, life has a way of taking over.  I've known and know now kids who are entering the military service.  I don't begrudge them that, but I'll sometimes hear parents hoping that when they get out, they'll go to college.  Maybe they will. Some certainly will.  But if you do four years in the Navy or Marines and find yourself 22 years old, for some they'll imagine (incorrectly) that they're ship has sailed and they best not try it.  One young man I knew who joined the Marines for one hitch found life taking over and is still in nearly a decade or more later.  When his hitch comes up in the next couple of years, he'll have to weigh getting out and into civilian employment (the lack of which kept in him in the Marines) against completing an additional eight years and having a military retirement.

The period from 18 to 30 is one of tremendous change, with the period from 17 to 25, really, being the most significant of that period (yes, I know I dropped a year in there).  People start and stop career paths.  People marry or pass by people they think of marrying.  People go one place for work and leave others.  A lot of these choices, if not irrevocable when made, start to set up like cement in a few years.

There are always exceptions to the rule.  I've known one man who started off a meteorologist, became a geophysicist, became a lawyer, became a teacher, and started practicing law again (after retiring from his school district).  And there are many, many people who started off in one career and chose another.  I'd guess maybe 40% of all lawyers fit that category, including myself.  But those doors, from the moment you see them, are closing, and they don't remain open for ever.

Chose wisely, if you can.

Friday, September 2, 1914. Staging for Tsingtao.

Japan invaded Chinese territorial sovereignty in order to land over 15,000 troops at Longkau in order to stage them for an attack on German controlled Tsingtao.

In nature, the act was really no different than Germany entering Belgium in order to invade France, although it was certainly much different in scale.

Today what had been the German possession is called Quingdao. The Yellow Sea port had been a German possession since 1897, but from this point until after the end of World War Two it was a Japanese one.  Following that, in 1946, it briefly was the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Western Pacific Fleet, until it relocated to the Philippines in 1948.  It reverted to full Chinese control with the entry of the Red Chinese army in 1949.

In addition to being one of the busiest ports in the world, its famous for the beer brewed under the city's name, per its original spelling.

The Germans entered Moronviliers which would become deserted and destroyed during the war.

Charles Masterman invited twenty five "eminent literary men" to Wellington House in London to form a secret British entity dedicated to British war time propaganda.

William Archer, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, Henry Newbolt, Gilbert Parker, G. M. Trevelyan and H. G. Wells attended the meeting.

Fighting drew down at Tannenberg.

Last edition:

Tuesday, September 1, 1914. Martha.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Affair of Néry, Artillery, British Army, cavalry, Imperial Japanese Navy, Labor unrest, Rewilding, Siege of Tsingtao, St. Petersburg Russia, The written word, World War One, Zaian War

Looking at Labor Past: Child messenger, 1910

Tuesday, September 1, 1914. Martha.

The last known passenger pigeon, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo.

It has been widely suggested that the species could be cloned back into existence, in which case it should be.

The poem "August 1914" by John Masefield was published, in an era when poetry still mattered, and wasn't' vapid.

How still this quiet cornfield is to-night!

By an intenser glow the evening falls,

Bringing, not darkness, but a deeper light;

Among the stooks a partridge covey calls.

The windows glitter on the distant hill;

Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold

Stumble on sudden music and are still;

The forlorn pinewoods droop above the wold.

An endless quiet valley reaches out

Past the blue hills into the evening sky;

Over the stubble, cawing, goes a rout

Of rooks from harvest, flagging as they fly.

So beautiful it is, I never saw

So great a beauty on these English fields,

Touched by the twilight's coming into awe,

Ripe to the soul and rich with summer's yields.

These homes, this valley spread below me here,

The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,

Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear

To unknown generations of dead men,

Who, century after century, held these farms,

And, looking out to watch the changing sky,

Heard, as we hear, the rumours and alarms

Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.

And knew, as we know, that the message meant

The breaking off of ties, the loss of friends,

Death, like a miser getting in his rent,

And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.

The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,

The friendly horses taken from the stalls,

The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,

The cracks unplastered in the leaking walls.

Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home,

And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,

With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam

As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind,

Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs,

And so by ship to sea, and knew no more

The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,

Nor the dear outline of the English shore,

But knew the misery of the soaking trench,

The freezing in the rigging, the despair

In the revolting second of the wrench

When the blind soul is flung upon the air,

And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands

For some idea but dimly understood

Of an English city never built by hands

Which love of England prompted and made good.

If there be any life beyond the grave,

It must be near the men and things we love,

Some power of quick suggestion how to save,

Touching the living soul as from above.

An influence from the Earth from those dead hearts

So passionate once, so deep, so truly kind,

That in the living child the spirit starts,

Feeling companioned still, not left behind.

Surely above these fields a spirit broods

A sense of many watchers muttering near

Of the lone Downland with the forlorn woods

Loved to the death, inestimably dear.

A muttering from beyond the veils of Death

From long-dead men, to whom this quiet scene

Came among blinding tears with the last breath,

The dying soldier's vision of his queen.

All the unspoken worship of those lives

Spent in forgotten wars at other calls

Glimmers upon these fields where evening drives

Beauty like breath, so gently darkness falls.

Darkness that makes the meadows holier still,

The elm-trees sadden in the hedge, a sigh

Moves in the beech-clump on the haunted hill,

The rising planets deepen in the sky,

And silence broods like spirit on the brae,

A glimmering moon begins, the moonlight runs

Over the grasses of the ancient way

Rutted this morning by the passing guns.

Saint Petersburg, Russia changed its name to Petrograd due to World War One, in a fit of anti Germaness. Of course, it was later be change to Leningrad, in honor of the murderous  Vladimir Lenin, but then changed back to Saint Petersburg, as it should have been, in 1991.

For some weird reason, of ceruse, Lenin's modly body remains on display in Moscow, when it should be planted in the ground.

British Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener met with General John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force following the Battle of Le Cateau at a midnight ministers in an off the books meeting that clearly was hostile.

The Affair of Néry occured in which British cavalry and a single gun of British artillery kept in action for two and a half hours until reinforcements arrived.

The Imperial Japanese Navy seaplane carrier Wakamiya arrived off Kiaochow Bay, China, to participate in the Siege of Tsingtao. Presaging events of the future, it was the first time a dedicated ship for aviation had been used in combat.

The  Zayanes called off their siege on the French-held colonial town of Khenifra, Morocco, resulting in a temporary armistice.

Martial law was declared in Butte, Montana in a mining labor dispute that resulted in 500 National Guardsmen being called out.

Last edition:

Sunday, August 30, 1914. The Imperial Russian Army destroyed at Tannenberg.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Battle of Gnila Lipa, Battle of Tannenberg, Emiliano Zapata, German Army, Imperial Russian Army, Mexican Revolution, New Zealand, Samoa, Venustiano Carranza, World War One

The Big Picture: National Women's Trade Union League Convention, 1924

Dr. Walmart?

Fairly recently on this blog we looked at some topics that dealt with Distributist Economics.  Looming large in that discussion was the economic role of outfits like WalMart, which are sort of the antithesis of the Distributist concept at least on the retail end.

Well, this past week we heard on the news that Walmart is considering adding physicians in its lineup, adding to the Opthomologist it already fields.

Folks who worry about economic trends may want to consider what this means. Walmart already pretty much dominates the retail field in North American in many areas, and has expanded into about every niche it can, or maybe not.  By going from retail goods, into health care, it threatens to really impact this area of the service economy.

Well, what of this?  Is this good, or bad?  There's interesting elements to both sides here.

Traditionally health care has been incredibly individual in nature, although that started to die for various reasons about a a decade ago.  That is, the traditional nature of health care is that people had individual doctors, who had individual practices.  

We've blogged on this before, when we discussed health insurance here, a hot topic the past few years. What we'd note again is that up until World War Two, most Americans didn't have health insurance, although some who worked for large industrial concerns worked for employers who had "company doctors", that is full time physicians employed by those companies (now also a thing of the past). The Second World War brought in health insurance in a big way, as when the Federal Government froze wages, it didn't think to freeze benefits. So, employers started competing for workers, in a tight labor market, with offers of additional benefits.  Health insurance, which existed but which was not hugely widespread, really took off.  That gave us the system we have had basically since, in which quite a few people have health insurance, some don't, etc.  In the 1960s the Great Society programs modified that further by extending health insurance at the Federal level for the very poor, and then Richard Nixon extended it to the elderly.

Health care remained very individual, but starting in the 1980s and 1990s, insurance companies started boosting Health Maintenance Organizations, ie., practices with an established relationship with them, in order to control costs. About the same time, doctors themselves, finding their practices more expensive to merely operate, due to advances in medicine, increasingly came to associate themselves in group practices, which are nearly quasi hospitals and clinics. So consolidation has been definitely occurring.  Prices have also been climbing.  And as a result of the latter, a renewed emphasis on national health care came about, as people began to loose their health insurance as companies, which had gotten the whole thing rolling in the 1940s, found that they could no longer afford it in the 2000s.

Now we have Walmart threatening to enter the field. What would that do?

Well, one thing it would probably do is drive prices down.  Walmart doesn't enter anything that it can't compete at, and we can be assured that they'll undercut everyone else.  It'll be less personal, probably, but also a lot cheaper, I suspect.  They must also have studied the Affordable Health Care Act and they must feel that they can operate cheaply and efficiently within it.

In my prior post, I pretty clearly took a shot at Walmart.  When I heard this news, I was tempted to as well. But maybe this is a not so fast sort of thing.  Professionals are going to just hate this trend, and my suspicion is that if it works it won't stop with doctors, but on the other had as prices have climbed and climbed, perhaps this was inevitable and even corrective.

Looking at labor past. A photo for my friend Couvi.

A photo which reminded me of my friend Couvi, on the weekend we celebrate the fruits of labor and working men, including our own past labor.

Caption reads:

Herschel Bonham, Route A, Box 118, an 11-year-old boy cultivating peas. He belongs to a cotton club in school. Father says he can pick 200 pounds of cotton a day. Location: Lawton, Oklahoma

Sunday, August 30, 1914. The Imperial Russian Army destroyed at Tannenberg.

The German Army wiped out Imperial Russian forces at Tannenberg, taking 92,000 prisoners and inflicting 78,000 casualties.  10,000 Russian soldiers escaped.  The Germans took 12,000 casualties.

Russian commander Alexander Samsonov is believed to have committed suicide after walking into nearby woods. German troops found hsi body a year later.

The Russian chances of ending the war before the winter of 1914 were over, and the German gamble of taking on the Imperial Russian Army early on had paid off.

20,000 Austro Hungarians were taken prisoner by the Russians at Gnila Lipa.

French forces withdrew at Saint Quentin, but in an orderly fashion.

New Zealand invaded and took German Samoa.

Emiliano Zapata agreed to support the government of Venustiano Carranza.

Last edition:

Saturday, August 29, 1914. Marching.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungarian Army, Battle of Gnila Lipa, Battle of St. Quentin Canal, Battle of Tannenberg, First Battle of Garua, German Army, Imperial Russian Army, panoramic, Personalities, World War One

The Best Posts of the Week for the Week of August 24, 2014

Standards of Dress. The police. A semi topical post

The Theodore Roosevelts

10610586_10152219321546879_5172222764660045729_n.jpg (JPEG Image, 764 × 960 pixels) - Scaled (91%)

Theodore Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, riding.

Insignia identification?

Does anyone here recognize this British insignia?  On British desert disruptive pattern smock, Jax's, Ft. Collins.

Whose weird scheduling idea was that?

The State Bar Convention in Wyoming is always in September.  It's a week long event.

September is also the month that all the hunting seasons start, as the weather turns cool. And after the blistering month (most years) of August, it's the first nice cool weather in awhile.  It's also the last chance for many rational fishermen (as opposed to the wet suit wearing denizens of Colorado) to get in some fishing before winter sets in.

All of which makes a person wonder who ever thought of scheduling the bar convention in September?  It must have been a person so dull and indoorsy that the thought of hanging around breathing in recycled air and drinking mass produced coffee sounded attractive..

And why do they keep on holding it in September?  I can't think of a rational reason to do it? Why not January when there's nothing going on and its really cold outside, or maybe August when its really hot and recycled air conditioning might not seem so bad.

Oh well.  September it is, as the traditional provides for it.  And, by tradition, and because I have other things to do, I shall not be there.