We brutes killed them all. . . or actually we didn't. Misplaced guilt.

This related to the item I just posted about Neanderthals and allergies, and I've posted directly on this topic, in regards to our ancient ancestors, before.  But I'm doing so again, as the way this topic has been historically treated is rather interesting. It says something, well. . . about us.  Not them

It's invariably the theory amongst any historical or scientific work written by Europeans or European Americans that our ancestors were Bad. And those Baddies killed off any other group of people that they came in contact with.  Always.

Well, DNA studies are showing not so much.

And I'm not surprised.

Perhaps the classic example of this is the long accepted story of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Great Britain.  Classically, the story is that Horsa and Hengest came in as mercenaries and saw that Britain, or at least southern Britain, was ripe for hte taking and this sparked the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.  They came in, killed all the British save for those basically north of Hadrian's Wall and who didn't manage to hold out in Wales, and established the series of Kingdoms that became England in later years.  Some, like Winston Churchill in his classic History of the English Speaking Peoples, allowed for the survival of a British woman here and there, but not much.

 Brothers Horsa and Hengest come with the tribe, as depicted in the Renaissance.  In reality, they probably not only didn't look this calm, but they wouldn't have looked this modern, if you will, either. They probably looked a lot like what we imagine Vikings to look like, as they really weren't much different. Assuming they existed at all.  Their names, oddly, mean "horse" and "horse", and they might be allegorical.

Well, a study of DNA on Great Britain reveals that the British, including the English, are mostly truly British. That is, while that German DNA is in there, it's not in there so much.  Seems the Germanic invaders came in, or sort of meandered in really, and ultimately gained political dominance over any one region, but never gained a population dominance. And while entire tribes moved, once settled, they started marrying amongst the existing population.

Gee, what a surprise.

This is true, by the way, for the Vikings too.

Now, I'm not saying the Vikings weren't bad. They really were.  And I don't appreciate the latter day revision of them which would hold that they were a bunch of misunderstood hippies. Baloney.  They did invade, and they ultimately brought their families with them.

But, missed in the modern stories of them somewhat, their language was intelligible with the Old English of the time, and they weren't all that different in some ways.  A huge difference, of course, was religion, as they adhered to a really primitive form of the old Germanic paganism. . . for a time.

But they started converting themselves. By the last Viking invasion of 1066 their king was a Catholic monarch.  So, like the Angles, Saxon and Jutes before them, they slowly melted into the existing population. You can tell, by their DNA, where they were strong today, but the British remain the dominant British genetic contributors.

Although some British DNA, it should be noted, like Irish DNA, goes back 10,000 years.  That's right. All the way back. Showing, once again, that earlier populations were not slaughtered like people like to imagine.

Now this is becoming increasingly evident about the Neanderthals.  The popular imagination has held that the Cro Magnons, i.e., us, came in and killed the whole lot of them, because we are bad.  Well, not it appears that the populations, which weren't as different as we imagine, merged.  Some would have held that "oh they were too ugly that can't be true", but that's turning out to be less true as well.  They did look a bit different, but then existing populations do as well.  Existing populations of humans mix readily today and frankly there will come a day when the mixing is sufficiently complete that there will be no differences in human populations (i.e., no races), so why we ever thought that it was the case that no Cro Magnon began to think that some young Neanderthal female wasn't somewhat cute is beyond me.

Now, all of these examples go a ways back. But it might serve to reconsider some ideas that became very popular in the United States in the 1970s, about European Americans and their presence in North America.  At that time, the old image of heroic colonist taming a wilderness yielded to an image of savage Europeans dominating the native populations.

Now, the conquering of North America was violent. And, contrary to the popular imagination, the conquering of American east of the Mississippi was much more violent than that event west of the Mississippi. But the use of terms like genocide are really misplaced. The killing impact of disease is very real, but what is probably the case is that it was much more accidental than anything else. That isn't good, but it also isn't quite what its recently been portrayed as. And, as with the other example, populations mixed a lot more than sometimes imagined.  This is particularly true in Spanish and French speaking regions of North America, where there tended to be a lot less fighting and a lot more attraction than seems to be commonly considered.  Indeed, we should be well aware of this as it's well known that the first Spanish Indian couples showed up as early as Cortez' conquest of Mexico and even English colonial populations, which were amongst the least likely to mix in North America, started mixing right from the onset.

Rebecca Rolfe, the wife of John Wolfe.  Known better to history as Pocahontas, although that was a nickname and she had several other "Indian" names.  She married John Wolfe in 1614.

So, what's the point of this?  Well, perhaps simply a pleas that occasionally we slow down and consider human beings as human beings before getting retrospectively indignant and righteous.  It's easy to look back and condemn all of our ancestors for avarice and violence.  But truth be known, most people have always been people.  And, frankly, most people here are the product of mixed ancestries even if they aren't ware of it.  Somebody crossed that color line, cultural line and even that subspecies line at some point.  Probably a lot of your ancestors did.

And, let's give ourselves credit.  We don't always do the right thing.  But we don't have a roadmap to the future either.  And we might do the right thing more often than not.  And at least here, while it's easy to imagine everyone from our culture, as we belong to that human culture that uniquely feels guilt about itself, was a baddie.  More often than not, chances were high that what happened is that young hunter Gronk of the newly arrived Cro Magnons was invited over for aurock by the family of young gatherer Gronella of the old Neanderthals, and things went fine.

 As mundane as it might seem, scenes like this probably have a lot more to do with average human ancestry that warfare.

Neanderthals are making me sneeze. . .

Neanderthals who are in my distant family tree that is.

I've never been bothered by the thought that I likely descend partially from Neanderthals.  Indeed, I long ago concluded that the theory that Neanderthals weren't out competed, and weren't wiped out, but disappeared to, well, attraction, was likely the correct theory.  And now I'm proven almost certainly correct.

Oh, now I know, you have in mind that obsolete image of a hump backed Neanderthal, but that's no longer the correct one. We know know that while they were heavy boned and stockily built, they probably didn't look all that different from heavily boned stocky people you run into today.  Most of us don't look strongly like Neanderthals, but some of us do. And no doubt there were comely Neanderthal.

Anyhow, and not very surprisingly in  my view, it turns out that Europeans tend to have a percentage of Neaderthal DNA in their genetic makeup.  And apaprently part of that DNA is related to their immune systems, whcih are sort of turbocharged.

That's a good thing in one way, but as allergies are basically an over-response by the immune system to something, that's bad.

And as I'm quite allergic to some things, for me that's a bummer.

But, as interesting as this new information is, I have to wonder why it didn't apparently plague Neanderthals, assuming that it didn't.

Friday Farming: 7 Vintage Photos of Draft Horse Farming

7 Vintage Photos of Draft-Horse Farming:  Long before tractors and trucks, horses were the muscle of the farm. Some small farmers today are turning back to true horse power, but take a moment to travel back to a time when mechanized farming wasn't even an option...

Hot surplus item

The manual:

TM 5-646

The page in the manual:

Section II:  Coal Fired Space Heaters.

Today In Wyoming's History: 2015 In Review

Today In Wyoming's History: 2015 In Review: It hasn't been my habit here to do end of the year reviews, and indeed there are no doubt more items on Medieval history on this site t...

Is Saudi Arabia out of its mind?

Monarchies haven't fared well in recent decades and some have ended very badly.

Among those that ended badly are those that got their nations into big spats.  Anyone recall Kaiser Wilhelm II, for example?  Took his country into war in support of the Hapsburg's.  He didn't have to do that, but it ended up getting him retired to Holland.  What about the Hapsburg's, who felt that they had to pick that fight as their archduke was gunned down by a pathetic?

Or what about Czar Nicholas II.  Nicky was an absolute autocrat, and took his nation into World War One, which resulted in the Romanov's falling and his entire immediate family getting gunned down.

This past week, the Saudi's executed a prominent Sunni cleric.  The Saudis are Sunni Arabs and allied with Wannabism.  The Iranians are Persian Shiias.  The didn't like each other to start with.

What on earth were the Saudis thinking?

Now protests in Iran have broken out and diplomatic relations have been severed.

Last week, at a New Year's Party, I heard form somebody employed in the oil industry, as a joke (he was not serious), what we need is a war.

Well, we may be getting one.

A Cornucopia of Unsettling Career Advice and Commentary

 Plan for stained glass window depicting the Lamb of God surrounded by depiction of  modern professionals: architect, dentist, typist, housewife, construction worker, doctor, businessman/husband, and psychiatrist.  To what extent this culture places anything more central than money is questionable.

Some of these posts meander, and this one certainly is going to.  But that's in part because I've been experiencing both some unsettling conversations in this arena and experiencing some synchronicity regarding it as well.  So here goes.

Let's start off with a comment I recently heard.

 Lawyer, sitting, at a desk (probably in a law library). Sitting remains a lawyer constant, but trips to the law library have nearly completely vanished due to on line legal research.*`

Recently I was sitting in a deposition when the very bright young lawyer across the table, who no doubt has a bright career in the law ahead of him, commented on how he just couldn't stand to be sedentary indoors.

Eh?

And you're a lawyer?

Lawyers may try to fool themselves about it, but being a lawyer is, always has been, and always will be, a sedentary career.  Indeed, it may be growing slightly more sedentary due to the computer, although it's always been fairly sedentary.  No two ways about it. It so surprised me that I commented "well you picked a funny career then", to which the another lawyer sitting there laughed and the court reporter loudly exclaimed "yeah".  The young lawyer seemed surprised, like maybe that had never occurred to him, and even looked unsettled.

Maybe he should be unsettled, as it wasn't all that long thereafter that I discovered that the Wyoming State Bar Association has a Facebook page.  I checked that Facebook page out as, of course, I'm a member of that association, all lawyers in the state are.  It was a bit of a shock for a peculiar reason. 

Wyoming lawyers have long used a phrase coined by one of our late bar presidents, Gerald Mason, that we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer".  Mason was seriously distressed by all the animosity directed at lawyers and thought if we had pride in ourselves it would combat and even reverse this, or at least he said that.  He seemed to be a pretty sincere fellow, based upon what very little I knew of him, so I think he genuinely believed it.  If so, he was highly naive on that score.

Indeed, I'm probably a rarity in that I've always been skeptical of the phrase, although I'll concede that there was and is some merit to it.  If we're proud to be a "Wyoming" lawyer, that means that there's something unique about being a Wyoming lawyer, as opposed to merely being a lawyer.  I think sometimes people using this phrase really mean that they're boosting the concept that lawyers should be proud of being lawyers, and indeed a recent article in our bar association magazine struck me that way.  There may be some merit to that as well, and I've listed an impressive list of lawyers on this website with some famous, and let's be frank, some infamous characters listed on it.  Anyhow, people who says we're "proud to be [Wyoming] lawyers" usually point to all the positive things lawyers do in society.  And there are quite a few.  If we say we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", that ought to point to the unique things about that status, and there are quite a few, including that our state bar has been small enough that it has encouraged collegial behavior among lawyers.  Of course, that fact that the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam upon the state means that we're now to the lawyer population megalith of Colorado and there's been a flood of Colorado lawyers getting admitted into Wyoming while living in Colorado.  That's changing the practice here, and for those of us who still keep using the "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" tagline I'll suggest it's now obsolete, and probably ought to be "proud to be a UBE lawyer with a connection to Wyoming", something that is becoming increasingly accurate and which is difficult to get enthused about.*

Anyhow, that isn't really my hope, even though I retain some hope that maybe the committee that overseas the bar exam will act on behalf of the state's citizens and go back to an actual state exam, a diminishing hope, and probably a pipe dream, in which case I have no hope that the UBE won't do a vast amount of damage to the state.  My actual point is this. Mason's comments about being "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" cutting into the negative views about lawyers were naive, and that's something that those proud folks should probably be aware of.  People hate lawyers.

Chances are, however, that Mason knew that, and his comments really meant that we shouldn't add to the perception by being part of the commentary.  Indeed, if I recall correctly, he didn't approve of lawyers circulating lawyer jokes for that reason, although it's been a long time since I've read that article.

Apparently the Wyoming State Bar is actually aware of that.  That is, that people don't like lawyers so much.  The last issue of the Wyoming Lawyer (do Colorado UBE lawyers guffaw when they get that?) has an article about the perception of lawyers from outside the law, and one of those commenting flat out states that, save for when a person needs to hire a lawyer, in which case they generally like that lawyer.  There's been more and more comments in our bar journal noting that, and also more and more noting that a lot of lawyers are apparently slipping into emotional trouble in the practice.

Which brings me back to the comment about the Wyoming Bar Association's Facebook page.  It's full of articles about lawyers in trouble with their lives and beyond that, even ones that  are really  harsh on the practice in general.  It's almost like a Caution sign for those pondering a legal career, although anyone reading it surely (or mostly) must already be a member of the bar, I'd guess.  It wasn't what I was expecting.

One article that I saw listed on that site was actually called "25 Reasons Most Attorneys Hate the Practice of Law and Go Crazy (and What to Do About it)" by one Harrison Barnes (whom one other blawg refers to as a "windbag").** Wow, that's a pretty surprising thing I think for a bar association to list on their Facebook page.  And it's a pretty surprising title in and of itself.  "Most"?  Hmmm. . . .  I know at least a couple who love their jobs and are pretty open about that, and they don't have odd malignant personalities or anything.  Most has to be an extreme overstatement.  Maybe he was trying to shock.

Still the article made me recall the conversation above, as it listed this as one of the twenty five reasons***:

They are miserable being behind a desk all day. Most attorneys spend the majority of their days trapped behind a desk. There is very little one-on-one interaction and socializing when you are under pressure to bill as many hours as possible. While television shows and movies glamorize the practice of law, most attorneys spend their time in an office, sitting at a desk, staring at a computer monitor.

That's a pretty accurate statement.

 Middle aged lawyer at his desk in 1919. . . something that middle aged, old aged and young lawyers in 2015 are doing just as much, if not more, than the subject of this photograph did.

Of course, a lot of modern professions do that, and I've commented on that on this blog before.  People truly not meant to do that, but we're building a world in which that's what everyone is going to have to do, it seems.  That's a very curious fact, as it isn't really good for us.  And I suppose that a person, in pondering careers, should consider, as my young friend mentioned above, their ability o handle that.  If they really "can't stand" to be in a chair all day, the law, and a lot of other professions, probably should be considered in that context.

Another comment that struck me

One that struck me was this comment:

They are exhausted from the constant conflict (conflict with peers, conflict with clients, and conflict with opposing counsel). The constant conflict attorneys face can take a massive toll on them. This conflict is never ending and something that drains attorneys emotionally and physically.

The same author stated, concerning the rising (or perhaps now simply appreciated for the first time a a real problem) of substance abuse:

If I were to pick you up and drop you in the middle of a war zone in the Middle East, give you a machine gun, and tell you that you had to fight there for the next 30 years, that would screw you up pretty badly. You'd want some liquor and antidepressants, and you'd be pretty sweaty and pissed off. Practicing law often feels the same way. At least in the war zone, you would know who your enemy was, and there would not be so many rules!

That's actually not a bad summary of what litigators do, and of course we should keep in mind that not all lawyers are litigators by any means.  I do think that's a factor in lawyer discontent and substance abuse, however.  Indeed, I was pretty surprised a few years ago when I completed defending a pretty hard deposition of a tough deponent, and jokingly asked the opposing lawyer if that lawyer "would like a beer" only to have that lawyer accept. We actually did have some in the office and that lawyer gladly took it, saying to me "I don't think it would be possible to practice law without beer." 

It ought to be possible to practice law without beer, and of course I know a few lawyers who don't drink at all, including a few litigators who don't.****  Frankly, I haven't known all that many lawyers who really had a substance abuse problem either, although it's apparently a rising problem.  I've written on stress and the law before, and I guess this is part of that scene.

Slipping away from the law, however, but noting that I heard the following at a party of all legal professionals, I've been a bit bothered by the western concept of career once again for a peculiar reason.  I've also written on that before.

This one comes up on a personal level, I'll note.

At this party, a friend of mine made an inquiry as to what my son's career plans are.  Oddly enough (synchronicity?) the same topic was simultaneously being explored by somebody else with my wife, which I know as I could hear her discussing it.

We don't really know what his plans are and perhaps he doesn't as well.  I have to say, at age 18 a lack of a plan worries parents but at the same time can a person rationally be expected to have one?  I'm not so sure that everyone should, and a person ought not to rush to one just because everyone thinks you should have one.

And people do think you should have one, and it turns out that they have ones for you, which is quite surprising.

Now, he tested very well on the ACT. Very well. And without bothering to do any studying for it.  So, when his ACT scores were mentioned by my wife (not me) to the above referenced friend, and it was noted that he may start off at the local community college, he was taken aback.  He was frank that a person with such high ACT scores should not do that, very much not do that, and rather should go to a major university from the onset.  Indeed, he thought about it and determined that my son should go to Georgia Tech to major in engineering.

Maybe he should major in engineering, and maybe he should go to Georgia Tech (about which I know nothing at all), but that raises an interesting aspect of Weltanschauung that hard for almost anyone in this society not to have, including myself. That is, in the western world (and my friend here is a European immigrant from one of the highly ordered European societies) there is a very strong concept that a person should exploit academics and then career to the maximum possible extent, even if that means leaving the place of their birth and all they know.

Why is that?

As far as I can tell, the only thing that's based on is a concept of money.  The general idea seems to be that a person should make as much money as they can.  It's a really primitive instinct and it probably derives from the idea that we need to keep the wolf from the door. But it's a particularly pronounced cultural concept, in my view, in Protestant societies.  By that I do not mean that only Protestants have it, that would be completely and utterly false, but it's a cultural aspect of those societies and generally held by nearly everyone in them, without any question of its correctness whatsoever.*^

And it's not as if its devoid of any rationality. There is some.  It's well proven that money won't make a person happy, but poverty sure doesn't help that situation much either. At least a little monetary surplus helps keep some anxiety at bay, unless a person is irresponsible with money.

But the acquisition of it can lead a person into areas that they would otherwise not naturally go.  Its stated by some that a person can't be a monetary success unless he loves what he's doing but the evidence of that is quite poor, and at least by my historical and personal observation the opposite is true in at least some cases.  A lot of people do well, at least for a time (whether they can indefinitely is another matter) doing things that they would rather not.

Indeed, I'd argue that this is responsible for one of the things that is constantly noted in articles like the one linked in above.  People start to compensate for their discontent, with some of that surplus money, with things that lead them into trouble.  According to Mr. Barnes, whose article is cited above:

Here are some incredible statistics:

• The American Bar Association estimates that 15-20 percent of all attorneys are alcoholics or suffer from substance abuse problems. Jones, D. (2001). Career killers. In B.P. Crowley, & M.L. Winick (Eds.). A guide to the basic law practice. Alliance Press, 180-197
   
• Lawyers have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. Greiner, M. (Sept, 1996). What about me? Texas Bar Journal.
   
• Lawyers have the highest rate of depression of any profession according to a John Hopkins' study of 100 professions. Occupations and the prevalence of major depressive disorder. Journal of Occupational Medicine, 32 (11), 1079-1087.

Pretty grim.  I think, however, that the last two items are statistically incorrect, and actually dentist have a higher rate of depression and suicide than lawyers do.

All the dentist I've every met, and I've known a lot as my father and one of my uncles were dentists, seemed to be a happy lot but obviously not all are.  Indeed, maybe only the upset in any profession draw attention.  However, I will note that dentist do suffer from some of the same liabilities that lawyers do, namely that people are pretty vocal to express their discontent with the entire group of them and at the same time complaint about their fees, etc.  Like lawyers, they make a lot less money than people believe that they do and they tend to have massive overhead.  Oddly, at the same time, it's a profession that, like the law, people from the lower middle class have pushed their children towards for a long time.  My father got into it in his own, like I did with the law, but college in general was something he was reluctant to do but for a big push from my grandmother.  His father owned a meat packing company and died young.  My uncle's father was, I believe, a construction worker.  One of my father's good physician friends, I'd note, came from a farm in Nebraska and other dentist friends had fathers who were, respectively, a railroad worker and a miner.

Which brings me back to community colleges for a moment.

My father attended the local community college, Casper College.  He did so as his mother wanted him to.  He was employed at the post office at the time, after the death of my grandfather, and his basic plan was to stay there.  My grandmother recognized that he undoubtedly had the intelligence to advance in university and she urged him to do so.  He was the single most intelligent man I've ever met and that was obviously apparent to my grandmother.  He started off in engineering and then went right from Casper College to the University of Nebraska, after a brief stop at Creighton which he didn't care for.  So, he did well, as we've been using the term, by Casper College.  And he's not the only one of his generation around here who did.  And who still does.

Indeed, recently I spoke to a lawyer about a decade younger than me who related to me that he'd started off at Casper College, in education.  He related that it was his opinion that if he hadn't have started there, he ultimately would not have graduated from university, in his opinion.  His father was a mechanic, I'll note.

Likewise, I've often suspected that if I hadn't have started off in Casper College I may have not made it far in post high school education.  Indeed, my earlier college career strongly suggests that to me.

I had no plans at all of going to Casper College at the time that I graduated from high school.  When I was in my senior year of high school, my vague thoughts were that I'd go to the University of Wyoming and major in Wildlife Management.  Like my son, I tested well on the ACT and my mother told me I could go anywhere I wanted, which frankly baffled me as I'd never thought of going outside the state.  Indeed, she darned near scared me by suggesting that I could go anywhere, in part because she cited the example of an older cousin who was going to a very prestigious university and whom I thought of as a really good student.  I didn't think of myself that way and probably regarded myself as an indifferent student.  I don't know that I really was, but I didn't have any developed study habits and therefore must muscled through high school on what I liked or what I needed to learn, when I needed to learn it.  I'd become a student, really, in college and university, a habit that became a personal character trait that's never left.*****  Anyhow, I declared then that UW was where I was going, which seemed to disappoint my mother a bit.

Shortly after that, or perhaps before that, I had my ACT scores as noted and also had to take some sort of personality career test, one of the very few and fairly pathetic things the school district did here at that time to attempt to help students find a career.  Wildlife Management was mentioned and my plan was loosely fixed, sort of. My idea was to go to UW and major in that while enrolling in ROTC, as I also wanted to see if a career in the Army, another outdoor profession (I believed) might be for me.  If it was, I figured I could do that for twenty years and then retire, and enter the Game & Fish here.  If it wasn't, I could do four years and come back and work for the Game & Fish. The concept that I wouldn't get hired by the Game & Fish didn't really occur to me, oddly enough.

I mentioned that to my father, who replied that there were a lot of people around here who had Wildlife Management degrees and no jobs.  That was all the more he said about it, but he so rarely gave advice of that type that any time he did, I listened.  Indeed, I don't ever recall ignoring his advice on such topics, which was always very rare.  That was enough to deter me from majoring in Wildlife Management and I decided instead to major in geology, which was an outdoor science that I was good at in high school.  It might be the case that avoiding  a career with the Game & Fish saved me from disappointment as a game warden later told me that he didn't get out hunting much as he was always working during the season, something that would seem self evident I guess, but which didn't occur to me at the time. That same sentiment is contained in an interview by Brett McKay, of the Art of Manliness, of his father Tom McKay, who was a New Mexico and later Federal game warden.  In that interview he relates:

9. What is the biggest misconception people have about the job?

The biggest misconception is that game wardens spend all their time hunting and fishing. The good wardens and agents have no time for this as they are in the field managing the other nimrods out there during hunting season. I hunted and fished much more before I became a game warden, not at all after I became one.

I would have had a hard time with that.

I did make it down to UW and I did obtain a degree in geology, but I didn't go down right away.  I enrolled in UW and went down to orientation.  Something about it turned me off right away.  It might just have been the hugely unfamiliar environment.  We were supposed to stay in the dorms and the crowd of people there, for an only child and solitary introspective personality was too much, and I backed off that very day.*~ I went home and announced I was going to Casper College.*~~ The very next day I went down and enlisted in the Army National Guard as I felt not starting off in ROTC would be disingenuine.  Joining the National Guard was one of the very best post high school decisions I ever made.

 

Me, as a Sergeant in the Wyoming Army National Guard in South Korea.  My parents weren't happy about me joining the Guard, but it was one of the absolute best post high school decisions I ever made and I have no regrets about doing it at all.

Going to Casper College may have saved my entire academic career.  My mother was very ill at the time and I lived at home.  In the afternoons when I didn't have class I went hunting or fishing.  In retrospect it was the freest I have ever been.  I got into the swing of studying at the post high school level and when I went to UW two years later I was ready for it.  In the meantime I'd learned that I didn't think I wanted a career in the military and my desire to experience that had been satisfied by the National Guard, indeed it'd last beyond that as my enlistment period of six years took me all the way though my undergraduate career. 

Would I have made it through university if I hadn't have gone to Casper College?  I don't know. Maybe I would have, but even during that first two years there were times when I wanted to quit pretty badly and acknowledge my desire to do so, although even now I'm not quite sure why I occasionally harbored those feelings.  On one occasion I recall even asking my father to ask a sheep rancher friend of his if they had any jobs, which would have been a turn in a much different direction, had it lasted, to say the least (that ranch long ago sold).*~~~   By the time I went down to UW however the urge to quit was behind me and it never occurred to me again.

Would my father have gone at all if it hadn't been there?  I don't know that either, maybe he would have.  It's hard to say.  But I can't sneeze at community colleges.  Indeed, as earlier mentioned in a post on this blog, at least actor Tom Hanks feels that he wouldn't have made it through university but for starting at a community college first.

 

Casper College geomorphology class, 1983.  This was the last Casper College class I took in my path towards a Bachelors of Science, and I already had just obtained my Associates when I took it. Technically it was a University of Wyoming class.  Of the individuals depicted, three of us I know went on to UW but only one other went on as a geology major, a good friend of mine who I am still in contact with today.  The professor remains at Casper College to this day.

Circling back around, a crash in the oilfield, much like the one we're experiencing right now, left me unemployable without after I graduated with a geology degree and I ended up in law school a year later.  I'd first contemplated the law, however, as far back as Casper College, when it became evident that I'd probably have to go on to grad school in order to find a career in geology.  I did take the Graduate Records Exam as well as the LSAT, and did well in both, and took the law route.*~~~~

 

Classroom in the S.H. Knight Building, the geology building, at the University of Wyoming, 1986.

Which oddly enough brings me back to this topic.  Recently a dental hygienist, asking my son's career plans, suggested that as his father was a "famous" lawyer, he could go on to law school and then capitalize on the last name.

Well, the thought that I'm famous is flattering, but quite inaccurate.  Indeed, if I'm famous I should be getting on television and capitalizing on my fame by hanging out with the people who are famous for being famous.  But that's not going to happen.  And unless you have a really famous lawyer last name, that's just not going to work.

But the thought that this is good advice is interesting.  Being a lawyer, in reality, is really hard, tough, work and anybody who is familiar with it probably ought to pause before recommending it to anyone.  Some lawyers I know have claimed that they'd not recommend it to their own children, although the very few I know whose have a child who is a lawyer are proud of it.  One person I know fits both of these criteria.  Of course the recommendation is based on a misunderstanding, at least in part, as to what we actually do.

 

All of which brings me back to a few points.

First of all, I think the concept that a person must maximize their economic potential deserves some serious reconsideration as part of the culture.  Not that it hasn't always been somewhat criticized.  But the idea that a person must do something as that will generate the highest income for them assumes that a high income is the highest goal, and it's pretty clear that point of view is destructive in more ways than one.  At the bottom line, just because a person can do it and make a high return doesn't mean that would make them happy.  I'd wager that there are plenty of high income people who would have been much happier doing something else, and I've heard plenty of high income people who look back on some earlier low income position as their happiest one.  Guys at their desks look back on working on family farms, or working in construction, or being a soldier in the Army, as their golden days, and not without reason.  Indeed, to at least some extent, perhaps we ought to reassess our views on this topic on a societal basis.

Which isn't to glamorize low income, as you'll sometimes find people do. Or suggest that a person can suddenly just up and have no income at all.  Not hardly.

Secondly, people should be cautious pushing a person towards a career if they aren't really familiar with it.  I have a better idea than most about a lot of careers, so I could probably do that better than most, but I don't think that's universally the case by any means.  Indeed, one of the really neat things about being a lawyer in litigation is that you get to know quite a bit about what a lot of other people do. Even then you sure don't know everything, however.  I would never have thought, for example, about game wardens not getting to do much hunting and fishing.  Some occupations we know a lot better than others, but usually because we have a close personal association with them in some fashion.

Finally, I think people should be pretty cautious about their concepts of ideal schools or institutions.  We have a very pronounced societal tendency to view certain schools almost as if they're Hogwarts institution of magic.  It's true that there are very good, and very poor, schools, but as higher education has spread in the US post war there are, quite frankly, a lot of really good schools that offer individual students an individual advantage.  A lot of people who go on to other schools start off at a community college level and beyond that quite a few graduate from universities that are very good, if not very big names.  In some occupations, in my view, such as law, some schools have acquired an inordinately revered reputation and society in general would benefit if their stars faded a bit.  It may actually be the case, in spite of all the criticism of higher education, that it's gotten so good that there are not all that many Yugos amongst the Mercedes really, except in terms of reputation, which does admittedly mean a lot in terms of later employment.

__________________________________________________________________________________

*`I'll make it the topic of another entry, more appropriate for the supposed focus of this blog, but a different comment I read elsewhere noted how the big firm expectation of a certain  number of billable hours of young associates is irrelevant in the modern context, as electronic legal research has made the practice of that sort of law so much more efficient. That is, a single lawyer can do the work of an entire team of lawyers.  Not only that, but one lawyer can research a topic in half a day that formerly would have taken days.  That person's comment noted that his superiors, all of whom had started off well before electronic research and never really learned it, didn't grasp that in his big firm, and therefore they didn't understand that what was for him a four hour project wouldn't result in 24 hours of billable time.  A very interesting point.

*Wyoming has seen a jump in applicants to its bar, but due to the UBE.

** Barnes seems to be employed as a lawyer recruiter, and the rest of his articles, to the very limited extent I've bothered to look at them, seem rather rah rah to me about the profession, so I don't know what to make of this one.  He notes that he was a drop out from the profession in this one, so its perhaps unusually candid.  If so, I don't know how to reconcile his rah rah posts and his occupation which would amount to recruiting people into something he claims drives people crazy.  Of course, maybe if I read all of them I'd feel differently, but I doubt that I will.

 ***I was going to list the full 25, and then comment on them, but it was too much of a diversionary project. Suffice it to say, I don't think all of them were all that common.

In fairness, Barnes offers solutions to his perceived problems as well, although there aren't many listed.  One of them is just to quit working and figure it out next, which strikes me as something that wouldn't be realistic for a lot of folks.

****The beloved late Gerald Mason, who coined the phrase "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", didn't drink and held what was, as far as I know, the only dry State Bar Association Annual Meeting.  I didn't go, but then I only rarely do.  I recall hearing some complaints about it, however.

Which isn't to say that I've witnessed a lot of lawyer drinking abuse.  I'm sure that lawyers drink more than airline pilots, but I really haven't seen a significant number of lawyers boozing it up.  Maybe I'd have to hang out more where that sort of stuff occurs, but I doubt it.  I suspect that this may be one of those areas where a lot of attention is being paid to a particular problem, but that means that attention is being paid, not that its increasing. 

*^It may mean nothing at all, but amongst European societies, it is noticeable that the ones that have not had a significant Protestant influence tend to be much less economic driven and have cultures much less focused on an individuals relationship to work..  Pretty much all of Europe and south of the Rhine would fit this category, and their work behaviors and life focus does tend to be quite a bit different.  The work ethic of France, Italy and Spain tends to drive Americans crazy to some extent.

Hillaire Belloc, I learned after writing this, was so convinced of something similar that he attributed Capitalism to the Protestant Reformation, with his analysis having some merit to it.  Belloc wasn't stating that in a nice way, as he was a Distributist and lived in the era of fairly unrestrained Capitalism.

*****While I didn't know it at the time, my parents feared in my later undergraduate stage that I'd become one of the classic "career students", a fear that was very parental on their part but actually not very well founded.  On the other hand, by becoming a lawyer, maybe that is what happened.

*~According to the same individual above who first is mentioned in this long winded essay, "introspection is my cure to bear".   Maybe.

*~~These struggles must be more common than I suppose.  I just watched the film American Graffiti for the first time in a long time and found, which I'd forgotten, that much of the film's central plot is based upon the central character struggling with whether to leave the next day for university or to attend the local community college.  He goes, his close friend who is going with him stays.

*~~~Indeed, I was practicing law when it sold and it was one of the first experiences for me on how agriculture was now really beyond the means of the common man, something that shocked me at the time, and which was a sad experience to observe.  Some out of state person bought it, something I can't help relive every time I drive through it, which I very frequently to.

*~~~~ I did well on both tests without studying for either.  Indeed, while I understand why a person would study for the GRE, it still baffles me that people actually study for  the LSAT.  The LSAT is just a logic test.  If a person can't do well on the LSAT without studying for it, they probably shouldn't enter law school.

Lex Anteinternet: Lamenting the change in the Christmas Season. . .?...

Related to this item here:

Lex Anteinternet: Lamenting the change in the Christmas Season. . .?...: I recently heard two podcasts by a fellow who was lamenting the passing of the traditional Christmas season.  I sort of like the particular...

Today is Epiphany for those using the Catholic liturgical calendar for the United States this year.  And hence, this is also the end of Christmas.

Fezziwig gets down at the Twelfth Night Party.

 

Elsewhere, for those using the Catholic liturgical calendar, January 6 will be Epiphany and hence the end of Christmas.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Presbytrian Church, Tulsa Oklahoma

Churches of the West: First Presbyterian Church, Tulsa Oklahoma:

Persistent Myths XIII: The Vietnam War Edition

The Vietnam War Edition

All wars result in myths, but in terms of recent, that is post World War Two wars, the Vietnam War has more than its fair share.

I've written here about the Vietnam War before, including my view that its more properly viewed as a campaign in the Cold War.  And I've written about it even on this thread before.  Nonetheless, and with some trepidation, I'm writing about it here again today, even though I may be upsetting a few folks by doing so.

Starting right of with the most likely to offend item, a persistent story about the Vietnam War is that of veterans returning from Asia and being spat upon at the airport. The story is extremely common, and its even repeated by veterans in documentaries.  It's also largely a myth.

I can't say its a complete myth.  B. G. Burkett, in his book Stolen Valor, reports that he could find about three or so incidents of it occurring, if I recall correctly.  But in doing so, he reports the story as a myth.  The reason for that is that such incidents were exceedingly rare.  It happened at least a few times, but only a very few times.  It was not the norm.

While on myths, although this one could apply to any American war for over a century, most US troops who served in Vietnam were not combat troops.

 

Infantrymen in the field.  Most US troops were not combat infantryman in the war, although obviously quite a few were.

The movies have left us with a persistent idea that all American troops in Vietnam were infantrymen and their experience there was something like that depicted in Platoon.  Granted, we did send a lot of combat troops to Vietnam, but most of them were not.  In some odd way, what's portrayed in a film like Good Morning Vietnam is more accurate for most U.S. servicemen who served there than Platoon.  Now, all of Vietnam was dangerous, but it isn't the case that most US troops were in the bush all the time looking for the VC.  In the later stages of the war the US effort came to be very heavily dominated by service troops as the Vietnamization program increasingly relied upon the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to do the fighting.

Another myth of the war which is widely accepted is that getting into it was an American idea and we somehow were uniquely there. That's flatly incorrect.

Most people know that the French fought in Indochina before we did.  A few are aware that the French withdrawal came amazingly close to our own first presence, but few seem to appreciate the extent to which it was an allied effort.  Numerous other nations contributed combat forces to the war, including Australia, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea.  A variety of nations sent medical support forces, including Spain and, in a naval contribution, Canada..  Support for operations came from neighboring Thailand.  it was more international than people suppose.  Late during the war there were more South Korean troops fighting in Vietnam than there were American troops..

Even those who realize that are usually unaware that it was Australia, not the United States, that really pushed for intervention in the war early on. Australia urged the United States to intervene, with the promise to contribute, but when it appeared the United States would not, Australia indicated it might go it alone, which caused the US to take more interest.  Ironically its been a persistent myth in Australia that the US got Australia involved in the war, when in fact the early interest was stronger on the part of Australia.

There's also little appreciation that we were not defeated in the field, but rather the opposite occurred. This myth arose during the war when the American public became convinced that we were stuck in a quagmire.  In fact, the American effort in the war was amazingly successful in terms of field success, if not in terms of causing South Vietnamese political reform.  By 1968 the North Vietnamese regarded themselves as facing defeat and the Tet Offensive was launched in desperation.  It was a military failure.   The U.S. military appreciated that and Westmoreland urged for expanding the war to a defeated North  Vietnam.  Rather than do that, the decision was made to turn ground combat over to an increasingly effective South Vietnamese army. By late war the US effort was, as noted, nearly all support.  The South Vietnamese required American air support, however, and our refusal to supply it in the face of the North Vietnamese 1975 invasion doomed South Vietnam to defeat. 

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

 

In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable 

Oh really.  Where were you living?  In a box?

Anyone who has looked at this topic and not been predisposed to be completely and totally enamored with the concept of modern "homesteading" would have been well aware of the fact that these small scale agricultural enterprises are not economic in a modern economy.  I've blogged about it here:
 

The "Homestead" movement

Homesteading then and . . .not now.

For that matter, the economics are tough for people who simply want to get into agriculture, but are unrealistic about a 17th Century agrarian model of farming.  I've blogged about it here:

Lex Anteinternet: You can't do what you want

You can't do what you want

Economic viability of entering agriculture, a question.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 5. How do you become a rancher?

Land Values and American Agriculture

And its not just me. Did she check out Kevin Ford's posts on the New Catholic Land Forum, as he slipped slowly into having to abandon his farm? What about Devin Rose's blog as he tried the same thing and also failed?  Hmmm?

Apparently not.

Let's look a little closer at this.

My farm is located in the foothills of Northern California, 40 miles east of Sacramento on 10 acres my partner, Ryan, and I lease from a land trust. In the heat of summer, my fields cover the bronzed landscape like a green quilt spread over sand. Ten acres of certified organic vegetables trace the contours of a small valley floor. Tomatoes glow crimson. Flowers bloom: zinnias, lavender, daisies. Watermelons grow fat, littering the ground like beach balls.

Ten freaking acres, and you rent it?  And you thought this was going to work?

Shoot, this isn't even the classic American homestead acreage model.

 

 19th Century Nebraska homestead. This would be a prosperous homestead.  A married couple with at least three, and probably at least four if not six children (the two adult men are possibly hands).  Nice house, and a windmill.  They've farmed right up to the house.  They're on at least 40 acres, if not more.

No, this is something like the Italian peasant model.

Italian peasants on their way to Tivoli.  They're riding a donkey.  The donkey is carrying their product. In other words, they're poor farmers, probably on a small acreage, taking their product to a big city.  They'd probably have preferred to be in the United States farming on 40 acres.

And, in the spirit of getting older and crankier, let's be blunt. By "partner" here, I'm going to assume that the author means romantic partner without the benefit of marriage.  I'm not going to lecture anyone on this, but farming is a really hard, stressful, way to make a living even in the best of times.  Ryan and Jaclyn would be better off being married partners as at some point any kind of business partnership is pretty darned stressed under in this line of work, let alone a romantic one that has no legal or formal constraints.  But this all says a lot, really.  A hip, cool, couple living the hip cool lifestyle in a hip cool location doing the hip cool organic thing. Of course this is doomed to failure.  There's a reason that farming has never been hip and cool.  It may be romantic, in the classic definition of the word, and I'll admit to feeling that way about it. But hipsters need not apply as it isn't hip.  At some point, when somebody decides its not that hip and cool to be working hard in poverty, the romance of this informal arrangement may very well wear immediately off, and that's the end of it, irrespective of the destructive consequences of that.

The point is that this occupation has been engaged in by human beings for millennia and the basic nature of it, right down to daily living, is highly defined as its been through the refiners fire.  If a person isn't aware of that, and more if they intend to reinvent major aspects of it, they better have analyzed that down to the elemental level.

As a further aside, on using terms, the author of this item says she "owns" the farm.  No you don't.  You lease it.  You are a tenant.  Don't fool yourself.  Owning is owning.  Leasing is leasing.

Wife of tenant farmer on the Texas Panhandle, and therefore a farmer herself.  This farm would appear to be considerably larger than 10 acres.

Son of tenant farmer, 1930s, Oklahoma. At this guys age he was undoubtedly in the Army a few years later, and probably never went back to being a tenant farmer.

Now, a lot of operations lease land.  But to lease 100% of your acreage, save in family operations, does not equate with "owning" anything.

So, back to the acreage.  

So you are committed to an economic outflow on land you don't own, and on an acreage that doesn't even meet the American agrarian standard of 40 acres.  Freed slaves wanted 40 acres, not 10, for a reason.  No wonder that Forbes deemed this farm to be "Medieval".  To quote from Forbes:

There’s a really delightful little essay over at Salon about the trials and tribulations of someone trying to make a living as a small scale farmer. Her point being that despite the vast amounts of labour that she and her partner throw at their 10 acres they’re not in fact able to make anything much of a living. This is entirely true of course: their income looks to be about that of a prosperous peasant farmer in the Middle Ages. And that’s the delightful part of the essay, although it’s not quite noted. Simply because the economics of all this is implacable. If you’re trying to live off the produce of 10 acres then your maximum income is going to be the value of what can be produced off 10 acres: not a lot. This is why the Middle Ages, when 90% of the population were trying to live off such plots (often a little larger, 20-30 acres was about right for an English villein) were so darn poor by our standards. This is also why other areas of the world, where people are living off such small parcels of land, are poor today.

That's about right.

 Farming, circa 1330.

Save it doesn't even rise up, or down, to that standard.

The author notes that she heard an interview of people entering this lifestyle, and I've seen quite a few recently about it myself.  I think I've linked some in here.  Here's what she noted, which related to the point immediately above.

What the reporter didn’t ask the young farmers was: Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage? If the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.

Duh!

Farm incomes have not had rough parity with urban incomes since 1919.  And that's on conventional production farms.  What does that mean? Well, what it means is that the level of income for participation in the economy has been below the average urban income since that time.  In practical terms, that means there's less money around for buying that X Box, or that new television, or healthcare. 

And with only 10 acres are you seriously suggesting you pay labor?  People farming on 10 acres don't have paid labor, and they never have.  Labor on a small farm is husband and wife, father and mother, uncle, aunt and cousins, and close friends whom you are going to help next.  Not you, "partner" and paid labor.

Now, having said that, I'll note that on actual realistic farms and ranches, people often make do around this topic as people are capable of doing and acquiring in a way that urban people are not.  More realistic agrarians, quasi agrarians, and conventional farmers are well aware of that. They fix their own machinery, do things in a manner that is cheaper than a more electronic and mechanized manner, grow much of their own food, etc.  Indeed, one of the real changes in post 1930 agriculture has been a push away from subsistence in farming and I feel that's bad.

But if you are looking at ten acres, that's something else entirely.  If you are a market farmer, you are on a market garden, not a farm.  Or, as Salon says, you are a Medieval tenant.  You aren't even a Russian pre revolution tenant, which at least had the commune to rely on.

And that means you are going to have to live like a Medieval tenant.  No income for health care?  No kidding.  You'll have to rely on yourself, your family (although given your "partner" situation, you don't have a family like they had) and your community, all of whom live in the same tiny village and go to the same small church, all of which matters to them above all else.  You don't have that social network.  They were eating what they produced, caught and killed and that alone, and therefore had a diet that varied little compared to what you are used to. They didn't think themselves hip and cool as they drank fair trade coffee as they didn't drink coffee, or tea, or soda, at all.  They drank beer, and they brewed it and consumed it in massive quantities as the water was lethal.  And they lived close to death.

 

Old Believer village in Alaska. Yes, they live on little plots (I don't know how little), and they fish as well (they don't try to be limited).  But they're not living near the big city and they're an isolated, non hip, group living an intentionally isolated life in a distinct ethnic and religious community with defined community beliefs, relationships and networks.  You, dear hip and cool neo homesteader, are not.

Now, I'll confess to agrarian leanings.  But a person has to be both aware and have some sense of history before they leave their hip coolness and try to engage in the world's oldest fixed labor.  Forbes is correct, ten acre plots haven't been viable since the Medieval period, and even then most farmers were tenants in most of Europe. There's a reason that European farmers immigrated anywhere, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and even Africa, to do the exact same occupation they were doing in Europe. . . farm. And that reason was land. 

And there's a reason that all over Europe farmers, when they had a chance, wanted land reform.  The Irish didn't keep the land lords when the English went, now did they?  And up until 20 years ago farming remained the biggest business in Ireland.  The English farmers struggled for and got their land after World War One. French farmers got it after the French Revolution.  Everywhere you look, you'll see, if you look, that the thing farmers wanted was to own land, not till the landlords land on a tiny substance plot.

Sheesh.

Now, all this from a person who laments the inability of the average person to get into agriculture now, and would frankly like to see that changed.  But at a certain point, you have to look at an ill thought out endeavor and shake your head.  This isn't helping anyone, its confirming the opposite. This is going to fail and fail badly.  Indeed, most homestead in the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century failed, but at least they were more realistic.  Pie in the sky endeavors ignoring agriclutural history and agriculture's nature aren't helping anything.

And that's my problem with the neo homesteading movement in general.

The local story of the year, the price of oil.

I saw diesel fuel for sale here yesterday for $2.09.

$2.09.  I haven't seen it that low in years and years.  Gasoline is down to $1.70.

 

Old Skelly station in Casper Wyoming.

The Casper Star Tribune lead off today noting that the US and Wyoming petroleum production for 2015 remained steady, in spite of the drop in price.  Now, that's also remarkable.  The globe is in surplus on the product, U.S. production is not dropping, apparently it can keep pace with the decline in price. . . at least so far.  Consumption globally is not increasing.  The Saudi gambit does not appear to be working.

The Chinese economy, which some hoped would pick up the slack, is slowing.  The global economy is expected to slow in 2016.  Wyoming is down to ten working rigs. Ten.

In spite of this, I keep hearing a few "it'll pick up".  But mostly, it's now "we're hanging on", and people still employed in the industry are worried. They have good reason to be.

First successful Blood Transfusion using chilled blood: January 1, 1916

Done this day, by the Royal Army Medical Corps.

New Year's Resolutions for Other People. 2016 Edition

 Polly and Her Pals, January 4, 1919.

Yes, I know that this is rude, but I fear that if I don't do this form them, they're not going to do it for themselves. And some folks needs some resolve, let alone resolutions.  So, in spite of last year's failure of this topic, we'll try again.  Probably with an equal lack of success, but here goes.

1.  The American political system.  Hey, your broken and are not making sense.

Well, not completely broken, but the method of picking a President sure is. What's with this absurdly long period just to pick a party candidate that is, after all, the candidate for that party? It's presented like an actual national election.  Ditch it, and have a convention about eight weeks before the national election and pick the candidate then. No primaries or any of that baloney.

And while you are at it, let's admit that the two party system doesn't make natural sense either.  The Democrats are at least two parties, the GOP is at least three.  Let's admit it and get some variety rolling.  Why are Clinton and Saunders in the same party?  Why are Trump and Paul?  It doesn't make very much sense.

2.  The Upper Federal Judiciary.  Back to law school for the Federal bench, or at least the Supreme Court.

The job of the Supreme Court isn't all that hard.  It's just to interpret the law, which usually is fairly straight forward.  Don't worry about the consequences of that, but quit making stuff up when it suits some "evolving concept".  You aren't a legislature.  Last year was a bad year for you.  Try to fix what you botched up in the law this year.

While you are at it, look up "natural law".  If you don't get that, or think there isn't one, enroll in the local colleges night school classes in biology.  Really.  You may have been wearing weird obsolete judicial stuff so long that you've forgotten that there is a nature.

Speaking of obsolete judicial stuff, why are we holding on to robes?  It's strange.

Also speaking of obsolescence, even though I know it runs counter to cherished ideas, perhaps its time to seriously consider imposing a mandatory retirement age for Federal judges. This is, I know, the exact opposite of what our legislature has pondered in regards to our own judiciary in recent years, but I mean it.  Four of the current justices are in their 70s.  Sure, they may be sharp, but sooner or later we're going to get one that isn't, then what?  And beyond that, lawyers, and that's what they are, in their 70s began practicing law in the 1960s.  Most Americans were alive in the 1960s.  Experience is one thing, but time does move on, and recently they've issued an opinion trying to anticipate what they think the evolution of trends are.  People in their 70s aren't necessarily that clued in, really, to current social evolution on things.

3.  The Media.  Try focusing on real news this year. Not the photogenic stuff, but the real stuff.  Just because its photogenic doesn't make it really important.

4.  People who cite statistics routinely.  Oh, you know who you are.

Research what that stuff means, will you?  Just citing some statistic doesn't mean anything if you don't understand the background to it, and the context of it.  Quite often, you are actually boosting erroneous assumptions.

5.  The Wyoming Legislature.  Hey, take a year off on insisting that the Federal government "give back" the land that Wyoming never owned.   

6.  Politicians.  This year, let's admit that the west is in a war with Islamic fundamentalism and that's going to last a very long time.  As part of that, let's not mince words.  It's a war (most of you are finally admitting that).  The Islamic State is not insane, but grounded in a fundamental conservative, if radical, understanding of Islam.  We're going to have to get this right.

7. Saudi Arabia.  Okay, Saudi Arabia, you won't play nice on petroleum, so we don't have to play nice with you.

Saudi Arabia, like every other country in the world, should be subject to the "Mormon Missionary Standard of Civil Conduct".  Now, I'm not a Mormon, but what I mean by that is that if your country can't tolerate a clean cut kid in a white shirt and tie coming to the door to tell you about the Book of Mormon, or perhaps about the views of the Jehovah's Witnesses, it's not an adult country.

It isn't that you have to believe what they believe, but if you are so freaking insecure about your own beliefs that its illegal for Elder Jones or whomever to come to your door, you have a real problem.  Grow up.

So, Saudi Arabia, start acting civil. And, rest of the world, until there's a Christian church, no matter how small, in a Meccas suburb, quit treating these guys like they are our friends. They aren't.

8.  Muslims.  It is rude to tell a person what to believe, save as evangelization, which isn't rude even if perceived as such.  So I'm not telling you what to believe.  But what I am saying is that there's clearly a world crisis in which one branch of Islam is clearly at war with the rest of the world, and at war with less radical Muslims.

We don't hear from you faithful bystanders much, and we need to.  If you agree that the Islamic State is the new caliphate, say so and tell us why. If you don't, and particularly if you don't agree with its methods, we need to hear that.  That takes some courage either way, but we can probably agree that your faith would sanction that.

9.  Christians.  Again, it's not my position to tell people what to believe, but I will note that in recent years some of you seem to adapt to worldly social positions as if they are religious tenants.  A central message of Christ was that Christianity was going to be unpopular and might end up getting you dead at the worst, or put outside of the circle of your family and friends.  So, if the letters of St. Paul are making you squirm a bit, maybe they ought to, rather than making you look to your political party for answers.

10.  The Islamic State.  Just this week you issued instructions how how abhorrent your soldiers were allowed to go with female captives, and that's pretty darned far.

That's creepy.  Stop it.

11.  Celebrities.  Oh, just shut up.  Seriously.  We don't really need to know what you think on anything at all.

And I mean anything.

12. Wyoming drivers.  Enough is a enough on making up new rules at intersections.  The rules are all in a book put out by the DOT. Get it. Read it.  Apply it.

13.  Lawyers.  For all 25 years of my practice I've heard you lamenting about the loss of civility in the practice. And it is real.  Here's an ideal, start acting civil.  

14.  The Bar Exam Committee.  And not just the Wyoming one.  There is no "uniform" law.  All law, even uniform acts, are going to be modified locally.  You exist for your state and your state alone. Ditch the UBE.

15.  Ford Motors and General Motors.  Automatic transmissions to not belong in heavy trucks. Reintroduce the stick shift in them.

And, while you are at it, Chrysler, I like the diesel engine in the Jeep Wrangler, good idea, but with an automatic only?  Seriously?

16.  Law Schools.  We're flooded with lawyers in the  US right now.  This would be a good time to make the curriculum harder and reduce class size.  You'd be doing your students a favor.

For that matter, you'd be doing them a favor too if you went through the faculty and asked everyone if they'd practiced real law for at least ten years. Those who haven't can benefit by getting a pink slip and going out the door to practice what they've been preaching.

While speaking of law schools, perhaps we ought to consider making them a bit more erudite once again.  In recent years this seems to have declined.  Lawyers who don't have a theory of the law and a historical understanding of that theory aren't very well educated.

I'm not sure how to introduce that, but perhaps we should ponder adding a fourth year to law school to include such topics.

17. Chambers of Commerce and all you economic types.  Economic analysis of things is surprisingly shallow.  Growth is good is about all it amounts to as a rule.  Maybe its time to consider economics in an actual real world, this is what people want sort of way.  And not in the worn out Socialist manner that's getting drug back out this year.

I sort of suspect that most people most places aren't all that keen on growth, but might actually want stability more.  Might be worth pondering.

18.  Television.  Okay TV, I hit you last year, and I am again.

Enough is enough.  I don't care what "real housewives" of any place do.  If you show one more episode featuring a bunch of trashy rich women anywhere, and bill them as housewives, you ought to run a hundred about married Hispanic maids in the same communities. They, dear TV, are the real ones.

And no more shows on the Duggars. Ever.  Haven't we had enough?  Granted, maybe to somebody a show about a family with nineteen children was interesting at first, but now its been done.  And spinning it off into second generations is a bit much.

No more Cody Brown and his crew either.   Ack.

19.  Women.  Women, every year there's a story about how women have not reached economic parity with  men, and you haven't.

And then one of your sisters will make a big news splash by omitting most of her clothing, and be celebrated for that.  Don't emulate her, and let her know what you think. She's not liberating you, she's holding you down.

20.  Men.  Dudes, there's been a lot of press here and there about men being less many now days.  And that press has some merit.  Cut it out with the novel haircuts and skintight jeans and do something manly. Seriously. 

And, take a look at number 19.  Yes, that tart is sans apparel in order to sell her image to you, but you don't have to buy it. Take a look at the ossified freak who is credited with getting this debasement rolling.  You definitely don't want to be that guy.  And the current scientific evidence is that this stuff is in fact having a detrimental psychological and effect on you.

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!  Thanks for reading my blog.

Friday Farming: Horsepower vs Horse Power: Which Wins?

Horsepower vs Horse Power: Which Wins?When it comes to agriculture, some farmers rely on the most modern tools available to produce their crops, but there’s a growing number who are choosing draft horses over tractors to help them get the job done. Their reasons are varied, but many find that using draft animals dovetails with their desire to utilize the most sustainable methods available to produce their crops. But how does horse power really stack up against tractor horsepower?