Cognitive Disconnect on the left and right.

This is one of those posts I started long, long ago, and then sort of let hang there for awhile.  A series of posts by a niche columnists caused me to reconsider it and post it again.

One thing Facebook has really served to do is to vastly expand the amount of casual political commentary, from all political spectrum, I run into.  Well, in re-editing this, not just casual, but even "professional" if you will. And that's increased my running into the interesting cognitive disconnect to many people have in their political views.

People often cherish hard right or hard left notions as they feel they should, and it fits their view on politics in general, or even because it fits their view of one particular thing in particular.  It's interesting how this works.

For instance, one fellow I'm aware of lives in that fair land to our north and comments continually about American politics from a fairly left wing perspective. That's fine, but the other day (now a day far back on the calendar) he posted a long heartfelt item on Israeli politics and how, because they're another culture, we cannot judge them.  Eh?  If a non American can judge American politics that some non American and non Israeli can judge Israeli politics.  Israel, here, however gets a free pass because it's Israel.  That doesn't make very much sense.  It just fits into his worldview.

Quite a few left wing folks I know are very much in favor of stringent gun control and won't consider anything else on that topic. This is always to "save lives" and they won't tolerate any concept that it won't. The same people, however usually have no problem with ending life before it comes into the world, which if the same logic were applied, would absolutely require that to be the state of the law.  Odd.

A selection of those folks are big on legalizing marijuana, even though more and more evidence is building that it has detrimental effects on the brain and its a public safety hazard. How can you be for banning one thing you think is a public safety and personal hazard while arguing to legalize something that is also a public safety and personal hazard?   Either you're going to require the state to probibit everything that's dangerous from being available, or you are not.   You can't hold both opinions, logically.

Indeed, almost nobody, left or right, is for banning booze, but it's undoubtedly the biggest public safety and personal hazard around.  People like to cite the "failed example" of Prohibition, but in reality, Prohibition was actually a success.  People just didn't like it.

Expanding things out, some time ago I saw on Facebook a post by a fellow who ciculated a misquote of H.L. Mencken's.  The quote offered was, in its correct form:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Now, the irony of this is that the person who posted the quote was directing it at the GOP race at the time, and more particularly he was addressing it towards Donald Trump.  I don't mean to suggest that Trump is a moron, he clearly is not, no matter what you think of him, but I point this out as that's who he was posting it about.  However, as the same fellow has a lot of conservative friends they leaped right in, not appreciating that, and made comments about how that had happened in the form of President Obama.

Once again, no matter what you think of him, President Obama is in no way, shape or form a moron.  Indeed, I'd guess that no matter who is the next President, they will not be as intelligent as President Obama who is a highly intelligent man. That doesn't mean I agree with Obama on everything, and indeed I disagree with him more often than not, but I note this as people who are asserting that he (or Trump) are morons are doing so simply because they are in the opposite political camp.  Indeed I'd dare say that Obama has taken more abuse of this type than any President since Ronald Reagan.  Being in university at the time Reagan was President I well recall that, according to what I was hearing, he was both a moron and a fascist.   Obama, in contrast, is according to some a moron and a Marxist. Well, none of that is true.

Expanding this out, once columnist I'm aware of is outright hostile to Donald Trump.  A lot of columnist are outright hostile to Donald Trump, that's fine, but this particular columnist is known only because he focus on religion in his writings and is known, therefore, as a religious columnist.  The irony here is that this particular person's faith holds extremely strong opinions on matters of life and death, and including the lives of those who have not yet been born, and by implicitly backing Hillary Clinton he's basically backing a candidate who is very obviously in favor of conduct that this religion holds to be a mortal sin.  What constitutes a mortal sin is not as simple as it may at first seem to be, to those who are not familiar with this in depth, in that it requires knowledge that the conduct is a mortal sin, but almost everyone who writes from that prospective well knows that the underlying conduct is a mortal sin which then raises the question of what arguing for the election of a person, implicitly, who supports conduct that's grave in nature and which is regarded as a mortal sin amounts too.  I'd hesitate to do that, if I were he.

Indeed the same columnist writes quite a bit on gun control, which at least isn't charged with the same apparent danger to ones soul in whatever position a person might take, but like a lot of issues its not that simple and some of the articles strike me as snarky.  I've addressed gun control above, but I'm often struck by how the debate quickly often is marked by Reductio ad absurdum.  I've written a bit on gun control here, and I'll admit that I'm opposed to it on legal, factual, and philosophical grounds, but the debate certainly doesn't always run that way.  Indeed, very often at least the anti vote is really snobbish and seems to assume that the entire world out to be sitting at Starbucks sipping some absurdly odd and over priced coffee product while you are reading The New Yorker and wearing Buddy Holly frames.  Not so much.

By the same token, there are quite a few people locally who take positions on energy issues based, it would appear, simply on their political alignment.  We're undergoing a revolution in energy production and we better face it, and it makes little difference if you are a Republican or Democrat in regards to that.  But to listen to people, you'd think otherwise.

Well, I guess this sort of thing has always been the case. But in a year of political theater of the absurd following years of political dysfunction, we could hope for better.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyoming History - Virginia Cole Trenholm

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyoming History - Virginia Cole Trenholm: Virginia Cole Trenholm is no longer a household name in Wyoming, too bad, she should be. Trenholm was raised and educated in Missouri and ...

Roads to the Great War: Lives and Treasure: What World War I Cost the Unit...

Roads to the Great War: Lives and Treasure: What World War I Cost the Unit...: The United States mobilized about 4.800 million men in World War I. About 2.086 million went overseas, and about 1.390 million saw combat...

The Preparedness Day Terrorist Attack: July 22, 1916

A bomb went off went off at San Francisco's Preparedness Day Parade, killing ten and wounding forty.  While two labor leaders were convicted for the terrorist act, they later had their sentences commuted due to the lack of any real evidence associating them with the acts.  The perpetrators have never been identified.

Why San Francisco had their parade on a day other than the Flag Day celebration that was the rule I don't know.  But this event occurred on this day, in 1916. 

Preparedness Day was an event authored by the Administration following the passage of the National Defense Act which recognized that we were on the verge of war with somebody.  Maybe Mexico.  Maybe Germany. Maybe Mexico and Germany.  Times were tense.

The times were also increasingly radical, as we will see soon in some additional posts, and anarchists and radical socialistic were very much a factor in various movements around the world, including the United States, at that time.  Indeed, not all that long ago on this blog we read of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland which featured a radical socialist element, which tends to be forgotten.

This event is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that this is an event which we'd presume to read more in our own time rather than a century ago.  It's also a terrible example of miscarried justice as those convicted of the act never really seemed to have any connection with it, which should have been obvious in the administration of justice that's impartial.  While the perpetrator has never been identified, there are strong suspicions about who was responsible, and it seems very clear that very radical elements were responsible.

Scary times in the US, to say the least. This came in the midst of  the mobilization of the National Guard, a raging war in Europe, and a nearly universal belief that the United States and Mexico would soon be at war.

Friday Farming: Women's Land Army

Another example of the US Women's Land Army during World War One.

Oh I know, you've heard that women first worked outside the home during World War Two.  Ain't true.

Lex Anteinternet: Retirement

I ran this item back in March of 2014:

Lex Anteinternet: Retirement: If you are in business, or read business news, or listen to any type of commentary at all, you're going to hear a lot about retirem...

Something that I wasn't aware of then, and have only learned recently, is that the average American retirement age falls in between 58 years old and 62 years of age.  62 is when the generational cohort I'm in can first take Social Security, which explains part of that.

But not all of it.

Ill health, whether it be the natural or unnatural deterioration of the body, and mental factors, including the natural deterioration of the mind in some circumstances, or the cumulative impact of years of stress on others, or unemployment of older workers, all play a significant factor.  In this way, perhaps, we're closer to earlier generations in regards to the close out of our work years than we might suppose.

It's interesting, but perhaps natural, that we've come to associate "retirement age" with age 65, which for generations has been the age at which a person is fully eligible for Social Security.  Interestingly, that same age was adopted by the Canadian government for its full retirement.  65 is not the age for post Boomer retirees in these regards in the US any longer, however.  In my generational cohort its age 67.  In the UK it was age 65 for men and age 60 for women for eons, although that is going up.  65 is common in many European countries as well, as are differential ages for men and women, with women's uniformly being younger where the ages are not the same.  So, we have to assume that placing retirement in the 60s is for a real reason, as so many nations do it.  After all, if countries as divergent as Vietnam (60 men/55 women) and Ireland (66 men and women) take this approach, it must mean something.

It doesn't mean that a person will be in super health, or even capable of working, at that age, however.  Retirement sites like to show healthy couples in their 60s enjoying life in exciting ways, but many people by their late 50s are in pretty darned bad shape.

All of which may mean nothing at all, or which may be serious food for thought.

Mid Week At Work: Saddle Trees, Ben Schroeder Saddle Tree Company.

Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: Write What You Know or Write Romance

Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: Write What You Know or Write Romance: Write what you know. The old cliché, so often seen on writing sites but now I am reading that is not necessary to know what you write.  In...

Monday at the Bar: Trouble in the legal profession hits the CST.

 Depiction of trial by combat, with combatants properly aligned to give each smiling combatant the advantage of the sun, unbekannter mittelalterlicher Künstler - Dresdener Bilderhandschrift des Sachselspiegels, hrsg. v. Karl v. Amira, Leipzig 1902, Neudruck hrsg. v. Heinrich Lück, Graz 2002.  From Wikipedia Commons.  This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.

I've written more than once about the reports of distress amongst legal practitioners here on this site.  Most recently I did that in an item on Alcohol and the Law.  In some of those I've been a little skeptical about what I was reading, but I've reached the point where the evidence seems sufficiently overwhelming (although there are a few doubters) that I'll concede its correct.

Indeed recently I've had a couple of odd instances in which this topic has come up in one fashion or another.  For one, I was sitting waiting for a deposition to commence when an out of state lawyer, a super friendly fellow, started talking about it (the topic came sort of out of the blue and I really don't know how it came up).  He went on a long litany of the statistics, it was like reading a journal article on it, about the topic, going into addictions lawyers have to alcohol, drugs, women, etc. and how destructive it was.  And this from opposing counsel.  I hard knew what to make of it, frankly. 

Anyhow, this past weekend Casper Star Tribune columnist Joan Barron, who is a CST columnist whom I really like, had an article on the Wyoming state program.  I was truly surprised, but I'll give credit to her and to the state bar for trying to publicize what they're doing.  Her article had this interesting set of observations in it:

Some people regards lawyers as rich fat cats in suits who don’t deserve sympathy. Some lawyers are well-off, but the average salary isn’t that stunning.

And they are the professionals people turn to when they are in trouble. They also are the men and women assigned to defend indigents, who have no other options.

Think Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” admittedly a romantic and idealist portrait of a small-town lawyer. Or the more realistic case of the late Gov. Ed Herschler of Kemmerer, who neglected his solo practice to appeal successfully to the U.S Supreme Court the death sentence of a transient he had been assigned to defend, a man he disliked.

She goes on to detail that there were apparently four lawyer suicides in recent years, of which only one was openly that and the others disguised.  I know the guy who had the open one, and indeed, I was in a hearing against him the day prior in which he asked for an extension in his case, which I agreed to.  I've felt horrible about it ever since as it makes me feel like I opened the door up a bit as it gave that case a window for a replacement lawyer it wouldn't have otherwise.

Anyhow,  the article details the new Wyoming State Bar program, which apparently all state bars or at least nearly all of them now have.  It's good that the state bar has one, but I have to wonder how effective these things are.

That's for a variety of reasons, but I'll be frankly that I have come to view a lot of psychological problems as a combination of environmental and organic.  I'll fully conceded that our DNA's in our fallen state set us up for a lot of problems.  But I also think we've created a world which we're not really very well suited to live in, and that includes, I fear, our legal system.  We have an adversarial system, which is not only well known, but celebrated in the law.  The thesis is that the courtroom substitution for trial by combat of old serves to bring out the truth to the jury.  Maybe it does, although I truly have my doubts about that, but what it also does is to put a premium on combat, and all combat takes it toll on the combatants.

 Wounded British soldiers, World War One.  Note the stare of the man on the bottom left of photo.

I suspect that's in part what happens to some of the lawyers who end up in needing the help referenced above.  Years of judicial combat, financial strains, and simply the everyday pleas for help get to them.  I've known a few that seem to have run into such trouble and did indeed take refuge in the wrong places, booze, women, or whatever.  And I've also known a few who seemed to have developed very harsh personalities.

I won't claim to know what the solution to these things is.  Some people end up seeking help in medicine, and they likely should.  But this all takes me back to something I've mused about here before.  I have to wonder about our having built a world that we don't seem fit to live in, and about also creating, as part of that world, a legal system that seems to be going after the well being of some of those employed in it.  Why are we doing that?

 New York lawyers, 1916.

Addressing the legal system alone, what we should note is that technology and advances in communication, while the law believes that it has improved it, hasn't improved the life of lawyers one bit but, if anything, its made it infinitely worse.  If we go back to the year we've been focusing on so much here recently, 1916, most lawyers would have been either solo practitioners or small firm lawyers practicing locally and relying on the mail for communication. Some would have had phones by 1916, but many would not have. Local affairs would principally have been the ones they were involved with, although as we know from very old entries here even in the early 20th Century some Wyoming trial lawyers had state wide practices.  But in those state wide practices they still had to rely on the mail and they traveled principally by train, and occasionally by horse.  

That's quite a bit different from what I see now all the time, which is lawyers flying across country to attend one thing, and checking on others from their Iphone while they are there.  

Technology can't be put back in the box.  But things can be done.  And one of those things is to recognize that law, like politics, is all local. And that would mean discouraging or even preventing the erasure of the the state borders in the practice of law.  But the trend is going the other way.  Our Supreme Court has been complicit in flooding the state courts with out of state lawyers who are sometimes hyper aggressive while also not understanding the local rules and customs.  It's dragging the practice down a level or two and not aiding the practice here a bit.  A partial fix to this problem would be to restore the old rules that you can only practice where you have actually passed a real state bar, not something like the UBE, and that you must actually have some business connection with the state where you are practicing.

Additionally, maybe something should be done to take a page out  of European systems that are more inquiry based than ours.  If litigation is a search for the truth, maybe it ought to actually be a search for the truth.

Finally, maybe something has to be done about he process of legal education.  Indeed, this gets us to the topic of education in general, but again and again I'm struck by how we have a system that's largely designed to recruit the ignorant and burden them with expenses while being educated by individuals who know very little about actual practice. That has to mean that there are people recruited who are not suited for the endeavor.  Once a person is out of law school they're qualified to do exactly one thing, and one thing only, practice law.  Maybe they ought to have a taste of that practice simply as a qualifier to even enter law school, before they do.

Jeep celebrates its history.

We noted the 75th anniversary of the issuance of the contract for the 1/4 ton truck, that came to be known as the Jeep, here the other day. 

Well, not too surprisingly, Jeep has a really nice feature on its website celebrating its own history.

Well worth taking a look at, and not only on the 1/4 ton models, but on the other Jeep brand vehicles that have been made over the years.

Lex Anteinternet: The Coup in Turkey. Perhaps not as disturbing as s...

Hmmm, so the coup failed, but will Turkish democracy survive?

Arrest warrants have also been issued for at least 2,745 judges and prosecutors across the country, according to Turkish media reports.

From the Washington Post.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. John's Episcopal Church, Jackson Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. John's Episcopal Church, Jackson Wyoming:

These photographs, taken in waning light, depict St. John's Episcopal Church in Jackson, Wyoming. There are actually two churches on the location, with this one being the new church built in 1995.

The photographs that appear below are the second church, built in 1916. This church is on the same half block as the 1995 church.  So here we have something that fits nicely into the 1916 theme we've been exploring this year.

The Coup in Turkey. Perhaps not as disturbing as some would have it.

As most folks following the news know, an element of Turkey's armed forces attempted to overthrow the government yesterday.

One piece of news analysis I read stated:

The military action, the results of which are still unclear, took Turkey out of Europe and placed it squarely in the Middle East. It tore away the country's stability, replacing polarization with what could end up being outright civil war, whether the coup succeeds or not.

Oh bull.

In fact, the Turkish coup attempt actually reflects a long history in the country of the Army, not the civil government, being the backer of democratic secular government.  The army long distrusted civil authorities not to fall into dangerous factionalism.  It was the Army itself that brought about the downfall of the Ottoman caliphate and made Turkey a secular state.  In recent years the presidency of  Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist, was making many in the west nervous but also making some wonder how it was that the Turkish army was actually standing aside and not intervening.  Now some have tried.

Indeed the real danger, which the article above did acknowledge, is that the Erdogan reaction to the coup may actually make it a real Middle Eastern nation.  Endrogan has been problematic all along as it stands counter to Turkey's secular traditions and always scared people into wondering if he might try to make Turkey into a more Islamic state.  Some of his backers are now blaming Fethullah Gülen, a moderate Sunni mullah, for inspiring the coup. This seems to be without backing, but its is worrisome as Gülen is truly a religious moderate of the type that Westerners always hope will inspire moderation in the Islamic world. That Erdogan backers would blame him is distressing as it brings one Islamic group, one in power, into contest with another which is more moderate.

Turkey is under a lot of stress right now, to say the least.  That some in the army attempted to rise up isn't that surprising.  The Turkish army has overthrown the government quite a few times before.  That the coup failed is also a good thing, as is the fact that the entire Turkish military didn't join in.  It shows that Turkey may have truly matured into a modern democracy. . . depending upon what its reaction to this event is.

Who the heck are these people. . .and what are they fighting for?

 Islamic Army in India.

Again and again in the past few years the Western world has been hit be spectacular terrorist strikes.  With each such strike, a brief burst of straight reporting occurs, to be followed by anguished analyzing that seeks to explain, and explain away, the terrorist strike.

Not every single act, it is pointed out, is organized or directed by a central enemy authority.  But that does not mean that there is not a singular consistent thread to them, and that's the single most glaring deficiency in our failure to understand the people who are attacking us.

In the US every attack, save for that which occurred on 9/11, is explained away in psychological terms or passed off as a conventional crime.  It can't be the case, we believe, that any sane person really wishes to harm us.  They must, therefore, be insane.

And, indeed, many of them may be, or perhaps are partially, or are perhaps otherwise deluded.

In the Middle Ages when the Norsemen descended on Northern Europe among their most fierce combatants were Beserkers. 

The dude on the right is a Berserker.

Berserkers fought with wild fierce abandon.  Indeed, they give us the world "beserk".  There are many theories about how they worked themselves into such a frenzy, and nobody really knows.  But one that should be noted, and seemingly rarely is, is that maybe they were just nutty and the Norse were employing their nuttiness for their own purpose.

This wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility or even that uncommon. Throughout man's long history there are plenty of instances of the nutty, distressed, or deluded being employed in combat.  It isn't that novel.  And for that matter a cause sometimes attracts people who are disturbed and distressed. Again, examples abound.  What better way for a malignant personality to justify his hatred then by linking into to a campaign of hatred?  Do we believe that everyone, for example, who was in the SS had just been convinced by Nazi ideology, or do we accept that some were just sickos who used that as an excuse?  Did every Red murderer in the revolutionary Russia really feel a hard devotion to the proletariat, or were some just nasty creeps?  What about Baron Ungern-Sternberg of the Russian Civil War.  Did his devotion to the Whites cause him to do all those creepy acts, or was something else going on?

The distressing Baron Ungern-Sternberg of the Russian Civil War.

All of which is to suggest this.  Yes, there's some real whackos who attach themselves to warfare, and they aren't always directed by a central authority.  But that doesn't mean that the combating authority doesn't adopt their actions or give them motivation to act.  Yes, Berserkers were berserk, and not all Norsemen were by any means. But they used them.  And not every German was a pathological hater of Jews, but that didn't mean that the Nazi government couldn't find employment for those who were.  You get the point.

And the wider point is that movements that adopt and excuse such behavior define themselves by it.  Some German soldiers were nothing more than clerks wanting to go home.   But the Nazis were evil.  Most Norsemen were farmers at heart, but their viking raids by which they are remembered were truly murderous.

We have now seen, in North America, a repeated series of attacks by people who claim allegiance to a hard line Islamic theology.  It's easy to say "oh, they're sick", but that's a risky assumption.  Not all are, likely.  And these attacks are accompanied by deadly ones in Europe.  In a little under a month we've seen one man claim allegiance to ISIL and strike a bar in Florida. While were looking for the reason and rejecting the one he gave, and wondering if trying to disarm the American public might be the solution, and even deadlier attack followed up in Nice France. 

Ban the truck?

That's not going to work.

Send them all in for psychoanalysis?  That's not going to work either.

Maybe we ought to start with just acknowledging what's going on.  An element of Islam is at war with us.  No, not every element.  And not every Muslim either.  But some are, and its more than a handful.  And, like it or not, they're amongst the most observant and hardcore.  They may also be way off the mark in their own interpretation of Islam. But pretending that they don't have one, and that those who answer that call are simply insane, is in error.

Happy (one day late) birthday Jeep!

 

Well, sort of.

The contract to produce the 1/4 Ton truck was given by the United States on July 15 in 1941. The contract went to Willys whose principal competitor for the contract was Bantam.  As it was, Ford would end up getting a contract to produce the Willys variant as well.

We've written about Jeeps a fair amount here.  It's become a 4x4 standard and the Jeep has outlasted all of its competitors, surviving competition from numerous companies that made near Jeeps. Willys didn't last however, and the brand has gone from company to company.  Still, the modern Jeep looks a whole lot like the original, even though improvements have definitely been made over the years.  Truly an amazing vehicle.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Jackson Wyoming

 All in all, maybe I'm just one of those guys who is most comfortable at home.

I posted a comment on this item on Wyoming Fact and Fiction the other day:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Jackson Wyoming: At times I have people say to me, “Jackson, that’s not even Wyoming, I hate it when people come to Wyoming and only visit Jackson Hole, Yel...

Now, by way of background, at the time  I posted it, I was getting ready to head out on depositions in Jackson.  When this appears, I will just be back from them.

 The view out of my recent hotel room.  This is how I see a lot of places.  But one hotel room, as long as its fairly decent, is pretty similar to any other.  At least in Jackson, where I know my way around, I operate mostly on foot and get in some walking.

Oh, how neat, is the common reaction to something like that, but traveling for legal work, at least for me, is not at all the same as traveling for fun.  That might not be apparent to the folks who stop in here, as I post a lot of photographs that derive from that travel, and that probably makes it look like a lot of fun.  But, placed in context, I left Casper around 8:00 am on Monday, drove to Big Piney, worked there, and then drove to Jackson, and worked that night.  I worked every day and night after that.  So, by the end of the trip, what I'd seen was mostly the Snow King hotel, where I stayed (which is a nice hotel) and the route where I walked to depositions, and then inside of the law firm where their depos were taken (a very famous firm, fwiw).

Very nice conference room of very well known law firm. That's my large briefcase.  It is not well known.  My old beat up one, however, had a reputation of its own.

Folks who see my entries on Facebook, which are not numerous, would have seen a couple of photographs of glasses of beer from the Snake River Brew Pub, where I ate a couple of times.  It was on the way to and from the depositions.  Easy to get to for a guy who isn't driving.  When in Jackson, I generally walk, as it's hard to find a parking spot.

Glass of Snake River beer.  I never drove to the pub, I walked.  That's not too unusual for me, however.  Once in Portland I walked several miles everyday to depositions as I didn't have a rental car.

Now, I'll be frank that not everyone experiences their work travel this way.  I've been a lot of places for work where I never saw a thing, and I know that this is very common.  I've been to Houston a lot of times, but I've never seen the USS Texas.  I've been to Dallas and haven't seen the sites.  And so on.  I'm focused on work for work travel, as I'm working.  Maybe too focused, according to some people who know me and worry about me.  But that's what most work travel is like.  Having said that, I will hear from some traveling lawyers who go do fun things where they go, depending upon what their view of fun is.  I'm not one of them.

So that taints my view of Jackson, as a lot of the times that I'm up here, that's why I'm up here.

Snow in the Tetons, as viewed from my hotel room.

But I also don't like it much as its so touristy, and things touristy always strike me as fake.  That's why I like places like Maui better than Oahu.   I'm not keen on touristy places, as I don't like fake much.

It isn't that there isn't something real here, or a reflection of the real.  The area itself is beautiful.  The park is real. The wildlife is real.  During hunting season, the hunting is real (although a lot of out of state folks for any one purpose strikes me as strange).  The skiing is real.   The lawyers, the law firms, the courts and the state offices are all very real, and made up of very real people.

But the doormen dressed as cowboys?  That's not real and I know that.  All the young people in their twenties hanging around being cool, for Jackson is like a college town without a college, are at the height of their unreal periods.  I know that those same hipsters in the brew pub with dirty t-shirts and weird hats, sporting hip testators, are going on to be accountants and lawyers and the like, even if they don't know it yet.

And then there's the sad aspect of any tourist town, which Jackson has a lot of.

The hostess in the morning is some sort of Slav.  The tiny pretty girl has an accent so thick (she apologized for it) that I can hardly understand her.  The Arab boy who served coffee can hardly understand what I'm saying.  The local Catholic Church serves a large population of Hispanic immigrants who sit right alongside the very wealthy.  What happens to all these displaced people?  What happens to a girl who lives the Ukraine (or wherever) and ends up in a really expensive tourist town? Can the Mexican families find a decent place to live in this super expensive region in which they are employed in construction and the service industry?  Do their lives work out?

Stuff like that bothers me.

Maybe it shouldn't.  The immigrants have always struck out in hope.  Jackson has been fakey as long ago as the 1940s, as The Cocktail Hour in Jackson Hole illustrates.  Maybe the Ukrainian girls' fate isn't really that much different from any other young persons' at that age, certainly her looks are in her favor anyhow.

So maybe I just think about it too much.

Pacific Aero Products incorporated: July 15, 1916

Pacific Aero Products incorporated by William Boeing in Seattle Washington.  The company would later be changed to be named after its founder.

Where have all the farmers gone?

Recently we posted an item about a conference in Wyoming seeking to address the increasingly high age of farmers and ranchers. Naturally, in this day and age, the conference seems to be focused on technology as the solution.

It isn't.

Land prices are the big problem.  Technology, oddly enough, is also a problem.  But land is the huge one, with prices driven up and up by various conspiring factors in our economy, improvements in transportation, the concentration of wealth, and the enormous increase in population over the decades.  I.e., in 1916 a person still needed a pretty substantial investment to get into agriculture, but it wasn't impossible and you could still homestead.  Now, you might be able to scrape and invest for the tools of the trade, but land is priced so high, there's no earthly way in much of the country you can actually make a living at it, if you have to buy land.  This is certainly the case for ranching anyhow.  You can't buy a ranch, if  you want to be a real rancher, and ever pay the land off or even make a living on it.

That's what agricultural conferences address.

Wringing hands over youth not entering agriculture won't solve any problems at all.  How can they, really?  Unless their family has land, and the family is already dedicated to staying in agriculture or at least not selling the land, their task is daunting and they have to accept never being able to own what they are working.

Not that the golden alternatives are all that great, they're just more obvious. Those "good" "town jobs" that are so often the alternative have plenty of their own problems.  In the ones where you actually own things, there are all sorts of problems associated with them, they're just less obvious and you have to really be a part of them to know what their downsides are.  Your dentist, doctor, lawyer, accountant, or whatever, isn't going to really tell you the bad sides of what  he's doing.  His incentive is completely in the opposite direction.

Not that it has to be this way. This actually can be addressed, we just won't do it.  Land prices for agricultural land could be depressed overnight by restricting the ownership of it to people who make a living from it.  That would change it, as most of your out of state executives that fly in to "their ranch" aren't going to walk out of their offices for ever to take up the life of a real agriculturalist.

The problem with that, however, is that doing this is deeply contrary to the American concept of "I can do anything I want" and "I can own anything I want".  Those values made a lot of sense, quite frankly, in the world of 1916 for the US. They're pretty obviously false in the world of 2016.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: SIDETRACKED

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: SIDETRACKED: Sidetracked Often, okay, way too often, I get distracted when doing research. This was just too good to pass up. Yesterday I was lookin...

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: Bastille Day in Paris

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: Bastille Day in Paris: One hundred years ago, despite having its army deeply involved in a double death-struggle – both at Verdun and on the Somme – the cele...

What is Pokemon Go and why would I care?

Just asking.

Roads to the Great War: Major General William S. Graves and the American E...

Roads to the Great War: Major General William S. Graves and the American E...: Contributed by John M. House World War I was in its final months, though no one knew that was the case. One of the Allies was caught i...

Roads to the Great War: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Sold...

Roads to the Great War: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Sold...: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel Princeton University Press, 2010 ...

Posner, Law Schools, and the Constitution

Justice Posner.  Just when he starts saying things you really like, he goes off and says something way off the mark.  Uff.

In the really like category:

I think law schools should be hiring a higher percentage of lawyers with significant practical experience. I think, for example, of Benjamin Kaplan at Harvard Law School, who went into law-teaching after 14 years in practice. There used to be many like that; there are many fewer now, especially at the leading law schools.

Here here!

I don't know anything about Kaplan, and I don't regard fourteen years as a long time (seriously?), but I do agree that law profs all too often have a career of being a law prof.

Too often professors have careers that read like this:

Professor Escargot graduated from Big Law School and then went through the front and back door of Leget, Leget, and Lex on a Thursday.   While there he said "ooo, ick, the law is hard. . . "  After that, he started teaching at Blogordorp School of Law where his trial experience (he saw all the episodes of LA Law on Netflix) trained him for. . . 

I think law profs should have a background of actually practicing, and indeed some do.  A good twenty years under their belt should be a minimum, in my view.  And I think that teaching law should be something it requires admission to the bar to do, in the state where you are teaching.

So Posner is right on the mark on this one.

But then he goes off and says this:

And on another note about academia and practical law, I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation (across the centuries—well, just a little more than two centuries, and of course less for many of the amendments). Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc., of the 21^st century. Which means that the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14^th), do not speak to today. David Strauss is right: The Supreme Court treats the Constitution like it is authorizing the court to create a common law of constitutional law, based on current concerns, not what those 18^th-century guys were worrying about.

In short, let's not let the dead bury the living.

Two centuries? That's nothing in historical terms, Justice Posner.  Shoot, as a member of the bar since 1962 you've actually been practicing law for a statistically significant portion of that time.

However, the "let's not let the dead bury the living" may have some merit, but not the way the Justice meant. Justice Posner is 77 years old and sitting on the bench.  On the current U.S. Supreme Court some of the Justices are so old that they might have been appointed by Lincoln.  If the dead are burying the living, it's the nearly dead hand of justices who are absolutely ancient, including Posner.  I've long maintained there should be a mandatory retirement age for judges of all types, including Supreme Court judges, and I'd set it at 65.  I'd support 60 if I thought anyone would listen to it. And yes, I know that there's a lot of judges who are more than competent at that age, indeed most are. But are they when they are 70?  80?  Age catches up.  One really admirable thing, I think, that a circuit judge did around here awhile back was to retire in his 60s, specifically noting that he wanted to retire while his mind was sharp.  Anyhow, the comment about the dead burying the living is really ironic for a justice who is 77 years old.  While Posner is right on the mark about law professors needing to have practiced, he hasn't practiced himself for years and years, which is one of the downsides of letting Federal judges practice forever.

Not that Posner isn't without a slight point, albeit a very, very slight one.  The Constitution is not holy scripture.  I've heard some speak of it, however, in such reverent tones that I think they truly do, in fact, believe that it's a Divinely inspired document.  Usually these people are laymen.  Most laymen who hold the Constitution in high regards do not go that far, however, but they do awfully darned far.

The United States Constitution is one of the most amazing laws in the history of mankind, and in some vastly distant day, it would be my guess that it stands with the Code of Hammurabi as one of the most significant bodies of law ever written.  It already stands with the Magna Carta in that regards.

But it is a law, and people would do well to really remember that.

Certain people I occasionally run into forget that arguments about applying the Constitution descend into the invalid if they simply become "the founders wrote it." So what?  I'd agree with Posner that far, but only that far.

Even that sounds harsh, but indeed, so what. They also wrote in slavery as part of the Constitution.  The document was flawed enough that they had to go back and put in a bunch of amendments right off the bat in order to really protect individual liberties, and it wasn't until decades later that the document was read to protect those liberties from both Federal and State intrusion.

Now, I'm not arguing for ignoring the Constitution, as Posner is at least somewhat suggesting be done.  Not at all.  I'm actually for interpreting it according to the original meaning, granted that this does require some development for some things that simply didn't exist at the time.  I frankly think that's a much easier exercise than many let on, and I do not respect courts taking liberty with the document, including the United States Supreme Court, which quite recently has done just that.  So I guess I'm actually taking the opposite approach to Posner.  I feel you have to do that, as otherwise the law has no structure and becomes the property of nine ancient justices who are not democratically elected and who are immune from the direct influence of the people.  In some ways, therefore, the Constitution stands as the shield of the people against the legislatures and against the Justices themselves, although applying them to it by getting them to correctly apply it can be difficult.

I feel that if you don't like the results or correctly applying the Constitution you have an option; amend it, or pass a law where you can.  Arguing about the meaning at that point isn't the correct road, as that does violence to the document and renders it meaningless.  If you are upset that the document provides for the protection of privately held firearms (and it does), or that it doesn't mandate same gender marriage (and in spite of what five justices recently declared, it does not), your remedy is at the ballot box, not with some fanciful interpretation of the document or the courts.

I am also a bit tired of those who find secret meanings in the document.  A fair number of people seem to have read a secret Constitution which enshrines all sorts of things meaningful to them, but which aren't in the documents.  As a person heads towards extremes, this becomes more and more common.  Some people argue that the document is paced full of "rights", or restrictions on the Federal government which simply are not there.  Indeed, some seem to feel that the document either restricts the Federal government from operating at all, or that it enshrines any rights that you can imagine as long as you can imagine them.

I don't mean to pick on the right or the left here.  But I am arguing that the Constitution is a much simpler document than many imagine, and that it is a law.  No laws are prefect, and it isn't either.  It shouldn't be easily amended, to be sure, but it certainly can be amended.  Arguing for vague secret or implied meanings, of any kind, don't do the document or society, as a democratic society, any justice.

But as a foundational document, its absolutely excellent. And I do have a lot more faith that the serious set of individuals who drafted it are people whose hands I'd rather be in, whether or not they are now dead, than nine unelected justices who can't seem to get around to retiring.

Note:  Last week Posner apologized for his remarks on the Constitution.

Sunday Morning Scene: First Baptist Church, Jackson Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Jackson Wyoming:

This is the First Baptist Church in Jackson Wyoming. The photograph was taken in poor light, but the church is an impressive modern wooden
structure.

The 1916 Olympics?

June 8, 1913, parade for the opening of the Deutsches Stadium in Berlin, the intended Olympic stadium for the 1916 Olympics

There's something about Olympic games that are supposed to occur in Germany, or that do.  They seem to be afflicted by hideous history. 

The Olympics are held, as we well know, every four years.  And we've recently run a post on an early Olympic game in the context of golf being part of the early games, but having later been omitted, and now returning.  People of a mathematical bent could easily deduce, of course, that there should be a 1916 set of games. Was there?  No. Why not?

Well, of course, World War one.

Those games were supposed to be in Berlin, but they obviously couldn't be held due to the Great War.  The Germans had built a stadium and everything for it, in Berlin, and they'd dedicated it in 1913 in anticipation of the games.

Well, they didn't come off.  No worries, they did get games eventually.

In 1936.

That set of games is infamous as the Nazi government of Germany tried to use it as a Nazi showcase. Well, I should not say "tried".  They did.  And while we remember the instances in which American athletes did well, the whole thing really was pretty much a Nazi hootenanny.  Not good.

Some of thought everyone should have refused to attend, but that wouldn't have really been realistic in context, and the boycott of the Moscow games in 1980 didn't exactly achieve much.  

After World War Two, the West Germans, in part hoping to point out how much they'd reformed, asked for and received the 1972 Olympics. Those where held in Munich.  And, as those who are old enough to remember will recall, those Olympics were marred by the Black September terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes which resulted in seventeen deaths, if we count the five Palestinian terrorist who died in the event.  One German policeman also died.  The rest were Israeli athletes or coaches.  

Anyhow, there were no Olympics in 1916.  The horror of the Great War prevented them from occurring.

The German cargo submarine Deutschland docked in Baltimore. July 9, 1916

American ports were open to ships of all countries as the United States was a neutral nation.  Germany's simply couldn't get to US ports in 1916.

Submarines could, and therefore the Germans actually constructed the Deutschland, a cargo submarine, which completed its first Atlantic crossing to the US on July 9, 1916.  The crew was celebrated due to the novelty of its passage.  It would make one additional crossing prior to the United States entering World War One. Amazingly, the submarine, even after being converted to a fighting vessel, survived the war.

Roads to the Great War: Are You a Victim of Optimism?

Roads to the Great War: Are You a Victim of Optimism?: Selections from the Wipers Times Source:  The BBC History Website

Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M3 Grant. Part 2

Wyoming should adopt subsistance hunting regulations

Alaska has them.

Canada also has them for "first nation" and Metis hunters.

Subsistance huning is hunting which is, by definition, hunting "for the pot" or "for the freezer".  That is, it acknowledges that the hunter is hunting in order to provide himself food for the year.

Now, truth be known, much hunting in the US is of this type anyhow.  People tend to focus on "trophy hunting", which in the case of big game animals (which is the only type of game it applies to) means animals with impressive antlers, but most hunters actually don't hunt in that fashion.  Most actually are hunting for meat.  You always have to use the meat that you take, of course, so trophy hunting is mixed purpose anyhow.

So, then, what's my point?

Well, the following is.

This year, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, I did not draw an antelope tag.  I've been hearing from friends about not drawing them the past several years, but I was, so I didn't pay too much attention to it.  I could have put in for a landowners tag but I didn't (maybe I should check and see if I still can), but assured by the past that I'd draw, as I always have, I didn't worry too much. 

Well, I flat out didn't draw.

In Wyoming you get to put in for three areas, so what this means is that not only did I not draw, but all three of my choices didn't pan out. 

Now, to put this in context, antelope has been part of my diet now for almost forty years.  For a time in the 1980s and early 1990s, antelope and deer (and maybe elk) provided 100% of the ungulate meat that I consumed in a year, with protein supplemented in the form of rabbit, duck, grouse and fish.  I.e., it was my subsistence.  This only changed when I married, as at that point my ranch girl wife insisted that we incorporate beef, which she was much more used to.  If we could go back and omit the beef (which I like, I'm not complaining) and only do the wild game, I'd do it.

Indeed, I like antelope, a meat that quite a few people complain about. The complainers, in my observation, wreck it by trying to prepare it like beef, which does do it in.  Treated as its own thing, it's good.  In fact, when I first started having beef again, after years of not having it as I was hunting for all my meat, beef tasted rather odd.  I later read that Plains Indians, when they started receiving beef rations, had the same reaction as I did. Beef was too sweet.

Anyhow, this year I didn't draw.  I may be able to pick up a left over tag, but I might not be able to.  It depends on whether I have time that day to apply, and given my schedule, I likely won't.

I did draw an elk tag, but elk are hard to get and most years I don't have ample time to devote to it.  I always go, but I fill out only about 1/3d of the time.

So the whole thing is really disappointing.

So why didn't I draw?

Well, I suppose a variety of reasons. One likely is that the population of the state has grown over the past decade, thanks in part to the oil boom we were having and in part to the uniquely weird American view that any country in the world is capable of having the population infinitely expand without that place eventually become a hideous blight, like Denver.  Now, before I'm accused of things, I'm not advocating all sorts of social engineering and persona pharmaceuticals (which I oppose), but rather noting that a country really can't sanely take in 1,000,000 immigrants every year without it looking, eventually,  like the hideous blight of Denver Colorado.

Part of it too, however, is that the state sells quite a few out of state tags, and antelope tags are a popular one.

Now, I'm not opposed to out of state hunters coming in here to hunt. And I understand that its important for our economy. But I frankly do think that the state ought to heavily favor the local residents.  All states should, in what ever they have.  I don't expect Alaska to give me the same rights in halibut fishing that natives would have.  I don't expect Nebraska to favor me with the same waterfowl hunting opportunities it gives its citizens.  I don't expect Colorado to favor me in. . . um. . . well I can't think of anything that I might compete with a Coloradoan in, in Colorado, but if there was, I'd expect the residents of the hideous blight to have rights to it over me.

If that sounds like favoritism, it is, of a type.  It's localism, and it conceded the nature of local resources.  It's also a species of agrarianism in this context.

Of course, what does that really mean?  

Well, I think Wyoming can and should take a page out of the Canadian playbook, or the Alaskan one, here.  If you have held, I'd say, Wyoming big game permits for a consistent ten years, and if you put in for antlerless as well as antlered in that time, your application should be weighted so that, after the first round of draws are done, those who have not drawn in this category, and who have put in for a classification of "subsistence hunter", should have their applications gone back over and if they didn't draw, they should have their licenses then bump out any anterless out of state, or second license (we have those too) drawn by a resident hunter, so that they get one.  

It would be fair, and it would be based on what hunting is really about.

I'd make that apply, I note, to all game animals.  Yes, I understand that might mean that somebody from Ohio who put in for a high dollar elk tag doesn't draw, but it probably won't mean that as it's probably the case that Ohioans don't put in for cow tags.  But if it did mean that, oh well.  Its fair and it focuses things on the very point of why we hunt.

Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M3 Grant. Part 1

Roads to the Great War: Lucien Jonas: Master War Illustrator

Roads to the Great War: Lucien Jonas: Master War Illustrator: By Tony Langley Jonas at Work Painting Indian Soldiers Lucien Jonas was one of the more prolific Great War illustrators. A gifted...

Roads to the Great War: The Plattsburg Movement Where General Pershing Fou...

Roads to the Great War: The Plattsburg Movement Where General Pershing Fou...: General Pershing's full expeditionary force was to be over four million men by 1919, requiring hundreds of thousands of officers....

Roads to the Great War: A Surprising Newspaper Headline from 1 January 1914

We've looked a lot in 2016 at the Punitive Expedition of 1916. But, of course, the crisis with Mexico started before that.  Here's an interesting example of how things were developing before the events of 1916.

Roads to the Great War: A Surprising Newspaper Headline from 1 January 191...: Click on Image to Expand On New Year's Day in 1914 there was simply no awareness in the United States that an unprecedented ...

Tracking the Presidential Election Part VIII. Is there a Brexit lesson for the US election?

There were a lot of early comments about what the British vote to depart the EC means in the context of the US election, and my early view was "no". But in looking at it, and events around the glove, I'm not so sure now and I think there might be something to the suggestion that the vote reflects something going on in the US, and the UK, and indeed perhaps around the world.

In thinking of this, I determined to make this post on it, but sure enough by the time I got ready to do it, at least two national columnist had stolen a bit of my thunder, although to my credit I'd posted on this topic somewhat prior to my reading their columns already.  Anyhow one of the columnist was George F. Will, who wrote an excellent column on the Brexit vote. The other columnist was Susan Stamper Brown.  

A comment of Brown's which mirrors something I posted in my post, was:

It's hard for elitists to comprehend that the commoners they seek to control aren't obsessed with money and power the same way they are. Ordinary people care more about freedom, their kids' future and their country than they care about the mighty Euro or dollar. 

Indeed, I think that's a lot of it.

One of the distraught comments I saw in some columnist's article was the suggestion that the British had voted "for the past".  Maybe, but maybe note, and maybe if they did, there's a lesson in there as well.  Maybe there were things about the past that they liked better than current times, or the future they were headed in.  No "future" is inevitable unless we choose it to be, and if we're headed towards one we don't like, we should change directions.

Will rejects the proposal that the British were voting against history and noted:

By breaking the leftward-clicking ratchet that moves steadily, and only, toward more “pooled” sovereignty and centralization of power, Brexit refutes the progressive narrative that history has an inexorable trajectory that “experts” discern and before which all must bow. The E.U.’s contribution to this fable is its vow to pursue “ever-closer union.” Yes, ever .

Will interestingly also cited Nicolas Sarkozy, on French sovereignty, to the effect that, France was “born of the baptism of Clovis,” and is“a country of churches, cathedrals, abbeys and shrines.” 

The point of this is that people might simply not want what European and American politicians have consistently acted to give them since World War Two.  Seemingly at first they did, but starting in the early 80s, after they had a dose of it, the better evidence is that they no longer desire it. And what that "it" is, is a fully integrated global economy and the globalism that goes with it. Elites have assumed that everyone will be happier with an world that increasingly resembles a cubicle farm, and that everyone wants to live in some version of a bland  big urban area.  One big economic unit with one big boring culture and the goal being to make as much money as you can, so you can live in your bland urban apartment equipped with Netflix.

It turns out, however, that people like their countries and they like their cultures, and they want to keep them.  People  would like to go to the corner pub or bar at the end of the day that's owned by a local, after coming home from their middle class job that might involve turning nuts and bolts.  And they'd like to think that their kids can work those jobs in those towns as well.  It also turns out, as part of that, that people aren't all that keen about shipping out manufacturing jobs to "developing countries".  Not everyone wants to work in a global version of a Microsoft office, and people miss their old farm towns and their blue collar manufacturing jobs.  The promise of a big box world doesn't entice them much.

And it never did.

Nor, really, should it. That benefits mostly the elite themselves who do value money over anything else, it would seem.  Or perhaps only understand that.

This has reflected itself in the Brexit vote.  And it has shown up in the US election in the form of a populist insurgency in both parties.  On the European mainland, it has shown up in the form of rising support of right wing parties mild and extreme.  And of course, the extreme elements that are showing up, including in the current US election, have tended to do so as the concerns mentioned above have been held down by those in power so long that to some extent they've festered and come out in an extreme form.

Where this ultimately goes, of course, nobody knows.  But what it might suggest is that there's something out there that should be given more of the light of day and hasn't. Perhaps the old ideas of Chesterton and Belloc, that were tamped down in the interest of supporting the war effort in  World War Two, deserve to be really considered.  An economic and political economy based more on the locals and principals of subsidarity seem to address the real concerns of average people a lot more than the big concepts of globalism do and are better calculated towards really maximizing people's chances for happy lives.  Unfortunately, they don't get much discussion.

I'm not going to bother with a "tale of the tape" on this one, as this is likely a one off comment post, or if it isn't, unless something surprising happens, there's no real reason to address that topic again until the conventions start, at which time new posts will be entered.

Followup 

In the election year that just won't keep from being bizarre we were treated today with the spectacle of the FBI criticizing Hillary Clinton for her email situation in no uncertain terms, but also finding that there is nothing to indict her on.  Anyway it is sliced, the news is good for Donald Trump.  Outside of her actually being indicted it actually couldn't be any better.


Part of that, of course, is the incredibly boneheaded move of Loretta Lynch actually visiting for about thirty minutes with Bill Clinton in Lynch's airplane on a tarmac where both happened to be.  It couldn't look worse.

I don't actually mean to suggest that the FBI's conclusion is incorrect or that Lynch was engaging in improper conduct, but what a gift to Trump.  I doubt it will be enough to turn the election around for him, but it sure doesn't help Clinton, even if she is elected. She will likely not be able to live this down in the minds of at least some sections of the electorate that already distrust her.

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part II

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part III Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Tracking the Presidential Election Part IV

Tracking the Presidential Election Part V

Tracking the Presidential Election Part VI. The wobbly Democratic Party. 

Tracking the Presidential Election Part VII

The Crisis Passed. July 5, 1916

The news, reported in various fashions, was in fact correct. While the Guard continued to be mobilized, the danger that war would break out with Mexico had passed. 

Having said that, the European crisis clearly was ongoing.