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

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What is Pokemon Go and why would I care?

Just asking.

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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?

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