The Jurisdictional Agony of the D. C. Circuit. Wolves

I'm really sick of the  Federal District of Columbia judicial circuit.

What brings this comment about is the decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson that the plan worked on seemingly forever by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the State of Wyoming allowing the state to assume control over the management of wolves in Wyoming failed as the reliance upon Wyoming's regulatory scheme was "arbitrary and capricious."

Now, to be fair to Judge Jackson, what is being missed in this decision is that the holding of the Court was very limited.  The court upheld nearly everything that the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service did, and really the only thing that the Court found fault with was that, in its words:

.

The record reflects that the FWS specifically relied on the representations in the Addendum as the basis for its conclusion that Wyoming would do what the agency has determined it must do:  manage above the 10/100 minimum.  The Court finds that under those circumstances the reliance on mere assurances was inappropriate and it rendered the FWS decision arbitrary and capricious.

The rest of the opinion upholds everything that the Fish & Wildlife Service did. The judge's opinion, while I feel it is in error, isn't exactly hostile or shocking.  The impact, however, of the opinion is enormous.  A process that has taken years to develop, which allows the State of Wyoming to manage the wolf population, and which allows wolves to be taken as predators outside of their recovery area, and managed through hunting in the recovery era, has been upset for at least the second time.  This now means that in the entire state stockmen are once again at the mercy of wolves, and cannot do anything really if wolves prey on their livestock.  And it means the employees of the State who are working in this area are now surplus to their agencies (last time the new head of this project, for the state, who had been the head for the FWS, resigned his state position and took a position with the Federal government again), and the FWS must not involve itself and its personnel once again.

That's the impact, but if the judge's ruling isn't patently in error, what is my complaint?

Well, what my compliant is that with the D. C. Circuit, the states, and their residents, have to put up with being judged by a jurist with no connection to the state at all, in a remote locality, where distance and conditions will never be favorable to a state, and where the jurists inherent knowledge is unlikely to exist on such topics.  Federal courts were set up in individual states for a reason, and there's a reason that the system provides the judges are to be drawn from the states, except, of course as to the  District of Columbia.

The D. C. Circuit was afforded with jurisdiction on suits against states because it was feared that plaintiff's would get "hometowned"  if they were always required to file suit against a state, in the state.  That may have reflected the conditions in the court system when the law was created, but it no longer does.  Originally, any Federal Court was likely to be far from Washington D. C.  That's still true, but it isn't true that Federal judges sit in remote vacuums in their states.  Being appointed to the Federal bench is a difficult and arduous process, and it isn't the case, and hasn't been for decades, that the Federal judges, who sit for life and who cannot be removed by the states, are likely to be excessively partisan to their states.  The entire Senate sits in review of these judges and its not unusual at all for the Senate to hold up an appointment it doesn't like or to just keep it from occurring. Wyoming has experienced that on one recent occasion, holding up an appointment for so long that ultimately the appointed lawyer withdrew his name and had to restart his process, basically because one party didn't like some things he had supported as a legislator.  On the D. C. Circuit, however, it isn't the case that any state process exist to even get a name to the Senate. The states have no impact.

Its not an accident that groups and organizations that want to go after states invariably file suit in the District of Columbia. Every time they do, they are likely to draw a judge who has no connection, and therefore no life experience based knowledge, on the state they're suing.  Take this judge for example.

This particularly judge graduated from Harvard Law in 1979, making her part of the group of Ivy League Federal jurists that have become so prominent in recent decades.  She worked as a Federal law clear and in the Justice Department up until entering private practice in 1986, which she stayed with until appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2010.  She probably was a really good lawyer, and she does have a fair amount of private practice experience, but not experience here, where her decision will have an impact on everyone.

And because of this background, Harvard Law, law clerk, U.S. Attorney, she's a member of a club that's insulated from the lives of most people most places, and even lawyers west of the Mississippi.   Lawyers here, including the judges, and including the  Federal judges, are not Harvard law graduates and most have had pretty conventional state careers before their appointments.  Frankly, I'd rather have judges like that every time rather than those Harvard pros with rarefied careers.  I'm already of the opinion that generally Ivy League lawyers are a different species of lawyer to start with, and less connected with the real world than the rest of us, and I don't think that's a good thing for a judge.  In recent decades the U.S. Supreme Court has tended to be drawn from this class, which isn't a good thing in my view.  This isn't to say that the Justices are all bad guys, but when people get frustrated as the opinions seem to be so rarefied, and the debate so ethereal, well they should consider the ultimate source of the legal training and experience involved in creating them.  In some former instances some of the lawyers lived some pretty colorful lives, they'd been solders (one had even been a Confederate soldier), politicians (one had been a President), and even entertaining jurist (one carried a handgun frequently out of the concern a jealous husband would catch up with him).  Now, they're less colorful and more remote.

They also aren't likely to be familiar with the hard efforts of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in any fashion, or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

To add to this, D. C. does a lot of whining about not having the full rights that states do, often failing to realize that it is, after all, a Federal reservation and it isn't supposed to be a state.  Here too, however, that shows how obsolete this system is.  It's original purpose largely now gone, there's really no reason that the city can't just be absorbed by a neighboring state for voting purpose and the district completely abolished.  It wouldn't be missed at all, and all of the legal causes and controversies that presently exist within it could just as easily be filed in the native circuit if they were local, or in the proper states if they were not.  Want to sue Wyoming?  Sue it in Wyoming.  Want to sue the Federal government?  Sue it where you live.  Or sue where the controversy actually exists.

Year and years ago, while in law school I worked on an article with Professor Robert Keiter about Wolf Recovery.  While doing that I interviewed the Wyoming's sitting Agriculture secretary, who was not only opposed to reintroduction, but thought it would be stopped.  At that time, I was in favor, but with a caveat.  It wasn't wolves I was worried about, as my thought that the reintroduction of a native species helped secure the ongoing preservation of wildlands, but it was the people that came with the wolves that I worried about.  That is, their backers who didn't live here and who would make it impossible to live with the wolves.  I was proved right on that, and some of those people are the Federal jurist an antiquated court structure provides jurisdiction to, far from the impact of their decisions.

In the U.S., it would be a sign of a pack of interest groups loose in the woods.

In Praise of the Dutch Oven

Ranch cook, early 20th Century, cooking with two dutch ovens. This photo has appeared here before, on a t thread about the speed of cooking.

Dutch ovens are the greatest cooking implement of all time.  If a person had only one cooking implement, it would have to be a cast iron dutch oven.  They'll do everything.

Dutch oven being used as a frying pan, with green peppers, onions and venison, cooked on an outdoor gas range.  Seasoned with seasoning salt, a great easy meal

They make, for example, a great frying pan of the high walled variety, much like that high walled type of frying pan called a "chicken fryer".  Indeed, in the country of their origin, the Netherlands, a type of evolved dutch oven, the braadpan, is mostly used as a frying pan.

Potatoes with skin on, being fried in a dutch oven.

Dutch ovens also make a fine pie tin, and make for excellent pies, if you adjust your cooking time properly. And by properly, we mean double the time.

Clean dutch oven, about to be used as a pie tin.

Pie crust in dutch oven.

Apples in pie shell, prepared in accordance with the recipe found in Patrick McManus' book, Watchyougot Stew.  Bottle of Wyoming Whiskey in the background, for the secret ingrediant.

 

Secret ingredient being poured in, 1.5 shot   Why Wyoming Whiskey?  Well, nobody here likes bourbon and the secret recipe calls for whiskey. We've always used Irish whiskey, but as we had this, and nobody likes bourbon, we used it.

 

Pie crust on top of pie.

Three slices, because, as Mr. Nighlinger allows in the Cowboys, you need two for steam, and one "because your Momma did it that way."

 

Finished pie.

In some English speaking countries, dutch ovens are called casserole dishes, and they can be used for a similar purpose.  Here we have a cast iron enameled dutch oven used in that fashion for what we call an apple cobbler, but which is probably more correctly something else.

Bread bottom, prepared to the Bisquick shortbread recipe, but omitting the sugar.

Bread filling in bottom of pan.

Apple mixture on top of shortbread dough, made exactly to the same recipe as the pie filling.

Shortbread topping, covering apples.

Nearly fnished.

Finished cobbler.

Not surprisingly, they also make a great oven for cooking bread and biscuits, or in a campfire.

 Dutch oven biscuits.

Bread being placed in dutch oven. Sheepherders bread, which is a simple soda bread, is cooked in this fashion and is very good.

Commentary on Career Advice. Caveat Auctor.

Immediately below here, I have a post on Bad Advice, and perhaps this is in that category, so I'll go ahead and add it to this mid week entry.  This topic is commentary on career advice.  It isn't career advice, it's advice on the advice.

 Great Depression era career poster. During the depression there was a fair amount of attention given to student and adult career education.  This one actually promoted the field of drafting.

It would not be true to say that I get a lot of people asking me for career advice, and by and large I don't think most people do either.  I get a little of that, from time to time, as I'm sure most professionals do, and it tends to fall into two groups.  One set comes from people pondering a career, the second set comes from their parents or a parent.  FWIW, I tend to find that when people ask themselves, their more sincere in asking, and because I think most people don't ask anyone at all about potential careers, I tend to think they're truly very much searching. When parents ask I tend to find that they're seeking affirmation of an opinion they've already given, and they're not really that interested in a sincere opinion.

Perhaps somewhat related to that, I find that career commentary itself is much more common within a career, and those conversations constitute insider knowledge.  That commentary also falls into two groups, one being observational about the career itself, and the other being observations on new entrants into the career as a class.

A third set of commentary is that which people independently put out about any one field. I suppose this post fits into that category sort of, although its not propaganda, and this sort of gratis unsolicited advice is the most dangerous of all such advice.  It might be accurate, or it might reflect the strongly held view of the individual.  I'll touch on that in a moment, but people who independently give such advice tend to fit into one of three categories, those being; 1) somebody who is some species of recruiter, whether or not they're officially that, and therefore have a vested interest in promoting the career to anyone who will listen and who tend towards propoganda; 2) Unicorn riders who have a happy view about things to such a degree its absurd; and 3) people who are in black despair and have nothing really good to say about anything, but who have focused on their career as the epicenter of their discontent.  The fourth group here is the rarest, that being those people who truly are their brother's keepers and who seek to advise accordingly.

So why am I mentioning this?

Well, partly because as I get older I'm slipping into the fourth category just mentioned above.  Over time, a person either becomes numb to things, only know those things, or begins to worry about things, and I guess at age 51 I'm in the latter category.  Having teenage kids, I'm amazed by how to this day there is so little effort to actually help kids find a career that will work for them.  When I was in high school the amount of effort devoted to this by officialdom in the school district was a negative number, and it doesn't seem to have risen up to much above single digits right now.  That's flat out bad.  Yes, I suppose most people can and do find their own way, but a little help might be warranted.  When you see somebody headed off for a career of some sort based on a book they read, or a movie they saw, it's really hard not to start worrying.

But it occurs to me that the first thing a person should note on this topic that whenever a person starts to ask for, or even receive, career advice, there are certain massive caveats that apply to it.  So, that's what this post is about.  The topic, basically, is Caveat Auctor.

Or in other words, Listener Beware.

So, what should a person be so wary about?

1.  How well do you know the person who is giving you advice?

This is important in two context, one is people you solicit for advice. The other is the professional recruiter.  Let's start with people you solicit.

As noted above, I only very rarely get approached by anyone who is looking at career stuff, but on odd occasion I do.  Interestingly, I've been asked, at various times, whether the questioner should 1) become a lawyer (the most common question); or 2) enter the Army; or 3) pursue a career in agriculture.  My guess is most professionals get asked something about their own profession from time to time.

Okay, so what to note about this?

If the person you are asking is somebody you know professionally, or that your friends or relatives know professionally, you should take their advice with a grain of salt if their employment depends on those people.  In other words, you are unlikely to get the unvarnished truth from somebody you do not know really well, if that person is in business, and needs the business, and you are the business or are associated with the business.

Let's take an example.  You are thinking of becoming an accountant.  Your father's business, Amalgamated Duluth Widgets and Law Ornaments, Uses Al Gebra as an accountant.  He looks to have a neat career, and you muscle up the courage to ask him about it. Good for you.  However, if it is the case that Al has a secret drinking problem caused by his despair over his career, and his regret that he didn't become a Yak Herdsman in Mongolia, he's probably not going to tell you that if putting food on his table depends on ADWLO.

Now, it might be the case that Al actually loves his job.  I'm not saying he doesn't.  I'm just saying that a person should consider this.  If you don't know him personally, chances are that he may be careful about what he tells you, or tell you nothing really at all.  Of course, he might tell you nothing really at all, even if he loves his job, as he knows that just because he loves it, doesn't mean that you will.  Indeed, that's the scary thing.  If you love doing something, but know somebody else might not, maybe its' just better to say nothing at all?

I think this danger is less, however, for people whose jobs don't depend on customers, of which there are a lot.  I can't think of all the examples, but let's say you are thinking about becoming a fireman and so you ask a fireman you don't know super well.  He's not going to get fired if he tells you the disadvantages of the career (I think), so I think this danger would be less..  However, I will say that generally people tend not to say negative things about their work unless they know a person really well.

Here, however, there's also a danger.

Any time you ask this question, you must be aware that a person's view is always unique to them.  And that makes a huge difference.

I've known one or two people whose personalities were so rosy, I truly think they'd be happy doing anything. That is truly a blessing, but it also means that their advice would be suspect.  If you were to ask them if they liked their jobs killing surplus kittens at the pound, they probably would, as they're just incapable of being unhappy.  Conversely, there are certain people whose view is so dark, they couldn't be happy about anything.  Those people would look down a job that paid a vast amount doing whatever you can think of, as they just view the world that way. So their view is also suspect.  If you don't know a person fairly well, either of those situations could apply, although I frankly think it's easier to tell a chronically unhappy person from a chronically blissful person.  Or maybe it isn't, as I suspect most really unhappy people probably don't announce that.

2.  What is their experience?

I think people asking about careers often forget that most people's experience in their profession is pretty limited.  As a trial lawyer, for example, it's probable that I know a lot more about other occupations than I do about the jobs some other types of lawyers do, as one of the pluses (or at least I feel its a plus) of my line of work is that I get to learn about the jobs of a lot of other people.

About our own lines of work, however, we usually know what we do.  So when a person asks "what's it like to be a . . . ?" you have to keep that in mind.  Asking a person what its like to be a "lawyer" will probably result in a different answer for a trial lawyer, than a divorce lawyer, or prosecutor.  And most of us don't have a really good idea what members of our profession do, if they don't do what we do.  A policeman in Chicago knows what its like to be a policeman in  Chicago, I suspect, and probably not what its like to be a sheriff's deputy in Raton New Mexico.  A game warden in Massachusetts is probably occupying a different job from a game warden in Wyoming, and for that matter, a game warden might not really be too familiar with what an officer from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife does.  A surgeon probably has a different life than an ophthalmologist, I'd guess.  A heavy engine mechanic doesn't do the same thing as a small engine mechanic.  The point is, you have to keep this in mind, and you probably have to keep asking too, to get a complete picture.

As part of this, I think it matters to be aware of what stage a person is in their career, and how careers change.  For example, looking at the law again, a person usually graduates with a JD in their 20s, but you don't spend much of your 20s practicing law.  Quite a few lawyers practice pretty actively well into their 60s.  But the overall experiences of a lawyer in their 60s might not reflect the conditions of a lawyer who is their 30s, and may very well not reflect the conditions that will dominate in that younger lawyers career.  I guess this is a way of saying that at some point our advice on careers tends towards the out of date, whether we know it or not.

There are certain professions (non legal) that I've really heard people express this view about.  People now in them, in their 40s, note that the careers have changed so much, they neither recognize them or like them anymore.  I doubt that they could have done anything about that, but the lesson here is that if you are entering a profession its good to know what people with some experience, but maybe not decades of it, think about it.  Keep in mind that overall, by the end of things, most people spend the same amount of time in their 30s, 40s and 50s than they do in their 60s and 70s.  So if you have a person finishing out a career saying its great, it'd be nice to know that they also thought that in their 30s and 40s.  And not too many people finish an entire career and want to admit that they wished they hadn't.  Of course, most people probably don't finish out an entire career they didn't like.  Or at least I hope not.

Maybe another thing to consider is when people retire and why.  That almost never matters to people in their 20s, but it starts to by the time you are in your 40s.  By your 50s, you'll notice your friends who were in some government jobs retiring, and its hard not be be envious about that.  In some other professions, people never seem to retire, and it might be worth knowing why that is.  Either they really love what they do, became what they do, or they can't afford to retire.

Finally, career impetus varies by generation, something that I've  heard made as a career observation in different careers more than once, but which really matters for a person's view.  People who grew up in the Great Depression (now mostly retired) tended to have very strong views about the simple value of work over everything else, and I've actually noted the same thing with people who came of age here in the 1970s and 1980s.  Work became so tight, that the simple concept of actually having a job dominated over everything else, and to many of those people, that's still true.  So, they'll heavily value an occupation in which there has been steady work and are often amazed by younger generations that do not.  By the same extension, people who came of age in the Great Depression often have very distinct ideas about the concept of dignity in professions, conceiving of it as its own reward, but are also very accepting of class distinctions. They also will sometimes value distinctions over income, and because they started working in booming economies after World War Two, they also tend to think that a person will become a financial success because they will. The Boomer Generation that came of age in the 1960s and often started careers in the 1970s, however, is ironically (given their Hippie reputation) often highly money oriented and have had the impact of converting careers, in some instances, into very money centric businesses.

In contrast to this, the generations that started entering the work force in the mid 1990s and every sense tends to value work place stability and career longevity not at all, and it also sometimes seems comfortable with money being pretty fluid.  One thing that lawyers my age and older tend to note is that new lawyers quit jobs and even the entire practice of law fairly frequently, fairly often, and fairly early.  This has lead to the claim that that generation is lazy, but it isn't.  It just is looking for something else.  For those sorts of people, freedom in fluidity must be pretty important, and if they're talking to an older generation, they might want to consider that that wasn't important, or not even admired, in earlier eras.

Motivational poster from the 1920s, urging employees not to change jobs. This poster expresses a value that tends to be contrary to the one held by people who have entered the work force post 1995 or so.

3.  What's their motive for giving you advice?

If you just asked them for advice, their honor and interest in their motivation.

 British Army recruiting poster from  World War One. This poster is absolutely true, for its era.  Being a farrier was a career, albeit one that was about to see a big reduction in numbers due to mechanization.  But the Army wasn't taking these guys in as a job program, it was fighting the Germans.

But for people who are basically recruiters, and I'd include anyone associated with a school with that, they have an additional motivation, which is to get paying customers in classroom seats.

That doesn't mean that everyone who is in that role is dishonest.  I've heard of university professors in some cases dissuading people from majoring in a particular field, and I've actually heard some professors do just that.  But when you hear really rosy predictions about a field from a department were employment opportunities are lacking, buyer beware.  I myself once had the experience of being in the hospital with pneumonia at Ft. Sill Oklahoma in which I was in a ward in which everyone else was a missile crewman who had enlisted in the Army under the belief that they were going to get to study computers.  Yes, missiles in 1981 did have computers, but. . . .

Note, none of this advice tells you to major or not major in any one field, or to go into one career or another.  I frankly won't do that.  When people do ask me this question, I generally try to tell them what I do or what I know, but I don't encourage them or discourage them from doing anything.  I don't really want the responsibility for one thing.  I guess I give advice the same way that I used to read the movie reviews in The New Republic, i.e., for informational purposes, and to make up my own mind.  What I am saying, however, is that when such advice is given, consider the advice, and consider the person giving it and what you know about them.  I also feel, FWIW, that a person should really try to get advice from somebody who will give them a full opinion, and that getting real experience in a field is the best teacher.

Mid Week At Work: Bad Advice

One of those dread motivational posters of the past.

Some of these posters, while all a little cheesy, have good advice.  This one doesn't, however.  It's universally agreed by industrial psychologist that employers and employers are better off taking their time off.  Paradoxically, Americans are terrible at actually taking their time off, and most Americans do not take off all of the time they're entitled to during a year.

I'm one of the worst offenders.  In a typical year, I don't take a real vacation and I probably work at least half the Saturdays in a year.

On this poster, it's important to keep in mind that Saturday as a day off was a recent achievement for labor, so it wasn't fully accepted at the time.

Lex Anteinternet: The Poster Gallery: Posters from World War Two.

Lex Anteinternet: The Poster Gallery: Posters from World War Two.: More posters that have been featured on this site, this set from the Second World War. ...

Lex Anteinternet: The Poster Gallery: Posters of World War One.

Lex Anteinternet: The Poster Gallery: Posters of World War One.: Our site has many threads featuring posters of various eras, including World War One.  World War One posters that have appeared here are rep...

The oldest marked grave on the trails

The oldest marked grave on the trails

Scots said “no,” but wow, did they care

Scots said “no,” but wow, did they care

Food: Seasonal, local, and from the grocery store. A revolution we don't often recognize.

World War One Canadian poster urging Canadians to preserve food for the winter.

Recently we blogged here about hunting, fishing and diet.  In response to that thread, Rich posted this comment:

I've always thought that there should also be something about seasonality to how a person eats.

There's something about that first asparagus in early spring, digging new potatoes out of the garden, peaches in summer, or venison in the fall that makes you appreciate it more than just going to the store and buying whatever you want whenever you want.

Eating a fresh-picked peach (if you can find one) in December doesn't seem quite the same as eating yourself sick on home-grown peaches in July.

As I noted in my reply, there's actually a movement that espouses that view, that being the "Eat Local", or "localvore" movement.  Sort of in the spirit of old norm returns as a trend amongst the well educated and well read, this movement, inspired in part by people like Michale Pollan and in part by people like Joel Salatin, the concept is that a person ought to try to obtain their food from a reasonable distance around them.  That isn't really what Rich espoused, but its sort of a related concept, as it would incorporate seasonality by default.

Of course, depending upon where you lived, it'd cause you to eat a very spartan diet as well.  I've blogged about that somewhere here before, but because the search feature of this blog doesn't always seem to work really well on the older threads, I haven't found it. Still, this is one of those areas that taps into the theme of the blog, and for which there are all sorts of interesting permutations.

 

Dick Latham, unintentional localvore, with an antelope in Wyoming.  This photo first appeared on our May 2, 2009 entry.

A year or two ago I was defending a deposition in Sheridan Wyoming and the law office I was in had a giant poster of the view in town from the courthouse.   One of the things that was visible was a sign on a building advertising a grocery that bought and sold local vegetables. That's fairly amazing for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is that in the early 20th Century there were enough vegetables being grown in the Sheridan area to market them commercially through a local grocer, something that certainly isn't the case now there, or anywhere in Wyoming.  Farming still goes on in the area, but not commercial vegetable farming.  All the farming is commercial hay farming or wheat, in that area.  Indeed, while there may be exceptions somewhere in the state, all the commercial farming I'm aware of in Wyoming is a hay crop, wheat, or corn.

 

Former grocery store in downtown Ft. Collins, Colorado, now occupied by Coopersmith's brewpub.

Indeed, at least as late as the 1940s, it was still the case that there was enough of a local demand that my family's packing house, which had some farm ground next to it which it generally used for hay production, put in a crop of potatoes for local sale.  That may have occurred elsewhere in the state after that, but if it did, I don't know of it. That might have been the last commercial potato crop in the state.  I can't think of a single conventional food crop being raised anywhere in the state at this time for sale in grocery stores.  A farm near Alcova Wyoming raises a crop of sweet corn for direct sale to customers, who harvest it themselves, but that's a bit different.  Near Riverton Wyoming there are some farms that likewise grow raspberries and pumpkins for sale in that fashion.  About the closest we get to the commercial sale of locally grown crops, in town, at an established market, is the vending of Colorado peaches and chili peppers that will happen on a seasonal basis, with those vendors setting up in parking lots to make their sales.  That's not really quite the same thing, however.

What's replaced this is the huge food distribution system we now have throughout the Western world. We don't even think of this, but frankly, it's an amazing thing in and of itself, and an amazing thing to ponder, if perhaps a little scary in some ways.

 World War One vintage poster urging conservation of wheat.

Go into any town or city in the state, like any town or city in any state, and you are going to see some grocery store chain.  This city has Safeways, Albertsons, Smiths, and Natural Grocers.  At one time it had an IGA as well, but that was before the Smiths.  These are present in many towns.  Guernsey has a Jack & Jills.  I'm sure there are others I've missed, maybe even here in town.  We do have a couple of surviving small grocery stores, however, those being Grant Street Grocers and Braddis' (which is now a meat market).  And this is before even taking into account that the "big box" stores, like Wal Mart and Sam's Club also have grocery sections.  That doesn't explain this change in and of itself, of course. Safeway, for example, has been around since the 1930s and was one of the first really widespread chain stores in the United States.  But it's emblematic of the consolidation and systematization of the food supply system.

What's really changed it, however, is how process and most particularly transportation has been employed both to process food and deliver it everywhere.  The change is so vast, we can hardly grasp it.

Let's go back, for a moment to the earlier condition. And in doing that, let's go back one century.  If we were here in Wyoming on an unusually warm September day in 1914, rather than 2014, what would we be seeing on our tables.

Well, just running through the day, there's still be coffee (thank goodness) on the breakfast table. Coffee was one of the earliest widely distributed mass produced crop items in the world.  Arbuckle's was particularly popular in  the American West, and it dates back as a company to 1864.  But unless I was extremely eccentric, I would note, preparing the coffee would be  bit different.  I use a coffee maker now, like most coffee drinkers I suppose, and struggle to get enough coffee against the intake of my coffee drinking son.  My father, however, always drank instant coffee for some reason.  I can't really stand instant coffee now, but I did drink it at one time, and will sometimes if camping, just because it's easy.  Instant coffee came in just before the First World War, and by accounts the process to make it is similar to the current one.

 

 Washington's Prepared (instant) Coffee.  It was apparently pretty bad, but popular with soldiers as it was easy to make.

Okay, so much for what I'd drink, but what if you drank milk? Well, there too, it'd be available, but probably from a local dairy.  And indeed at one time my family owned the local "creamery", that being the the institution that processes and delivers the milk.

 

Former  Jersey Creamery building in Casper Wyoming.  Once an institution of nearly any decent sized town, these are now largely a thing of the past.

Most places, local creameries are a thing of the past, replaced by regional ones.  Oddly, at least one regional one that supplies this region notes that the milk goes basically straight from the farmer's cows to you, but those farmers aren't around here.  There are no longer any dairy herds here at all.  The old dairy isn't far from where I live, but it boards horses now and has for decades.

 

Refrigerated trailer for milk, advertising a local origin, as noted in a prior thread.  There are, however, no dairies right around here, which doesn't of course mean that the advertising slogan isn't true in context.

But still, so far no big difference. So what else? Well, I frankly usually have cereal for breakfast, and I have for most of my life.  My wife, on the other hand, during the school year cooks breakfast for the kids, a marker of her ranch background. So for the kids, breakfast most days hasn't changed much.  For cereal eaters, however, the story is different.

Some processed cereals were around in 1914, but not all that many.  The selection isn't what it is today.  Post is really the oldest cereal brand, and its been around since 1895, which makes it pretty darned old.  So you could eat cereal.  You could also eat oatmeal of course, or "porridge" as my mother called it.  You wouldn't be eating instant oatmeal, however.  There was no such thing.  You had to cook it.

 Corn Flakes advertisement from 1910.

On occasion, I'll cook oatmeal, and it does taste better, in my opinion, than the instant. It also takes more time.  It seems like it takes forever in fact, even though it really doesn't.  On odd occasions, when I've had Irish oatmeal here at the house, I've even cooked it the night before so as to save time the following morning.  But still, so far we're not seeing huge variety differences in our house.

You would, however, if you are one of those people who eats yogurt or drinks something exotic, like orange juice, at breakfast. Flat out not available in most places in the US in 1914.

Indeed, something like orange juice would have been exclusively home made, and rarely available.  Now, oranges are literally shipped in by ship year around, if not in season in the US.  Nobody shipped oranges in 1914 to the US.  It would have been a  seasonal crop, as would any single fruit crop.  Most of the year, no fruit.  This time of the year there would have been some, particularly apples in this region, perhaps from a tree out back.  Oranges, I'd note, were once sufficiently uncommon by mid winter that they were a common Christmas gift for children.

Perhaps we should leave the breakfast table and move on to other meals, although that proves in the case of midday to be a little more difficult.  Now at midday most people eat "lunch", although I often as not just skip it.  People in early eras didn't skip it, and they typically ate what we'd consider an enormous lunch.  For these reasons, it's practically beyond comparison. Depending upon what they did, they either ate a large home prepared meal they packed with them or went to a cafe, or ate at the house.  In any event, their lunches were more like our "dinners" or "supper", IE., the last (big) meal of the day.

Nothing in these meals was of the prepackaged type we see today.  No Lunchables or packaged cellophane wrapped sandwiches.  Nothing microwavable.  Unless you go out for lunch and stick to a pretty basic diet at that lunch, such as a beef sandwich or something, your lunch is different.

So is your evening meal, and in spades.

A lot of evenings we no doubt eat a meal that resembles one of a century ago, probably more than most families, particularly for this region. We have antelope, deer and a volunteer beef in the freezer.  While freezers were non existent a century ago, these meat sources would have all been fairly common here a century ago.  For quite a few folks around here, something they shot would appear on the dinner table from time to time, and beef was available.  Pork probably was, in small amounts, too.  Chicken, from local sources only, would have been too.

So what's different?  Well, we're talking 100% local.  Local beef, and local poultry, supplemented by local wild game.  Now, that's not common for most Americans.  

And normally it would have been fairly fresh too.  As in very fresh. Without very good refrigeration, you couldn't have kept meat for even more than a couple of days, unless it was of the salted or cured variety.

Which was around, to be sure. Corned beef and bacon are two good examples.  Corned beef and bacon will keep awhile, particularly as the corned beef of that day isn't the same thing, really, that people eat now.  Heavily salty, like hams of the days, it had to be boiled to drive the salt off in order to eat it.  Corned beef was a staple of European armies in this era for a reason, and it wasn't because its was tasty (which modern corned beef is).  And there were canned and "potted" meats by this time, for those who couldn't acquire fresh meat. But they were not popular daily items for most people, which is the same as today really.

Anything else on that dinner table likewise would probably have been fairly fresh, depending upon the time of the year, and highly local.  However, canning and preserving also existed, so canned vegetables and preserved vegetables were available other times of the year. Some sort of vegetables really keep, such as potatoes and onions, and these would have made a long presence into the looming winter.

 World War One vintage photograph, part of food preservation campaign.

What all that probably makes plain is that the diet was much less varied. That doesn't make it bad, I'll note, just less varied.  No Kiwis, hummus, yogurt, or any of the numerous other things people now routinely eat.  No canned refried beans.  No peppers in December.  No lettuce in January.  No grapes in March.  And so on.

Well, so much for a century ago. If we take it back one century further, to 1814, and therefore take out anything not being mass produced and packaged or canned, we're left with basically one item that was preserved and distributed, that being corn in the form of whiskey.  There was food that could be preserved, of course, by corning, smoking, or drying, including both meats and vegetables of various type.  The meat products are fairly obvious to us upon considering it, but probably the vegetable products, like dried beans, less so.

So to what can we attribute this huge change. Well, factory processing is surely one, and that's spread from its beginnings in the late 19th Century to the present point where even whole meals are prepared hundreds or thousands of miles from where they will be eaten, and shipped.  And that's caused an element of centralization in the system that didn't previously exist.

 Cutting fish for canning as sardines.

If we stop and think about this for a moment, the nature of it is really amazing. We receive vegetables from hundreds of miles, even thousands of miles away.  Lettuce is harvested in California, or northern Mexico, and transported to grocery stores all over North America. That required a pretty amazing transportation system, which the case of the United States is entirely dependent upon highway using trucks.  Or consider oranges, which we can now get year around.  Oranges are harvested in Texas, or Florida, or Belize and taken by, perhaps, ships to one spot, and then trucked to far distant points, and yet they are still affordable.

That they are still affordable is in and of itself amazing.  Each bears a fractional share of the transportation costs, and yet that turns out to be quite small in the end.  Of course, some of the costs are borne indirectly, such as the costs of maintaining and building the highways, but still it comes out pretty cheaply.  Its so efficient in fact that even if the environmental costs are added in, according to Freakanomics, it still comes out ahead of at least some alternative options.

This is a revolution that's hard for us to appreciate today, but its truly an amazing one.  I'm not saying, of course, that a person shouldn't till their own soil, and I've maintained substantial gardens of my own in the past, and my father always did.  Growing your own was its own reward, and the taste of freshly grown is indeed better from that grown long distances away.  And there's something to be said for maintaining local agriculture, the loss of which is disturbing on multiple levels.  Rather, what we note here is the change itself, which has been enormous.

Uncle Couvi s Rules For Visiting A Museum To Perform Research - SMH

Uncle Couvi s Rules For Visiting A Museum To Perform Research - SMH

Business Machines of Antiquity.

This is a lobby display in the office of DepMax in Salt Lake.  It's nicely done, really, and the amazing thing about it in contemplation is that the devices displayed were undoubtedly so routine as to not be regarded as worthy of display in their day.

The machine of the left is, of course, a type righter.  A manual Royal typewriter, to be precise.  Not particularly notable, but in fact revolutionary, in its day.  It wiped out the occupation of scriviner and it was instrumental in converting that male occupation into what ultimately became largely the female occupation of secretary, which didn't really do quite the same things, but where the latter basically absorbed the former to such an extent that the world "scrivner", when used in the law, no longer really means quite the same thing it originally had.  The typewriter also revolutionized all sorts of other writing professions, and there were portable versions, not much larger than the one seen here, for people who had to write on the road or in the field.  Now this is all largely a thing of the past, although a few diehards still will use manual typewriters.  Supposedly conservative columnist George F. Will does.

On the far right is a court reporters stenograph machine. These still exist, but certainly not in this form.  This form used a large roll of paper to type print out the court reporter's shorthand in a continuing roll, with the court reporter having to stop from time to time to change the roll.  This version of the machine is a manual one, like the typewriter, and it slowly supplanted handwritten shorthand, which a few court reporters were still using as late as the 1950s.  When I started practicing law in 1990 this manual type had been replaced by an electric version, much like electric typewriters had largely supplanted manual ones, but otherwise they were more or less the same.

About fifteen years ago or so, court reporter's stenographic machines started showing up with computer jacks, and laptops.  We could, all of a sudden, take a look at the raw transcript in "real time", as the computer translated the shorthand. This wasn't entirely trusted at first, but slowly it came to be, and now the overwhelming majority of court reporters use computers jacked into their machines and dispense with the paper roll entirely.  I've had one occasion on which a computer failure required the reporter to call in a second one, which was justified as when the reporter feels that things aren't working, they aren't.  Still, this photo shows the interesting way in which things have stayed the same, and very much changed.

I don't know what the wooden roll top thing in the middle of this display is.  Probably something having a connection with office work, but I have no idea what it is.

Monday at the Bar: Lawyers Office, Dover Deleware, 1940s.

The Big Picture: Cambrai, 1919

Sunday Morning Scene

Cathedral of the Madeline, Salt Lake City Utah



From Churches of the West: Cathedral of the Madeline, Salt Lake City Utah: where there is more on the same..

Friday Farming: Sheepherder, 1940s

Student Revolt in Jefferson County, Colorado

High school students in Jefferson County (part of the megalopolis of Denver) are now on day four of a walk out, in protest of their school district.  A "Massive Protest" is occuring outside of one of the high schools in the area today, in which 1,000 high school students from two different high schools are participating. What' gives?

Well, in part, getting a walk out rolling in nice weather probably isn't as hard as it might seem, but beyond that the protests are focused on the following, according to the Denver Post:

Community members are angry about an evaluation-based system for awarding raises to educators and a proposed curriculum committee that would call for promoting "positive aspects" of the United States.

I'm not sure what an "evaluation based system for awarding raises to educators" actually means.  That's vague enough that, without further explanaion, it'd be hard to know what they're talking about really. As for the curriculum, the post reports the following:

The curriculum proposal, crafted by board member Julie Williams, calls for a nine-member panel to "review curricular choices for conformity to JeffCo academic standards, accuracy and omissions," and present information accurately and objectively.

Williams' proposal calls for instructional material presenting "positive aspects" of U.S. heritage that "promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights."  Materials should not, it says, "encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law."

Interesting how this has worked. The students apparently are offended and feel that they're going to be fed propaganda, and are reacting.  So, accidentally, the materials are resulting in civil disorder and social strife.

Logic would or should dictate that students just get the straight scoop on stuff, whatever that is, science, history, or whatever. In recent years that has always been the case, on the political right or the political left.  At least in Jefferson County, students appear to have taken note to some extent.

Of course, the nice weather doesn't hurt either.

Some Gave All: Sharp, Franklin, Taylor, Doe, and Kelly, and the b...

Some Gave All: Sharp, Franklin, Taylor, Doe, and Kelly, and the b...: A marker locating the spot where various Oregon Trail immigrants lost their lives during the Indian Wars of the early 1860s, ...

Holscher's Hub: Competing modes of transportation.

Holscher's Hub: Competing modes of transportation.

 

 Interesting example of two very separate generations of transportation, but with the older carrying the newer.

Holscher's Hub: Mystery Plant

Holscher's Hub: Mystery Plant: Does anyone recognize what this very large leafed plant in the Laramie Range may be? The leaves are easily 5" across, and were g...

And what if Ireland. . . ?

As everyone knows, Scotland voted yesterday to keep on being a member of the United Kingdom, effectively keeping the United Kingdom as a entity. Without Scotland, no matter what it called itself, the country that was the United Kingdom would really be England.  Indeed, in some ways that was the point of Scot's separatist.  England has the dominant political and economic role in the United Kingdom, although perhaps a bit oddly in recent years, Scotland effectively has home rule on most things, and a vote in the English Parliament, while England lacks a vote in the Scottish Parliament.

 Flag of the self declared Irish Republic, somewhat ironically with text in English.  Attribution:  Wikipedia Commons, ArnoldPlaton - SVG version of Irish Republic Flag.jpg

Anyhow, a person of historical bent can't ponder the recent episode with Scottish separatist bidding for independence without considering the history of just over a century ago in regards to Ireland.

The United Kingdom was once the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.  A Celtic land, of course, like Scotland (with which it shared interesting historical and ethnic connections), England's history in connection with Ireland, or perhaps we should say the United Kingdom's history, was considerably different from that of Scotland's, which perhaps makes any comparison between the two somewhat irrelevant. Still, there's some interesting things to consider.

Relating that history would amount to writing a treatise, and it isn't as if it hasn't been done before, but will simply summarize it so as to make the story informed enough to make sense in context.  While Scotland and Ireland shared ancient historical, ethnic and religious connections (Scots are descendant not only from the original native British population, but also from Irish invaders who gave the Scots their ultimate name, and Ireland Christianized Scotland), their paths really diverged during the Reformation. By that time, England was already the dominant political power in the British Isles, and it effectively dominated the area irrespective of the regions theoretical independence.  Ireland had effectively been an English possession since the time of the Anglo Norman invasions of Ireland, which it had resisted at the time and which it continued to resist off and on until independence. Scotland also retained waning independence aspirations, and resisted the English, but really less effectively.

The Reformation effectively sealed what was already the case at that time.  England, due to King Henry VIII, became a prime mover in the Reformation, but because its path way was mixed, confused and unclear, it flopped back and forth for some time between Protestantism, near Catholicism and a return to Catholicism.  Ultimate the "Settlement" of this issue, or rather the forced Crown decree on how it was to be settled, created the official Church of England, but in some ways the questions that have always existed continue to exist within it to this day.  Scotland, however, joined the most Protestant of the Reformation movements, or at least its monarchy did, adopting Calvinism in the form of Presbyterianism, which remains today the official Church of Scotland.  Ireland remained staunchly Catholic, however, and continued to do so even with the British Parliament briefly sided with Calvinist thought under Cromwell, whose forces famously attempted to fully subjugate Ireland.

Religious strife went on for a long time on Great Britain, something that's somewhat forgotten today, as the Crown and Parliament struggled over which branch of Protestantism would be the official one, and as, which is also forgotten, a fair amount of Catholicism remained amongst the rural peasantry and the Churches that served them.  Any religion other than the official one was suppressed, often violently, and the English spread this effort out to Ireland, which it fully controlled.  In England Catholicism was outlawed.  In Ireland, where completely outlawing it would have been impossible, Irish Catholics were extremely repressed.  As part of their effort to more fully dominate the island in this era, the English caused Scots Presbyterian immigrants to settle in Ulster, where they had no choice but to be loyal to the English Crown, as they formed a tiny Protestant island in a large Catholic sea.

Scotland became part of the United Kingdom in 1707, with the Act of Union.  Ireland didn't become part of it until 1801, although its role in the UK was at first necessarily constrained, given that so much of its population was really ineligible to vote.

This is all history that is well known, and of course the Irish continued to resist and occasionally rebel against the Crown.  Resistance to the Crown continued in Scotland, in a different context, for a time too, but eventually it died down, in spite of some good reasons to continue to resent England.

But lets leap ahead to the late 19th Century (skipping the famine and all of that). By the late 19th Century the British had really started to reconsider much of what had occurred before, and the Parliament began to back away from the repression it had levied in early decades and centuries.  Parliament lifted its ban on Catholicism in England and it ceased suppression of it in Ireland.  By the late 19th Century, the English Parliament was starting to seriously consider Irish Home Rule, so much so that it became a controversial subject in the English Parliament.  Home Rule was very much gaining ground in the early 20th Century, and it appeared, and looking back still appears, that but for World War One, home rule would have been achieved.

Had home rule been achieved, Ireland would essentially have today what Scotland has, it's own self governing parliament and laws withing in the United Kingdom. And because there was actually a Scottish independence movement that was gaining some ground in the early 20th Century as well, chances are high that had Ireland achieved that by 1920 or so, Scotland would have achieved the same shortly thereafter, and the United Kingdom would have gone on to be a federated state, which it now appears likely to shortly become.

That assumes, of course, that Irish independence wasn't inevitable, which it's easy to assume it was. But looking back, it doesn't appear to have been.

Home Rule, as a movement, was faced with two sources of opposition. One was in English nationalism, which very much opposed it.  Randolph Churchill, for example, somewhat made his name opposing it.  But beyond that it also faced Irish nationalism, which also opposed it as it wanted to take Ireland completely out of the United Kingdom, and by the early 20th Century was ready to do so by force if it could.  Armed nationalist militias were forming, and at the same time Unionist militias were also forming, both often quite in the open.  Strong support for Unionism was also found within the British officer ranks for Irish units, who reflected the fact that the British Army's officer corps remained a class within a class, largely recruited from well to do members of Protestant British families, who otherwise would have gone into the business of managing family estates or into the Anglican clergy.  Indeed, this was so much the case that a significant section of these officers made it known that if their units were called out of their barracks to suppress armed Unionist activity, they'd refuse the order and resign, resulting in a "rebellion" that threatened their careers.

Such was the case just a century ago.  Ireland appeared clearly headed towards home rule, with it being fairly clear that if that happened there'd be at least some Unionist armed revolts, and with it also being fairly clear that these would be met by Republican armed militiamen, who were less well armed, but more numerous. Those Republicans also were headed towards rebellion themselves.  A certain section of the Republicans were already working underground towards that aim.

Then, in August 1914, Europe erupted into warfare, with the United Kingdom joining in right from the onset.  The whole thing was put aside, Home Rule, Unionism, and Republicanism, at least for most people.  The Irish volunteered to serve in the British Army in large numbers.  The entire issue largely went away, although it was generally assumed that immediately after the war, Ireland would be granted home rule.

The United Kingdom tried, at first, to fight the war with all volunteer troops.  But the manpower requirements were simply to vast.  Britain therefore passed a conscription act that extended to Great Britain alone.  Ireland's unique status, and the fact that it might be a tinder box, was recognized in that conscription was not made to extend to it.  But, in 1916, with manpower waning, and with a feeling amongst British conservatives that omitting Ireland from conscription was unfair, conscription was extended to Ireland.

It was a mistake.  Ireland was already contributing manpower in such numbers that the conscription act would have had no actual effect on British manpower. But it was regarded as offensive on an island that had suffered from British repression and had only recently found its population being regarded as co-equal in rights with those living in England and Scotland. And it caused Republicans to believe that their moment had come.  On Easter, 1916, they staged a rebellion in Dublin.

 Proclamation of 1916.

That was also a mistake. The rebellion failed and Dubliners came out to protest a rebellion against the British when their sons were serving in France.  It didn't deter the Republicans, however, who shortly after World War One took the very unusual step of declaring Ireland independent and forming a parliament and ministries.  In essence, they were conducting a guerrilla war against the United Kingdom while simultaneously acting as the legitimate Irish government.

In what must be regarded as a peculiar move, and on that reflects how tired the United Kingdom was after World War One, the British chose to treat the Dail in exactly the fashion it regarded itself, and it negotiated with it. The results was the Irish Free State, which recognized an independent Ireland with the British Empire.  In short, Ireland was a dominion at that time, in the same fashion that Canada and Australian were.  Part of the 1922 treaty that recognized Irish independence allowed a vote in Ulster as to whether to remain part of the Free State, or to return to being part of the United Kingdom.  It opted for the United Kingdom, and the Irish Civil War immediately commenced over both Ulster's ability to do that (ironically, really) and the Dominion status of Ireland. The Free State won.

But, at that point, the point at which the rebel Dail signed a peace treaty and thereby became the defacto and de jure Irish parliament, were most Irish demanding full Independence.  It doesn't seem so.  Indeed, to the extent we can tell, even after all of that, the majority of the Irish hoped for home rule, even that late.  Had the Irish negotiators accepted that, which they could not given who they were an what the represented, the majority of the Irish would have achieved what they hoped to receive.  They received more than that in receiving independence with a dominion status, and the Republicans' dream came true. They also received, of course, a civil war, which went on in to 1923 before the National Army defeated the Irish Republican Army.  Eventually, the competing forces would uneasily come to live with each other, although a Republican desire to have the return of Ulster lingered on, and with some still does.

So, once again we have an application of Holscher's Fourth Law of History, War Changes Everything.  But for World War One, it seems certain that Ireland would have received home rule, with an accompanying period of messy civil unrest, probably in the mid teens.  That would have resulted in Scottish self rule almost immediately thereafter, and probably the United Kingdom would have become a federation, sort of like the United States, by the 1930s.   I doubt very much, in this scenario, if Ireland would have ever have become an independent state. The United Kingdom today would be a federated nation made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.  Northern Ireland would simply be part of Ireland.

Is this a better or worse result?  I hate to say it, particularly as two of my ancestors fought for Irish independence at Vinegar Hill, and one of them died there, but I frankly think it would have been a better one.  Ireland, in independence, became an economic backwater whose main export was its people for decades.  As a nation that managed to preserve its nationhood for centuries in spite of occupation, I don't think its culture was in danger, and indeed the fact that the Scottish are still that, would show that it wasn't.