Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Random Snippets: Oxford commas
The Wyoming Tribune: January 1, 1915
And some grim news from the Wyoming Tribune.
I had yesterday's up, in 1914, for the Tribune, but seem to have wiped it out somehow. It had the interesting headline that the Japanese were not going to "invade" Europe, which strikes me as an odd concern for the era.
Gillette News Record: January 1, 1915
Friday, January 1, 1915. Mexican land reform.
A Mexican land reform program was announced by the Carranza administration which promised to distribute land to those most in need. In reality Carranza was reluctant to implement land reform and therefore it was done haltingly at best during his administration, in spite of the topic being a major cause of the Mexican Revolution.
The Panama–California Exposition officially opened in San Diego in spite of World War One going on in Europe, Africa and to some degree in Asia. President Wilson opened the event by pushing a telegraph button in Washington, D.C. that turned on the power and lights at the park.
The exposition celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which of course has been much in the news recently.
The bizarre and misnamed Battle of Broken Hill took place in New South Wales, Australia, when Muslims Mullah Abdullah and Gool Badsha Mahomed took shots at a passing train in aid of what they believed to be a jihad ordered by the Ottoman sultan. The attacked killed several passengers and provoked a military and police response which killed the two perpetrators.
The HMS Formidable was sunk by a German U-boat U-24 off of Dorset.
Last edition:
Monday, December 28, 1914. Ottoman advance slows.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Random Snippets: Western law schools
Denver University's College of Law was founded in 1892.
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Today In Wyoming's History: December 29 Updated
2014 The Special Master issues his report on Tongue River allocations in Montana v. Wyoming. Wyoming newspapers report this as a victory for Wyoming, but Montana papers report that both states won some points in the decision, which now goes to the Supreme Court for approval or rejection.
Je Ne Regrette Rien et Je Me Souviens: Resolutions and Regrets
These two attitudes might best be summed up by the two French phrases, which sounds so much more poetic in French than in English, from two different sources.
The first phrase if from Édith Piaf's classic, and defiant, song by that title, which freely translates as "I don't regret anything". It starts out:
Non... rien de rienThat translates as:
Non je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien... qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égale..
No, nothing at all,I can see why this defiant song was sung by defiant French Legionairres as they went into captivity following their failued uprising in Algiers.
No, I regret nothing
Not the good things. . . they did to me
Nor the bad. . .may it's all the same to me!
In contrast, there's the defiant motto of Quebec. "Je me souviens", or "I remember".
To remember, and to remember accurately, is to have regrets, at least some minor regrets. And to have regrets requires us to attempt to adjust to avoid creating new regrets if we can. As a learning intelligent being, we must face our regrets and act where we can. And those are resolutions.
Of course, some regrets are unaddressable. Things we regret from eons ago, or regrets about situations which are permanent. Those kind of regrets, we're told, can be disabling. There's no point in crying over spilled milk, we're told as children, and there certainly isn't any point in crying over milk that's spilled and then spoiled. But, as a person with a long memory, I'm sometimes conscious of those old regrets.
But I don't view that as a bad thing. We are a species which weighs and measures things, including mistakes, and mistakes that stick with us do so for a reason. We've no doubt always been that way, as in "I regret whacking that bison on the head. . . I shall not do so again."
And I do make resolutions. I'm a work in progress for sure, and I know that. As we all have a backdoor view of ourselves, which nobody else does, I"m sure that most people acknowledge that. Indeed, a person who thinks that they're near perfection is a pain, and laboring under an illusion. Few do that, however.
Which doesn't mean the content should not be. Some do better than others at their lives and some also are blessed with fortune, opportunity, or a personal makeup that allows for them to be contented. Indeed, I suspect all are.
Which is why regrets well chosen, and resolutions well made, are useful. And January 1 is as good of time to make those as any other, whether they be large, as some people's are, or small, as most of our resolutions really are.
So, Happy New Year!
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men: Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel?
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel?: A couple of weeks ago I posted this: Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel? : Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel? : Driven by Sau...Related to this, in yesterday's Tribune there was an article about the county's plans for infrastructure, based upon the (frightening) estimate that the county will gain 30,000 residents over the next 25 years. Well, this brings to mind:
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,Excerpt from Robert Burns, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
I was amazed by the prediction, but in reading the article I found one of the knowledgeable folks in it noting that all the planning was done before the current crash in the price of oil. In other words, the planning basically was done with $100/bbl oil in mind, in perpetuity. Not oil that's dropping below half that price, and falling. Indeed, planning aside, this state now faces a decline in oil that represents about 50% of this value six months ago, and its still falling. Coal in the meantime has been steadily declining in production. Natural Gas prices collapsed some time ago. And actual demographic information is that the state lost about 1.5 times the number of people that the county plans stated would come into the county each year for 25 years. Wyoming's population slightly increased last year, but due to births by residents.
Now, I'm not getting after the planners nor the industry, but pointing out that all such planning has some inherent folly to it, as the assumptions that are made are frequently highly invalid. Looking at the basic industries of the state, all extractive save for tourism and agriculture, what we actually have is an economy based upon the production of three things, gas, coal, and oil, and all three are may be, or might not be, in some long term trouble Oil is the most stable, sort of, as the consumption of it will go on for some time, but even long term trends there are not comforting for those who would base an economy solely on it. The old habits of the country which saw fuel consumption dramatically rise every time the price at the pump went down are really over. People seem now fully committed to accepting rising CAFE standards and ever more fuel efficient cars, and turning away from petroleum entirely seems to be a widely shared goal. During this period, Saudi Arabia, whose economy entirely depends on the sale of petroleum, can afford to keep the price low and keep the money coming in, until it can hope to shift to something else in the future. They seem fully aware of that now and committed to that course.
The irony of that is that, but for the Saudi Arabian gambit, the oil economy did appear to have been fairly stable, which the planners no doubt noted, as consumption will go on, the cyclical nature of prices seemed over, and after the drilling was relatively complete, the infrastructure will of course remain and need to be serviced. But nobody planned on Saudi Arabia essentially knowing the same thing, and also knowing that it could drop the price and crowed the domestic industry out. That shows, I suppose, the inherent risks in any sort of long term planning. You can never really fully account for such things.
Gas, which did create a booming economy in some Wyoming counties, sort of endured a price crash awhile back which was more predictable, but also seemed to take people off guard. The reason for that is that the new gas pockets were, in some areas, easy to exploit, but once the infrastructure came on line, which was regional in extent, it put a lot of gas on the market. Gas used to be basically consumed here locally, as that's all the infrastructure that there was, and the thought, reasonable enough, was that once our gas was put into a national infrastructure, the price would rise. It did, but then all the regional gas including the Canadian price came into the system too, and then the price at the wellhead fell.
Coal's problems are much deeper, but without going into them, here we can say that everyone has been pretty good in deducing that and essentially planning for decline. That's a good thing in that while the decline is perhaps at least somewhat inevitable, it hasn't really caught anyone by surprise too much. It's a huge problem for State government, however, in that much of the state's revenue comes from coal.
At any rate, what that now means is that all the local planning may be really out the window. That would suggest, in my view, the planning was too early, and much too unimaginative in its nature. The risk now is that we'll go on for some time with plans that have every appearance of being obsolete, and that perhaps we ought to plan for a period of decline, or perhaps we should have been planning for that possibility all along. What if prices stay this low, or lower, for a decade? That's something we better start planning for. The industry itself likely is, as it's good at planning for such things as a rule, and has learned from the shocks of the past.
Also, while it places me in the camp that some regard as radical, in doing the planning, there's nothing wrong with trying to keep a lid on some aspects and byproducts of growth as well, which isn't the planning we've always been doing. We always seem to believe we can have everything we want, but we can't, or that everything is simply inevitable and capable only of some direction. By this point in time, we should be aware of that and strive to keep the things that make any one place nice in some ways and control things in a planning sense to our advantage, when we can, which in part might build in an element of delay that would allow for a cushion should plans go awry.. Nearly every place that people seek to escape in the US today got that way as the only plan was to encourage things to come in, or just assume that was inevitable, and they did, until people weren't happy about what had developed but could do nothing about it. Some forethought of that type should be made, even thought that means not building all those roads, etc., or at least not doing it right away We can afford to be smarter than we usually are when times are good and plan accordingly, and when things go badly, the motivation for effective planning usually goes out the window with the economy.
Of course, the folly of planning is that its very difficult to really make a rational plan of this type more than ten years out, if event that long. Early predictions for the state held that the population of the state would be double its current population early in the 20th Century, which obviously were incorrect, but which were built on the assumption that Wyoming's economy would mirror Pennsylvania's then industrial economy. A plan made 25 years ago would still be somewhat valid, if wisely done now, as not that much has changed in spite of the fact that we think it has. But would a plan drafted in 1925 have been valid for 1950? Probably not. Or a plan in 1950, in 1975? Planning is a must, but not accepting that generally most plans go out the window and planning itself is more valuable than the plan is something that should always be taken into account.
Monday, December 29, 2014
The Big Picture: Southern Big Horns
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Movies in History: Stalingrad, Enemy At The Gates, and Stalingrad
Movies In History: The Cowboys
This 1972 John Wayne film is one of his absolute best, second only to The Searchers (a film I have not yet reviewed in this list). It's a classic drama, and touches on a Romantic part of our history in a way few other films do.
This running thread, of course deals with movies in history, not movies as great cinema, and so we'll only really look at this film in this context, and looking at it that way, the film does remarkably well, particularly for one filmed when it was.
Set in Montana in the late 1870s or 1880s (the film isn't really clear, other than that it is post Little Big Horn), the film surrounds a cattle drive east across Montana to Belle Fourhe, South Dakota. As rancher Wil Anderson's cow hands have all quit to participate in a gold rush on the Ruby River, he's forced to use actual boys.
The plot device actually only exaggerates a custom that existed at the time, and it is not hard to find examples of very young teenage cowboys participating in drives. Indeed, going to work and leaving home at that age was not uncommon at that time, and my own grandfather did so at age 13 in the early 1900s. Anderson's cowboys are, in some instances, very young in this film, but I've seen middle school aged cowboys not much older participate in drives in present times.
In terms of details, the film does a very good job, and the ranching details are mostly correct. A nice detail in the film depicts a large string of horses being gathered prior to the drives commencing, which is accurate for the era and even now. The firearms shown for the period are surprisingly correct in an era when they rarely were, and some older arms are shown in use, including one cap and ball Colt revolver. This is very unusual for a film of this period.
Of course, it isn't perfect. The clothing is generally correct for the boys, but not for the adults in all cases, as both Anderson and cook Nightlinger are shown wearing cotton jeans and otherwise being dressed in the fashion that Wayne had made popular for cowboy films of this era, but which did not depict dress of the period accurately. Therefore, the film has an interesting mix of correct and incorrect clothing.
All in all, however, this film deserves its place as a classic and does pretty well in terms of historical detail.
Lex Anteinternet: Movies getting it right in time and place
Lex Anteinternet: Movies getting it right in time and place: Movies, for good or ill, shape our view of the past, so I thought it might be interesting to note those that seem to get a certain topic or...Which brings up this question.
Are seeing movies part of your Christmas traditions?
Movies getting it right in time and place
Postscript
Over time, I decided to change this topic so that the films discussed, rather than be listed here, have been individually listed. Therefore, the list that once appeared here, no longer does. As the films were separated out, I generally just posted them to the last updated date, August 2, 2014, where they now appear.
Postscript II
It is, of course, Christmas Season and for some weird reason, that's associated with movies, both big screen, and on the small screen.
Even though I really hate to spend any free time I have indoors, I've caught a few films on the small screen over the holidays, and so I intend to note them in this context. Given the change in this thread over time, I thought I'd note that here, particularly as some of these films are old, not new, and otherwise my reasons for noting them might seem odd.
Monday, December 28, 1914. Ottoman advance slows.
The Ottoman advance at Sarikamish slowed due to exhaustion.
The first Sherlock Holmes film, A Study in Scarlet, was released with American actors Francis Ford and John Ford, the famous director, appearing as Holmes and Watson. Francis Ford directed.
It is a missing film.
Last edition:
December 26, 1914. Boxing Day.
Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Cheyenne Wyoming
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel?
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel?: Lex Anteinternet: $40/barrel? : Driven by Saudi Arabian efforts, the price of petroleum oil is falling through the floor. When I las...West Texas Light is at $54.73 this morning. Wyoming's crude, which was at $80/bbl in September is likely below that now. Rigs are being stacked.
And 2,000 more people left the state this past year than moved in. That's a clear sign. We're in a slump right now, in spite of denial of that by people who are hoping that booms are endless. Anyone who has lived here for awhile knows this to be the cycle of the industry, and should not be surprised, but no doubt many are.
Of course, this may be a slump, not a crash. But the local oil economy is just a service economy for existing production if oil is in the $50s. There's no sign of that changing any time in the near future.