Holscher's Hub: Boyce MotoMeter

Holscher's Hub: Boyce MotoMeter

Holscher's Hub: Images of flight

Holscher's Hub: Images of flight: Model A radiator cap.

The old and the new. A passenger jet passes in front of a Ford Trimotor

Thanks, but no thanks, and oh, why even bother. Wyoming rolls over on the UBE.

Two years I wrote this item about the unfortunate move by the Wyoming State Bar adopting the Uniform Bar Exam:

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Adopts the Uniform Bar Exam, and why that'...:     Wyoming Supreme Court in  Cheyenne. Students of legal minutia know that the phrase "to pass the bar", or "to be ca...

I made some predictions at that time, including that the net effect of the UBE would be to increasingly pass off Wyoming's legal work to lawyers in big cities in neighboring states, and that has become true.  Now both defense and plaintiff's work, in the civil arena, has become something in which out of state firms are increasingly involved in.  So litigants who have cases in Wyoming are increasingly, in some instances, using non Wyoming lawyers, and in some instances defendants are being defended by non Wyoming lawyers.  It isn't that these attorneys are better than Wyoming's lawyers.  They aren't.  It's that they are from large cities in some instances.  In my view, Wyoming is being hurt by this as lawyers who know Wyoming's law and live in the state aren't handling as much of this work as they should.

When the UBE was adopted by the Wyoming Supreme Court, a Wyoming component was added in the form of a CLE that new admittees had to take. The concept was that, in the course of a day, they'd be exposed to Wyoming's law. That was always a fairly absurd concept, as it takes years to pick up the nuances of Wyoming's law, and no CLE with topics ripping by in fifteen minute increments is going to do that.

In saying that, I should note that I was part of the process.  While I'm opposed to the UBE and particularly opposed to the reciprocity aspects of it, my very opposition to it ended up causing me to be asked to write for one of the CLE topics.  I agreed to do it, after being approached, as I felt I had little choice.  Having been asked to do it, I could hardly decline, particularly as those who asked me were well aware of my opposition to the entire process.

Due to that, in the most recent issue of the state bar's publication I see that I, along with the other authors of written material for the UBE, have been thanked.  The reason is that the Bar Examiners have now concluded that the CLE requirement isn't worthwhile, so we're just going to admit new members without a state component, other than an expanded introductory pathways requirement.  Those who wasted their time on the written CLE requirement programs, such as myself, have had the futility of their efforts publicly applauded.

Well. . ., thanks but no thanks.  The entire Uniform Bar Exam process is misbegotten and ought to be dumped, and it was always a poorly through.   All this is serving to do is to export Wyoming's legal work to the detriment of Wyomingites.  It's not too late to salvage the situation, but it will become so as fewer and fewer Wyoming lawyers handle substantial cases.  I can easily envision a near future when even the judges will be out of state lawyers who apply for those positions are deemed to be the only ones experienced enough in the topics to handle the tasks.

The Board of Law Examiners, by the way, dumped the CLE requirement as it was ineffective.  That should have been self evident from the get go, as it was quite evident to me, as one of the drafters of a section of it, that the time element of it was so short as to be nonsensical.  There was no way that anyone was going to learn much in that sort of CLE, and there was no test as a part of it.  It was just something a person had to endure.

In its place, the BLE is going to expand the Pathways to Professionalism, a mandatory professionalism course which will be expanded.  Well, quite frankly, programs on professionalism do not  enhance professionalism one iota.

In making this decision, according to the article I read, the BLE was conceding that the law of most states is all the same, and a person can just look it up on the Internet.  Oh really. Well, that's baloney, and anyone who has had the experience of out of state lawyers practicing in a complicated Wyoming case knows better.  Of course, if we persist in this path, it will become very similar to Colorado's law, as that's where the majority of out of state "Wyoming" practitioners live.

Indeed, recently I was in a case which had one such practitioner on the defense side and two out of state lawyers on the plaintiff's side.  The lawyer on the defense side had a practice heavily based on out of state work, and he commented that "he couldn't believe" that Wyoming allowed such simple CLE admission and that he'd think that Wyoming lawyers would resent it.  So, something that's pretty self evident to out of state lawyers practicing in the state apparently isn't to those who are supposed to be manning the gate here.

This entire situation has been a terrible shame.  The concept that Wyoming's bar exam was somehow fatally flawed was poorly thought out, and the Wyoming Supreme Court really bought a line of baloney in adopting the UBE sales pitch.  There's no excuse for it, and the situation should be reversed before the damage, which will take years to undo, becomes any worse.  It would be simple to repair.  Simply require that any applicant to the Wyoming bar take a test on Wyoming's law.

Wyoming has a lot of really good lawyers, still.  And we have a law school, still.  We can craft a Wyoming component and test those who wish to practice here on Wyoming's law.  We should.

If we don't, our current pathway will have a logical development.  Within a decade nearly all serious litigation will be handled by out of state lawyers, and Wyoming's lawyers will reduce in number and be reduced to minor matters and criminal matters.  The judges will start to come from out of state too, and our law will start to resemble Colorado's, whether we want it to or not. The law school of which so many Wyoming lawyers are graduates, will go by the end of the next decade, as the uniqueness of Wyoming's law will decline, and there will be no reason to have an institution that serves no state specific purpose.

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Salt Lake City Utah

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Salt Lake City Utah:

Lost Rail: The Past

Lost Rail: The Past:   In Gallatin County, MT, within the confines of 16 Mile Canyon lies Maudlow.  The Milwaukee Milepost here is 1417.2.  Like the railroa...

Old Picture of the Day: Cleburne Texas

Old Picture of the Day: Cleburne Texas: This is Horse and Buggy Week, and today's picture delivers up a LOT of horses and buggies. The picture was taken on the town squar...

Friday Farming: Finland, 1899

Quite the scene, from the then very agrarian country (which was part of the Russian Empire at the time this photo was taken.  Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Friday Farming. The basic unit.

"Forty acres and a mule".  The basic agrarian unit in the American east in the 19th Century, and hence the unit that freed slaves were hoping to obtain, with the basic animal necessary to work the same.

"Three acres and a cow."  The basic agrarian unit in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, and hence the slogan of land reformers and Distributists.

Today In Wyoming's History: After Appomattox. The Civil War's impact on Wyomi...

After Appomattox. The Civil War's impact on Wyoming.

We recently posted this item on the Civil War in Wyoming:

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming in the Civil War: I posted this item on our other blog, Lex Anteinternet, very recently for a variety of reasons: Lex Anteinternet: The Stars and Bars as ...

That's not where Wyoming's story with the Civil War ends, however.  When the guns fell silent at Appomattox (which of course didn't really end the war everywhere), changes kept on coming.  And indeed it was inevitable that they would, given the operation of Holscher's Fourth Law of History, War Changes Everything.  So here we'll look at that part of the history of our state, which
again is a very significant one we've heretofore overlooked.

More on the thread posted on Today In Wyoming's' History.

Redrawing the battle lines to fit modern sensibilities, and thereby doing violence to history.

I suppose I'm over-publishing on this topic, due to the recent controversy over South Carolina's continued flying of one of the Confederate battle flags (there were a variety of them).  I've already posted on that immediately below.

On that topic, tonight on the national news I saw a man yelling at the reporter interviewing him when that reporter associated the Stars and Bars with the cause of slavery.  He yelled back something to the effect that Southern solders "were never fighting for slavery".

Oh, yes they were.

Oh sure, a person can put any number of nuances on this.  Drafted men, for example, fight (sometimes) because they were drafted. But at the end of the day, the argument that Southern soldiers didn't know that the war was about slavery are fooling themselves and dishonoring history. No matter what else the motives of individuals solders were, and no matter how hard, and even valiantly, they fought, they knew that if they one, slavery as an institution was going to be preserved, and that's what had taken their states into rebellion.  Individual motives may have been, and likely often were, much more complicated than that, but that's the simple fact.

What's also the fact, however, is that there's a tremendous desire on the part of people to make combatants of the past, even the near past, fit their sensibilities.  People don't like to think that people who fought really hard, and who had some admirable qualities, let alone people who are related them, fought for a bad cause, and knew it.

So, let's see how some examples of this work.

"The lost cause" has been a romantic Southern perception since some point during Reconstruction, when Southerners ceased confronting what they'd fought for and reimagined it.  As they did so, something the opposite of what Americans did to their returning servicemen during the late 60s and early 70s occurred, as they began to imagine the cause as noble and every Southern soldier a hero.  This stayed largely a Southern thing up until film entered the scene, and Birth of a Nation spread the concept everywhere.  It's likely best expressed in Gone With the Wind, which no matter what else a person thinks of it, has a very racist and rosy view of the old South.  It well expressed the concept that every slave was like Pork, Mammy or Prissy, and ever Southern soldier was Ashley.  The slave holding South is presented as a romantic dream, and effectively. Heck, I like the film. But it doesn't express reality.

The reality of Southern secession was that the Southern slave holding states had such a hair trigger about slavery the election of Abraham Lincoln was too much for it to endure, simply because he expressed the intent not to let slavery spread.  Southern legislatures went out of the Union, or tried to, on that point.  

That doesn't mean every Union soldier was enlightened.  But it should be noted that Union soldiers fought for the more philosophical point of preserving the Union.  At one time, their service was hugely admired, but in recent years, somehow, the romance that surrounds the Southern cause is the one that tends to be remembered.  That skews history.  Sure, the individual motivations of Southern troops may be more complicated, but that's still a fact that can't 'be ignored.

It probably also shouldn't be ignored that a huge percentage of the Southern fighting force had deserted by the end of the war either, or that regions of the South were hostile to the Confederacy.  

Which brings me to Italians during World War Two, truly.

For some reason, Italians, who actually did fight pretty hard in North Africa and in the Soviet Union (you didn't know that they fought with the Germans in the USSR, they did) are regarded as cowardly as they gave up when it became obvious that Mussolini wasn't worth fighting for.

Now, exactly what's wrong with that?  That doesn't make them cowards, that makes them smart.

I don't know what that says about the German fighting man in World War Two, but whatever it is, it isn't admirable.  But here too there are apologist who would excuse the German soldier.

German troops fought hard everywhere right to the bitter end, and they did so for an inescapably evil cause.  That's not admirable, and I don't care if most of them were drafted.  Most Italian soldiers were drafted too, and by 1943 they were giving up where they could, including their officers.  Some German officers did rebel, but mot didn't, and most German troops fought on until late war.  They shouldn't have.  They shouldn't have fought for Hitler at all.

The Japanese have gotten more of a pass about World War Two than the Germans have on every level, and I do suppose that the fact that Japanese soldiers were largely ignorant of things elsewhere may provide a bit of an excuse for the barbarity that they engaged in, but only barely.  And the occasional confusion of Japanese Medieval chivalry for later day Japanese "honor" is bunk.  The Japanese were brutal during World War Two and the fact that they claimed to liberate other Asians and then acted brutally shows that they should have known better.

Speaking of chivalry, however, the recent trend to show the enemies of Medieval Christendom as primitive nobles and the forces of Medieval Christendom as baddies is also revisionism in need of a dope slap.  Crusaders who went off to the Middle East weren't on a confused mission, they were repelling an invasion, and the Vikings weren't admirable in their pagan state.

Speaking of mounted troops (chivalry) another odd one has been the modern tendency to view all native combatants as committed against the United States in the 18th and 19th Century, or even against all European Americans.  Many Indians view things this way themselves, but it doesn't reflect the complicated reality.  Many tribes allied themselves with European Americans in various instances, sometime temporarily and sometimes not so.  In the West an interesting example of this is the Shoshone, who were allies of the United States and who contributed combatants to campaigns of the 1870s.  In recent years I've occasionally seen it claimed that the Shoshone were amongst the tribes that fought at Little Big Horn, in the Sioux camp.  It's not impossible that some were there, but by and large the big Shoshone story for the 1876 campaign was the detail contributed to Crook's command against the Sioux.  I'll note I'm not criticizing them for this, only noting it.

Regarding the main point, the fact of the matter is that we admire those who fight for us bravely, and bravery is admirable.  It's hard to accept that bravery for a bad cause is admirable, however. That doesn't mean that all bravery serves honor.  Quite the opposite can be true.  Redrawing the motives of combatants doesn't do history any favors, and it doesn't do justice of any kind to the combatants on any side in former wars either.

Mid Week At Work: Whaling

Old Picture of the Day: Processing Whale

Old Picture of the Day: Processing Whale: Today's picture shows a whale being processed after being killed. The picture was taken around 1940. I see a lot similarity betwee...

Old Picture of the Day: Whale Hunt

Old Picture of the Day: Whale Hunt: Today' picture is really sad and it shows the outcome as whaling became commercialized and was done for profit. This picture was t...

Old Picture of the Day: Whaling

Old Picture of the Day: Whaling: Welcome to whaling week here at OPOD. We will be looking at that now extinct career of hunting and processing whales. This picture was...

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming in the Civil War

Wyoming in the Civil War

I posted this item on our other blog, Lex Anteinternet, very recently for a variety of reasons:

Lex Anteinternet: The Stars and Bars as viewed from outside the Sout...:As everyone is well aware, there's been a controversy over the Confederate battle flag, the Stars and Bars, brought about by the recent
...

In doing this, it occurred to me to link this item over here, as I mentioned Wyoming's role in the Civil War in the post. . .

The rest can be read on our post on the Today In Wyoming's History blog.

The Stars and Bars as viewed from outside the South.

As everyone is well aware, there's been a controversy over the Confederate battle flag, the Stars and Bars, brought about by the recent senseless racist murders in South Carolina.  The Confederate battle flag flies on the statehouse lawn, where it has of course since the end of the Civil War.

Except it hasn't.

It's only been on that piece of ground, more or less, since 1961.  The Stars and Bars started flying from the State House dome in 1961, in what was frankly an attempt at a poke in the eye at desegregation.  It was since moved to the lawn in 2000 as it became increasingly controversial, and it now appears that it will be removed, finally, from the grounds entirely.  It's long overdue.  Indeed, it shouldn't have been there at any time post 1865.

Chances are that it had never been there prior to 1961.  Contrary to common belief, the Stars and Bars is not the "Confederate Flag". That distinction belonged to another flag.  Rather, the Stars and Bars was the Confederate battle jack.  A flag flown by some, but not all, Confederate forces on the battlefield, principally because the first Confederate national flag (the CSA adopted three flags during the course of the war), was easily confused with Old Glory.  By the war's end, the Stars and Bars had appeared as part of two Confederate national flags, but it was not, itself, ever the flag of the CSA nor even of the entire armed forces of the CSA.

The Stars and Bars, recalling Scotland's Cross of St. Andrew (with perhaps a shout out to one of the more independent Southern demographics at the time) is striking, and perhaps for that reason, it's the one that sticks in peoples minds and it's the one you see around today.

But why?

I know that the flag is cited as being part of Southern heritage and pride, but let's be frank.  It was the flag of an army in full rebellion against the United States and that rebellion cannot be separated from slavery.  Those today who would claim that the South was exercising a retained democratic right can only do so if the ignore the fact that a huge, largely native born Southern demographic, blacks, was kept in slavery and there's simply no excusing that.  South Carolina is a good example, as the majority of residents of South Carolina in the 1860-1865 time frame were black.  It's not like they were given the vote on succession.

For that matter, most Southern yeomen were fairly marginalized politically pre war as well, which helps explain why, during the course of the war, there ended up being more than a little resistance to the war effort. So much so, of course, that Virginia split in half.

Anyhow, the Stars and Bars, where it appears on public or private display, cannot help but offend.  For anyone who is not a white Southerner, it's insulting to some degree.  For blacks, how could it be taken otherwise?  For South Carolinian's, for that matter, who are black, how could it not be.  It only showed up on state grounds when South Carolina's legislature balked at desegregation.  It was meant to send a message all right, and the choice of the battle jack sent one pretty clearly.

In recent years, the Confederate battle jack has been showing up a lot here.  I saw it just this weekend at a camp site some people had set up out in the sticks.  Their camp was flying the U.S. flag and the Stars and Bars, a real mixed message.  That probably was intended to send sort of an in your face, Southern pride, message, but this isn't the South.

Indeed, the only Southern fighting men in this region of the country in the 1860 to 1865 time frame were "Galvanized Yankees" who had decided they'd take their chances with the Union as Indian fighters in order to get out of POW camps.  They were probably pretty reluctant Federal soldiers, but their performance wasn't bad and there seems to have been no troubles in stationing them with men who'd volunteered to fight the CSA from Ohio and Kansas, but who ended up here instead.

I suppose the Stars and Bars, today, is intended by most who fly it to show pride in their region, and not to send a rebellious racist message. If so, some Southern states, South Carolina included, have really pretty state flags that don't feature the Confederate battle jack and which, in some cases, probably predate the CSA.  Most Southerners during the war more closely identified with their states than with the CSA anyhow, and a person who is so state pride inclined ought to consider that.  And it should also be considered that American blacks have a history in the South which is as long as any other demographic, save for Native Americans.  They're story is just as much the South's as anyone else's.  It'd do Southern pride more justice to consider that time frame that falls outside of the five years of the Civil War, or perhaps that twenty or so year period if we include the time leading up to the war and Reconstruction, and not focus so much on it. 

Southerns of that era, we should note, did not.  Figures such as James Longstreet didn't wallow in their former Southern military status but went on to work to rebuild as part of the nation.  Longstreet, one of the most famous of Lee's Lieutenants, went on to become a Republican politician.  Lee went on to be a college president and refused to march in step with his students.  One former Confederate cavalry general went on to Congress and then back into the U.S. Army, as a volunteer, for the Spanish American War.  Southerners only one generation removed from the war volunteered in droves to serve in the Spanish American War.  Apparently they at least partially got over it. And with that, perhaps too its time for the Stars and Bars to go, or at least not to be flown in other regions of the country where the message definitely won't be seen as pride but rather something else.

Victor Military Band – 1916

Victor Military Band – 1916

Random Snippets: How to tell you are really out of the mainstream and too history minded.

"Adrian Peterson finding a new normal with Vikings" read the headline on the net.

And, having not had enough coffee I read that and thought to myself "well, Peterson could be a Norse name. . . but wait, we don't have vikings anymore. . . ."

It took me a few seconds to wake up and realize that, of course, Adrian Peterson is a football player with the Minnesota Vikings.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Johnson County Courthouse, Buffalo Wyoming

Courthouses of the West: Johnson County Courthouse, Buffalo Wyoming:

 
Now no longer a courthouse, but it was at the time this photo was taken a couple of years ago.  A new courthouse has come into service since that time.   More details on Courthouses of the West, where this was originally posted.