Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Endings.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Endings.:

Mid Week At Work: Endings.

I posted this the other day:

Sigh . . .

And depicted with a horse too. . . 

Kroger retires after 35 years of service  CODY - Worland Wildlife Biologist Bart Kroger retired last month, bringing his 35-year career with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to a close.  “Bart has been referred to as the ‘core of the agency’, meaning through his dedication and continuous hard work, he has significantly and meaningfully impacted wildlife management within his district and throughout the state,” said Corey Class, Cody region wildlife management coordinator. “Throughout his career, he has been a solid, steady and dependable wildlife biologist, providing a foundation for wildlife conservation and management in the Bighorn Basin.” Through his quiet and thoughtful approach, Bart has gained the respect of both his peers and the public. Bart is best known for his commitment to spending time in the field gaining first-hand knowledge of the wildlife and the habitat that supports them, as well as the people he serves in his district.

 Found this old draft the other day

RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY

Vesting Requirements

After obtaining 72 months of service, you are eligible to elect a monthly benefit at

retirement age. The 72 months of service do not have to be consecutive months.

Retirement Eligibility

You are eligible for retirement when you reach age 50 and are vested. There is no

early retirement under this plan. You must begin drawing your benefit no later than

age 65.

Which means, as a practical matter, if you are to draw retirement as a Wyoming Game Warden, you need to take the job no later than the beginning of your 59th year.

Of course, if you started at age 59, you wouldn't be drawing much, if anything.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you couldn't be hired after age 59.  You'd just draw no retirement.

The actual statute on this matter states the following, as we noted in a prior thread, from 2023, quoted below:

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

This differs, I'd note, significantly from the Federal Government.  The cutoff there is age 37.  That's it.

Have a wildlife management degree?  Spend the last few years in some other state agency?  Win the Congressional Medal of Honor for single handled defeating the Boko Haram?  38 years old now? Well, too bloody bad for you.

Anyhow, I guess this says something about the American concept that age is just a number and the hands of the clock don't really move.

They do.

On a somewhat contrary note, I was in something this week when a 70-year-old man indicated he might retire in order to take a job as a commercial airline pilot.

He's never been employed in that capacity, but he's had the license for 50 years.  It wouldn't be carrying people for United or something, but in some other commercial capacity.  

He's always wanted to do it, and has an offer.

Well, more power to him.

I did a lot of what this lawyer is doing here, when first practicing, in front of barrister cases just like this.  No young lawyer does that now.

I spoke to a lawyer I've known the entire time I've been practicing law, almost. He's four years younger than me, which would make him 56 or so.  He's worked his entire career in general civil, in a small and often distressed town, in a firm founded by his parents.  When I was first practicing, it was pretty vibrant.

Now he's the only one left.

He's retiring this spring.  This was motivated by his single employee's decision to retire.

I was really surprised, in part due to his age.  I'm glad that he can retire, but it was a bit depressing.  We're witnessing, in Wyoming, the death of the small town civil firm.  Everything is gravitating to the larger cities, and frankly in the larger cities, they're in competition with the big cities in Colorado and Utah.  That's insured a bill in the legislature to try to recruit lawyers to rural areas.*

It's not going to work.

The problem has been, for some time, that it's impossible to recruit young lawyers to small rural areas.  The economics don't allow for it.  The economics don't allow for it, in part, as the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam down on the Board of Law Examiners, and that resulted in opening the doors to Denver and Salt Lake lawyers.  It's been something the small firms have been competing against ever since.

And not only that, but some sort of demographic change has operated to just keep younger lawyers out of smaller places, and frankly to cause them to opt for easier paths than civil law in general.  I know older lawyers that came from the larger cities in the state, and set up small town practices when they were young, as that's where the jobs were and having a job was what they needed to have.  I've even known lawyers who went to UW who moved here from somewhere else who took that path, relocating from big Eastern or Midwestern cities to do so.

No longer.  Younger lawyers don't do that.

Quite a few don't stick with civil practice at all.  They leave for government work, where the work hours are regular, and the paycheck isn't dependent on billable hours.   And recently, though we are not supposed to note it, young women attorneys reflect a new outlook in which a lot of them bail out of practice or greatly reduce their work hours after just a few years in, a desire to have a more regular domestic life being part of that.

I guess people can't be blamed for that, but we can, as a state, be blamed for being shortsighted.  Adopting the UBE was shortsighted.  Sticking with it has been inexcusable.  I'm not the only one who has said so, and frankly not the only one who probably paid a price for doing so.  The reaction to voices crying in the wilderness is often to close the windows so you don't have to hear them.  Rumor had it, which I've never seen verified and have heard expressly denied by a person within the law school administration, that it was done in order to aid the law school, under the theory that it would make UW law degrees transportable, which had pretty much the practical effect on the local law as Commodore Matthew Perry opening up trade with Japan.

Wyoming Board of Law Examiners bringing in the UBE.

The lawyer in this case is worried, as he has no hobbies and doesn't know what he'll do with himself.  I'm surprised how often this concern is expressed.  To only have the law, or any work, is sad.  But a court reporter, about my age, expressed the same concern to me the other day.

Court reporting has really taken a beating in this state, more so than lawyers.  When I was first practicing, every community had court reporters.  Now there are hardly any left at all.  Huge firms are down to just a handful of people, and people just aren't coming into the occupation.  It's a real concern to lawyers.

It's always looked like an interesting job to me, having all the diversity of being a lawyer, with seemingly a lot less stress.  But having never done it, perhaps I'm wildly in error.  We really don't know what other people's jobs are like unless we've done them.

A lawyer I know just died by his own hand.

I met him when he took over for a very long time Wyoming trial attorney upon that attorney's death.

The attorney he took over for had died when he went in his backyard and put a rifle bullet through his brain.  He was a well known attorney, and we could tell something wasn't quite right with him.  Just the day prior, he called me and asked for an extension on something.  I'd already given two.  I paused, and then, against my better judgment, said, "well. . . okay".  

I'd known him too long to say no.

He was clearing his schedule.  If I had said no, I feel, he wouldn't have done it, and he'd be alive today.

The new attorney came in and was sort of like a goofy force of nature.  Hard to describe.  A huge man, probably in his 40s at the time, but very childlike.  He talked and talked. Depositions would be extended due to long meandering conversational interjections, as I learned in that case and then a very serious subsequent one.

He was hugely proud of having been a member of a legendary local plaintiff's firm.  That didn't really matter much to me then, and it still doesn't.  My family has always had an odd reaction to the supposedly honorific.  My father never bothered to collect his National Defense Service Medal for serving during the Korean War, I didn't bother to get my Reserve Overseas Training Ribbon, or my South Korean award for Operation Team Spirit, I don't have my law school diploma's anymore. . . It's not that they aren't honors, it's just, well, oh well.  We tend to value other things, which in some ways sets standards that are highers than others, and very difficult to personally meet.

Anyhow, the guy was very friendly and told me details of his life, not all of which were true.  He was raised by his grandmother, his grandmother had somehow encouraged him to go to law school,  Both true.

He was from Utah and grown up there, but consistently denied being a Mormon.  His wife was Mormon, he said.  He was an Episcopalian.  As I'm very reserved, I'm not really going to talk religion with somebody I only casually and professionally know, as opposed to one of my very extroverted and devout partners who will bring it up at the drop of a hat, and his religious confession didn't particularly matter to me, given the light nature of our relationship.  As it turns out, and as I suspected, that wasn't even remotely true.  He was and always had been a Mormon.  Why did he lie about that?  No idea.

I suppose this is some sort of warning here, maybe.

The first lawyer noted in this part of this entry had suffered something hugely traumatic early in his life and never really got over it. Some people roll with the punches on traumas and some do not.  We hear about combat veterans all the time who live with the horrors they experienced, and which break them down, all the time, but I've known a couple who didn't have that sort of reaction at all, and who could coolly relate their combat experiences.  Others can't get over something that happened to them, ever.

With the second lawyers, there were some oddities, one being that he jumped from firm to firm, and to solo, and back and forth, all the time. That's unusual.  Another was that he seemed to have pinned his whole identify on being a lawyer.  It's one thing, like the retiring fellow above, to have worked it your whole life and have nothing else to do, it's quite another to have that make up everything you are.  He'd drunk deeply of the plaintiff's lawyer propaganda about helping the little guy and all that crap, and didn't really realize that litigators often hurt people as often as they help them, or do both at the same time.  Maybe the veil had come off.  Maybe he should never have been a lawyer in the first place.  Maybe it was organic and had nothing to do with any of this.

Well, the moral of this story, or morals, if there are any, would be this.  You don't have endless time to do anything, 70-year-old commercial airline pilots aside. You probably don't know what it's like to do something unless you've actually done it, but you can investigate it and learn as much as possible.  The UBE, which the Wyoming Supreme Court was complicit in adopting, is killing the small  town civil lawyer and only abrogating it, or its successor, and restoring the prior system can address that.   The entire whaling for justice plaintiff's lawyer ethos is pretty much crap.  And, finally, you had some sort of identify before you took up your occupation.  Unless that identity was what you became, before you became it, don't let the occupation become it.  It may be shallower than you think.

Footnotes:

The bill:

SENATE FILE NO. SF0033

Wyoming rural attorney recruitment program.

Sponsored by: Joint Judiciary Interim Committee

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to attorneys-at-law; establishing the rural attorney recruitment pilot program; specifying eligibility requirements for counties and attorneys to participate in the program; specifying administration, oversight and payment obligations for the program; requiring reports; providing a sunset date for the program; authorizing the adoption of rules, policies and procedures; providing an appropriation; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 33‑5‑201 through 33‑5‑203 are created to read:

ARTICLE 2

RURAL ATTORNEY RECRUITMENT PROGRAM

33‑5‑201.  Rural attorney recruitment program established; findings; program requirements; county qualifications; annual reports.

(a)  In light of the shortage of attorneys practicing law in rural Wyoming counties, the legislature finds that the establishment of a rural attorney recruitment program constitutes a valid public purpose, of primary benefit to the citizens of the state of Wyoming.

(b)  The Wyoming state bar may establish a rural attorney recruitment program to assist rural Wyoming counties in recruiting attorneys to practice law in those counties.

(c)  Each county eligible under this subsection may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program. A county is eligible to participate in the program if the county:

(i)  Has a population of not greater than twenty‑five thousand (25,000);

(ii)  Has an average of not greater than one and one‑half (1.5) qualified attorneys in the county for every one thousand (1,000) residents. As used in this paragraph, "qualified attorney" means an attorney who provides legal services to private citizens on a fee basis for an average of not less than twenty (20) hours per week. "Qualified attorney" shall not include an attorney who is a full‑time judge, prosecutor, public defender, judicial clerk, in‑house counsel, trust officer and any licensed attorney who is in retired status or who is not engaged in the practice of law;

(iii)  Agrees to provide the county share of the incentive payment required under this article;

(iv)  Is determined to be eligible to participate in the program by the Wyoming state bar.

(d)  Before determining a county's eligibility, the Wyoming state bar shall conduct an assessment to evaluate the county's need for an attorney and the county's ability to sustain and support an attorney. The Wyoming state bar shall maintain a list of counties that have been assessed and are eligible to participate in the program under this article. The Wyoming state bar may revise any county assessment or conduct a new assessment as the Wyoming State bar deems necessary to reflect any change in a county's eligibility.

(e)  In selecting eligible counties to participate in the program, the Wyoming state bar shall consider:

(i)  The county's demographics;

(ii)  The number of attorneys in the county and the number of attorneys projected to be practicing in the county over the next five (5) years;

(iii)  Any recommendations from the district judges and circuit judges of the county;

(iv)  The county's economic development programs;

(v)  The county's geographical location relative to other counties participating in the program;

(vi)  An evaluation of any attorney or applicant for admission to the state bar seeking to practice in the county as a program participant, including the attorney's or applicant's previous or existing ties to the county;

(vii)  Any prior participation of the county in the program;

(viii)  Any other factor that the Wyoming state bar deems necessary.

(f)  A participating eligible county may enter into agreements to assist the county in meeting the county's obligations for participating in the program.

(g)  Not later than October 1, 2024 and each October 1 thereafter that the program is in effect, the Wyoming state bar shall submit an annual report to the joint judiciary interim committee on the activities of the program. Each report shall include information on the number of attorneys and counties participating in the program, the amount of incentive payments made to attorneys under the program, the general status of the program and any recommendations for continuing, modifying or ending the program.

33‑5‑202.  Rural attorney recruitment program; attorney requirements; incentive payments; termination of program.

(a)  Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, any attorney licensed to practice law in Wyoming or an applicant for admission to the Wyoming state bar may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the rural attorney recruitment program established under this article. No attorney or applicant shall participate in the program if the attorney or applicant has previously participated in the program or has previously participated in any other state or federal scholarship, loan repayment or tuition reimbursement program that obligated the attorney to provide legal services in an underserved area.

(b)  Not more than five (5) attorneys shall participate in the program established under this article at any one (1) time.

(c)  Subject to available funding and as consideration for providing legal services in an eligible county, each attorney approved by the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program shall be entitled to receive an incentive payment in five (5) equal annual installments. Each annual incentive payment shall be paid on or after July 1 of each year. Each annual incentive payment shall be in an amount equal to ninety percent (90%) of the University of Wyoming college of law resident tuition for thirty (30) credit hours and annual fees as of July 1, 2024.

(d)  Subject to available funding, the supreme court shall make each incentive payment to the participating attorney. The Wyoming state bar and each participating county shall remit its share of the incentive payment to the supreme court in a manner and by a date specified by the supreme court. The Wyoming state bar shall certify to the supreme court that a participating attorney has completed all annual program requirements and that the participating attorney is entitled to the incentive payment for the applicable year. The responsibility for incentive payments under this section shall be as follows:

(i)  Fifty percent (50%) of the incentive payments shall be from funds appropriated to the supreme court;

(ii)  Thirty‑five percent (35%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by each county paying for attorneys participating in the program in the county;

(iii)  Fifteen percent (15%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by the Wyoming state bar from nonstate funds.

(e)  Subject to available funding for the program, each attorney participating in the program shall enter into an agreement with the supreme court, the participating county and the Wyoming state bar that obligates the attorney to practice law full‑time in the participating county for not less than five (5) years. As part of the agreement required under this subsection, each participating attorney shall agree to reside in the participating county for the period in which the attorney practices law in the participating county under the program. No agreement shall be effective until it is filed with and approved by the Wyoming state bar.

(f)  Any attorney who receives an incentive payment under this article and subsequently breaches the agreement entered into under subsection (e) of this section shall repay all funds received under this article pursuant to terms and conditions established by the supreme court. Failure to repay funds as required by this subsection shall subject the attorney to license suspension.

(g)  The Wyoming state bar may promulgate any policies or procedures necessary to implement this article.  The supreme court may promulgate any rules necessary to implement this article.

(h)  The program established under this article shall cease on June 30, 2029, provided that attorneys participating in the program as of June 30, 2029 shall complete their obligation and receive payments as authorized by this article.

33‑5‑203.  Sunset.

(a)  W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 are repealed effective July 1, 2029.

(b)  Notwithstanding subsection (a) of this section, attorneys participating in the rural attorney pilot program authorized in W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 shall complete the requirements of the program and shall be entitled to the authorized payments in accordance with W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 as provided on June 30, 2029.

Section 2.  There is appropriated one hundred ninety‑seven thousand three hundred seventy‑five dollars ($197,375.00) from the general fund to the supreme court for the period beginning with the effective date of this act and ending June 30, 2029 to be expended only for purposes of providing incentive payments for the rural attorney recruitment program established under this act. This appropriation shall not be transferred or expended for any other purpose. Notwithstanding W.S. 9‑2‑1008, 9‑2‑1012(e) and 9‑4‑207, this appropriation shall not revert until June 30, 2029.

Section 3.  This act is effective July 1, 2024.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The sw...: T

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

• Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.

This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.

It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew.  Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.

Everything about this is wrong on an existential level.  AI, frankly, is wrong.  

And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest. 

• There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift

I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing.  She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.

I suppose that's the root of it.

Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift.  This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.

Swift is dating some football player.  I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me.  Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting.  Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe.  Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers).  Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy.  There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.

And so now we have this total weirdness:

Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec: 

People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly:

They’re elevating her to an idol.

Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!

Far right activist Laura Loomer:

The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.

Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …

And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing  OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion. 

This is insane.

Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics.  What more evidence of this is required than this?

• Celebrity endorsements.

Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden.  I read something that claimed she had in 2020.

I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.

There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump.  Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it.  So why the concern.

Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of.  I.e, she's young and an independent female.  

Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?

I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow.  I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything.  Freaking out about it is just silly.

• Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.

This is a tragedy.

It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight.  We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news.  Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.

But this serves as a warning.  Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps.  And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not.  Most families find this out.

But what about when they're running for office?

• The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park.  Heart attack.

This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?

• A concluding thought.  We're getting scary stupid.

Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.

Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this.  It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.

That's not happening in the country now at all.  Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness.  This is out of hand.

Last Prior Edition:

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Lex Anteinternet: Today is St. Dwynwen's Day.

Lex Anteinternet: Today is St. Dwynwen's Day.:

Today is St. Dwynwen's Day.

The ruins of the church built by St. Dwynwen.

She was a Welsh nun of the early Church, having died in about the year 460.

She is the patron saint of lovers, having lived as a hermit on Ynys Llanddwyn off the west coast of Anglesey, where she built a church.  Becoming a hermit was common amongst the extremely devout of the early Church, although it's more common associated with North Africa.  She apparently had been very sought after by a young suitor whom she could not marry, and in her isolation prayed that God look after all true lovers.

Her day is widely celebrated in Wales.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, January 24, 1944. Rendering Skunk Fat.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, January 24, 1944. Red Advances, Luftwaffe...:  

In Cheyenne, a War Salvage lecture was given on the topic of "How to get fat from skunk without smell". Attribution:  Wyoming State History Society Calendar.

I don't think I'd try that.

Some apparently do, however.

The question is why?

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hat Shaping

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hat Shaping: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hat Shaping : I'm more of a straw hat guy, but for six months out of a year, Wyoming cowboys ar...

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, January 23, 1944. Filling in.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, January 23, 1944. Halting at Anzio.: 

Pistol Packin' Mama was number one on the country charts.

23-year-old New Zealand er Linda Malden working on a windmill while managing her parent's farm.  No men were left to do what was traditionally a male role, due to wartime manpower demands. Public domain, State Library of New South Wales.

Agrarian of the Week: Diocletian

Diocletian (Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus) was Emperor of Rome from 284 to 305, brining in the system in which the Empire was split in half and ruled in two separate administrations.  In that capacity, he was the Emperor from 284 to 286 and Emperor in the Eastern half of the Empire, the more important part, from 286 to 305.

There are definitely things not to like about Diocletian, but there are admirable things as well, chief among them being that he retired, something unusual for Roman Emperors, and went back to his villa to farm.

We've included him for that reason.

He famously stated, when being asked to return to power to resolve conflicts that had arisen follwoing his retirement:

If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.

If only more in power had those thoughts. 

Going Feral: Subsistence Hunter of the Week: Jack O'Connor

Going Feral: Subsistence Hunter of the Week: Jack O'Connor: 

Subsistence Hunter of the Week: Jack O'Connor

Arizona born writer/professor/big game hunter Jack O'Connor was, in my opinion, the best firearms author the country has ever produced, and certainly the best one on the topic of North American big game rifles.

Born in Arizona in 1902, he was partially raised by a bird hunting maternal grandfather, due to his parent's divorce when he was five years old, which influenced him heavily.  His paternal grandfather was a judge who also ranched, which also influenced him a great deal.  His mother became a university professor after that, at the University of Arizona, which he ultimately would as well.  As a very young man, he'd briefly worked as a market hunter for an uncle's saw mill.

O'Connor served in the military twice.  He joined the Army at age 15 during World War One, but was discharged due to tuberculosis.  He later joined the Navy in 1919, serving as a hospital corpsman until discharged in 1921.

He took to big game early on.  By profession, he was a writer, as noted first being a college professor.  He was the first journalism professor at the University of Arizona, a position he left to write in sporting journals full time in 1945.  In that role, he became famously associated with the .270 Winchester and Mountain Sheep hunting.  Not too surprisingly, he moved to Idaho in 1948, where sheep are indigenous, although he stated that this was in part as he felt Arizona had become overpopulated following World War Two.

While associated particularly with sheep, O'Connor was the class western North American hunter, and hunted every big game animal native to the region, frequently with his wife.  He was a noted conservationist as well.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, January 18, 1924. Corn husking bee

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, January 18, 1924. Corn husking bee, Trans...:   

Friday, January 18, 1924. Corn husking bee, Transiting Mexican Federals, Convalescing Commie.

 

A corn husking bee, January 18, 1924.

The news recalled 1916.

Lex Anteinternet: What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?

Lex Anteinternet: What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?: 

What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?

The other day Robert Reich, whose writing I have a love/hate relationship with, wrote this article:

What’s the matter with Iowa?

I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.

I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right.  This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:

I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.

The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.

I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.

Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.

When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.

Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.

As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.

This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.

But not entirely.

The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool.  Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms.  There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.

But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.

Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way.  Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.

Distributism would cure a lot of this.

If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one.  For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods.  There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally.  At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.

If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal.  The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.

But here's the other thing.  As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom.  Exploitative, in another word.  It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.

The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious.  That gets back to my Distributist argument above.

But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.

Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted).  Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.

The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries.  Both are still with us.  Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation.  The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen.  In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here.  I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . . 

And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.

But the handwriting is on the wall.  Coal is declining and will continue to do so.  And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop.  Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing.  Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.

We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form.  We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation.  And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding.  Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.

Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear.  A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing.  Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.

In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers.  He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic.  He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.

In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.

That's a lot like Wyomingites in general.  We've received the hard knocks and blows.  Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.

For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status.  In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.

But in reality, it might, and probably will.

Lex Anteinternet: Honesty and Authenticity. Resolutions.

Lex Anteinternet: Honesty and Authenticity. Resolutions.: 

Honesty and Authenticity. Resolutions.

Many years I post a resolution thread, particularly with those for other people, that being a type of frankly snarky satire.  I sometimes note some for myself as well.

This year I haven't posted anything.

The grimness of 2023 has a lot to do with that.  On a professional note, and by all externals, I had a fairly good year last year. Economically, it went well, in spite of being knocked out for surgery.   But surgery and health wise it was really tough.  So I haven't been in the mood for that.

I am one of those people who do resolutions, and looking back on them, I'm also one of those people who typically fail at them. That's not a reason to try, however.  And I've had enough in the way of shocks and major setbacks over the year not to look at life in 2023 as sort of ending me to the penalty box.  So here's at it.

Rather than set resolutions, and I know generally what mine would be anyhow, I'm instead going to note a dedication, which is a form of resolution. And that would be Honesty and Authenticity.  I'm tired of the dishonest and unauthentic.

I believe, as part of this overall, that dishonest and unauthentic behavior and actions are responsible for almost all of the problems our society faces right now, and I need to reflect that myself.  Casting a wide net, almost all of our personal problems, and our national, and international ones, are due to dishonesty and inauthenticity.

Not that the honest and authentic win any prizes of any kind with people.  People like to be told lies that they agree with to support their own dishonest beliefs, wants and behaviors. And people like fake too.

But deep down, that doesn't work.

It's not as if I've been living a dishonest and inauthentic life.  But most of us make a lot of mental compromises to get along in daily life this way.  It's really not good for anything.

Related Threads:

2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.

 

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