Farm to school cafeteria: Wyoming students experience locally grown food

Farm to school cafeteria: Wyoming students experience locally grown food: In Fort Washakie, kids celebrate Farm to School Day with beef and corn from local farmers and lettuce from their school garden.

Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place

Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place: For some time, I’ve thought a great deal about how long someone needs to really know a place. To know its geography, for sure, but also to k...

Why you should eat meat

Why you should eat meat

 

Lex Anteinternet: Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Cante...

Lex Anteinternet: Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Cante...: 

Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Canterbury, in case you were wondering.

There hasn't been a legitimate one since, in absolute terms.

Lex Anteinternet: A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumers and does so again for 大豆

Lex Anteinternet: A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumer...: 

A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumers and does so again for 大豆

I had a draft post at the time of the last election I never published why farmers and ranchers routinely vote to have themselves shafted by voting for the GOP.  Democrats typically have farm policies that actually benefit farmers, including preserving the lands.  Republicans tend to be in favor of land rape to benefit the wealthy.

I really have no good explanation for it.

Well, no surprise, soybean farmers are getting pounded by Trump's tariff polich. D'uh.

Trump's trade battle with China puts US soybean farmers in peril

I love this quote from one soybean farmer:

“Overwhelmingly, farmers have been in President Trump’s corner,” said Ragland, the president of the soybean association. “And I think the message that our soybean farmers as a whole want to deliver is: ‘President Trump, we’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.’”

Well, I'm a type of farmer, a livestock farmer, and frankly Ragland, screw you and the John Deere you rode in on.  You are getting just what you deserve.

Trump bets the soybean farm on tariffs | Wall Street Journal

But, have no fear, socialized farming through the GOP will come to the rescue.  Trump is going to take $10B from the national sales tax, i.e., tariffs, to bail out farmers.

So, the American consumer is getting taxed, as in the end it's us who pays the tariffs, to bail out soybean farmers.  

Good old free enterprise at work there.

Farmers are getting stiffed by Trump's taxes, and will continue to get stiffed by them, and he hopes to balance the table by handing over money the American public handed over via tariffs. 

A better plan would just be to let soybean farmers go bankrupt.  

 

USDA Staffing Crisis: Farm Service Agency Staff Losses Put Farm Safety Net at Risk

Courthouses of the West: A Broken Profession

Courthouses of the West: A Broken Profession: 

A Broken Profession

This is a follow-up to something I posted here just the other day, taking the blog away from its comfortable place of depicting courthouses, into the nature of the contemporary practice.

Courthouses of the West: Things in the air. Some observations with varying ...: This blog is supposed to be dedicated to architecture, basically, although matters pertaining to the law do show up here.  Very rarely is th...

Here, I'm doing it again.

The CLEs above were on my mind to such an extent, and indeed they still are, that I've discussed them with several other lawyers I know.  Turns out some of them are on meds for anxiety.  I would never have guessed it.

There's something about this that really disturbs me,. although I don't fault them any one of them a darned bit.  Some of them seem to love their careers and are really good at what they do.  What bothers me, however, is that we seem to have developed a profession that has to heavily rely upon chemicals just to get by.

Just going back to the earliest of human mind altering chemicals, it's reported that between 21-36% of lawyers engage in problem drinking at hazardous, harmful, or potentially alcohol-dependent levels.  That's pretty disturbing, as that's between 1/5th up to a little over 1/3d of all practicing lawyers.  Some studies suggest that 36% of Minnesota's lawyers and judges drink at a dangerous level, and if that's not disturbing enough, some studies suggest that 41% of Canadian lawyers do.  Around 10% of lawyers have a drug abuse problem, but that probably includes a lot of them who have an alcohol problem.

Not good.

There's really no way to know how many lawyers are on anti anxiety medications.  Probably a bunch.  It's obviously much, much, better that people dealing with anxiety inducing situations seek medical help than crack open a bottle of Henry McKenna and poor yourself several shots.*  It's also better than smoking a joint or whatever else people are doing in the illegal drug categories, although obviously these days marijuana is sort of in a weird still illegal but not enforced much category.**

The laws approach to all of this has been to reach out to lawyers and offer "help".  But perhaps what should be obvious, but doesn't seem to be, is the profession itself needs the help.  If this percentage of its professionals, including its best and brightest, need chemical help just to get by each day, there's something existentially wrong in the profession.  All the CLE's on mindfulness in the world aren't going to fix that.

Footnotes:

*Henry McKenna is an Irish Whiskey named after lawyer and distiller, Henry McKenna.

**Marijuana is still a scheduled illegal drug in Federal law and students imbibing in it can risk admission to their State bars.  Likewise this can be true for people seeking a career in law enforcement.