A while back – actually, a considerable while back – a couple of readers asked what the weirdest bird was that WC had photographed. “Weird” is pretty subjective. So subjective that WC has dragged his feet in responding. But here are a few birds that WC, for one reason or another, WC regards as weird.…
The thing to remember about the Founding Fathers is that the country they rebelled against had a state religion. That state religion served the myth of the divine right of kings, defending and justifying the British monarchy. The American Revolution was as much against the state religion as the monarchy that religion justified. The separation…
Commentary / Idaho / Law
WC thanks the late Jonnie Swift for the inspiration for this post. WC also acknowledges the contributions of Deci Juvenalis. The State of Idaho Department of Law has been intensely frustrated in its efforts to execute the many folks waiting on death row. Idaho has the death penalty and Idaho law currently provides for execution…
The Brits use the term “confiding” to describe a bird or bird species that is more approachable than most. In WC’s admittedly small experience, the Rhinoceros Auklet is the most approachable alcid. Aboard the auspiciously named R/V Auklet, piloted By the delightful David Lanka (since retired), we were able to approach with 10 feet of…
(This is a part of an eclectic, sometime series on writers and artists WC has known and doesn’t want forgotten. The first post in this series was on Steve Goodman. The second was on Sir Terry Pratchett. WC has also written about Laura Nyro, Bill Berry, Jo Ann Wold and Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Here’s another wonderful artist WC doesn’t want to be…
The Biden Administration has approved a somewhat scaled back version of ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The Willow oil field, over the 30 years of its production, will add about half a billion tons of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse gases already baking our planet. The Alaska Congressional delegation was…
It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.1 Douglas Adams, describing the products of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, in So Long, Thanks for All the Fish The late Douglas Adams, in his absurdist, five volume Hitchhiker’s Guide…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. This is the second part of a two-parter. Recap: Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. So this is a two-parter. Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the King Cove Road? The…
When Fox News asked Sidney Powell what her sources were for her . . . surprising . . . claims about the 2020 presidential election, she forwarded an email she had received to several “journalists” at Fox News. The email, first revealed in Dominion Voting Systems’ motion for summary judgment as to liability in Dominion’s…
They really should be called “Tiny Auklets.” at about 5.25 inches long, they are much less than half the size of their cousins, although they make up in attitude for what they may lack in size. Here’s a photo with a Tufted Puffin, Parakeet Auklet and Least Auklet that gives you an idea of the…
(WC’s family tree doesn’t include even a trace of Irish blood. Besides that, in law school, WC’s apartment was across the street from the biggest, loudest Irish pub in the city. So WC generally takes a pass on all things St. Patrick. You can doubtlessly find abundant Irish content elsewhere on the Web.) Yes, there…
It’s been a while since we looked at the lawyers who supported Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. While Trump is still using the lie on his 2024 campaign trail, his former lawyers are paying the price of knowingly defending and perpetuating a lie. Most recently Colorado lawyer Jenna Lynn Ellis…
(This post was about half written when WC got an email from Idaho State Senator Melissa Wintrow’s (D, Common Sense), forwarding an article in her recent weekly newsletter. At the risk of stating the obvious, she has no responsibility for what WC has done to it, or what WC says here.) “The Idaho Way” is…
The theory is pretty good. Where a very large number of person have been injured by a common cause, they can form as group, called a “class,” and collectively bring a lawsuit, called a “class action,” to recover their damages. Otherwise, you have millions of individual lawsuits. But, as the settlement recently approved and paid…
This is an immensely complex area of medicine. WC is not a virologist or an immunologist, although he has read fairly widely in those fields. Additionally, to make this discussion manageable, WC has necessarily simplified but not, WC hopes, over-simplified. WC’s recent post on two Idaho legislators’ effort to block use of all mRNA vaccines…
Fairly early in his legal career, WC helped an Alaska bank set up one of the first locally-branded credit card programs in Alaska. WC’s task was to conform the MasterCard “standard” agreements with Alaska’s arcane finance laws. Much of that Alaska law has since been amended to better conform to nation-wide practices, but the experience…
Another alcid and, if anything, even cuter than last week’s Parakeet Auklet. With that crest and sometimes silly postures, the Crested Auklet is almost guaranteed to make you smile. It’s also delightful in a way that’s unique among the thousands of bird species WC has seen. But we’ll get to that in a minute. This…
There are folks who would argue that WC, as a lawyer, has been a criminal for decades. The public’s opinion of lawyers holds them in something considerably less than esteem. But this time, WC is deliberately setting out to violate a law, in fact, a law that hasn’t even been formally adopted yet. You see,…
It wasn’t called Augustana Creek at the time of these events. So far as WC knows, the creek and the glacier at its head didn’t have an Anglo name. and if the Athabaskan people had a name for it, that seems to have been lost. The Richardson Highway, as it runs through the central Alaska…
In addition to the Rosy-finches and Barn Owl WC has posted earlier, WC and Mrs. WC saw a very nice selection of other Idaho winter birds in south-central Idaho. Because you can never have too many bird photos, here’s a handful of the species we saw that WC was able to photograph. While there are…
David Lindley, multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire, peerless sideman and astonishing live act, died March 3. He may not have been well known to the general public, but among musicians he was regarded as a brilliant sideman. Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, he recorded with an amazing number and variety of artists, performing pretty much…
The Hagerman Formation, a layer of sand and silt compressed to fragile sedimentary rock, is part of the larger Idaho Group. It’s world famous as the source of the Hagerman fossils. A large piece of the Formation is preserved as the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, which has produced thousands of fossils across more than…
The title for Worst Job in America formerly belonged to the spokesperson for the late U.S. Representative Don Young (R, Senility), whose job consisted of following Rep. Young around and “clarifying” Young’s statements; i.e., explaining Young hadn’t said what he’d actually said and if he had Young hadn’t meant it. It’s the political equivalent to…
We’re continuing to look at Alcids, one of the families of small, diving seabirds of the Northern Hemisphere. This is the first auklet we’ll look at, the Parakeet Auklet, a species of the North Pacific Ocean. This is a beautiful seabird whose white irides (the area of the eye surrounding the iris) stand out dramatically…
WC nd Mrs. WC made a short road trip this week, chasing winter birds. The trip was amazingly successful, and there will be more than one blog post about it. Among the highlights a lifer and two and half species photographed for the first time. The target birds – a primary reason for the trip…
On December 5, 1969 the Oregon Daily Emerald, the student newspaper at the University of Oregon, sent WC to cover a speech to be given by Ted Gold. Gold wasn’t well known at that point, but was a member of Students for a Democratic Society – the SDS – and a future member of the…
There has been a kerfuffle over milk. Is the stuff that comes out of female mammals the only “milk”?1 In almost any supermarket today, you can buy soy milk, oat milk, coconut milk, almond milk, walnut milk, rice milk and a dozen or more other “milks” that have never been near a female mammal, let…
Even for the shortest month, February seems to have been a short month. But even with just 28 days, we’ve reached the end of them, so it’s time for WC to have a look back at stuff that didn’t get written, stuff that shouldn’t have happened and stuff involving the Magpie Principle. Rest assured, Craig,…
WC is being deliberately vague in this post about where and when the events reported here occurred, and has altered the facts slightly to make the players difficult to identify. Their identities aren’t the point of the post. It wasn’t baby seals; it was baby sea otters, not that that’s any better. But, yes, an…
Alaska state Rep. David Eastman (R, Wasilla, of course) has always been a racist, misogynist, oath-breaking jerk. But now he can add hypocrisy to his list of character traits. Negative character traits are the only kind Eastman has. Which qualifies him to be a nominee for Wickersham’s Conscience 2023 Hypocrite of the Year. If you…
Another spectacular and improbable-looking bird, a sister species to last week’s Tufted Puffin, although more closely related to the Atlantic Puffin than the Tufted. The Horned Puffin”s range overlaps with the Tufted’s, but the Tufted’s is more extensive, particularly along the Oregon and California coast. Like the Tufted Puffin, the Horned Puffin is a pelagic…
Stupidity is dangerous. And sometimes legislators do things that are so stupid that they can only serve as a horrible warning to others. Two members of the Idaho Legislature, where there is more than few poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect, recently demonstrated these principles. Sen. Tammy Nichols (R, Middleton) and Rep. Judy Boyle (R,…
Readers sometimes criticize WC for writing mostly about bad news. It’s a fair criticism but, on the other hand, some weeks it’s mostly bad news. But there is some encouraging news on getting the U.S. just a little greener. The good news is that it’s now less expensive to build solar and wind turbine green…
WC is starting a new sometime series of blog posts that ask rhetorical – and usually unanswerable – questions. When did compulsive lying about your credentials become a Republican qualification? Did it start when Donald Trump, when in one of his first public comments after being sworn in as President, claimed to have had the…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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