What will we look like on the Tricentennial?

Mr. Gillette and I have made a solemn oath to live until our great nation's tricentennial in 2076. In that year, I will turn 100 and Mr. Gillette will turn 110—assuming we are able to elude history's greatest monster. Many reader(s)™ have, I assume, wondered how we will look when we are out celebrating 300 years of USA! USA! USA! Slate has a nice story with pictures of some current centenarians. I assume we will look a little better than these folks, thanks to technology, but I would settle for this:

Bart Torvik and Mr. Gillette in 2076

Too old to judge?

There is a movement afoot in New York to remove its constitution's requirement that judges retire at age 70.

Mr. Gillette recently posted about Vermont's "optimistic" forced retirement age of 90. As I said in a comment to that post, my intuition is that judges should probably retire sooner rather than later. Here's my thinking, beyond the obvious arguments about how they may be too old to do the job.

1) New blood. There are plenty of good middle-aged lawyers who are waiting to bring a fresh perspective and energy to the bench. Even in systems where there are judicial "elections," they are generally not highly contested affairs. Age limits are a good practical way to clear the way for better judges.

2) Turnover can be good. Although today's elderly are surely healthier than the elderly of yesterday, old judges are just as susceptible to the dreaded "black robes disease"  as they used to be. This is another reason for new blood. (Although, to be fair, this particular disease often goes away with age rather than worsening.)

3) Generational equity. I think it's kind of pathetic to see rich old people hanging on to these awesome jobs while qualified people in the next generation scrounge for work—or at least soak up all the available work so that the next generation down has to scrounge for work. I think there should be a strong presumption that old judges should step aside to let the next generation take over.

4) Joe Paterno.

Obviously not every 70-year old is financially independent. But if you are a 70-year who was successful enough to become a judge, you should be financially independent. If you aren't, you likely just spent too much money on stupid things and you do not have my sympathy. On the contrary, I condemn you!

It's not just judges who should retire at 70 or thereabout, by the way. All rich people should retire at around 70 if they can, and that should be the societal expectation and the societal pressure. I'm not saying that there should be laws to enforce this, but we should fogey-shame rich people who hang on to their high-paying jobs past the point of reason.

An example in the news recently is E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State. Mr. Gee is a guy who thinks he's a lot cleverer than he really is, so he's constantly getting into trouble for running his mouth off. (This is a sort of corollary to black-robes diseases—these successful academics who never get negative feedback from their underlings on a day-to-day basis start thinking that people are laughing at their offensive and idiotic jokes because they are actually funny, when the truth is that they're laughing because it is part of their jobs.) After Mr. Gee's most recent outburst became public—in which he insulted "those damn Catholics" at Notre Dame, among many others—he got a stern rebuke from the board of trustees at Ohio State. "One more strike and you're out!" they said, effectively.

But Gee is 69-years old. He makes about $2 million a year now, and he's presumably been making seven figures for many years, and six figures for decades. He is the .00001%. He should just retire. More importantly, everybody around him, including the trustees, should be saying to him, "Why don't you just retire? Why are you hanging on to this awesome, high-paying job that some other person could do without embarrassing the entire state?" The regents' threat to fire him the next time he insults an entire ethnic group is pretty empty—there's no way Gee needs the money. Although I guess he'd rather not be embarrassed by being fired, that's the only thing on the line.

That's a long tangent. Point is, old rich people should be retiring more to make way for the poor and unemployed young people to fill up the ranks. I think it's morally unacceptable for them not to accept a life of leisure at this point.

Children of civil war veterans live amongst us.

The AP did a story about how the costs of war can linger on.   You can read it here.  As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I was surprised to see that the government pays $876 per year in survivor benefits to two disabled children of Civil War Veterans. 

"I mind my own business and I don't eat junk food."

The quote in the title to the blog is probably the opposite of what I do.  Maybe the fact that this blog exists demonstrates that the first part of the quote does not apply to me.

R.I.P. Judge Wesley Brown

The Gillette-Torvik blog is saddened to learn of the death of Judge Wesley Brown. Judge Brown was a judge in the United States District Court in the District of Kansas and the oldest sitting judge in the country's history. He was 104 and still hearing matters in 2011. The Wichita Eagle has a nice summary of the judge's accomplishments here.

Incredibly, Judge Brown was not the longest tenured judge in our nation's history. That title belogns to Judge Joseph Woodrough. He was a district court judge in Nebraska and then a judge on the 8th Circuit, for a total of judge for 61 years. However, according to Wikipedia, Judge Woodrough did not perform any judicial duties the last 16 years of his life. So in terms of active service, Judge Brown has the record.

At 104, Judge Brown was not particularly close to hitting oldest person in the world status. One hopes this means that he was not targeted by the serial killer that we discussed here.

Another example of poor reporting from the lamestream media.

Slate. com has an article which asks the question, "why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?" The article claims that "In fact, eight of the last nine "world's oldest" titleholders were 114 when they achieved the distinction. Here's the morbid part: All but two were still 114 when they passed it on. Those two? They died at 115." The article goes on to posit that 114 (or so) is the age people can't live past; that the body simply isn't made to survive longer. Depressingly, the article suggests that predictions that people will one day live to be 150 are akin to predictions made in the 1950s that people in the twenty-first century would have flying cars.

As an initial matter, I am not ready to give up on flying cars. Also, my research indicates that the author is wrong about the last nine titleholders. Three off them, Edna Parker, Maria de Jesus dos Santos, and Gertrude Baines, were 115 when they died. Moreover, the author's use of the last 9 titleholders is an example of the tricks one can play with math depending on when one chooses to stop counting. If the author had counted the last 12 title holders (five of whom lived in the U.S.A.), the title holders would have had 6 people who lived to 114, four who lived to 115, and two who lived to 116. 114 doesn't seem so compelling if half the group lives past 114. I note that counting the last twelve only gets us back to August 2004. We are not talking about a very large sample.

In any event, the biggest problem with the article is that it fails to take into account the possibility that these deaths are all the work of a very clever serial killer. After all, each time a person assumes the title there is a lot of publicity for the person. Then, within a very short time, the person is dead. Are we to believe these deaths are age-based coincidences? According to the author, we are. However, if TV shows like "Lost," "Fringe," "The X Files," and the reportage of Nancy Grace have taught us anything, it is that the simplest explanation is often wrong. Until provided with definitive proof that these deaths are not the result of foul play, I remain unconvinced.