The Good Old Days

Brad DeLong gets Laura Ingalls Wilder's thoughts on the advantages of modernity, circa 1911.  "Oil stoves" (I assume kerosene) instead of wood/coal, gasoline engines enabling inside water supply, and rural free delivery of news were all having an impact.

This was just after TR's Country Life Commission had issued its report describing problems of country life.

Thank You Keith Good--End of Farm Policy

Over the years I've blogged on a lot of pieces from the Farm Polcy daily summary of agricultural news item.  But Keith Good has had to shut it down, with this his last post.

Adulterating the Milk: Then and Now

In the 19th century adulterating milk was common, leading to Henry David Thoreau's quote: "some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk".

Today though it's human milk which is adulterated, as described in this story.

White House Garden Coverage or Lack Thereof

Apparently Eddie Gehman Kohan has shut down the obamafoodorama blog and instead is solely tweeting (https://twitter.com/obamafoodorama).  She notes that March 20 was the anniversary of the initiation of the project in 2009, but a quick search doesn't reveal any recent coverage of it. The last news item I find is from last fall.  Now that Sam Kass has left, I suppose Barack is worried about his legacy, and the family is worried about colleges, it may be running on bureaucratic inertia.   If so, that's the usual fate of initiatives of outsiders who come into the bureaucracy with great ideas.

Different Perspectives on the Past: Golden Age versus Vast Wasteland

This Vox piece talks about "Golden Age"s of TV, in connection with the ending of Mad Men.  It seems the first Golden Age was the 1950's.  The referent is to the "high culture" approach, live drama and things like Leonard Bernstein's programming explaining classical music.

I more vividly remember JFK's FCC chair, Newton Minow, deploring the "vast wasteland" of TV.

Two takes on one history.

Why There's Turnover in the Billionaires

George Will had a column pointing out the extensive turnover in the Forbes list of the richest, arguing that mobility as seen in the turnover was more important than inequality.

Janet Kinzner had a letter to the editors pointing out one factor in the turnover: death.

Pinball in Space

We have one of those pot racks which hang from the ceiling and has hooks for pots and pans.  It's a small kitchen, so every so often my head hits one of the pots, resulting in a very unpredictable chain reaction of pot clanging against frying pan against saucepan, etc. etc. Gradually the interactions die out and the sounds fade away.

Turns out there could be the same sort of interactions in space, which possibility makes a hazard for ideas of NASA changing the course of an asteroid due to hit the earth.  That's mentioned in this piece on NASA plans to practice such things. I applaud both the idea of practicing (see Harshaw rule) and the wisdom of anticipating interactions.

A Violation of the Religious Establishment Clause

Stumbled on this language in a treaty between the US and the Kaskasia Indian Tribe:

. And whereas, The greater part of the said tribe have been baptised and received into the Catholic church to which they are much attached, the United States will give annually for seven
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years one hundred dollars towards the support of a priest of that religion, who will engage to perform for the said tribe the duties of his office and also to instruct as many of their children as possible in the rudiments of literature. And the United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars to assist the said tribe in the erection of a church.

Not sure how modern scholars would view this.

Sen. Charles Schumer and Payment LImitation

The good senator from New York was precocious, winning election to the State Assembly and then to the US House in his twenties.  He's notorious as a publicity hound, and I strongly suspect in his early days aggravated his elders and betters.  That, I speculate, is why an early committee assignment was to House Agriculture Committee--why else would one stick someone so obviously and completely a city slicker on that committee if not to embarrass him?

I don't remember all the ins and outs, but I do remember that Schumer was active in pushing payment limitation provisions.  And here's a GAO report back to Schumer and Conte on their proposal to change the provisions in the 1985 farm, to tighten them up.   In considering the 1990 farm bill he proposed an adjusted gross income limitation, which was defeated then, but which finally passed.

A lesson for farm state legislators: never agree to put ambitious urbanites on your committee.  As Shakespeare warned:

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Tell Me What You Really Think

Conor Friedersdorf on Ted Cruz:

That such a brilliant, accomplished man so regularly comes off as a petulant, short-sighted phony is inextricable from the demands of the conservative base, and the sorts of personas that it tends to reward.