Olympic Memories: Mills

Memories:  Billy Mills coming from behind down the stretch in the 10K.  Can still bring tears to my eyes.  Youtube

Surprise of the Day: Cambodia

World Bank says Cambodia is now a lower middle income country (i.e., not the lowest grouping).

My memories of Cambodia feature Pol Pot and thousands/millions of skulls.  But now it's one of the fastest growing countries in the world.  History is strange.

Contrarian: Descriptive Not Prescriptive

I'll probably be alone in this, but my interpretation of Trump's statement is, it's a one-sentence digression describing what the gun nuts could do if his prediction of Clinton taking away guns came true.  I'm led to this because Trump famously isn't big on Second Amendment rights, or hasn't been in his past. So he outlines a sequence: Hillary aiming to take guns away (wrong), appointing Justices who share her aim (wrong because she doesn't aim to take guns away), yielding an inevitable result if you don't elect Trump.  But Trump's mind, which skitters like a moose calf on ice, undermines his projection by playing with the idea that gun nuts might assassinate Clinton.  It's not pushing the idea, it's the spur of the moment statement of a smart ass who never leaves a thought, or nonthought, unexpressed.

USDA and Civil Rights

The Jefferson Auditorium is the big meeting room in USDA's South Building at 14th and Independence.  Lots of ceremonies there, usually the audience filled the middle seats first, then the rear and lastly the front seats.  Apparently that's changed since I left.  Here's the blog post  bragging about the improvements the Vilsack leadership has brought to USDA in the area of civil rights.

Olympic History: the Soviets Are Coming

Intellectual History had a post on the Olympic games, which got me to thinking about the changes I've seen over the years, both in the Olympics and sports more generally.  One of the changes is in the title.  Flowing Data has a "streamgraph" showing the distribution of medals among nations over the history of the Olympics.

One of things not often remembered about post-WWII history was how competitive we (i.e., the US) felt about our position in the world and how challenging the USSR seemed to be.  We competed in heavy industry: tons of steel poured and tons of coal mined.  And beginning in 1952 we competed in the Olympics: the Soviets burst onto the scene in 1952 and caused great angst.  Then the East Germans added to our tension in 1968 and especially 1972--our dominance was slipping.  Our free enterprise, amateur-based system just couldn't keep up with the state-organized and subsidized systems of the Soviets and East Germans.  Changes had to be made. That at least was a strong reaction after every Olympic games for many years.

Why Prefer Convenience Foods?

From an ERS study:

First, Americans may be constrained by labor-force participation and have less time to spend on preparing food. Second, prices of many convenience foods may have fallen relative to their less convenient counterparts. Third, income changes may affect the degree of convenience demanded by households. Lastly, advertising, which is notably
more visible for the most convenient foods, may stimulate demand for convenience foods.

Animal Rights--The Right to Race

Northview Diary has a post on horses, offering a different view of animal rights.

Chickens Need Space?

 A couple more stories on the "cage-free" movement for chickens:    Haspel in the Post
and today. 

Today's story treats the movement as a fait accompli for the Humane Society. As I've written before, I've some reservations about this.  There's tradeoffs: on the one hand chickens get space to behave more "naturally", on the other hand some of the chickens will lose their lives earlier than they would otherwise.  Being pecked to death is not a good way to die.  (Hens being omnivores react to the sight of blood and compete to get a beak full, and then another, and then another.

And the "free-range" concept also has qualifications: chickens are naturally a warm weather bird, so those being reared north of the Mason Dixon line won't go outside for all the months of the year.  Hen houses typically aren't climate controlled, perhaps fans to move the air during the summer but I doubt heaters.  I remember our hens huddling together for warmth on the cold days of the year, more hens in closer contact than if they were in cages.

I'm no expert in modern day poultry raising but I wonder about culling.  On the farm my mother would cull our flock of 1-year old hens down by half, keeping the best for another year.  But that's labor-intensive (requiring early morning rising and all-hands on deck).  I don't know whether these days hens are culled in the same way.  If they are, the process would be much easier and more accurate with the cages than not.

I honor the impulse behind the cage-free movement, but a sizable fraction of the benefits are accruing to people's sense of their own merit.

Amish Dust Is Gold (for Asthma)

Two pieces in the NYTimes today on the same scientific research.

Briefly the Amish in Indiana have small dairy farms with barns near the house, the Hutterites have larger farms with bigger barns away from the housing quarters.  First exams of children from the two groups found significant differences in asthma, and in the underlying biology (too complex for me to summarize).  Experiments with dust from the two applied to mice reproduced the same differences in biology.

It's part of a recent theory--children today suffer because their environments are too sterile, while early exposure to a more varied environment can reduce asthma--but significant in that the experiment identifies the chain of biologic events at issue: which dust from which source.

Soon we may see the Amish making more by selling dust from their farms than by selling milk. :-)

I also found the cultural differences between Hutterites and Amish interesting.

The Hazards of Inconsistency

Daniel Drezner has a piece on MorningJoe's interview with ex-CIA head Hayden which might be setting records for him for the number of comments.  His big problem is the revelation that several months ago a high level foreign policy type was briefing Trump, and Trump asked three times during the interview why the US couldn't use nuclear weapons. (This was Joe Scarborough belatedly revealing the information.)

I've a different problem, based on Hayden's comments: Trump's inconsistency.  Hayden is a former bureaucrat, as am I, and apparently we both share a belief that perhaps the most important quality in a leader is consistency.  Whatever good and bad qualities a leader has, the supporting players, including the permanent bureaucrats as well as the leader's personal retinue, can adapt.  Is the leader an idiot? Then speak and write simply, and keep complex issues away. Is the leader intellectually omnivorous? Write 100 page tomes on every issue?  Is the leader a drunk? Structure his time so the drunk periods don't overlap with decision making.  Does the leader fly off the handle and order "off with their heads"? Agree, and do nothing.

Note: some of my examples are written based on the revelations of the Nixon tapes and the memoirs of Nixon's official family,another from Reagan's.

The point in all this is, if the leader is inconsistent from day to day, it's much harder for the good bureaucrat to adapt to compensate for his/her deficiencies and maximize her/his strengths.