Schafly: Losing the War?

I first became aware of Phyllis Schafly from her anti-LBJ diatribe.  Needless to say, I was not impressed.  She is widely credited with stopping the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70's, and pulling the Republican Party to the right.  Corey Robin has an interesting take here.

I won't speak ill of the dead, but I'll muse on the significance of the ERA defeat.  It seems to me that American society has essentially evolved to where it would have been had ERA been passed. Yes, it's been a piecemeal progress, but progress it has been.  If I'm correct, it makes you wonder about the circumstances under which a constitutional amendment is vital, and when it's not.   

Notes of a Political Pollee

I was polled yesterday by one of the national pollsters, a rather interesting process.  Obviously the polltaker was being paid by how many people she could work through, because she was a very fast talker, which combined with some deafness on my part meant I didn't catch the full name of the poll (not Gallup, etc. but somewhat familiar) nor could I catch some of the options.  That was particularly true when she rattled off a list of issues and asked my top one. I thought she wanted one, but maybe she was open to more.

I've talked to pollsters in the past--I suspect they pass around the list of <s>suckers </s> people willing to talk to them.  Some of the pollsters were obviously just trying to identify whether I was going to vote and who for; a few were more consumer-oriented, including one which took 40  minutes or so, putting me off the process for some time.  But yesterday I was in a good mood so I answered. It was thorough, getting a lot of data, both demographic and political.

Containers for Pregnant Cows

James Fallows writes on Eastport, ME, which does an export business in pregnant cows, which are shipped in hay-filled containers, apparently.  But those exports have stopped, pending the restoration of some calm to the cattle areas of Turkey, which are feeling the effects of Syrian conflict and the Kurdish PKK.  It's an interesting take on the complexity of the global economy (including wood pellets for the EU and kraft paper wood pulp for China).

"“I guess I’ve learned to be careful what you wish for,” Chris Gardner told me at the WaCo. “It’s been a big part of our program to put Eastport on the map. We’ve done that—but one thing it means is that this place is much more at the whim of global trends and upheavals. As I said about the PKK, I guess I take a strange satisfaction that we are sitting here in eastern Maine and talking about how stuff on the other side of the world is going to affect us.”

 There's also a link to an interesting piece on the changing wood industry globally.

Voting With Your Feet

. Some of us believe that immigrants are voting with their feet when they choose to come to the US rather than stay where they were born (we usually ignore people who choose other nations than the US to migrate to). Some conservatives believe in "voting with your feet"; the idea that people will move from heavily taxed and regulated states to more lightly taxed and regulated ones.  They point to the gains the southern and western states have made over the years as evidence this works.  And some point to migration from California to Idaho or Texas as examples.

Given the continued disparities among states on many measures, and my liberal bias/skepticism of low tax/regulation policies I'm not convinced. Recently the NYTimes did a piece on a subset of migration: the migration of college students from one state to another.  Lyman Stone picks up on that study and expands into an interesting  discussion here.

Down With Honeybees, the Deadliest Animal

Did you know that not only are honeybees dangerous, killing up to 100 people a year*, more than any other non-human animal, but they aren't even native Americans; they're an invasive species.  I learned the last fact from a very good book I'm reading: A Sting in the Tale, by Dave Goulston, who is a British entomologist focused on bumblebees.  As I say, it's recommended (and no, I don't really want the honeybees to die off).



* together with wasps.

Boydton

I've blogged often enough about John Boyd to have a tag for him.  He lives near Boydton, VA, formerly a tobacco growing area.  Now it's servicing another addiction, the Internet addiction as noted by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Climate Change Is Real: The Northwest Passage Cruise

Lawyers, Guns, and Money  has a post which covers an article on a cruise ship cruising through the Northwest Passage.

I follow Powerline, which is skeptical of climate change, along with some liberal sites which accept it pretty much without question.  Though I've a knee-jerk reaction that things are probably more complicated than the public discussion makes out, it seems to me this is unambiguous proof of global warming.  Real people, not scientists, are venturing real money to cruise through the Northwest Passage, the object of centuries of exploration. 

IMHO the rate and extent of climate change may be debatable, but not the fact.

[Updated:  Here's a discussion from Politico on how far behind we are in icebreakers--I guess Congress is assuming the ice will vanish on its own.]

British Agriculture and US

I think one big difference between the UK and the USA is land tenure.  Oversimplifying, to get people to work the land the USA mostly offered ownership, though in the South we used slavery.  In the UK they always had enough people for the land and technology which were available, so they've always had tenants without ownership.  Of course these days the US has lots of renters, but typically outside the South the renter has some owned land, and has expanded her operation by renting from the heirs of deceased owners.  (I don't know how many errors I've written so far.)

To me this difference is shown in the Duke of Westminster, who just died.  The pieces on his death noted he was one of the biggest landowners in the UK, including some 300 acres worth of London.  I don't believe we would see similar stories in the US.  Yes, we've some big owners, like Ted Turner, but their lifestory isn't centered around landowning.

Another big: the Tenant Farmers Association, a UK organization:

  The TFA is the only organisation dedicated to the agricultural tenanted sector and is the authentic voice on behalf of tenant farmers.  The TFA lobbies at all levels of Government and gives professional advice to its members.

The TFA seeks to support and enhance the landlord-tenant system.  It represents and advises members on all aspects of agricultural tenancy and ancillary matters.  It also aims to improve the professional and technical knowledge of its members, to increase the flow of new tenancies onto the market and to help the farming industry best apply existing agricultural tenancy legislation.

The Virtues of Rural Life

 I suspect my blogging has reflected my aversion to rural life, having left the rural area where I grew up as soon as I got a permanent job.  Yet I'm ambivalent, as I often am, so I'll link to this piece in the Post, written by the guy who moved his family to Red Lake County, MN after describing it as the worst place in America to live, based on ratings of various criteria.  A paragraph:

Nor, as far as I can tell, have we come up with a good way to quantify nostalgia. Red Lake Falls feels like the kind of town your grandparents would live in, and I mean that in the best possible way. The town's 1,400 residents keep tidy homes on tidy lawns with sprawling vegetable gardens out back. To an adult living here for the first time, it feels like the kind of place you remember visiting during summers in childhood, where memories are built on indolent afternoons spent in broad sunny lawns while the adults relaxed on a screened-in porch with cocktails in their hands.

The author has children, BTW, and I don't, which might explain much.

Threats to USDA

Some USDA offices have been threatened and closed.  This was in an e-mail to employees, but nothing on USDA's social networks I can find as of now.  (My suggestion: having a twitter feed is a nod to the conventions of the present, but isn't yet incorporated in to the habits of the bureaucracy.