Number of Nuclear Test: the Country Which Is Sixth

North Korea, according to this Vox piece.

When Republicans Hated Lincoln

Lincoln is our secular saint, but there was a time when Republicans hated him.

Terminology: Clinton Versus Hillary

It seems to me when this presidential campaign began, the customary reference was to "Hillary" or "Hillary Clinton" and usually a reference to "Clinton" meant her husband.  These days though I think I see a presumption that "Clinton" will refer to Hillary; that's the default these days.  Maybe it's like "mail"--it's almost like you should use "snail mail" if you mean USPS.

Clinton and the Good Old Days

“I hope I will be the last American president who can ever say that when I was a small child, I spent some time on a small farm that didn’t have indoor plumbing. In the wintertime, the outhouse is way overrated. "

From Atlantic report on Bill Clinton and the campaign trail. Some more:

The idea of hope—as in The Man From Hope, rather than the Shepard Fairey poster—kept coming up. “Growing up in a post-9/11 America, there’s a lot of cynicism and vitriol,” Jay Rora told me. “The Clinton administration was a time when people had hope.”
For an older observer, the idea that the era of Monica, government shutdowns, and Dan Burton’s backyard demonstrations was an age of optimistic comity in politics might seem peculiar. For Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, these rosy impressions are highly welcome, even if they come at the expense of thinking about the Big Dog as a mummified relic.

The Lesson of Self-Sufficiency in Food: Boredom

Modern farmer describes an attempt by a man to eat only food grown on his land.  Some caveats: some grocery items and the trial lasted only 100 days.  His family was less enthusiastic.   The big downside: boredom.  100 broilers were to provide meat for a year, but his kids got tired of a chicken and veggie stir-fry after 3 days.

That's the point of our modern food system: incredible variety.  Back in the day we ate lots of potatoes, a lot of roast beef, and a lot of overcooked vegetables.  No more.  No more that is unless you voluntarily trade variety for other benefits.

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.