Boyd and the 109,000

EWG reports John Boyd's testimony before a House Committee on Financial Services:

"John Boyd is founder and president of the 109,000-member Black Farmers Association. Testifying before the House Committee on Financial Services, Boyd said the Trump tariffs are “a national crisis” for farmers – and that small minority farmers are hurting the most:
It seems as though many have turned a deaf ear to America’s small farmers and black farmers alike. . . . Anytime the government gets involved, when they say it’s going to be a speedy payment to farmers, it’s always last for African American farmers, it’s always last for Latino farmers, for small-scale farmers and for women farmers."

That's the National Black Farmers Association,, not Thomas Burrell's 20,000 member Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association.

Not sure about those membership counts.  Might be as inflated as the Farm Bureau's.

Trump and Bureaucracy

A tweet:

So much of modern administrative law is premised on the “presumption of regularity”—an assumption that, all things being equal, government generally acts in good faith and follows its own rules.

A President with this approach to the law makes it hard to defend that presumption. https://t.co/1WzziYnrFh

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) July 21, 2019

Refugees from the Past: 1956

Media reports that some in the Trump administration want to cut the number of refugees admitted next fiscal year to zero.

I was first conscious of the US and refugees in the 1956.  The Hungarians revolted against their Soviet-supported leader, an uprising eventually put down by Soviet tanks. The result was a surge of refugees coming to the "West" as we called it back then.  There was much sympathy for these fighters for freedom who had suffered, so the US was able to welcome some,including an airlift which evacuated some thousands.. 

This was a precursor to the welcome extended to Cuban refugees after Castro took over, and subsequent episodes where the refugees seemed to be pawns or victims of the Cold War. Of course, back in the 19th century America viewed itself as the refuge for revolutionaries, from the 1798 Irish uprising to the 1848 uprisings particularly in Germany. We were the beacon of freedom.

But the Cold War is over, the beacon seems to be flickering, and our open door for refugees is closing.

(Can't resist a personal note: one contribution of the Hungarian refugees was the soccer-style kicker in the NFL, with Pete Gogolak being the pioneer during the days I was in college.

Marching Season and Remembering the Past

Here's a report on Marching Day in Northern Ireland.

The Protestant Orange Order is able to muster a lot of people, including a 6-mile long parade, ostensibly to celebrate a battle 330+ years ago.  I write "ostensibly" because it's really an assertion of community identity, at least incidentally in opposition to their Catholic neighbors.

Compare that to the remembrance ceremonies of the white South, celebrating the Confederacy of 158 years ago.  I'm sure there are some scattered around, but they aren't significant enough to warrant much attention. Why the difference?

You suggest one is celebrating a victory, the other an ultimate defeat?

That might logically make a difference, but where are the big parades celebrating the Union victory?  The closest we can come is the Juneteenth observances of recent years. And, more importantly, there's no organization dedicated to the celebration, as well as agitating for the cause now.  We had one such organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, but the GAR ended with the last vet, in 1956.

So why do Americans forget the past more easily than those in Northern Ireland? 

I suspect part of the answer is immigration: we've added millions of people who've no live interest in the fight for the union or the abolition of slavery.

How Do Small Farms Survive?

Here's the piece from which I stole the heading:
The answer: renting out a minihouse through Airbnb

Another piece in the media suggesting comfort animals, as in those with big brown eyes, aka "cows", is the answer.

The real answers, of course, are:

1. off-farm income, as has been the case for decades.
2. drawing down capital (i.e., the value of land and buildings)   (My mother used to fuss about farmers who would be better off selling out and investing the proceeds in bonds.)

Farming: the Definition

I follow Cam Houle on twitter and was struck by his T-shirt in this tweet.

Turns out the t-shirt is available on Amazon.

It seems even in Canada with its supply management setup, dairying is a losing proposition.

President Carter and the Courts

Slate has an interesting piece on President Carter's approach to filling judicial vacancies: Some points:

• he was able to persuade Sen. Eastland to support a judicial commission to pick appeals court judges.
• the result was diversity:

When Carter took office, just eight women had ever been appointed to one of the 500 federal judgeships in the country. (For the purposes of this article, I’m referring to the district courts, appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.) Carter appointed 40 women, including eight women of color. Similarly, before Carter, just 31 people of color had been confirmed to federal courts, often over Eastland’s strenuous disapproval. The peanut farmer from Plains appointed 57 minorities to the judiciary. (He also had more robes to fill: A 1978 bill expanded the federal judiciary by 33 percent, or 152 seats.)

Justices Breyer and Ginsburg were Carter nominees for appeals courts.

FL Olmsted: Bureaucrat

Reading a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted: "Genius of Place"

He's known as the creator of NYC's Central Park, his first big project just before the Civil War,.   But judging by his career through 1863 when he resigned from the United States Sanitary Commission, which he had serrved as executive secretary through its creation to Gettysburg, his true calling was as a bureaucrat.

Amish Vacations

"Amish vacations" seems like an oxymoron; dairy farmers don't get vacations. 

But the Amish have been moving into other occupations, and they still have big families, meaning someone can be in line to do the day-to-day work even of dairy farms.

So it seems that the Amish do take vacations, as shown by this Kottke post., linking to some photos and older articles.

Farewell to Cokesbury

My sister was a devoted patron of the Cokesbury book store in Syracuse.  It closed in 2012 as part of the closure of its 57 physical stores, shifting to online only.

I suspect the closure reflects both the decline of mainline Protestantism and the impact of Amazon on bookstores. 

Slate has a long piece on the decline of the religious bookstore here, and John Fea links it to evangelical religion.