Successful Farming has a piece on 3 of the biggest American farmers: row and crop farmers (which I think means excluding fruits and vegetables). That led me to this on William Scully, an Irish immigrant, who died in 1906 with 225,000 acres in the Midwest.
It's a reminder that America has always been a country where some can get very rich.
"Carnism" is a word I just discovered in this Vox piece. It gets 150,000 hits in Google; it has its own wikipedia page.
It seems to mean the opposite of "veganism", designating the set of beliefs, attitudes, and social institutions which lead most Americans to eat meat from various animals.
Without getting into it much, I can buy the likelihood that some societies will come to see meat eating as undesirable or repulsive, perhaps on the level with smoking, perhaps someday equating it to racism.
In that possible future I wonder how our descendants will think of us--if political correctness still reigns will all statues of meat-eaters be removed. Logic would argue so.
This FCW article argues that Covid-19 should impact the government's priorities on IT. Ir's part of a larger set of speculations over the long term impacts. Maybe:
I've wondered whether USDA would run into problems with the WTO's limits on farm program payments. A recent CRS report analyzed the problem.
The last paragraph of the summary says:
If the United States were to exceed its WTO annual spending limit, then offending farm programs (whether ad hoc or traditional) could be vulnerable to challenge by another WTO member under the WTO’s dispute settlement rules. However, if the payment programs that appear likely to cause the United States to exceed its WTO spending limits in 2019 and 2020 prove to be temporary, then a successful WTO challenge might not necessarily result in an adverse ruling against the United States or any other authorized retaliation (e.g., permission to rais e tariffs on U.S. products), depending on the outcome of a WTO dispute settlement proceeding.
The issue is summarized as this:
The U.S. government provided up to $60.4 billion in ad hoc payments to agricultural producers cumulatively in 2018, 2019, and 2020, in addition to existing farm support. These payments have raised concerns among some U.S. trading partners, as well as market watchers and policymakers, that U.S. domestic farm subsidy outlays might exceed its annual WTO spending limit of $19.1 billion in one or more of those three years. [emphasis added]
I bolded the numbers because the last I'd heard it was $48 billion. I'm sure the $60 billion had little to do with the election results.
I start and don't finish a good number of posts. One I started before the election predicted how the transition would go. Unfortunately it assumed Biden/Harris would win FL and NC so it doesn't really work.
I join the people who point to the relatively peaceful days since Nov. 3. There's been no significant violence. I think part of it was how long it took for the election to be called--if it had been called on Tuesday night it would have been more likely for jubilant Biden supporters and/or upset Trump supporters to explode, or get into confrontations. Another part is just the machinery operating; we're used to the pageantry and operation of elections, and the familiarity of the usual routine dampens emotion.
So far Trump is resisting the outcome, which is inevitable. The margins in the different states are small, but not small enough for recounts or court challenges to overturn the outcome in any state, much less in the multiple states which would be needed.
I think the Trump administration will gradually sputter out, with little grace and some noise.
The Post magazine has an article: "How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together".
It includes this sentence: "Meanwhile, another parallel collapse is unfolding: the erosion of the traditional norms that have sustained our democracy. "
It's the sort of statement which I see relatively often: modern trends are undermining/eroding something from the past.
It's true enough, but what's usually ignored is the building of the new. For example, one thing going on now, about which I know nothing except it's gathering momentum and creating professionals, is the development of online games. What sort of norms are the participants in such games learning? What's the culture which has developed? How might those things carry over to public life.
Republicans made significant gains in House races, mostly it seems because they nominated and supported women candidates. For that they deserve congratulations, even though one of the successful candidates is an OAnon supporter.
This is one of the ways our politics works in the long run: one party comes up with an advance, like nominating women candidates or a fund-raising mechanism like ActBlue; the party gains an advantage; the other party then tries to catch up.
Once again the elections defied my predictions. I'm assuming Joe Biden will be inaugurated on Jan 20, but that's about the only thing I got right this year (won't talk about 2016).
Time enough for analysis when all the votes are in, but it seems the national polls once again were reasonably close, the state ones had their problems.
But the lesson for me, once again, is to warn that my picture of reality is warped by my desires for what reality should be. You'd think after almost 80 years I'd learn.
