Gardening Time

Been in the garden yesterday and today.  The long range forecast is for temps above freezing, the snow is gone, and the soil is in good shape.  

So aching muscles but the satisfaction of doing something physical. 

The Persistence of Folk Wisdom--Memes?

The current effort to vaccinate for Covid-19 has run into resistance, particularly among black Americans.  The conventional wisdom explains this by the past history of science mistreating blacks, in particular the Tuskegee experiment.

The participants in the study are all dead now, the last one dying 15 years ago.  The study itself ended in 1972.

Assuming the conventional wisdom is correct, the extent to which people have become aware of it, and the duration of the time since the ending is striking. I wonder if sociologists have studied the factors which account for this penetration of the public consciousness, particularly in comparison with other memes.

{Here's further discussion of the issue--perhaps the meme lives longer in the minds of the intellectuals than the lay person?]

FSA Administrator Designate

  Zach Ducheneaux is from South Dakota and a Native American, the first for FSA. USDA announcement.

Gloria Montano Greene is nominated to be Deputy Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation.  She has been state executive director for Arizona in the Obama administration, while Ducheneaux isn't shown as having any FSA experience.

I wonder--the Trump Administration reorganized USDA--IIRC they moved NRCS and FSA into the same undersecretary's remit, where it had been FAS and FSA together?  Wonder if Vilsack will go back to the old organization or keep the new.  The establishment of the FPAC Business Center to serve admin functions of NRCS and FSA would argue for keeping the new, but I've no idea of how well that is working nor whether there could be any advantage politically to reorganizing.

Global Warming and the Arctic

 Vox has this post which updates a previous post of mine which noted commercial shippers using the Arctic in the summertime to go from Asia to Europe or vice versa.  Now it's possible in winter, at least some years.

Worn-out Knees in Pants

 I now have a hole in the right knee of my LLBean jeans.  Don't know how long I've had them, but they're well faded and well stained, and I'm happy with the wear I've gotten from them.

Back in my youth, when I was harder on my clothes than I am now, and during the period when I didn't grow much, my mother would fix such a hole by cutting a rectangular piece out of the knee.  She'd take an old pair of jeans and cut a matching piece from the back of one of the legs, and then sew the repair patch into the hole.

I don't remember whether I wore those patched jeans to school; I may well have worn them for weekends and kept newer jeans for school, but I won't swear to that.

We don't do that anymore.  Back in my youth jeans were maybe $3 or so, roughly 3 hours worth of work at the minimum wage, or maybe the price of 30 hamburgers. These days I'll spend $25 on LLBean jeans (using sales) and a McDonald's quarter pounder is $3.75. Our 1949 Chevrolet seems to have cost about $1500 (I'd remember it as $1700).

I'm sure people still patch the knees of jeans, but not many. 

Looking Forward to Rosa Brooks

 I really liked Rosa Brooks' last book, so I pre-ordered her new one, Tangled Up in Blue, Policing the American City. Haven't started it yet, as I'm still finishing Midnight in Chernobyl.  She and Peter Moskos, who I follow on Twitter, had an interesting exchange.  Here's a quote from a Georgetown interview:

It’s incredibly hard to be a good cop. This really came home to me once I started patrolling.

By underfunding other social services we’ve created a society in which cops are all-around first responders to everything from shootings, stabbings, domestic assaults and burglaries to mentally ill people walking down the middle of the street talking to themselves. And no one really has the skills to handle all those very different kinds of situations well.

In the interview she uses my favorite phrase: "It's complicated". 

Humor and Politics

 Ann Althouse at her blog has over the years considered Trump as being funny, humorous, tongue-in-cheek.  I could never see it.  In the wake of Rush Limbaugh's death some of the remembrances on the left have noted his comedy.  Never listened to him, didn't like what was reported about what he said (i.e., AIDs, McNabb, etc.).

I've always thought humor was one of the virtues, but I dislike Trump and Limbaugh's politics, so how do I reconcile the two?  

I'll assume for the sake of argument that both men were quite funny. Typically the humor I appreciate is directed at the establishment, from the position of an outsider. The other category is self-mocking; a liberal mocking liberals, etc.  (Wife and I enjoy "The Good Fight" TV series which does both. ) What I don't enjoy is jokes aimed at outsiders.  

That seems a fairly defensible position.  But then there's the category of blue jokes. Those can be defended as mocking the human body, so again self-mocking. 

Perhaps what I'm struggling with is a matter of power.  As a liberal I see Trump and Limbaugh as using humor from a position of power, to attack and denigrate those weaker than they are.  A conservative who perhaps firmly believes she's living in a world dominated by liberals who have all the power can find them funny because they're compatriots in the great rebellion against liberal hegemony?

Bureaucracy Extremes

Started reading "Midnight at Chernobyl" today.  It's been around the house for a while since we saw the TV series based on it,  but hadn't gotten to it until today.

Then I just got off the Facebook group for current and retired FSA employees (mostly field employees but some DC and retirees). I like to keep up with what's happening there. 

There's a big contrast between the rigid bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the more free floating discussion of issues and techniques in the Facebook group. I wonder how much of that is American versus Russian and how much is technology enabling exchange of ideas. 

I think it was true in the old days of ASCS that there was pretty good sharing of ideas within a state, and perhaps some across state lines based on personal connections.  Back in the 90's we tried to develop the sharing by having "train the trainer" courses with county people mixed in with the state people.  Having the internet and Facebook now facilitates the exchange even more.  

The Price of Your Daily Bread (Vertical Farm)

 ". As a result, 91 m2 of artificially produced wheat is necessary for each person, with a total cost of 125,680 euros per year."

That's from a critical analysis of vertical farms at Low Tech Magazine.

The Role of Government Regulation

 Over the last year or so the role of government regulation has been in the headlines:

• Boeing's 737-Max suffered two fatal crashes. The conventional wisdom now is that FAA failed to exert enough oversight of the process of redoing the 737 into the Max.
• The development of vaccines for Covid-19 has been controversial.  Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen  at Marginal Revolution in particular have pushed for faster approval and looser regulation of the various vaccines. The FDA's process has been contrasted against the process in other countries.  Alex, I think, has come out for reciprocal approval--approval by the regulatory authority in any (big, developed) country should be enough for FDA.
• The Trump administration pulled back on various regulations.  Today's Post  says the changes in inspection of pork processing plants have lead to more contamination in the ultimate products.

I always remember the thalidomide problem when the Republicans start pushing looser regulations.

Having said that, I wonder whether in the process of redoing the regulations which were undone in the last 4 years the Biden administration will find some things which should be changed.  I think anything a group does is going to have some flaws. In the usual course of events it's often easier to work around the flaws than to change them. But since the Biden people will have to go through the regulation process anyway, there's no added cost to fix problems.

IMO there's often a fine line between not enough regulation and too much, so a feasible solution can be an alternation between the two.