Panics in Past and Present

 Started reading "The Year of Peril: America in 1942".  It's okay though I'm not enthusiastic--read too much on the period,  But it does remind me of how people panic when things happen, things like Pearl Harbor.  It's not a pretty story, with the mishandling of Japanese-American residents, and Italian-Americans, though not to the same extent.  Add the panics over potential or preceived Japanese attacks on the West Coast and German air attacks on the East.

I'd like to think we're more mature these days, but my memory of our reaction to the anthrax attacks which shortly followed 9/11 or to covid-19 persuades me otherwise.  And remember the scare about child-abuse in day-care centers in, I think, the 1990's. 

Sad.

What Should Historians Make of Venezuela?

 One possible argument for historians goes like this:

• Venezuela is becoming a failed state, with misery abounding, refugees fleeing, and insurgents surging.
• The failure traces to the policies of Presidents Chavez and  Maduro and their Bolivarian Revolution.
• In the light of the failure, and the disastrous results, any history of Venezuela must give priority to the politics, and the forces underlying the politics. 
• That suggests that historical investigations of America should at least acknowledge the overall context.

Flaws in Statistics

Media have reported a significant percentage of people have failed to get their second shot of vaccine.  I'm not sure of the basis, but if it's built on the CDC's automated database there may be some distortion.  In the case of my wife, we reported the first shot timely, but failed to report the second until the issue hit the news. How much such a pattern might have occurred I don't know.

Vaccination History

 We're far enough along in our covid vaccination process to discuss patterns, as my cousin and I did this morning.  It turns out the Northeast, especially New England, is doing the best.  Early leaders like WV or NM have fallen back.  

I'm not sure what accounts for New England's record.  They voted for Biden, so that's a plus. My impression is that they're well-educated and perhaps have a higher regard for science than average.  But what accounts for SD's presence high up the list?

I wonder if anyone has run a correlation between the states which do well with the annual flu vaccinations and the current effort?  

Here's a graph of all the states for the 2019-20 flu vaccine. Eyeballing there seems a correlation, though Maine is an exception.  When the dust settles we'll see whether there's a pattern of general resistance/acceptance of all vaccines, or whether the unique factors of covid-19 played a role in acceptance.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1920estimates.htm

Iowa Farmers Are Old--So It's Always Been

 A quote from  Chris Jones, an Iowa environmental engineer (doing a demographic analysis of Iowa farmers,

Of these white folks, 80% are male and the average age is almost as old as I am: 58.9 years

He's fighting Iowa CAFO's polluting water, with facts and complaints. A good cause, but I picked out this factoid to comment on. 

I remember in Infoshare Sherman County, Kansas was one of the trial counties for providing on-line access for farmers to some of the data USDA agencies had for them.  Mike Sherman, then the CED, had some data on the average age of his farmers--somewhere in the 50's IIRC. A problem then, a small part of the problem, was the older farmers generally weren't into computers, so what we were trying to do had no appeal.  

But to my title--I suspect if we had data going back to the Revolution on the age distribution of farmers we'd find they were consistently older than most working Americans.  Why? Because since the Revolution the proportion of US workers engaged in agriculture has been declining, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly. That means some farm children left the farm for the city, while their parents stayed on the farm, thereby skewing the age distribution. 

Was It Push or Pull--Leaving the Farm

 I read a paragraph like this, and it triggers me:

Agroecology is at a crossroads. The farming system—which is primarily practiced in the developing world but is gaining some traction in the U.S.—incorporates a suite of ecological growing practices into a wider philosophy rooted in shifting power from global agribusiness companies to peasant farmers.

The assumption behind it is that the "peasant farmer" way of life is preferable to any other.  The further assumption is that big companies push farmers off their land. But what if the way of life available off the farm is, on the whole, what one prefers?

I retain some affection for farming as it was in the 1940's and 50's. There were good times and good memories.  There were also downsides, and for me, a misfit between me and the possibilities of the style.  Part of that was the advance of "production agriculture", to use a relatively neutral name for market-oriented farming, with increasing investments required to compete.  So I was pushed. 

But in my case, it was mostly pull.  And I think over the course of history there's been more pull than push. To say otherwise is, in part, the romanticism of the liberal/progressive left.

Under Recorded: Luck and Power

 I think there's a gap in both journalism and history; we don't do enough to recognize the role that luck and power (differentials) play in human affairs.

Determining who has the power, and why, is often a better way to analyze things than alternatives such as racism, etc.  And looking at the effects of power differentials on the holders of power and the the subjects of power is as important.  Lord Acton's " Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a favorite.

It's possible to determine the powerful and those who have to cope with the powerful, but much harder to determine the lucky.   Just finished the bio on James Baker.  The authors note the ways he was lucky in his rise to prominence.  I don't know of any rules or analysis of the subject though.

Changing Our First Responders

Just saw an interview on Ananpour with Danielle Allen talking about policing, etc. Wasn't paying that much attention, but caught her mentioning changing our first responders.  That seems to be a popular liberal interpretation of "defund the police"--where currently police are our first responders for 911 calls (at least that's our perception, the EMTs and fire might disagree), a "generalist" model, instead we should separate different types of problems and have "specialists" for each.  For example, social workers, social psychologists, traffic wardens, etc.  

The logic is that police, being armed, resort too often to violence where a softer, gentler approach would avoid the tragedies.

I like the idea, but my contrarian streak also offers a caution"

America is a heavily-armed society. If a jurisdiction is able to set up such a system, the likelihood is sometime they will have one of their "specialists" will be killed by someone with a gun (or knife). When that happens, there will be a popular uproar and demands to arm the specialists, or shift responsibility back towards the police.

There's always tradeoffs.  TANSTAAFL 

Policing--a Modest Suggestion

 Saw a piece on police training in the US today, somewhere.  Apparently there are several problems: with 18,000 organizations there's no uniformity (and no national database to record bad cops); training in the US is a lot shorter than in Europe; the training they get doesn't cover some of the key issues.  Another problem is lack of money--the emphasis is getting bodies on the street.

All this leads me to this suggestion:

• provide federal money to local police force
• make the money available only to expand the training and cover some of the missing areas
• record those who receive federally funded training in a database, and track their careers--do they do better than their peers/predecessors, etc. Publicize the results, presumably good, to pressure the organizations which don't take advantage of the money.

Rural Broadband--in Vermont per Walt Jeffries

 Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm has been a very quiet blogger for a good while, and it's been even longer since I blogged about him.  (I'm sure I did, but too lazy to check.) He and his family have pigs, plus other livestock, on a farm in Vermont. 

He ceased right after he had gotten the necessary inspections to butcher their hogs on the farm and sell the meat across state lines, as well as within Vermont.  Building the butcher shop had been a multi-year endeavor, chronicled in the blog. After that he may have had less material to use in the blog.  Don't know.  I also thought maybe his children might have had problems with his blogging as they grew to adulthood, which would explain his silence.

Anyhow, he's recently returned to blogging, at least a little. His latest post reports the approach of fiber optic cable to his farm. He might go with that way, as opposed to Musk's Starlink system.  He credits the USDA broadband effort.  That's interesting because he's basically a libertarian type, reluctantly dealing with the regulations needed to get his butcher shop and retail sales operation running.