The Times had this feature on how Pfizer makes its covid vaccine.
It's fascinating, What struck me most strongly was the amount of testing and retesting which was done all through the process.
I recommend it for anyone on the fence about getting their shots.
When I was growing up New York City had three teams: the Giants with Willie Mays as center fielder, the Dodgers with Duke Snider, and the Yankees with Mickey Mantle. Snider got to the majors at 20, but became a regular in 1949 at 22. Mantle got to the majors at 19, becoming a regular in 1952 at 20. Mays got to the majors at 20 and became a regular in the same year, 1951. (His career was interrupted by military service.)
There was debate over who was better. My sister was a Dodger fan, so favored Snider. I was a Yankee fan, so favored Mantle (even had a baseball card for him). No one in the house was a Giant fan, so Mays didn't get equal time.
It seems clear now, on Mays' 90th birthday, that he had the best career and likely was the best player. The link has a good discussions of him.
The Volokh Conspiracy had a series of posts on a book: The Hidden Rule of Ownership.
The posts tempted me but so far I've not gotten the book either from the library or Amazon. It describes six bases for "ownership":
Politico has a piece on the Democrats use of the CRA, finally, with a discussion of why they're using it less than the Trump administration did. If you can get the courts to kill the Trump rules, you don't need the CRA, and you don't run the risk involved in applying it--the provision that prohibits the agency from future rules to the same effect.
Rubber was in short supply in the early days of WWII for America, because the Japanese took control of the major producing areas.
It's not mentioned in the book I'm reading but I remembered "retreads". No one born in the last 50's years is likely to be familiar with them, at least according to this website.
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.
One possible argument for historians goes like this:
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.
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.
