A rule of thumb: whenever there's money on the table, or "new frontiers" of opportunity, there's people who will exploit the opportunity.
Recent examples:
Apparently R. Kelly had a big entourage. Other big shots, stars in various endeavors, have their own entourages, including the former guy.
People have been selling fake covid-19 vaccination certificates.
Several reports of people scamming the various pandemic-related stimulus programs.
The former guy pushed the envelope of governmental laws and norms across the board. That included the use of the Commodity Credit Corporation authority in ways which I think were unprecedented. He mostly escaped criticism and legal challenges because there was no one, no group whose interest would be served. Farm groups were receiving dollars. Conservatives were blind to Trump's efforts. Members of Congress responded to the interests of their constituents. Good government groups mostly aren't interested or informed about agriculture and USDA.
It seems the Biden administration is following in Trump's footsteps, judging by their announcement of using CCC for what to me seems like a grab bag of goodies.
Read, or skimmed, Julia Galef's book, The Scout Mindset. I'd recommend it. But what I want to write about is the mystery of "identity". The last part of the book covers how "motivated reasoning", or the "soldier" mindset as she calls it, is tied up with our sense of identity. Her repeated references to "identity" got me wondering when it became so important.
When I was young, I knew my identity was white, Scots-Irish/German, Protestant, farm boy from upstate New York. Child of John and Gertrude, sibling of Jean, with stories of ancestors immigrating to the US. But I don't recall feeling my identity was in question.
Is it possible that these older sources of identity have faded away as society has changed and market capitalism has evolved so Americans and Brits worry more about identity and start to find it elsewhere? Google Ngram viewer has been improved since I last used it; you can now search texts in languages other than American and British English. When I used it to search for use of "identity", it started to be used much more around 1960.
Some discussion this morning on the Democrats maneuvering in Congress led to this idea:
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a part of game theory where, per wikipedia: that shows why two completely rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. In the game, if both players trust each other they can end up with an outcome which is good for both, but if they only look to their own interests with no consideration of the other player they end up with the worst result.
I see Senators Manchin and Sinema (MS) as one player; the progressives as the other player. MS want the infrastructure bill; the progressives want the Biden "Build Back Better" bill. If the two groups cooperate they can get both; if they don't they may get neither. Partially this boils down to how much trust the two parties have in each other, but mainly it rests on whether there's a compromise on the size and contents and tax provisions of the BBB which both can live with.
A lot of media attention to China, specifically the possible bankruptcy of Evergrande due to overdevelopment of housing, triggered me.
China's economic development in the last 45 years or so seems to have been based on privatizing land, or at least selling individuals and corporations a long-term right to farm or develop on a piece of land. (I'm hedging because I vaguely remember that perhaps they used long-term leases in some cases, rather like the Brits did sometimes.)
Anyhow, how did the Chinese state get the land? My impression is that as a result of the Chinese Revolution the Communist Party nationalized land in the 1950's, which they've been privatizing since 1980's.
To me in a broad view that seems like what the English/Americans did--they nationalized the land held by Native Americans and then fueled economic development by privatizing.
Yesterday I tweeted a comment about Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series and its lack of women characters. Got a lot of adverse comments, which is fine.
Got to wondering about American literature and female characters. I couldn't think of memorable characters written by dead American authors, except for Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. Hemingway's Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan also came to mind, but I'd have to go to Cather and Wharton for better characters.
It's sort of funny--I resist the idea that authors are restricted to writing only about their own, that a white male can't write a black woman, etc. But it does seem from my self-poll that similarity between writer and character makes a difference.
Searching google results in hits for English language works, so characters from Bronte, Austen, and Rowling come up, not to mention Chaucer.
I follow Tamara Haspel on twitter, whose feed included this response, the beginning of a thread on the genetics of obesity:
As requested by @TamarHaspel here is a brief tweetorial on my latest @NatureRevGenet review on the #genetics 🧬 of #obesity https://t.co/OsLHqyvy6w 🧵👇 1/7 https://t.co/RrxTOZQmkf
— Giles Yeo (@GilesYeo) September 23, 2021
If I understand he says there are relatively rare cases where a mutation in a gene causes obesity and more common cases where a constellation of genetic markers leads to obesity.
For as old as I am, I think I keep up pretty well with the changing social norms, at least the more important ones. But I still have a hard time with obesity--I have a knee jerk reaction when I see a picture which includes obese people, particularly obese Americans. I'd like to think I don't act on my first feelings when I'm dealing with obese people in person, but you never know.
Maybe science will finally disprove the idea that obesity is a matter of willpower?
Wolff's book gets some 1-star reviews on Amazon, partly for bad writing and for finding Trump to be innocent of bad designs.
Needless to say that's not what I get from it. While there's some problems (many references to Giuliani's drinking and farting) and often the sourcing is clear, he moves the narrative along. His conclusion about Jan 6 rings true: there was no plan because the "adults" had deserted Trump and those who were left in the White House were incapable of forming a plan, much less executing it.
That reminds me of Dana Milbank's take from the Mueller report--while the Trump team wanted to collude with Russia, they were too incompetent to do so.
LInda Greenhouse writes about Sandra Day O'Connor--two bits struck me: "Imagined communities" are the groups we think we belong to,
“Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?” Here O'Connor is writing an opinion, and her "we" refers to "Americans".
“I guess you know Senator McCain pretty well,” I ventured. Her response was instantaneous and almost fierce. “I do not,” she declared. “I’ve met him, but I don’t know him. He’s a newcomer to Arizona.” (Unlike Barry Goldwater, born in the Arizona Territory before statehood, John McCain had moved to Arizona after his discharge from the Navy in 1981.) Here Greenhouse is trying indirectly to find who O'Connor voted for in 2008 (and takes Greenhouse's reaction as indicating she voted for Obama.) Here I think O'Connor is identifying herself as a "true Arizonan", in contrast to the newcomer McClain.
I liked the way there were two examples of how the psychology of imagined communities works in the one article. Note in the McClain example she's excluding, establishing a boundary, while in the religious example she's more appealing for people to include themselves.
I'm taking the liberty of doing a screenshot of a post in the Facebook FSA Employees group:
When you're serving many people in all parts of the country all year round, you run into unusual situations, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. County employees have to deal.
(While I'm on FSA, I'd mention farmers.gov, which has developed over time. There's also some Youtube videos--I'd have a link which I found yesterday but am having problems with Chrome. Here's a starting point.
