Simple Rules of Food Waste

As a retiree I hit the supermarket at odd hours, including times when employees or suppliers are changing the merchandise for sale.  The produce people go through the old produce and usually throw out the majority of it.  The bread people check the codes on the loaves and take back a lot.

We humans have a simple rule for food: when there's a choice, take the freshest and the best looking.  That simple rule means we waste a lot, because the whole marketsystem is founded on giving the consumer choices.
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On the Basis of Sex

Today's news about Justice Ginsburg's pancreatic cancer comes a few days after we watched the biopic: "On the Basis of Sex".

It was better than I anticipated, or at least I was more affected by its portrayal.   Ginsburg was 3 years ahead of my sister at Cornell, and she was likely in the same class as a first cousin.  So at least vicariously I knew something of the situation of women in those years, although as far as Cornell was concerned things were changing, at least for undergrads. (I had one female professor in 4 years there.)

Blast from the Past: Oswald's Rifle

I've a lot of posts which I've started but not finished.  I may lose the train of thought; more often I see something which triggers a reaction, but isn't sufficient to carry me through a discussion.

This is a  post which I abandoned for a while but which I've come back to.  I think the trigger was the discussion of the need for semi-automatic weapons, specifically against the threat of feral hogs.

To pick up the thread, back in the day there was much discussion in the Warren Report over whether Lee Harvey Oswald would have been able to get off the shots which killed Kennedy and injured Connally.  There were questions over how many shots were fired, how many struck the limousine, how many were heard. 

As I remember it, tests with a rifle like Oswald's bolt action rifle (a cheap mail-order gun) showed that a good shot could easily get off the three shots the Warren Commission determined had been shot.  IIRC the rate was 3 shots in about 5 seconds, maybe less. 

I just did a google search, on how fast you could fire a bolt-action rifle, getting conflicting results.   Obviously there are lot of variables, skill of the shooter, the weapon, scope?, distance, accuracy, etc.  Bottom line seems to be you can put out a lot of lead in a short time.

USDA and Its Scientists

I've lost track of what I've posted about the relocation of ERS and NIFA to Kansas City.

It seems, from outside, to have been rather mismanaged.  The latest problem is the reduction from $25K to $10 in the buyout payments to those who refused to move.  (To be fair, the initial letter said the "maximum" payment would be $25K, but if a good bureaucrat had been involved in the drafting she would have questioned why the adjective, leading to a discussion of the fact that the pot of available money for buyouts was limited, and subsequently a rewording of the letter.

The opponents of the relocation have played their card well, wrapping the ERS and NIFA in the robes of "scientists".  The story is a bit more complicated than that--ERS is social science and NIFA funds research.

Slavery and Caste Systems

Having read Ants Among Elephants (see yesterday's post) I'm musing about the similarities and differences between the caste system and slavery.

Did a google search, with limited results--I don't see a solid academic study, just some student work or summaries that can go off track. This might be the best one, throwing in "class system" and "meritocracy" as well as slavery and caste. One big problem is comparing different times and different countries.

What's striking to me from Ants is the use of force to enforce caste boundaries.  As it happens, a front page article in the Post today is an account of an honor killing, a Dalit married a woman of a trading caste, her father hired men to kill him.  Force obviously was used in slavery.  Which one was/is more violent.

In both cases (chattel slavery and caste system), the position is inherited by child from parent. In chattel slavery the law backs the social norms; apparently in the caste system social norms were  sufficient. And in India these days the law doesn't support the system.

It seems some social mobility is possible in both systems.  Certainly the family described in Ants is mobile, though their upward progress seems a function of the changing laws.  Their progress seems more problematic than some mobility under slavery.  The key difference might be the ownership: if your owner was your father and/or enlightened, he could boost you.  Since Dalits have no owner, that doesn't work.

On the other hand, there might be more unity among the caste (considering Dalits as a caste) than there was in slavery.  Perhaps, perhaps not.

[Added:  Other important differences:

• there seems to be no boss, no slave driver in the caste system. That might mean more "freedom" in one's daily routine, more akin to the "task" system in rice culture than the "driver" in cotton system.
• mobility within the caste is restrcted--no house slaves versus field slaves, no chance to become a skilled artisan]

Ants Among the Elephants

Just finished the book, which I'd recommend.  It's very much narrative driven, very little description or fine writing, and not much analysis.  It's obvious that the author isn't writing in her first language, a fact which some reviewers on Amazon found objectionable. Essentially it's the story of the author's grandfather, uncle, and mother.  They were Dalits, or "untouchables", striving to get educated and escape the life to which they were born.  The uncle becomes a leader in the Naxalite/Communist rebellion, while the parents become college instructors.

It got good reviews (Wall Street Journal list of 10 best nonfiction books of 2017) for the description of a different world.

What strikes me is, although the family struggles to rise, they also accept the norms of the society. 

E. J. Dionne Is Absolutely Right

He has an op-ed in today's Post on the importance for Democrats of winning control of the Senate.

Unfortunately that likely means defeating some Republicans I'd just as soon see stay, but given our growing partisan divisions that's the way it's going to be. 

Is Trump Really Alan Ladd or Richard Boone

Daniel Drezner picks out a paragraph from Bruenig's Post piece here:

As always, I learned many things reading @ebruenig’s exploration of why most Texas evangelicals back Trump so fiercely. This paragraph stood out. https://t.co/htyvqqC6ka pic.twitter.com/sUV4WIqx3L

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 18, 2019

I commented on it, and I want to expand my comment here:

The gist of Bruenig's paragraph is many evangelicals see Trump as their defender against the evils besieging them.

I'm reminded of the Westerns which were popular in my youth.  One of the themes was epitomized in the movie Shane. A similar theme was in the TV series Have Gun, Will Travel.

The plot of Shane, and many of HGWT's plots, have townspeople who are civilizing the West but whose very virtues render them helpless and inept in dealing with the pure evil of gunslingers (at one time Indians, but by my adolescence they were white).  They need a gunslinger of their own, someone with a pure heart (or at least a heart better than those of his opponents) but clouded past, to defend them and defeat evil. The opponents are numerous and wily, not above stooping to the lowest of tricks and hurting the innocent.

I can't see Trump as either Ladd or Boone, the stars of the shows, but Drezner/Bruenig do help me to understand some evangelicals.

Needed: a Peach Cartel

I think peach growers should form a cartel and push for legislation permitting "peach" to be used as a label only for fruit marketed in the month of August.

I just finished the second of two peaches I bought earlier in the week.  Both were delicious, nice yellow flesh, juicy and yielding but not soft, reminding me of the way peaches used to taste when I was a boy.  I've a vague memory (vague because it's not a good one and so suppressed) of buying peaches in June and July and being consistently disappointed.  The peaches were hard, reddish flesh, not the perfect yellow of August peaches.  In sum, eating them discouraged me from buying peaches.

If the peach growers can't form a cartel to enforce standards of identity for their product, maybe I can file a claim for deceptive advertising with the FTC.  Someone in the government has to do something.

A Contrarian Word :Steve King

Time for my contrarian side to show:  Seems to me people don't understand Steve King's words, as reported in this NYTimes piece.

He's wrong, of course, but there's a bit of truth there.

The issue is, if we humans had always had the means and the will to abort all fetuses what would that mean today?

People interested in genealogy know a truism: go back far enough and everyone is related.  So it makes sense that everyone has a rape, or incest, in their chain of ancestry.

Where King goes wrong is in his conclusions.  He's saying, as I understand him, if fetuses which result from rape or incest can be aborted, then everyone with rape or incest in their ancestry would be/should be dead.  That's wrong.  Suppose King David rapes Bathsheba and she becomes pregnant, a pregnancy which is aborted. That doesn't mean that neither David nor Bathsheba will have descendants.

The answer to the issue is: while nobody today would be alive, all the people who were alive would have no rape or incest in their ancestry.

S

And Canada's Dairy Farmers Are Compensated

Prime Minister Trudeau and President Trump are similar in one way: when their wheeling and dealing on trade issues hurts farmers, they compensate them.  See this article on the Canadian program.

Big Japanese Dairies

A look at the Japanese dairy industry here.

Seems the farms are smaller than US.

Bowling Alone and White Identity

To expand on the last paragraph of my post yesterday, which read: "Another note--it seems to me in the 1950's older people had firmer identities--they were Catholics or Methodists, union or management, Italian or Slovak.  Those identities have faded now, leaving only whiteness and politics."

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" and other books have noted the decline of organizations.  When I was growing up, one's identity was Methodist, Catholic, Orthodox, etc., which was reinforced by organizations associated with the church--Knights of Columbus.  For many whose parents or grandparents had immigrated to the US in the last of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, their identity was hyphenated: Italian-American, Irish-American etc. (I was German-American but the two world wars essentially suppressed the German-American identity.) For others unions provided an identity--coal miner, steel worker, autoworker, longshoreman, etc.  If you weren't in a union, likely your employer was an identity, as IBM and EJ were identities in my area. And still others had an identity based on military service and participation in American Legion or VFW. 

Compare that with today: unions are in decline, as are the mainline churches. Veterans organizations are diffused and losing membership.  Ethnicity has declined as the passage of time means people never knew their immigrant ancestors.

What we have now is the general "white identity", education, class, and the general "(white) evangelical" religion.

The Past and White Identity

Here's an Atlantic article discussing "white identity".  Graham is interviewing a social scientist who says:

I think the term white identity politics often conjures up this image of a working-class white man who maybe lost his manufacturing job and feels he’s being left behind. There’s not a lot of evidence that such a person is the typical white identifier. People high on white identity tend to be older [emphasis added] and without college degrees. Women are actually slightly more likely to identify as white than men. And white identifiers are not exclusively found among those in the working class. White identifiers have similar incomes, are no less likely to be unemployed, and are just as likely to own their own home as whites who do not have a strong sense of racial identity.

She goes on to distinguish between having a positive attitude towards one's racial identity and a negative attitude towards other racial/ethnic groups (i.e. prejudice).  By attacking immigrants, Trump attracts both the prejudiced and the white identity groups, the latter which dislikes the idea of being in the minority.

Why would white identity people tend to be older?  One theory would be they learned the attitude at their mother's knee, and carried it forward through life, in contrast to younger people who didn't learn such feelings in youth.  Might be something to that, but I prefer another theory.

My guess is that as people get older they tend to try to understand their life.  When you're young, you're too busy living to have much time for navel grazing,but when you're in your 60's and beyond you've got the time, and at least in my case the motivation to make sense of things.  That's one basis for my theory.  The other basis is the truism that old people view the past through rose-colored glasses.  The way things were when we were young seems still the natural order of things. Changes since one's youth seem "newfangled", unnatural, wrong, or at least grating.  (The last popular music I really liked and listened to was the Beatles.)

Combine the two: the force of nostalgia and the drive to understand and you have a formula for white identity.

I'd note I don't remember much "white identity" back in the 1950's, at least not identity that was separate from prejudice. 

Another note--it seems to me in the 1950's older people had firmer identities--they were Catholics or Methodists, union or management, Italian or Slovak.  Those identities have faded now, leaving only whiteness and politics.

The Role of Power in Society

The older I get the more attention I give to the role of power in society. It seems to me to play a role throughout society, a role not usually analyzed as such.  What's important when one entity has power is that there is some countervailing force in society.  Lacking that, you have injustice.

That's why unions were so important as counter balances to the big industrial powers in the 1950's and 60's.  Today we have the big tech firms, the Microsofts, Amazons, Netflixes, Googles, etc., and we're still struggling to develop institutions of some sort to check their power.

A Gripe About Dell

The 1 year warranty on my Dell desktop is expiring, so I was looking into an extension.  That caused me to become very unhappy with Dell:

• when I went to their website, I was able to find an extension for about $42 a year.  The page promised a 15 percent discount for ordering on line, although there was a phone number to extend by phone.
• the page did not offer any obvious link to a description of what was or was not included in the warranty.
• when I added it to my shopping cart and tried to check out I couldn't.  On separate days I got the message that the page was no longer available.  One day I got a message saying the code was wrong--something about the length of the HTTPS header exceeding 8140 bytes.
• there was no apparent way to contact Dell about the website problem.
• when I called the support line, I explained my problem to four separate people (each one very nice, and the first three transferring me to someone they thought could help)
• the last person got me so mad that I forget what his explanation was--IIRC he seemed to be saying the problem was known. Although the web page said my warranty expired on the 12th, he claimed it was actually the 11th.  
• after a day to cool off, I called the number on the web page.  The woman attempted to explain the elements of the warranty and gave me a price of $350+ for 3 years extension.  I asked for something in writing, which she promptly sent to me.
• the Dell explanation of its warranty service was long and legalistic.  I understand why--trying to cover all legalities in all the states, but what I really wanted was something more sales-oriented, a chart showing the different options (the guy from yesterday seemed to say there were different levels of support) and their cost.

Bottom line:  while the people were polite and did their best, I conclude Dell makes them work within a flawed system, which will cause me to think seriously about a different vendor for my next desktop.  Meanwhile, I'll take my chances with no warranty--if I need help, which I usually don't, I'll pay for support for that episode.

What Dems Are Stupid About

Politico has this:

THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF IDEAS in this Democratic primary. But there is almost no discussion by the two dozen candidates running for president about how they would get a Republican Senate to pass their policies. (Saying you’d end the filibuster doesn’t count, since presidents don’t control Senate rules.)

What I Learned Today: New Sport

Apparently this is a new sport, was on channel 4 when I turned on the TV, now advertised on Twitter.

This is the moment you’ve been waiting for 🏁🔥
Watch extended coverage of the 2019 DRL @Allianz World Championship season premiere right here on Twitter LIVE.
Join the conversation by tweeting the hashtag #DroneRacingLive https://t.co/Mbq5nVZvGR

— Drone Racing League (@DroneRaceLeague) August 9, 2019

Public Service Announcement

Check your surge protectors.  I didn't and lost a TV and receiver.

The Size of "Small Farms"

NFU comments on the Family Farmer Relief Act.

And a new Congressman tweets about it:

Read more here about the bipartisan Family Farmer Relief Act which passed the Senate last week. I join @NFUDC in urging the President to sign this legislation as soon as possible to bring relief to small farms and allow more farmers to stay in business. ⬇️ https://t.co/In7iAzGu3X

— Congressman Antonio Delgado (@repdelgado) August 5, 2019

What does it do?

Raise the debt limit for Chapter 12 filing from $4 million to $10 million.

When big farms have thousands of cows and thousands of acres, I guess $10 million is "small", but it's hard for an old man to get his arms around.

Ex-Politician Speaks Truth? Mulvaney on Moves

Mulvaney is Trump's acting everything, currently chief of staff.  This Govexec article reports on his recent speech in his native South Carolina, discussing USDA's move of ERS and NIFA offices from DC to Kansas City.

“Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” he said. “I know that because a lot of them work for me. And I’ve tried. And you can’t do it. But simply saying to the people, you know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven and move you out into the real part of the country, and they quit. What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.” 

Meanwhile OIG says provisions in the appropriations law prevents USDA from spending money on the move.  USDA says the provisions are unconstitutional:

In an OGC opinion prepared to respond to the IG’s draft conclusions, USDA says the “committee approval” provisions in the omnibus act are unconstitutional.
“The department states that Supreme Court, Office of Legal Counsel, and Government Accountability Office (GAO) precedents support their position,” the IG said. “The department provided advance notification to the committees before obligating funds for office reorganizations and relocations to the extent they involve a reprogramming or the use of the identified interagency agreement or transfer authorities. The department states that it is not required to obtain committee approval of such actions.”


But the inspector general said that position conflicts with previous positions taken in litigation by USDA. “The department needs to communicate, in writing, this change of interpretation to USDA leaders at the sub-cabinet and agency levels.”

Post on Dairy Farm

The WaPost has an article on the death of a dairy farm. It's more than an article:

One more year on the farm

A visual narrative of one family’s fight to save their land

Photos and video by Ricky Carioti | Text by Annie Gowen Aug. 3, 2019

After seeing a number of stories on the plight of dairy farms I'm frankly becoming numb to the plight of the families.   So my reaction to this is: flat flat land.

Are Farm Programs Insurance or Welfare?

Seeing several articles, some based on EWG's research, hitting Trump's MFPI and MFPII for helping big farmers and not small ones.

Seems to me there's a basic conceptual issue here; how are farm programs to be "framed"?

One way to look at them is as "welfare", similar to food stamps, welfare (TANF), Pell grants and student loans, etc.  For welfare programs, our expectation is that our tax dollars are given on the basis of "need", with the most needy getting the most money.  If farm programs are indeed "welfare", as they've often been labeled, then giving the most money to the largest farmers in bass-ackwards.

Another way to look at them is as "insurance", whether it's federal flood insurance or unemployment insurance or the insurance policies on cars, homes, and life provided by private companies.  In all such cases (that I can think of), insurance coverage is tied to the "value" of the property.  The more expensive the car or house, the more coverage you can get on them.  The better your salary, the higher your unemployment insurance benefit.

Cleaning Files and Voter Suppression

Jennifer Rubin in the Post cites a Brennan Center report on voter list purges. The report emphasizes that counties which are no longer required to pre-clear changes in their electoral operations under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act have increased their purge rates (roughly from 8 percent to 10 percent a year).

Rubin is concerned. 

I'm not, likely because I had some experience with the problems of maintaining lists in the past.  The bottom line: it's difficult to keep a list of name and addresses up to date because there's really no cost, no push to identify errors.  An example: one of my past employees resigned from ASCS relatively quickly--IIRC her husband in another agency decided to take an early out and they decided to move to Florida.  So her exit process was rather hurried and incomplete.  After I retired I would occasionally search the online USDA employee directory, just to see who still worked there.  For about 10 years, I'd still find Jane's name in the phone directory.

The way FSA counties were supposed to update their name and address list was to do an address check (not the right terminology) requested with USPS once a year..  I'm sure some didn't do it, and it wouldn't have been fool proof.  I gather that some purging of voter lists done differently, bouncing a voter file against another  database.  The problem there is using names to match. One of my employees noted her home county had a lot of people named "Johnson".

Although the color coding of the report is poor, some of the higher ranking states in purge rates are Maine, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin.  In some states (Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, Wisconsin) the rates among counties are very similar; in other states (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi) the rates vary widely among counties.

Without knowing the process being used to purge the files and the history of past purges at the county level, I think it's dangerous to draw general conclusions.  As a good liberal I am, of course, a bit suspicious of the actions of those counties which used to be covered by Section 5.  But I don't think the Brennan Center proved any wrongdoing. 

A final consideration: purging voter rolls isn't very important IMHO--having a dead or moved voter on list offends my bureaucratic sensibility and it wastes computer storage, but is very unlikely to open the door for any voting fraud

The End of City Newspapers?

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a post showing the decline in circulation of big city newspapers over the last 17 years.  Some papers have fallen from 500,000+ to 50,000- !!

I knew the newspaper industry had been hit by craigslist and online news, but hadn't realized how deeply newspaper staffs had been cut.  It's bad because papers had been a countervailing force against local problems.  Some innovations may be replacing that function in part, but not totally.

My Political Preferences for President

I've written on this blog that I support Amy Klobuchar for 2020. [Note: I started writing this before the Tuesday debate.]

I remember 1972, when George McGovern was the Democratic candidate.  He had good positions, with which I agreed. But he was tagged as supporting "amnesty, abortion, and acid", in other words supporting the far left. His "demogrant" of $1,000 per citizen was also far out, though I think Sen Booker has a similar proposal.  Though I voted for him, I would have preferred a more moderate candidate, like Muskie or Humphrey, as more likely to give Nixon a fight.

In general I don't have principled objections to many of the proposals on the left.  Put them into legislative form, design good bureaucratic structures to implement them, and see if you can get enough support from the center and right to pass the legislation.  Implicit in that sentence is the idea that the plans of Warren and other candidates can't be enacted or implemented.

I'm pleased that Buttigieg last night pointed out the problems of getting proposals through the Senate.  Even if we get the four seats we need for majority control, our margin will depend on Sens. Manchin, Sinema, Jones, King, Warner, et. al., none of whom are very liberal.  So here's my preferences:

1. someone reasonably sure of beating Trump
2. someone who will have positive coattails in AZ, CO, AL, KY, KS, NC, etc.
3. someone who won't hurt Senate candidates.

It's way too early to know who will meet my preferences.

How Food Waste Happens

Watching DC's channel Four News.  (4 pm, 7/12/2020)Just had a consumer segment reporting on a test of having a supermarket deliver produce.  Bottom line, not good.  Berries mush, apples bruised, avocado not organic.

Agreement by the anchors that picking produce was personal, so such problems were big issues.

The program had no discussion of food waste, but it revealed why food waste happens--we pick the best out of the bin, and leave the worst, meaning the worst get tossed.

Fraud in the Farm

Farmers are no better or worse than other humans--that's my position and I'm sticking to it.

What's important, I believe, is structuring institutions so there's "countervailing power"--give anyone some power, you need to find another person whose interest is countering that power.

In the case of agencies, that's typically the inspector general, including the auditors, the fraud hot lines, and the whistleblowers.  I'm not sure those checks and balances are sufficient, but they can work, as in this instance of a tobacco farmer in Kentucky defrauding crop insurance.

MFP II

Farm Policy blog has a post on the announcement of signup for MFP II

If I'm correct, CCC may be getting close to exhausting its borrowing authority by the end of MFP II, requiring Congress to replenish it.

The Down and Dirty Dairy People

My mother always celebrated the goodness of farmers, particularly dairy and poultry farmers. Se would be disappointed at the shenanigans described in this thread.

Alright, today’s the open show and all these cows are ready to compete. Figured now’s as good a time as any to do the sequel to my last thread. This time: A Study in Dairy Infighting. pic.twitter.com/DIzwtNm42o

— 😇💖😈 (@songlin221) July 27, 2019

Electric Airplanes and Electric Motorcycles

This article discusses the developments in electric aircraft.  I had no idea they were being worked on.

Noertker and his team at the Los Angeles-based startup Ampaire are developing first-generation electric aircraft — and they’re far from the only ones. Something on the order of 170 companies have joined what Noertker calls an electric aircraft “arms race.” Several made a splash at the Paris Air Show a couple weeks back. 

I wonder though. Yesterday while I was in the garden a motorcycle roared down Reston Avenue.  I'd assume that doing an electric motorcycle would be very easy compared to an electric airplance.  However, my cynical take is that the roar of the cycle is 90 percent of the value of the vehicle.

So, a modest prediction: development and sales of electric airplanes will advance faster than electric motorcycles.

Will Autonomous Cars Save Parking Spaces in the City?

It's assumed the answer to my question is "yes"--some recent articles arguing for changing zoning requirements in the city to reduce the number of parking spaces required.

I'm not so sure.  As long as people commute from the suburbs to the city for their jobs, it seems to me parking is going to be a problem.  Yes, in some cases I can imagine a Reston commuter to DC getting a car at 7 for a 30 minute drive to DC, the car then returning to Reston to pick up another commuter at 8 for another 30 minute drive.  But then it's going to need to be parked until the evening.  So if the two individuals were each driving solo into the city and parking now, that would reduce the number of parking spots needed.  But that's a special pattern

Granted, you can imagine with autonomous cars and a drive sharing app, we could have much more flexible drive sharing so the number of people in the car rises from 1 to 2 or more on average.  And there likely will be realignment of jobs and homes based on the availability of autonomous cars.

My bottom line: the change requires people to change their habits, meaning it's going to take a while before the impact on parking spaces is felt. 

A Circuitous Route to Farm Survival--Cather, Stephens, and Somerby

Among the books in our house when I was growing up were three or four by Willa Cather, including My Antonia..  I've read it several times, but unlike some people I know, my wife for one, I don't have a great memory for the contents of what I've read.

Bob Somerby has his blog, The Daily Howler, which I follow.  He's often repetitive and usually idiosyncratic, predictably criticizing journalism and liberal pieties, although from a liberal background.  (He was a roommate of Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones at Harvard who has never forgiven some journalists for their criticism of Gore.  Also taught school in Baltimore for years, leading to sharp criticism of educational panaceas and the misuse of statistics.)

Yesterday he wrote a piece picking up on a Brett Stephens op-ed in the Times, in which Stephens uses My Antonia to discuss immigration.  The book is based on Cather's childhood, spent in Nebraska among immigrant families, mostly Czech, with the central character the "Antonia" of the title. It's a rich picture of immigrant and farm life on the Nebraska plains which I recommend. I also recommend both the Stephens piece and the Somerby piece.

Somerby has a quote from the book, which reads in part:

"There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk [the local market town] All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school..

What I'd point out is it's the 1880's, not now, and farmers are being supported by off-farm income! Most people don't realize that most American farmers do rely on off-farm income today.   Usually, when that's discussed, it's treated as a revelation and an indicator of how bad the farm economy is. But maybe it's time to reconsider.  (BTW, back in the day most FSA clerks (program assistants) were the daughters and/or wives of farmers, or former farmers.)  I think what's going on is the same logic as my father used when he notoriously came home and told my mother she was going to have a flock of chickens (mom held that grudge until she died).  The logic--diversification reduces risk.  That's true whether you're talking investments in stocks and bonds, or agriculture. Hens and dairy have different economic cycles. But an even better diversification is a nice steady income in town, whether it's 1880 or 2019.

Boyd and the 109,000

EWG reports John Boyd's testimony before a House Committee on Financial Services:

"John Boyd is founder and president of the 109,000-member Black Farmers Association. Testifying before the House Committee on Financial Services, Boyd said the Trump tariffs are “a national crisis” for farmers – and that small minority farmers are hurting the most:
It seems as though many have turned a deaf ear to America’s small farmers and black farmers alike. . . . Anytime the government gets involved, when they say it’s going to be a speedy payment to farmers, it’s always last for African American farmers, it’s always last for Latino farmers, for small-scale farmers and for women farmers."

That's the National Black Farmers Association,, not Thomas Burrell's 20,000 member Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association.

Not sure about those membership counts.  Might be as inflated as the Farm Bureau's.

Trump and Bureaucracy

A tweet:

So much of modern administrative law is premised on the “presumption of regularity”—an assumption that, all things being equal, government generally acts in good faith and follows its own rules.

A President with this approach to the law makes it hard to defend that presumption. https://t.co/1WzziYnrFh

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) July 21, 2019

Refugees from the Past: 1956

Media reports that some in the Trump administration want to cut the number of refugees admitted next fiscal year to zero.

I was first conscious of the US and refugees in the 1956.  The Hungarians revolted against their Soviet-supported leader, an uprising eventually put down by Soviet tanks. The result was a surge of refugees coming to the "West" as we called it back then.  There was much sympathy for these fighters for freedom who had suffered, so the US was able to welcome some,including an airlift which evacuated some thousands.. 

This was a precursor to the welcome extended to Cuban refugees after Castro took over, and subsequent episodes where the refugees seemed to be pawns or victims of the Cold War. Of course, back in the 19th century America viewed itself as the refuge for revolutionaries, from the 1798 Irish uprising to the 1848 uprisings particularly in Germany. We were the beacon of freedom.

But the Cold War is over, the beacon seems to be flickering, and our open door for refugees is closing.

(Can't resist a personal note: one contribution of the Hungarian refugees was the soccer-style kicker in the NFL, with Pete Gogolak being the pioneer during the days I was in college.

Marching Season and Remembering the Past

Here's a report on Marching Day in Northern Ireland.

The Protestant Orange Order is able to muster a lot of people, including a 6-mile long parade, ostensibly to celebrate a battle 330+ years ago.  I write "ostensibly" because it's really an assertion of community identity, at least incidentally in opposition to their Catholic neighbors.

Compare that to the remembrance ceremonies of the white South, celebrating the Confederacy of 158 years ago.  I'm sure there are some scattered around, but they aren't significant enough to warrant much attention. Why the difference?

You suggest one is celebrating a victory, the other an ultimate defeat?

That might logically make a difference, but where are the big parades celebrating the Union victory?  The closest we can come is the Juneteenth observances of recent years. And, more importantly, there's no organization dedicated to the celebration, as well as agitating for the cause now.  We had one such organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, but the GAR ended with the last vet, in 1956.

So why do Americans forget the past more easily than those in Northern Ireland? 

I suspect part of the answer is immigration: we've added millions of people who've no live interest in the fight for the union or the abolition of slavery.

How Do Small Farms Survive?

Here's the piece from which I stole the heading:
The answer: renting out a minihouse through Airbnb

Another piece in the media suggesting comfort animals, as in those with big brown eyes, aka "cows", is the answer.

The real answers, of course, are:

1. off-farm income, as has been the case for decades.
2. drawing down capital (i.e., the value of land and buildings)   (My mother used to fuss about farmers who would be better off selling out and investing the proceeds in bonds.)

Farming: the Definition

I follow Cam Houle on twitter and was struck by his T-shirt in this tweet.

Turns out the t-shirt is available on Amazon.

It seems even in Canada with its supply management setup, dairying is a losing proposition.

President Carter and the Courts

Slate has an interesting piece on President Carter's approach to filling judicial vacancies: Some points:

• he was able to persuade Sen. Eastland to support a judicial commission to pick appeals court judges.
• the result was diversity:

When Carter took office, just eight women had ever been appointed to one of the 500 federal judgeships in the country. (For the purposes of this article, I’m referring to the district courts, appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.) Carter appointed 40 women, including eight women of color. Similarly, before Carter, just 31 people of color had been confirmed to federal courts, often over Eastland’s strenuous disapproval. The peanut farmer from Plains appointed 57 minorities to the judiciary. (He also had more robes to fill: A 1978 bill expanded the federal judiciary by 33 percent, or 152 seats.)

Justices Breyer and Ginsburg were Carter nominees for appeals courts.

FL Olmsted: Bureaucrat

Reading a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted: "Genius of Place"

He's known as the creator of NYC's Central Park, his first big project just before the Civil War,.   But judging by his career through 1863 when he resigned from the United States Sanitary Commission, which he had serrved as executive secretary through its creation to Gettysburg, his true calling was as a bureaucrat.

Amish Vacations

"Amish vacations" seems like an oxymoron; dairy farmers don't get vacations. 

But the Amish have been moving into other occupations, and they still have big families, meaning someone can be in line to do the day-to-day work even of dairy farms.

So it seems that the Amish do take vacations, as shown by this Kottke post., linking to some photos and older articles.

Farewell to Cokesbury

My sister was a devoted patron of the Cokesbury book store in Syracuse.  It closed in 2012 as part of the closure of its 57 physical stores, shifting to online only.

I suspect the closure reflects both the decline of mainline Protestantism and the impact of Amazon on bookstores. 

Slate has a long piece on the decline of the religious bookstore here, and John Fea links it to evangelical religion.

On the Filibuster and Policy Flip-Flops

Just replied to an Ezra Klein tweet about ending the filibuster.

If the Democrats can win the presidency, and if they can win control of the Senate, they've not won too much, at least not when compared to the stack of policy proposals the candidates, especially Warren, are coming up with.  The fact that the Senate majority will likely be composed of Sens. Manchin, Rosen, Jones, Kelly (AZ), Gideion (ME) and whoever, all centrists whose seats aren't the most secure, means the most liberal proposals won't get considered in the Senate, regardless of the filibuster.

The filibuster means even somewhat bipartisan measures (say 51 Dems plus 7 Reps) won't pass.

Removing the filibuster means a Dem majority can change policy (if they can agree, which is a big "IF").  My reservations here can be seen in the Mexico City policy on abortion--see my discussion below.

Two considerations might make me change my mind:

1. suppose ACA is deemed unconstitutional by the Supremes next fall.  Obviously the Dems will want to pass some new healthcare legislation, but what can be passed that will not also be invalidated by the Supremes? I'd like to see some discussion of this.  Is it possible to change ACA enough to get past the 5 conservatives on the Court?  If so, we might need to kill the filibuster to get it done.  Pass it, and hope 8 years of a Dem administration gets it solidly entrenched enough to withstand Rep control of Congress and the Presidentcy.
2. the other issue is the Congressional Review Act, which has been used extensively by the Reps to kill Obama's regulations.  The Act includes this provision:

(2)A rule that does not take effect (or does not continue) under paragraph (1) may not be reissued in substantially the same form, and a new rule that is substantially the same as such a rule may not be issued, unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the joint resolution disapproving the original rule.

That provision hasn't been tested in the courts, but what it could mean is there's no way for a victorious Dem party to reinstate Obama's regulations.  That's my interpretation, though one should never underestimate the ingenuity of lawyers.  If that's its meaning then we may need to kill the filibuster to permit bare majorities to pass the new laws needed to reauthorize the regulations.

 As Wikipedia describes:

First implemented in 1984 by the Reagan Administration, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has enforced the policy during all subsequent Republican Administrations, and rescinded the policy at the direction of all Democratic Administrations.[3] After its initial enactment by President Reagan in 1984,[4] it was rescinded by Democratic President Bill Clinton in January 1993,[5] then re-instituted in January 2001 as Republican President George W. Bush took office,[6] rescinded in January 2009, as Democratic President Barack Obama took office[7][8] and reinstated in January 2017, as Republican President Donald Trump took office.

That's no way to run a railroad, much less a country, if applied to all major policies.

The Big Sort and Actblue

Gave money to Ms. McGrath via Actblue yesterday in the vain hope she'll be able to beat Sen. McConnell.

Something this morning ( likely reading about the Republicans struggle to come up with their own version of Actblue) triggered this thought: over time our politics have become more partisan, our parties more unified, our legislative bodies more cleanly divided; has Actblue been a cause?

Back in my childhood parties were local--you had Tammany Hall dominating NYC politics, various state houses and state bosses controlling how state delegations voted in the national conventions.  National lobbies were groups like Farm Bureau and the Grange, National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce, AFL and CIO,  American Bar Association and American Medical Association.  Dollars for national ads weren't important (Ike did the first TV ad in 1952 I believe.

Anyhow, these days individuals can easily give to campaigns across the country, and candidates can fly to New York or LA to raise money from the rich based on their policy positions, not their ability or commitment to do their best for their constituency (a la Sen. Robert Byrd).

My Political Thinking on 2020

A couple of Never Trumpers-Megan McArdle and Jennifer someone (forgot her last name) have argued on twitter that Democrats expect too much of them. If I understand they feel Dems want them to vote for any Democrat we nominate, in spite of a leftish platform which violates all conservative principles.

I tweeted replies a couple times to McArdle.but let me be more considered:

• if you're a Never Trumper, then logically you need to NOT vote for Trump.  Vote libertarian or don't vote, but don't vote for Trump. Yes, that means you're saying Trump's personal and presidential deficiencies, the damage he's doing to our institutions and our world standing, outweigh policy considerations, especially the chance to add two more conservative justices to the Supremes.  If that's your judgment, okay.
• Consider this, however. Suppose Warren is the candidate and you like only one of her 1,000 plans. If she's elected with your vote, the odds are that she is at best governing with the support of a Democratic House, where the "majority makers" of 2018 are still worrying about their jobs in 2022, and a nominally Democratic Senate, where the balance of power is held by Joe McManchin, Kristen Sinema, Jackie Rosen, Doug Jones, and the winning candidates in ME, CO, AZ, and ?.  In other words, in neither House will there be majority support for the Warren plans which most deeply offend conservative sensibilities.   

In light of the above, my suggestion for Never Trumpers is to vote strategically--if it's close for the presidency, vote for the Dem, knowing we're likely to have split government for the next four years. If it looks good for the Dem, vote libertarian.  If it looks good for Trump, pray.

Aging, Savings and "Crashed"

Reading "Crashed" raises questions about interest rates and the amount of capital in the world.

I'm sure it's been observed before, but the world is getting older.  Japan and the US are examples, but China's another one.  I'll be foolish and apply my own experience to the rest of the world.  The older I get the more I save, partly because it's more important to have security for the future and partly because my desires are less.  Or in other words, I'm more set in my ways.

Extrapolate that pattern world wide and maybe we have more savings, more capital than investment opportunities and thus lower interest rates.