Deadlocked Senate?--a Prediction

 I strongly doubt the Democrats will be able to win two Senate seats in Georgia in January, thereby deadlocking the Senate at 50/50.

But that's not my real prediction.  My real prediction is, if the Senate is deadlocked, it won't stay that way for the next 2 years.  In other words I'm predicting one of the oldtimers in the Senate will die.  I think the odds are with me--there are a few over 80:  including Feinstein, Grassley, Shelby, Inhofe--Sanders and McConnell will become 80 in the time period, and we know McConnell has balance problems.

Voter Turnout--Hate Versus Love

 Donald Trump boosted his total votes from 63 million in 2016 to 73 million in 2020. His opponent went from 65.8 to 78.9. (2020 totals are preliminary, still a bunch out esp in NY.)

By my calculations Trump's increase was about 16 percent, his opponent's almost 20 percent.  For fun let us attribute all of the Biden increase to people hating Trump (using "hate" as a blanket term) and all of Trump's increase as people loving him (using "love" as a blanket term).

Verdict: Hate is more motivating than love.

Thoughts on Trump's Appeal

 My first thoughts on Trump: 

I don't think commentators are giving Trump enough credit for attracting about 72 million votes. I'd like to see a spreadsheet comparing percentages of eligible voters won over recent history of presidential elections but I'd guess his support is higher than past losers.  (Trump is a loser--I love the sentence.)

It's also true his qualities are likely mostly responsible for Biden's record vote total.  I think I know most down ballot Republican candidates ran slightly ahead of Trump.  If I'd thought about that before Nov. 3 I think I'd have predicted a greater difference. 

Why does Trump have this appeal?  There's the policy issues, most of which I disagree with, but I think most of the appeal is personal.  First, he's a performer.  Ann Althouse persists in seeing him as a comic, as joking in many of his statements, statements which I regard as repulsive and evil.  I have to admit that many of his supporters enjoy his performance.  Second, he connects with the audience. Is that just another way of saying he's a performer?  Perhaps. But what I'm getting at is his ability to merge his persona and the audience together in a shared "we/us".  He's a demagogue, because much of the merging is based on attacking the "others".

{Added later: Just got an appeal from the Virginia Democratic Party noting that Trump increased the turnout in rural areas, which are critical for maintaining Democratic control of the Virginia legislature.]

Do Away With Plane Geometry?

 That's what Kevin Drum proposed.

I remember plane geometry fondly.  I think it was my best subject in high school.  I enjoyed the process of figuring out the logic, the deduction from axioms through a step-by-step process.  Its appeal stayed with me through my job at FSA; I almost always told people to walk me through the process, whatever software or problem we were discussing, step by step.

My teacher was suffering from diabetes. I think he'd come to the Forks district the year before, teaching us algebra I.  He was very good despite his illness, which started to get worse during the next year, the year of geometry, the year when he gradually went blind, though continuing to teach, the year when I weakly agree to provide answers to another student.  He died, I think, that summer.  I still remember that year with pleasure and with shame.

Big Farmers --Past and Present

 Successful Farming has a piece on 3 of the  biggest American farmers: row and crop farmers (which I think means excluding fruits and vegetables).  That led me to this on William Scully, an Irish immigrant, who died in 1906 with 225,000 acres in the Midwest.

It's a reminder that America has always been a country where some can get very rich.

Carnism

 "Carnism" is a word I just discovered in this Vox piece. It gets 150,000 hits in Google; it has its own wikipedia page.

It seems to mean the opposite of "veganism", designating the set of beliefs, attitudes, and social institutions which lead most Americans to eat meat from various animals.

Without getting into it much, I can buy the likelihood that some societies will come to see meat eating as undesirable or repulsive, perhaps on the level with smoking, perhaps someday equating it to racism.

In that possible future I wonder how our descendants will think of us--if political correctness still reigns will all statues of meat-eaters be removed.  Logic would argue so.

Covid-19 Impacts on Society

 This FCW article argues that Covid-19 should impact the government's priorities on IT. Ir's part of a larger set of speculations over the long term impacts. Maybe:

• broadband access is more important so everyone can work and study from home?
• people who for the first time were forced into using online services will continue to use them, and expect their availability?
• on-line shopping is growing and the old brick and mortar department stores, and smaller outfits, are obsolete?
• lots of restaurants going out of business, more delivery services, and perhaps more home cooking?
• more family togetherness?

WTO Limits on Farm Subsidies

 I've wondered whether USDA would run into problems with the WTO's limits on farm program payments. A recent CRS report analyzed the problem.

The last paragraph of the summary says:

If the United States were to exceed its WTO annual spending limit, then offending farm programs (whether ad hoc or traditional) could be vulnerable to challenge by another WTO member under the WTO’s dispute settlement rules. However, if the payment programs that appear likely to cause the United States to exceed its WTO spending limits in 2019 and 2020 prove to be temporary, then a successful WTO challenge might not necessarily result in an adverse ruling against the United States or any other authorized retaliation (e.g., permission to rais e tariffs on U.S. products), depending on the outcome of a WTO dispute settlement proceeding. 

The issue is summarized as this:

The U.S. government provided up to $60.4 billion in ad hoc payments to agricultural producers cumulatively in 2018, 2019, and 2020, in addition to existing farm support. These payments have raised concerns among some U.S. trading partners, as well as market watchers and policymakers, that U.S. domestic farm subsidy outlays might exceed its annual WTO spending limit of $19.1 billion in one or more of those three years. [emphasis added]

I bolded the numbers because the last I'd heard it was $48 billion. I'm sure the $60 billion had little to do with the election results.

And the Transition Starts

 I start and don't finish a good number of posts.  One I started before the election predicted how the transition would go.  Unfortunately it assumed Biden/Harris would win FL and NC so it doesn't really work.

I join the people who point to the relatively peaceful days since Nov. 3. There's been no significant violence.  I think part of it was how long it took for the election to be called--if it had been called on Tuesday night it would have been more likely for jubilant Biden supporters and/or upset Trump supporters to explode, or get into confrontations. Another part is just the machinery operating; we're used to the pageantry and operation of elections, and the familiarity of the usual routine dampens emotion. 

So far Trump is resisting the outcome, which is inevitable. The margins in the different states are small, but not small enough for recounts or court challenges to overturn the outcome in any state, much less in the multiple states which would be needed.

I think the Trump administration will gradually sputter out, with little grace and some noise.

The Erosion of Traditional {X}

 The Post magazine has an article: "How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together".

It includes this sentence: "Meanwhile, another parallel collapse is unfolding: the erosion of the traditional norms that have sustained our democracy. "

It's the sort of statement which I see relatively often: modern trends are undermining/eroding something from the past.

It's true enough, but what's usually ignored is the building of the new.  For example, one thing going on now, about which I know nothing except it's gathering momentum and creating professionals, is the development of online games. What sort of norms are the participants in such games learning?  What's the culture which has developed?  How might those things carry over to public life.

Congratulations to the Bidens, Harris, and Emhoff

 And most of all to the United States of America. 

The Democratic Debates Start

Reps. Spanberger and AOC seem engaged in an early debate over the course of Democratic politics.  Spanberger said Dems should deep-six talk of "socialism" and "defund police", blaming that for the defeats of some Democratic representatives who gained office in 2018, and the failure to take new seats.

AOC has a twitter thread countering that position, arguing that some new progressives won (my comment--I think they won safe seats by winning the Democratic primaries) and that many candidates were lousy in their digital campaigns.

I suspect both are right.  It's a big country, but politics is often local.  So positions which are popular in one place, like NYC and its suburbs, and not in another area, like southern Virginia, or southern Florida. Appeals which work with one voting bloc may well turn off another bloc. [Updated: and people are complicated and react differently to different stimuli.]

Hopefully the different parts of the party can mostly reconcile under (probable) President Biden's leadership.  His task will be quite difficult: he's likely to be considered a one-termer, and therefore have less clout than otherwise.  I'm reminded of 1976 and President Carter's job--he too had liberals on his left, still smarting over the failure of their dreams in 1972,  and led by a Kennedy.  That didn't work out well for him. 

Congratulations to Republicans

 Republicans made significant gains in House races, mostly it seems because they nominated and supported women candidates. For that they deserve congratulations, even though one of the successful candidates is an OAnon supporter.

This is one of the ways our politics works in the long run: one party comes up with an advance, like nominating women candidates or a fund-raising mechanism like ActBlue; the party gains an advantage; the other party then tries to catch up.

My Predictions: 0 for 2

 Once again the elections defied my predictions.  I'm assuming Joe Biden will be inaugurated on Jan 20, but that's about the only thing I got right this year (won't talk about 2016).

Time enough for analysis when all the votes are in, but it seems the national polls once again were reasonably close, the state ones had their problems.

But the lesson for me, once again, is to warn that my picture of reality is warped by my desires for what reality should be. You'd think after almost 80 years I'd learn. 

What Dems Will Owe to Stacy Abrams and Beto O'Rourke

 As in my previous post, I'm confident of the election outcome.  Georgia and Texas might or might not vote for Biden/Harris, but it's clear that Democrats owe a lot to the efforts of Stacy Abrams in Georgia and Beto O'Rourke in Texas.

What We Will Owe to Arnon Mishkin

I'm confident that the Biden/Harris ticket will win, likely tonight.  In that confidence I want to link to this NYTimes article on perhaps the most important bureaucrat/nerd involved in the election: the man running the Fox decision desk.  

He's important because the media decision desks provide the data for analysts to call a state as having firm results. He's doubly important in my scenario because the Fox news people are the ones who have the credibility to persuade Trump supporters that their man has lost.  And he's triply important because of the big unknowns of this election: the impact of early voting, of the massive turnout, and of the pandemic. And he's quadruply important because of the uncertainty of Trump's reaction to a defeat.

Women Advance? Some Evidence

It's interesting to follow the posts on the FSA Facebook Group for a number of reasons.

Sometimes posters in the group ask for help on various issues, questions of policy, software, approaches to handling service during the pandemic. Sometimes it's just sharing news, funny stories, etc.

In the last week there was a work issue which seems to have been solved by some software developed by a county employee, which a number of people asked for.  Back in the day that sort of thing happened as well.  A couple difference from 30-40 years ago:

•  the existence of the Facebook group.  I don't think we had a formal sharing site before the SCOAP QandA's in the late 80's and Jeff Kerby's BBS around 1990 or so. There's more lateral communication these days as opposed to running things up and down the ladder of the hierarchy.
• the gender of the person creating the solution. In the old days the creators tended to be males (I'm thinking of doing programs for programmable calculators around 1980 and queries for the System/36.  I might be wrong on this--it might be I just noticed or remember the men more and/or the female creators were operating in a more informal environment.

I think both differences are good. 

A Bad Tuesday Evening- Unexpected Violence?

Some are worried by the possibility of  violence resulting from the 2020 election.  Their fears seem mostly to be that Trump supporters will be upset by a Biden victory and commit some violence.  The fear is of "sore losers" I suppose it's possible that some on the right have a similar "sore loser" fear of violence coming from Biden supporters if Trump pulls off another upset. 

As a general proposition I'm not that afraid of the scenario. But there is one which I just thought of which scares me.

I remember occasions, I think mostly when a college wins either the NCAA football or basketball championship where the students take to the streets and riot, destroying property, etc.  We normally dismiss such episodes, at least I dismiss them, as "boys will be boys".

But, there's a lot of emotion invested in the outcome of this election. Isn't it more likely that election violence will come from "exultant winners"?  I remember the election of 2008, when the winners exulted.  That was a victory of love, of belief in Obama, of the redemption of America, and I don't remember any particular violence, or animosity directed towards McCain supporters.

But a Biden victory on Tuesday would be a victory based on a lot of animosity towards Trump, and some of his supporters. 

I always like a metaphor, so think of the exultant winners and despondent losers as two masses of plutonium, back in the days of the Manhatten Project.  Keep them separate and everything is copasetic.  Bring them together and you get a nuclear explosion.

The Future of Vertical Farming

 This asks the question: Can Vertical Farming Grow Beyond Herbs and Leaves?

I'm dubious, if we're talking generally.  I can see vertical farming might work in niche areas: on the moon and Mars or in permanently inhabited space stations, where it's the only economical alternative.  Or in areas such as Iceland, where geothermal power means cheap cheap electricity, which current powers aluminum smelters and datacenters for block-chain systems. Or in the grand future when we have practical fusion.  

Or there may be a technological breakthrough which drastically changes the economics.  But bottom line, I don't see its broad comparative advantage, particularly as long as we use fossil fuel to generate electricity and, if as I assume, it's a net contributor to carbon dioxide emissions.

The Most Christian Continent?

 From this source via the Templeton foundation, it's Africa.  The trick here is that the ranking is based on total numbers, so Africa with 631 million has more Christians than Latin America with only 601 million, but in percentage terms Latin America at 92 percent blows away the other continents.

Where is North America, you ask? At 277 million it's the smallest of the big five continents.

Will Justice Barrett Disappoint the Right?

 She's almost guaranteed to.  Only Justices Alito and Thomas have not, in recent memory at least, disappointed the right on some decision or other.  Kavanaugh is too early to be a fair case, but I'd predict he also will. (For one thing, he's the father of daughters, which research has shown sometimes leads to more liberal conclusions.)

What are some things which might lead her to surprise conservatives on some cases?

• She's a mother, unlike everyone else on the Court.
• She's the mother of two black children.
• She's a woman, and her two fellow justices who are women are also liberal.
• She's young as justices go, so she has plenty of time to evolve.

She's also likely to change the group dynamics of the court--a 6-3 split may lead one of the majority to distinguish her/himself from the others.

Nepotism

 Matt Yglesias at Vox writes on nepotism.  It's a thorough and to my mind bipartisan treatment.

I do wish Biden had been asked during the debate what role, if any, his family would play in his administration. Would he have replied: the same sort of roles as my predecessor has assigned to Ivanka, Don Jr., Eric, Jared Kushner or would he have excluded them? Would he promise to put his assets into a blind trust? 

The Golden Rule Applies in Government

 I've referred before to the idea of a "golden rule", the cynic's version: those that have the gold gets. It's also known as the "Mathew Effect", named by the sociologist Robert Merton from verses in the New Testament.

Saw another instance of it, from Hawaii where ProPublica reports that the "Homestead Program" (who knew we had a century-old program to provide homesteads to native Hawaiians) this:

But no one, not even the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the state agency that oversees the initiative, fully understood how far the program has strayed from its original intent. A first-of-its-kind analysis by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica of department data showed the program has benefited those with the means and knowledge to navigate the complex homesteading system while leaving behind much of the Native Hawaiian community it was primarily meant to help.

I suggest there are similar instances throughout government where the legislature passes a worthy program, but enrollment is required and there's an information gap, so some of those who might qualify simply don't know about it or don't know enough to navigate the hoops. 

Network Effects in the Classroom

 Washington Post magazine had an interesting article by a university English teacher on teaching English, including through the transition in the spring to Zoom.
What struck me was this: 

"Especially in a class organized around discussion, it’s the level of the floor, not the ceiling, that most dictates the strength of the group. Even if you get lucky and have two or three great English students in a class, they can’t carry a weak group, and it’s more likely that the gap between the standouts and the rest will breed resentment....

My insistence that all students participate in class discussions isn’t just some kind of touchy-feely inclusiveness, nor is my insistence that they bring the reading in hard copy and shut off all electronic devices some kind of aggressive old-fashionedness. Rather, it’s a recognition that the class works better for everyone if we’re not dragging along silent or distracted partners, and of what’s special and valuable about what we’re doing. Students are essentially paying for two things in a humanities class: the admissions process that produces the students in the room, and the hiring and promotion process that produces the teacher. Everything else they can get at home, online: They can do the reading, study scholarship about the writers and their eras, post opinions and even watch lectures about literature (most of which are bad, so far, but if you dig you can find substantive ones, and in time there will be more).

What happens in the classroom — humans paying attention to books and one another — may seem rudimentary to a fault, but it’s a vanishingly rare and precious experience. Most of the people in the room will never again gather regularly with other people to think deeply about something they have all read, uninterrupted for 75 whole minutes by text messages, emails, buzzes, beeps, dings, klaxons, flashing lights, tempting links, breaking news alerts or GIFs of naked mole rats dancing..."

One way of thinking about this is the idea of "network effects"; the idea that the more participants on a network you have, the more attractive the network is.  So in a classroom, consider the activity, the speech in the classroom during the duration of the class to be a network, where the more participation you have the more value for all.

I don't know that the observation leads anywhere, but I like it.  

Farm Program Payments

From  here, a nice graph of US farm payments, including MFP and CFAP.

 

Today's Tractors

It's amazing how far out of touch I can get.  Was discussing this morning the likely cost of a modern tractor.  I guessed 6 figures.  My first search turned up this ad for a used John Deere, a 2016 model. Asking price is $300K+.  Further searching showed a lot more progress in guidance and precision than I expected.  Also checked wikipedia and their entries seem somewhat out-of-date.

Broadband Gaps in the Big City?

 Turns out the rural areas aren't the only ones.  This Technology Review explains, in the context of an effort to fill the gaps.

The Two Sides of Low Interest Rates

 In today's NYTimes Paul Krugman has an article arguing for big stimulus spending, partially justified by the very very low interest rates now being charged for the Federal government's borrowing.

In the business section is an article on CALPERS (the California employees pension fund) and its problems with trying to have its 7 percent return on investments.  It's taking on more risk to try to get its returns up.   CALPERS has, or used to have, a reputation for good investment strategies, so if they're having problems you can bet other smaller retirement funds across the country are having more problems.

I don't have any answers, just the observation. 

[Updated--ProPublica has a related piece, also on impact of Fed's actions on retirement savings.'

What's Good in America?

 From Cesar Hidalgo comes a twitter thread describing three things he finds good about America (although he's leaving for more academic opportunity in France).

A tweet:

Today I am leaving the US.
With my family we are exploring a new life in the south of France.
I’ve been in the US for more than 16 years. I earned my citizenship & experienced many ups & downs. But I am grateful. The US was good to me in many ways ...
/1 pic.twitter.com/YRIQrvxbsP

— César A. Hidalgo (@cesifoti) October 17, 2020

My summary of the thread:

• people value quality work (over cost)
• people value entertainment, even in speaking to business audiences
• our bureaucracy is simple!!! 

Let me expand on the last item, since it is so surprising.

He's talking specifically about the running of a small business, and comparing it to the notary-ridden bureaucracy in countries whose legal codes are based on Roman law, not common law. I think it might be related to the De Soto thesis, arguing the need for well-defined and documented property ownership.

Adherence to Principle Creates Different Alliances?

 I follow L. D. Burnett, who is a history professor at Collin College both on twitter and at this blog. Her background might surprise some of her right wing critics.  She's more vocal about her opposition to Trump and his administration than I, which recently caused the Collin president to criticize a tweet of hers. Links are at the end of her post here.

What was different to me was that FIRE jumped in to her defense.  I've been only vaguely aware of FIRE; I knew it opposes speech codes in college, but thought of them as defending conservatives.  Turns out they adhere to principle, even when it involves someone on the left.  As someone who joined the ACLU at the time of Skokie I need to recognize their stand. 

A Rush To Regulate

Eric Lipton at the Times writes about the Trump administration's rush to get their last (I fervently hope) regulations through the process and published in the Federal Register.  It's not a new process, but as the Obama administration learned to its regret the Congressional Review Act puts regs issued now in jeopardy.   I hope the Biden/Harris transition team has studied their history and is ready to apply the same medicine to these regs.

The Importance of Weather and Farming in the Civil War

 John Fea at Way of Improvement posts an interview with Kenneth Noe, author of a book on how weather impacted the Civil War, both directly and through its impact on farming. Seems interesting. Likely a similar book could be written on any war of years, for example the American Revolution. 

The Problems of Hemp

 The Rural Blog has a post on the problems of hemp farmers--no good crop insurance or disaster payments.

We Voted

My wife and I voted today, in Fairfax county's second day of widely available advance voting. A beautiful day, it wasn't too bad to spend 2 hours in line and voting.

 This is about 10 minutes after we got into line.

This is maybe an hour into the day.

This is the Democrats notice to voters--four languages (English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean). Because Fairfax is part of 3 Congressional districts, it got a bit complicated.

As the second day of voting at this site things went reasonably well but I'm glad we waited until day 2.  (Harshaw rule).

2020 Election Predictions

I screwed up my 2016 election prediction but that doesn't prevent me from predicting again.  Because I feel optimistic today I think Biden/Harris will win a solid victory, north of 350 electoral votes, the Democrats will control the Senate 52-48, and they'll gain 5 seats in the House. These results will come after all the votes are counted, maybe by the end of the month, but most importantly the presidential outcome will be apparent the evening of Nov. 3.

 Trump will bluster for a bit, but will find he's a lame duck and has no support in the Party to fight the outcome.

Those Were the Days (of Dashed Math Dreams)

Andrew Gelman posts some memories of fellow competitors in the Math Olympiad program. 

I was never on that level, but I did have contact with Prof. Nura Turner, who seems to have ramrodded the program in its early years.  In 1957-8 school year some of us Chenango Forks students took a math test, I think sponsored by some math society--maybe John Turna our math teacher pushed it. Anyhow, IIRC I got into the top ranks in the region--which may have been upstate NY, don't remember.  Anyhow I must have been one of these because Prof Turner included me in the people she tried to track.  

I write "tried" because I wasn't too cooperative.  IIRC my scores in my senior year were lower, an omen of what happened in college.  I was placed in the calculus course for math majors, not the one for math geniuses.  The teacher had a thick accent, I forget from where, and I never got into it. So after one term any interest in pursuing math was gone--government and American history were much more interesting.

1619 Project and the Birth of the Nation

 Bret Stephens writes about the 1619 Project  Actually, he focuses on only a few sentences of it, but the sentences have become controversial.  In a nutshell, the original writeup in the Times said two things: the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery and the nation was born with the arrival of slaves in 1619.  The writeup has been changed and softened since its original publication.  IMHO the Revolution was well underway in the hearts and minds of Americans well before 1775 and had little to do with slavery.  It's true that slaveowners were alarmed by British attempts to woe slaves to support the Loyalist cause, but that was late in the process.  If the preservation of slavery in the face of the Somerset decision in the UK had been a major factor, one would have expected the British sugar colonies in the Caribbean to have joined the 13 colonies because they were even more dependent on slavery than were the mainland colonies.

The question I really want to consider is: what constitutes the "birth" of a country, a nation?  How do we know? Was Canada born with the French in the the 17th century or when the British conquered it in the 18th century, or with the 1867 Act?  When was the UK born, and did it die with the loss of Eire, or will it die if Scotland secedes?  

Was France born with the First Republic, or the Second, Third, Fourth or Fifth?  Was Germany born before Bismarck?  

Lloyd Wright in Fortune

 Mr. Wright has a Fortune magazine piece on black farmers and USDA discrimination in loans. 

"Even today, plainly racist policies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) frequently deny Black farmers the resources they need to keep their businesses afloat.

Creating a more equitable agriculture system will be impossible unless Black farmers have control over their own financial destinies. That goal will require a new credit and financing institution, owned and controlled by Black farmers and aimed squarely at supporting Black farmers, landowners, and their cooperatively owned businesses.

He asks that Congress waive loan repayments by farmers who got Pigford settlements and establish the new financing institution.  

Perdue's No-No

 Violating the Hatch Act.

Rich Democrats

I'm unsettled by the trends noted in this Bloomberg piece: specifically Democrats are becoming richer.  It's good that we've been giving money through ActBlue to the various campaigns and party organizations, but I became a Democrat back in the day when the party was a coalition of unions, ethnic groupts, and a smallish group of "eggheads", as they were famously known in the 1950's.

Now Democrats are a bit richer than Republicans, at least by some measures.  Apparently the Republicans still have the business class, the car dealers, insurance agents, small business types, but the Democrats are supported by the eggheads' grandchildren, college-educated and many with graduate degrees, plus minority groups.  A couple of my concerns: 

• there can be a disconnect in interests between the two.  For example, the rich Dems in the Northeast want to remove the limit on deductibility of state and local taxes which was part of Trump's tax cut law. 
• And all too often there's a lot of NIMBYism among the rich, when additional development would increase the supply of affordable housing.

Two Reasons Why Bigger Farms Survive Better

 Two recent pieces showed the advantages of bigger farms:

1. the development of new and better equipment.  Buying, maintaining, and operating new equipment is expensive, whether it's the change from horses to tractors as my father and more experienced, or today's change from manual labor to fancy robotics, as in the robotic milking machines or the robotic harvesting machines. See this piece.  
2. changing operations to respond to risks in the environment, whether by diversification as my father and mother added poultry to their small diary farm; paying for insurance against weather disasters or acts of God or against sicknesses and accidents (farming is a risky occupation); adding irrigation, or whatever. In the case of modern dairy farming, it seems being big enough to have an accountant, or at least someone specialized in strategy, at least according to this piece.

Risk management

MacArthur Foundation Discovers Heir Property

 Via Ann Althouse, the MacArthur Foundation awarded a fellowship to a law prof working on heirs property issues.

One of the things which always bugged me about the Pigford litigation was the failure by the USDA, the DOJ, and the plaintiffs to consider the effects of factors other than discrimination.  Unfortunately the original suit was filed before Google because there was some scattered recognition by scholars that dying intestate with heirs property was a significant factor, but it never was considered in the suit. Since the Pigford suits have been settled there's been a lot more recognition and research, along with provisions in the farm bill. 

What Gets a Member of Congress Reelected?

 It's certainly not ensuring that the IRS has enough funding and authority to do a good job of collecting taxes.  

See this report.  It's issued by  the House Budget Committee and these are its members.

[Updated: Annie Lowrey at the Atlantic has a relevant article.]

Immigrant Remittances

 The Post has an article on reverse emigration; the pandemic forcing migrants who lost their jobs to return home. What I found interesting was the diagrams showing the volume and direction of remittance flows. Mexico and India were big recipients and the US and UAE big sources. 

I remember in the late 50's and 60's the left was very concerned about the volume of foreign aid Western governments needed to provide to the new governments of the Third World managing their new independence from the old colonialist powers. That was a big big issue in those days.   Decolonialism is about as forgotten these days as the Cold War.  For a long while it seemed that the effort was doomed to failure.

Without much notice, perhaps dating back to the immigration reform in the US in 1965 and OPEC oil embargo in the 1970's, emigration grew and so did the remittances back home. Remittance flows reached over $500 billion in 2018, according to the World Bank. In  comparison foreign aid was $140 billion.

I may be getting somewhat conservative as I get older, but I take this as pointing to the power of individual decisions, market driven even, more power than progressive's belief in the ability of rational government to direct the course of human affairs.  It's a reminder, not conclusive.

Violence in Politics

 A survey has shown that more Americans believe violence in politics is sometimes permissible.

I think the survey is flawed, as surveys often are. In this case there's no definition of what violence is--are we talking about a demonstration resulting in broken windows, or broken bones, or a revolution.

In the broad sense if we believe in classic American history, in which the American Revolution became a light to the world, wehave to concede a place for violence.

A Letter from the President

 USDA and the administration are catching flak because of this:

The Agriculture Department last week began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from President Donald Trump claiming credit for the program.

 I'm trying but failing to remember somewhat of a parallel. Secretary Bergland signed a letter which we sent out to farmers, perhaps to all active producers associated with a farm.  This was, I think, in 1980, an election year.  The subject was something related to crop insurance.  I don't remember whether it was base on legislation or a policy decision, perhaps an expansion of the insurance program..  I do remember ASCS had been running a test of selling crop insurance, because Roy Cozart, who became DASCO when the Reagan administration came in, was working on putting FCIC directives into the ASCS system. That test was a failure.

IIRC we career bureaucrats, and possibly Roy, who was career but with political pull, raised an eyebrow on it. The differences between then and now: Jimmy Carter didn't sign the letter and I remember the content as being more informative and less propagandistic than the current letter.

No Federal Money for Tobacco, Except in Pandemic

 In 2004 when Congress provided for the ending of the tobacco program, they included a blanket provision that no CCC money could go to tobacco growers.

That was fine, except when things change.  It's 2020, an election year, and North Carolina is a battleground state, and tobacco is still important to the state, and the pandemic hit.  So USDA will provide up to $100 million to tobacco growers from the second pandemic law (CARES Act), but they'll do it bypassing CCC.   All this from here.

USDA ended most of its tobacco reporting shortly after the program was ended, but I did find it in the crop report--NC grows about half the US acreage--150,000 acres in 2018.  (Got there from a hit on a CDC publication. ) That's about a third of what we grew in 2000 and about a tenth of what China grows now.