I haven't thought the events at the Capitol today would happen. So I'm very surprised.
But, I happen to be reading American Maelstorm,by Michael Cohen, on the 1968 election. It's a reminder that we've had tough times before. We easily forget how much unrest we've had in our past.
As pointed out here, Joe Manchin won reelection in an incredibly adverse position and time. And his reelection is now key to Democrats winning control of the Senate.
Israel’s vaccine success is made possible by its small size (slighter larger than New Jersey) and the efficiencies of its nationalized health system, in which all 9 million citizens hold identity cards and register their electronic medical files with one of the country’s four national health maintenance organizations (HMOs).
Israel also maintains a national vaccination registry, first designed for childhood vaccinations, that will be used in the coming weeks to monitor immediate and long-term progress of the coronavirus vaccine program.
I suspect one of the arguments in the 1960's against a national identity system was the specter of the Holocaust; people being numbered, tattooed, and subject to totalitarian rule, at the whim of the state.
While I continue to believe that efficiency would have been, and would be, enhanced by a national identity system, I have to concede the disadvantages which are real. One worth mentioning here: the greater security provided by our dispersion of data--the eggs in one basket proverb--especially in light of the election and the Southwinds hackl
There was an aborted effort to establish a national identifier in the 1960's, using the Social Security number. IIRC it was some nerds/bureaucrats suggesting it, but it was quickly killed amidst a concern over privacy, not to mention the sign of the beast.
Over the decades the U.S. has come up with jury-rigged substitutes, Real ID being the latest. In the last century we had a process for passing information on men who were ordered to provide child support between states. But we don't have the sort of process which bureaucrats would like. If we did, it would alleviate problems on updating voter rolls and on tracking coronavirus vaccinations.
We'll continue with our jury-rigging process for the foreseeable future.
In addition to points in my previous post, a couple of other things occurred to me:
There's been a number of pieces relating to black farmers recently. Some are keyed to the new administration and controversy over whether Vilsack is a good appointment. Several quote statements from different black farmer organizations. There seems to be more these days than there were when the original Pigford suit was filed.
I found this Politico piece interesting, especially including this paragraph:
Horne said her data shows there was a 57 percent decline in the number of Black farmers in North Carolina from 1954 to 1969, with the number dropping from 22,625 to 9,687. During the same period, farms operated by white farmers dropped from 201,819 to 106,275 — a 47 percent decline.
It's the first time I've seen a direct comparison of this kind. Maybe somewhere there's an economist who has gone a bit deeper into the statistics. What I'd particularly like to see is a breakdown by farm size. I suspect the distribution of black farms was proportionally weighted towards smaller farmers, and I suspect the farms which survived were proportionally weighted towards the larger farmers. If that was true, what should one conclude?
General Perna is the chief operating officer for Warp Speed, which is now taking some flak for the seemingly slow progress of vaccinating for covid-19.
I never had to deal with his problem, but I have been involved in rolling out programs affecting thousands of counties and a million or so people on a crash basis. The difference between his problems and mine were great:
Google "signaling theory" and you get links for its use in economics and sociology with this brief explanation:
Signaling theory is useful for describing behavior when two parties (individuals or organizations) have access to different information. Typically, one party, the sender, must choose whether and how to communicate (or signal) that information, and the other party, the receiver, must choose how to interpret the signal.
I see it used fairly often on the Marginal Revolution blog, which raised my curiosity and triggered a line of thought. One of its uses relates to higher education; the idea being that education is important for the signal it gives to potential employers and others, not so much for the actual learning which may or may not have happened, but for the fact the person got into a college and got through the college, something of a rite of passage.
Some of the people with whom I worked in ASCS/FSA hadn't gone to college, and I've often thought about what differentiated them from the people who did have college. I don't think it was intelligence so much as self-confidence. By graduating from college a person learns about herself, signals to herself that she can surmount some obstacles of a certain difficulty. That signaling is in addition to the signals sent to others. I suspect it can enable a feedback cycle. My co-workers who hadn't gone to college hadn't learned that about themselves, and didn't get the feedback from others.
Similar psychology works in other fields--my being drafted and spending 1 year, 11 months and 11 days in the USArmy showed me I could do things I hadn't been confident of before.
I'd encapsulate this as developing a sense of "mastery" in a field, which perhaps is the reverse side of the coin of "impostor syndrome".
Somewhere in this blog I've mentioned the differences in local government between New York and Virginia. In New York, outside the cities, the counties are divided into towns for purposes of local road maintenance, tax collection, etc. and into central school districts for schools. My father was on the Chenango Forks Central School board for a number of years. (You can find a sample of what goes on in a town government in this recent supervisor's email.)
In Virginia the county handles the schools and other local functions, In NY Broome County has 16 towns, 7 villages, and one city--Binghamton.
I was struck in reading the Gordon-Reed/Onof book on Thomas Jefferson by a discussion of his letter on local government. In 1816 he was pushing to subdivide Virginia counties into smaller units, specifically in this instance "wards" which would handle local public schools (which Virginia didn't have). There's a reference to using the areas which were the basis for the militia (I'm guessing companies). He observes that the New England town meetings shook the ground beneath his feet and caused his embargo to fail.
He didn't persuade Virginia to adopt wards/towns. As I've done before, I wonder the effect of this difference in organization.
Robert Putnam in "Bowling Alone" argues for the importance of nongovernmental social organizations as schools for democracy. If he's right, surely the local government units are as important, if not more so.
Joe Glauber, former chief economist for USDA, tweets here:
The US farm sector just reported its 4th highest net farm income since 1970 (adjusting for inflation). So why more aid when there are millions out of work? 👇👇👇 https://t.co/HZuW99hyFy
— JoeGlauber--IFPRI (@JoeGlauber1) December 22, 2020
responding to this:
Congress should not give #farmers, who already have numerous safety net programs, more aid. @JoeGlauber1, @dwschanz, and Vince Smith argue congress should aid Americans facing #hunger instead in @thehill. #COVID19 https://t.co/1Ti3ogwWlp
— Philip H🌐xie (@phoxie58) December 22, 2020Which in turn links to this AEI post.
I wasn't impressed by the military during the time I was in the Army; something which is likely reflected at times in my posts here. But via Lawyers, Guns and Money I was directed to this article on Army anti-drone efforts, which seems impressive.
I'm not sure what "slavery" meant in the18th and early 19th century. One meaning obviously was chattel slavery, where a person was enslaved, could be sold, and the status was inherited based on one parent's status.
But what was the "slavery" which the American rebels feared at the hands of the British? What was the opposite of the , "land of the free" in the Star Spangled Banner--was that also slavery?
One thing that's true--for centuries in many different places the losers in a war might be subject to slavery, or worse. The New England settlers sold some of their Indian captives into slavery in the Caribbean. Oliver Cromwell sold Irish captives into the Caribbean (though I don't believe their status was inheritable). Some Native American tribes imposed "slavery" on their war captives, although it seems there was a lot of variety in the patterns. I was surprised to learn that some Pacific Northwest tribes indeed had chattel slavery.
I've not seen any discussion of whether the rebels really feared being sent into slavery if they lost the war, or whether the use of "slavery" was similar to the current use of "slavery" in connection with socialism by libertarians.
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to a report of Walmarts self-driving trucks, with no safety drivers.
Since I don't get the hard copy version of Technology Review, I'm not sure whether it's one issue, but this is the notation they attach to the beginning of a number of posts on their website:
"This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay."
"But I still have more crops than some of my neighbors, who sometimes recycle seeds and don’t have very much at all."
That one sentence seems to me to encapsulate the challenges for the small farm/food movement people. It points to an evolution over decades which will lead to modernized production ag growing the bulk of our calories, with smaller operations producing for the niches.
Reading "Most Blessed Patriarch:Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination" by Gordon-Reed and Onof. It reads well, discusses his ideas more than his deeds.
I'm just part way through it, but I wanted to note an observations which struck me: the authors write that in his own time, his contemporaries viewed his relationship with Sally Hemings as one of love, which was dangerous to the social structure; while in our time most critics refuse to believe it was love, rather a relationship of power which was the essence of slavery.
Technology Review posts a puff piece written by Baidu, a Chinese firm which seems to be progressing well in developing a self-driving car, with emphasis on steps they've taken trying to earn the trust of potential customers.
US firms are making progress as well. The pandemic has severely limited my driving, so it seems as if a self-driving car could fulfill my needs soon.
It seems if you can't keep them down on the farm, FSA has been directed to follow them to the city.
Apparently the 2018 farm bill included provisions for establishing county committees for urban areas. I missed the first announcement in August of the establishment of committees for these cities:
A collection of gripes, with no particular theme and no sources.
If I recall my John Locke correctly, his theory of property was that the owner established a claim to property by intermixing his labor with natures. (My memory seems to be close according to this.)
The snowstorm expected tomorrow will offer the chance to create property. While my home owners association provides two parking spaces per townhouse, a lot of people also park along the side of Greenrange Drive. After the snow ends, they'll have to shovel their cars out (assuming there's more snow than the 1-3 inches currently predicted). In doing so they'll feel they've established a property right to the space, and a few will try to exclude others by putting traffic cones, folding chairs, or whatever in the space when they pull out.
One of my problems with the draft legislation S.4929, JBF, is it is piling new programs on old programs. (The text has been posted on Congress.gov.)
In a rational government Congress would evaluate the success or failure of existing rural development and farm loan programs, change the law where needed, and reorganize the bureaucracy. If current programs are successful we could add resources, if they have weaknesses we could reform them, if they're too bad we could kill them. But such changes wouldn't convince the advocates that reforms were real and therefore wouldn't reward the Congressional sponsors. So instead we get more programs, with somewhat different approaches,
Bottom line: it makes life more difficult for the bureaucracy.
The Volokh Conspiracy had a post urging adoption of a point system to fairly distribute the Covid-19 vaccine. I like the idea. The military used a point system for demobilizing troops after World War II which seemed fair. It's a way to handle cases where multiple factors are at work (i.e., an essential worker with underlying condition).
I've a gripe with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically its website, and more specifically the way it handles membership. I know I've run into similar problems elsewhere; I think one was the Wolf Trap website, possibly the New Yorker as well. And my guess is that it's a result of hidden silos: when they got into the internet, separate departments did separate developments. For the Met, the website is focused on visitors, describing exhibitions, how to visit, etc. and how to become a member. What's missing is any focus on existing members--to find your member account info you have to go to the shopping option.
It makes sense that the accountants would worry about renewals, etc. while the museum people just worry about getting people in the door.
But, if I were emperor, my edict would be that any website for an organization would have a "Log in/Your Account" icon in the upper right corner,
I've been checking Congress.gov for the actual text of the "Justice for Black Farmers" Act sponsored by Sen. Booker. Today I found it; it's Senate S4929, but while it's been introduced and a number assigned, the text is not yet available.
The bill is getting some publicity, both pro and con. I may continue to post on it.
Had my second haircut since the start of the pandemic today. Some trepidation, given the new surge of cases which has hit Virginia, though not as hard here as elsewhere in the country.
I have the "Harshaw rule", which says you never do something right the first time.
There have been exceptions to the rule, one of which has just occurred--Japan has just brought back a sample from an asteroid--congratulations to them.
[Update: It turns out my compliment was undeserved. According to the NYTimes article, there was a previous try at doing this, which had several problems.
"Hayabusa2 is not Japan’s first planetary mission. Indeed, its name points to the existence of Hayabusa, an earlier mission that brought back samples from another asteroid, Itokawa. But that mission, which launched in 2003 and returned in 2010, faced major technical problems."]
Josh Blackman is a conservative law professor writing on the generally conservative Volkoh Conspiracy, but today he notes the failure of "Trump" judges to buy the Trump lawsuits.
We should give credit when credit is due.
The UK has approved the Pfizer vaccine for use; the FDA hasn't yet. Some, like the Marginal Revolution blog, are critical.
The FAA grounded Boeing's 737-Max for 20 months, before approving it this month.
These are judgment calls, or actually likely a nested series of judgment calls in each case.
There are some of us alive who remember thalidomide, and the British Comet.
I'm not one to second guess bureaucrats who have to make judgment calls with life and death consequences.
Kevin Drum on Dec. 1 blogged his positions on an assortment of domestic issues. I commented that I agreed with almost all of them (I plan a separate post discussing them in detail) but he embodied the typical Democrat moderate/progressive in totally ignoring rural issues.
Here's my thoughts on some issues:
President-Elect Biden is planning a covid- czar, apparently. I suspect we'll see more czars, task forces, and commissions in the Biden administration than in past ones.
Czars can provide the promise of greater coordination among different silos. There's a widespread perception the government does not act effectively, so the czar is one solution. Cynically, it also offer another prestigious position for Biden to use in satisfying the demands of various parts of his coalition for influence. (Think of a robin with one worm in its mouth facing four hungry chicks in the next.)
Task forces do much the same. Trump's covid0-19 task force doesn't have a good reputation, but the Operation Warp Speed seems to be doing well at combining the efforts of HHS, CDC, FDA, and the military.
And commissions are a way to seem bipartisan and, at the least, give the impression of action while kicking insoluble issues down the road.
I like this book by Robert Draper. A 3-star review on Amazon says there's no new stories in it, which may be true. We know the outline of the decision to go to war, true enough.
I like these things:
I can think of two possible explanations I've not seen mentioned in discussions on this issue:
Started reading Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". I want to quibble with some sentences on page 29:
"[The South] was where the tenets of intercaste relations took hold before spreading to the rest of the country..." (There follows a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville with a similar point.)
I think this is wrong: slavery was a feature of the world before Europeans reached the Americas. It was a part of the Old Testament, it was part of medieval times, it was an accepted feature of war. It was arguably part of many Native American societies. There was slavery in Great Britain until the Somerset decision.
The bottom line is: we can't blame the South for slavery, which is the way I read Wilkerson. She can argue that slavery on Southern plantations was developed into an American archetype, perhaps with some unique features. But even there, she would need to recognize the differences between Southern slavery and Caribbean sugar plantations.
As I said, it's a quibble. Wilkerson's writing at a level of generality and artistry with which I'm not terribly comfortable.
One place where Republicans and Democrats should be able to reach bipartisan agreement is on fixing the election process. In the past Democrats have felt they do well with the biggest turnout and Republicans have mostly felt the opposite. But in 2020 both parties did well with big turnout, although Democrats in the race for president and Republicans for Congress and the legislature. That perspective on the facts might make it easier to reach a compromise.
I don't see why technology can't be used to monitor the processing of ballots--put cameras in place and record everything. People should be able to agree on best practices among the states with the best records in handling mail and inperson voting.
GAO looked at how FSA is enforcing payment limitation rules. The summary conclusion seems to be "improving, but with a ways to go". I ran across this paragraph, which reminded me how Mike Campbell in the Sherman county FSA office in 1992/3 wanted us to make the process so simple it would put consultants out of business. We failed to do it, and so have the people now in FSA (and Congress, especially Congress):
Several FSA officials said that large farming operations receive assistance from consulting firms to help them comply with active personal management criteria. For example, a state office official said the documentation that consulting firms prepare for farming operations is consistently sufficient to support a determination of active personal management.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/720/710470.pdf
I saw a report today, which I've since lost, that House and Senate conferees have agreed on an important reform: requiring what we used to call in ASCS the "live bodies" who own a corporation to be identified. Under current law if you want to hide the ownership of something, you set up a shell corporation to own it, and then set up more shell entities to own the shell corporation and so on.
I hope the reform goes through, but there's lots of hurdles between a deal on Capitol Hill and having it in the law signed by the Presideb. We'll see.
[update--the politico article]
Rural Blog has a post linking to a Progressive Farmer article on a change in payment limitation regulations published here. The article interprets it as a flip-flop, easing the requirements for payment limitation determinations. I'm not sure that's right but I'm 23+ years out of date on these technicalities, if not more, so I'll just quote the meat of the explanation:
After publication of the rule, stakeholders notified FSA of concerns regarding potential non-intended, adverse effects to farming operations comprised solely of family members. In streamlining the definitions for consistency, these revised definitions were inadvertently made applicable to farming operations solely owned by family members. This was not the intent of this rule change, and as revised, the definitions were more restrictive than they needed to be in order to provide intended consistency in the rule. Those more restrictive definitions were not intended to apply to farm operations comprised or owned solely of family members. Therefore, this document restores § 400.601 and the previous the definitions of “active personal management” and “significant contribution” in § 1400.3 that were applicable prior to publication of the final rule on August 24, 2020. The more restrictive definitions described in § 1400.601 apply only to farming operations comprised of non-family members that are subject to a limit in the number of farm managers seeking to qualify for actively engaged in farming based on a contribution of active personal management alone.
There's a reference to a GAO study as well, which seems to be this.
Jill Lepore has an article in the New Yorker on the Trump administration and official records. It's pretty good. For a while I was responsible for records management in ASCS. This was pre-PC. In those days "records management" was a component of "paperwork management", which also included "directives" and "forms".
Back then paperwork management had become rather formal, partially perhaps because of the Billie Sol Estes case. But since then technology seems to have disrupted everything; at least it was well on the way to doing so when I retired.
Successful Farming has a piece discussing this bill, introduced by Sens. Booker, Warren, and Gillibrand. Warren's statement of support is here. The legislative language is here . (I'm not sure the bill has actually been introduced--the draft language doesn't have a number and I can't find it at Congress.gov.) Mother Jones has an article on it.
It includes several reforms and programs, most of which are focused on black farmers (defined as American-born).
The biggest ask is a program to give qualified applicants of up to 160 acres of farmland, representing from $400,000 to $800,000 in value (using Farm Bureau's average farmland value of $4,100) at no cost.
Other provisions seem to oust OGC from civil rights matters, to put additional layer(s) of authority and/or review over the existing civil rights structure and the FSA county committees, and call for an extensive research and statistical work by ERS and NASS. In addition to the provisions on black farmers there are changes relating to packers and stockyards, conservation, and local markets.
There's an "Oversight Board" focused on current and future USDA/FSA operations and an "Equity Commission" focused on historical and structural issues to do a report within 2 years, and a Civil Rights Ombudsman.
I'm still trying to understand everything in this. Some things which struck me:
In this month someone on the right has:
The Armenia-Azerbaijan hostilities have involved extensive and effective use of drones by the Azerbaijanis which caused the Post to see the future of warfare. in this article.
I doubt that DOD will move quickly to adapt weapons and tactics for scenarios where the adversary is using drones against us--it's not a situation we've run into much up to now, so the military bureaucracy is unlikely to have focused on the threat.
I'm reminded of some discussions of the evolution of the submarine and torpedo, where you had "torpedo boats", then "torpedo boat destroyers" which evolve into the WWI-WWII hierarchy of weapons.
Dylan Mathews has a post at Vox: "10 enormously consequential things Biden can do without the Senate".
He writes: "Pushing the limits of executive authority is sure to provoke legal challenges that the Biden administration could lose, especially with a 6-3 Republican Supreme Court. But even if only half of the options below are implemented and affirmed by the courts, the practical effects would still be hugely significant."
I guess my conservative side is showing. I know the frustrations of facing a deadlocked Congress, a body which cannot decide what laws to pass. But there are problems in going down this road.
I graduated from college long before college loan program came into existence, so I've no first-hand experience with it. However, my impression is that it's been a political football as the parties alternate in power. The Democrats push loans issued directly by the Education Department while the Republicans believe in loans from banks/financial institutions with a federal guarantee. As the program has gone on, people have made changes to the provisions, including forgiveness of payments under certain conditions. So you end up with the sort of mish-mash this person finds herself in. If you follow the thread of responses to her, itbecomes even more confusing than indicated here.
If, hypothetically, you took out a heap of Stafford and Perkins loans, and then consolidated them, and then the consolidation loans were sold like 5 times, and you qualify for various federal repayment plans but not for the pandemic relief - are those federal or private loans?
— Melissa Johnson, PhD (@Lady_Historian) November 18, 2020
One fallacy of my education in government, as my school called "political science" is that Congress makes decisions and the executive branch administers them. In reality for some areas it's an ebb and flow of changes making it very hard for the poor bureaucrat to administer.
