Textiles and Food--a Similar Evolution?

 Virginia Postrel has a new book on the history of textiles. I gave it to my wife but haven't yet read it myself.  Based on online interviews/discussions with her I expect it to be very good.  One theory I've developed from them is there's a general parallel between the evolution of the making and use of textiles and the evolution of the growing and eating of food.  There's a gradual shift from individual hand labor to mass production and marketing of textiles, just as there's a gradual shift from hand labor to mass production and marketing of food.

Me and the ACLU

 I joined the ACLU back in the Skokie days, IIRC. And I'm still pretty much an absolutist on free speech so I'm not enthusiastic about its recent softening of its position.

The Lactose-Intolerant Chinese Don't Have Enough Cows for Their Thirst

 I got to this Reuters article on the growing Chinese market for milk and their lack of enough cows to produce it from the Illinois extension website.  It sparked my curiosity, so I found this BBC article by Googling.  It tries to explain the demand--maybe partially yoghurt, partially other products, partially prestige? 

I'm reminded of a book I've blogged about before, Appiah's, The Honor Code.  In it he discusses the end of footbinding in China.  At roughly the time my aunt and uncle were in China working for the Y Chinese elites were dissing their culture and elevating Western culture as "modern".  Foot binding became regarded as old-fashioned, retrograde thinking.  I wonder if milk is benefiting by a similar logic.

The Lessons of Northern Ireland

 Half my ancestry is from Northern Ireland, my cousin has written on the history of Ulster, and I remember the start of the Troubles there, when the Catholic/Sinn Fein movement seemed in tune with the student movements in France and Germany, not to mention our civil rights movement.

Bottom line--I've tracked developments there with more interest than elsewhere in Europe or the world for that matter.  To me it's an object lesson in human nature, a lesson to put alongside the lesson from Israel/Palestine and the various racial and ethnic conflicts here and abroad.  People are able to discern differences in fine distinctions and often use them as the basis for enmity. Such patterns tend to endure through time, and often lead to vicious cycles of eye for an eye. 

(Watch the TV series Fauda for another example of the same.)

Here's the Times on the current status. It also seems that there's a cycle at work--the young get riled up, get violent, get exhausted, and there's less violence for a while until a new generation comes along. 

Buried in the Charts--Black Men

 The NYTimes had an article on the recent employment report.  Towards the end they had a series of 4 charts comparing the employment levels for men and women for whites, blacks, Asian-Americans, and Latinos.  It was all in support of the article's points about the differential impact of the pandemic. But the charts also had the data for the numbers in the employment market. For three categories there were more men in the force than women, roughly 10-12 percent more when I eyeballed it.  But for blacks there were fewer men than women.  Again roughly speaking, there were about 3 million fewer black men than there should have been if the ratio were similar to those for the other groups.

The Lab Leak Possibility

 For what it's worth, which is nothing, my memory is that early on the theories of the origin of the virus were the wet markets in Wuhan and a weaponized virus from the Wuhan lab, a theory according to something I read this week which was being pushed by Bannon. 

So when I read the Vanity Fair article, this passage strikes me as off:

 But on April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out an ambiguous statement whose apparent goal was to suppress a growing furor around the lab-leak theory. It said that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Seems to me the ODNI was trying to suppress the Bannon--weaponized theory since they left open the lab-leak possibility.  And part of the push-back by US scientists was denying there was evidence in the virus genome of human manipulation, which would be a smoking gun for the lab leak. 

The other aspect was the determination by Trump and politicos after the virus hit the US to tie it to China--"Wuhan virus" etc. There's past precedent for using a location's name to identify a virus, but not for using it to attack the location.    So there were two triggers for Democrats to push back. The push back was perhaps as lacking in nuance as the Bannon/Trump positions.

Now I'll go back to reading the Vanity Fair article.

Eight Thousand Posts

 I just noticed I've so far published 8001 posts.  Ann Althouse rightfully boasts of her record of daily posting since she began, which was before me. I can't say the same.  I've missed some days, particularly in recent years, and the pace of my blogging has slowed to a post a day.  Some days I'm pretty dry, as today.  It's been drier since Jan. 20. 

I've probably got another 6,000 draft posts.  Sometimes I get an idea for a post, create one with just the title, then go off to do something else.  By the time I get back, I'm wondering what I was going to write, or at least the energy to write on the subject has dwindled away.  Sometimes I write part of one but don't have even the ghost of an ending (endings have always been a problem) so don't publish.  

A few times I've found the subject too controversial; I didn't want to get into it.  That's usually the case with issues of race.  

One of these years I'll go back and skim my past writings, see whether they've stood up.  Not today. Too tired after gardening and errand running. 

Inflation and Women's Lib

 From yesterday's conversation with my cousin--some idle speculation on the interrelated threads of suburbanization, car ownership, feminism, women working and inflation:

• after WWII we had a lot of people moving to the suburbs, the Levittowns, or the Manassas Parks where my in-laws moved to.
• if the household owned one car, then the wife was stuck at home (see yesterday's post on food trucks), or dependent on clubs/associations where one woman could provide transportation.
• there was, I think, more inflation in the economy than we've become used to in the last couple decades.  Inflation around the Korean War, worries about inflation in the 50's and early 60's, actual inflation beginning late 60's.
• inflation made it harder and harder for the one-wage earner family to manage, particularly as the boomer generation was exploding, increasing the pressure for women to go to work.
• the return to work would increase the returns from a second car, which would in turn liberate women a bit more.
• all of which undermined some of the women's associations, like the League of Women Voters and the AAUW. But the experience of the workplace and the paycheck would empower women.

I've not done any research for statistics to back up these threads, but they fit my general impressions.

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Decline of the Deliveryman

 Made a discovery this morning talking with my cousin, who mentioned the deliverymen/vendors in her neighborhood in Berwyn heights in the 1930.  The family had one car, so when her father was at work her mother was dependent on walking or public transportation.  The area was affluent enough (many UMd college professors and researchers at USDA Beltsville) so that it was worthwhile for trucks to sell meat and cheese, fruits and vegetables, and bakery (3 different trucks--she didn't mention milk which was even available in our more rural area in the 1940's but I assume they had it). I'm visualizing these as mobile farmers markets, though the milkman model would allow for advance orders, so maybe not.

I assume this was an evolution from the older horse-drawn vendors as the suburbs evolved from close in to car-mobile. And I'm guessing that as women went to work and had their own cars, the deliveryman/vendor model was no longer effective or economical.

Makes me muse on today's model--it's probably more efficient energy wise for groceries to deliver than for people to drive to the store.  But people like the  power to inspect and choose.  So will the effect of the pandemic be to somewhat increase the miles driven by grocery/vendor deliveries and decrease the miles driven by consumers to stores?  

[Update: found this link, not very descriptive though.]

[Update: a more informative link about horse-drawn wagons. Note: my cousin remembers the trucks as markets, not as delivery.  Unlike the milkman where you could leave an order in the empty milk bottle.]

What History Should Include

 Bob Somerby comments on a news commentary show where one participant noted he hadn't been taught the Tulsa massacre and just recently learned about the Birmingham church bombing which killed four young black girls in Sunday school. 

I think it seems to Bob (who's maybe 7 years younger than I) and to me that obviously modern kids should be taught both.  

But that's a knee jerk opinion--both Bob and I lived through the reporting of the bombing so it's something of a landmark in the progression of the civil rights movement. We didn't live through Tulsa; not that it matters because the massacre did not, I believe, make any national impression--media is very different now. Given the limited time a teacher has, I'm not sure which events need to be covered--letter from a Birmingham jail, Woolworth counter sit-in, Albany Georgia, Pettus bridge, Shwerner, Chaney, and Goodman?  The laws which were passed, the Rochester riot, the Kerner commission, RFK on MLK's assassination? 

I suppose for most teachers the details have dropped out so their decision making is easier than it would be for me or Bob.