Scientific American:
During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.
This two-step milk revolution may have been a prime factor in allowing bands of farmers and herders from the south to sweep through Europe and displace the hunter-gatherer cultures that had lived there for millennia. “They spread really rapidly into northern Europe from an archaeological point of view,” says Mark Thomas, a population geneticist at University College London. That wave of emigration left an enduring imprint on Europe, where, unlike in many regions of the world, most people can now tolerate milk. “It could be that a large proportion of Europeans are descended from the first lactase-persistent dairy farmers in Europe,” says Thomas....The single-nucleotide switch in Europe happened relatively recently. Thomas and his colleagues estimated the timing by looking at genetic variations in modern populations and running computer simulations of how the related genetic mutation might have spread through ancient populations. They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary.
Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. In a 2004 study, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”.
At some point, cities were established and dairy farmers became socially awkward (while I'm not a dairy farmer, I am socially awkward) and quit dominating societies. Now they are the folks wearing white clothes and funny hats while showing cows at the fair.
The ones at our fair would wear white paper McDonalds cook hats.
Dayton Daily News:
Six of nine members of the JobsOhio board of directors have direct financial ties to companies that have received tax credits and other assistance from state government or JobsOhio since Gov. John Kasich took office in 2011, public records show.
The directors are employed by, sit on the board of or hold stock in companies that have received assistance from either the state of Ohio or JobsOhio, the newly created non-profit established by the Kasich’s administration. JobsOhio also assisted two subsidiaries of Worthington Industries, a Columbus-based company that has contributed heavily to Kasich and where he served as a director between 2001 and 2010....
The JobsOhio board includes a host of prominent names, including former Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee and Bob Evans Farms Chief Executive Steven Davis, both of whom sit on the Bob Evans board of directors.
In March 2011, shortly before JobsOhio began operations, Kasich announced an $11 million package of loans and grants for Bob Evans to move its corporate headquarters from south Columbus to New Albany, an upscale suburb 25 miles away. JobsOhio’s 2012 annual report also lists Kettle Creations, a Bob Evans subsidiary, as having received undisclosed assistance from the JobsOhio Network, or the group of regional economic development agencies that partner with JobsOhio.
Jones said Kettle Creations did not avail itself of the approved state assistance, which was offered before the company was acquired by Bob Evans.
As a Bob Evans director, Gee has been paid $156,700 in cash and stock worth $533,074 over the past three years, according to filings with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Davis has led Bob Evans since 2006, a job that has paid him $19 million in salary, bonus and benefits over the years, SEC records show.
You can always could on Gordon Gee to
suck up money from the state government. I've never seen a bow-tie wearing conman like that guy.
Des Moines Register:
U.S. farmers converted an estimated 7.2 million acres of wetlands and fragile lands to cropland from 2008 to 2012, the Environmental Working Group reported Tuesday.
The findings come as Congress plods along on crafting a five-year farm bill that would end the $5 billion in direct payments given to farmers regardless of need, in favor of expanding popular crop insurance programs subsidized by the federal government. Crop insurance traces its roots back to the 1930s when the program was established in response to the Great Depression.
“The data strongly suggest that over-subsidized crop insurance policies are greasing the wheels of conversion to row crops,” said Craig Cox, EWG’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources. “The government is picking up too much of the risk of plowing up and planting fragile land, all at a cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers and untold environmental degradation.”
Also:
Using mapping and geospatial technologies, EWG found that in Iowa only two counties — Taylor and Adair — saw between 2,500 and 5,000 acres of wetland and wetland buffers converted to cropland.
But almost 40 counties in Iowa — including most of them in the lower third of the Hawkeye state and a group in the northeastern part bordering Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois — had highly erodible land converted to cropland from 2008 to 2012. The amount of land shifted to growing crops varied, but most counties experienced a conversion of between 5,001 to 15,000 acres.
From 2008 to 2012, 5.3 million acres of highly erodible land, most of it grasslands, were plowed up to grow crops in the United States. Iowa, South Dakota and eight other states accounted for 57 percent of all the area converted from highly erodible land to cropland. About 40 percent of the land was used to grow corn and soybeans, EWG said.
Short-term thinking will kick us in the ass.
Not in God-fearing Indiana. Well, yeah,
in God-fearing Indiana:
Former Indiana and current Florida schools chief Tony Bennett built his national star by promising to hold "failing" schools accountable. But when it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett's education team frantically overhauled his signature "A-F" school grading system to improve the school's marks. Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan's school received an "A," despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a "C." "They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence's chief lobbyist. The emails, which also show Bennett discussed with staff the legality of changing just DeHaan's grade, raise unsettling questions about the validity of a grading system that has broad implications. Indiana uses the A-F grades to determine which schools get taken over by the state and whether students seeking state-funded vouchers to attend private school need to first spend a year in public school. They also help determine how much state funding schools receive. A low grade also can detract from a neighborhood and drive homebuyers elsewhere. Bennett, who now is reworking Florida's grading system as that state's education commissioner, reviewed the emails Monday morning and denied that DeHaan's school received special treatment. He said discovering that the charter would receive a low grade raised broader concerns with grades for other "combined" schools — those that included multiple grade levels — across the state. "There was not a secret about this," he said. "This wasn't just to give Christel House an A. It was to make sure the system was right to make sure the system was face valid." However, the emails clearly show Bennett's staff was intensely focused on Christel House, whose founder has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett and thousands more to state legislative leaders. Bennett estimated that 12 or 13 schools benefited, not just Christel House, but the emails show DeHaan's charter was the catalyst for any changes.
Wait, a Republican donor runs a charter school that sucks, and when the test scores come in too low the state superintendent changes the grading system? What about the children? I thought only those evil teachers' unions hated the kids and used the system for their own benefit. I never would have guessed that for-profit school operators would ever do anything except the public good.
Also, I hate Republicans and Hoosiers.
The Atlantic:
Why are Chinese buildings built so quickly? One well-publicized factor is corruption: Chinese construction projects are prone to bribery and corner-cutting, and the resulting structures typically do not last very long. Newer Chinese buildings, though, also use prefabricated modular technology, something that has shortened construction time without a corresponding sacrifice of safety standards.
Then, there is the labor force, which usually consists of undocumented internal migrants
working for very long hours at low wages. These workers lack the means to complain of unfair labor conditions, and construction strikes are rare in China -- something that helps keep building projects on schedule.
That is not where I want to be if there is an earthquake.
PEDV has entered the U.S. and is
spreading across the nation, but nobody is sure how it got here:
A lethal virus that causes diarrhea and vomiting in pigs has entered the United States and has been found in 14 states. With the country’s $97-billion pork industry standing to lose millions of dollars in the event of a mass outbreak, scientists are working to track the virus and prevent its spread, even as they try to understand how it passed through biosecurity defenses in the first place.
“How this virus got here, that’s the million-dollar question,” says James Collins, director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Minnesota in St Paul.
The pathogen, a type of coronavirus called porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), was first identified in the United Kingdom in 1971, and it caused mass epidemics in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. As pigs there developed immunity, the virus petered out and now causes only occasional, isolated outbreaks. It has since spread to Asia, where it has been considered endemic since 1982, causing substantial economic losses to pork producers. The virus can spread quickly by a fecal–oral route and infect entire herds. And although adult pigs typically recover, PEDV can kill 80–100% of the piglets it infects. The virus poses no health threat to humans.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had tried to keep PEDV and other diseases out of the country by restricting imports of pigs and pork products from certain nations, such as China. But on 10 May, the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Iowa State University in Ames confirmed that PEDV had infected pigs in Iowa, the leading producer of US pork. The lab then screened samples taken earlier from other states and found a case from Ohio submitted on 16 April that is now the earliest known US detection of PEDV, according to Gregory Stevenson, a pathologist at Iowa State. The fact that the virus has now spread to 14 states in total is a sign that the outbreak is still flaring and could become an epidemic (see ‘Pig virus on the wing’).
That's bad news. It's likely going to hit a lot of confinement facilities pretty hard. It isn't very encouraging that they have no idea how it got here.
Nature gets into ongoing research on strains of MRSA found in hospitals and confinement operations. I thought this section was interesting:
CAFO supporters acknowledge that farm strains of drug-resistant bacteria could theoretically spread to people. But “I don't see this equating to human health risk”, says Scott Hurd, a veterinarian and epidemiologist at Iowa State University who has conducted multiple studies to assess the risk of drug-resistant bacteria spreading through meat production. He says that the average person has a greater chance of dying from a bee sting than of contracting MRSA from pork. Hurd argues that limiting the use of antibiotics on farms could be harmful to human health. Even Smith's grocery-store study found that meat sold as 'antibiotic free' had the highest levels of garden-variety S. aureus, suggesting that untreated animals harbour more pathogens. “Animals really do need to be treated,” Hurd says.
Nevertheless, regulatory authorities have clamped down on antibiotic use on farms. The European Union began phasing out antibiotics for growth promotion in the late 1990s. Denmark led the charge with a full ban in 2000. (China, however, which claims half the world's pig population, has yet to rein in antibiotic use.)
The bans' effects on drug resistance and human and animal health have been murky. Levy and other supporters of the bans say that the result in Denmark has been positive, pointing to data showing a drop in the use of antibiotics on farms and an increase in meat production. But opponents, including the Animal Health Institute, point out that the use of antibiotics to treat acute illness in Denmark has increased, as have animal deaths.
Last year, amid mounting pressure from several groups, including the National Resources Defense Council, based in New York, the FDA released new guidance calling for the “judicious use” of antibiotics on farms. The agency discouraged the use of antibiotics for growth promotion and urged label changes to the drugs and more veterinary oversight for their application. Not all the guidelines are yet approved, and compliance is voluntary. Nevertheless, the agency has suggested that it will enforce tougher rules if farmers and drug-makers do not adopt the guidelines within about three years. Few are satisfied with the FDA's policy. Pig farmers and meat-industry representatives consider the move a blow to farmers and animal welfare, and supporters of antibiotic restriction say that the voluntary guidelines do not go far enough. Scientists, meanwhile, have pressed the FDA to reveal more data on how farmers are using antibiotics, so far without success.
I think it is kind of bogus to say that it is a big deal that untreated animals harbor more pathogens than treated animals. No shit? But constantly wiping out non-resistant bacteria just leaves resistant bacteria left. I look at it like a septic tank. If you dump some chemical down the drain that kills off all the bacteria, you've got a problem until the bacteria reestablish themselves. Constant dosing with antibiotics has to screw with beneficial bacteria as well as harmful bacteria.
This issue, along with confinement practices and manure management are going to be the central issues of livestock production for the foreseeable future. More research needs to go into balancing animal welfare, minimization of antibiotic use and productivity to position the livestock industry to avoid unnecessary disasters.
Quartz:
The Northern Sea Route—a.k.a. the Northeast Passage—is a shipping lane from Europe to the Far East that runs around the north of Russia, cutting thousands of miles off a trip that would otherwise be made through the Suez Canal. Melting ice has made it more accessible, and since April this year, 266 ship voyages have received permission from Russia’s Northern Sea Route Administration to use the lane; in 2010, just four ships made the trip. But the main way to accomplish the trip safely has involved either bulking up with expensive iceberg protection, or hiring the service of Russian ice-breaking vessels.
Raytheon, the Massachusetts-based defense contractor, says it has developed a new, less cumbersome way to make the voyage. For three years, it has been developing radar-, sonar- and-satellite-fed software called RAMP. The software analyzes the various data feeds and, loaded into a ship’s navigation system, steers it around icebergs, finds otherwise little-known villages, and otherwise maps out a safe sea route.
Until now, Raytheon has been testing out RAMP with the US military. But the company is targeting the growing Arctic traffic, arguing that RAMP is a cheaper way to avoiding the Arctic’s hazards than hiring icebreakers. “What you need is better eyes to see in a very austere environment,” Raytheon’s Tim Raglin told Quartz.
That sounds like an adventure. It will be interesting to see how many bugs that software has right now. That'd be an interesting beta version to try out.
July 25:
The Beautiful Trifid
Image Credit & Copyright: Máximo Ruiz Explanation: The beautiful
Trifid Nebula is a
cosmic study in contrasts. Also known as M20, it lies about
5,000 light-years away toward the
nebula richconstellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid illustrates three different types of astronomical nebulae; red
emission nebulae dominated by light emitted by hydrogen atoms, blue
reflection nebulae produced by dust reflecting starlight, and
dark nebulae where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette. The bright red emission region, roughly separated into three parts by obscuring dust lanes, lends the Trifid its
popular name. But in
this sharp, colorful scene, the red emission is also surrounded by the the telltale blue haze of reflection nebulae. Pillars and jets sculpted by newborn stars, below and left of the emission nebula's center, appear in Hubble Space Telescope
close-up imagesof the region. The Trifid Nebula is about 40 light-years across.
National Journal:
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., has tasked four GOP members of his panel to take the lead on reforming a federal biofuels mandate.
The four members represent districts that crisscross the diverse industries with a stake in this complicated and contentious debate, including oil refineries, corn growers, livestock farmers, and biofuels producers.
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., a senior member of the committee who represents a state that is No. 2 in corn production, will lead the unofficial GOP team. The others are Reps. Cory Gardner of Colorado, Lee Terry of Nebraska, and Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
The eight-year-old renewable-fuels standard requires increasingly large amounts of biofuels—mainly ethanol made from corn—to be blended with gasoline each year. Since the devastating drought that sent corn prices soaring last year, the policy has come under intense scrutiny by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike.
Among the four Republicans, Scalise from oil-rich Louisiana is the only one who has advocated for repeal of the RFS, as favored by the oil, livestock, and food industries. The other three lawmakers take more-nuanced positions because they represent constituencies that have a stake in maintaining the standard, including producers of corn and advanced biofuels that come from nonfood products such as cellulose but that are not coming to market as quickly as Congress initially envisioned.
The group will work on policy actions that reform but don't repeal the mandate, which was established in the 2005 energy law and strengthened by Congress two years later.
You have to change what doesn't work, and trying to meet cellulosic ethanol standards when the technology isn't there yet, and trying to meet higher ethanol requirements when producers have hit the blend wall just won't work. They won't get rid of the mandates entirely, but making fuel from food is just really bad policy, and $4 a pound hamburger is some of what you get from it.
From the
Bangor Daily News:
In Skowhegan, Lambke and a group of people began to notice trends that pointed to what one of the area’s strengths could be. First, more and more bakers around Maine were struggling to find enough flour made from Maine-grown grain. Second, a local mason who built wood-fired bread ovens found his trade to be in increasing demand from people around the country who wanted to bake their own bread.
“It was kind of a culmination of bakers and a mason and some of us who jumped in as community organizers and volunteers who cared about Skowhegan’s revitalization,” Lambke said. “We came together and decided to launch a conference that brought these different trades together to talk about how we could work together to revive a regional grain economy.”
While farmers in Aroostook County have continually grown grain for hundreds of years, Lambke said grain production had all but ceased in the rest of the state as the availability of inexpensive grain started arriving from the midwest.
At one time, Maine was the breadbasket of New England, she said. In the 1830s, farmers in Somerset County produced 239,000 bushels of wheat a year (a bushel of wheat equals roughly 60 pounds), she said.
In 2007, only one farm in Somerset County produced wheat, according to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, the most recent data available. That farm’s production in bushels was not reported to avoid disclosing proprietary information. (The Census of Agriculture is completed every five years, but the 2012 census data likely won’t be available until 2014.)
There are today at least 22 farms in the Skowhegan area growing wheat, Lambke said, though they’re not all growing it for human consumption.
That's kind of interesting. I didn't imagine there would be enough bakers to move the needle at all for grain production. Sure, it is a little thing, but it is notable.
I liked
this part:
Mineral extraction economies activate this neural mechanism: wildcatting, prospecting for gold — gambles that may pay off. Today it’s no longer the individual who makes these scores, of course, it’s corporations, but the work and opportunity draws those with nothing to lose but the trying. California in 1849, Colorado in 1859, Montana in 1883, Texas and Oklahoma in 1912, Alaska in 1970, North Dakota in 2008 — every time there’s a mining boom, it plays out thusly: Someone finds a valuable resource. People hear about it and flock to the area. These people are mainly men. The newly populated area is lawless and lacks the civilizing influence of family life. Among the first women to show up are prostitutes. For a while, everyone makes money and has fun. Or some people do, some gambles pay off. Then the resource dries up or its price drops, and the gamble isn’t profitable anymore, and the town eventually dries up or turns into a tourist attraction — or San Francisco, if it’s lucky. Because our brains are wired to want to continue taking that chance, everyone keeps gambling, no one thinks the boom will bust. It will. It always will.
Williston is booming right now. I’ve worked there since 2007, and oil has changed the town both completely and not at all.... Despite boom–bust history being part of the landscape, there is surprisingly little reservation about the boom among the Williston workers. After all, the price of oil is always rising. But the price of oil always falls. My home state of Texas has been through this cycle more than once, and the differences in attitudes between the two places is striking. The Eagle Ford Shale play is close to as active as the Bakken, but housing construction has been slow in coming because they feel it could stop at any time. Not the people I meet in North Dakota, most of whom aren’t natives. Most of them think it’s just going to get bigger. There’s so much oil in the Bakken, and the technology now is so much better, that it will keep going for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, they say. The only dissenting voice I encountered was that of one old-timer who’d seen the initial drilling of the 1950s.
There will be a bust. Maybe it won't be sudden, but it will come. Also, if you want some insights into how the stripping economy works, check out the article.
Never heard of them, but I like the name, and this ain't bad:
Dirt Farmer - She Shakes from Oh Yeah Wow on Vimeo.
A little bit of news coverage and Congressional questioning gets JP Morgan to at least
go through the motions of getting out of their most recent scam:
JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM -0.80% announced today that it has concluded an internal review and is pursuing strategic alternatives for its physical commodities business, including its remaining holdings of commodities assets and its physical trading operations.
To maximize value, the firm will explore a full range of options over time including, but not limited to: a sale, spin off or strategic partnership of its physical commodities business. During the process, the firm will continue to run its physical commodities business as a going concern and fully support ongoing client activities.
J.P. Morgan has built a leading commodities franchise in recent years, achieving a top-ranked revenue position. The business has been consistently named as a top client business in Greenwich Associates' annual client surveys and was recently named Derivatives House of the Year by Energy Risk magazine.
Seriously, though, what's to keep Glencore or one of the other major commodity players from doing the same thing? Do they really expect regulations to be written to stop them from hoarding metals? I'm guessing this is just show.
Drinking has ruined my life. I'm only 31.
The University of Iowa is, at least
partially:
One afternoon about 10 years ago, the Quaker Oats processing facility in Cedar Rapids contacted administrators at the University of Iowa. The oatmeal, granola, and cereal manufacturer generates thousands of tons of oat hulls each year, and it wanted to know if the university was interested in purchasing the waste product—significantly cheaper than coal—to use as a fuel in its campus power plant.
After spending $1 million on two years of testing and other preliminary work, U of I started processing oat hulls in 2003, combining them with coal and burning the mix as fuel. The deal with Quaker Oats has saved the school up to a half-million dollars each year, depending on the market price of coal. The institution plans to quadruple the amount of biomass it uses as a fuel by 2020, with a goal of making it 40 percent of the fuel mix.
"One of the big themes is, let's get our energy local," says Ferman Milster, principal engineer for renewables at the university's Office of Sustainability. He estimates that the university's goal of upping its local biomass purchases could return about $6 million annually to the local economy.
This change in U of I's energy infrastructure was made easier by the school's district energy system—a centralized boiler that delivers heating and cooling services to the campus. Now common on college campuses, these utilities are still found in some municipalities, often dating to the early 20th century, when towns were built around a dense urban core. It's far less common today to see towns installing the same infrastructure. Recently, however, the small town of West Union, Iowa, decided to give it a try, investing in a district energy system that will tap geothermal energy to lower heating and cooling costs for downtown businesses. The $2.5 million project is a collaborative effort, funded by grants from EPA, state government, and the U.S. Energy Department.
I've been by that Quaker Oats factory in Cedar Rapids. It is massive.
Via
Big Picture Agriculture,
this is depressing:
“We had eighteen months of no rainfall,” says Ogden, whose curly gray hair, ready smile and blue eyes make him look startlingly like the actor Gene Wilder. “We sold a lot of equipment last year. When you’ve had people who have worked for you, it’s hard to let them go.” As he considers what will happen to his family if his farm fails, he starts to cry. “I’ve got college degrees, but with my age it’s going to be hard to find something in this job market.”
Ogden’s friend Matt Rush is also struggling to make ends meet. He recently took a job with the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau in Albuquerque, four hours from home. He, too, cries as he considers his prospects. “This is who we are,” he says. “When your livelihood becomes your identity, you can’t just stop.” He pauses, tries to talk himself into optimism. “It’ll take a while to get her Sunday clothes on,” he says, referring to the land. “But she’ll look good. It’s so wide open. You can see the sun coming up and the sun going down. You can see every star in the heavens at night. When it’s green, it just feels so alive to me. When it rains, you can see it in everybody’s faces—how relieved they are. Contributions go up in church on a Sunday after it rains.” Eddie Speer homesteads a small farm outside Lubbock. His wells have almost run dry; his wife, Laura, worries that she might not have enough water for cooking, washing the dishes and bathing. “We wake up every morning, and if we didn’t know God was taking care of us, we couldn’t get through the day,” he says. “We pray for rain—in church and privately. We ask God to bring rain and bless our farms.” .....I want Speer’s prayers to be answered. But I fear that Ed Moore might be more realistic. Moore looks over the land on which he rides his 15-year-old Appaloosa, Lady, at the end of each workday. You can almost see the sigh forming in his chest. “I don’t think we’ll ever run out of water [entirely]. But it’ll get so expensive we’ll have to quit,” he says. He stops to gather his thoughts. “You ask about this land. I don’t have a clue why I love it. It’s flat. Very hard to make a living. If I were really smart, I’d go somewhere where the average rainfall is forty inches. But this is home. And I don’t like to fail.”
That is so sad. I think Ed Moore is right. The rain-fed Midwest is where it's at. Hopefully it stays rain-fed.
the State Fair youth choir? Yep:
Didn't know there was a State Fair Youth Choir.
Via
Ritholtz:
The big ball could say luck, also.
Anne Buchanan
compares her sister's life on the farm to her's:
I had to take a sick baby goat to bed with me last night,’ my sister said. ‘I found her lying in a corner of the greenhouse barn getting ready to die.’ ’Did she make it?’ I asked. ‘Yep,’ said Jennifer. ‘I tubed her and gave her some electrolytes when I brought her in, fed her and wrapped her up in a towel, and took her up to bed. She peed all over me around 5am, so I brought her downstairs and put her in the barrel with the two boys. It’s a bit crowded, but they’re all going out to the barn today anyway.’
Jennifer and her husband Melvin work Polymeadows Farm, a small goat dairy farm and dairy plant in Vermont. They are currently milking about 120 goats. During kidding season, twice a year, the newborns spend their first night in a barrel of hay in the kitchen. This is important during Vermont winters, but also in summer, so that Jennifer knows the kids are healthy before they go out and join the rest.
My sister and I live very different lives. She’s a dairy goat farmer and I do genetics research at Penn State University in the middle of Pennsylvania. I spend much of my day at a computer in my small office, or sometimes in the genetics lab that I manage, and she spends her days outdoors, haying, watering and graining her goats, bottle-feeding the babies, milking the dams, or in the dairy plant making cheese or yogurt and bottling milk.
The first line of the third paragraph works for my sister and I, also. She's got her life in the big city, and I've got the life on the farm. I haven't brought any calves into the house (although somebody did guess that I did when I asked what she figured I'd done that night with the newborn calf [I'd
dragged it across the pasture on a tarp]), but I have hauled them to the barn at my house in my Ford Focus. Buchanan's whole story is pretty good, especially the description of the seasonality of farming. That is what I like the best about farming.
New York Magazine:
If you buy Gordon’s story, then the effect of the second industrial revolution was to replace the specific entitlement of the Gilded Age (of family, of place of birth) with a powerful general entitlement, earned simply through citizenship. “Just the fact of being an American male and graduating from high school meant you could have a good-paying job and expect that you could have children who would double your own standard of living,” Gordon says. This certainty, that the future would be so much better than the past that it could be detected in the space of a generation, is what we call the American Dream. The phrase itself was coined only in 1931, once the gains of the second industrial revolution had dispersed and inequality had begun to dissipate. There is a whole set of manners, which we have come to think of as part of our national identity, that depends upon this expectation that things will always get better: Our laissez-faire-ism; our can-do-ism; the optimistic cast of our religiosity, which persisted even when other Western nations turned toward atheism; our cult of the individual. We think of the darkening social turn that happened around 1972 as having something to do with the energies of the sixties collapsing in on themselves, but in Gordon’s description something more mechanistic was happening. “The second industrial revolution had run its course,” he says, and so, in many ways, had its social implications.
What happened around 1972 (actually 1971)? U.S. oil production peaked. The days of easy energy are over, and we'll pay an economic cost for that going forward. For all our productivity gains with technology, the drag of lowered return on investment for energy production will be a drain on our economy. A lot of other things also figure into our stagnation, including a reversion to mean for our standard of living. Right now the folks at the top are improving their standard of living at the expense of everyone else, while the rest of us slowly start to slide toward the rest of the world population. I don't think that arrangement can continue for long. Like Gordon, I do believe that our post-war prosperity was a fluke event. How we handle the implications of that will be very interesting.
Via
Ritholtz, the Census Bureau has a fascinating
graphic with their release of 1940 census records (click on infographic to enlarge):
Definitely check out the employment, housing and marital status part. Almost 42% of the population worked in manufacturing or agriculture in 1940. Only 17.7% of farms had running water, and only 31.3% had electricity. And 11.6% of females age 15-19 were married.
This
map is also pretty wild:
The impact of the Dust Bowl is amazing.
Morning Edition:
A century ago, New York could claim that much of its liquor was local, thanks to distilleries large and small that supplied a lot of the whiskey, gin and rum that kept New York City (and the rest of North America) lubricated. Then Prohibition arrived and the industry largely dried up, before trickling back to life in the 21st century.
Now, distillers in New York state are toasting a revival 80 years in the making. Tuthilltown Spirits is one of the first boutique distilleries to open in New York since Prohibition. It's been 12 years since co-founder Ralph Erenzo bought the property in Gardiner, N.Y., a rustic corner of the Hudson Valley about 75 miles north of Manhattan....Now there are dozens of distilleries operating in New York State, from the Adirondacks to Brooklyn.....
At Tuthilltown Spirits back in the Hudson Valley, Erenzo has already scaled up to employ 26 people. He says craft distilleries are starting to have a real economic impact in New York, and beyond.
"People are getting hired. Old buildings are being reused," says Erenzo. "A craft is being reestablished in this country that hasn't existed for 70 or 80 years cause of Prohibition. People are building cooperages and malt houses. This is a rebirth of a whole industry."
I'll stick to my beer, but I'm glad to see the microdistillery industry grow.
July 17:
A Waterspout in Florida
Image Credit & Copyright: Joey Mole Explanation: What's happening over the water?
Pictured above is one of the better images yet recorded of a
waterspout, a type of tornado that occurs over water.
Waterspouts are spinning columns of rising moist air that typically form over warm water.
Waterspouts can be as dangerous as
tornadoes and can feature wind speeds over 200 kilometers per hour. Some
waterspouts form away from
thunderstorms and even during relatively fair weather.
Waterspouts may be relatively transparent and initially visible only by an unusual pattern they create on the water. The
above image was taken earlier this month near
Tampa Bay,
Florida. The
Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida is arguably the most active area in the world for
waterspouts, with hundreds forming each year. Some people
speculate that waterspouts are responsible for some of the losses recorded in the
Bermuda Triangle.
NYT:
The maneuvering in markets for oil, wheat, cotton, coffee and more have brought billions in profits to investment banks like Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, while forcing consumers to pay more every time they fill up a gas tank, flick on a light switch, open a beer or buy a cellphone. In the last year, federal authorities have accused three banks, including JPMorgan, of rigging electricity prices, and last week JPMorgan was
trying to reach a settlement that could cost it $500 million.
Using special exemptions granted by the Federal Reserve Bank and relaxed regulations approved by Congress, the banks have bought huge swaths of infrastructure used to store commodities and deliver them to consumers — from pipelines and refineries in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas; to fleets of more than 100 double-hulled oil tankers at sea around the globe; to companies that control operations at major ports like Oakland, Calif., and Seattle.
Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.
Longer waits might be written off as an aggravation, but they also make aluminum more expensive nearly everywhere in the country because of the arcane formula used to determine the cost of the metal on the spot market.
What a bunch of crooks and thieves. JP Morgan, Goldman and BlackRock are playing the same game in the copper market.
Moon of Alabama:
The NSA's says it needs all teh data it collects to find "terrorists". If one believes that the NSA genuinely wants to find terrorists one should be worried that it has chosen the wrong method for the false problem:
General Alexander spoke in defense of the N.S.A.'s surveillance programs, including its collection of a vast database of information about all phone calls made and received in the United States. “You need a haystack to find a needle,” he said
The assertion that one needs a haystack to find a needle is incredibly stupid. It assumes that there is a needle (or "terrorist"). Something neither given nor provable. Even if there were a needle how will making the haystack bigger it easier to find it? And why is the needle the danger that must be found? Edwald Snowden set the NSA's haystack on fire. Alexander now has his house burning because of the much too large haystack he accumulated.
I just listened to John Boehner claim he wants to cut government waste, but there was no mention of the ridiculously stupid NSA spying program. I would think Republicans, if they have brains in their heads, would try to cut this program and attempt to pin it on Obama, even though it started under Bush. However, since they claim it will help find evil brown people who hate our freedoms, and since tons of the money goes to contractors, Republicans seem A-Ok with the idiocy of the NSA. As for Democrats, they should be pummeling the administration over this. It is an unconstitutional travesty.
The Ohio State Fair
opens on Wednesday. The Columbus Dispatch
highlights some of the new food this year:
• Apple uglies: A twist on the classic deep-fried apple pie, lightly glazed and as ugly as can be!
• Banana puddin’ funnel cake: A French vanilla funnel cake loaded with homemade banana pudding, crushed Nilla wafers, whipped cream and marshmallows.
• Giant deep-fried gummy bears: A five inch cherry gummy bear on a stick, deep-fried in vanilla or chocolate batter.
• Make your own pixie sticks: Mix your own flavors to create your own unique flavor of this classic candy.
• Maple bacon ice cream: A new flavor from Velvet ice cream.
Can't find what you're looking for from the food vendors? There's an app for that (of course):
With 188 food vendors, you are sure to find a meal you’ll love at the Fair - from classics such as lemon shake-ups and corn dogs to unique items like chocolate covered bacon and deep-fried candy bars.
Now there is an even easier way to find the just the right snack at the Fair!
- Visit the Food Finder online
- Text “ FoodFind” to 88588 for a link to the Fair's mobile Food Finder
- Download the free Mobile Food Finder App for Android or iPhone Operating Systems
Maple bacon ice cream? Sounds good.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
profiles the Vice-President:
The job of vice president is important, really it is, way more important than it used to be, but not in that fucked-up way Cheney made it important. I got the feeling Biden would have loved to say "fucked-up way Cheney made it important." But he didn't say that, not with all the tape recorders going, and the staffers there, and him in his breakfast-with-the-king-of-Jordan blue suit. Still, the uneasy expectation that he might say something like that is the thing, always the thing with Biden, the guy who trips and falls, gets back up, gets taken out, keeps getting back in.
He will say foolish things he doesn't quite mean, and he will say bluntly brilliant things that others long to say. "This is a big fucking deal," he whispered to Obama, as the president was about to sign the health-insurance-reform bill into law. Of course it was. Thank you, Joe. "Who do you love?" he said on Meet the Press. "Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love?... Whether they're marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals." Of course. Thank you, Joe. He sparked the debate so many Americans wished Obama would have with that unscripted bit.
It's his charm. It's his gift. It's his political liability, and it's part of an American conundrum. We beg for authenticity, and then when we get it, oh man, it's hilarious. Biden can be fantastic when he's on his game. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, his speech got higher Nielsen ratings than either Bill Clinton's or Obama's. He killed the debate against Ryan, pumped air back into a campaign deflated after Obama's miserable first performance against Romney.
I love the guy. Should he be running the free world? I'm not sure. However, I see no Republican candidate I'd rather have than him. If it is Biden versus any of the candidates I've heard mentioned for the GOP, I'm voting for Biden. At least it would be entertaining. Yet, I doubt the third time will be the charm for Joe.
Molly Ball:
Of 234 Republicans, just 20 percent are reliably loyal to the speaker, a Washington Post analysis recently demonstrated. More than half have gone against him on two or more of this year's biggest votes. Boehner has also suffered a series of humiliating failed floor votes, from his "Plan B" on the fiscal cliff to the recent debacle of the farm bill. Of nine bills that have passed the current Congress and been enacted, four of them did not have the support of a majority of House Republicans, and made it through the House with mostly Democratic votes instead.
Those votes violated the "Hastert rule," an informal guideline formulated by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House. Hastert pledged in 2003 not to allow votes on bills that didn't have the support of "the majority of the majority," meaning more than half of the Republican members of Congress. Democrats -- led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- decried the move at the time as an overly partisan attempt to marginalize their influence.
Today, Boehner's violations of the Hastert rule have angered conservatives who see themselves as the ones marginalized by his ability to get around their demands. Under pressure, Boehner has repeatedly reassured them that he won't break the rule again when it comes to immigration reform. Something resembling the bill that has passed the Senate would likely pass the House if it came to a floor vote, with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans in support. But Boehner has made clear he won't allow that to happen.
I'm not feeling too badly for my Congressman. He worked hard over the last twenty years to get all the idiot conservatives elected who now give him fits. He's been so busy taking corporate cash and throwing out bullshit talking point that he hasn't had time to do anything constructive in DC. Boehner has brought on all his own headaches. Note, the issue isn't that bills can't get passed, they only can't get passed if you listen to the morons in the majority. I think
this is appropriate:
For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; it shall yield no flour; if it were to yield, strangers would devour it.
The article indicates there is a rumor that Boehner may retire. I say that it is about time for the man who 20 years ago claimed he wouldn't be a career politician and campaigned for term limits.
Last night, I led my first, and last, Church League softball post-game prayer. Traditionally, our team, as the only Catholic team in the league, defers to the other team for the post-game prayer. The main reason for that is that most of the other teams have the Pastor, or a youth pastor or some elder on the team, whereas our priest and deacons do not play on the team (and most of the players on our team either aren't very religious or aren't even Catholic). Plus, Catholics aren't well known for improvising prayers. We're much better with the rote, memorized prayers. But our reticence to pray has recently been altered.
A couple of games ago, our coach decided to lead the post-game prayer. As best as I can remember, here's his prayer:
Lord, our judge, thank you for the gift of softball....and the camaraderie and for bringing us together this evening, Amen.
We hadn't walked 20 feet away from the prayer circle when one of my teammates started heckling him with, "Lord, our judge, thank you for the gift of softball? What was that?" Since then, we've been giving him a ton of crap about it. Last week, we were having a cookout after the game, and we had a bunch of emails flying around giving each other shit. I jumped in with a message saying the coach was working on our pre-meal prayer for the cookout:
Lord, our judge, thank you for the gifts of softball, ground beef and processed pig snouts and anuses....
That got a few laughs. Then, at the end of that game, coach put his brother-in-law in charge of the prayer. He did a passable job, but the other team commented about it being short and sweet, like a prayer before a big meal. This week, however, was my turn, especially after I struck out swinging (with the excuse that I'd badly sprained my ankle the inning before).
I had already planned out two lines of the prayer. Since it had been hotter than Hell this week, I started out, "Lord, thank you for this cool evening for us to come out and enjoy, and thank you for the heat this afternoon, to remind us of where we want to be for eternity....and thank you for the opportunity to come together and for the chance to be together on Sunday....Amen."
When I gave the line about eternity, one of my teammates started laughing. Afterwards, the appropriateness of delivering one-liners in prayers was discussed, along with the fact that some of my teammates took that line to mean that I wanted to go to Hell, as opposed to the idea that the oppressive heat was a reminder to try to get to Heaven and avoid the fires of Hell. it was also determined that I would no longer be charged with leading post-game prayers.
Seen for the first time:
The Dublin pitch-drop experiment was set up in 1944 at Trinity College Dublin to demonstrate the high viscosity or low fluidity of pitch — also known as bitumen or asphalt — a material that appears to be solid at room temperature, but is in fact flowing, albeit extremely slowly.
It is a younger and less well-known sibling of an experiment that has been running since 1927 at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, which Guinness World Records lists as the world’s longest-running laboratory experiment (see: Long-term research: Slow science). Physicist Thomas Parnell set it up because he wanted to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit surprising properties. In the past 86 years that experiment has yielded eight drops, with the ninth drop now almost fully formed and about to fall.
I was fascinated with how that funnel jumped up after the drop fell off.
Paul Campos
talks about McDonald's sample
budget for its low-paid workers:
I have seen secondhand (like most members of the pundit class, I am not personally poor) a woman feed herself and her three children on a $30 per week grocery budget, for months on end. I’ve been amazed by her combination of discipline, creativity and self-sacrifice. (A commenter to Scalzi’s post writes: “Growing up poor means realizing twenty years later that Mommy was lying when she said, ‘it’s OK sweetie, I’ve already eaten.’”)
And although this may not be a particularly intellectually nuanced way of making the point, I am of the opinion that any person, corporate or otherwise, who want to “help” this woman by offering her a sample monthly budget is in dire need of a swift kick in the groin.
The great legal historian A.W.B. Simpson once said to me that “the problem of the poor is not thttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8584393706491130969#editor/target=post;postID=815342324748110579hat they’re oppressed, but rather that they have no money.” Precisely. The working poor generally work far harder than their well-intentioned upper-class advisers, but they have no money.
In other words, the poor don’t need financial advice; they need higher wages. Yet apparently The Market – our all-seeing, beneficent Market, which declares that it is right and just that some men should have billions, while others sleep under bridges – has decided that higher wages for the working poor are an offense against all that we hold sacred.
The comment about mom lying punched me in the gut. I've never been there, but I can imagine the moms who go through that. The part about the working poor working far harder than their advisers I see every day. There weren't too many office workers in our plant this week when it was oppressively hot, and when any of us were there, we didn't stick around too long. Those guys on the floor were working 10 hour days in that crap. I took off in the afternoon a couple of days to go
try to kill myself, but I wouldn't have wanted to have been working 10 hours like those guys did. And the thing is, so many folks in corporate America make so much money that they just can't understand what working class folks go through. What's $50,000 to
Lloyd Blankfein? Not nearly enough to do
God's Work, that's for sure.
Smithsonian:
The earliest gloves were simple leather work gloves, often with its finger removed to ensure that ball handling isn’t inhabited in any way. It’s hard to say exactly who wore the first glove, but some reports claim that catchers were wearing work gloves as early as 1860. A pitcher for the by the name of A.G. Spalding claims that it was New Haven first baseman Charles C. Waite who, in an 1875 game against Boston, first had the audacity (i.e. common sense) to take the field with a glove. Maybe “audacity” isn’t quite the right word. Though there were no rules against gloves, Waite tried to preserve his masculinity by wearing a tan, flesh-colored work glove, hoping no one would notice. People noticed. And Waite was ridiculed mercilessly by fans and players alike. Nonetheless, he persevered.
Spalding thought Waite might be on to something.
“I had for a good while felt the need of some sort of hand protection for myself. For several years I had pitched in every game played by the Boston team, and had developed severe bruises on the inside of my left hand. Therefore, I asked Waite about his glove. He confessed that he was a bit ashamed to wear it, but had it on to save his hand. He also admitted that he had chosen a color as inconspicuous as possible, because he didn’t care to attract attention….Meanwhile, my own hand continued to take its medicine with utmost regularity, occasionally being bored with a warm twister that hurt excruciatingly. Still, it was not until 1877 that I overcame my scruples against joining the ‘kid-glove aristocracy’ by donning a glove. I found that the glove, thin as it was, helped considerably, and inserted one pad after another until a good deal of relief was afforded. If anyone wore a padded glove before this date, I do not know it.”
The year after Waite’s debut, Spalding and his brothers started a sports equipment company and one of their first products, alongside the first official baseball, was a baseball glove –though Spalding wouldn’t wear one himself until 1877 when he started playing first base. Unlike Waite’s glove, Spaldings was made from dark, almost black leather. Spalding’s reputation kept away the ridicule and in fact, he may be responsible for helping to remove the stigma that came with wearing a glove.
My glove from high school was getting in pretty sad shape, but I dropped $25 on getting it relaced, and it is practically new. It sure as hell isn't a softball glove (it is a second baseman's glove), but I'll retire before it does.
Charlie Pierce
reports on Morgan Shepherd:
At the end of his afternoon, Morgan Shepherd hung around in the cool precincts of the infield garage. He had not won, but he had not expected to win. He hadn't won a race on this circuit since he won in Atlanta in 1993. He did not run at the front of the field, but he had not expected to do that, either. He had not even finished 100 laps and, if he would tell you the truth, he also probably had not expected to finish that many at all. Not that he didn't sound like every other driver who didn't win Sunday. He lifted the brim of his battered cap, looked across the way at his car as they were packing it up, and he talked about the things that went wrong in just the same way that all the other drivers do.
"We had a great engine," Shepherd said. "But the front end of the car just got to bouncing up and down. There was just something off on the chassis and it made the car hard to turn. Of course, we didn't have a chance to test it on the track or anything."
But starting the race was his best moment. By starting the race, Morgan Shepherd won. He is 71 years old. He first raced on a NASCAR track at about quarter past the first Nixon administration. Sunday, as he roared past the starting line — and even the lowliest stock car roars the first time it comes around the grandstand — he became the oldest person ever to start a Sprint Cup race. When he began racing, NASCAR hadn't discovered yet that there were pockets of high-octane yeehawing all over the country. They didn't run races in Vegas or, heavens to Cale Yarborough, New (by God!) Hampshire. They ran on tracks like the Hickory Motor Speedway and the Asheville-Weaverville Speedway, and North Wilkesboro. "They had Daytona," said Shepherd, who also drives on the Nationwide circuit. "But the rest of them were places like that.
That is pretty impressive. Back when grandpa hit 71, we didn't really want him driving, let alone in a NASCAR race.
