On Farming

It was about 9:15 this evening when it really hit me.  We had just finished planting the corn on our first farm, and I was walking from the north field back to my truck about a quarter mile away.  It was approaching the end of the gloaming, and in the general stillness the slightest wisp of breeze would kick up a tiny chill.  It would pass, and then I would feel the warmth of the soil radiating the stored solar energy of a beautiful May Day. That happened four or five times as I made that 5 minute walk. It was a good day.

It didn't start that way.  If you talked to me as late as 2:30, I would have had a tale of woe and frustration that stretched days as we'd managed to get 10 acres planted while neighbors seeded hundreds.  I was trying to repair yesterday's breakdown, and had just discovered that the part I ordered and that dad picked up this morning was the wrong one, and wouldn't work on our machine.  At that point, I was looking for a quick fix and dad, while expressing that immediate retirement was looking pretty attractive, said that we had waited this long, we might as well wait a couple more hours while he went to get the right part and do it right.

"Good enough never is."  That is the sales slogan at my town job, which also happens to be our family business.  It is a potent motto, but from this jaded engineer and farmer's perspective, good enough is good enough.  Dad left to get the part, and I went to work on my quick fix.  From my perspective, we could do the proper fix tomorrow when it was forecast to rain (although that may get pushed back to Thursday [and dad is right, we need to fix it correctly when we can, which I will try to do in the early morning]).  Within a half-hour we were up and running, and with minor slowdowns, were able to complete what we could reasonably expect to get done in what was left of the day. 

That is what I love about grain farming.  When you decide to try something that might not be ideal, you don't have to answer to anyone except family and maybe the banker.  Also, unlike almost every other job, there is a definite start and finish to crop production.  Sure, we are barely a sixteenth of the way to completing our seeding labor, but we got most of that done in less than seven hours from our lowest point at 2:30 to that moment where I felt the last remnants of the sun's work escaping to the atmosphere in the beautiful transition from day to night.  Few other jobs blend that physical feeling of accomplishment with the opportunity to experience nature in all its wonder and beauty.  I got to feel the warmth of the May sun, watch that sun set, and watch the moon rise.  And I got to feel the subtle shift of our work from frustration to success.

As I type this, this good day passes into the next one.  I am looking at an early start to a day that may bring rain, will definitely bring a careful balance of labor between the town job and the one that is done more for love than money, and may bring more frustration. But I am looking forward to another feeling of accomplishment as this new day fades into the next one. 

Chart of the Day: Federal Budget Edition

CBO, via Ritholtz:

There is a lot of interesting stuff in that graphic.

Bomb Cyclone Demonstrates Boston's Climate Vulnerability

Boston Globe:

It’s time to start talking about ways to protect entire neighborhoods from rising seas, Abbott said. Actually, she said, Thursday’s storm showed it’s well past time.
“We keep talking like this is something that’s coming in 30 years,” she said. “The reality is it has been coming for a while now.”
And experts expect it will become more common, with sea levels in the region projected to rise between 3 and 7 feet by the end of the century. A city report in 2015 found that rising sea levels could make major flooding three times more frequent by 2030 and 10 times more common by 2050.
Both Walsh and Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon, said Thursday’s storm is a wake-up call.
“The reality of climate change makes storms like this the new normal,” Clarke said.
Indeed it was so intense that flooding exceeded what scientists typically call a 100-year storm, meaning one like it only comes once a century.
Climate change, though, is fast upending those calculations.
“This flood level will occur a lot more frequently in the future,” said Paul Kirshen, a professor in the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston who studies coastal flooding and sea rise. “It’s possible that at the end of this century we could be seeing these kinds of tides with every tide.”

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen somebody comment that 100-year floods are occurring much more frequently, and that they will have to be recalculated, I wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow.  As it is, it is very obvious that climate change deniers are endangering everyone when they prevent planning for future flooding and other storm damage.

Blood Money

If you don't read anything else today, I recommend reading this.

The Republican Party, In Summary

Alex Pareene goes over many of the things that make the Republican Party such a dysfunctional governing party:

If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you don’t need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, or even the beliefs of the “alt-right.” You pretty much just need to be in semi-regular contact with a white, reasonably comfortable, male retiree. We are now ruled by men who think and act very much like that ordinary man you might know, and if you want to know why they believe so many strange and terrible things, you can basically blame the fact that a large and lucrative industry is dedicated to lying to them....
The bottom-feeding amorality of the sorts of people who sponsored the right-wing press, and the crummy nature of the products and services sold, shows exactly who was supposed to be consuming it: suckers. Or, more specifically, trusting retirees, with a bit of disposable income, and a natural inclination to hate modernity and change—an inclination that could be heightened, radicalized, and exploited....
Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.

That, broadly, explains the dysfunction of the Obama era, post-Tea Party freakout. Congressional Republicans went from people who were able to turn their bullshit-hose on their constituents, in order to rile them up, to people who pointed it directly at themselves, mouths open.

The radicalization of the base actually occurred earlier than Pareene lets on.  He pinpoints it to the election of Obama, but, at least around here, it occurred before that.  I ran for office in 2006 because I saw a Republican party being taken over by know-nothing idiots who believe all kinds of non-factual bullshit.  That year was an election year for all of the statewide executive offices, and when there is a contested Republican primary election for Governor, my county's Republican party holds a County Convention.  As one of the candidates for office, I was invited to speak, or I otherwise wouldn't have attended. The opening address was given by John Boehner, who, at the time, was House Majority Leader (he would become Minority Leader after the 2006 election).  He rolled out a lot of red meat, but over the course of the day, his speech was one of the tamer ones given.  Also present was House Freedom Caucus founder and do-nothing government paycheck thief Jim Jordan, who was leaving the Ohio Senate to run for Congress that year.  I don't think he spoke, but if he did, it was while I was trying to keep from puking due to nerves before my speech.  I gave my speech, which didn't stick to my script, but generally focused on the need for more spending on education.  Not surprisingly, I was the only speaker who didn't mention guns, terrorism or abortion, and the only one who mentioned additional spending for education.

The delegates to the county convention were a mix of elected officials (especially township trustees), party volunteers and business people.  To best illustrate that the base had already been radicalized, all but two of the right-wing loon candidates for statewide office (State Attorney General candidate Betty Montgomery and Mike DeWine, who was the most sane candidate for U.S. Senate present-how times change) was endorsed by the delegates present.  Later that week, I stopped by the county Recorder's office.  He was the county political boss, and he confided to me that he and the other political wheel, the county Prosecutor, were terrified by how radical the base was, and how willing they were to back the morons who professed the greatest faith in the old-time right-wing media bullshit.  Those two were more in it for the power and the ability to hand out patronage, and they were shocked that the majority of the local party was drinking the Kool-Aid.

As Pareene points out, one of the main problems is that the true believers are now a substantial minority in Congress.  The problem is that they were already holding most of the positions at the state level.  Jim Jordan was, at that moment in 2006, making the leap from the state-level stage to the national stage.  My goal was to convince people that they shouldn't be electing morons like Jim Jordan and my opponent to government positions, but instead be electing people who were smart enough to vote for positions outside of the conservative dogma.  Unfortunately, I had a hard time telling my friends and neighbors that they had a lot of stupid political beliefs.  Instead, I tried to work my way around the edges of political discussions, and ended up absorbing a brutal shellacking from a rather dumb incumbent I ran against.

Pareene focuses on Trump's position as the Fox News viewer-in-chief, and how dangerous that is functional government.  The unfortunate thing is that this movement has been building for almost 40 years, and it has taken completely unqualified dumbfuck being elected President of the United States for most folks to realize that stupid people have gradually been filtering up from the grassroots, and now they control almost all the levers of power.  We've had plenty of time to realize what's happening, and the fact that I ran for office is evidence that it was completely obvious back in 2006.  Now we have to reap the whirlwind.

Revisiting the Carrier Plant

Bloomberg goes back to follow up on what currently looks like the high point of the Trump era (which actually occurred before the inauguration):

HVAC makers have left the U.S. for the same reason countless other businesses have: cheaper labor. Carrier’s unionized workers in Indy are paid, on average, about $23 an hour (though more recent hires earn $17). Their Mexican counterparts earn an hourly rate of $3. Absenteeism and turnover in Indiana are considerably higher than at the company’s Monterrey operations, Hayes says. He told the Council on Foreign Relations breakfast that his Mexican rooftop AC plant has “probably one of the best-performing workforces that we have around the globe.”
Which isn’t to say that Carrier’s Indy workers, represented by United Steelworkers Local 1999, aren’t productive. They produce 10,000 furnace or fan-coil units a day, or one every seven seconds. According to a 1993 Hartford Courant story, the Indianapolis plant back then produced 500,000 furnaces a year with 1,500 workers. Today it can make four times as many furnaces and fan coils with a slightly smaller workforce—and you don’t have to explain the significance of that to the members of Local 1999. Studies show that 50 percent to 90 percent of job losses at American factories are attributable to productivity gains linked to automation. Except for a blip during the 2008 recession, industrial production in the U.S. has been on a fairly steady rise for decades. Even if Trump struck three Carrier deals a day for the rest of his term, he wouldn’t recoup even half the 7 million American manufacturing jobs lost since that employment peaked in 1979.

Here is a gem that should be repeated anytime some businessperson trots out the "job-killing regulations" line:

The union offered concessions amounting to a third of the $65 million a year Carrier expected to save by moving. Indiana then-Governor Mike Pence and Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly met separately with Carrier and UTC executives. Pence told RTV6 of Indianapolis that the “rising tide of red tape” in Washington made it impossible for Carrier to keep the plant running.
Donnelly says he asked Carrier executive Nelson and Robert McDonough, who runs UTC’s Climate, Controls & Security division, to cite one regulation that figured in the decision. “They couldn’t,” he says. The executives did confirm that furnaces sent to the U.S. from Mexico would have to comply with the same rules. The company later told the union that regulatory costs didn’t figure into expected savings from the move.
“This is about Carrier chasing wages at $3 an hour,” Donnelly says. “They put together a $16 billion stock buyback and just went wherever they could to try to pick up a few extra pennies.”

So what was the outcome of the "deal"?  This:

Carrier struck a deal with the Indiana Economic Development Corp., a public-private agency chaired at the time by Pence. UTC had declined a similar arrangement in 2014 because, in part, it would have required the plant to add workers. According to the current plan, Carrier will receive up to $7 million in state tax credits and training grants over 10 years—about $1,000 per worker per year, a pittance for UTC, which offers to underwrite four years of college education for any employee.
UTC also pledged to spend $16 million on plant upgrades, including automation. That should make the plant more productive, which in turn could lessen the need to seek dirt-cheap wages. But technology tends to shrink payrolls, and that’s likely to happen at Carrier. “We will take a lot of those jobs that today require very low skill and … eliminate those jobs through automation,” Hayes says...He offers little comfort to the sorts of workers whose jobs he reluctantly preserved. “If you have a low-skilled job, they’re not safe no matter where you are,” he says. “The forces of globalization are not going to slow down.”
That’s painfully clear in Indiana. Not far from Carrier, Rexnord LLC is closing a bearings plant and shipping production to Mexico. Trump tweeted about it in December: “This is happening all over our country. No more!” Rexnord’s 350 workers are expected to be gone by summer. Elsewhere in the state, auto parts supplier CTS Corp. in Elkhart is sending production to Asia and Mexico, cutting 230 jobs. Welbilt Inc. closed its Sellersburg beverage systems factory in January and sent production to Mexico, eliminating more than 70 jobs. Harman Professional Solutions shifted some operations in Elkhart to Mexico, killing 125 jobs.
Layoffs at UTC’s Huntington plant began recently. The facility will be closed by early 2018. The Carrier fan-coil lines and related jobs will be gone by the end of this year.

Unfortunately, I don't think anything, especially a blowhard moron jackass President, can staunch the flow of job losses to low wage countries and to automation.  The truth is, we have locked ourselves into an unsustainable, resource-intensive way-of-life that we just can't afford to maintain.  It is just too easy for businesses to use wage arbitrage to make products in low-wage countries and sell them in rich countries.  It doesn't matter whether Trump's excise taxes or Paul Ryan's border-adjustment tax were to go into effect, because each would pummel the millions of Americans in low-paying service jobs, while barely assisting the approximately 9% of Americans who work in manufacturing.  The only thing that could maybe revitalize American manufacturing would be for investors to give up on squeezing more and more profits out of American companies, and settle for allowing workers to gain a much greater share of productivity gains.  You may as well wait for Donald Trump to show humility.

Chart of the Day - Trump "Landslide" Edition

FiveThirtyEight:

By most measures, Trump’s victory was modest

		ELECTORAL COLLEGE SHARE		POPULAR VOTE SHARE		POPULAR VOTE MARGIN		OVERALL
YEAR	PRESIDENT	SHARE	RANK	SHARE	RANK	MARGIN	RANK	AVERAGE RANK
1936	Roosevelt	98.5	1	60.8	2	+24.3	3	2.0
1972	Nixon	96.7	3	60.7	3	+23.2	4	3.3
1964	Johnson	90.3	5	61.1	1	+22.6	5	3.7
1984	Reagan	97.6	2	58.8	5	+18.2	6	4.3
1920	Harding	76.1	13	60.4	4	+26.2	1	6.0
1932	Roosevelt	88.9	6	57.4	7	+17.8	7	6.7
1928	Hoover	83.6	9	58.2	6	+17.4	8	7.7
1956	Eisenhower	86.1	7	57.4	8	+15.4	9	8.0
1924	Coolidge	71.9	14	54.0	11	+25.2	2	9.0
1940	Roosevelt	84.6	8	54.7	10	+10.0	11	9.7
1952	Eisenhower	83.2	10	55.2	9	+10.9	10	9.7
1980	Reagan	90.9	4	50.8	16	+9.7	12	10.7
1944	Roosevelt	81.4	11	53.4	12	+7.5	15	12.7
1988	GHW Bush	79.2	12	53.4	13	+7.7	14	13.0
2008	Obama	67.8	17	52.9	14	+7.3	16	15.7
1996	Clinton	70.4	15	49.3	21	+8.6	13	16.3
2012	Obama	61.7	18	51.0	15	+3.9	19	17.3
1948	Truman	57.1	19	49.6	20	+4.5	18	19.0
1992	Clinton	68.8	16	43.0	25	+5.6	17	19.3
2004	GW Bush	53.2	24	50.7	17	+2.5	20	20.3
1976	Carter	55.2	23	50.1	18	+2.1	21	20.7
1960	Kennedy	56.4	21	49.7	19	+0.2	23	21.0
1968	Nixon	55.9	22	43.4	24	+0.7	22	22.7
2016	Trump	56.5	20	45.9	23	-2.1	25	22.7
2000	GW Bush	50.4	25	47.9	22	-0.5	24	23.7

Sources: Dave Leip, Statistical Abstract of the United States, David Wasserman, Wikipedia

The Rural/Urban Divide Illustrated

The Economist, via Ritholtz:

As our map (above) of America’s voting patterns on a county-by-county basis going back to 1952 makes clear, Mr Trump’s gains were concentrated in rural areas across the northern United States. Republicans have long held the edge in America’s wide-open spaces, but never has the gap been this profound: a whopping 80% of voters who have over one square mile (2.6 square km) of land to enjoy to themselves backed Mr Trump. As the scatter plot below demonstrates, as counties become increasingly densely populated, fewer and fewer vote Republican. American politics appear to be realigning along a cleavage between inward-looking countryfolk and urban globalists. Mr Trump hails from the latter group, but his message resounded with the former. A uniquely divisive candidate, he is both perhaps the least likely politician in the country to build bridges across that gap and also the only one who has the capacity to do so.

I don't see Trump uniting the nation.  I honestly think that the appreciation of civil government increases with the number of people one is surrounded by.  Alternatively, based on farmers and business people I know, maybe the more government money you receive, the more you hate government. 

The World Is Not Coming To An End

And violence against police isn't getting worse because Obama is President:

It's worth pointing out that in 2016, year-to-date officer fatalities via shooting only are up 44 percent over last year, according to the numbers compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial Fund. But that's partially an illustration of how sensitive these numbers are to individual incidents: If you set the Dallas shootings aside, the year-over-year increase is only 17 percent. And as Eugene Volokh points out, the 2016 numbers are roughly on par with the numbers for the past 10 years.

These figures in the chart above include all incidents in which a suspect intended to kill a police officer — shootings, stabbings, assaults, bombings and vehicular assaults. They exclude such things as accidental shootings, job-related illnesses and traffic accidents. If you were to narrow it down to just shootings, the overall trend would be roughly the same: from 80 deaths annually under Reagan to 48 annually under Obama. Again, factoring in the 2016 shooting numbers, including Dallas, has a negligible effect on the average under Obama.
These falling fatality numbers aren't simply a function of better medical care for injured officers. Overall assaults on officers are down, too. In 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, there were 15.9 assaults for every 100 sworn law enforcement officers according to the FBI. In 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration, there were 12.7 assaults for every 100 officers. By the end of the Bush administration that number fell further to 11.3. Under Obama in 2014, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, that number further fell to 9.0.

I read a comment on Facebook from a local person I've met before which stated that America's racial relations were improving before Obama was elected and he set about causing discord.  I wanted to just reply, "Bullshit," but thought better of it. The Blame Obama crowd seems to think that getting elected made Obama too uppity, and it is reflected in tense relations between black citizens and the police.  Never mind that these tensions have been in place for 50 years, and that it has only been the presence of cameras available to record police brutality that have brought these issues to the forefront.   I realize I won't be able to convince almost any white people that if they were treated like black people are by police every day, they'd take a swing at a cop within a week, but I believe that is true.

The frustrating thing for me is that the police videos last week were making some white people really consider what black people face every day.  I heard a few people I know to be typically critical of the generic black person in trouble with the law express shock at what they thought were unjust police actions.  But it only takes one instance of violence by a black person (albeit in this case, a particularly horrific one) to more or less wipe all that out.  Even generally peaceful protests anger the majority of white people I know.  It seems that white America can relate to the suffering of blacks as long as they suffer those injustices calmly and in silence.  I hope that America's streets become safer for all Americans, whether they are police or civilians, white or black, but the numbers indicate that in general, police are safer now than they have been at any time during my life.  And that is a good thing.

Farm Bill Funnels Money to Overproducing Peanut Farmers

Reuters:

A mountain of peanuts is piling up in the U.S. south, threatening to hand American taxpayers a near $2-billion bailout bill over the next three years, and leaving the government with a big chunk of the crop on its books.Peanut growers in states including Georgia and Alabama boosted sowing acreage by a fifth this spring and now are wrapping up harvesting their 3.1-million-ton crop, the second-largest ever, even as prices plumb seven-year lows...
One way or another, U.S. farmers look set to keep producing more peanuts than Americans can consume, leaving taxpayers on the hook.
First, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is paying farmers most of the difference between the "reference price" of $535 per ton (26.75 cents per lb) and market prices, now below $400 per ton. A Nov. 18 report to Congress estimates such payments this year for peanuts exceed those for corn and soybeans by more than $100 per acre.

Secondly, government loan guarantees mean once prices fall below levels used to value their crops as collateral, farmers have an incentive to default on the loans and hand over the peanuts to the USDA rather than sell them to make the payments....
Through forfeitures, the USDA amassed 145,000 tons of peanuts from last year's crop, its largest stockpile in at least nine years, according to data compiled by Reuters.That stockpile is enough to satisfy the average annual consumption of over 20 million Americans - more than the population of Florida - and puts the administration in a bind.Storing the peanuts in shellers' and growers' warehouses comes at a cost. Selling them could depress the market further and in turn would add to the price subsidy bill.
Payments to peanut farmers could total between $960 million and $1.9 billion through fiscal 2018, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and USDA projections cited in the Congressional Research Service report.
The higher costs come as the 2014 Farm Bill set high peanut reference prices relative to historic averages and cut support for production of cotton, an alternative crop, encouraging growers to dedicate more acres to peanuts, the report and experts said.
The government spends far more on big cash crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans, with support for corn alone expected to cost $3.6 billion this year, according to CBO estimates. Yet relative to crops size and value, peanut crops are costlier, with payments worth more than a third of the crop's value.

I anticipate we are going to see a massive increase in government subsidies to farmers in all of the commodity programs.  Most corn and soybean farmers signed up for the program that guaranteed them payments in the next two years, but if prices continue to fall, I expect disaster payments or other program modifications to be made to ensure that farmers receive larger payments.  We had a massive commodity bubble, and the popping of that bubble will be extremely painful for rural areas which only had that bubble to keep them from being pummeled through the recession which mangled the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy.  Farmers vote, and politicians know this.  There will be a multitude of articles similar to this in the next few years, although many will focus on other commodity crops.  We had our seven good years, you can expect we'll have seven or more bad ones.

Another Government Handout for Minorities

Rural Americans are a distinct minority in the United States, even if they don't see themselves as one.  Here is another in a long line of government handouts to improve life in rural America:

Rural Ohioans’ telephone and Internet service is about to get a boost, thanks to a $1.5 billion federal program.
CenturyLink, Cincinnati Bell, AT&T, Frontier Communications, FairPoint Communications and Windstream Communications have all accepted Federal Communication Commission funding in the form of annual subsidies to offer broadband service to rural homes and businesses that are currently not being served.
Overall, carriers in Ohio will get $58.5 million in annual support to serve 166,967 homes and businesses.
The funding is needed because nearly 1 in 3 rural Americans lack access to broadband service, compared with only 1 in 100 urban Americans, according to the FCC’s latest Broadband Progress Report.
The broadband service is intended to ensure universal telephone coverage as companies phase out traditional landline service as well as add Internet service to areas where the cost of providing such service would otherwise be prohibitive.
“Access to modern broadband is critical to life in today’s society,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in a statement. “The financial support provided by American ratepayers through the Connect America program is an investment in the future of our rural communities that will pay dividends for all Americans for years to come.”
The funding will subsidize the construction of broadband networks in rural areas over the next six years. Forty percent of the work must be done by the end of 2017; 100 percent by the end of 2020.
The funding will “dramatically alter the broadband landscape in Ohio and throughout the country,” said Lindsay Shanahan, executive director of Connect Ohio, a nonprofit that promotes broadband access in the state.
“This phase of the Connect America Fund is about deploying broadband to locations that do not have it, not the removal of legacy infrastructure (such as existing landline phone service) or a possible transition to Internet protocol-based networks,” she said.
“Recipients of this funding are required to build out broadband and voice networks that meet various criteria beyond the obligation to upgrade or build networks capable of broadband,” Shanahan said.
The biggest amount of funding is going to CenturyLink, which will take $505.7 million annually to expand and support broadband for more than 2.3 million of its rural customers across the United States. In Ohio, CenturyLink will take $16 million annually.

Of course, this program is tied to the "Obama phones" so many rural folks bitched endlessly about around 4 years ago.  The origins of the Universal Service Fund were tied to the effort to extend phone service to high cost, hard-to-serve rural areas:

The Communications Act of 1934 includes in its preamble a reference to universal service. It calls for “rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges” to “all the people of the United States.” Communications Act of 1934 - Title I, Sec. 1 [47 U.S.C. 151] The Communications Act of 1934 first established the concept of making affordable basic telephone service available to everyone everywhere within a nation, state, or other governmental jurisdiction.
The code was amended by the Telecommunications Act in 1996 to include, “without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex…” To comply, AT&T began increasing the price of long distance service to pay for universal service. The act also established the FCC to oversee all non-governmental broadcasting, interstate communications, as well as international communication which originate or terminate in the United States.
Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Universal Service Fund (USF) operated as a mechanism by which interstate long distance carriers were assessed to subsidize telephone service to low-income households and high-cost areas in order to ensure that all the people in the United States have access to rapid, efficient, nationwide communications service with sufficient facilities at realistic charges....The Universal Service Fund was first codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934. The act addresses new challenges and opportunities of the digital information age, with the goal of promoting an economic environment conducive for the growth of new information technology. It also further developed the meaning and implementation of universal service. The act calls for the creation of a joint federal-state board to make recommendations to the FCC on defining federal universal services and set time tables. The act also set out immediate priorities of universal service. These include quality and reasonably priced services, access to advanced telecommunication services, access for rural, low-income and high-cost regions, equitable and nondiscriminatory service, specific and predictable price structure, access of advanced telecommunication services for schools and health care and libraries (Sec. 254(b)(1)-(7)). The act provided ability in the constantly changing telecommunication environment to periodically revisit and adjust universal service, while setting core principles (Sec. 254(c)). The 1996 act also “mandated the creation of the universal service fund (USF) into which all telecommunications providers are required to contribute a percentage of their interstate and international end-user telecommunications revenues”.
The major goals of Universal Service as mandated by the 1996 Act are as follows:

• Promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable and affordable rates for all consumers
• Increase nationwide access to advanced telecommunications services
• Advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas, at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas
• Increase access to telecommunications and advanced services in schools, libraries and rural health care facilities
• Provide equitable and non-discriminatory contributions from all providers of telecommunications services to the fund supporting universal service programs

But don't let that history get in the way of a narrative that government programs only benefit minorities with dark skin. Republican politicians have been getting elected in rural areas for more than a generation convincing the social minority residents there, beneficiaries of government programs all, that it's the poor blacks in the inner city who are being handed their hard-earned tax money, and that those politicians are going to change that by cutting taxes and slashing government programs.  It just isn't true, but it plays well to a built-in bias among residents in rural areas.  Fox News coverage of "Obama phones," without any background into how the underlying program benefits rural areas feeds that bias and inflames it more.  I just like to poke holes in that bubble of bullshit and swamp gas. 

Libertarian Paradise

Katrina.

A More Perfect Union

Traffic Stop

Ignorant Bigots: Not Just a Southern Thing

The Dayton Daily News shows up at the local country music festival to interview local folks who were flying the Confederate battle flag. Ignorance ensues: 

Matt Hill proudly flew a Confederate battle flag below the American flag and a POW-MIA flag at his campsite at the Country Concert in Ft. Loramie on Thursday. For Hill and countless of others, the flap over the rebel flag being removed Friday from South Carolina’s capitol grounds is “ridiculous.”
“The first one stands for our country. There’s nothing more important than that flag right there. That goes on top,” Hill, 39, a white man from Leo, Ind. said as he pointed at the American flag. “The POW (flag) is for every man and woman that serves this country. We’ll never forget them and what they’ve done for this country. And that Confederate flag goes right along with that POW flag. That flag is (as much) a part of this country as is the Statue of Liberty. It was part of the South and the Civil War.”
Even as the same symbol was removed from outside the state capitol building in South Carolina following an extraordinary debate over the pain its mere presence causes, fans at the Country Concert — held in Ohio, a state that wasn’t part of the Confederacy — seems almost removed from that changing current. The flag is disappearing even in places where it traditionally flies, such as NASCAR races, but throughout the crowd in this days-long tribute to country music, people displayed the flag proudly and defiantly, sending a clear message that the debate that began in South Carolina is far from over.
Tim Bown, 58, of Hamilton is in favor of flying the Confederate flag, and he said officials in South Carolina should not have caved to the “1 percent, the people who whine all the time.”
“Whoever’s whining the most gets the most attention,” said Brown, who was not at the Country Concert. “That’s the problem, you’ve got a small group that’s complaining all the time. You get tired of it.”... 
“We definitely do not think that it should be banned, that’s for sure, for anybody,” said Michaela Goettemoeller, 18, of Minster. She and her group of friends who displayed both American and Confederate flags at their campsite.
“It’s not really a racist thing, like, I saw on Facebook that there was a black guy pulled over on the side of the road and nobody else would help him and the people with the Confederate flag helped him out,” Goettemoeller said. “So, it’s not about racism. It’s about heritage.
“Growing up in a small town, everybody I grew up around had the Confederate flag, so, I just took it as my own.”

 Nathan Homan of Maria Stein said displaying the Confederate flag was about acknowledging his southern pride. Homan and a group of friends were attending the 35th Annual Country Concert in Ft. Loramie. LISA POWELL / STAFF

I assume Mr. Homan is referring to southern Mercer County pride, because I would wager he has no connections south of the Mason-Dixon line.  But, somewhat in his defense, southern Mercer County, along with Fort Loramie and the rest of the German-settled area there has some pretty ugly racial history of its own:

Although he competed stride for stride with other members of the Virginia aristocracy by amassing over 8,000 acres of land and 400 slaves, John Randolph had doubts about the morality of the use of slaves all of his life.

He was one of the first plantation owners to recognize the benefits of educating his slaves and treating them as humanely as possible. Randolph personally taught many of them to read and write. He also organized them into groups and gave each separate tracts of land for which they were to be responsible - an unusual approach in those days.

Economic expediency compelled him to accept slavery as a fact of life while he lived, although he continually spoke against its evils. John Randolph never married. He battled the effects of tuberculosis all his life, and the use of opium as a pain killer resulted in his addiction to the substance. At the time of his death in 1833, three wills were found, and each granted freedom to all 400 of his slaves. His opium addiction, along with his contrarian views on issues, including slavery, caused many to question his sanity. The ownership of slaves meant economic power, and Randolph's next of kin immediately filed a will contest action, alleging he was incompetent.

Thirteen years of legal battles followed. However, it was ultimately determined that Randolph's will of 1821 was valid. In that document, his intent was made clear: "I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom, heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one." John Randolph had gone to some lengths to see that his plan would be carried out. He set aside $30,000 for the purchase of land in Ohio and supplies for their journey to freedom. He secured the promise of an old friend and judge, William Leigh, to settle the newly freed slaves in Ohio.

Although it was perhaps unknown to Randolph and Judge Leigh, Ohio in the 1840's was anything but a hospitable place for people of color. Just a year after Ohio had become a state in 1803, the General Assembly passed a law entitled "An Act To Regulate Black and Mulatto Persons."

The law decreed that "No Negro or Mulatto should be allowed to settle in the state unless he could furnish a certificate from some court...of his actual freedom...The Blacks already living in the state must register before the following June with the county clerk..." No black person could register without paying a registration fee of twelve and a half cents. Whites were forbidden to employ a Negro unless he had a certificate of freedom.

The newly freed Randolph slaves, now numbering 383, left Virginia on June 10, 1846 - thirteen years after being given their freedom. They ranged in age from an infant less than one year old to Granny Hannah, who had passed the century mark.

With them they carried a certificate of the Clerk of Court of Charlotte County, Virginia, which listed the first names and a description of all the freed slaves. The document confirmed that Shadrach, (No. 514), born in 1796, was among those freed. He was destined to become an interesting part of Sidney history. Also listed was Carter (No. 421). He would take the last name of Lee after arriving in Shelby County, and his descendants would include Sidney's first black mayor.

This was no ordinary group of southern blacks. Randolph had to seen to it they were educated. Typical was Clem Clay, who would become an engineer after settling in Ohio. Most had developed trade skills. Some had horses, but the majority walked the 500 miles to what they were sure would be the Promised Land.

Judge Leigh had carefully made his plans. According to research later compiled by Rossville, Ohio historian Helen Gilmore and late local author Leonard Hill, Leigh purchased about 3,200 acres of fertile Mercer County ground for in excess of $6,000. It is probable that Judge Leigh had heard of Carthagena, a Mercer County colony of free Blacks established by Augustus Wattles, a white Quaker, in the 1830's. Leigh purchased some land near Carthagena, and much land in the vicinity of Celina.

After making it to Cincinnati, the adventurers worked their way up the Miami Erie Canal toward Mercer County. They never made it. Waiting at the dock in New Bremen were armed white settlers. Author Trudy Krisher recounted the scene in an article in a recent edition of Ohio magazine. The bewildered Negroes listened as three resolutions read out loud, one of which stated: "Resolved, That we will not live among Negroes; as we have settled here first, we have fully determined that we will resist the settlement of blacks and mulattos in this county to the full extent of our means, the bayonet not excepted."  In later years, when the dispossessed land owners inquired about their land, they were told it had been flooded and was useless. (In fact, according to Helen Gilmore, there is some evidence that water was released from Grand Lake St. Marys to temporarily cover some of the land.)

An editorial on the Cincinnati Gazette on July 2, 1846, commenting on the Randolph Slaves, summed up the feelings of many in Ohio at that time: "And now the poor creatures are among us! Why should this be? The people of Virginia...hear the call of death...the first step is to free the slaves, that they may lull the unquiet knawings of conscience- next to send them to Ohio so that they may be free. What right have they to be pouring in upon us their helpless, new made free?"

The boats continued south on the canal to Piqua. In testimony given in a subsequent trial involving their land, Clem Clay recalled that they all left Piqua soon after to "come to a place called Sidney." The former slaves were first taken to a place in Shelby County Clay referred to as 'Carey's Plantation'. (The authors believe this is the present day Fort Loramie.)

The July 14, 1893, edition of the Sidney Journal later carried an account of the reception they encountered. "In July of 1846 quite a commotion was caused in the village by the arrival of a boat carrying as passengers...about 100 Randolph slaves, just set free. The boat passed up to the vicinity of Berlin (Now known as Fort Loramie), but were not allowed to land. A mob received them with sticks and stones....It was the exclamation of one of the old Negroes that he guessed his 'Master (referring to Randolph) was his best friend, after all."

Clay and the others went next to Sidney. A mob began to gather here as well, but appeals were made to their charity. Joseph Cummins, Guy Kelsey and others in Sidney convened a meeting at a local hotel to debate what to do. It was decided to allow a number of the Negroes to stay in Sidney. Clay recalled: "Well, a good class of white people took some on the farm, and some around to the dwelling houses...some settled around through Sidney...and the rest came to
Piqua."

It was therefore here that these proud men and women first experienced the meaning of freedom and acceptance. The rest of the close-knit band boarded the canal boats for other areas, including Piqua, Troy, and Xenia. Others, including Carter Lee, eventually settled in New Bern, a canal town in Washington Township. Some went to Rumley, a settlement of Blacks in Van Buren Township dating from 1830....

What of the Promised Land in Mercer County that had been purchased for Buddie Shang and the others? Helen Gilmore found in her research that Joseph Plunkett of Mercer County was appointed by Judge Leigh to look after his charges when he returned to Virginia. It was a tragic mistake.

Beginning on December 16, 1846, Plunkett began to sell the 3,000 plus acres of prime land to area land owners. In a series of transactions over six years, he sold all the land for the total sum of $7,738. Evidence uncovered later showed that Plunkett had forged Judge Leigh's signature on the deeds. Plunkett also rented out some of the former slaves for work to local farmers. None of the money from the land or labor ever went to any of the former Randolph slaves.

Commencing in 1900, the remnants of the original band of intrepid Randolph survivors, (referring to themselves as the 'Originals" along with their offspring, known as the 'Buckeyes', assembled for reunions every few years. The Democrat reported in July of 1902 that the old slaves gathered, "...and the tales they told of their peculiar master were highly interesting."

In the reunions from 1900 to 1906, Manson Brown of Sidney was elected an officer of the Randolph Slaves Association. Brown's relatives still reside in the area. As a result of discussions at these meetings, many members decided to file suit in order to recover the money rightfully due them from the sale of their Mercer County lands. Attorneys Beam and Henderson of Indianapolis pursued the case for over ten years, through the Ohio Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court. At each level, the judgment of the Mercer County Common Pleas Court was affirmed: the plaintiffs had waited too long to sue, and the statute of limitations of 21 years had run out.

So, does flying the Confederate flag signify support for racism, secession of slave-holding states from the United States in order to maintain the institution of slavery, opposition to civil rights, disenfranchisement, white supremacy and hundreds of years of violence and repression of blacks recorded in U.S. history?  Not according to Ms. Goettemoeller (video below).  For her, it is all about "heritage."  In many ways, she is wrong, because the flag represents all of the things mentioned above. In some ways, though, she is right, but it definitely isn't a heritage to be proud of.

Nuclear Activity

Radical Cartography, via Ritholtz:

USA! USA! USA! Iran, how dare you think of joining all these other countries we've done nothing to when they got nukes (Israel, looking at you).

Immigration in Maps

Vox features immigration in one of their "X# of maps that explain [subject]" posts.  One of the maps was this cool one:

and there was this cool gif (click to enlarge):

Finally, there was this historical note:

The bottom line: before 1965, Germany sent more immigrants to America than anyone else; after 1965, Mexico did.
Here's why: from World War I to 1965, the immigration system was designed, essentially, to keep the United States white. Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg has called it "unbelievable in its clarity of racism." Each country was given a certain quota of immigrants who were allowed to come to the United States each year, based on who'd been in the country in 1890.
Combined with existing laws that prevented any Asian Americans from coming into the country, the laws of the 1920s basically froze the demographics of the immigrant population in place until 1965.

American history.  So classy.

The Extreme Effectiveness of ISIS Terrorist Tactics

I've heard a lot of people in the last few days say that we need to double down on killing those fuckers from ISIS because they behead people and set some dude on fire.  Yes, both of those things are horrible, but doesn't Saudi Arabia behead people they find guilty of crimes?  And what the fuck were those dirty fucking hippies doing protesting against Dow back in the 1960s?  Wasn't it for manufacturing the napalm that was dropped over rural villages and set innocent civilians on fire?  Does anybody remember seeing this picture?

And it seems like I recently saw a post about the photo from the first Gulf war that no U.S. newspaper would publish. It showed one of thousands of Iraqi army victims of a U.S. fuel-air bomb attack:

This is a description of that scene:

The retreating Iraqi soldiers had been trapped. They were frozen in a traffic jam, blocked off by the Americans, by Mutla Ridge, by a minefield. Some fled on foot; the rest were strafed by American planes that swooped overhead, passing again and again to destroy all the vehicles. Milk vans, fire trucks, limousines, and one bulldozer appeared in the wreckage alongside armored cars and trucks, and T-55 and T-72 tanks. Most vehicles held fully loaded, but rusting, Kalashnikov variants. According to descriptions from reporters like The New York Times’ R.W. Apple and the Observer’s Colin Smith, amid the plastic mines, grenades, ammunition, and gas masks, a quadruple-barreled anti-aircraft gun stood crewless and still pointing skyward. Personal items, like a photograph of a child’s birthday party and broken crayons, littered the ground beside weapons and body parts. The body count never seems to have been determined, although the BBC puts it in the “thousands.....”
“There were 1,400 [Iraqi soldiers] in that convoy, and every picture transmitted until that one came, two days after the event, was of debris, bits of equipment,” Tony McGrath, the Observer’s pictures editor, was quoted as saying in the same article. “No human involvement in it at all; it could have been a scrapyard. That was some dreadful censorship.”

Here is a description of how those bombs work:

A Human Rights Watch report of 1 February 2000 quotes a study made by the US Defense Intelligence Agency:

The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.... If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.

According to a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency study, "the effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness." Another Defense Intelligence Agency document speculates that because the "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue…it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."

And then we have to remember firebombing Dresden and Tokyo, and both times that an atomic or nuclear weapon were ever used in war.  The horrific scenes in which ISIS beheads or immolates prisoners involves two or three bad guys killing one or two good guys.  How does that compare to a few good guys immolating thousands of bad guys?  What about three or four good guys torturing a bad guy to death?  I guess I have a hard time telling the good guys from the bad guys without any reference to skin color, religion or the efficiency of the attack.  Please don't tell me that we need to continue spending gargantuan amounts of money and wasting lives trying to "rid the world of evil."  If we do that, we will probably be killed along with those fuckers from ISIS.  God have mercy on us all.

Not Fit for Service

It's amazing what you find when you do a little regulating.  Too bad it took a disaster to get somebody to do it.

30 Years After Bhopal

The Atlantic features a photo series reminding us of the largest industrial disaster ever:

Thirty years ago, on the night of December 2, 1984, an accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released at least 30 tons of a highly toxic gas called methyl isocyanate, as well as a number of other poisonous gases. The pesticide plant was surrounded by shanty towns, leading to more than 600,000 people being exposed to the deadly gas cloud that night. The gases stayed low to the ground, causing victims throats and eyes to burn, inducing nausea, and many deaths. Estimates of the death toll vary from as few as 3,800 to as many as 16,000, but government figures now refer to an estimate of 15,000 killed over the years. Toxic material remains, and 30 years later, many of those who were exposed to the gas have given birth to physically and mentally disabled children. For decades, survivors have been fighting to have the site cleaned up, but they say the efforts were slowed when Michigan-based Dow Chemical took over Union Carbide in 2001. Human rights groups say that thousands of tons of hazardous waste remain buried underground, and the government has conceded the area is contaminated. There has, however, been no long-term epidemiological research which conclusively proves that birth defects are directly related to the drinking of the contaminated water.

 A worker cleans dust as he displays a panel of photographs of some of the thousands of people who died in the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster at the forensic department of Gandhi Medical college in Bhopal on June 8, 2010. (AP Photo/Prakash Hatvalne) #

To me, the pictures of the children born with birth defects are the most troubling, and that applies even if the birth defects can't be tied to the disaster.