Seeing as we've been featuring 1914:
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Thursday, May 16, 2024
The 2024 Legislative Sessions of other states.
Utah's house has passed a bill to ban public transgender bathrooms.
January 25, 2024
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Ohio
Ohio's legislature over road a veto and banned gender mutilation of minors and restricted those who have undergone gender mutilation from participating in athletic teams of the opposite gender.
January 31, 2024
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New York expanded the definition of rape, which apparently was narrowly defined by the previous law. The new law states:
Section 1. Sections 130.40, 130.45 and 130.50 of the penal law are
REPEALED.
§ 2. Subdivisions 1 and 2 of section 130.00 of the penal law, subdivision 2 as amended by chapter 264 of the laws of 2003, are amended read as follows:
1. "[Sexual intercourse] VAGINAL SEXUAL CONTACT" [has its ordinary meaning and occurs upon any penetration, however slight] MEANS CONDUCT BETWEEN PERSONS CONSISTING OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE PENIS AND THE VAGINA OR VULVA.
2. (a) "Oral sexual [conduct] CONTACT" means conduct between persons consisting of contact between the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the anus, or the mouth and the vulva or vagina.
(b) "Anal sexual [conduct] CONTACT" means conduct between persons consisting of contact between the penis and anus.
§ 3. Section 130.25 of the penal law, as amended by chapter 1 of the laws of 2000, is amended to read as follows:
§ 130.25 Rape in the third degree.
A person is guilty of rape in the third degree when:
1. He or she engages in [sexual intercourse] VAGINAL SEXUAL CONTACT with another person who is incapable of consent by reason of some factor other than being less than seventeen years old;
March 5, 2024
March 6, 2024
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have made it a crime for noncitizens to enter the state through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry
New Hampshire
The state has banned men mutilated to appear as women from appearing in women's sports.
Arizona
Arizona had declared Pluto as the official state planet.
March 31, 2024.
Oregon
Oregon recriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs after botching a decriminalization effort.
April 2, 2024.
Colorado
A bill in Colorado that aims to protect the data found in a person's brainwaves was signed into law.
Colorado's Democratic House passed a bill that bans a wide variety of "assault" firearms.
Inaccurately reported on as banning semi-automatic firearms, which it does not, it does take on a lot of popular longarms with military type features.
It's doubtful that it will pass Colorado's Senate, and if it does, it's likely unconstitutional.
April 18, 2024.
Montana
Two genitals mutilated men have filed suit in Montana over a new Montana law that keeps them from having their actual gender changed on government issued identification.
April 19, 2024.
Arizona
Arizona has repealed an 1864 territorial law that banned most abortions. Press reporting on this has been unclear, so it's not clear if it repealed and replaced the statute or what, but a review of the text of the very short law shows it simply repealed the law. Some digging shows a a 2002 statute banning abortion after 15 weeks will become the law.
Florida
Florida has banned artificial meat.
May 3, 2024
Florida
Gov. DeSantis signed into law a bill that de-emphasizes climate considerations in Florida's energy considerations.
May 17, 2024
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
You can have anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.
There ain't no such thing as free lunch.
El Paso Herald-Post, 1938.
There really isn't.
For some reason, the concept of "free" lunches and "free" breakfasts has bothered me for decades. I don't know why, really, but it always has.1 Generally, it's because I'm well aware that "free", in this context, means the financial cost is passed on to somebody else, and nine times out of ten in my experiences the bearer of the cost does so involuntarily.
I don't believe the common unthinking populist phrase that "taxation is theft", but in this case, the free meal is really darned close to it. I've railed here in the past against "free and reduced costs" meals at the local schools, as they aren't free or reduced costs, it's just that property owners pay for negligent parents failing to provide for their kids.
Yes, that's harsh, and that's not what brings me back to this topic, but it's the truth. I'm not opposed to helping the needy, but here nine times out of ten (that phrase again) some tragic "heroic" single mother is packing Young Waif to school hungry because Dudley Dowrong departed the scene after donating his genetic contribution, and now the people who are responsible are picking up the tab. That's okay on a limited basis, but as soon as those whose occupation is Buying Cotton pick up on it, they become to regard it as a right, and soon in fact it becomes one.2 3
Which, again, isn't what brought me back here.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant.
Just like the meanderings in Guthrie's classic, what I’m here to write about isn't school breakfasts, but office lunch's.
For a reason that I'll omit, I suddenly find myself in the role which made an old Denver lawyer friend of mine supremely crabby when he had it assigned to him, and now I see why. I'm management.
In the new assignment, which snuck up on me, I was instructed I needed to cut expenses that weren't mandated or necessary. And what I found, of course, is that mandated and necessary are in the eyes of the recipient. Put another way, one parent's free and reduced lunch is another's absolute Constitutionally enshrined right.
The expense I rapidly cut was sending our runner to buy groceries for the break room.
Oh, I know what you are thinking, coffee, tea, and the like.4 5
No, I mean real groceries. Soup, relish, hot peppers and hot sauce.
In the over three decades of my current employment and having worked with lots of professionals, I've noted that there's only been a small handful that actually ever ate their lunch at work. There are a few, but it isn't many. Staff people who do, and there are a small handful that have, always packed their lunches, or went to one of the downtown shops to buy lunch and brought it back. Professionals, I'd note, mostly left the office for lunch. Some went home to eat there, often to take care of chores while they were doing it, and some ate downtown. A few, however, ate in the breakroom every day.
I've never done that. When I was younger, I actually walked home to where I then lived, ate a quick light lunch, and returned to work. It helped keep me 30 lbs lighter than I now am. Most of the time now I just don't eat lunch, so if I'm in the office, I'm working. This is against the wise council of my father, who felt that leaving the place of work every day at noon gave you a necessary break. He ate downtown every day with a small group of his friends.
I admire that.
Anyhow, of the professionals that have eaten lunch in the office over the past three plus decades, there are only two that have acclimated to the company buying them lunch or elements of their lunch.
I don't know how this happened.
Long suffering spouse suggest that it was probably started so that there was food for people in an emergency, and I can see that. You're trying a case, and it ran long in the morning as Dudley Dowrong was on the stand for a long time, trying to remember if he has six kids by eight women, or eight kids by six women. So you run back to the office, and you forgot lunch, and don't have time to go buy it. Have some soup, from the company stores.
Well, I wouldn't. I hate soup, for which there's no excuse.
My guess is that is how it started, but it expanded somehow. So for a long time I'll see somebody who hasn't tried a case for eons ordering soup to be picked up by the runner. And in another, a person who brings a gigantic lunch from home everyday spices it up with relish and condiments he had us pick up, that only he uses.6
Quite frankly, this has always pissed me off.
Basically, at that point, you are making every single person who works with and for you buy you lunch. Yes, it's not a major cost, but over the years that means you've taken hundreds or thousands of dollars in food from your coworkers by fiat.
So, with my new found authority and mandate, I ordered it stopped.
...came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts.
Rudyard Kiping.7
It went badly.
Interestingly, the person I thought might complain did not. The whining from another person was incessant, however.
I'll be frank that I really don't like the passive-aggressive snide type of hostility that some people will exhibit. I prefer that people know that I'm mad when I'm mad, and they almost certainly do. In this instance, after days of it, I blew up in front of the front office starting off with "you're pissing me off".
I yielded, however. People who feel they have the right to impose their lunch menu items back on everyone else now can.
If they dare.
Footnotes:
1. Without knowing for sure, I wonder if its because people who grew up when I did always had it impressed upon them as children that providing a meal for somebody was a big deal. If we received lunch at a friend's home, we were always asked if we had thanked the host for doing so. We were implicitly made to understand that food costs money.
Moreover, snacking just didn't exist where I lived as a kid. People didn't have snacks out, ever. One boyhood friend of mine who is still a close friend had a family that bought 16 oz glass bottles of Pepsi, and the lack of snacks situation was so strong that it always felt like a huge treat to have a bottle of Pepsi there when I was a kid.
2. I'm not one of those who currently feel that everything is wrong with public education, and indeed public education here is good. But this is one cultural difference that may in fact make a difference.
At least with Catholic schools here, there are those who attend who because parishioners have donated the tuition to make it possible. I don't know the lunch situation, but I'd wager this is also the case for some food served there. That's charity, but it's voluntary. Providing free or reduced cost food in public schools is legally enforced involuntary charity, which the recipients of, at least by way of observation, sometimes come to feel is a right.
3. "Buying cotton" is Southern slang for doing nothing.
4. I almost never drink coffee at the office, and never tea, but these are office staples. Likewise, a water cooler in a century plus old building makes sense. And some food, like soda crackers, or something does as well. But food that's used by one person. . .
5. Oddly, soda isn't viewed this way.
Years ago, we had a Pepsi supplied pop machine and, in going through a similar episode, the then managers determined to send it packing. Restocking it with soda was costing a fortune.
That move was detested by the staff, but not by the professionals. Why? Probably because the staff drank the soda and the professionals simply didn't.
6. If you drown your leftovers every noon with buckets of hot sauce and jalapeƱos, there's something wrong with them in the first place.
7. What Kipling failed to mention here is that the "free lunch" was packed was salty fare. Heavily salted ham, etc., was set out for the taking, but the one beer lunch accordingly became two or three.
As an aside, a depiction of this is given in Joe Kidd, in which the title character walks into a bar early in the movie and picks up ham, bread and cheese off an open plate.
Related threads:
Do these people actually have a clue how debt works?
There is such a thing as a free lunch. Was, Lex Anteinternet: Quiet Quitting? Is it real, and if so, why?
1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Food, Great Depression, Poster Saturday, Posters, The Depression of 1920-1922, The roles of men and women, trends, Women, Work, World War One, World War Two
Agrarianism, Commentary, Distributism, Economics, Government, Localism, Subsidiarity, Taxes, The Law of Unintended Consequences
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Blog Mirror: The Wurst Article
An item by a German expatriate living in the UK on what Germans call what most Americans call "hot dogs"
The Wurst Article
Note the presentation.
I'm surprised that in Frankfurt, Wieners are regarded as a delicacy. When I was a kid, we had them all the time, and I liked them. I particularly liked "hot lunches" at school, which we rarely got, when we were served steamed hot dogs.
I still like the recollection of how those tasted.
Now days, I only eat hot dogs if I'm at a baseball game. That's about it. Otherwise, I never do. I probably had too many fried hot dogs as a kid.
Yes, my mother fried them. But she was an awful cook.
Anyhow, my grandfather was a meat packer and this article caused me to think of what we called these sausages. We called them "hot dogs" the American standard word, but my father would call them Wieners. His father was of 100% Westphalian extraction and had grown up speaking German. My father could speak it too, but sort of kept that to himself, like many other things in his very quiet personality. Anyhow, maybe that's why my father used that term for the little mild sausages.
The packing house did make them. Apparently they made a lot of them during World War Two, as the Army ordered them. When the war ended the contract for them was suddenly canceled and it turned out to be a big problem for the packing house, as the Army wouldn't order them with the added red dye that is what actually causes them to be that color. That was an unnecessary added expense, in the Army's view.
But not for civilians. The hot dogs turned out to be hard to sell to grocery stores as they weren't the expected pink. Without it, they're white.
I love sausages, FWIW. It's probably one of the things that will get me in the end, but then I don't have the American expectation of living perfectly fit until I'm 120 years old. But I'm not keen on Wieners. Brots, yes, other sausages, you bet. But these aren't my favorite.
Maybe they would be in Frankfurt.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, Inconveniently Moving Easter for Convenience, and Oliver Cromwell, fun sucker.
I started this post right at the start of Lent, didn't finish it, and was going to trash it, but due to a late Lent event, I'm picking it back up.
The United States and Canada are Protestant nations. They don't really notice it as a rule, and quite a few cultural Protestants like to deny it, but if you are an adherent member of an Apostolic Christian religion, or for that matter probably if you are Jewish or Muslim, you'll definitely notice it.
One of the ways that it oddly comes up is the annual "it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you can't eat meat on Fridays" discussion that Protestants in particular, and some very weakly evangelized lapsed Catholics, like to have. It's ironic as some of the same people will insist that grape juice was served at The Last Supper (nope, definitely wine) or that the Bible says once you accept Jesus into your heart you can go back to sinning (nope, St. Paul in particular warns you can do that and still go to Hell).
Of course, it doesn't say that you must abstain from meat on Fridays. It's a law of the Church, not biblically imposed. The Bible discusses fasting and gives lots of examples, and it left the office of Bishops to bind and loose. This is a rule of the Church, which has been bound.
It only applies to members of individual Churches. I.e, Catholics are bound, not Lutherans, or members of make it up as you go Christian churches. Moral laws bind everyone. Church laws bind the members of the church.
Also, FWIW, fasting and abstention from meat go way back in Church history and used to be much stricter as a practice than it is now. It's still much stricter in the Eastern churches. In the East, fasting involves abstention from alcohol, eggs, dairy, fish, meat, and olive oil for the 40 days of Great Lent and Holy Week. So the Orthodox, for example, are really down to a very bland menu at this point.
That group of people who like to claim that the Latin Rite practice was made up to support the fishing industry are really out to lunch on this one, particularly as the claim is based on a grossly misconstrued concept of what the food economy was like in the ancient world. If you lived, for example, in a Sardinian fishing town in the Middle Ages, fish is what was for dinner every night. The fishing industry didn't really need anyone's help to be economically viable. And at one time the Latin Rite fast more closely resembled the Eastern one. Claims like that are generally myths of the Reformation, created in jolly old England to justify carrying on with the Reformation when they couldn't come up with any actual good reasons to do so.
For most non-Catholics and non-Orthodox, however, this isn't in the forefront of people's minds. Restaurants get it, as there are a lot of us, which is why fish based fare shows up this time of year darned near everywhere. But rank and file Protestants, particularly of the Christmas/Easter variety, really don't ponder this much. If you live in a state like Wyoming, that's really obvious, as we have very low religious observation here anyhow. There are a lot of Catholics, but we're a minority. Protestants who don't go to church often are no doubt the majority, followed by Protestants who go to the new "non-denominational" churches, which is to say the quasi Baptist, churches (there are no "non-denominational" churches). They can't be expected to know Canon Law.
When you go to a function of any kind during Lent, this becomes pretty obvious. "Here's your entrƩe". . will say the server, serving the beef sandwich between two slabs of beef served with beef fries. "Would you like gravy with that?"
Oh, well.
That you can't suspend this and just go to meatless on Saturday is something people don't grasp. "You can skip it this time". No, you can't. Violation of the rule is a mortal sin. That seems extreme to non-Catholics, and probably has for a long time, but by the same token we live in an era when a host of other mortal sins, the sexual and marital ones in particular, are ignored by even devout church going Protestants. If you can convince yourself, getting married for the third or fourth time doesn't mean that you are an adulterer, you can pretty easily convince yourself that eating a hamburger on Fridays in Lent is okay this one time. Indeed, in some odd ways, the logic isn't that much different. They both involve appetites and excuses.
This does make Catholics stick out, and the Orthodox even more, maybe. In some ways, as the Catholic Church has suspended so many of these rules, the fact that there are some remaining makes Catholics stick out all the more and, in turn, the few remaining rules offend people all the more. And that is in a way part of the point in the modern world. It sets us apart, and it should. Like those who appear with ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday, it's going to mark you.
This came to mind as when I got home last night, Long Suffering Spouse announced, "my mother proposed to have Easter Dinner this Friday. . ."
Eh?
Now, by way of an obvious point, we're clearly a "mixed" family. My side of the family is all Catholic. LSS's is all non-Catholic.
I don't know where the dinner suggestion stands right now, as LSS isn't saying, which means it must be in the air. She protested this as we have "town jobs" which means that a Friday gathering really isn't a viable option anyhow. And one of the things about being married to a Catholic means is that the Catholicism will start to be picked up by the non-Catholic party, no matter what.
Beyond that, however, under the current rules for Latin Rite Catholics, (and I'm sure for Eastern Rite Christians as well) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the fasting rules allow Catholics to eat only one full meal and two smaller meals which, combined, would not equal a single normal meal. We've already seen that the Eastern Rite is fasting by this point every day. Catholics may not eat meat on these two days, or on any Friday during Lent.
Now, I'm over 60 years old, which means the fasting rules no longer apply to me. As it is, however, that's my normal daily routine anyhow. I never eat big breakfasts or lunch. I used to often skip both, but thanks to my thyroid medication, I'm hungrier than I used to be. Be that as it may, I'm not comfortable with a feast on Good Friday. That's weird, from an Apostolic Christian prospective. "This is the day our savior was murdered. . . let's just skip ahead to the day he was raised".
You can't really do that.
Of course, in Cromwellian influenced Protestant America, you probably can. He wouldn't, as he didn't approve of observing things anyhow, but he so messed stuff up it's never recovered in the English speaking, non-Catholic, world. Another reason that they've had to hide his head.
Anyhow, I love my in-laws, who are great, but this is pretty much something I'm not going to be able to do. I can't go to a big Easter dinner on Good Friday and do something like, "wow, that ham looks great. . . I'll just have the mashed potatoes. . . thanks". The meatless rule still applies to me, and there's probably not going to be a giant cod for an "early" Easter dinner.
That would be weird.
Also weird is that on Good Friday, I have people trying to make appointments. Most law offices are closed on Good Friday. I guess there were enough old Irish and German Catholic lawyers, even here, to make that impact. But most Americans work as Oliver Cromwell was a theologically deficient fun sucker and our Puritan heritage is ruining everything. Working to the grave is one thing that our Protestant founders in this country really gave to us, and it's one of the things that's really wrong with the culture. Now, I usually do work, but I've long looked forward to most of the office being out, and only working a partial day. And it gives me a chance to take Holy Saturday off.
I'm going to have to handle this today. In prior years I think I would have just said yes, to somebody wanting in, or "the office is closed". But instead I'm going to just say, the "office is closed for Good Friday".
I'll let the Puritans ponder it.
Friday, March 8, 2024
Sunday, March 3, 2024
Monday, March 3, 1924. End of the Caliphate.
The Turkish National Assembly ended the Ottoman Caliphate. It had been in existence for 407 years and claimed religious sovereignty over Islam. The Assembly also ordered that Abdulmejid II and his harem were to be deported by March 15. The official deposing of Abdulmejid would come at 2:00 a.m. on March 4.
He did not welcome the news and warned that the ending of the caliphate would cause the rise of extremism in Islam, which his role as the religion's leader of Muslims tempered. He proved to be correct. He lived the rest of his life in Europe, at first in Switzerland, and then in Paris, where he died in 1944. His exile was not an easy one at first, and he was disappointed that Muslims did not demand the restoration of his office.
The Teapot Dome investigation continued.
And the local Piggly Wiggly was robbed. That location is now a tattoo parlor.
Last prior:
Saturday, March 1, 1924. The Nixon Nitration Works Disaster.
Friday, February 9, 2024
The worst immigration argument
Victory Farm Volunteers registering in Lane County. Oregon. Lovina Wilson, farm labor assistant, routes the first three children, and that is what they are, to register during the Mobilization Day program at the Frances Willard School in Eugene. The enrollees in the photo are, left to right, facing table front row: Glenn Cash,13; Howard Cash, 11; and Don Mickelwait, 13. This photo was taken in 1946, right after World War Two, demonstrating that wartime manpower shortages were ongoing. This would be, quite frankly, more than a bit much today, as these individuals are way to young to seriously work on a farm, unless they are working on their family farm, and they were frankly way too young then. Note the boys are wearing white t-shirts, with nothing emblazoned on them, and that girls are in the crowd as well.
There are a lot of varieties of this argument I keep seeing:
If you’re out here talking sht about immigrants but still going to the grocery store to feed yourself, that’s clown sht of the highest order.
Stop being lazy & get your hands in the dirt or shut the fck up.
From, of course, Twitter.
This is baloney.
To distill the argument, it is that the US must dare not get control of its border with Mexico, or at least not a fair degree of control, as the US is dependent upon those illegally crossiong for food production.
That argument is first and foremost baloney, as it somehow makes the assumption that the huge number of immigrants arriving from Central and South America are in fact arriving in order to work on farms. That isn't happening. They want to work, no doubt, but the migrant farm system is well established, and they aren't seeking to get jobs in cabbage fields this summer and then go back home.
In reality, most are economic migrants or migrants from Central and South American failed states. The US is racing towards becoming a failed state itself right now. Our government isn't working, and we're about to elect an imagined Caudillo who will have to turn on migrants like a health inspector turns on expired milk.
But economically, the farm sector isn't employing them.
Lots of other things are, such as the construction industry, local small businesses, and back door employment, which explains who we got in this mess. Democrats imagined, wrongly, that all future migrants are Democratic voters.* Republicans imagined them all as somebody who was going to mow their lawn for cheap. Turns out that they are none of those things.**
In reality, they take entry level manual labor jobs which, frankly, would go to Americans who need them, but for the price depression impact this has.
Which gets to the next thing.
The "agriculture depends on migrants" argument is, really, that American agriculture is habituated to cheap farm labor because the Federal Government, with apocalyptic visions of the future after World War Two, created a cheap food policy.
Frightened that Depression Era conditions would return after World War Two, and then frightened that conditions were going to go into the waste bin due to the Cold War, from 1945 on the government has done everything it can to keep foods as cheap as possible. Americans bitch about food prices, but they spend about 9% of their budget on food, and it generally keeps going down. The U.S. Government has tracked food prices since 1929, and it's the lowest ever, generally. From 1929 to 1952 Americans spending on food consumed generally above 20% of a family's income. In 1932, it was 22%. In 2008, in contrast, it was 5.6%.
That's great, for family budgets, and it has ancillary impacts on a lot of industries. Cheap food means that people can go to good restaurants (where you are actually a lot more likely to run into an illegal alien than in a cabbage patch) and have a really good dinner for pretty cheap, and then sit there over dinner and bitch about food prices. This hasn't always been the case. When Americans "ate out" well into the 1970s, they probably meant that they went to a diner for lunch. Growing up, trips to restaurants for dinner were so rare that they only occured, normally, when it was some sort of special occasion, like a birthday or anniversary. To take a date to a restaurant was a big deal, even when I was a college student. You were trying to really impress a girl if you took her out for a meal, and later you assessed the damage to your finances that had ensued.
Even fast food joints to some extent expressed this. We would often hit the burger joints on the weekends, but not daily. By the time my son was in high school, however, high schoolers hit the nearby fast food joints every day. Indeed, when I was in high school I ate in the cafeteria, the first time I'd eaten routinely at school. I didn't particularly like it, but that's what there was. When our high school cafeteria was condemned during my first year of high school, and prior to their building a new one, I briefly ate downtown, but it was too expensive, and I took up just brining a bad sandwich I'd made myself at home and sitting in the football stadium to eat it.
Glory Days indeed.
Now, fast food fare is absurdly cheap. Quite a few people I know hit Dirty Ron's Steakhouse every morning for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a cup of Joe on the way in to work, and frankly, they're not bad (and no, that nickname aside, that establishment is not dirty at all). And I've met working adults, including professionals, who go to Subway, or whatever, every day for lunch. "Value Meals" and the like are incredibly cheap. All of this because of a "cheap food" policy. Part of that policy is related to legal farm migrants, but they are not flooding across the Rio Grande or the desert and claiming asylum.
Nor, frankly, is an ongoing "cheap food" policy a good thing.
The cheap food policy has helped make Americans increasingly fat while driving smaller agricultural entities out of business. It's contributed to the concentration of everything, and not in a good way. It's made food prices unrealistically low, while divorcing Americans from the reality of the actual cost of things. It should end.
Part of that would be, quite frankly, to end the modern version of the Bracero program that has depressed the value of farm labor. When it came in, in 1943, it made a little bit of sense, maybe, perhaps. But eighty years later, it doesn't. Americans will work any job, contrary to what is claimed about them, but at wages that are realistic. Immigrant farm labor wages won't attract them, as the wages are too low.
In an era in which thousands of Americans are out on the streets without jobs, and in which there are rural areas that are basically depopulated save for the injured and left behind in smaller towns, lying between the consolidated farms, and in which we have urban areas and reservations that are hardcore reservoirs of poverty, if people were paid real wages, there's a ready-made source of labor. Sure, they aren't the best jobs in the world in some ways, but they are jobs. And they're also jobs for middle class younger people, who have a demonstrated interest in topics of the soil.
The numbers involved are not small. The US takes in 3,000,000 migrant farmworkers per year. Ending a program such as this would result in a big impact to farm production, and it'd jump food prices for sure as the positions were, and they ultimately would be, filled with American residents. It'd frankly also spur mechanization, which I'm not particularly keen on, as right now there are very expensive agricultural implements that are not employed as migrant farm labor is cheaper.
But ultimately, the principal of subsidiarity should come into play here for lots of reasons.
None of the reasons involve the thousands crossing the US Southern border, who are people facing an existential crisis that must be addressed. They aren't the migrant farmworkers however. That's a completely different topic.
Footnotes:
*Democrats have long assumed that Hispanic immigrants are natural Democratic voters, without learning the lessons of demographics or history.
Immigrants tend to be Democratic voters early in their demographic's migration history. Irish immigrants were. Italian immigrants were. This frankly had a lot to do with patronage. But as they became established, this became much less the case. To declare yourself "Irish" today doesn't mean that somebody should automatically assume you are a Democrat.
And that's true even if you have 100% Hibernian heritage, or to take the Italian example, if you can trace your lineage back to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus' third cousin, once removed. Truth be known, in a species in which Joe Cro Magnon pretty quickly asked Lucy Neanderthal out on a date, those straight lines of lineage don't last very long. To declare yourself "Irish" today, in the US, might merely mean that you think the Irish drink green Budweiser with corned beef sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day.
Moreover, Hispanics in the US have and retain (although they are rapidly losing it) a very distinct culture which is existentially Catholic and conservative. This is so much the case that the radicals of the Mexican Revolution, in the form of the Constitutionalist, sought to stamp it out, much like their semi fellow travelers the Bolsheviks went after Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917. And they had a similar success rate, which means lots of Mexican Hispanics, which is what most Hispanics in the US are often only semi observant, but culturally Catholic still. Given that, the darling issues of the Democratic Greenwich Village set, which forms the central corps of Democratic thought, are deeply at odds with what most Hispanics believe. And this only becomes more the case when Hispanics from outside of Northern Mexican ancestry are considered. So, not too surprisingly, they're turning Republican.
They are also due to the border crisis itself. Hispanics along the border whose ancestors settled there two hundred years ago, or in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, or even in earlier recent migrant waves, are not really of the same culture, no matter how dimwitted Americans are about it, as those now crossing and the flood is wrecking their communities. Americans may see Hondurans and Guatemalans, as well as Venezuelans, as being the same as people from Chihuahua, but people from Chihuahua who live in Eagle Pass do not.
**And they are people, which oddly seems forgotten, except as an argument over the crisis. Democrats thinking they were mindless sheep who could be herded into the voting booths and Republicans thinking they were something akin to slaves is inexcusible.
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Blog Mirror: 1924 Menus for Meatless Meals
Given that Lent is coming up:
1924 Menus for Meatless Meals
Friday, January 19, 2024
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
No More Puppy Chow. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.
South Korea has banned the production and sale of dog for human consumption.
Last Prior Edition.
Lame. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 52nd Edition.
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Super size it.
Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, January 1, 1924. Receiving the New Year.:
When I put this up on January 1, I also posted this calendar image on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub. Somebody came by and remarked on how tiny the glass the young woman is holding was.
And indeed it was.
Coca-Cola for years came in a 6.5 oz bottle, not 12. It's interesting to reflect on as it really says something about proportions.
Coke's iconic bottle was a 6.5 oz bottle until 1955.
Its competitor Pepsi started using 12 oz bottles in 1934. In fact, that as one of its marketing devices, as it came in a 12 oz bottle, having a jingle that went
Pepsi-Cola hits the spotTwelve full ounces, that's a lot!Twice as much for a nickel, tooPepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
It says something about the quality of Coke, or at least the original recipe of it, that people would in fact pay the same amount for half of what they'd get if they'd bought Pepsi instead. It also says something about soda in general that it's so cheap to make, the added 6 oz of product really doesn't do anything to the economic bottom line.
In 1955, Coke switched to 10 oz bottles and 12 oz bottles and offered a "Family" sized bottle of 26 oz. The move was not without internal company controversy, however. One company executive stated that “bringing out another bottle was like being unfaithful to your wife.”
But that 55 10 or 12 oz bottle isn't gigantic.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, when you went to a fast food restaurant and got a soda, large was a 12 oz serving with ice. Starting in the 80s, somehow, that doubled, with stores, particularly convenience stores, advertising what was essentially double that.
24 oz of Coke is a lot.
And it went on from there.
McDonald's, when it was first getting up and running, served Coke in 7 oz cups. After Coke switched, it started serving it in 16 oz cups. In 1980, 7-11 introduced the "Big Gulp" which weighed in at an absurd 32 oz. In 86, 7-11 introduced the 44 oz Super Big Gulp, and everyone went down that road thereafter.
Indeed, now, getting a small or medium soda draught is really what a person should do, and on the rare occasions when I get fast food, I try to get that. But most people don't. Even little kids get the 55 gallon size soda drink.
And that's really not good for you.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Tuesday, December 14, 1943. The Death of Captain Waskow.
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Captain Henry T. Waskow, who became the subject of Ernie Pyle's most famous column, and who was the inspiration for the protagonist in The Story of GI Joe, was killed in action in the Battle of San Pietro.
The French Committee of National Liberation granted French citizenship to Algerians classified as "Moslem elites", those being the ability to fluently read and write French. It was expected that this would enfranchise between 20,000 to 30,000 Algerians.
This also abandoned a prior requirement that those obtaining French citizenship abandon Islam.
This would have been a huge move had it come in the 30s, but now, it would prove to be too little, too late.
The Germans raided Nantua, France, in reprisal for resistance activities.
Allied aircraft raided Luftwaffe airfields near Athens at Eleusis, Kalamaki and Tatoi, as well as the harbor facilities at Piraeus in the heaviest raid on Greece to date.
Sarah Sundin's blog, reports that:
Today in World War II History—December 14, 1943: US Army Air Force decides to stop using camouflage paint on planes, with the exception of night fighters and transports, to increase speed and range.
The reason I've always been told that this was done was to save weight. You wouldn't think that this would make much of a difference, but if you consider the overall surface area of an airplane, it's a fair amount. Less weight means fuel savings and increased speed.
The Red Army took Cherkasy.
John Harvey Kellogg, creator of cornflakes (1878) and founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium ain Battle Creek, Michigan, died at age 91.
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Monday, December 10, 1923. Mexican rebels and cheese empires advance.
The Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, which has not been ratified, was first introduced in Congress.
At the time, many suffragettes opposed it out of fear that it would eliminate statutory protection of female laborers, which it likely would have.
Rebels were advancing on Mexico City.
Coolidge was encouraging commercial aviation, and running for reelection.
The National Dairy Products Corporation was founded by a merger of Thomas H. McInerney's Hydrox Corporation and Edward E. Rieck's Rieck—McJunkin Dairy Company. In 1930, it would acquire Kraft-Phenix Cheese Company, and then rebrand itself in 1969 as Kraftco Corporation and then Kraft, Inc.
It is now Kraft Heinz as of this very year.
Kraft cheese is, in my opinion, hideous.
The U.S. Supreme Court held in Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co. that only it, in appropriate Federal questions, could review state supreme court decisions.
The Italian parliament was prorogued, i.e., dissolved, by King Victor Emmanuel III at the request of Benito Mussolini.
Turkey and Albania signed a treat of friendship.
Thursday, November 23, 2023
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XV. The 2% solution?
August 9, 2023
3%
That is what inflation has fallen to.
The target rate is nonsensically 2%, which still robs workers of their wages. Given the recent inflation, a more sensical target would be at or about 0%, or better yet a slight deflationary rate of 1%.
That's the core inflationary rate, by the way. Real inflation is at about 4.1%.
The US is banning private equity investment in China and investment in some Chinese technology companies.
August 12, 2023
The EPA estimates that by 2055 most petroleum fueled vehicles will have attrited off the road.
August 16, 2023
From the Oil City News:
CASPER, Wyo. — Rocky Mountain Power, the state’s largest electric utility, is proposing to raise its energy rates by 29.2%.
August 24, 2023
Before more consolidation of everything is just what we needed:
Subway sandwich chain sells itself to Dunkin’ owner Roark Capital
August 27, 2023
France will spend €200 million to destroy excess wine in hopes of shoring up the struggling wine industry. Wine consumption in Europe has been falling, while production increasing.
September 7, 2023
Chinese exports, upon which that nation depends, have decreased every month of 2023. China's economy is dependent upon exports and there is serious discussion on the country going into a recession.
September 11, 2023
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced severe criticism from her constituents, after sharing a video on Instagram from the Kiwi left-wing Aotearoa Liberation League that accredited rising prices solely to corporations and described the discussion surrounding inflation as propaganda.
When I read the headline, I actually wondered if she'd reposted something of Robert Reich's. . .
The bloom has really been off AoC's rose in recent months.
Trump has been heard at campaign dinners indicating that if re elected he will cut taxes, which are too low to start with, and use tariffs as a trade weapon.
September 15, 2023
The United Auto Workers are out on strike.
September 20, 2023
Ford Motors in Canada reached a deal with is union to avoid a strike there.
Republican infighting kept two budget bills from advancing there.
Cont:
A drought in Spain has caused a 50% increase in the price of olive oil, which in turn is causing a spike in olive oil theft.
September 27, 2023
The Writers Guild of America has reached an accommodation with the entertainment industry and has ended its strike.
U.S. regulators and seventeen states have sued Amazon on Tuesday over allegations it uses its position in the economy to inflate prices.
The Senate has drafted a stopgap funding bill it will likely pass, but there's no certainty the dysfunctional House of Representatives will.
September 28, 2023
Kevin McCarthy, prisoner of GOP populists, will not take up the Senate bill to fund the government, making a shutdown impossible to avoid.
The House of Representatives is, quite frankly, dysfunctional.
And given this, we will close out this edition of Subsidiarity Economics, even though its barely gone, and start one focused on that theme.
But not before noting that the U.S. economy recently grew 2.1%.
October 1, 2023.
Crisis postponed.
The following crisis that is:
Subsidiarity Economics. The Shutdown edition.
Kevin McCarthy, prisoner of GOP populists, will not take up the Senate bill to fund the government, making a shutdown impossible to avoid.
The House of Representatives is, quite frankly, dysfunctional.
And given this, we will close out this edition of Subsidiarity Economics, even though its barely gone, and start one focused on that theme.
Kevin McCarthy should hang his head in shame.
What all will close, assuming that the House doesn't get its act together today, isn't clear. Some things will, but "vital" things apparently will not. Some Federal employees will be asked to work without pay, which is interesting, as working without pay is involuntary servitude, and was banned by a post Civil War constitutional amendment.
Congress, oddly, will get paid.
The mail will continue to be delivered, as the U.S. Post Office funds itself.
Arizona and Utah have voted to spend state funds to keep their National Parks open. Senator John Barrasso asked the Secretary of the Interior to use park entry fees to do the same.
Fat Bear Week is off due to the dysfunctional House of Representatives having been taken hostage by populists.
Government contracts and modifications to contracts will not be issued.
Medicaid will continue to be paid. Medicare will continue on.
The FHA will have limited staff and loans it processes will be delayed.
The SBA will shut down.
The ATF might not process background checks, which may lead to a complete halt on the sale of firearms by licensed firearm's dealers.
The latter is the thing that Wyomingites are likely to complain about right away. People in industries supported by tourism are likely to notice the closure of the parks rapidly.
All of this, of course, is because this will be a managed shut down, which is really a limited shutdown or a slow-down. If things continue for some time, and this time they might, a real shutdown may creep in, which Wyomingites, in spite of apparently disdaining the Federal Government, would really feel. A closure of the airports, for example, could be expected at some point, And a cessation of petroleum production on Federal lands due to a lack of Federal oversight. Perhaps a cessation of grazing on the Federal domain for the same reason. And a lack of highway funds.
None of that will happen rapidly, of course. Or maybe at all.
September 30, 2023.
We’re likely to avert a shutdown, but the clown show continues
Let the grousing now being.
Not from Reich, with whom I obviously have a love/hate relationship, but from the MAGA far right out in the hinterlands, who will be outraged, outraged I tell you, and they'll tell you on their way from the television to the refirgerator for a Coors Lite (can't touch that Bud, of course) who would, they'll say, have enjoyed the shutdown. . .right up until they didn't, and then somehow, it would have been the Democrats fault.Congress passed a 45-day stopgap spending bill yesterday. In doing so, Speaker McCarthy noted:
We’re going to be adults in the room. And we’re going to keep government open.
Well now he has 45 days to see if he can do that.
The bill omitted funding for Ukraine. President Biden noted that in his address regarding the stopgap bill.
Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. This bill ensures that active-duty troops will continue to get paid, travelers will be spared airport delays, millions of women and children will continue to have access to vital nutrition assistance, and so much more. This is good news for the American people.But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.While the Speaker and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been steadfast in their support for Ukraine, there is no new funding in this agreement to continue that support. We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.
McCarthy had to rely on Democrats to pass the bill, and will now surely face an effort aimed at his removal by his hard right.
October 4, 2023
Facebook's parent company Meta is laying off 11,000 employees.
October 5, 2023
75,000 Kaiser Permanente employees went on strike Wednesday. Staffing levels are an issue.
October 9, 2023
Workers for Mack Truck are going out on a UAW strike.
October 11, 2023
The UAW's strike has expanded to include a Ford plant in Kentucky.
October 15, 2023
The price of oil has jumped 6% since April.
October 24, 2023
Icelandic women are on strike for wage equality.
October 27, 2023
The economy grew by 4.9% last quarter.
October 28, 2023
Governor Gordon sounded climate alarm bells in a speech at Harvard this past week, noting that Wyoming needed to decarbonize. This caused the Wyoming Freedom Caucus to freak out.
October 31, 2023
Robert Reich.
November 2, 2023
Headline:
Union sets its sights on Tesla
November 5, 2023
Voters in Maine are voting on a referendum to replace the state's two electric companies with consumer-owned Pine Tree Power Company.
The proposal goes to the polls on Tuesday. It states:
November 9, 2023
The Air Force wants Congress to restrict the placement of wind farms near nuclear missle silos.
November 10, 2023
Moody’s Investors Service is revising the outlook on the U.S. government’s ratings to negative from stable but affirming the long-term issuer and senior unsecured rating at AAA.
Lest anyone doubt, this is bad for the economy and reflects a years long inability to get the deficit under control.
November 21, 2023
Ontario Knife Co. was sold to Blue Ridge Knives and all 56 employees at its Frankliville, New York plant lost their jobs as a result. Blue Ridge owns 800 brand names.
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