Towns and Nature: Leesburg, FL: Paquette's Historical Farmall Museum
Lex Anteinternet: "All along the watchtower".
Blog Mirror: Losing Time
A new entry by South Roane:
Losing Time
Lex Anteinternet: Carbon Hypocrisy
Carbon Hypocrisy
Off to the side, in the blogs we follow section, is one called Buzzard's Beat.
"Buzzard" is a female rancher in southeast Kansas. I know that everyone who isn't too familiar with Kansas thinks of it as one giant wheat field, but it isn't. In actuality, there's a lot of ranch ground in Kansas.
I've had the opportunity to drive across Kansas twice. People complain about places like Kansas and Nebraska being boring, but I really enjoy the states. Moreover, I've driven across the back roads of those states in addition to the long, boring interstate highways. This true of North and South Dakota as well. I really love them, even though I'm not from there.
This isn't, however, a travelogue of the farm belt, but rather to point out two posts she makes.
One is entitled: Dear Richard Branson: What's worse, a rocket or a steak?
It's pretty clearly the rocket.
What I want to point out here is hypocrisy, and not just the hypocrisy of Sir Richard Branson, although I do want to point out that.
Rather, what I want to point out is that in the discussion on global warming, everyone seems to feel free to blame others while their own conduct goes unnoticed.
It's become trendy to blame agriculture, more particularly stock raising, for global warming. That gets both to this post and another she's put up, that one being Raising Cattle for a Healthy Climate. Both are well worth reading, as well as a number of other posts she's put up, including Dear Epicurious: Your Meat-Free Resolution Confuses Me.
This also gets to the recent trend of the dim giving up meat as they think it helps the planet somehow.
Seemingly missed by the dim are some basic facts of animal production. Every domestic meat animal can be raised on food, for it, that you can't eat. You really can't eat prairie grass, for instance, but cows can. You sure can't eat the crap that sheep do. And even the finish grain that's used, unless you are buying "grass fed" beef (or simply eating a volunteer grass fed cow, like we are), that being corn, is a grain that you can barely actually eat. I know that maize is a worldwide staple, but frankly unless its ground up and processed into something it's actually a human foodstuff that you can't really digest for the most part. Corn on the cob may be delicious, and it is, but it, um, mostly passes through you. And we all know that it's really a vehicle for butter, salt and pepper anyhow.
As she points out, the greenhouse gasses that are produced by livestock globally are really small. And contrary to what those self-declared non meat eating environmentalist may imagine, the carbon footprint of nearly everything produced by a "dirt" farm is massive.
Put another way, if you are dining on a big bowl of nice health brussels sprouts, unless you grew them yourself, they didn't get to your bowl during the annual brussels sprout migration. No, they were grown by somebody using some pretty heavy-duty diesel powered things, and then trucked to market by a pretty heavy diesel powered thing, kept cool by something that was electric, and then you probably fired up your car and drove to the store to get them.
Hmmm. . . .
Also, while we're at it, if you are vegan or a vegetarian, you should be aware that production crop agriculture is a major killer of animal life, so you can pretend you don't have blood on your hands, but they're at least as bloody as somebody's who eats meat. I'm not dissing farmers for this, it's just the way things are. But if you spend a day on a combine you are going to mow down something, and that's just the start of it.
It's not that there aren't things everyone can do about this, but feeling sanctimonious about your own personal dinner plate isn't it. The more you think that your bowl is planetary benign, the more likely it isn't. Ideally, if we really wanted to be fully green, we'd grow our own vegetables, as much as possible (and it wouldn't be 100% possible) on our big urban lawns, and we'd buy a local beef or go hunting in the fall. If you aren't doing at least one of those things, you aren't the least bit green and should quit pretending that you are.
And if you are so massively wealthy that you can afford to blast yourself into space, unless you are a neo Tolstoy living the peasant life, you're mere existence is carbon positive, let alone indulging yourself in being a space cowboy.
Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: “Since Time Out of Mind.” Asserting ...
The Good Old Days.
Among the blogs linked in to our companion blog Lex Anteinternet is the blog of the Adam Smith Institute.
I'll confess when I linked it in, I'd run across it and had confused it with another entity, perhaps The Philadelphia Society. No matter, this British institution celebrates the thinking of Scottish economist Adam Smith, a person whom free marketers herald, and with good reason.
In terms of economics, I'm a distributist, which puts me in a group of about five people or so, all of whom have to spend endless time, if the topic comes up, just trying to explain what distributism is. Distributism, a species of free market economics, hasn't been popular in the main since the Second World War, and to compound the problem of its obscurity, its not only saddled with an unfortunate name, but it attracts people who are sometimes on fringe of wacky, or not outright wacky. For example, as its modern founders were Catholics (Chesterton and Belloc), and English, it'll attract very conservative Catholics who have strayed into thinking they are monarchists. As Belloc had an absurdly romantic concept of the Middle Ages, and as some Belloc fans think everything he said must be accepted without analysis, perhaps there was some inevitability to that, and to a completely inaccurate view of what Medieval economics were like (and I do mean completely inaccurate).
Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society posts some really thought provoking items, and todays' entry is not exception.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE RIGHT NOW - AND DON'T FORGET IT
I'll admit, I don't really fully agree with what the headline relates, but in some significant ways, this is really correct. They correctly note, for example:
We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.
They go on to honestly note, however:
However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:
Here's an interesting item on this:
This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.
The article doesn't really draw any conclusions, save for one, these are the "good old days". And it makes some pretty solid arguments.
All of this is in reply to a post in The Guardian, which posed the question of "when", or "what" were the good old days. [1]. It wanted reader comments on the same.
The Guardian is a notoriously left wing newspaper with frequently very radical ideas. It's gained global circulation in the age of the Internet, and it now is fairly widely read in the US, helped in part by the fact that it lacks a "pay wall", unlike the Washington Post or New York Times. My point here isn't to criticize those latter papers, but to simply note that's how The Guardian is now read by the same folks in rural Wyoming who read the NYT. Indeed, perhaps they're more like to read The Guardian, even though its radically "green" position is likely to make some folks pretty upset locally and they are, in my view, often way off in left field.[2].
Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society likely is correct that in all sorts of substantial ways, we're in the good old days right now. But it is interesting that female happiness is declining. And what its declining to is the rate of male unhappiness.
A couple of years we reported on the finding that workplace discontent is way up over 50% in the United States. That makes it seem like Joanna might be right in her comment to Peter in Office Space that "everyone hates their job", but if that's true, it's really distressing, to say the least.
The Guardian item brought a lot of replies, and its clear that a lot of people really do look back on a prior era, material advances not withstanding, as happier than the current one. Some people cited the 1950s, which seems to often hold this status in people's recollections, in spite of the really scary Cold War, the hot Korean War, and for the British the falling apart of the British Empire all being a feature of it. One person commented that it was the 1970s, which wouldn't occur to me, as I lived through the 70s and have a pretty good recollection of it.
Indeed, there's a good case to be made that "the good old days" were the days in which you were young and without burdens, as your parents took care of them, or some past era you didn't experience, reflected through a mirror, inaccurately, with the bad things filtered out. There are, for example, people who are real fans of the 1940s, and the 1940s were generally horrific on the main. The British often look fondly back at the 40s, I'd note, as, at least in modern times, it really was "their finest hour." Be that as it may, if you were on a beach at Dunkirk hoping not to become a casualty or a German prisoner of war, it would have been unlikely to be seen as a nifty time, at the time.
But I digress.
Focusing on the rising level of female discontent, the Adam Smith Institute correctly notes the following, in my view.
That's pretty hard to disagree with.
What that comment means is that the calls by those who would really return truly to the past are misguided due to the horrors of the past. One of those was high infant, and female, mortality.
Both of those factors are well known but easily forgotten in romantic recollections of the past. Indeed, its interesting to see how this has evolved over time.
To set things in a bit of context, if we went back, let's say, to the 1700s, we'd find that the normal state for men and women to live in was, not surprisingly, marriage. No matter what moderns may like to believe, this is the normal state and for a society on thinner resources, it was actually the only one really safe if people were to yield to their reproductive instincts in any fashion. This is not a surprise.
What might be a surprise, however, is that remarriage by males was extremely common at the time due to a high female mortality rate mostly associated with childbirth. I.e., lots of women died in childbirth and the men usually went on to remarry. It must of hung like a cloud over pregnant women like nothing else.
Additionally, infant mortality was really high. Indeed, a lot of the illusion that we now live longer is based on the massive reduction in the deaths of infants and young children. Take those figures out, and average lifespans aren't much different than they are now. Additionally subtract those figures for women who died in childbirth and this is even more the case.
Not too many women in developed countries now die in childbirth and infant mortality is also way down. We know this intellectually, but we have a hard time grasping it in real terms. I don't know of a single person, personally, who has died in childbirth. I know of couples that have lost infants in childbirth, but not many.
So the Adam Smith blogger certainly has a point.
But it also begs a point. If being free from the high risks of death in childbirth and the risk of losing an infant aren't making women happier, why is that.
That gets back to what we've noted before. People aren't really meant to live this way. I.e, in an industrial society.
And that gets back to the overall happiness rate.
We noted the other day that what the Industrial Revolution achieved, in social terms, was to take people off the land and into factories and work places, but not all at once and not by gender all at once. It took men first, due to their physical build in part but also in part as it was easier to spare them from the home. I.e., you can take a young man with a child and send him down a coal mine without the child, but you really can't send a nursing young woman down the coal mine without the kid.
We're so used to the concept of men being out of the home and away from their families that it not only seems the norm, it became celebrated as the social norm for a long time. However, as we've also noted here in the past, the development of domestic machinery changed that for women over time and their labor became surplus to the home. When that happened, they were redeployed in the economy in the workplace. That went from a more or less temporary matter in a lot of households to a necessary one over time and now the economy demands it. It demands it so much, in fact, that a recent (and maybe still ongoing) effort in the U.S. Congress was to subsidize the workplace by government funding for daycares. People are so used to this concept by now that they don't recognize that for what it is, which is a pure subsidy for employers so that women with children have no excuse but to go to work.
Starting to resist that are women themselves. We just dealt with that more recently here:
A lamentation. The modern world.*
That post contained this item from a young woman in her early twenties from Twitter:
I don't mean to keep belaboring this point, and this does all recall, kind of, Thomas Wolfe's comment that "you can't go home again and stay there". That seems to be sort of true, but then what Chesterton stated, and which is featured on the footer of this blog, about clocks being human contrivances and being capable of being set back is also completely true. What we seem to have achieved, however, is to create a system that makes us materially much wealthier but its contributing to some degree to our misery.
Why is that?
Well, it might be that a major deep seated reason for all of these changes was to secure us from the wolf at the door, but it was never meant, psychologically, to take that door out of the field. In other words, maybe we burned down the farm, in order to save it.
And we could always rebuild that.
Footnotes.
1. My favorite reply to the question was this one:
I remember a time when nostalgia was a thing of the past.
I'll get my hat...
2. The Guardian aids itself in being taken seriously, I'd note, by not prominently featuring Cheesecake like so many other British newspapers.
Lex Anteinternet: Friday July 8, 1921. Whiskey in some jars but not...
Friday July 8, 1921. Whiskey in some jars but not others. End of the Anglo Irish War, Prohibition, and the formation of Land o Lakes.
Sir, The desire you express on the part of the British Government to end the centuries of conflict between the peoples of these two islands, and to establish relations of neighbourly harmony, is the genuine desire of the people of Ireland.
I have consulted with my colleagues and secured the views of the representatives of the minority of our Nation in regard to the invitation you have sent me.
In reply, I desire to say that I am ready to meet and discuss with you on what bases such a Conference as that proposed can reasonably hope to achieve the object desired.
I am, Sir, Faithfully yours, Eamon de Valera
Exit Mia.
Slowly, and sometimes controversially, after that time, people began to reconsider the depiction of people it had used in advertising where those people had been minorities. It didn't just apply to Indians, of course, but too all sorts of things. Sombrero wearing Mexican cartoon characters and bandits disappeared from Tex-Mex fast food signs. Quaker Oats' "Aunt Jemima went from being a woman who was clearly associated with Southern household post civil war servants, who had only lately been slaves, in an undoubtedly racist depiction, to being a smiling middle aged African American woman whom Quaker Oats hoped, probably accurately", would cause people to forget what being an "aunt" or "uncle" meant to African Americans. As late as 1946 Mars Inc. would feel free to do something similar but without the racist depiction and use the "uncle" moniker and a depiction of well dressed elderly African American for Uncle Ben's Rice, something they've kept doing as they'd never gone as far as Quaker Oats. And these are just common well known examples. There are leagues of others.
But removing labels and depictions has been slow. The Washington football team remains tagged with the clearly offensive name "the Redskins". Cleveland finally retired the offensive Chief Wahoo from their uniforms only in 2018.
So what about Mia?
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The irony.
Same day, same paper. One ad celebrating agriculture, and one celebrating its destruction.
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