This year my wife engaged in an experiment. She planted potatoes and the picture above illustrates our harvest. We harvested and ate a few a couple of weeks ago (they were delicious).

She says it puts her in touch with her Irish ancestors.

She’s eager to do it again next year.

Whatever you think of Hunter Biden’s guilt or innocence, Donald Trump’s guilt or innocence, or what Joe Biden knew and when he knew it, I think some attention should be paid to Matt Taibbi’s lament at the conclusion of his most recent post:

I think a lot of people in the world I once inhabited, in center-left media and academia, don’t realize they’ve slipped into a deeply unattractive habit of substituting checklists of unquestioned assumptions for thought. In the blue bubble Trump’s limitless evil is an idea with such awesome gravitational pull that it makes nuanced discussion about almost anything impossible. It’s why no one in media could suggest even the possibility he hadn’t colluded with Russia. He’s become an anti-God, of a faith that requires constant worship. When do we get to go back to being atheists

Was it Alan Simpson who said that the Republicans were the stupid party and the Democrats the evil party? How did we arrive at our present situation? Now we have two stupid and evil parties, at daggers drawn, while there’s broad consensus among ordinary people on any number of issues. My belief has always been that it’s because opposing a stupid and evil party is a good way to get people to re-elect you so you can continue to do stupid and evil things.

The increased availability of information with everyone having a library in their pockets hasn’t helped. If anything it has hurt. Who has the time to do the meticulous research that the people paid to do the research won’t do? It is poised to get worse as “deep fakes” become increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine videos.

Not only will you not be able to believe what you read in the New York Times, you won’t be able to believe what you see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears.

In this case the impossible dream to which I refer is carbon offsets. The old fashioned version is a flop as this article by Keerti Gopal at Ars Technica points out:

Carbon offset projects claiming to curb deforestation are significantly overestimating their impact, according to a new study published in Science on Thursday.

Sold as a way to lessen the impact of greenhouse gas emissions by allowing polluters or consumers to purchase offsets or credits that allow them to keep emitting in return for funding projects that decrease emissions elsewhere, offsets have become a high-profile model for corporate climate action.

But a systematic evaluation of 26 carbon offset projects that claim to slow the rate of potential deforestation in six countries on three continents found that the vast majority of projects did not actually slow deforestation, and those that did were significantly less effective than they claimed.

For decades I have thought that carbon offsets based on activity in faraway countries was all too likely to be a scam. Maybe these foreign projects are sincere in their efforts; maybe they aren’t but regardless of intention they’re not working. Not to be deterred Microsoft and Meta seek another way as this article at Financial Review by Agnes King points out:

Global technology and e-commerce giants are driving demand for direct air capture technology to remove carbon emissions, according to Sydney-based carbon removal company, AspiraDAC, but Australian firms are lagging behind.

Direct air capture is an embryonic industry that aims to fight climate change by extracting carbon dioxide from ordinary air then storing it or making products out of it.

AspiraDAC chief executive Julian Turecek says frontrunners like Microsoft are setting the agenda with offtake agreements for early-stage direct air capture, and they are paying a premium to remove legacy emissions dating back to when their operations commenced.

The only way for a company or country to go carbon negative is to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it emits, Turecek says.

My only advice is don’t take any steps you are unable or unwilling to monitor. Good intentions are sufficient only for PR campaigns not for making material progress.

Ruy Teixeira returns: to same drum he’s been beating for some time—the Democratic Party’s support among non-white voters is waning:

Democrats may have thought that they were on the right track in the wake of the “racial reckoning” of 2020. Surely if Democrats went all-in on social justice and racial “equity,” that would lock down the nonwhite vote. That was a chimera as a careful examination of actually-existing opinions and priorities among actually-existing nonwhite voters would have quickly revealed. Perhaps now that declining nonwhite support for the Democrats is “official”, that much-needed examination can take place.

There is a thorny question to which I do not know the answer but I would bet there are some Democratic pollsters who do. What turnout among non-white voters do Democrats need to win national elections? Recent elections have been sufficiently close that they don’t need to lose all non-white votes to lose the election. Just enough of them.

I found this commentary on the war in Ukraine by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee at War On the Rocks informative and optimistic although not unduly so. Here’s a snippet:

The West ought to be introspective about missing important decision points, which had a profound impact on the course of the war, constraining everyone’s options later on. Decisions about future support should have been made well before this offensive even began, assuming that it was unlikely to end the war. Instead, another cycle of attritional fighting may ensue after this offensive, followed by yet another surge effort to restore Ukraine’s offensive potential. In short, the West has been unappreciative of the lead times required to reconstitute military potential or provide Ukraine with a decisive advantage.

The recent anonymous criticism by officials spilling select narratives in the press, rather than fostering an open discussion about Ukraine’s challenges and successes, reveals enduring problems in this war effort: The first, is a lack of Western understanding of how Ukrainian forces fight. The second, which is closely related, is an insufficient Western presence on the ground to enable closer coordination or even the invaluable understanding that could be offered by battlefield observers. Western capitals have sought to keep this Ukraine’s war, avoiding an in-country presence that includes contractor support or trainers. To be clear, there are Western contractors and companies operating independently in Ukraine, but this is not the same as a government sanctioned and supported effort. There is much more that could be done without becoming directly involved in fighting or deploying uniformed personnel on the ground. The hitherto cautious approach has clear limits to its efficacy. Western support thus far has been sufficient to avert a Ukrainian defeat, and arguably has imposed a strategic defeat on Russia, but not enough to ensure a Ukrainian victory. Independent of the outcome of this offensive, Western countries need to be clear-eyed about the fact that this will be a long war. Taken together, Western industrial and military potential greatly exceeds Russia’s, but without the political will, potential alone will not translate into results.

I found the observation about what I think is a general Western indifference to understanding how the Ukrainians make war particularly astute.

Meanwhile at New Statesman Lily Lynch offers a more somber assessment:

As a more sober reality sets in, it’s worth asking why Western governments and the media were such effusive boosters of Ukraine’s war effort. The writer Richard Seymour has suggested that part of it was about identity formation, wherein Ukraine is emblematic of an “idealised Europe” or even democracy itself, while Russia represents Oriental despotism and authoritarianism. The war thus embodies the supposed civilisational struggle theorised by Samuel Huntington between democracies and autocracies, promoted by the Biden administration through initiatives such as its Summit for Democracy. That annual event aims to “renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”, underlining the continuity between liberal opposition to the putative authoritarian affinities of Donald Trump and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But beyond the merely symbolic there was a practical rationale for the kinds of coverage we saw in the war’s early months: the conflict in Ukraine has revived a waning Atlanticism – a long-sought aim of proponents of Nato enlargement. Just a few years ago Emmanuel Macron, the French president, declared Nato “braindead”; the war in Ukraine has brought it back to life. Finland and Sweden applied to join. Critics say that the governments of both countries used “shock doctrine” tactics to convince their respective populations to abandon their policy of neutrality, making the decision to apply for membership while the war was top news and the public was still afraid.

I don’t believe that the change in tone betokens an imminent change in policy.

These are tiny snippets from lengthy pieces.

I’ll just contribute this which touches on a theme I have mentioned before. As U. S. aid to Ukraine in its prosecution of war against Russia approaches $100 billion

1. How much of that aid has been spent opposing Russia?
2. How much of that has been siphoned off by corrupt U. S. and Ukrainian businesses and officials? 1%? 10%? 90%? It makes a difference.
3. How do you know?
4. How much has just been wasted?

I’m seeing quite a few articles demanding that either Joe Biden’s or Donald Trump’s name be withdrawn from contention for the nomination of their respective parties for president in 2024. Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. What would happen if neither Trump’s nor Biden’s name are on the ballot in 2024?

My speculations are that

1. whoever succeeds them would be more extreme than either Trump or Biden, the Democratic candidate being more left wing than Biden and the Republican candidate more right wing Trump
2. victory would hinge on turning out the base
3. the campaign would be even more negative

Not a particularly bright prospect.

In comments my attention was called to this statistic:

Find more statistics at Statista
The NYT took note of the same phenomenon, noting that no one understood why that was happening.

My reaction was this:

Both graphs address the same period; one shows that total costs are falling while the other illustrates that the average cost continues to rise. I’ll leave the interpretation of that to the interested reader.

All I ask is that any decline in total Medicare spending not be used as an argument for increasing Medicare reimbursement rates.

The graph above was sampled from a Washington Post editorial. I find it difficult to relate their thesis, that young Americans are eager to work, to that graph. Perhaps what they meant to say is that young Americans are more eager to work now than they were a few years ago. College enrollments are down, too, so that doesn’t explain what’s going on, either.

Things are certainly different from when I was a kid. I have filed a 1040 every year since I was 14.

Update

After looking at that graph again, it’s clear that graduating from high school used to be synonymous with working for 40-50% of the population and that was very consistent over a long period. That changed in the 1990s, coincident with the push for higher education. Whether that was cause, effect, or both I have no idea.

Labor Day is traditionally a celebration of and for organized labor. Let’s think about organized labor a bit. The demographics of the construction trades look like this:

All of these trades are composed almost entirely of men.

There are probably multiple reasons for the distribution including preference, history, and that in the trades you work your way up. You don’t enter as a master craftsman. You begin by doing menial work, then become an apprentice, a journeyman, and, finally, a master. If you’re not willing or able to do the menial work, you won’t become a master.

One more statistic to reflect on. The majority of union members in the American workforce are now government employees.