Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Cheap partly-constructed houses lacking water and sewage, Lockland, Ohio. Carl Mydans, 1935.

Seamus Heaney, RIP

Too young... seemed likely he had some good poems left in him at 74...

Lifting (from A Lough Neagh Sequence)

They're busy in a high boat
That stalks towards Antrim, the power cut.
The line's a filament of smut

Drawn hand over fist
Where every three yards a hook's missed
Or taken (and the smut thickens, wrist-

Thick, a flail
Lashed into the barrel
With one swing). Each eel

Comes aboard to this welcome:
The hook left in gill or gum,
It's slapped into the barrel numb

But knits itself, four-ply,
With the furling, fat, slippy
Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly

That stays continuously one
For each catch they fling in
Is sucked home like lubrication.

And wakes are enwound as the catch
On the morning water: which
Boat was which?

And when did this begin?
This morning, last year, when the lough first spawned?
The crows will answer, "Once the season's in."

March on Washington, part 2

• TNC nails it again. Please read.
• Party of Lincoln?

Bayard Rustin

An American hero who, like A. Philip Randolph, needs to be remembered on days like today... and every day.

Happy People

Werner Herzog's "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" is a typical entry in Herzog's recent oeuvre, a documentary exploring human strangeness in extreme conditions... in this case, a year in the lives of fur trappers in a remote part of the Siberian taiga. It is a beautiful and fascinating movie. The trappers spend some of the year in the village with their families, but they prefer solitude and living off the land in their harsh environs, especially over the long, vicious winter. That's when they trap their wild sables in a variety of simple contraptions, moving in a circuit from hut to hut across their assigned hunting territory. Solitude is not quite correct, however, because there is always a dog. The partnership between man and dog is the central relationship of the movie, and a complex one. The dogs are valued--indispensable perhaps--and, in a way, loved, but also mistreated.

The economist in me couldn't help but wonder how they do it. The trapping production process appears to be surprisingly capital intensive. The short summer is devoted to repairing and building traps, and particularly to maintaining and stocking the network of trapping huts, which are rustic but quite robust structures, built to withstand the elements. There are snowmobiles and small motorboats to buy and maintain as well. Year after year, it's a considerable investment in time and money, and blood too: the mosquitoes are, well, beyond belief. All this for the occasional frozen, somewhat bedraggled sable pelt, crushed in a simple but effective deadfall trap. They must do it for fun, not profit... how strange is that?

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Convicts from the Greene County prison camp at the funeral of their warden who was killed in an automobile accident, Georgia. Jack Delano, 1941.

France "in decline"

A NY Times article finds the French lamenting their country's alleged slow decline and provides a laundry list of economic woes. Way down in page 2 one finds a few caveats... yes, the French economy "retains plenty of strengths." Sneering a little at those generous vacations, the reporter concedes that "When the French work, they work hard.... labor productivity... is still relatively high..."

Actually, France's real output per work hour in 2012 was sixth highest in the world, ahead of Germany, Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland. Not so shabby for a bunch of wine-swilling slackers!

Update: Dean Baker has more, and is more explicit about the not-so-subtle agenda behind the article. Here's a typical line, without any indication or evidence whatsoever regarding whose "underlying understanding" this is: "There is nonetheless an underlying understanding that there will be little lasting gain without structural changes to the state-heavy French economy." My guess is that it's the underlying understanding of people who would like to gut the French welfare state.

Louisa Jo (Louis) Killen, RIP

"We're all bound to go."