Conservative. Tennessee (now). Ex-Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
Email complaints/requests about copyright infringement to clayton @ claytoncramer.com. Reminder: the last copyright troll that bothered me went bankrupt.
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." -- Rom. 8:28
I was reading Ruth for a Bible Study and ran into both the word and concept of gleaning. Leviticus 19:9-10 directs farmers:
9“ ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.
Why? Even the poorest could put a small amount of labor into gathering food without anyone else needing to do so. This provided for them but also meant that a poor person would need to invest some effort into getting himself fed. At the same time, he was not going (to mix a Victorian metaphor profoundly time machine blended) cap in hand asking for help. His dignity was undamaged. If you were too proud to invest a few minutes of your time locating unharvested food, you were probably too proud. From the Torah.com:
The concept of “charity” (tzedakah) in a form recognizable to us today – as giving one’s money or other asset to the poor without an expectation of compensation from the recipient – is a post-biblical development, beginning in the Hellenistic era and brought to fuller fruition in the earliest rabbinic texts (second-third centuries C.E.).[1] In the Hebrew Bible, support for the poor is provided in a variety of different ways.
Exodus 23:11 instructs landowners to leave their land fallow every seventh year for the poor to collect what grows. Deuteronomy (14:28–9 and 26:12–15) requires the tithe in the third and sixth years of the Sabbatical cycle, to be given to the needy, and advocates lending to the poor in the years leading up to the cancellation of debts every seventh year (15:7–11).
A number of prophetic texts also express special empathy for the poor, instructing the reader not to take advantage of the needy (Isa 3:14–15, 10:1–2; Jer 5:28; Amos 8:4–6) while the book of Esther (9:22) instructs one to give “gifts to the poor” on the festival of Purim.
Above all, the preeminent way to support the poor in the Hebrew Bible is through allocations to the poor at the time of the harvest, which is the focus of this piece.
Gleraning seems to have been a right recognized in English law at times:
If the right to glean was ever recognized in American law, I have not seen it. Yet the parallel to SNAP (or "Food Stamps" as the program was known in my youth) is very strong. When Food Stamps were created, the goal was to soak up the surplus that American agriculture had created by its high efficiency in the postwar era. This is why the Food Stamp Act of 1964 excluded imported foods:
(b) The term “food” means any food or food product for human consumption except alcoholic beverages, tobacco, those foods which are identified on the package as being imported, and meat and meat products which are imported.
In a weird analogy, SNAP was doing the gleaning on behalf of the poor. Farmers were producing food so efficiently that there was not enough demand to buy it all, so our government was doing a sort of post-harvest gleaning. Similarly, if you are of my generation, you remember US Government surplus cheese in the 1980s.
Most cities have laws prohibiting the poor from taking the garbage behind restaurants. There are certainly some health risks associated with this; I can also see why this likely leads to unsightly messes. I think laws allowing restaurants to leave in clearly marked locations food that has not gone bad that could be safely put in a timed container: eat until 10:00 PM. This could certainly alleviate hunger among the homeless. Is this an ideal way of doing it? No. But better than letting people fall through the crevasses of pride or bureaucracy.
I can see why farmers might not be keen on legal recognition of gleaning. It would certainly be commercially misused. Not everyone gleaning a harvest is likely to be responsible about access to the fields.
11/07/1973: Seven adults were bound and gagged in a
semicircle, then shot to death. Two children were found shot to death in a
bedroom. Police eventually arrested two persons for whom arrest warrants were
already outstanding for a similar crime in Phoenix One of the dead owned a
nearby market. An undetermined amount of cash was missing from its floor safe
which had not been forced. Police believed this mass murder was to cover up the
robbery. Police across Northern California were stacking up charges against
these two for murder and rape. Arizona executed one of them in 1978; the other
died of cirrhosis of the liver on death row in 1986.
My wife went to an ATM to get some cash. She walks up to the ATM and saw an account balance. Odd, almost like the previous customer walked away with exiting a menu. She put in her card and took out $20. The new balance in checking was essentially what it showed before she put her card in the machine.
Her first thought and mine was that someone put a scanner on the front of the ATM. The cleek in the store spoke little English. Our online account showed the transaction she had just completed.
I called the credit union. After hours goes to somewhere with cheap labor but at least English sufficiently free of accent that he could well have been an American.
He agreed it was odd, but he said some ATMs actually interrogate your card as you get close. Think of this as an aggressive tap card interrogation. He had me turn on alerts for all accounts just in case.
This was the key figure in a Nature Medicine paper published on Dec 14, 2021. It showed clearly that myocarditis after vaccination (in this case, Moderna dose 2) was higher! than myocarditis after sars-cov-2 infection for people <40.
There were a few remaining issues. While the denominator for vaccines is known with precision, the true number of infections is unknown. Many people don’t seek testing or medical care. So the red bar above will be shorter if you used a sero-prevalence (aka the correct) denominator. The authors needed to fix this.
The other problem is that this analysis lumps together men & women, while men have the greatest risk. Well, the authors are back with a new pre-print to fix this point, and here is what they find.
It is now clear for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna.
Pfizer boosters (Dose 3) have more myocarditis for men <40 than infection.
Myocarditis post infection is more common as you get older, in contrast with myocarditis post vaccination, which is more common as you are younger (reverse gradients).
