Government Cheese

There was a time when the U.S Government stored 4 billion dollars worth of cheese in a cave. Yes, cheese. How did this happen?

During the Great Depression era, the price of milk had plummeted. And since a large portion of America were farmers, the Government would help a large portion of the country by helping them out. The USDA developed a "Price Parity Formula", which meant that if the price of producing something such as milk dropped below of what it costed to produce, the government would make up the deficit. This was succeeded by the Agricultural Act of 1949 which provided formal price support to farmers, by regulating the supply of commodities like wheat, corn, and dairy.

During the Oil Crisis of 1973, prices of food shot up, especially dairy products. Just a few years later, they plummeted again. To help dairy farmers out, President Jimmy Carter promised to raise the price of milk 6 cents per gallon. In addition, he passed a law that would make it go up every 6 months as well to account for inflation. He then signed a bill that pumped in $2 billion into the dairy industry.  This made it very profitable to produce milk, and farmers scrambled to produce as much milk as they could. There was no such thing as "too much", as the Government was there to buy up all the excess. However, the problem with milk, is that it spoils really quickly . Farmers had to turn the milk they produced into things like butter, powdered milk, and cheese, which stay longer. The government then bought all these things by the ton. Stockpiles ballooned, and the U.S had so much of all these dairy products which they didn't know what to do with. Powdered milk was donated to developing countries. In 1981, Reagan, who had pledged to cut down on food stamp spending, said that the U.S would distribute 30 million pounds of surplus cheese to people in need. Cheese manufacturers cut up their supply into 5 pound blocks, and shipped them to warehouses all over America, the biggest of which being a cave system near Kansas City, MO, which the government rented out. And thus, Government Cheese was born.

Left: Ronald Reagan holding a block of "Government Cheese." Right: Packages of Government Cheese and butter.


These bricks of cheese were distributed to food pantries, schools, and other organizations. It became the quintessential symbol of government food assistance, and was in the house of every American family on welfare. Author Bobbi Dempsey recounts her memory of growing up on Government cheese: "While the taste has been described in many ways... Many people have compared it to Velveeta—or, at least, the poor man’s Velveeta.In the school cafeteria, or when a friend came over and peered in the fridge, the cheese was a source of infinite shame—a clear indicator of our financial situation. But when no one else was watching, my siblings and I liked the cheese, or at least learned to tolerate it. My younger brother was probably the biggest fan, believing then (and now) that it made for the best grilled cheese sandwiches."

By the 90's, it wasn't as profitable to produce milk in such quantities, and as a result, Government Cheese started to disappear. However, in recent years, the USDA has gone back to purchasing surplus cheese. In June 2018, the amount of surplus cheese reached a record high at 1.4 billion pounds.
This is due to many factors. Aside from farmers overproducing and milk consumption going down, the Trump Administration's trade war, China and Mexico have slapped tariffs on American dairy products. Exports of Cheese went down 63% in China and 10% in Mexico. In addition, though American cheese consumption is increasing, consumers are preferring specialty, European cheese over mass-produced blocks of processed yellow cheddar.

Cheeseburgers. Mac n Cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Philly cheese steaks. Nachos and Cheese.  The iconic, fluorescent-orange America cheese had defined a lot of American cuisine. The government is doing everything it can to get us to consume more of this stuff. They're working with fast food companies and getting them to stuff as much cheese as they can in their products, resulting in creations like Pizza Hut's cheesy crust pizzas and Taco Bell's Quesalupa. The Trump Administration scaled back nutritional standards allowing more cheese and milk to be served in school lunch.



All in all, the one thing we can count on is that cheese, in its fatty salty goodness, will continue to play a large role in the American diet for years to come.

Sources:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/01/08/cheese-surplus-united-states
https://www.milkbusiness.com/article/how-government-cheese-came-to-be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPuY0oDGeiw
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/645459818/government-cheese-well-intentioned-program-goes-off-the-rails
http://fortune.com/2019/01/09/cheese-surplus-us-cheddar-2019/

The History of Emoji

In my previous post, I talked about how Unicode standardized text to appear the same on every device/platform by assigning each character to a number. If we can assign hundreds of thousands of numbers to store characters, we can do the same with pictures.

In the early days of computing, people did not have much to work with when trying to express their emotions through text. A solution to this problem was proposed way back in 1982, when people 
had difficulty telling the difference between humorous and serious posts on Carnegie Mellon University's digital message board. Faculty member Scott Fahlman came up with a solution: use the symbol :-( to denote serious posts, and :-) for jokes. He even instructed people to "read it sideways."

The modern emoji was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer for a Japanese telecommunications company called NTT Docomo. He wanted a way to convey information through icons, rather than having to spell out the word for it. So he sketched a set of 176 12 x 12 pixel images, and called them "emoji". The name combines two Japanese words "e" (picture) and "moji" (character). Unlike today's emoji, this early version put emphasis on symbols rather than faces.  
The original 176 emojis, created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999.


Emoji became a huge success, and other companies like Apple started to notice. In 2007, Google's software internationalization team petitioned to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium. Unicode accepted in 2010, and adopted 625 new emoji characters. Now officially their own language, they could be accessed on all devices. The Unicode Consortium adds new Emoji every year, and as of June 2018, there are 2,823 of them.

While the scripts of languages can usually only be read by the people who speak it, pictures can be interpreted by anyone. As a result, emoji reached a truly global audience. They have had such an massive influence in our day to day lives and our culture. A certain movie was made based on them, and despite a 7% on Rotten Tomatoes, it did turn a profit. And though Blogger's spellchecker doesn't recognize "emoji" as a word, Oxford dictionary named "😂" the 2015 word of the year. Though created with simple intentions, the presence of emoji are worldwide. They represent an era of globalization, and the diffusion of culture to all corners of the earth.

Sources:
https://www.rd.com/culture/history-of-emoji/
https://emojipedia.org/faq/
https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/press/news/2016/9/2/WOTY
https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/

Apollo 13

Apollo 13
After the landing of the Apollo 11 on the moon, six more Apollo missions followed by the end of 1972. Apollo 13 was one such mission, and was intended to be NASA’s third moon-landing mission. However, a malfunction in the rocket turned the mission into one for survival.  The spaceflight stands today as a demonstration of NASA innovation saving lives on the fly, and has been featured in a movie.
The astronauts on the mission were Jack Swigert, Jim Lovell, and Fred Haise. Lovell was the world's most traveled astronaut. He had three missions and 572 spaceflight hours of experience. He was in Apollo 8, the first mission to circle the moon, and flew two Gemini missions.
 The Apollo spacecraft was made up of two independent spacecraft joined by a tunnel: orbiter Odyssey, and lander Aquarius. The crew lived in Odyssey on the journey to the moon. It was launched on April 11, 1970. However, on April 13, when they were nearing the moon, mission controller Liebergot noticed a low-pressure warning on a hydrogen tank. At first, they thought that the hydrogen tank just needed to be resettled- a fairly routine procedure. Moments later though, power disappeared and oxygen pressured dropped. The crew notified Mission Control, with Swigert famously uttering, "Houston, we've had a problem." (It was the movie that changed the line to “Houston, we have a problem").
Luckily, the Aquarius was functional enough to provide a place for the crew to stay until they neared Earth. The Aquarius didn’t have a heat shield, so they would need to be in the Odyssey for entry. The crew was forced to power down every non-essential system in Aquarius to preserve power. They had no source of heat and had to ration food and water.
Lovell, Haise and Swigert returned safely to the Pacific Ocean on April 17. Despite the mission being aborted, it was called a "successful failure" because of the experience gained in rescuing the crew.The spacecraft design was reconfigured with better wires and an extra tank, and subsequent missions did not face the same problem.
In 1994, Lovell and journalist Jeffrey Kluger co-wrote a book about Lovell's spaceflight career that primarily focused on the events of the Apollo 13 mission. The book was called "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13", and spurred the movie "Apollo 13" (1995), which starred Tom Hanks. The movie won two Academy Awards and was filmed in cooperation with NASA.

Sources:
https://www.space.com/17250-apollo-13-facts.html

Why Bernie Sanders Needs to Step Down

      I figured it would be fitting to write my last Blogger post for this class as an opinion piece—you know me and my opinions.  As a staunch progressive who will be voting in the next election, I have found myself in a very tough and presumably relatable position: how do I choose between the 20 Democratic candidates already announced to be running in the 2020 presidential election?  It's especially difficult considering that the two frontrunners, according to polls, are the oldest candidates ever: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, respectively.  At this point, I believe Bernie Sanders needs to step down.
      Why only Sanders?  Well, Biden is currently in the first position, and we need to keep our strongest contender if we want to have a chance at winning the presidency.  However, on top of that, and perhaps even more significantly, Bernie Sanders is currently creating the divide amongst liberals.  He's too far left for the American voting population, and even if he did win, he would create an even more tense and reactionary Republican movement.  Many of the policies that he proposes have no explanation for their funding, yet sound so lovely that he dissuades voters from all other Democrat candidates that cannot offer free college tuition for all.  Sanders has repeatedly criticized his opponents, and in the 2016 election, became most unforgivable for attacking Hillary to such an extent that hoards of his supporters refused to show up to the polls and vote for her after her primary win.
      I wrote more, but it got deleted, so that's sad.  Essentially, Bernie is also problematic in his own policies.  As the senator of Vermont, he has repeatedly voted to represent the interests of his people rather than to assist those interests.  For example, he has time and time again voted against gun control, contrary to his apparently staunch liberal position in his presidential campaign.  In a country that is so tense, close, and opposing in its views on how to protect itself, it's very dangerous to put a man who is not consistent in his policies.  He has also acted problematically; once at an interview, he was asked how he planned on helping black women as president, which he completely ignored.  Additionally, he compared urban and rural guns, favoring the latter, and as he explained his inherent bias became clear towards white Midwesterners and against commonly colored cityfolk such as Latinos and African-Americans.
      He's too old, he's wishy-washy, and he is divisive.  There are tons of qualified candidates of diverse and important backgrounds and experiences, and it's their time.  For him?  It's time to step down... but that's just my opinion, of course.

Sally Ride

      Sally Ride was the oldest of 2 and born in Los Angeles California to elders in the Presbyterian Church. While she had long harbored an interest in science, she was also a nationally ranked tennis player. She attended and graduated from Portola Junior High School and attended Birmingham High School until she transferred to, and graduated from the private Westlake School for Girls.
       She then attended Swathmore College for 3 semesters, then went to Berkeley to take physics classes, then transferred to Stanford as a junior. She eventually graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor's in English and physics. She also went on to earn a master's and PhD at Stanford in 1975 and 1978 respectively.
        In 1978, she was selected to be one of 38 astronauts in NASA Group 8, which was the first to choose women. In 1979, she graduated and began to work as a mission specialist running the ground based capsule communicator for the second and third space shuttle flights. She also helped with the development of a robotic arm called Canadarm.
        On June 18, 1983, she became the first woman in space as part of the Challenger crew for STS-7. Her main job was to operate the robotic arm. In 1984, she again went to space in the Challenger and spent more than 343 hours in space.
         After the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, she was named Head of the subcommittee of the Rogers Commission, which investigated the cause of the disaster. 

Future of the political parties in America

Recently the Democratic and Republican parties have seemingly gone under a massive transition. They both integrated more populist aspects into their parties and were torn apart between the old center and the new younger radical. This division took place for the GOP under the Obama years when the party was forced under and the old Country Club Republicans ultimately lost influence to the younger and more populist TEA party faction. Trump embodies this new party that is more socially conservative, brash, and at least outwardly seems like a party of the people. He's taken a hard stance on immigration, rolling back minority rights, and weakening the federal government. Compare this to George H. W. Bush who realized the importance of legal immigration and the importance of the federal government.
Today another similar shift is happening within the Democratic party. Much of the old guard like Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and Joe Biden who are much more centrist in their beliefs and even willing to reach across the aisle is now losing influence to a new generation of Democrats. These Democratic Socialists are people like Alexandria Acasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders who stand for much more liberal if not even socialist views on healthcare, higher education, environmental policy, and welfare. 
Although personally, I do agree that there is a need for reform I believe that such political division within our country is not good. The inability to come to bipartisan agreements has become more and more frequent and can be quite disrupting. People are left as the collateral when the government shuts down because Congress couldn't agree on something. Today sectionalism is extremely high between the coastal population centers which are primarily blue and the rural middle of our country which is extremely red. If America is unable to reach a more practical return to center the shocks of such a polarized system will be more far-reaching than just a government shutdown. The inability to place another chief justice on the supreme court without a huge political scandal shows that the wheels of our democratic system are under threat because of our polarization. We are all Americans and all want the best for our country so we should act accordingly and not put party ahead of state.

Where is Terrorism?

Under the Bush administration, terrorism has become the center of American foreign policy. There has been active, aggressive American military and political involvement in the Middle East ever since George W. Bush declared the "War on Terrorism". America has established itself as the keeper of peace in the world, but should the United States continue to assert its dominance over conflicts in the Middle East? How much influence does terrorism has on the United States, that it should put its own country at risk by making enemies in the Middle East?

While our military is stationed far away in the Middle East, the main reason why there had not been a successful, notable terrorist attack on the United States is because that America employs a layered set of defenses in addition to military interference. According to New America's analysis on the threat of terrorism in the United States, 48% of jihadists are currently monitored by a direct informant, 24% are implicated by a tip from family members or the community, and 9% are implicated by a tip from the general public. This minimizes the possibility of organized terrorism under a network of terrorists. Individual jihadists may still be able to pose a deadly threat, but any individual in America may be able to pose a deadly threat. A high school shooter and a lone jihadist poses the same kind of threat, however, and the only real way of preventing these individual threats relies on internal security rather than global subjugation on terrorism.