re: #234 Shiplord Kirel: Fan of USPS, Goodyear, and Oreo

Another example of yokel resistance to science, different issue though.
In the former dust bowl (Lubbock, etc. where I lived and worked for many years) God gets most of the credit for ending the Dust Bowl through increased rainfall. If so, the Dust Bowl would have returned during much worse droughts in the 50s and later. It didn’t. The real solution was contour farming, where farmers plow their field so the furrows follow the contour of the land rather than in geometrically straight line. This was developed by USDA scientists through research at places like Texas A&M and the University of Nebraska but it was monumentally difficult to get dryland farmers to accept it. They knew better than a bunch of pointy-headed college types, even though the latter were mostly farm raised themselves.
It has been my own observation that this probably had a lot to do with the demographic changes of the 40s and later. The dumb yokel farmers who relied on instinct and superstition went bust, sold their lands to smarter neighbors and moved to the cities and burbs during World War II. Yokels and hicks still exist in abundance but they aren’t farmers these days.

:sighs: We’re gonna die surrounded by yokels, hicks and idiots, aren’t we?