Dr. Shiva Is Wrong

At Blog for Rural America, Steph Larson reports on the organic farming conference. Including this nugget:

To a packed audience, Dr. Shiva remembered the roots of industrial agriculture, which was born out of a need to find different uses for the chemicals of war [emphasis added]. Now seeds are patented and controlled by only a few multi-national corporations, while producers are driven further into debt and suffer from hunger. As agriculture becomes more consolidated and fewer people control our food supply, Dr. Shiva asserted that the very health of our democracy is at risk.

The bolded phrase is ridiculous nonsense, though a meme popular among the left food community. (Dr. Pollan repeated a version of it in "Omnivore...". )

The reference presumably is to the Haber-Bosch process, which was developed before WWI in order to avoid the need to import nitrates from Chile. The nitrates were particularly important in European agriculture. Now gunpowder originally was made of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpeter (or "nitre" or potassium nitrate). And Germany's access to Chilean nitrate during WWI was cut off by the British blockade, so the Haber-Bosch process was used to make nitrate for explosives. "The Alchemy of Air" is a fast-moving narrative of the developments in this area.

Sentence of the Day:

From Dana Milbank, Post, describing a press breakfast on GM's prospects:

As Wagoner [GM CEO]described the company's gloomy economic forecast, the moderator, Dave Cook, [of the now on-line only Christian Science Monitor] was sympathetic: "We're from the newspaper business. We understand."

Email and Health Care Costs [Revised]

The NYTimes bits blog covers a study of Kaiser Permanente:

The study, focusing on the experience of Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii when it implemented electronic health records, secure e-mail and a Web portal, found that patient visits declined 26 percent from 2004 to 2007.

Makes sense to me. Matter of fact, Kaiser has the same setup in the DC area and I've used email to avoid office calls. I think it works well for those who are averse to doctors (me) anyway but who also have a bit of hypochondria (me again) and who are into researching on the Internet (me). An ache triggers the research, but email allows me to scratch the itch without wasting the good doctor's face time.

This effect may be just as important as the other pluses: "The long-awaited transition from paper to electronic records is considered essential if doctors and hospitals are to improve coordination of care, manage patients with chronic disease, lessen the wide variation in how medicine is practiced and monitor quality." from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

[Had a comment on the original post I wanted to get rid of --hence the revision. But I'm taking advantage of it to add a comment on the Wash Post op-ed questioning health IT. While the arguments have weight, IMO one could make the same arguments against many of the advances over the last 100 years. There's always trade-offs and a learning curve. But basically I believe in progress.]

Republican Star Believes in Nationalizing Industry, Not Banks

That was my reaction when I saw this from brownfield (the piece mentions Bobby Jindal as involved in the negotiations):

Poultry processor Pilgrim’s Pride has rejected the latest offer from the State of Louisiana and Foster Farms for the plant in Farmerville, Louisiana. As part of Chapter 11 restructuring, Pilgrim’s Pride announced in February it is going to idle the plant which employs 1,300 people. The State of Louisiana offered to go 50-50 with California-based Foster Farms to buy the plant for $40 million. Pilgrim’s Pride rejected that offer saying it was not enough.

Most Amusing Sentence (for a Cynic of Goo-Gooism)

From a Farmgate piece:

"Recently an agricultural policy analyst for the Congressional Research Service also looked at the ACRE program in an effort to explain to Members of Congress what they had done in creating it."

Deprivatizing the Iraq War

This Post article from Monday reports on the phase-out of private contractors in Iraq, partially by converting from contractor personnel back to government. Much of it is due to Blackwater's being no longer welcomed by the Iraqi government. And to the fact the agreement between the US and Iraqi government doesn't cover private contractors, so their possible use of force is not protected.

Thus, the US is moving some work (and the experts) back into government. That way, the people are government employees protected under the US-Iraq agreement.

As I've said before, there's always trade-offs, in this case the flexibility of private contractors has both bad and good aspects.

Blogging Without Knowledge

A cynic might say my title fits all bloggers. But it fits this post. I've done no research into cryonics. But I do follow Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias, who seems to have that bee in his bonnet. The problem I have with freezing my brain in the hopes of future technological advances is: my brain is used, not just previously owned, but used. It's got lots of miles on it. So my choice is: kill myself now, before my brain is entirely defunct in the hope of a future refurbishment which still preserves my memories (some I'd gladly forget), knowledge and personality or continue on. There's no mystery which I'd choose, and which choice most any human will take.

You Think?

From Power Line:
"The 2002 NIE estimate claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction seems to have been wrong"

Vilsack, Congress, and the Pay Limit

Secretary Vilsack is still plugging the changes in payment limits according to Chris Clayton (wrote a letter to the Des Moines Register) and here, despite the fact the House Ag is four-square against
and here

I think (and since I started this 3 days ago, most have agreed) OMB or the Department screwed up the original proposal in the budget--it sort of makes sense that if the Census shows farms with gross income < $500,000 decreasing to tie your proposal to that metric. Except it doesn't, if you know anything about farming or had some history in the farm programs, so I agree with Peterson's guess that it wasn't really staffed with USDA. That aside, if you like the point of the policy, the metric can always be fixed. Use an AGI of $x. Or, adopt my pet idea, a graduated reduction based on AGI, following the EU.

Senators Are Like Horses

Publicity about "Sunshine Week"--making government more open. But a cautionary note pops up in a Post op-ed on the Charles Freeman fight (the pick for the National Intelligence Council who withdrew). The writer, in minimizing the importance of the council, notes the National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war was read by only 6 senators, and 77 voted in favor of the resolution. So senators are like horses, you can make the document available, but you can't make them drink it in.