A Blast from the Past--The Hammer Award

The Hammer Award was an Al Gore, Reinventing Government, idea to recognize bureaucrats who had been innovative. Al Gore, for those of you who are young, or old with bad memories, is the man who used to be Vice President of these United States before he was the man who used to be President.

I was trying to research procurement procedures, just being bored on a Friday afternoon and with nothing better to do, particularly as a reader had expressed frustration with the Government's process. So I did a search on "programming" on the GSA site and got this result, with the Hammer Award as the top result. Makes me real confident in the currency of the site.

Fast Tracking the Stimulus, Not So Much

The Government Executive has an article on the various problems the administration is running into with its stimulus package.

Dr. Shiva Again

Since I took one crack at Dr. Vendana Shiva, I might as well take another. This Post article today on the burgeoning middle class in rural India paints a different side of the picture than the poor, oppressed farmers committing suicide she has depicted in the past. An excerpt:

India's rural destiny still depends on good monsoon rains and robust agricultural production, but four years of bumper crops and heavy government investment in rural infrastructure have given birth to what some analysts call an emerging economy within India.

In the dusty market along a bumpy road in Yadav's village, 40 miles south of New Delhi, sales of microwave ovens, washing machines and 32-inch, flat-screen plasma televisions have risen in the past year. Branded-clothing stores called Rich Look and Charlie Outlaw have sprung up, looking to attract upwardly mobile farm youths.

I suspect the truth is in between--commercial, yes "industrial", farming with its chemical fertilizers produces winners and losers, Dr. Shiva sees only the losers, this article shows the winners.

Carbon Offset for the White House Garden?

The first lady makes the front page of the Times and the Post style section with the announcement of the White House vegetable garden.

As they're apparently digging up the lawn to create it, I think they might need to buy carbon offsets for it. If I understand correctly, and I may not, any conversion from permanent or perennial vegetation to annual cropping means a net release of carbon. But, all cynicism aside, it's a nice symbolic gesture.

Carbon Credits, A Pipedream?

Sec. Vilsack may be overpromising (I know, he's a politician so that's totally surprising) when he says farmers can replace direct payments with payments for carbon credits. That's the message of this Marcia Zarley Taylor post at DTN:

The number one challenge facing pro-carbon trading farm groups at the moment is proving that agriculture's contribution to carbon reduction can be real, "additional" and permanent, others Ag Carbon Market Group members say.

Here are two GAO products which are relevant

FSA Interfacing With IRS

According to Sec. Vilsack, FSA will now require producers to sign a waiver form to permit IRS to provide income data to FSA to check compliance with adjusted gross income requirements. (It's a followup to a GAO audit.) See the press release here.

Note: the public doesn't want bureaucratic red tape, but it wants payments made to eligible people and it wants IRS data kept private. How does a bureaucracy square the circle: a form.

So Much for Conservative Scare Tactics

I remember the great Panama Canal fight in the 1970's--a hot issue which Reagan rode to the nomination by demagoguery. Then in the 1990's when, under the treaty's terms, we were to hand the Canal over to the Panamian government, some conservatives got all outraged that Hutchinson-Whampoa, a Hong Kong firm, would operate a terminal at one end or the other. Well, almost 20 years on and the sky has not fallen. Indeed, the Illinois Corn Growers seems to be using Panamian management as a stick to beat the US with:

"[the ICG spokesman said]says that while improvements are still pending on U.S. locks and dams, Panama is improving their canal to grow traffic through that waterway.

"And the reason they are doing this, and they are spending billions of dollars, is because they want to bring Capesize vessels, which are the largest ocean going vessels out there, through the Panama Canal," said Lambert.

My Face

Finally got around to updating my profile, and including my official passport photo shot. I may be self-centered, but I'm not fond of my looks as a senior citizen. Fortunately, I don't have to look at the picture as I write a post.

One Cell to Rule Them All

The NYTimes has an article on the cellphone (i.e., Iphone) as a universal remote.

On its blog, there's a suggestion to convert cellphones into the SecurID device. As it says: "For those of you who don’t work for security-conscious corporations, a SecurID is a little LED display that goes in your wallet or on your keychain, that flashes a different six digit number every minute or so. You need to enter that number, along with a user name and password, to get into some computer systems."

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.