Is Organic Farming the Wave of the Future? Maybe Not

Google Insights is one of Google's beta projects which tracks the change in the number of searches over time. Just for the heck of it I used it to search for "organic farming". I expected to see a steady rise, as it seems the subject is getting more and more attention. But, no--see this

The US isn't in the top countries and the interest seems to be declining gradually. Of course, one swallow does not a summer make. Maybe the Obama White House garden caused "organic garden" to show an increase? Here the trend line is flatter, and the US is in the top 3, but Obama doesn't seem to sparked enough interest to change the trend.

Angry Drunk Bureaucrat Strikes Again

In the third part of his guide to Pittsburgh for the G-20 conference, discussing shopping areas:

-The South Side - Shopping for young, hip urbanites
- Shadyside - Shopping for older, ironically hip urbanites
- Squirrel Hill - Shopping for Jewish, hip urbanites
- Downtown - Shopping for urbanites that need hip replacements

A good start to the long weekend.

Obama Can't Win

Two leading voices of the right have entirely opposite takes on our President:

Mr. Krauthammer in the Post this morning attacks him as Icarus whose wax wings have melted, an audacious flyer, all left wing, who is now going to have to operate as an ordinary politician. He says:

Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt

Meanwhile, Mr. Brooks in the Times writes on health care reform, seeing Obama as a timid politician who wrongly promised everyone they wouldn't lose an existing health plan if they liked it, urging him to be bold:

This is not the time to get incremental. It’s the time to get fundamental. Reform the incentives. Make consumers accountable for spending. Make price information transparent. Reward health care, not health services. Do what you set out to do. Bring change.

A Health Care Concern

Ezra Klein in the chat linked to in my previous post responded to a question that's been worrying me. Generally speaking on health care I'd be for a European system. Lacking that, I'd support some of the proposals being floated, Wyden-Bennett if it were feasible. My biggest concerns are:

• the reliance on cleaning up "waste" to fund some of the proposals. Ronald Reagan made me suspicious of that idea long ago. Certainly I could see some big gains in efficiency if the entire system were as efficient as say Kaiser, or the Cleveland Clinic. But I'm too cynical to believe "waste". It's like what's-his-face's (Stockman--remembered a minute later) magic asterisk in Reagan's first budget.
• the focus on dollars doesn't pay enough attention to the health-care supply. Even if, by some miracle, we converted tomorrow to a single-payer system which cut administrative costs from 20 percent to 5 percent, we still have a problem. We need the doctors, nurses, labs, and clinics to provide the additional health care needed by the uncovered population (or by the covered population whose illness is not covered). Granted, as Ezra says, it will take time to implement changes and the uncovered people need, on average, less health care than the currently covered, I still have my doubts. Given that part of the financing is to be cutting reimbursements to providers, that's a signal to youngsters considering health care to go somewhere else. (Perhaps, given Obama's budget, to education or environmental occupations.)
  

Those are my concerns, but on balance I still favor what's being proposed.

An Honest Blogger

Ezra Klein in a Washpost forum:

"Betsy McCaughey is really just a horrible, evil, awful, lying person who wants to make the world worse for people because that's her ticket to increased TV time."

Come on Ezra. Don't hold back. Tell us what you really think.

Ezra Klein: I can't. This is a family paper.

Out-of-Network Fees

A good piece in MSNBC on out-of-network fees. Although I like Kaiser, we got caught by this. Amazing, since we don't travel much but when someone takes ill on a trip, it's hard to be rational.

The Funniest Sentence Today

From Angry Drunk Bureaucrat, part of his guide to Pittsburgh for the G-20:

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is noted for its collection of old fossils, which make up the core of the local Democratic Committee.

Read the whole thing--he's in rare form.

White House Garden Video

Via Obamafoodorama, the White House has released a video on its garden. It's a puff piece, including a clip from the Victory Garden planted in 1943. Sam Kass observes that garden was over-hyped, as the reality turned out to be rather small, smaller than Michele's.

The video includes a time-lapse sequence of the garden, up through July. Kass claims it had produced over 200 pounds of vegetables by sometime in July. I'm not sure how impressive that is, but I give them credit for keeping it going. Many new gardeners give out by mid-summer.

I can't resist a couple snarks criticisms, though:

• Kass talks about amending the soil, apparently to adjust the N P K figures. What I don't see is the first and most important step in the organic gardening ideology: adding organic matter. If I recall, the USDA garden got some compost from Pennsylvania. But the White House garden's soil looks rather orange/red, not nice and dark brown, throughout the video. I'm not even clear whether they tilled the sod under, or removed it.
• someone kept the garden pretty well weed free. But it wasn't through the use of the second primary element of organic gardening: mulch. Mulch adds organic matter, and keeps down erosion when we have the strong rains often associated with our thunder storms. But it looks as if the WH just weeds and weeds. I hope that's Malia and Sasha doing the weeding--weeding is educational and character building. That's what my Calvinistic and Lutheran forebears would have said, but mostly it's just hard on the back, which is all the more reason young backs should pain, rather than the middle-aged guys from the Park Service who did the original tilling.
• back to organic matter. As I say, that's the key to organic gardening, and any good garden is only as good as its compost pile, at least that's what the organic nuts gardeners say. So where's the White House compost pile or bin? That should be front and center in this operation.
• where's the tomato count? The video doesn't go into August, so you can't tell how many plants they had, but tomatoes are the best argument for home gardens you can have.
• where's the fall plantings? By now they should be planting for fall, unless they're going to cheat again by buying seedlings.
• and the video could be better.
  

I have to think there's a lot of PR in this. And I can sympathize: Michele wouldn't be the first beginning gardener to have grand plans for all the work she and her girls are going to do, only to find out as the summer goes on that real life intervenes with other priorities. You have only to look at a handful of the plots in the community garden where my wife and I garden.

Cavalry in Poland

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries puts up a picture of her father-in-law, a cavalry officer in the Polish Army on the eve of WWII.

The picture can stand for many things, but it reminds me how long it takes to make changes. Yes, there were cavalry fights in WWI, but very few and none significant (unless you count camel cavalry and T.E. Lawrence). But here, 21 years later, a whole generation, a sovereign nation with brains and know how is still putting cavalry in the field. (As a side note, the Poles you remember were the ones who originally figured out the German Enigma machines, enabling Ultra to become a decisive factor in beating Hitler. ) Of course, the German Wehrmacht still moved by horsepower, but I don't think they had cavalry.

Prediction--Vera Lynn

I suspect there's enough old fogies like me to see her rise on the charts in the US. I'm too cheap to buy her records but YouTube is good.