Corn for City Folks

For any "city folks" (my mother's term for those strange people who didn't live on a farm) who don't know how field corn is harvested, here's a photo sequence.

(Don't tell anyone, but I never harvested corn--dad had stopped growing corn for silage by the time I was conscious of farming activities.)

[Updated: And Erin has a nice picture marking the end of another farming cycle.]

USDA Reorganization

Government Executive has a piece on the reorganization of USDA administrative agencies. For some reason the USDA web site doesn't seem to have been updated to reflect the changes (which not to amount to much, except putting the staff offices and agencies under one person,  Pearlie Reed, formerly of NRCS, rather than reporting to the Secretary. Given that Vilsack apparently announced his intentions during the summer and implemented them effective for the new fiscal year, it reflects badly on the USDA website people.

[Updated--ran across this in a Farm Policy post: "

In a separate DTN article from yesterday, Jerry Hagstrom reported (link requires subscription) that, “Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan plans to continue managing the USDA budget even though a reorganization has placed the USDA’s budget office under an assistant agriculture secretary.
“‘I will be running the budget process at USDA,’ Merrigan said in an interview.
“Under the reorganization, the budget office is under the purview of Assistant Secretary for Administration Pearlie Reed. Since the change went into effect Oct. 1, farm lobbyists have expressed alarm that if an official below the level of deputy secretary made the presentations USDA would be in a disadvantaged position compared with other departments. One former USDA official said White House Office of Management and Budget officials always ask how they can cut farm subsidies, particularly cotton subsidies, and that only a deputy secretary or the secretary himself would be able to defend them against budget officials looking for programs to cut.”]

On Wingnuts

From The Monkey Cage comes this report of academic research, which finds the wingnuts on both sides tend, as opposed to more centrist people, to be:

• less trusting of institutions
• more paranoid and conspiratorial minded
  
• less tolerant of ambiguity
• more Manichaean (in religious terms--seeing life as a struggle between Satan and God)

And finally: "The far left and the far right also resemble each other in the way they pursue their political goals. Both are disposed to censor their opponents, to deal harshly with enemies, to sacrifice the well-being even of the innocent in order to serve a ‘higher purpose’, and to use cruel tactics if necessary to ‘persuade’ society of the wisdom of their objectives. Both tend to support (or oppose) civil liberties in a highly partisan and self-serving fashion, supporting freedom for themselves and for the groups and causes they favor while seeking to withhold it from enemies and advocates of causes they dislike."

The Seeds of the Agricultural Adjustment Act

From the 1930 blog:

"Two Farm Board members say will concentrate on controlled production and cooperative marketing by producers as “sole salvation for American farm industry.”

It wasn't clear to people at the time, but clearly the AAA was evolving from the lessons learned in the Hoover Administration--Hoover tried price support loans through the Farm Board and voluntary reductions through jawboning, but it didn't work. 2 1/2 years later the AAA would provide for the loans, but with mandatory reductions of production.

The Wingnuts on Both Extremes

At least every other day I think the wingnuts on the right and those on the left show the same symptoms (i.e., crazy).  This article in Slate pointing out both right and left are anti-H1N1 vaccine is an example of the anti-government, anti-science populism.  Read it all, but I particularly like the last sentence of the last paragraph:

"Still, the current political climate is a veritable petri dish for swine flu fears. For one thing, the debate over health care reform has already stirred up suspicions that the government will use medicine to hurt the American people. (The charges range from well-intentioned negligence to conspiratorial world domination.) Meanwhile, post-Katrina, lack of disaster preparation is unacceptable. Politicians would rather overreact than underrreact. Then, of course, there's the Internet echo chamber and the vague paranoia surrounding Obama. A caller recently told Glenn Beck that "if this were five years ago, I'd probably say definitely, I'll take it [the vaccine]." Perhaps there's a simpler, more elegant explanation for why members of both political extremes refuse to get vaccinated: natural selection."

Bits and Pieces

Trying to catch up with my blog reading I missed while traveling:

"... because the Senate pretty much runs on bad policy compromises.... Ezra Klein

"Conventional wisdom, whether it's mine or someone else's, deserves pushback...."  Kevin Drum

"..these are not just local haulers but transcontinental shippers running from Hamburg to Hanoi, Damascus to Delhi, the Urals to Hydarabad...." Fred Starr quoted at Tom Ricks' The Best Defense talking about using Afghan roads to connect faraway places.

Marijuana and Prioritizing Resources

I never smoked pot, so you might expect I'm dubious of the medical marijuana laws passed by some states.  It seems to me likely these, whatever their benefits to the ill, will serve as figleaves (spell check doesn't like that) for abuse.  So I'm not applauding the Obama administration's ruling that DOJ won't spend time prosecuting those who use the laws.  On the other hand, I'd much rather DOJ devote its attorneys to prosecuting tax fraud and those who try to cheat the farm programs. So, as usual, I end up ambivalent.

Travel Status

Will be on the road to NY the next few days so blogging will be light.

White House Garden--6 Months

Obamafoodorama has a post celebrating the 6 month anniversary of the White House garden.   I don't recognize many of the plants in the picture at the top (which doesn't mean much--I'm not good at recognizing).  The photo isn't dated--presumably it's maybe late August as there looks to be some fall lettuce growing. Because gardeners are competitive, I do wish there was more transparency.

Props to Obamas

As I was grumpy yesterday (see prior post), I'll give kudos to the Obamas for doing a family picnic for Secret Service and their families. It's a simple thing, but both good in human terms and in management terms.