Mr.Beauregarde on Victory in Europe Day

A post on the remembrance of VE day in middle France, where no ministers or priests participate in the marches, where the headquarters of the Gestapo is still there, now used as an adult education centre, where the boundary of Vichy France is just 5 minutes away, and where a 15-year old identifies Hitler as an actor.

Am I Playing With House Money?

George Will and I don't normally see eye-to-eye, but his post on reaching 70, a tad after I did, is something I can mostly agree with.

He cites the end of racial segregation, the emancipation of women, the end of the Cold War, the advance of medicine, as major milestones he's seen.  Doesn't mention gay rights or the emancipation of the mind, AKA the Internet, or the liberation of the aged and their  by extending Social Security and creating Medicare.  But that's nitpicking, which I'm good at. 

Kids on the Farm

The Cotton Wife has a picture of a cute redhead.  New Yorker has a piece on Ree Drummond, also a cute redhead, who apparently is the biggest blogger of farm/ranch life (unfortunately just an abstract), but her blog is here. (Might as well add to her audience.) One common thread: kids learn to drive young on farms.

Am I a Hybrid

David Roberts at Grist has a post discussing a piece by a couple of military types, thinking about the future in the 21st century. He includes this paragraph to support his claim the military men are liberal:

"The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

Sounds to me like I'm something of a hybrid: I think I'd rate well on conscientiousness, but I don't like fast decisions (i.e., I'm indecisive); I have intellectual curiosity, but I don't do well on stimulation: change is bad at the personal level.

One Reason To Follow International Politics

I blogged about my interest in politics, specifically international politics back in the Cold War days.

The Archives does a document of the day, and yesterday's was a reminder of why it was easy to stay interested in foreign policy back in the 50's. It was a photograph showing the effects of a nuclear blast on a house a mile away.  Not only did we have Cold Wars (the Berlin airlift) and Hot Wars (French Indo-China, Korea) but we had nuclear and thermonuclear testing, all of which filled the news columns.

The Glass Ceiling Cracks a Bit More--Osama's Tracker

 "And notably, the NGA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] is the first intel agency to be headed by a woman: Letitia Long, an intelligence veteran." from a National Journal story on the tracking of Osama bin Laden.

(I suspect it traces its history back to, in part, the Army Map Service.

The Definition of Perpetually Bad Traffic:

From Chris Blattman: "Cars get snarled so long in traffic there are now shoe salesmen by the roadside. You have time to try on many, many pairs

Government Help for Flooded Farms

In the wake of the decision to blow the levee on the Mississippi, farmers are concerned about compensation for their flooded fields/prevent planting.  Back in the old days, when we had a disaster program in ASCS that was unrelated to crop insurance, for a while we had a rule saying: if the cause of the crop damage was something someone did, the farmer had recourse against the someone and the losses weren't eligible for disaster payments.  I remember early in my career a case of drifting herbicide which damaged a cotton crop.

And there were limitations on whether land between the river and the levee, or under Corps of Engineer easement, could be designated as set-aside

Later, the redoubtable Jamie Whitten, after whom the USDA administration building is named because he was the long-time head of House Ag (or maybe it was the Ag appropriations subcommittee) some of whose constituents were hurt by our rules, pushed through a special provision saying Uncle Sugar would pay regardless.

One of the good things about periodic redos of programs is you can clean out the special provisions which clutter up programs, like cow flops on a clean stable floor.

(Seems apparent to me that the Corps of Engineers should pay the compensation, not FCIC or FSA.  But that's not going to happen according to the Times article.

[Updated--see this farmgate post by Stu Ellis.] Politically and administratively it may be better to handle the situation as if the farmers had crop insurance, etc.  Of course, that once again creates moral hazard and lessens the incentive for farmers to comply with the rules in advance, because their representatives will get them off the hook afterwards.  It's called, not "too big to fail" but "too many votes to fail".]

My Precocious Interest in Politics: WWII and Cold War

Megan McArdle links to a post describing teenagers ignorance of Osama bin Laden. She says:

 I didn't know what Iran Contra was when I was in high school, and I was a sophomore when it happened.  Teenagers live in their own little world, only tangentially connected to the one the rest of us occupy.

Now she is sharp and interested in politics, but that experience contrasts sharply with my own experience.  Her commenters tend to agree, though some report early interest in politics. Personally I can remember opining pompously to a classmate about the possible successor to Stalin (at age 12-3?) and sitting on a panel to discuss current events in fourth grade.

Part of my early interest was aspirational; I was surrounded by older people whose opinions I valued and needed to keep up with the times.  I also had an elder sister who enjoyed the role of pedant. 

But part of it was likely the times: we'd come out of WWII and emerged into the Cold War, with the USSR getting the atomic bomb, and the arms race.  So current events were much hotter then than now, or even in the 1980's when McArdle was a youth.

A (Textile) Piece of History I Didn't Know

"Elihu Yale, who lived and worked in India for nearly three decades with the British East India Company from 1670 to 1699 donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut three bales of goods- Madras cotton, silk and other textiles from India – laying the foundation of their first building."

We think of textiles as British, not Indian. From a good post at Chapati Mystery: Remember Eric Rudoph?