The Story Behind the Forest Service Sale of Warehouses

I was fiddling around, resting from some landscaping efforts (these days I work a half hour and rest for 1 1/2) and found the Forest Service has a bunch of warehouses for sale in Illinois. They're listed on the White House's website for sales of surplus government property.  Now I don't think of the Forest Service as having a lot of action in the East so I was curious.  What seems to have happened is this: the Army surplused (presumably through a BRAC) the Joliet Ammunition plant which covered 20,000 acres near Joliet. They had to do an environmental clean up of the land.  The Forest Service picked up some of it, or maybe all of it.  They say:

The Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie was established in 1996 on the former Joliet Arsenal. It is the first national tallgrass prairie in the country and one of the newest units of the National Forest System.   Midewin represents a major effort to restore 20,000 acres of farmland and industrial land to a unique American landscape and the complex ecology of the prairie. Its mission also includes providing education and recreation opportunities. All of Midewin’s programs and progress are thanks to the support of hundreds of volunteers and partner agencies, businesses, and organizations. Midewin Tall Grass Prairie site

So the 10 pages of warehouses  and other buildings, including some as small as 26 square feet, FS lists for sale are really storage buildings associated with the old Army Arsenal.

[Updated:  Turns out almost all of the 175 buildings in Maryland are at the Beltsville location of the Agricultural Research Service.  Wonder if the building my uncle once worked in is included.]

Turnover at FSA

Chris Clayton noted the turnover at USDA, including FSA.  One acting administrator has returned to California so another comes in from Montana. It's an undesirable situation.  The administrator may or may not be a great leader, but it's for sure that no acting administrator will be great.  The best you can say will be: "for an acting admin, he's pretty good". 

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".]