"Fun To Be Around"--A Founding Father

I think Henry Knox rates as a founder, certainly a leader in the Revolution and Washington's Secretary of War.  Boston 1775 post on the relationship of Knox and Washington uses the phrase "fun to be around" in describing Knox and his wife. 

While I know it's true, people in the past were fun to be around, somehow I never think of them that way.

Gun Control: A Modest Proposal

Three things strike me about mass slayings using guns in the U.S.:

• the shooters are young males
• the shooters aren't NRA members that I know of.
• most of them have multiple weapons.

That leads me to this modest proposal:

• permit men to buy 1 gun every other year on their birthday, or
• permit men to buy a gun if they provide proof of being an active member of an NRA club for at least 1 year.

 In theory that should slow down the accumulation of weapons and mean that they're successfully handled social relations with others for a year.

Not that I expect anyone to take this seriously, but I get tired of the fights liberals have with the NRA.

Surprise of the Day: Fewer Gun Owners

While the US has gotten much more permissive on issuing permits to carry guns, what's surprising is that gun ownership has declined very significantly in the last 40 years.  That's from John Sides at the Monkey Cage.  Once you stop to think, we've become a more suburban nation over the years, and suburbia doesn't hunt and often doesn't have guns.

Climate Change Bad News for Dairy

The "standup economist" has gotten links from Prof. Mankiw and Paul Solman at the Newshour.  He's funny, but he does serious research, including this paper projecting the decreased production of dairy cows resulting from higher temperatures of climate change.

The research has been so strong that it inspired progressive students to rally in support of Holsteins, as described here.

The GRH Zombie Rises from the Dead?

Reading the Congressional Research Service report on sequestration it seems to me that Gramm-Rudman-Hollings is starting to stir.  (GRH for the whippersnappers in the audience was the attempt in 1985 to fix federal budget deficits, by applying a flat percentage reduction to federal expenditures if certain conditions weren't met.  In 1986 we reduced deficiency payments by a factor (I think 4.6 percent) under GRH.  The result, when combined with the System 36 automation and the new farm bill, was total disaster administratively.  That was partially my fault because of the way we ended up applying payment limitation, and partially fiscals because we didn't have the coding and entries for refunds in place.) 

I wish FSA well if they have to apply sequestration in the new year.

No One Ever Washed a Rental Car

That's my best memory of something some economist once said.  Turns out the Zipcar is just another rental, according to this from Treehugger.  The advantage Zipcar presumably has is their continuing relationship with their customers and computers to track when their customers fudge on the agreement.  It's just another way in which modern Americans trade privacy for advantage in the age of the Internet.

The Promise of Satellites for Agriculture

Back in the day ASCS had an Aerial Photography Branch in the Farmer Programs Division (and two labs, one in Asheville and one in Salt Lake).  With Comsat Congress started the process of privatizing the exploitation of space (in 1962).  We were young then, and full of hope that science fiction dreams would come true.  So ASCS dipped its toe into the world of satellite sensing and satellite photography, thinking someday we'd be able to assess crop conditions and acreages from space. We had for a while someone stationed in Houston just to work with NASA on this area.

I'm not sure of the history between then and now, but this earthobservatory image from NASA shows what's possible now, in the way of assessing drought.

Question for Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney

What's your position on taking legislative action to help drought-stricken farmers in 2012?

Secretary Vilsack raised the question yesterday, suggesting Congress needed to act.

[Updated: via Obama Foodorama here's the briefing today at the White House--Vilsack is focusing on livestock producers. Back in the day we used to have the Livestock Feed Program for these sorts of situations but I guess it got cut.]

[Update II: Got around to doing what I should have done--check the FSA webpage.  Apparently the old LFP got reauthorized under different titles and in different forms, but the authorities in the 2008 farm legislation expired Oct 2011. ] 

Question of the Day?

"I wonder how the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone down if Kennedy and Khrushchev had relied on Twitter instead of diplomatic cables?"

From a KevinDrum post noting Russia responded to the latest explosion in Syria via Twitter.

After This, the Deluge (of 2012 Disaster Ideas)

Chris Clayton quotes Sen. Stabenow pushing for House action on the farm bill, goes on to say:

"This [is] another reason to pass a farm bill now so that we can not only pass what we have in the farm bill now in terms of disaster assistance, but I think we need to be strengthening that for 2012," she said.

See my post on the 20 percent of uninsured farmers. When you live a long time, you can be prescient.