Everyone Has His Own Taste

Stanley Fish reports on life in Delaware County, where some 160 years ago my great grandfather was a Presbyterian minister amid a thriving Scots-Irish community with good barns and nice houses:  It's now been invaded by aesthetes from the city, who say: 

It is anybody’s guess as to what will happen if this rumor [of a big development] ever pans out, and the people I talk to regard the prospect with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. Please no Gaps or Banana Republics, Charkut pleads. I really like falling-down barns and falling-down houses, Valk-Kempthorne tells me.

Curiosity: Sometimes You Do It Right the First Time

But not often.  See this Technology Review post.  However, it's nice to hear of people who stayed up late to know the result of the landing.  Reminds me of the days of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo.

White House Garden

Obamafoodorama has a post showing the President in the White House garden.  I don't recognize the vegetables, but they've got good growth.  Don't know if they have sprinkler irrigation or what--the DC area is down about 7 inches from usual rainfall. 

Farmer Software in the Cloud

The Times has a piece by a business professor describing some software applications, a couple of which reside in the cloud: FarmLogs and Farmeron,.

I suppose the next step will be communication between MIDAS and the data in such applications.

Correcting Errors: Does the Internet Help?

Somewhere on the Net this week there was a discussion of whether the Internet helps or hurts in correcting myths and errors.  It may have been Prof. Bernstein (or maybe someone else) who opined that some errors were checked and caught very quickly, while others persisted on and on and on.

In the latter category is this from Gail Collins in today's Times, in the course of beating up on Congress for not working on the postal system or the farm bill:

The Senate recently voted 64 to 35 to approve a new five-year authorization, which reformed some of the most egregious bad practices, like paying farmers not to grow crops. [emphasis added]

The truth is that we haven't had the authority to pay farmers not to grow crops  for at least 16 years (unless one includes the Conservation Reserve Program, which normally people don't and Ms. Collins is not).   But this error will probably never die, it's like the ejecta from a volcano eruption which has escaped into the atmosphere and persists, dimming the sun of truth.  

Marketing Quotas

FSA goes through the motions of determining whether to declare marketing quotas for upland cotton.  It's a nullity, because there's no way to determine the acreage allotments for cotton if quotas were declared.  If quotas are declared, the next step is to provide notices of farm acreage allotments to farmers, who then vote in a referendum whether to agree to the imposition of quotas.  The last referendum on wheat or cotton was back in the mid 1960's, and it was defeated. 

If Congress had any sense they'd kill the 1938 Act, the permanent legislation which comes back into effect whenever there's no farm bill passed before a crop year begins.

The Importance of Drudgery: Maintenance

As it happens, the Post has an article on Afghanistan, describing a post and equipment the Americans handed over to the Afghans which they lack the ability to maintain. And the Times has an article on the problems Assad's military is having maintaining its high-tech equipment, particularly helicopters, during the current hostilities.

The conjunction of the two is an occasion to once again observe the importance of drudgery.  Yes, it's ego-building to do things the first time, to buy fancy weapons, to give high-tech stuff to our allies.  It's good for us, it's good for our arms manufacturers, but it's bad.  Over the years I think I was pretty tolerant of my bosses, but what I couldn't stand was the people who had no regard for nitty-gritty, for the details, for all the steps needed to implement something and then, as I learned by painful experience, the need to spend time and money maintaining what we'd done.  It was all too easy for the big shots, for the guys in the ivory tower of the USDA Administration Building, to talk big.

Though I'm generally an Obama supporter, his administration started off wrong by talking of "shovel-ready" projects, as the President later admitted.  There shouldn't be many such projects in any agency, because you should be working on the stuff for which you have money, and not the stuff for which you may not get money.  And doing the work to take projects off the shelf and into the contracting process isn't likely to create many jobs.

Maintenance on the other hand could create jobs, but its got no sex appeal, no glamor. 

Me and Chipmunks

Via Ann Althouse, here's a piece with which I sympathize.  I have to admit, though, I reverted to my basic conservative side when I had to deal with an infestation of chipmunks in my garden.  Chipmunks are cute, but property is property and my vegetables are my vegetables.  I'm not sure what the food movement, all those urban gardeners, etc., do with the forces of nature against which we must fight.  Maybe you only get lots of pests when you've been gardening for lots of years.

Ink on the Finger

Josh Marshall says (Talking Points Memo) applying ink to a finger of a voter could eliminate multiple voting, which seems to be the worst problem voter ID might solve.  Works for me, as I've said before, though maybe only in comments elsewhere.

Conservatives Don't Like Crop Insurance: Texas and Cruz

Ted Cruz just won the Republican primary in Texas, meaning he's the next US Senator from there.  His reputation is: very smart, very conservative.  But I wonder--Texas agriculture is often beset by disaster, as witness the drought last year.  Not sure what its status is this year, but I'd be willing to bet during his 6 year term in office Texas will have some agricultural disasters.  And of course Texas ranching/farming is part of the self-image of Texas (all hat, no cattle, etc. etc.)

The Washington Times is a conservative newspaper, so I was struck this morning by a piece from a Heritage thinker, who picks up EWG's  populist viewpoint on crop insurance.  Big corporations profit at taxpayer expense.

So my prediction: at some point down the line Sen. Cruz will have to decide between his principles, as represented in the Heritage piece, and his constituents, who will need either crop insurance or a livestock disaster program.