Why Brits Are Fat: Blame Earl Butz

That's right, according to this article:

The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.

Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.

By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap

That seems to be the thesis from King Corn.  And Butz doesn't disclaim the credit. In my opinion, it's all hogwash. Some day my ambition will be sufficient to document it, but not today. 

Romanticism and Reality: Farming

One source of my skepticism of the food movement in its various manifestations is the nagging feeling their vision is blurred by romanticism.  Seems as if many of the articles  and the blog posts are written by recent converts, eager to spread the word to all and sundry.  Now as a liberal I should be open to such revelations, but I retain enough conservatism to doubt, to ask for a tad more aging of the wine before I take communion.

This bit is prompted by this post from "Pasture Raised and Grass Fed from Stony Brook Farm".

Communal Moments

Ann Hornaday, the Post's movie critic, had an article about video on demand, noting the movement of movie watching from the theater to the home theater.  It fits with another article I read about how fast movies are in and out of theaters.

Back in the day (of my youth), the big movies came and stayed, and we watched in crowds.  Sometimes a good movie would run for months and months.  You knew if you didn't see it in the theater, you wouldn't see it.

Then came TV, and sometime after good movies started being shown on TV, but only every 10 years or so.  Gone with the Wind on TV was a big event.  Of course this was all on broadcast TV, one of the 3 networks would boost viewership by broadcasting a notable movie.   Gradually though more and more movies went to TV; just as gradually UHF stations popped up and cable TV started making its inroads.  And now, of course, movies are available 24/7 through many media.

Back in the day we had communal events, not only big movies but big prize fights, big political conventions, big World Series, big novels. And everyone (i.e., people on TV and in the newspapers and the periodicals) would talk about it.  There was a sense of a national community, although in retrospect some parts of the nation, such as the South, might have been left out. 

Today it seems that the cultural landscape is flatter, there's no big peaks, fewer unifying events.  9/11 and the mass murders, McVeigh, Columbine, Holmes, et.al. may remain but not much else.  There may, however, be a bunch of smaller events: parents seem to find community in following their kids activities much more closely than in my day, and there are more activities now than then.

DOD: We've Got a Problem Here

“Ship is inherently directionally unstable,” one Navy document said.

That's from a Project on Government Oversight post on the Navy's littoral combat ship.   Seems like it might be a problem.

Our Shrinking Government

Some conservatives like to bloviate about how Obama is socialist and is increasing the size and reach of government.  The standard riposte of liberals like me is to point to employment figures, which show the government, federal, state and local, as having gotten smaller since he took office.  That's true, but not the whole truth, as is illustrated in this paragraph from a Govloop post:

The Washington area has survived the recession fairly well, but that could change if the across-the-board spending cuts happen in January, that could change. That according to new analysis by the . The Washington region could lose 65,000 federal jobs and 96,000 federal contractor positions in the short term. WTOP reports that the region would be significantly impacted, mainly because of the federal payroll and procurement dollars the area receives from the federal government. [emphasis added]

There's room for a discussion of whether a government which grows by expanding contractor positions while shrinking career employees should be more feared by conservatives, or by liberals. We don't have that discussion.

Crop Insurance Audit

The threshold for a required audit of actual production history has been changed from $100,000 to $200,000.  Agweb reports here.  

I don't know if they do random audits of insurees with lower protection or not.
[Stu Ellis has a description of requirements here. ]

Filling Out Forms: Deferred Action

Wrote recently about Cass Sunstein and the OMB form approval process.  Today is the first day people can apply for "deferred action for childhood arrivals".  From the website:

Over the past three years, this Administration has undertaken an unprecedented effort to transform the immigration enforcement system into one that focuses on public safety, border security and the integrity of the immigration system. As the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to focus its enforcement resources on the removal of individuals who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety, including individuals convicted of crimes with particular emphasis on violent criminals, felons, and repeat offenders, DHS will exercise prosecutorial discretion as appropriate to ensure that enforcement resources are not expended on low priority cases, such as individuals who came to the United States as children and meet other key guidelines.  Individuals who demonstrate that they meet the guidelines below may request consideration of deferred action for childhood arrivals for a period of two years, subject to renewal, and may be eligible for employment authorization.

Here's the application.  Note it can be filled in online, which is good, and it has an OMB clearance.  I suspect it was put together in a hurry.  I wonder about the software backing it up.  Apparently the process means: fill out online and print the form, mail the completed forms to a "lockbox" facility with the fee.  The forms are scanned to pick up the data.

A couple of nits: some of the entry blocks are blue shaded, some aren't.  The drop-down lists of state abbreviations includes "AA" and "AE", which points up the error of not including state name.  I also question whether the language on the site is clear English, but then they're anticipating criticism.

More seriously--I see we're still imposing our name structure on the rest of the world (first, middle, last; which doesn't work well for some of the other cultures in the world).

Returning to my previous post: this example both fits and doesn't fit.  It is a case of a new program which requires a new information collection.  But since it's the President's own priority and a key to a reelection, I'm sure Prof. Sunstein cleared it personally through OMB.  And since it's still using a hybrid process to collect data (i.e. print completed form then scan) it's an example of how backward even the Obama administration's effort at egovernment are.

Post and Crop Insurance

This Post article on the drought picks up on the criticism of crop insurance from the EWG and Heritage.

Farming Is Dangerous

This post at Northview Dairy is a reminder that farming can be is dangerous.

Input and Output: the Milk-Feed Ratio

This post reports a long time low in milk-feed ratio (comparing the cost of feed and the price of milk--low is BAD). [Note: a delayed post.

"
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a preliminary milk-feed ratio of 1.29 for July. That was down significantly from June’s ratio of 1.38.
None of the milk-feed ratios on record, going back to 1985, have been this low. The lowest ratio recorded in 2009 was 1.45."