Rep. Issa Praises Obama Administration!!

The nether reaches of hell must be starting to freeze.

This FCW article reports this comment by Rep. Issa:

"The whole Recovery.gov effort has been a great success. I’m taking no positive shots at how they spent their money, because I don't think it created jobs. But it accounted for funding in a more transparent way than ever before, and did so on a small budget," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said at an event hosted by the Data Transparency Coalition on Sept. 10.

I have to admit I was skeptical of it, I haven't revisited the site since its early days, and I still suspect a subject-matter expert could punch holes in the data for her subject area.  But the fact remains, even if its reputation is a tad higher than it deserves, it does set an example for the future and there weren't many scandals related to the Recovery Act spending, once we got past the early glitches about the quality of data.    So at least one gold star for the Obama administration.

(Hmm, since I'm feeling devilish today, what's the odds of having a similar database for Pigford payments?)

South Versus Midwest

Politico has an article on the farm bill, summarizing the current status but with some discussion of the sectional differences Midwest versus South.  It argues that current plantings have increased in the Midwest, not so in the South.  (I've a reservation, TX and OK are down in current plantings, presumably partially because of drought. )

The issue of basing payments on planted acres versus base acres is always interesting: do we want the safety net for current and future farmers or for past farmers?  The issue of yields gets less attention--I've lost track of whether there's been any updating of yields in past farm bills.  A fine kettle of questions for some philosopher/economist to figure out.

Did ARS Sponsor This Cutting-Edge Research?

(The answer is "no", but I need a title.)

What's the research?

"The probability prize was awarded to animal scientists at Scotland's Rural College for making two related discoveries. "First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up," read their citation. "And second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again."

From the Ig Nobel Awards, via University Diary.

French Fries and Good Sentences

Al Kamen in the Post muses about why the Capitol cafeteria didn't retaliate on British food after Parliament refused to back a strike on Syria, a retaliation like the one when they renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries" back in 2003 when the French didn't back GWBush.

"The greater problem in this instance may have been that no one particularly likes British food, so there weren’t many options: Fish and chips to Fish and French fries or  English muffins to Cowardly Crumpets?

The Things We Lose Without Knowing--the Milky Way

From Kottke -- most American kids will never see the Milky Way (from their home, I suppose).  Some, maybe even most, change is good, but some isn't.  (Though I suppose the people in this world who can see the Milky Way are often in what we used to call the Third World.  There's always tradeoffs--did Robert Heinlein write that?)

Harry Potter Kills

According to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, a scientific sampling of people who died in the last year would show that reading Harry Potter novels is strongly correlated with dying young.  If you don't read Harry Potter you're much more likely to live to a ripe old age.  Wish I had known that before I read the series.

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Amazing Sentence of Today: Judges Err

"n ordinary litigation, the judges misunderstand things all the time and reach decisions anyway, and they rarely discover all that they’ve misunderstood.  "

This sentence is from a very good post by Stewart Baker at Volokh Conspiracy discussing the recently declassified FISA court materials.  Don't know whether he's right, but two points he makes:

• the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence which played a disputed role in the failures to prevent 9/11 was unreasonably enforced by Judge Royce Lamberth.
• cultural differences between IT types and legal types may have played a big part in the problems.  (That's an attractive argument to me: I believe in Murphy's Law.)

EWG and Non-Farmers

The EWG has a new report out, entitled "City Slickers Harvest Cash Crop" which Ron Nixon in the NYTimes writes about here, using the hook of the possible extension of farm programs for another year.

EWG has a familiar theme: the inequity of government payments to people who don't get dirt under their nails.  Frankly, I'm surprised the amount here is so low:

 "Residents of America’s 54 largest cities collected more than $24 million in Direct Payment farm subsidies in 2012, according to new research by the Environmental Working Group."

Maybe I've been brainwashed by their previous reports to expect a bigger figure?    I wonder, would this headline sound better to the public: "Heirs of Deceased Farmers Receive Government Dollars"? Of course, we don't know how much is going to heirs, and how much is truly going to Wall Street investors in farmland, but probably the majority of the $24 million.  And it may be that those Wall Streeters who now own farmland have been suckered--if the current high farmland values turns out to be indicators of a bubble, they could be hurt.

EWG has Google maps of the locations of some recipients.  Perhaps significantly, they don't show NYC or Boston.   The distribution of locations in the DC area seems a bit more random than I'd expect; a few markers in the poorer areas, probably showing heirs.

Sailing, Sailing, Through the Arctic

I may have expressed the opinion that the vision of commercial ships sailing around Russia through the Arctic, particularly those sponsored by China, was an indicator of global warming.

Via Tom Ricks at the Best Defense, here's an interesting discussion of the practicality of this.  Bottom line, it's probably not practical for container ships, because they're limited in draft and beam, even though it can be significantly faster.

I recommend a book called The Box, on the development of containers.  This quote from the article is significant:

What is far more important than speed is reliability. Unlike the bulk shipping discussed earlier, schedule integrity is a key service-attribute for containerships. The Arctic will always suffer from periods of poor visibility and the potential for wind-driven ice, both of which can make routes with a comparatively low average transit time have a large variability around that average. More than half of all container cargo is now component-level goods—materials destined for factories for use in production processes operating on a just-in-time-type inventory-management system. That makes consistency, reliability, and schedule integrity of paramount importance. The key goal of container shipping is 99 percent on-time delivery. If this is attainable at all, it will be extraordinarily expensive using Arctic transit routes. Thus the variability in transit time that may be tolerable in bulk shipping is unacceptable for container shipping.

4-H and the Economist

Interesting article praising 4-H in The Economist, implying that it, extension, and land-grant u's account for the differences between US and European agriculture. 

I think not, actually--they contribute but don't "account".