An Amazing Sentence

From an Ann Althouse post on Andrew Sullivan's defense of Obama:

"Sullivan's analogies and metaphors are a crazy quilt of a mixed bag of bouillabaise."

Base Versus Planted, Continued

From David Rogers at Politico on farm bill negotiations:

In aggregate numbers, the estimated 260 million base acres counted today in farm programs are not so different from the average of real “planted” acres. But within that universe, huge shifts have taken place as corn and soybeans have grown more dominant while rice, cotton and wheat plantings have declined
For example in the South, about 12 percent of the base acres went unplanted in a recent year compared with just 3 percent in the Midwest. Oklahoma and Texas alone accounted for more than 4 million unplanted base acres or 26 percent of the total for the nation that same year.
At the same time in Midwest states, plantings over base totaled almost 9.5 million acres in 2010 — more than double that of the South. And in Kansas and North Dakota, corn plantings have soared as land has been pulled out of the conservation reserve program.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/farm-bill-crop-subsidies-agriculture-congress-corn-soybean-interests-100758.html#ixzz2mioXC5Mu

 

The reallocation/adjustment process he's predicting will keep FSA offices busy for a while.

Yale Foodie Meets "Real Farmers"

The Yale Sustainable Food Project has an organic operation at Yale.  It's been going for several years (I keep following it thinking the student enthusiasm will wane, but it hasn't).

In this post, a Yale foodie meets up with a Farm Bureau summer legislative picnic.  Sounds as if both sides learned a bit.

Cotton Farming Today

NPR has a five chapter feature tracing the history of a cotton t-shirt.  The first chapter is focused on a Mississippi cotton farm.  Surprisingly, though he bought 5 $600,000 cotton pickers last year, his total USDA subsidy on the EWG database is $467,000 for 2000-2012.

The Accuracy of Cost Estimates on Regulation

Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg writes on the estimates which are required for new regulations.  A study shows there's no systemic error (bureaucrats underestimating costs or overestimating benefits), although the estimates probably aren't very accurate. 

What would be more interesting to know is how often the analysis results in changes to the regulations or dropping the effort altogether.  I'm still waiting for a thorough redo of the regs on paperwork and regulations to make them fit the 21st century.  Not holding my breath though.

On the Importance of Sex

For science.

Josh Marshall's TPM Blog has a message from a reader asserting the importance of "sexy science" to raise the interest level and the dollars for all science. 

Words of the Day: Making Sausage

"In general, I feel that I’ve experienced a strong pattern in which uncovering new information about an organization or intervention (which I previously understood only at a superficial level) tends to lower rather than raise my confidence in it."

From a post at Givewell.org,written in reference to evaluating NGO desirability as objects of giving. I'm not whether I got there from Chris Blattman or Roving Bandit, but I think the statement applies broadly, specifically in the sayings about not looking too closely at how sausage is made.  As a general rule, we over-generalize, based on limited information and the reality is much more complicated than we think.

A Revolutionary Thanksgiving

Boston 1775 provides a dash of sour to go with the sweetness of our modern Thanksgiving: the sort of meals some of our soldiers enjoyed back in the Revolution.

Base Acres Versus Planted Acres

That's the dispute going on now, according to today's Farm Policy.  Base acres avoids problems with the WTO, planted acres reflect current operations, not something many years in the past.

Sounds like one option is going back to 1977 and the "normal crop acreage".  As someone said: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes".

How the Presidency Works, or Doesn't

Conor Friedersdorf has a post up, asking why President Obama would have said the healthcare.gov site would work.  Obama himself says: he's not stupid, he didn't know the problems.  Friedersdorf cites a NYTimes article showing that the developers were well aware of many problems in the months before October 1. He writes:

It does not seem credible that Obama was unaware that failure was likely. And if he really was unaware, the implications are extremely unflattering. Either he failed abjectly to ask the right questions of a staff that was also derelict in informing him, or else he asked the right questions and his staff misled him.  What the Times story confirms is that the launch of Healthcare.gov wasn't the sort of failure that reasonable actors could have failed to anticipate beforehand.

As it happens I'm reading (struggling through actually) a recent biography of John Kenneth Galbraith.  He was an adviser to JFK while serving as ambassador to India in 1961-2, had his own back channel to the President, and was audacious in his infighting (like stealing a highly classified copy of a report to which he'd been denied access off the desk of the NSC type, while the NSC guy's attention was on a phone call, then writing a preemptive counterblast for JFK). 

It's a dense and scholarly effort, which goes rather broadly into the infighting over whether and how strongly to intervene in Vietnam.  And based on the narrative, JFK's decisions were sometimes/often evaded and ignored by the NSC/State/DOD figures.  The bottomline: not only did the flow of decisions from the President to the bureaucracy get interrupted, the flow of information from the bureaucracy to the President was uneven and incomplete.  JFK was smart enough, probably having read Neustadt's book on Presidential Power, to have multiple sources; BHO may not have been that smart.