Organic Farming Has a Weakness

 Give credit to Grist for publishing this piece on regenerative grazing (a version of organic farming which reduces carbon emissions from beef cattle by capturing carbon in the soil).

A new analysis says there is indeed a big reduction in emissions, but the problem is the regenerative system requires more land, 2.5 times more land.

I may have blogged on this before--I think this applies to row crops as well.  Doing a rotation among row crops, small grains, and legumes requires more land for the legumes, as well as a market for the hay.

Impeachment?

 I believe Trump deserves to be impeached, again, but I don't believe there's enough time to do so.  I fear setting a bad precedent for future impeachments if we don't devote more time to developing the case, and we don't have the time.  

Nor is there enough support in the Senate to convict.

So my bottom line is for Congress to pass a resolution of censure.

Congressional Review Act Lives!

 Slate notes  that Warnock and Ossoff's victories mean the reviving of the Congressional Review Act.  

I've posted about it before--it briefly allows Congress to revoke regulations passed within the last 60 business days, and makes it more difficult to reinstate them later. That last bit hasn't been tested yet, while the Republicans made extensive use of it in 2017 to revoke Obama's last regulations.

I suspect lawyers will be interested to see how things play out. I know the papers have cited a number of different issues on which the Trump administration has been moving recently. One of the most recent was limiting the basis for regulatory action to research for which the data is publicly available, an issue of big concern on climate change. 

Unbelievable But Not Unprecedented?

 I haven't thought the events at the Capitol today would happen.  So I'm very surprised.

But, I happen to be reading American Maelstorm,by Michael Cohen, on the 1968 election.  It's a reminder that we've had tough times before. We easily forget how much unrest we've had in our past.

Thank You, Joe Manchin

As pointed out here, Joe Manchin won reelection in an incredibly adverse position and time. And his reelection is now key to Democrats winning control of the Senate.

More on Vaccinating

I posted yesterday about a chance un the 1960's to lay the basis for an efficient way to vaccinate the public.

Today a Post article reinforces that--a quote:

Israel’s vaccine success is made possible by its small size (slighter larger than New Jersey) and the efficiencies of its nationalized health system, in which all 9 million citizens hold identity cards and register their electronic medical files with one of the country’s four national health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

Israel also maintains a national vaccination registry, first designed for childhood vaccinations, that will be used in the coming weeks to monitor immediate and long-term progress of the coronavirus vaccine program.

I suspect one of the arguments in the 1960's against a national identity system was the specter of the Holocaust; people being numbered, tattooed, and subject to totalitarian rule, at the whim of the state. 

While I continue to believe that efficiency would have been, and would be, enhanced by a national identity system, I have to concede the disadvantages which are real.  One worth mentioning here: the greater security provided by our dispersion of data--the eggs in one basket proverb--especially in light of the election and the Southwinds hackl 

 

If Only Back in the 1960's

 There was an aborted effort to establish a national identifier in the 1960's, using the Social Security number. IIRC it was some nerds/bureaucrats suggesting it, but it was quickly killed amidst a concern over privacy, not to mention the sign of the beast. 

Over the decades the U.S. has come up with jury-rigged substitutes, Real ID being the latest. In the last century we had a process for passing information on men who were ordered to provide child support between states.  But we don't have the sort of process which bureaucrats would like.  If we did, it would alleviate problems on updating voter rolls and on tracking coronavirus vaccinations. 

We'll continue with our jury-rigging process for the foreseeable future.

More on Gen Perna and Vaccine

 In addition to points in my previous post, a couple of other things occurred to me:

• doing a checklist, or rather a series of checklists, would have been good.  Even though the decision had been made to allow state and local governments to design the system to do the jabs and report the status, my guess is it would have been possible to specify different parts of the operation in detail.  For example, actually giving the vaccination could start with removing the vial from the deep freeze, warming it, etc. etc.  At some point a recording and reporting process would take place.
• one problem with using past processes for vaccinations is that this one has different parameters.  The flu vaccine is requested by the public so you have a sales effort. For covid the attempt is to ration the jabs.  For me, I'm about to hit my 80th birthday, but I've no underlying health condition.  When and how do I learn VA has reached me in the queue? Or do I just call around to pharmacies or Kaiser until someone tells me to come in.  I don't know. 
• I see a report that WV is doing well, perhaps because they gave the job to the National Guard.  I can see how that could fix the notification problem, and perhaps even the checklist point.

Black Farmers in the Biden Administration

 There's been a number of pieces relating to black farmers recently.  Some are keyed to the new administration and controversy over whether Vilsack is a good appointment. Several quote statements from different black farmer organizations.  There seems to be more these days than there were when the original Pigford suit was filed. 

I found this Politico piece interesting, especially including this paragraph:

Horne said her data shows there was a 57 percent decline in the number of Black farmers in North Carolina from 1954 to 1969, with the number dropping from 22,625 to 9,687. During the same period, farms operated by white farmers dropped from 201,819 to 106,275 — a 47 percent decline.

 It's the first time I've seen a direct comparison of this kind.  Maybe somewhere there's an economist who has gone a bit deeper into the statistics. What I'd particularly like to see is a breakdown by farm size.  I suspect the distribution of black farms was proportionally weighted towards smaller farmers, and I suspect the farms which survived were proportionally weighted towards the larger farmers.  If that was true, what should one conclude?  

Some Sympathy for Gen. Perna

 General Perna is the chief operating officer for Warp Speed, which is now taking some flak for the seemingly slow progress of vaccinating for covid-19.

I never had to deal with his problem, but I have been involved in rolling out programs affecting thousands of counties and a million or so people on a crash basis. The difference between his problems and mine were great:

• the visibility to modern media.  ASCS/FSA programs were visible to local newspapers, but weren't followed nationally or internationally.
• an organizational structure which reached to the end user, the farmer, and one which had long experience in crash programs, dating back to 1933 when it was first set up.
• a program which usually was similar to previous programs--I can't judge how closely the covid-19 program matches the influenza program but it seems quite different.

Just from my back seat position of almost total ignorance, there's some things which didn't happen which should have:

• a tick-tock time schedule. Perna's already apologized for screwing this up. My impression is that there weren't sit-down meetings thrashing through every minute step, which could then be documented in a schedule to establish a base of understanding.
• implementation training. Because a vaccine is just a "jab" in the arm which everyone knows how to give, and because the implementers of the Warp Speed hadn't done this before, it was easy to assume (I assume) that no training was necessary. The reality is that training sessions get everyone on the same page, allow for the identification of areas where silos create problems, and permit exchange of ideas.
• as a former directives person, I suspect whatever directives were issued weren't really in a system.  Part of the problem seems to be lack of delineated authority, but it's also the human tendency to resist systems--to believe that a memo (or these days an email, etc.) handles the immediate problem, without realizing the proliferation of unsystematic directions can worsen problems.

I suspect, given the overall directive of relying on state and local governments to distribute and vaccinate, leaders assumed that those governments had systems in place.  Ass u me.  

I want see to the after-action reports and analyses of the effort to see how wrong this post is.

I also want to restate my sympathy for Perna (unusual for me to feel for a general): doing something new under scrutiny and a time line is a formula for bad public relations.