Do We Have 60?

My latent party feeling is stirred by the prospect Sen. Specter may switch to the Dems, which, with Sen. Franken (as oxymoronic as that phrase is), would give the Dems 60 votes in the Senate. It would be very interesting to see what would happen to the idea of lowering the political temperature in DC in that case.

Get Out Those Gardening Tools

From a Government executive post on the USDA garden:

Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan "... also repeated Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's challenge to USDA facilities worldwide to create similar gardens and create healthier landscapes. When asked if the gardens at USDA facilities around the world have to be organic, Merrigan replied she understands that organic is not possible everywhere because she comes from New England, where it is hard to raise some crops organically. Gardening methods "are not going to be dictated decisions from headquarters," she said. That should come as a relief to USDA's workers in Farm Service Agency, Rural Development and Natural Resources and Conservation Service offices in nearly every county in the country, as well as Foreign Agricultural Service offices overseas. The workers will undoubtedly want their gardens to be blooming by whatever method when Vilsack and Merrigan visit and ask to see them."

Of course, USDA owns few, if any, of its buildings. (I'm not even sure they own the lawn to the Administration Building and there is no lawn to the South Building.) So the question becomes whether the landlords will agree to gardens and if they will charge for such agreement.

A Good Sentence

"We had slime mold growing upstairs.”

There are certain people who belong on a different planet than the rest of us, and the person who uttered that sentence is one of them. It's from a short Freakonomics post on the Sereno family of Chicago, whose accomplishments seem to outweigh those of the Emanuel family of Chicago (who definitely beong on a different planet).

And no, the Serenos weren't poor housekeepers, they were nurturing intellectual curiosity.

Unsung Hero of Copyright

Barbara A. Ringer died at 83. Why should you care? Well- she was a great bureaucrat who pushed through our modern copyright law, as well as being a pathbreaking feminist in the Federal service.

No, I hadn't heard of her before I read her obit in today's Post. A sentence from it:

Foreseeing the rise of the Internet, she inserted provisions into the law to protect authors from the unauthorized reproduction of their work, even by means not yet devised.

Is There a Nitpickers'Anonymous?

I need a 12-step program. I was casually surfing the Growing Power site (the Chicago/Milwaukee urban farming operation that's gotten ink and a MacArthur Genius Award) and ran across this:

"At Growing Power it becomes worm food. We collect

over 20,000 lbs. of brewery waste from Lakefront Brewery every week

for compost or 1.4 million tons of waste annually."

20,000 lbs a week is 10 tons, or 520 tons a year according to old math. To be fair, I suspect some enthusiastic humanities student was writing the blurb (look at all those "o" sounds), and had a mind lapse when setting down the units of measure).

Sometimes You Can't Win

The CourierPress (KY) has a piece on a long conflict between FSA and a black farmer over farm loans. The latest episode has the man arrested for his words on a phone call, which were interpreted as a threat. As he's 82, it seems to have been overreaction. On the other hand, how much strength does it take to pull a trigger?

One doesn't know the rights and wrongs of the case, though there's lots of comments on the article, most of which assume some misaction on the part of the government. Of course, the infamous $60 million lawsuit in DC over the missing pants from the drycleaners is a reminder that not all suits are well-founded.

Poor Walt Whitman

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries quotes a piece on a protest of Walt, at the school named in his honor. The protestors were from Topeka, KS. They think he doesn't deserve a school.

Today's Amish Problems

LA Times has a story on the Amish in Indiana--many are off the farm due to high land prices and high population, pushing them into the system. Now some are laid off, and collecting unemployment.

The Amish have adapted to economic crises before. During the Depression, some men were permitted to register for driver's licenses, according to research by Nolt. That special exemption is less likely to happen this time, the professor said, because the Amish have come to view the horse and buggy as core parts of their identity.

This recession is especially brutal because the Amish factory workers became accustomed to earning annual salaries of $60,000 to $100,000, which provided for mortgages and shopping trips. A fiberglass basketball hoop hangs above a buggy in one driveway. The Wal-Mart has a hitching post. And some Amish men are as attached to their cellphones as their beards.

Prof. Kraybill has observed there's a tension between someone being the leader of an enterprise and boss of a number of employees and the self-effacement that's expected of Amish. Will be interesting to see how this works out over the years.

Slowness Serves as Validation Check

My wife and I had some problems getting our passports through. (A word of advice--never say you have no plans for foreign travel, even when you don't. The system seems to be set up to expect a specific departure date. When I looked up my grandfather's passport application in ancestry.com it showed specific departure date and place. So probably the State Dept. has just carried that forward over the centuries, regardless of the fact that passports are being required for any foreign travel, even Canada and Mexico, these days.)

Anyhow, my problems made me attend to news reports, including this. GAO found they were issuing some passports based on SSN's of dead people (also sounds like FSA's problem in the past). Turns out:

State was experiencing a relative lull in applications in late 2008 after a spike in 2007, Sprague noted. The database check can take a day, which was never an issue when employees faced a backlog of applications in 2007, she said. But when the workload decreased and passport applications could be processed much faster, some specialists and supervisors didn't know to wait for the database check to be completed.

So the interface between State and SSA worked fine as long as State was slow enough. I love it.

Our Ancestors Ruined the Soil

From Farmgate summary, on combating soil compaction: "He says MN researchers have found compaction remaining from 1880’s covered wagons."